The meaning of art
Distortion of some kind, we may therefore say, is present in a very general and perhaps paradoxical way in all art. In the sixteenth century, largely from a misunderstanding of the purpose of classical art, a representational literalness did become common. But it did not last for long: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for one reason or another forsook the Renaissance conception of art, and it was only in the nineteenth century, that age of sham revivals, that literal representation once more became normal. There are, however, various degrees of distortion and no one, it will be said, objects to the idealization of reality. In Gothic art everything is made to contribute to the cathedral's single effort to express the transcendent nature of religious feeling; the idealism of Greek art is blended with the symbolism of Byzantine art; the result is not representational. In Chinese art, in Persian art, in Oriental art generally, motives are used, not realistically, but sensuously-that is to say, they merely contribute to the general rhythm and vitality of the artist's pattern.The spontaneous motives that lead an artist to express himself in formal patterns are obscure, though no doubt they can be explained physiologically. What we really expect in a work of art is a certain personal element - we expect the artist to have, if not a distinguished mind, at least a distinguished sensibility. We expect him to reveal something to us that is original - a unique and private vision of the world. It is this expectation which, blinding the plain man to all other considerations, leads to a confirmed misunderstanding of the nature of art. Pattern implies some degree of regularity within a limited frame of reference – in a picture, this is quite literally the picture frame. Beyond this simple conception of pattern we get increasing degrees of complexity, the first of which is symmetry; instead of repeating a design in parallel series, the design is reversed or counter-changed. The work of art is in some sense a liberation of the personality; normally our feelings are inhibited and repressed. We contemplate a work of art, and immediately there is a release; and not only a release - sympathy is a release of feelings - but also a heightening, a tautening, a sublimation. Pottery is at once the simplest and the most difficult of all arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elemental; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract. Historically it is among the first of the arts. The perfect types of pottery, represented in the art of Greece and China, have their approximations in other lands: in Peru and Mexico, in mediaeval England and Spain, in Italy of the Renaissance, in eighteenth-century Germany-in fact, the art is so fundamental, so bound up with the elementary needs of civilization, that a national ethos must find its expression in this medium. Pottery is pure art; it is art freed from any imitative intention. Sculpture, to which it is most nearly related, had from the first an imitative intention, and is perhaps to that extent less free for the expression of the will to form than pottery; pottery is plastic art in its most abstract essence. 23. We must not be afraid of this word `abstract'. All art is primarily abstract. For a perfect contrast to such ‘abstract’ art, we might take a work of the most humanistic phase of European art, such as the marble relief portrait of a youth by an Italian sculptor. Ruskin once claimed that ‘the best pictures that exist of the great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits often of very simple and in nowise noble persons.
Distortion of some kind, we may therefore say, is present in a very general and perhaps paradoxical way in all art. In the sixteenth century, largely from a misunderstanding of the purpose of classical art, a representational literalness did become common. But it did not last for long: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for one reason or another forsook the Renaissance conception of art, and it was only in the nineteenth century, that age of sham revivals, that literal representation once more became normal. There are, however, various degrees of distortion and no one, it will be said, objects to the idealization of reality. In Gothic art everything is made to contribute to the cathedral's single effort to express the transcendent nature of religious feeling; the idealism of Greek art is blended with the symbolism of Byzantine art; the result is not representational. In Chinese art, in Persian art, in Oriental art generally, motives are used, not realistically, but sensuously-that is to say, they merely contribute to the general rhythm and vitality of the artist's pattern.The spontaneous motives that lead an artist to express himself in formal patterns are obscure, though no doubt they can be explained physiologically. What we really expect in a work of art is a certain personal element - we expect the artist to have, if not a distinguished mind, at least a distinguished sensibility. We expect him to reveal something to us that is original - a unique and private vision of the world. It is this expectation which, blinding the plain man to all other considerations, leads to a confirmed misunderstanding of the nature of art. Pattern implies some degree of regularity within a limited frame of reference – in a picture, this is quite literally the picture frame. Beyond this simple conception of pattern we get increasing degrees of complexity, the first of which is symmetry; instead of repeating a design in parallel series, the design is reversed or counter-changed. The work of art is in some sense a liberation of the personality; normally our feelings are inhibited and repressed. We contemplate a work of art, and immediately there is a release; and not only a release - sympathy is a release of feelings - but also a heightening, a tautening, a sublimation. Pottery is at once the simplest and the most difficult of all arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elemental; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract. Historically it is among the first of the arts. The perfect types of pottery, represented in the art of Greece and China, have their approximations in other lands: in Peru and Mexico, in mediaeval England and Spain, in Italy of the Renaissance, in eighteenth-century Germany-in fact, the art is so fundamental, so bound up with the elementary needs of civilization, that a national ethos must find its expression in this medium. Pottery is pure art; it is art freed from any imitative intention. Sculpture, to which it is most nearly related, had from the first an imitative intention, and is perhaps to that extent less free for the expression of the will to form than pottery; pottery is plastic art in its most abstract essence. 23. We must not be afraid of this word `abstract'. All art is primarily abstract. For a perfect contrast to such ‘abstract’ art, we might take a work of the most humanistic phase of European art, such as the marble relief portrait of a youth by an Italian sculptor. Ruskin once claimed that ‘the best pictures that exist of the great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits often of very simple and in nowise noble persons.
Comments
Post a Comment