About what do we paint?

Continuing my reading of Meyer Schapiro ("The value of modern art" (1948) in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society), 

Schapiro acknowledged the heterogeneity of early- and mid-century visual arts.  But he went on to apply a broader view of its commonalities.  “However, if we consider the art of our time – and I speak only of that art which is fresh and original and could not have been done in a previous age – I believe it is possible to discover in it certain features that set it apart from the work of preceding times” [134; emphasis added].  Citing claims that modern art does not have subject matter, Schapiro asserted “in the art of the last fifty or seventy-five years [before his 1948 presentation], types of subject matter that are sufficiently standard and characteristic” [134]:

1)   direct observations of everyday life

2)   the life and work of the artist

3)   “the consciousness of art itself:  [paintings in which] the constituting elements do not form images or signs for objects, but are themselves ideal figures of elementary operations in the shaping of things;  these, too, are an important subject matter of art, drawn from art itself” [135]

4)   “the interior world of the artist,” expressed through non-representational composition of color, line, shape, and/or brush strokes.

Schapiro compared these themes to those of earlier periods of Western painting.  “If the art of the Middle Ages is about supernatural beings whom one never saw directly or in ordinary vision, if the art of the Renaissance is about mythological and historical figures, and if the art of the Baroque period is rich in moral and political allegories, then the art of the last seventy-five years is about ourselves” [137].

If modern artists are individualistic, and face no art-world limitations on subject matter, why was there, up to Schapiro’s writing, so little reference to human inequality and suffering in modern art?  Schapiro turned to this question at the end of his essay or lecture, and gave it too short a treatment.  He glossed over the paintings emphasizing the horrors of twentieth-century war, for example.  He suggested that modern artists’ reliance on individual patrons and purchases disciplined them to emphasize themes of leisure or related to pleasure.  

Formal qualities of "modern" art

I've greatly enjoyed reading "The value of modern art," a 1948 lecture by Meyer Schapiro, published in the compilation Worldview in Painting: Art and Society.  He wrote with a perspective that is rare for someone in the midst of major changes.

Schapiro attempted to analyze the formal qualities of the contemporary art of his period with the same eye that art historians train on art from their past.  “In the same manner that we are able to distinguish the art of the Renaissance from the art of the Middle Ages, the art of Egypt from the art of Mesopotamia, by careful observation of the forms, so we discern in the immense diversity of modern art a broad constancy in its structure and expressive means” [138].

1)   The artist leaves clear signs of the act of painting.  “Hence, in modern painting, the touch or stroke is so very pronounced” [138].  The trace of the act of painting becomes an important part of the form of the painting.

2)   “The modern painter treats the surface of the canvas as a concrete definite tangible ground, as an object in itself” rather than a transparent window into an image somehow beyond the canvas [139].

3)   “The work is so designed or constructed that the composition though well ordered looks undesigned, independent of any a priori scheme.  The artist does not aim at symmetry or a legible pattern” [139].  “The result is a constant interplay among chance, incompleteness, and the final order, completeness and rightness of elements” [140].  Schapiro presented this as a manifestation of the modern emphasis on individual creativity, self-expression and (re)invention.”

4)   “in a modern painting, the artist preserves in various parts of the work the traces of the original instigating object or experience,” [140], rather than hiding the original impetus or pattern under a beautiful representation of a scene.

I cannot but agree with these generalizations of the formal qualities of mid-twentieth-century painting, and conclude that they represent the ascendency of the artist as individual auteur, visibly placing her/his creative ideas and process at the forefront.

Artists and their neighborhoods

The Guardian recently published an article about Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates and his serial renewal of buildings in South Side Chicago.  He uses proceeds from the sale of his art works, and then opens the renovated buildings to public uses.  

Though short, the article invites comparison to a book-length study of another Chicago district transformed by artists and art worlds, Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (Routledge, sec.ed. 2010).  Lloyd reports his sociological study of the Wicker Park district of Chicago, 1993-2003 (with later follow-up for the second edition).  Lloyd’s primary questions are:  What constitutes “bohemia” at the end of the 20th century?  What are the economic relationships that support the development of a “bohemian” neighborhood?  What economic relationships drive neighborhood change (wealth to poverty to gritty arts enclave to corporatized artsy and art-industry)?  

Each is worth a read -- I'll provide more comments in a later post.

Inspiration and rationality in art: an early Romantic view

ON THE NECESSARY LIMITATIONS IN THE USE OF BEAUTY OF FORM
From Schiller’s Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays, 1795.
Published in English translation by Harvard Publishing Company (New York), 1895.

Excerpt,  pp. 246-7 (boldface added)

"I believe this to be the test to distinguish the mere dilettante from the artist of real genius. The seductive charm exercised by the sublime and the beautiful, the fire which they kindle in the young imagination, the apparent ease with which they place the senses under an illusion, have often persuaded inexperienced minds to take in hand the palette or the harp, and to transform into figures or to pour out in melody what they felt living in their heart. Misty ideas circulate in their heads, like a world in formation, and make them believe that they are inspired. They take obscurity for depth, savage vehemence for strength, the undetermined for the infinite, what has not senses for the super-sensuous. And how they revel in these creations of their brain! 

"But the judgment of the connoisseur does not confirm this testimony of an excited self-love. With his pitiless criticism he dissipates all the prestige of the imagination and of its dreams, and ... leads them into the mysterious depths of science and life .... If nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will study the structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will descend into the lowest depths to be true in representing surfaces, and he will question the whole race in order to be just to the individual. If he is born to be a poet, he examines humanity in his own heart to understand the infinite variety of scenes in which it acts on the vast theatre of the world. 

"He subjects imagination and its exuberant fruitfulness to the discipline of taste, and charges the understanding to mark out in its cool wisdom the banks that should confine the raging waters of inspiration."