Dr Alka Pande

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What is Good Art?

"That which is static and repetitive is boring.
That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art."
John A. Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher.

How does one measure the intangibles inherent in art? How does one know the difference between good art and bad art? Plato believed that all art is representational. He states that there is an absolute truth and that different objects form shadows of this ideal. While we cannot approach perfection through our everyday interactions, he feels that through art, we can transcend the purely physical to create a more accurate representation of this ideal. Together, art's imagery, metaphors, and allegory conquer, to some extent, the commonplace and provide intimations of the sublime. Therefore, to him and to other Greeks, such as Aristotle, art has inherent value as an imitation of absolute truth.

We cannot establish an absolute definition of "good art." Art by its very nature is subjective; each person will evaluate a piece of art as he chooses. Perhaps, the legal definition of obscenity, which incorporates the concept of "community standards", can serve as a template for a artistic merit. "Community standards," when applied to obscenity means that what is considered "obscene" in Amish Pennsylvania may well be termed "sophisticated" in Manhattan. In the case of art, "community standards" would mean that for a given community, whether geographic or intellectual or otherwise, the basis for artistic merit would derive from general agreement. However, there is an easier criterion for artistic worth, although it is entirely subjective. The value of a work of art is directly proportionate to the level of emotional response it provokes in a viewer. How good can any piece of art be if a person is indifferent to it? The notion is ridiculous that an audience should like a work of art because scholars call it "genius," as so often happens with Shakespeare; one should not need erudition to appreciate art. A composition that provokes an emotional reaction, whether it be violence or awe or hatred, is infinitely better than one to which the viewer can remain neutral. Art can only exist through its audience. Just because the response is negative does not make it bad.

While I believe that art is almost entirely subjective, I maintain that the aesthetic is much more absolute. An aesthetic piece is pleasing to the eye, because of its balance, form, color, line, shape, stroke, or any other number of physical qualities. The aesthetic and the artistic are almost entirely divorced in my view.

We could say there are three conditions of what constitutes a 'Good' work of art:

The more individual the feeling transmitted the more strongly does it act on the receiver; the more individual the state of soul into which he is transferred, the more pleasure does the receiver obtain, and therefore the more readily and strongly does he join in it.
The clearness of expression assists infection because the receiver, who mingles in consciousness with the author, is the better satisfied the more clearly the feeling is transmitted, which, as it seems to him, he has long known and felt, and for which he has only now found expression.
The last, sincerity, i.e., that the artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling. That condition includes the first; for if the artist is sincere he will express the feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is different from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for everyone else; and the more individual it is - the more the artist has drawn it from the depths of his nature - the more sympathetic and sincere will it be. And this same sincerity will impel the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling which he wishes to transmit. Good art is autobiographical. This is about perception. It’s personal. Therefore this third condition - sincerity - is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; it is a condition almost entirely absent from art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.

Such are the three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work of art apart from its subject matter.

The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art.

The presence in various degrees of these three conditions - individuality, clearness, and sincerity - decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfill the first, the second, and the third of these conditions. In one the individuality of the feeling transmitted may predominate; in another, clearness of expression; in a third, sincerity; while a fourth may have sincerity and individuality but be deficient in clearness; a fifth, individuality and clearness but less sincerity; and so forth, in all possible degrees and combinations.

On a more pragmatic note, Good Art may also be characterized by the following:

Line An element of art and design that pertains to the narrow mark or path of a moving point on a surface.

Form An element of art and design that pertains to an actual or implied 3-D shape of an object or image. In a broader sense, form refers to the total physical characteristics of an object, event or situation.

Colour Very often the most significant element in a work of at , color may be used to pictorially or emotively while expressing an idea or vision.

Space An element of art and design that pertains to the real or illusory 3-D expanse in which an image or components of an image exist or appear to exist.

Shape An element of art and design that pertains to an area set off by one or more of the other elements of art and design.

Texture An element of art and design that pertains to the way something feels by representation of the tactile character of surfaces.

Value An element of art and design that pertains to the degree of lightness and darkness, attributed to color and related to one or more parts in a work of art.

Tone An element of art and design that pertains to the effect of lightness and darkness in relation to one or more parts of a work of art.

Rhythm A principle of art and design concerned with the employment of repeated movement in regular or irregular succession of one or more elements to make a work seem active or to suggest repetition.

Balance A principle of art and design concerned with the arrangement of one or more elements in a work of art so that they appear symmetrical or asymmetrical in design and proportion

Contrast - A principle of art and design concerned with juxtaposing one or more elements in opposition, so as to show their differences.

Emphasis - A principle of art and design concerned with making one or more elements in a work of art stand out in such a way as to appear more important or significant.

Movement - A principle of art and design concerned with creating a distinctive structure that shows a feeling of action or a series of actions and guides a viewer's eye through a work of art.

Unity - A principle of art and design concerned with the arrangement of one or more of the elements used to create a coherence of parts and a feeling of completeness or wholeness.

Harmony - A principle of art and design concerned with the blending of one or more of the elements in a work of art to create a pleasing effect, balance, symmetry, and a composed appearance.

Historical Background - The Renaissance or the Enlightenment:

René Descartes is perhaps the single most important thinker of the European Enlightenment. At an age most people graduate from college nowadays, he quietly and methodically went about tearing down all previous forms of knowledge and certainty and replaced them with a single, echoing truth: Cogito, ergo sum , "I think, therefore I am." From that point onwards in European culture, subjective truth would hold a higher and more important epistemological place than objective truth, skepticism would be built into every inquiry, method would hold a higher place than practice, and the mind would be separated from the body.

Descartes played a crucial role in practically every other area of the Enlightenment. Descartes was a pretty smart fellow who established several patterns for modern Europe to follow: he laid down the idea that the thinking mind was somehow more real than the body in which it is housed (this is called the Cartesian mind-body split); he established that emotions were due to the overall nature of the character of the individual--called Cartesian affect (i.e., emotion) theory: this would become the basis of things like music education, which attempted to develop the character by producing certain emotions in students, a kind of Beethoven emotion work-out; he established the supremacy of the observer over the things he observed.

The term Renaissance, adopted from the French equivalent of the Italian word rinascita, meaning literally "rebirth," describes the radical and comprehensive changes that took place in European culture during the 15th and 16th centuries, bringing about the demise of the Middle Ages and embodying for the first time the values of the modern world.

The consciousness of cultural rebirth was itself a characteristic of the Renaissance. Italian scholars and critics of this period proclaimed that their age had progressed beyond the barbarism of the past and had found its inspiration, and its closest parallel, in the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.

Leonardo da Vinci

The term ‘Renaissance man’ has become a cliché, yet if ever there was a person in history who fitted this description it was Leonardo da Vinci. Born into an age in which only an elite few had ever even seen a book, he drew together many confused strands of human knowledge and lent a logic and cohesion to what he understood of the world; he then translated it into an encyclopedia of information about an incredible range of subjects.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is one of the most intriguing personalities in the history of Western art. Trained in Florence as a painter and sculptor in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488), Leonardo is also celebrated for his scientific contributions. Leonardo's curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature. Although completed works by Leonardo are few, he left a large body of drawings (almost 2,500) that record his ideas, most still gathered into notebooks. He was principally active in Florence (1472–ca. 1482, 1500–1508) and Milan (ca. 1482–99, 1508–13), but spent the last years of his life in Rome (1513–16) and France (1516/17–1519), where he died. His genius as an artist and inventor continues to inspire artists and scientists alike centuries after his death. What makes Leonardo unique is that he worked for half a century bringing together vastly different areas of knowledge and uniting them with an intellect that could find expression equally well as an artist, experimenter, engineer and designer.

The Last Supper (ca. 1492/94–1498)

Leonardo's Last Supper, on the end wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, is one of the most renowned paintings of the High Renaissance. Recently restored, The Last Supper had already begun to flake during the artist's lifetime due to his failed attempt to paint on the walls in layers (not unlike the technique of tempera on panel), rather than in a true fresco technique. Even in its current state, it is a masterpiece of dramatic narrative and subtle pictorial illusionism.

Why is it Good Art?

Leonardo chose to capture the moment just after Christ tells his apostles that one of them will betray him, and at the institution of the Eucharist. The effect of his statement causes a visible response, in the form of a wave of emotion among the apostles.
These reactions are quite specific to each apostle, expressing what Leonardo called the "motions of the mind." Despite the dramatic reaction of the apostles, Leonardo imposes a sense of order on the scene.
Christ's head is at the center of the composition, framed by a halo-like architectural opening. His head is also the vanishing point toward which all lines of the perspectival projection of the architectural setting converge.
The apostles are arranged around him in four groups of three united by their posture and gesture. Judas, who was traditionally placed on the opposite side of the table, is here set apart from the other apostles by his shadowed face.
Their scale and grandeur is otherworldly, but their emotional distress is obviously human. He created the characters as if they were each on their own frontal plane. He also put a painted border around the painting, which cut off most of the ceiling and the walls. These two modifying factors caused the characters to seem to leap out of the portrait.
Two zones of light make it possible for Leonardo to give his characters a very finely "graduated relief"
He accomplished the correspondence between physical movement and mental emotion by the pause between two great emotions which are the "momentarily stiffening" at an extreme point of excitement and at the horror of being "startled out of tranquility"
The symbolism, the individualized personalities of the characters, and the skills such as the light perspective and spatial perspective blended together to form a photograph-like painting.

Mona Lisa (ca. 1503–6 and later)

Leonardo may also be credited with the most famous portrait of all time, that of Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and known as the Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre).

What makes it Good Art?

An aura of mystery surrounds this painting, which is veiled in a soft light, creating an atmosphere of enchantment.
There are no hard lines or contours here (a technique of painting known as sfumato—fumo in Italian means "smoke"), only seamless transitions between light and dark.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the painting is the sitter's ambiguous half smile. She looks directly at the viewer, but her arms, torso, and head each twist subtly in a different direction, conveying an arrested sense of movement.
Leonardo explores the possibilities of oil paint in the soft folds of the drapery, texture of skin, and contrasting light and dark (chiaroscuro).
The deeply receding background, with its winding rivers and rock formations, is an example of Leonardo's personal view of the natural world: one in which everything is liquid, in flux, and filled with movement and energy.

Michelangelo: a dominant force in Florence and Rome

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) exerted enormous influence. He, too, was universally acknowledged as a supreme artist in his own lifetime. The complete artist, he expressed the ideas of the Renaissance, passing from "realism" to the "beautiful" as the quintessence and glorification of the capacity of man.

Michelangelo resisted the paintbrush, vowing with his characteristic vehemence that his sole tool was the chisel. As a well-born Florentine, a member of the minor aristocracy, he was temperamentally resistant to coercion at any time. Only the power of the pope, tyranical by position and by nature, forced him to the Sistine and the reluctant achievement of the world's greatest single fresco. His contemporaries spoke about his terribilità, which means, of course, not so much being terrible as being awesome. There has never been a more literally awesome artist than Michelangelo: awesome in the scope of his imagination, awesome in his awareness of the significance--the spiritual significance--of beauty. Beauty was to him divine, one of the ways God communicated Himself to humanity.

The Sistine Chapel

What makes it Good Art?

Using his extraordinary artistic capacities, Michelangelo tried to translate into visible forms the invisible beauty and majesty of God and guided by the words of Genesis he made the Sistine Chapel "the shrine of the theology of the human body"
It is the Sistine ceiling that displays Michelangelo at the full stretch of his majesty. Recent cleaning and restoration have exposed this astonishing work in the original vigour of its color.
The sublime forms, surging with desperate energy, tremendous with vitality, have always been recognized as uniquely grand.
These splendid shapes are seen to be intensely alive in their color, indeed shockingly so for those who liked them in their previous dim grandeur.
The forms and figures are gloriously, powerfully rendered and so sculpturesque as to seem to stand out in high relief.
The story of the Creation that the ceiling spells out is far from simple, and provides a windoe to the artists vision and soul, because Michelangelo was an exceedingly complicated man,
He dwells here on profundities of theology that most people need to have spelt out for them.
They express a truth with surpassing strength, yet we do not clearly see what this truth actually is. The meaning of the ignudi is a personal one: it cannot be verbalized or indeed theologized, but it is experienced with the utmost force.

Whether in painting, sculpture or architecture, Michelangelo's influence has been immense. Although he restricted himself to the nude in painting, his expressive use of the idealized human form had a tremendous impact on contemporaries and future generations

Raphael

Raphael's life was short, but while he lived he was one of those geniuses who continually evolve and develop. He had an extraordinary capacity (like, though greater than, Picasso's) to respond to every movement in the art world, and to subsume it within his own work.

The School of Athens:

Why is it Good Art?

His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
While we may term other works paintings, those of Raphael are living things; the flesh palpitates, the breath comes and goes, every organ lives, life pulsates everywhere. -- Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Raphael is one of the most acute of all portraitists, effortlessly cleaving through the external defences of his sitter, yet courteously colluding with whatever image the ego would seek to have portrayed.
This duality, looking beneath the surface and yet remaining wholly respectful of the surface, gives an additional layer of meaning to all his portraits. We see, and we know things that we do not see; we are helped to encounter rather than to evaluate.
The School of Athens, monumentally immortalizing the great philosophers, and is unrivalled in its classic grace. Raphael's huge influence on successive artists is all the more impressive considering his short life.
It is a tribute to his genius for synthesis that he combined the realism of 15th century portraits with the human ideal of the High Renaissance.
His genius was his unique power of synthesis. He was able to merge the qualities of Leonardo and Michelangelo, creating an art at once lyric and dramatic, pictorially rich and sculpturally solid.

Impressionism

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

Monet

Claude Monet is generally considered to be the most outstanding figure among Impressionists. The term Impressionism derives from his picture Impression: Sunrise. A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue of the exhibition in 1874. Monet suggested simply Impression, and the catalogue editor, Renoir's brother Edouard, added an explanatory Sunrise. The artist was not to know that because of criticism, which seized upon the first word he had given the entire movement its name. Louis Leroy in the magazine Le Charivari scoffed at the Monet's painting using for the first time in the history the term Impressionists. Monet analyzed in his paintings the effects of changing light; in order to capture changing conditions he painted entire series of pictures, transforming Nature into art.

Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise (1872)

Why is it Good Art?

It marks the birth of the most influential and celebrated art movement of the last 150 years. Monet's almost apologetic title for the piece was to give the Impressionist movement its name.
At the 1874 'Exhibition of the Impressionists' in Paris, it was seen by the public for the first time, alongside works by Pissarro, Renoir, Cezanne and Degas and it caused outrage. The critics were appalled by what they saw as unfinished, splodgy brush-strokes, and immediately denounced the artists as charlatans.
The painting, a view of the harbour at Le Havre, where Money's family moved when he was 5 years old, doesn't look revolutionary today. But its apparent sketchiness, its focus on the shifting reflections in the water, and the importance of shadows resolutely rejected the traditional polished look of academic Salon painting.
The subject matter and industrial landscape also signaled a radical departure from what had become expected of the French artists of the time.
Impression: Sunrise is a painting which contains the major new ideas of the nineteenth century: modern life, sketch, anti-academy and the realization that with growing urbanization, modern life would never be constant, which is reflected in the Impressionist technique itself.
Monet's unique brush-strokes, once derided as childish and vulgar, led the twentieth century into new ways of seeing and painting, especially in the seemingly directly-descended works of Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and Klein.

Post-Impressionism

Gauguin, (Eugène-Henri-) Paul
(b. June 7, 1848, Paris, Fr.--d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. His masterpieces include the early Vision After the Sermon (1888) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).

'Jacob Wrestling with the Angel'

Why is it Good Art?

He broke away completely from the Impressionist style, using areas of pure, flat color for expressive and symbolic purposes.
Emphasis and size are controlled by memory and how you would remember it--the women are very large while Jacob and the Angle are quite small--no unifying perspective.
Gauguin successfully devised an absolutely interlocking composition of shapes and sinuous line experienced over the shoulder of the protagonist.
And like no one else at the time, he managed to suggest deep space while completely compressing it into a flat pattern on the surface of the picture.
This work marks a high point in the development of his mature style.
In the foreground, a group of pious local women and a priest experience an imaginary vision—the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, depicted in the upper right.
The bold color, dramatic compositional devices (such as the diagonal tree trunk and tilted ground), and the exaggerated shapes of the women’s bonnets reveal Gauguin’s interest in abstraction, inspired by sources as varied as medieval stained glass and the art of Japan.
Gauguin's art has all the appearance of a flight from civilisation, of a search for new ways of life, more primitive, more real and more sincere. His break away from a solid middle-class world, abandoning family, children and job, his refusal to accept easy glory and easy gain are the best-known aspects of Gauguin's fascinating life and personality.
He was one of the first to find visual inspiration in the arts of ancient or primitive peoples, and reacted vigorously against the naturalism of the Impressionists and the scientific preoccupations of the Neo-Impressionists.
As well as using color un-naturalistically for its decorative or emotional effect he reintroduced emphatic outlines forming rhythmic patterns suggestive of Japanese colour prints or the technique of stained glass.

The Nabis were formed under his inspiration; he was a leading figure of the Symbolist movement and one of the sources for Fauvism. Later he has been one of the major influences on the general non-naturalistic trend of 20thcent. art. Because of the romantic appeal of his life and personality, particularly his willingness to sacrifice everything for his art, Gauguin has been with van Gogh the most common subject for popular and fictional biography, including the novel 'The Moon and Sixpence' (1919) by Maugham, and the opera (1957) of the same title by John L Gardner.

Vincent Van Gogh

Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van (b. March 30, 1853, Zundert, Neth.--d. July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris), generally considered the greatest Dutch painter and draughtsman after Rembrandt. With Cézanne and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. He powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The Starry Night (1889).

Starry Night

Why is it Good Art?

Starry Night was painted while Vincent was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy and his behavior was very erratic at the time, due to the severity of his attacks. Unlike most of Van Gogh's works, Starry Night was painted from memory and not outdoors as was Vincent's preference. This may, in part, explain why the emotional impact of the work is so much more powerful than many of Van Gogh's other works from the same period.
He had once admired religious subjects from ancient art, but he now considered that the feeling of solace should primarily be evoked by the color and design of representations of nature. [...]'The Starry Night' should be seen as [...] based on religious ideas only in this specific sense.
The artistic solution chosen by Van Gogh for these canvases lay in a compelling form of stylization. The landscape with hills - in which he had attempted 'to render the time of day when you see the green beetles and cicadas fly up in the heat' and 'The Starry Night' were, he wrote later, 'exaggerations in terms of composition' with lines 'warped as in old woodcuts'.
The power and fury of the strokes employed by Van Gogh are intensely expressionistic.
Powerful fluid strokes of a brush saturated with paint result in the creation of an image that is simultaneously opaque and open to investigation.
'The Starry Night' in particular was an attempt by Van Gogh to create a masterpiece on a par with the very stylised work of Gauguin and Bernard.
The graphic style adopted by Van Gogh was not an obvious choice to achieve a nocturnal effect in which surfaces and silhouettes would normally play a greater role than lines.
commentators have elevated 'The Starry Night' to a place among his most exceptional and important works. The combination of style and religious overtones has fuelled endless critical debate.

His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism, and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20th century art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times providing the most auspicious material for the 20th-century vogue in romanticized psychological biography.

Expressionism

Movement in fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist.

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

Artistic and literary movement born in the early years of the XXth century. Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visul object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.
The most famed German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

Edvard Munch

Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intense, evocative treatment of psychological and emotional themes was a major influence on the development of German Expressionism in the early 20th century. His painting The Scream (1893) is regarded as an icon of existential anguish.

The Scream

Why is it Good Art?

"The Scream" is not an exceptionally beautiful picture in the way that the Mona Lisa could be described as such, and there is one simple reason for this: its subject is fear. And just because it is such an authentic picture, this context allows it to offer nothing in the way of a manifestly esthetic enjoyment.
I know of no other picture that has such an authentic way of expressing so directly the phenomenon of FEAR as an existential human condition.
"The Scream" is an autobiographical document; a document of Edvard Munch's chronic fear of life. "I was walking along the street with two friends -- the sun was going down -- I felt a touch of melancholy. Suddenly the color of the sky changed to blood-red. I stopped walking and leaned against a fence feeling tired to death --I saw the flaming clouds like bloodstained swords -- the blue-black fjord and the city -- my friends went on walking -- I stood there trembling with fear -- and I felt how a long unending scream was going through the whole of nature."
Munch painted this experience, like all his great pictures, from his recollections.
It is the uniquely outstanding value of Munch's pictures that they are "recollected images", images of emotional traumas that had their origin in a very difficult childhood:
Many of his contemporaries considered these flowing forms to be artistic effrontery and an offence against good taste; but the historians of art have characterized this freedom of mind as the "Modern Age".
Here art begins to serve man. It is no longer the expression, or replica, of a perceived objective world, but the expression of the subjective world-view of the artist. Mankind is beginning to shape the idea of the individual, and the individual lives through his feelings, which are indivisible from him.
In "The Scream" Munch portrays the individuals fears, and for exactly that reason it occupies a special place among works of art because an individual's fears cannot be shared; they are not fit to be talked about in the public discourse of society fear is a taboo subject like death, although it is the most widespread feeling among human beings. Fear is instead banished into abstract terms.
The importance of Munch's 'Scream' lies in the fact that he has brought a fundamental human existential feeling to its simplest visual denominator.

A gifted Norwegian painter and printmaker, Edvard Munch not only was his country's greatest artist, but also played a vital role in the development of German expressionism. His work often included the symbolic portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death. The Cry, probably his most familiar painting, is typical in its anguished expression of isolation and fear.

Max Beckmann

"There are few German painters who have had as long and distinguished a career as Max Beckmann, and fewer still who have been able to sustain the consistent level of excellence he maintained throughout his career. Between 1905 and 1950, he created more than eight hundred paintings and produced hundreds of prints and drawings, a phenomenal output under any circumstances, and even more considerable when one realizes the challenges that faced him during the height of his career. Persecuted by the Nazis, he was forced to flee his homeland and work in relative isolation while the war turned Europe upside down.

Departure

Why is it Good Art?

Beckmann's triptych oil painting "Departure" is a sweeping narrative on the investigation of self. On the left are bound, gagged and mutilated people surrounding an executioner and a gigantic quintessential modern still life. The easy read is of the historical context foretelling of the Nazi war machines imposition on the artist, for example forcing them out of Germany.
I think the work delves deeper into what it means to be an artist. Showing what is involved in the constant struggle of creating art that is satisfying to the creator or up to a particular artist's expectations and ambitions.
On the right are two figures bound vertically opposite next to a blindfolded uniformed figure holding a fish. This panel suggests the upper half as the psychological life of the artist. He has become blindfolded and marching to the beat of the drum holding his fish, which I am labeling the artistic practice or brush of his artistic career.
In reflecting on the work "Departure" Beckmann had these few words to say, "It is a departure, yes, a departure from the deceptive surface appearances of life, to those things which are essential in themselves, which stands behind the appearances."(Beckett pg.45)
They are the embodiment of my hopes, dreams and nightmares and their meaning is not yet clear to me. Posing in a sitcom world the paintings can hide behind their loudness. Shrouding the self, the work attempts to hint at meaning conjured out of this new constructed reality of my mind.
"A painter's painter, he eschewed identification with a particular school or style. His oeuvre is a celebration of painting's grand traditions - the still life, the portrait, history painting, and allegorical and mythological subjects - articulated in a visual style that has often been described as Expressionist. But while his frenetic brushwork and highly complex, metaphysical iconography have much in common with German Expressionism, Beckmann's paintings never succumbed to the Modernist tendency to render the world abstractly.
His forms are mannered and polished; his colors intense, and his rendering of space take on a vaguely Cubist orientation, with figures compressed into torturous settings and angular forms tilting precariously toward the picture plane.

His works become a mosaic of contemporary social criticism and religious or mythical themes, and he uses used masked or costumed circus characters as allegorical figures, a practice that are a hallmark of his art.

Cubism

Cubism was a highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.

Georges Braque

"Georges Braque developed his painting skills while working for his father, a house decorator. He moved to Paris in 1900 to study where he was drawn to the work of the Fauve artists, including Matisse, Derain and Dufy, as well as the late landscapes of Cézanne. Meeting Picasso marked a huge turning point in Braque's development and together they evolved as leaders of Cubism. After a brief interlude in which he was called up to fight in the First World War, Braque's style developed in the direction he was to follow for the rest of his life. In establishing the principle that a work of art should be autonomous and not merely imitate nature, Cubism redefined art in the twentieth century. Braque's large compositions incorporated the Cubist aim of representing the world as seen from a number of different viewpoints. He wanted to convey a feeling of being able to move around within the painting. The still life subject remained his chief preoccupation from 1927 to 1955."

Violin and Palette

Why is it Good Art?

These paintings give the sensation that Braque has felt his way visually around each object and examined its relationships with the other objects around it from several viewpoints.
By rendering the areas between the objects in a tactile, material fashion, Braque succeeds in fusing objects and space into a spatial continuum composed of small, fluid, interpenetrating planes ... [His landscapes turn into] tighter, more arbitrary compositions, reminiscent in the emphasis on the vertical and horizontal structure broken by forty-five degree diagonals ...
Violin and Palette is a work of art as a complex interchange between artifice and reality: "Braque's exploration of the ever more complex language of Cubism closely paralleled Picasso's ...
Transparent and opaque forms are confounded wittily ...
Space, too, is fascinatingly ambiguous: the illusion of depth inferred from the sharp cut of the wall and triple molding at the right is contradicted by the continuous oscillation of planes that seem to cling to the picture surface as if magnetized.
But most brilliant is the trompe-l'oeil (A French term literally meaning "trick the eye." Sometimes called illusionism, it's a style of painting which gives the appearance of three-dimensional, or photographic realism.) nail [in] Violin and Palette ... An essential key to the complex interchanges of art and reality that were later to be explored in collage, for the illusionistic nail helps to establish one of the basic meanings of Cubism - that a work of art depends upon both the external reality of nature and the internal reality of art ... The nail shatters the deception that Renaissance perspective would sustain in its attempt to transform the surface of the picture into a transparent window through which we see an illusion of reality.
By appearing to cast a shadow upon the flat surface of the canvas, the trompe-l'oeil nail also casts doubts upon the illusions around it ... The trompe l'oeil nail is, after all, no more and no less real than the ostensibly unreal Cubist still life below, just as the almost palpable scroll of the violin in both pictures is actually no more and no less real than the body of the violin , which slips out of its material skin like a specter.
The inevitable conclusion is that a work of art presents a complex interchange between artifice and reality. A picture depends upon external reality, but the Cubist means of recording this reality - unlike the means devised by the Renaissance - are not absolute but relative.
One pictorial language is no more 'real' than another, for the nail, conceived as external reality, is just as false as any of the less illusionistic passages in the canvas - or conversely, conceived as art, is just as true ... It is therefore essential to realize that, no matter how remote from literal appearances Cubist art may at times become, it always has an ultimate reference to external reality, without which it could not express the fundamental tension between the demands of nature and the demands of art ...
The artificial colors of this painting are nevertheless partially relevant to the world of appearances ... The light in this painting, for all the arbitrariness of the contradictory patterns of highlight and shadow, conveys a luminosity that refers to the laws of physics and visual perception as well as to the laws of art."

Pablo Picasso

"Before he struck upon Cubism, Picasso went through a prodigious number of styles - realism, caricature, the Blue Period, and the Rose Period. The Blue Period dates from 1901 to 1904 and is characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes. This was when he also produced his first sculptures. The most poignant work of the style is in Cleveland's Museum of Art, La Vie (1903), which was created in memory of a great childhood friend, the Spanish poet Casagemas, who had committed suicide. The painting started as a self-portrait, but Picasso's features became those of his lost friend. The composition is stilted, the space compressed, the gestures stiff, and the tones predominantly blue. Another outstanding Blue Period work, of 1903, is in the Metropolitan, The Blind Man's Meal. Yet another example, perhaps the most lyrical and mysterious ever, is in the Toledo Museum of Art, the haunting Woman with a Crow (1903).

"The Rose Period began around 1904 when Picasso's palette brightened, the paintings dominated by pinks and beiges, light blues, and roses. His subjects are saltimbanques (circus people), harlequins, and clowns, all of whom seem to be mute and strangely inactive. One of the premier works of this period is in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery's large and extremely beautiful Family of Saltimbanques dating to 1905, which portrays a group of circus workers who appear alienated and incapable of communicating with each other, set in a one-dimensional space.

Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque, and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. "Every progressive painter, whether French, German, Belgian, or American, soon took up Cubism, and the style became the dominant one of at least the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, in New York, the new style was introduced at an exhibition at the midtown armory - the famous Armory Show - which caused a sensation. Picasso would create a host of Cubist styles throughout his long career. After painting still-lifes that employed lettering, trompe l'oeil effects, color, and textured paint surfaces, in 1912 Picasso produced Still-Life with Chair-Caning, in the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is an oval picture that is, in effect, a cafe table in perspective surrounded by a rope frame - the first collage, or a work of art that incorporates preexisting materials or objects as part of the ensemble. Elements glued to the surface contrasting with painted versions of the same material provided a sort of sophisticated double take on the part of the observer.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Why is it Good Art?

The awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures.
The painting shows a figurative composition of five nudes grouped around a still life in the foreground. The three on the left are angular distortions of Classical figures, while the violently dislocated features and bodies of the other two have all the barbaric qualities of primitive art.
Avignon is a reference not to the French town but to a famous street in the red-light district of Barcelona. The painting is more a record of work in progress, of an artist in the process of changing his mind, than a resolved composition: the forms are dislocated, inconsistent in style, in fact unfinished.
It is still a disturbing picture -- overthrowing perspective, single viewpoint, integral form, local colour, decorative colour.
The figures and the background seem to form a relief that for goes all pursuit of spatial depth and retains the close relationship to the pictorial surface. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes.
They constitute a unique kind of matter, which imposes a new kind of integrity and continuity on the entire canvas. Each individual figure is united by a general geometrical principle, which superimposes its own laws on to the natural proportions, and they merge almost completely with the background, which is full of similar rugged cleavages.
There are no distinctions of light and darkness that might lend shape to the women’s bodies, and together with the combination of several perspectives, this contributes to a general impression of disorientation in space.
Picasso simplified the painting, to reach the internal structures of objects and establish that a picture was not a window on the world, but something which grasps the substance of an object and then restores it.
The definite solid outlining, sometimes with tonal contrast, is both thick and heavy, created the flat space.
Only lines suggest forms, not by tonal effect. Picasso is not interested in describing tone, depth, or form.
The large figures are angular, with the influence of ancient Iberian sculpture evident in the heads of the central figures, whereas the corner figures with their large, firmly contoured planes herald an entirely new approach. The faces themselves possess a compelling force that owes much to African sculpture.
The strong, harsh colouring of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has given way in early Cubist pictures to soft tans and olive tones, remarkably cool and serene.Contrasts of colour and texture are reduced to a minimum, so as not to compete with the design.
This painting represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of modern art. Whereas the central figures are still indicative of that stage in which the painting was begun, the nudes that frame the composition already demonstrate the decisive change of direction in Picasso's art that was to be of such seminal importance to Cubism.
Picasso wanted to destroy absolutely everything. His rebellion against the myth of feminine beauty was relatively insignificant compared with his other rebellion: with this picture he wanted to destroy the whole of Western art since the early Renaissance. Not only the proportions, but the organic integrity and continuity of the human body are denied here, so that the canvas “resembles a field of broken glass.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this picture and the profound effect it had on art subsequently.

"At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was appointed the director of the Prado. In January, 1937, the Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris. Spurred on by a war atrocity, the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country, he painted the renowned oil Guernica in monochrome (now in Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.) Something of an enigma in details, there's no doubt that the giant picture (which until the death of Franco was in New York's Museum of Modern Art) expresses a Goyaesque revulsion over the horrors man can wreak upon fellow man. The center is dominated by a grieving woman and a wounded, screaming horse illuminated, like Goya's Third of May, 1808 by a harsh light.

Picasso later turned enthusiastically to sculpture, pottery, and print-making, and, in his later years, preoccupied himself with a series of mistresses and girlfriends, changing his style to express his love for each one, and, finally, making superb evocations of the works of old masters like Diego Velazquez. Whatever Picasso had a hand in turned out to have an unquenchable spark of utter genius."

Abstraction

Abstraction was a term first used in connection with Kandinsky in 1919, but more commonly associated with post-war American art. Robert Coates, an American critic, coined it in 1946, referring to Gorky, Pollock and de Kooning. By the 1951 Museum of Modern Art exhibition 'Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America', the term was used to refer to all types of non-geometric abstraction. All the abstractionists were influenced by Existentialist ideas, which emphasized the importance of the act of creating, not of the finished object. The Abstract Expressionists sought to express their subconscious through their art. They also shared an interest in Jung's ideas on myth, ritual and memory (inspired by exhibitions of African and American Indian art in 1935 and 1941 respectively) and conceived an almost Romantic view of the artist, seeing their painting as a way of life and themselves as disillusioned commentators on contemporary society after the Depression and the Second World War.

Kandinsky

It was Kandinsky who found that the ``interior necessity'', which alone could inspire true art, was forcing him to leave behind the representational image. He was a Russian who had first trained as a lawyer. He was a brilliant and persuasive man. Then, when already in his thirties, he decided to go to Munich in 1897 to study art. By the time Der Blaue Reiter was established, he was already ``abstracting'' from the image, using it as a creative springboard for his pioneering art. Seeing a painting of his own, lying on its side on the easel one evening, he had been struck by its beauty, a beauty beyond what he saw when he set it upright. It was the liberated color, the formal independence, that so entranced him.

Black Lines 1913

Why is it Good Art?

Subject: one of Kandinsky's Improvisations. All elements of representation and reference disappear. Just because there is no subject matter, however, does not mean the work lacks content or meaning.
The drama here is played out purely by the formal dynamics. Colors are not descriptive because they have no associative connection back to nature; color has its own autonomy and freedom.
Line is sketchy and animated without being defining; it has a life of its own.
Kandinsky works from intuition rather than logic and rational design, keeping the image improvisational and avoiding the hard-edge boundaries of a rigid geometry. Consciousness, not consciousness of something, but consciousness itself is his subject; what he expresses is his pure sensations and feelings, divorced from any object or specific subject.
He did want his abstractions to be emotional through the intuitive, outward expression of the artist's inner needs. Kandinsky, thus, paints from the inside out, cutting all ties to the world of matter and particularities in the process. The space he creates, thus, is not one bounded by gravity, but one radically open-ended and boundless.
The canvas surface is no longer measured in terms of a horizon line and a grounding at the bottom; he conceives of the surface plane as an allover energy field. A believer in "synestehsia" (where one sensory stimulus evokes another, like seeing colors and hearing music), Kandinsky wanted the viewer to listen for the "inner sound" of a color. He wanted painting to be abstract like music is; he is seeking a metaphysical art that transcends the material, objective world. What he did not want was for his art to be mistaken merely for decoration. In the spiritual crisis of Germany before the war, pure aesthetic formalism did not address the artist's inner necessity. Abstraction, thus, had to address the spiritual. For Kandinsky, it is the spirit that rules over matter, and thus he turns away from material reality.
Style: opposed to the orderly construction and restricted color range of Cubism and other hard-edge geometric abstraction; did not trust an art that evolved out of logic or the rationale; trusted only internal feelings and intuition.
His art, thus, has a mystical core that takes form at this time in dreamy improvisations that are not earthbound.
Space is conceived of as an unbounded, energy field; he has no interest in illusionistic one-point perspective.
Line, shape, and color all have their own autonomy and function freely within the unbounded field.
Note how the color bleeds here and suggests a slippage beyond any boundaries that would attempt to contain it. The picture is conceived of as a vibrant arrangement of rapidly moving color areas that make no reference to a storyline or object in external reality.
The picture has its own reality.

Piet Mondrian

Mondrian's early works, through 1907, were calm landscapes painted in delicate greys, mauves, and dark greens, tempered by Impressionists. In 1908, under the influence of Dutch painter Jan Troorop, he began to experiment with brighter colours, this represented his first attempt to transcend nature. This inclination was support by his decision in 1909, to join the Theosophical Society, where the religious mysticism encouraged him to turn inward to spiritual life.

Under the Cubism influences, Mondrian started to develop structure by breaking down the objects analytically. But soon concluded that Cubism was "more or less naturalistic", as it always rely on the real object one way or the other. For several years, he purified the formal geometric patterns. In "Composition No. 10" from the "Pier and Ocean series" (1915), the composition is reduced to the basic elements, in the form of small verticals and horizontals strokes.

Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow

Why is it Good Art?

An art of total clarity and strict economy of material, a source of Geometric Abstraction.. He saw the foundations and essence of things, and used only straight lines joined at right angles, because he believed this to be the angle of perfect equilibrium.
Mondrian rejected the sensuous qualities of texture and colour, and reduced his palette to primary colours, as they can never be found in their purest in nature, therefore the most abstract colour.
His masterly application of these theories led to work such as "Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow " ,this composition consisted solely of a few black lines and well-balanced blocks of colours, creating an monumental effect through its limits.
Mondrian stated that his works represented universal reality in its most fundamental form. According to him, everything in the universe could be broken down into vertical and horizontal lines.
Mondrian’s painterly sensibility is clearly illustrated – shiny black lines and delicately brushed fields, subtle gray hues and bold primaries, and careful adjustment of lines and planes as they reach the painting’s edge.
Both a beautiful work and an ideal object of technical study, historical research, and lasting aesthetic contemplation. Its pristine condition and intimate scale allow us to see clearly the astonishing craft of this groundbreaking artist.
Mondrian rejected figuration as the goal of art and replaced it with the pared-down vocabulary of elemental shapes and primary colours, thereby allowing art to express its own `plastic' language free of the concerns of representation. The artist in this environment became less author of a subjective artwork than the agent of a universal harmony.

Mark Rothko

Rothko was born in Russia, but moved to the United States with his family when he was 10 years old. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and decided to become an artist when he was a college student. His paintings became more and more abstract through the years, until finally he chose not to show any recognizable objects at all in his pictures. "I favor the simple expression of the complex thought," he wrote in 1947. "I am for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."

Red, Green and Orange

Why is it Good Art?

Mark Rothko is known for his characteristic works of large non-objective pictures that consist of horizontal bands of color with fuzzy edges. His works are passive rather than active, and tend to soothe rather than to assault the senses
Rothko is known for paintings called "color fields." His works often have big solid square shapes with soft edges that blend in to one another. This Rothko painting is titled "Orange and Yellow" and was done in 1956.
While it is the glowing, ovoid areas of color that the eye first embraces in a typical Rothko, it is useful to become aware of how they are contextualized with often dramatically emphasized horizons -- and borders. These divisions are mostly two, often three (occasionally more).
They define a horizon gestalt between the areas of color; the borders the peripheral limitation of our normal view of any horizon. We thus float at the center of a prospect that falls out as below us, before us and above us -- the artist leaving us to our own associations, but determining within his formal structures, the extent of the world he wants those associations to inhabit.
Thus, Rothko's tripartite and quadripartite compositions present a radical abstraction of the planet in cross-section from below the viewer's feet up, the internal light of that world provides it welcoming warmth or abject negation, as befits the artist's moods.
The underlying simplicity and unity of Rothko’s abstract paintings gives then the appearance of being self-evident and perennial. They seem to be saying, “We’ve always been here.”
Their variations on the same strictly non-geometrical oblong evokes matter, fields, the earth, weight. This is a very specific impression, quite different from the ones produced by circles, spirals, stars, triangles.
Yet its a somewhat paradoxical impression too, for it embraces weight and buoyancy, earth and fluidity, flatness and depth. Although they’re saturated, Rothko’s colors seen immaterial. What we’re witnessing here is a sort of respiration, not an earthward plunge. The painting’s shapes float in a space that is both liquid and airy. They rise and sink to the rhythm of quiet breathing. For all their rectangularity, they’re soft and round-edged. Viewing one of these paintings we find ourselves breathing to its rhythm--more deeply, more generously.
The monumental size of these canvases invites us insistently to enter them, to let ourselves be absorbed by them. Rothko, who set a great deal of store in this kind of viewer-participation, firmly believed that small formats shut out the spectator.
Remarkably, the frontality of these large canvases doesn’t in any way prevent the viewer from having an experience of depth, of entering a space apart, a meditation space. [...]

Pop Art

"The term first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Trilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience."

Andy Warhol

"Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol's best work was done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy..."

Green Coca Cola Bottles

Why is it Good Art?

Central to Warhol's career is the idea of emptying cultural icons of their meaning, something he does to both movie star images and food.
Warhol's skill lay in his uncanny ability to choose social themes and iconic images at the very moment when they were beginning to lose their meaning; he then enacted that process in his serialized, seemingly mass-produced images.
The images of the coke bottles suggest a death-like depersonalization and detachment, an emotional and physical numbing of the person and object such that the identity of what we see in the art work matters less than the medium.
As Chicago did somewhat later in the Dinner Party, Warhol and other pop artists were questioning the boundaries between art and life or popular culture.
But the statement Warhol is making may be about illusions in general and the ways in which stereotypes, people, objects, and social values were losing their meaning in the culture of the 60s.
Pop Art elevated the material realities of everyday life (Campbell's Soup cans and Coca Cola bottles) to an art form. It also repackaged the visual pleasure derived from POPular culture, (TV, magazines and comics), and presented them as art. The movement blurred the distinction between fine art and commercial art techniques.
The media and advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society, so there's little mystery as to why Warhol became part of a new form of art based on marketing and consumerism. In Warhol's mind everything could be seen as having a relationship to art. In his words: "Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything". Therefore the label of a soup can was art in itself as was any object created by a designer.

David Hockney

David Hockney has always denied being a Pop artist but is included under this heading because this is how the public perceives him. The most highly publicized British artist since the Second World War, he occupies a position analogous to that which was once accorded to Augustus John - one irony of this being that for John's exuberant heterosexuality Hockney substitutes a publicly acknowledged homosexuality.

"After working with master printer Ken Tyler in the 1980s on making etchings and lithographs, in 1986 Hockney explored ways of creating work with with colour photocopiers. 'The works I did with the copying machine ... were not reproductions,' he said later, 'they were very complex prints.' Subject to the same curiosity about new technical methods, he began to experiment with the fax machine, and in 1989 even sent work for the Sao Paulo Biennale to Brazil via the telephone line. Experiments using computers followed, composing images and colours on the screen and having them printed directly from the computer disk without preliminary proofing.

A Bigger Splash

Why is it Good Art?

David Hockney (1937- is one of the most important representatives of British Pop Art. His move to California at the beginning of the 1960s inspired him to paint a number of swimming: pool pictures.
In a series of calm, almost static, snapshot-like views, they evoke an effulgent, laid-back atmosphere that, in this example, is disturbed by "a bigger splash.
The picture, precisely constructed from photographs, is painted in acrylics with bright even areas of color. The splash was added subsequently in impasto. There are no human figures in this uncannily peaceful scene (apart from the swimmer, of course, who is not visible).
The landscape, too, is merely a backdrop of secondary importance to a scene of hedonistic leisure culture.
The house and the pool are emblems of the Californian lifestyle; Hockney has made his own. In view of the other pictures in this series, in many of which there is also a male figure bathing, Hockney would seem to have returned to the ancient myth of the Golden Age.
The clinically clean atmosphere should not, however, cause one overlook the fact that this is merely a reaction "after the Fall."
Hockney's idyllic, sensorly charged leisure world clashes with the profound social upheavals that took place in the 1960s, from which the artist tries in vain to shield himself.
Hockney's perfectly staged visual worlds, for which he also used photomontage and collage, fascinated an entire generation of younger artists who preferred a "freely figurative" form of painting to an abstract art that had congealed into ornamentation.

The contemporary definition of what constitutes good art may not be as clear as it once was. More and more artists are mixing media, blurring the boundaries between disciplines. Many would not regard themselves exclusively as painters, sculptors, installation artists, performance artists, printmakers, etc. The technological innovation particularly in communications has resulted in the creation of an ambiguous field for the art world. Artists have appropriated and started experimenting with technology and media as their personal tools of creative expression, which more often than not, are not easily positioned in the taxonomies of the past. Art produced from this practice from videotape to computer screen images become increasingly difficult to market, but fulfils an important function by questioning the art world and the relation, as it exists today, between art and culture.

Within the Indian Context

The traditional Indian holistic and Cosmo centric vision governs the entire Indian view of arts and aesthetics. Therefore, an inquiry into the Indian view of time, space, direction, universal, substance or elements, numbers, relation and action etc., is an imperative for the clear understanding of Indian arts and aesthetics, The system of correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, linking the gross and subtle, sense perception and human emotive states, paves the way for such an aesthetic experience of unity.

What is Rasa?

Rasa literally means the ultimate essence of a work of art. Rasa is a two-way process. The artist strives for rasa in his work and the rasika or connoisseur intuitively detects it. Rasa is bestowed, not made. In its most obvious sense, rasa refers to the sap, juice of plants, or extract/ fluid. In this physical sense, it is easy to identify: for instance, one speaks of the rasa of orange or sugarcane. Rasa also signifies the non-material essence of something or the “best or finest part of it,” like perfume, which comes from matter but is not so easy to describe or comprehend. Rasa also denotes taste and flavour, relating to consuming or handling either the physical object or taking in its nonphysical properties that yield pleasure. And when Rasa is applied to art and aesthetic experiences, the word signifies a state of heightened delight or ananda, the kind of bliss that can be experienced only by the spirit. The theory of art that focuses on the idea of rasa was enunciated for the first time, around the beginning of the Christian era, by Bharata in the Natyashastra, an extraordinary text on the arts of theatre.

The Aesthetic experience

Aesthetic experience is described as the “tasting of flavour” or rasavadana. The viewer, or more specifically, the scholar or connoisseur, is referred to as a rasika. A work of art bearing rasa is often described as being rasavat or rasavant.

Other terms that are more difficult to understand because they are used in a very specific sense are: bhava (as mood or emotional state), vibhavas (determinants), anubhavas (consequents), and vyabhicharibhavas (complementary emotional states). A sthayibhava is an enduring or durable emotional state; sattvika bhavas are involuntary bodily responses in states of emotion. Each of these terms needs to be clearly understood to comprehend rasa.

There is no agreement about how many rasas there are; however, Bharata speaks of eight sentiments: Shringara (the erotic), hasya (the comic), Karuna (the pathetic), Raudra (the furious), Vira (the heroic), Bhayanaka (the terrible), Bibhatsa (the odious) and Adbhuta (the marvelous). Later writers have added a ninth rasa, Shanta (the quiescent), that has been widely accepted.

Music and dance and their relationship to painting,

A dance sequence frozen in a frame become a painting and then line form colour rhythm, the abstraction of music to the abstraction in art where tones microtones and technical skill can be compared to painting. Ragamala paintings have a special significance in the world of art, which has not so far been fully realised. They not only display their own technique and art of colour and line but express, interpret and exhibit the soul/spirit and beauty of another art, the art of music, the art of svara-laya and cultivated/cultured voice.

"Music was considered to be of divine origin and was supposed to possess the property of evoking an ecstatic state of mind or mood, called rasa-anubhuti, in the musician as well as the listener. This conception of rasa is the basis of all art in India. The Sadhakas (practitioners) of music devised some formulas in order to capture and comprehend the divine quality of music and to evoke rasa or brahmananda. These were formulated in the form of prayers in which the conceptual form, dhyana-murti, of the raga was described. Thus the ragas were personified or deified. This fact provided a rich and expressive theme to Indian painters and it has considerably enriched the art treasure of India.

Many of the finest Indian miniatures were based on Ragmalas - i.e. moods associated with different musical ragas. Here the emphasis was on conveying a particular sentiment or mood, or atmosphere. Through the bold use of color, abstract touches, and deliberate flattening of three-dimensional textures, the artist succeeded in bringing out certain hidden nuances that simply would not be possible any other way.

The Inter disciplinary nature of the arts in India

A cultured person was expected to be educated in the sixty-four kalas (arts and sciences). These included dancing, singing, acting, gambling, sensing, metallurgy, cooking, gymnastics, minerology, calligraphy, architecture and engineering, nursing and rearing children. The acquisition of wealth to the pursuit of refined accomplishments art and pleasure were not restricted to any single segment of society.

In the Brahmanas - the common term for arts was "silpa" -in the sense of the creations of a perfect or refined form or replica of life. Bharat’s Naatya Saastra lays down the principles makeup, costume, acting both for the author and the actor. Since intimate knowledge of prosody, grammar, rhetoric, makeup, costume, acting, dance, song and music is essential to both of them.The ancient craftsman was a painter, architect and writer.

Another aspect of the Indian tradition that has baffled Western critics is the apparent lack of individualistic expression in traditional India art and sculpture. The anonymous craftsman in contrast to the modern inscriber of individuality.