A HISTORY OF ART

Art is an advanced human activity in the abstract, requiring a specific mind to rise above our natural abilities. The artist himself is a strange, often enigmatic, driven, person, his work being omnipotent. His reason for doing art is usually tied up with its aesthetic value, its beauty – though not necessarily beauty as we appreciate it. The first known art was hidden from view in deep caves in prehistoric times. It was not art for exhibition – a vital factor of art in known history – but most likely to supplement transcendence with spirits. Art for exhibition began with the ancient Greeks, who first played with the notion of individuality, the two concepts obviously linked.
Medieval art was mainly based on sculpture. Painting initially appeared in stained glass windows for Cathedrals, and as the practice grew it was held back by lack of appreciation of distance. Hence, paintings were drab, two-dimensional affairs, usually depicting religious themes.
Art came into its own with the discovery of perspective geometry during the Renaissance. This gave depth to paintings, becoming three dimensional. Religious images were still predominant, but a rebirth of Classical ideas led to a merging of the two in the High Renaissance with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
Following the Renaissance, art became an outpouring of ideas that led to modern individuality. The l9th century Impressionist movement was based on feelings rather than structure. Through artists such as Monet and Renoir, paintings became bright and cheerful, and without minute detail.
At first Impressionist artists failed to be recognised, traditional galleries not taking their work, but in 1874 a number of French artists began the movement by organising their own exhibition. This shows the revolutionary aspect of art, pushing forward the boundaries.
Such a spirit had been in the air since the Romantic ideal began in the late 18th century. Based on a distrust of new ideas in science and politics, Romanticism reached to all areas of intellect, but in painting is best expressed in the likes of Goya.
In Romantic art, reality is shifting out of the picture. Even beauty is often lacking, with paintings expressing emotions, with often nightmarish, dreamy, mysterious landscapes. Self-expression of the artist is growing, painting his mind rather than society’s or nature’s reality. The artist is becoming, in a word, an individual.
This became particularly so in Expressionism, the style of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Expressionism communicated the emotion brought out by a scene, an object, rather than any realistic aspect of what is seen, the result being distortion, exaggeration and imaginative use of colours.
The invasion of the artist’s mind into reality reached a crescendo following 1900, when the psychologist Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious mind. Mixing with the despair of the world situation following World War One, Surrealism appeared, with artists such as Picasso seeming to disregard any pretence of painting reality at all. Surrealist images are a release of the creative powers of the unconscious.
Art did rebirth an interest in the ‘real’ during the 1960s. But it had fundamentally changed from the initial conception of art. In Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, depictions are of everyday, even trivial, objects. Celebrating urban life in everything from soup cans to comics, it is inane fun, the purpose no longer to be revolutionary, as if art had become intellectually stagnant.
In the modern day, art in terms of painting is relegated to the slave of consumer society, images used to advertise. In art proper, individuality has moved art away from the permanent, to temporary mutilations of animals, or a soiled, dishevelled bed. Some say this is not art. But if art is there to express contemporary life, it is art. It reflects the fleetingness, the non-permanence of society; and equally its despair of having nothing of value above the individual.
This is timely, almost conspiratorial, for consumerism. It ape’s the changing world of fashion, destroying permanence and providing a fleeting backdrop of nothingness to be filled with consumer goods.

(c) Anthony North December, 2006

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