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A Short Essay On Painting

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Copyright 2006

On Painting

By Brandon Cropper

There is an invention we all take for granted today. When it was new, over 150 years ago, it challenged the nature and purpose of the art of painting. The earliest version was the degeurotype. We call it the camera.

In the mid 1800’s as the camera became a way of life, the idea that an artist should render as life-like a picture as possible was challenged. What is the value of a painstaking recreation of reality if it can be done as easily with the *click* of a new-fangled camera. Why paint a bowl of fruit, or a ball room dance, or anything? Just take a picture.

There are two possible answers to the dilema. The painters of the mid-1800’s in Europe gave the following answer: We will no longer reality as it is; we will paint reality as we see it. This answer was only possible because of the philosophy of Plato, descended to Descartes, purified in Immanuel Kant, which was transfixing the European continent in this period. According to Kant, we don’t see the real reality with our senses: we just see the reality that our senses show us. Our perception of reality is not direct, it is filtered through our senses and organized by our mind. Being indirect knowledge of reality, our perceptual knowledge is also incomplete, imperfect. (Kant suggested that faith must fill the gap.)

The results of this philosophy created Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the feild of painting, it created men who gave up the depiction of reality to the camera, and attempted to show their reality, their own personal reality, as they themselves saw it. Cezanne is said to have thought there was “something wrong with my eyes.” He painted the same mountain over and over, blurry.

The school was Impresionism. Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix (see his de: Porträt des Frédéric Chopin), Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The climax: Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. With Picasso, modern art is truly a fully flowered phenomena. Today we are victims of the admirers of Pollock. Modern art no longer even pretends to be painting anything, unlike the vulgarity of Cubism which at least had the virtue to pretend to be painting soemthing, however destorted.

But what is the other answer we can give to the challenge of the camera? It must be said here that perhaps it never was proper to paint bowls of fruit. What should be and is proper to paint? Things you can’t take a picture of. Tings you can’t normally see. Before the time of the camera, a beautiful woman’s portrait may be proper. But when the camera comes available, the subject of a painting becomes much more challenging to select. You can’t take a picture of the signing of the declaration of independence (it happened over two hundred years ago), but it is a subject which remains important today. It is also impossible to take a picture of the Battle at Marathon in Greece, hundreds of years before Christ was born. But it is a facsinating and important story, and could make an inspiring view if one were skilled enough to depict it. The skyline of a new city on the moon, or ___________. The possible choices of what to paint are limitless, dictated only by your own values: what do YOU want to paint?

The end

Copyright 2006

Brandon Cropper

brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think modern art started down its current path sometime in the 1910's with Suprematism and Dadaism. Abstract Expressionism absolutely killed modern art because it fooled people into thinking an artist could translate his feelings and emotions directly onto the canvas with some splashes of paint. As a painter (not professionally) I believe this is impossible. Emotions are a person's reaction (or in the logcial mind, response) to certain events/stimuli. Therefore, when one doesn't attempt to represent anything in reality, the emotion trying to be conveyed is completely decontextualized, and the artist begins to rely on symbols (ie: quick, jagged strokes in red to represent violence/anger, blues for sadness, etc).

Also I think that some early modern art (impressionism, proto-cubism, futurism, group of seven, and some of post-impressionism) has its merits, and has some interesting ways to reinterpret perspectival representation.

Edited by RI1138
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I think modern art started down its current path sometime in the 1910's with Suprematism and Dadaism.

Impresionism was already old news by this time. Dadaism couldn't have occured without the Impresionists having led the way decades earlier. Its all an inter-related time period and its no coincidence that two World Wars, Communism and Nazism all climaxed during the orgy of modern art. They are interdependent, interrealted phenomena.

And invalid too!

- Brandon

Edited by Brandon
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Impresionism was already old news by this time. Dadaism couldn't have occured without the Impresionists having led the way decades earlier. Its all an inter-related time period and its no coincidence that two World Wars, Communism and Nazism all climaxed during the orgy of modern art. They are interdependent, interrealted phenomena.

And invalid too!

- Brandon

Yes, Impressionism was old news by this time, but where do you draw the line? Every art movement was influenced by another, or the rejection of another.

I singled out Suprematism (an attempt to portray non-objective feeling) and Dadaism (the art of randomness) because thats when people (who recieved recognition for their art) stopped representing things from reality. You mentioned Nazism as having risen during a period of modern art, true, but Hitler (i'm not sure about other Nazi party members) was a neo-classist, and many modern artists fled Germany at the time. The Communists did support modern art (notably, constructivism) early in the revolution.

I would like to know how a piece of art, no matter how bad, can be "invalid" since it is not a logical argument.

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Copyright 2006

This answer was only possible because of the philosophy of Plato, descended to Descartes, purified in Immanuel Kant, which was transfixing the European continent in this period. ...

The results of this philosophy created Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark and Friedrich Nietzsche...

Its all an inter-related time period and its no coincidence that two World Wars, Communism and Nazism all climaxed during the orgy of modern art. They are interdependent, interrealted phenomena.

And invalid too!

- Brandon

Nietzsche came from Kant? Nietzsche was an explicit repudiation of Kant and, in many ways, a return to Greek philosophy.

Also, I find it ironic that you mention Nazism when the Nazis (or at least Hitler) virulently hated modern art, considered it Jewry, and had some of the then most revered works of modern art destroyed or confiscated and sold to people in other nations.

I also wonder what your response would be to the work of Frank O'Connor, such as this:

DimReturns.jpg

Outstandingly Dali-esque to me.

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Nietzsche was fundamentally Kantian. His belief that we cannot know reality as it really is and must therefore "lie creatively" has huge Kantian overtones.

As far as modern art and Hitler go, they were two products of the same cultural atmosphere and philosophy. Witness the rise of (for example) the Dada movement in Weimar Germany.

Also, the term "modern art" is in my view a bad one. Probably, representational versus "non-representational" is a better distinction, as some modern art (i.e. Dalí) is legitimate art. Kandinsky is not.

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I can't defend that painting by Frank, and I can't see validity in Dali. I'm not a die-hard fan of Frank's from the paintings I've seen.

BTW, it is mentioned that the Nazi's disliked much modern art, so how could I say they are part of the same root? But the observation merely shows that the Nazi's were not logically consistent. No surprise there! :glare:

And the Walrus was right: Nietzsche was Kantian in the fundamental areas- epistemology and metaphysics. He differed from Kant on ethics, but that's all just window dressing and fig leaves.

- Brandon

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  • 3 weeks later...

This conversation is muddled by vague premises and language. I despise linguistic arguments, as they promise a tiresome circularity, but nevertheless your reference to "modern art" lacks clarity. As does your approach to valuing art. Some of the previous replies have alluded to these problems.

Your comments about whether painting a bowl of fruit is "proper" is misguided. I find little basis for deeming different species of subject matter as proper or improper, as the true import resides in how it is expressed.

This is why the camera poses no challenge to the painter - painstakingly trying to paint something with precise photorealism as the end will produce no more than a novelty. Such would compel one to say, "Wow, how very realistic."

For a work of art to truly resonate with a viewer, the artist infuses their creation with perspective, emotion, or as Rand might say..."the world as it ought to be". Can the camera achieve such an expression? Well, yes, possibly...medium is irrelevant (and to an extent, so is the subject). What really matters is the treatment of the subject.

My own portrayal of a bowl of fruit, which, sadly I do not have imaged for my website, endures as one of my personal favorites. This is not because I champion the significance of the mundane (I don't), but because in it there exists a light, dynamic, elegance that I value both visually and ethically.

My problem with what we may call "modern art" is that it lacks intelligibility. RI1138 was quite right - the subject becomes decontextualized, with no form to communicate the expression to the viewer. Enjoying art at this level seems purely a social chimera, ugly in its arbitrary elitism and desperate parroting.

aleph_0: Thanks for posting the piece by Frank O'Connor.

Cheyne

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