MODERN ART

Jerry Harkins

Once upon a time, art was not nearly as convoluted an undertaking as it is today.  Artists did what they did to earn a living or maybe only to nurture their own emotional lives without actually articulating a nebulous theory about it and without the benefit of critics to explain it.  Nor did they need to concern themselves overly with the vicissitudes of a marketplace beyond a handful of patrons.  Aside from works commissioned for churches, the public rarely encountered most of what they produced and art as we understand it was not a force in the lives of most people. Artists were mostly anonymous craftspeople. Of course, there had always been exceptions.  Virgil, for one, was widely acclaimed by both the elite and the ordinary citizens of Rome.  Chaucer himself was not well known to the public at large but The Canterbury Tales was the medieval equivalent of a best seller.  Michelangelo was widely recognized as the greatest artist of his time by contemporary artists, patrons and the Italian public.   Mozart and Handel were favorites of the aristocracy and their large scale works attracted large audiences.  Mozart, however, remained very much a mid-level employee of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and was poor through most of his short adult life. [1]  But Handel died a wealthy man with an extensive art collection.  Thousands of Londoners attended his state funeral and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Such exceptions notwithstanding, most artists labored anonymously even as their art often attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians and litterateurs.  Plato and Aristotle both wrote detailed explications of the role of the arts in society and both worried about the power of art to deceive.  In late antiquity, Longinus’ extended essay “On The Sublime” described the Bacchanalian power of art almost admiringly to the point that he is sometimes referred to as Dionysius-Longinus.  The great nominalist debates of thirteenth century Paris dealt extensively with the ethics of representation.  Even Abelard addressed the central issue:  if, as Aristotle wrote, art is the heightened and selected imitation or representation of life, does that mean it automatically violates the standard of truth?  Heightened and selected, after all, implies different from and less accurate than its referent.  The truth is being distorted deliberately to make a point.  The artist who carved the Venus of Willendorf, some 24,000 years ago re-imagined female anatomy to emphasize its fertility symbolism.  Modern cubism distorts to emphasize the multi-dimensionality of the subject.  Picasso’s portraits of his mistress Dora Maar are thoroughly misleading if all you want to know is what the lady looked like.  The artist depicts his unique perspective of her.  No other viewer can possibly share that perspective which may be why early cubism was often greeted with disdain.  Modern music, literature and dance were similarly criticized for precisely the same reason:  they distorted, indeed violated reality.  For many, modern art seems meaningless and even tedious.

Of course, all art inherently distorts the world as perceived by our unmediated senses which are in any event often unreliable. Artists bravely stand outside the mouth of Plato’s cave and try to tell us what they see.  Art proceeds from the imagination and deals in metaphor.  Its purpose is not to deceive but to invite the mind to consider something beyond the obvious.  Some find this threatening.  The Bible, for example, condemns “graven images” [2] as sinful enough to be dealt with in the decalogue.  The second commandment begins, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

 By the nineteenth century, however, the perception of art was changing.  The arts were going public and artists were suddenly exalted members of the community.  The transition is exemplified by a famous incident in the spa resort of Teplitz in what is now the Czech Republic.  In the summer of 1812, Beethoven and Goethe, friends a generation apart in age, were walking in a public park when they came upon members of the royal family walking in the opposite direction.  Beethoven told Goethe to keep walking as artists are more important than aristocrats and “they must make way for us,” not the other way around.  Goethe thought differently;  he took off his hat, stepped aside and bowed while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their retinue. The royals drew aside to make way for him, saluting him in friendly fashion. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too much esteem to those people.” [3]

By the end of the nineteenth century, Puccini to the contrary notwithstanding, La Vie de Bohème was no longer the default condition of artists.  Indeed, art itself was undergoing a profound revolution.  In Paris, painters turned their attention to renditions of ideas about things and to emotional responses to those ideas.  Monet’s 1872  “Impression, Sunrise” had suggested the term for an entire movement.  In an earlier era, this painting might have been a recognizable picture of the harbor at Le Harvre.  Now it appeared to be a quick sketch done at the scene and meant to be taken back to the studio for refinement. [4] At first, critics used the term "impressionism" pejoratively.

Impressionism became the progenitor of a dazzling variety of isms that arose in its aftermath as painters and sculptors sought to depict interior rather than exterior realities.  Most of their works remained grounded in representation even as they were explicitly trying to break away entirely from the object in favor of complete abstraction.  It was a difficult quest.  Ultimately, Jackson Pollock developed a thoroughly abstract genre called “drip painting,” and others such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still invented color field painting.

Abstract expressionism, derided by many at first, ultimately became widely if not universally accepted by  connoisseurs, collectors and the general public.  In 2012, a color field painting by Mark Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” brought $87 million at auction, 2.6 times the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt.  This was only the thirtieth highest price on record for a painting but, among the top fifty, all but two or three are modern or contemporary.  Acceptance was not, of course, universal.  In 1975, Tom Wolfe published a cri de Coeur denouncing and ridiculing modern art, especially abstract expressionism. [4]  His main complaint seemed to be that the retreat from representation, the “de-objectification” of art, amounted to nothing but pseudo-intellectual masturbation.  It was a theme he returned to twenty-five years later in a remarkable defense of the sculptor Frederick Hart who had  been excoriated by the art establishment for “defacing” the abstract purity of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial by providing a realistic portrayal of “Three Soldiers” nearby.

The entire brouhaha was an exercise in absurdity.  Ms. Lin’s wall may be the most moving war memorial ever erected. It does indeed “de-objectify” the war but, in place of jungles and weapons and burning villages, it forces the viewer to focus on the price we paid in terms of individual lives cut short.  Mr. Hart’s soldiers are majestic as sculpture and innovative as memorial art.  Moreover, they are casting their gaze at the wall with a combination of reverence and grief.  They, together with Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial are a subsidiary but integral part of experience.  They honor the wall and encourage us to see it as they do.

Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan explained the difference between “hot” and “cool” media any debate between the relative merits of representational and abstract art is bootless.  The former is hot, engaging the viewer quickly and completely without requiring extensive interaction.  The latter is cool, demanding a great deal of involvement.  Both communicate between artist and audience.  Neither does so perfectly.  Both seek to seduce your imagination.  Both celebrate the uncertainty and ambiguity that are part and parcel of the human condition.

What is new in “modern” art is not abstraction per se of which there are examples going back thousands of years [5].  But over the past century and a half, artists have developed an entire spectrum of genres which rely more or less on non-representational imagery.  Very quickly, such art has become dominant, especially in North America and Europe.  Many forces encouraged this transition:  the declining influence of the aristocracy and the church, urbanization and a more educated populace, a sudden rise in academic interest in the arts and, not the least, a sense that the humanities in general had reached something of a natural climax.  Museums were established, attracting a large audience of people yearning for culture and advancement.  The British Museum had already opened to the public in 1759 and the Louvre followed in 1793.  Nicholas I admitted the public to The Hermitage in 1852 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1866.  With broader interest came both artistic and economic independence and a favorable environment for innovation.

The new forms occasioned a wide range of responses, positive and negative, from a startling array of sources.  Suddenly everybody was a critic.  Modernism was greeted with ridicule by the public press, condemned as “degenerate” by politicians of the left and right and denounced as the “new iconoclasm” by at least one philosopher.  Less than three weeks after leaving the White House, Teddy Roosevelt published a review of the seminal 1913 Armory Show.  He was not impressed by the European “extremists” and recommended that Americans “should keep track of the avant-gardes but by no means approve of them.”  Both he and The New York Times were actually offended by Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2.”  More recently, the poet John Ciardi summarized what many traditionalists still think of modernism. “Modern art,” he wrote,  “is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”  The negative reactions, however, were overpowered with startling rapidity and, as we have seen, traditionalism was relegated to the defensive.  A similar seachange in perceptions accompanied the arrival of modern poetry and fiction while almost the opposite occurred in the reception of modern music.  But such reactions are a matter of taste which cannot be the subject of edict or fiat.  Thus, critics who proceed from a theoretical bias expose themselves to irrelevance.  What happens in art—any art—is a kind of intercourse between an artist and a witness.   As Rainer Maria Rilke explained to the young poet, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Notes

1.  Mozart earned 150 Florins a year in Salzburg.  The Florin contained 3.5 grams of pure gold (.123 oz.) which, at today’s price ($1,564.20/oz.) would be equivalent to $28,859.49 a year, roughly the median income of all U.S. workers in 2012.  Such calculations are, of course, less reliable and less meaningful than a writer would hope.

2.  Exactly what constitutes a “graven” image is a matter of some ambiguity.  Most English translations of the second commandment (Deuteronomy 5:8 and Exodus 20:4) specifically limit the prohibition to graven or carved images and most commentators believe that the Hebrew original refers only to idols.  But the text clearly refers to all images.  In both books, it reads, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”  The next verse prohibits the worship of such images but it is clearly referring to one type of the generally prohibited graven images.  Leviticus 26:1 specifically addresses the question of idols.  “Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it.”  This is one of many priestly regulations, not part of the Decalogue.  To complicate matters further, in Numbers 21:8-9, God commands Moses  ‘“Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’  So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”  A bronze snake is clearly a graven image.  Of course, this is one of those things you should not try at home.

3.  This description of the famous incident is taken from a written account by Bettina von Arnim, a friend of both Beethoven and Goethe.  There are other accounts offering slightly different details but there is no testimony that I know of by an eyewitness.  For one thing, Beethoven’s mild reproach does not sound like the great man who had a titanic temper.  The famous 1887 painting of the scene is by Carl Rohling who was born 37 years after the event.

4.  It almost seems the Impressionists were borrowing an idea from the Romantic poets.  In 1798, William Wordsworth had written, “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:  it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

5.  The book (or extended essay) was titled The Painted Word is a notable example of the New Journalism of which Wolfe was a pioneer.  There is irony in the fact that the journalist who dethroned objectivity from journalism should complain about pretty much the same thing in art.

6.  The pre-historic people of Ireland were among the earliest abstractionists, etching their elaborate spirals and other designs on rocks and in metal.  Some of these appear to be standardized patterns which recur in widely separated locations.  Such constructions as the passage tomb at Newgrange which was built between 3200 and 3100 BCE display elaborate designs some of which seem to be symbolic while others appear to be pure design.  They are much more recent than the cave paintings of Lascaux and other sites in Europe which are astonishingly representational.  Greek and Roman architectural ornamentation used abstract motifs but are, of course, much younger than the Irish material.