Painting: An Essay On The Brief Modern History

[Brandon]

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