Academies, Museums and Canons of Art
It is important to consider that the value of individual works of art are inextricably linked to their market value, so in that sense art is worth as much as the highest bidder is prepared to pay for it. The art market, based as it is in economically advanced countries commonly designated as the 'West', has a vested interest in being very influential in determining what is important. The canon represents art considered important and therefore collectable. It is a difficult concept to give a shape to, but I'll try to explain it in as simple terms as possible. It was originally established by the collaborative efforts of people with an influence on the production, display and acquisition of art. For over 200 years following the founding of The French academy in 1648, European art that was appraised contemporaneously as canonical was produced in academies. It was subsequently maintained by art historians, patrons and successful artists. In more recent times of more intensified consumption, the original (classical) canon was succeeded by the modern canon which was established by people such as cultural commentators, critics, artists themselves, art historians, collectors, curators, dealers, auctioneers - sometimes referred to collectively as the art world. Also government ministries of culture or the arts, bodies such as The Arts Council in Britain (through grant awards) and school art history syllabuses all have an influence in exhibiting and establishing what is considered to be important in the unfolding history of art.
There are nevertheless differences of opinion between the influential parties. For example it might be seen to be in a particular country's national interest to give prominence to one of its own. The canon, from its classical origins, has had to be flexible enough to include 'aberrations' such as baroque and rococo. It has been unable to resist the value and subsequent prominence that the art market has bestowed on the work of certain artists. Some artists who were once highly esteemed have lost their canonical status, while others who once had only modest reputations have gained renown.
So this first course book talks about the relative flexibilty of the canon from the 17th century onwards. The case study on the Albert Memorial in London mentions the fact that Constable was excluded from the frieze of painters, as was Vermeer. Another painter whose posthumous fortunes have ebbed and flowed on the tide of expert opinion is Lorenzo Lotto, a 16th century Italian painter. It just takes an influential book, media coverage, a large exhibition and the generation of critical reaction for reputations to be restored or created. In 1895 the influential art historian Bernard Berenson wrote a book about him. Lotto's disadvantage is partly due to the fact that he did not fit neatly into either the Venetian or the Florentine school; Vasari devoted little space to him. Colm Toibin (London Review of Books, Volume 32, Number 7) mentions some of the extant written records: 39 letters, his will and last testament and an account book with an entry recording the hiring of a female model 'only to look'! His work, says, Toibin, is a useful reminder of the affinity between Northern Italy and Northern Europe.
The 17th century French artist Nicholas Poussin is introduced in case study 1 in this first part of the course as a pivotal painter in neo-classical academic circles, starting with the French Academy where he was held up as the model for academic art. The first English national collection of 1824 inherited a few of Poussin's canonical paintings, one of which, The Adoration of the Golden Calf,
was sprayed with red paint in July 2011. The incident sparked of a debate on the National Gallery's security and the dangers of inter-gallery loans, although there have been several similar attacks in other art museums around the world. It just so happened that the incident coincided with a joint Poussin- Twombly exhibition at the London National Gallery, and Cy Twombly's Phaedrus was also singled out in 2007 by a member of the public who planted a full kiss on the painting surface leaving a lipstick mark.
The case study on Turner and Leighton discusses the change of the canon from the classical academic to the modern in the 19th c and implications of the change for the subsequent reputations of both artists. Leighton's later paintings such as Flaming June, 1995, described in the study as a type of painting that was 'easy on the eye', show his proximity to the late 19th c Aesthetic Movement. The 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 'The Cult of Beauty: 1860-1900' draws together works from the wide range of painters, as well as writers and designers, who espoused 'art for art's sake' that offered the viewer sensual pleasure instead of a moral lesson. Depictions of 'easy on the eye' females were popular subjects, and oriental influence on formal arrangement and ornamentation was common. The hint of modernism in Leighton's Flaming June
may also be seen in Albert Moore's earlier Midsummer, 1887,
and John Millais' much earlier Esther, 1865. Esther's yellow robe (which Millais was said to have borrowed from General Gordon who had been given it by the Chinese Emperor) is turned inside out to reveal a vivid abstract pattern of colour.
This exhibition was primarily sponsored by the philanthropic Merrill Lynch, (now) Bank of America, who stated that their 'support for the arts is built on the firm belief that greater cultural understanding leads to better opportunities for us all.' That's Merrill Lynch which can take as much pride as other financial empires for its role in the financial crash and even more pride for censoring a 2008 report on Irish banking which may have alarmed the population with its warning of imminent crisis.
This first part (and also the second on the next page) of the A216 course refers to the movers and shakers of the art world before the modern era, from the patrons, collectors, commentators and historians of the Renaissance through to the cognoscenti of the 18th century and from there to people of influence of the 19th century. Here is a list of the most influential figures, including entrepreneurial artists, in the art world compiled by Art Review (www.artreview.com) for 2009 followed by 3 charts showing how Professions, Gender and Nationality are represented:
1. Hans Ulrich Obrist
2. Glenn D. Lowry
3. Sir Nicholas Serota
4. Daniel Birnbaum
5. Larry Gagosian
6. François Pinault
7. Eli Broad
8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
9. Iwona Blazwick
10. Bruce Nauman
11. Iwan Wirth
12. David Zwirner
13. Jeff Koons
14. Jay Jopling
15. Marian Goodman
16. Agnes Gund
17. Takashi Murakami
18. Alfred Pacquement
19. Peter Fischli & David Weiss
20. Mike Kelley
21. Barbara Gladstone
22. Steven A. Cohen
23. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin
24. Adam D. Weinberg
25. Marc Glimcher
26. Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy
27. Cheyenne Westphal & Tobias Meyer
28. Ann Philbin
29. Matthew Higgs
30. Matthew Marks
31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
32. Gavin Brown
33. Ralph Rugoff
34. Liam Gillick
35. Anne Pasternak
36. Dakis Joannou
37. John Baldessari
38. Isa Genzken
39. Paul McCarthy
40. Michael Govan
41. Eugenio López
42. Cindy Sherman
43. Ai Weiwei
44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
45. Annette Schönholzer & Marc Spiegler
46. Diedrich Diederichsen
47. Richard Prince
48. Damien Hirst
49. Bernard Arnault
50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
52. Joel Wachs
53. Victor Pinchuk
54. Udo Kittelmann
55. Marina Abramovic
56. Michael Ringier
57. Gerhard Richter
58. Richard Serra
59. RoseLee Goldberg
60. Kasper König
61. Roberta Smith
62. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
63. Germano Celant
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. Peter Schjeldahl
66. Beatrix Ruf
67. Okwui Enwezor
68. Nicolas Bourriaud
69. Karen & Christian Boros
70. Isabelle Graw
71. Maurizio Cattelan
72. Charles Saatchi
73. Jerry Saltz
74. Jasper Johns
75. Louise Bourgeois
76. Thaddaeus Ropac
77. Mera & Don Rubell
78. Thelma Golden
79. Sarah Morris
80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
82. Paul Schimmel
83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
84. Sadie Coles
85. Daniel Buchholz
86. Victoria Miro
87. Maureen Paley
88. Johann König
89. Nicolai Wallner
90. Maria Lind
91. Massimo De Carlo
92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
93. Rirkrit Tiravanija
94. Toby Webster
95. Long March Space
96. Nicholas Logsdail
97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
98. Claire Hsu
99. Peter Nagy
100. Glenn Beck
PROFESSIONS:
GENDER:
NATIONALITY:
In the year 2000, an experimental installation at the National Gallery 'Telling Time' set out to monitor the way people look at paintings. Devices were set up to track eye fixation points and movements. This would clearly have interesting implications regarding artists' intentions and viewers' responses. At the beginning of the first course book there are exercises in formal analysis that ask the question of how artist have made the formal arrangements and subject matter contribute to the overall meaning in works of art. It would be interesting to know to what extent artists' intentions in directing viewers' attention have been satisfied by the way paintings are actually looked at. It seems that rsearch on the findings is still underway (March 10th, 2010). See http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/applied-vision/projects/national_gallery/index.htm
A team of Oxford University academics from the fields of neuroscience, history of art and physiology have published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience their study of reactions to works of art (of Rembrandts), some of which were genuine and others fake. Viewers reacted to information received about the paintings rather than to the paintings themselves. In the experiment 14 participants could not distinguish between the genuine and the fake works, but when told which ones were genuine a process of neuro-imaging revealed that the part of the brain dealing with rewarding events such as tasting pleasant food or winning a gamble was activated. 6/12/2011
You learn something about national prestige accruing from the possession of art e.g. in case study 3 in this first book. It sometimes appears quite presumptuous, as in the recent claim by the director of The Hermitage in St Petersburg, that The Madonna Alba is part of Russia's national heritage. It has actually been bought and sold plenty of times (The Art Newspaper, September, 2004).
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THE NUDE
The first course book Academies, Museums and Canons of Art and corresponding texts in Art and Its Histories, Ed. Steve Edwards, introduce students to the importance of the nude, particularly the male, in the classical canon. Its importance is in line with the prominent proactive male role in classical and biblical literature.
Aesthetic appreciation of the female nude was problematic because of the fine line between lascivious interest and aesthetic appreciation and the overriding need for decency in public. The difficulty in maintaining this distinction is illustrated by Richard Cosway (Plate 107). Erotic interest could be catered for in private collections and displays sometimes referred to as secretums.
THE IDEAL
In order to understand the pursuit of the ideal it would be useful to understand the beliefs commonly held in the ancient world of an ideal or perfect world. This corresponds in some ways to the Judeo-Christian heaven, a concept influenced by ancient Greek and Hellenic philosophy. By comparison, the real world was ugly, full of disease and disfigurement. Physical existence was mercifully brief.
The desire to improve nature, particularly on natural human bodies has been and continues to be common among societies across the world. Just to give one example: The Mayans used various methods of deforming the cranium to achieve a more beautiful shape. They devised apparatuses for compressing childrens' foreheads between wooden boards, balls were also suspended between the eyes to induce cross-eyes, and teeth were perforated.
You don't have to look far these days in western societies to see the variety of ways in which people 'beautify' their bodies, not only decoratively with tattoos and piercings but also structurally with surgery, implants and botox injections. Historically too, varieties of pigment have been used in make-up and constrictive devices have been used in European societies to deform towards an idealised shape.
Some improvements or deformations perhaps seem hideous to the minds of outsiders. In Japan, the Rikishi, professional sumo wrestlers, are sex symbols in Japan. They are worshipped by millions of women because of rather than despite their size and shape. They are regarded as the epitome of male physical perfection.
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Aesthetic and sexual perfection in the Louvre: Hermaphrodite Sleeping, a Roman copy of 2nd century Greek original restored by Bernini in 16 |
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A sculpture by Marc Quinn - Apparently pristine and unblemished yet incomplete; it challenges mythological perfection of Three Graces behind |
Alison Lapper, the disabled artist born with shortened legs and no arms was placed on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in the form of a nude and pregnant sculpture by Marc Quinn. The sculpture recalls classically idealised figures that have lost their original limbs or even of truncated portrait busts. Ms Lapper entered the cultural mainstream in Spring 2004 when her first major exhibition opened at a Mayfair art gallery.
Marc Quinn's golden sculpture of Kate Moss, fashion 'icon' and indeed golden girl of this celebrity era, has her in a contorted position reminiscent of tantric sculptures and also ancient Greek classical sculptures of Aphrodite. We are presented with both her face and (allegedly smiling) genital area with equal prominence (5/10/08). Unless the sculpture is melted down, which is what happened to golden statues of ancient Greece, it will last forever. But how long will celebrity (that of Quinn and Moss) last? What a search we must undertake to find out about celebrities of bygone ages sculpted or painted by bygone artists.
While the fashion industry is being condemned for encouraging eating disorders among young women by parading undernourished female models on the catwalk and while obesity is being equated to nicotine addiction as a social evil, flesh translated into paint, is very much on display in the painting of Sue Tilley by Lucien Freud (who has also painted Kate Moss) in 1995 which is about to take art prices even further through the troposphere (April 12, 2008). As it will remain in private hands it won't be on public display until the next time it goes to market. Fatness, now officially pronounced clinical obesity, has been represented in various ways during the history of 'western art', from Rubens' depictions of corpulence as symbolic of beauty and sensual pleasure, while for Hogarth it stood for gluttony and laziness. Courbet eschewed the academic ideal for a series of creamily fat female nudes wandering in forest glades as though it was the most natural thing in the world, examples of make-believe realism.
Luciano Ventrone's paintings are often described as realist, however Edward Lucie Smith says the artist does not consider himself as a realist painter in the traditional sense, as 'what we see in the paintings is not what we see with the naked eye - we see more.'
Jenny Saville's transformations of flesh into paint, similar to Freud's but a bit closer in the direction of abstraction in the application of paint and angles of composition, remind me of the uncertainty of physiological and sexual self-appraisal, and not only among established categories of transsexuals or people with eating disorders, where you don't think of your body size and proportions or sexual identity in the way that the disinterested viewer may. This is where a self-image and self-portrayal of a thin person could defy more objective assessments and measurements.
Jenny Saville: 'With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.'
The latest ranges of children's dolls bear a striking similarity to Ron Mueck's sculptures with clothes on - blue for boys and pink for girls which goes quite some way in determining gender types. These babies are stacked on the shelves of Poundstretcher, the well known high street economy retailer, like Midwich Cuckoos awaiting adoption. Is life copying art here? There was a time (I'm sure there still is) when children would project their imaginations onto knotted rags and bags of sticks for their dolls.
LANDSCAPES
'Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain' - the exhibition at the Royal Academy which ended on June 13th 2010 shows faithfully represented British landscapes at the turn of the 18th century, a time when painters who painted 'from the eye' rather than 'the mind' were thought of as producing mere views or map-work and talked of in disparaging terms. This kind of painting epitomised by Paul Sandby was termed 'topographical', a mechanical skill. The 18th century Academy championed the Ideal not the real; nature was considered commonplace and imperfect. While Dutch landscapes of the 17th century were admired by such painters as Gainsborough and later Turner and Constable they were considered unequal to the idealised landscapes of Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Italianate paintings from the Netherlands.
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BOOKS:
Studies in Kant's Aesthetics, Eva Schaper, Edinburgh Univ, 1978.
Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, ed. Cohen & Guyer, Chicago Univ, 1982. Neither of these books are directly related to the course but they attempt to understand and clarify Kantian 18th c aesthetics concerning perception of the good, the pleasant, the beautiful and the sublime.
Jerry Brotton's The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection, Pan Macmillan, claims that contrary to popular belief very little of the King's art collection was actually sold during Cromwell's commonwealth period of reform and modernisation, due to a mixture of administrative conservatism, public unease and bureaucratic inertia. Plus ça change! This subject is touched on in the first course videtape (video 1).
The Objective Eye: Colour, Form and Reality in the Theory of Art, by John Hyman, Chicago, 2006, deals with the question of how we are able to see a two dimensional representation as if it was real. It is reviewed in The London Review of Books, vol 29, no 3.
Black: The History of a Colour, Michel Pastoureau, Princeton, 2008
SOME CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS TO LOOK AT (via internet or library)
Marc Quinn, Ron Mueck, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marlene Dumas, Melanie Monchot, Cindy Sherman, Rowena Miller, John Coplans, Jenny Saville, John Currin
John Currin
The Pink Tree (1999)