A New history of western art  Page 338

The importance of the works discussed here lay not, incidentally, in their pictorial qualities alone: their revolutionary political character was at least as important. Painters such as Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet were the first to demand the autonomy of the artist as critical citizens in a society where power and authority were no longer unambiguous certainties. Citizens were gradually given a decisive voice in the political system and, above all, the freedom to choose: Catholic or liberal? Royalist or republican? Religious or freethinker? For the first time, artists were able to make ideological choices, and they wasted no time in doing so. The greatest in their ranks were no longer the visual ideologues of power, but critical thinkers in a complex society. Freedom loomed on the horizon. 


A New history of western art  Page 338


Gauguin - History of Modern Art, H.H. Arnason

Gauguin advised a fellow painter not to "copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, but think more of creating than the actual result." In these statements may be found many of the concepts of twentieth-century experimental painting, from the idea of color used arbitrarily rather than to describe an object visually, to the primacy of the creative act, to painting as abstraction. Gauguin's ideas, which he called Synthetism, involved a synthesis of subject and idea with form and color, so that his paintings are given their mystery, their visionary quality, by their abstract color patterns. His purpose in creating such an anti-Realist art was to express invisible, subjective meanings and emotions. He attempted to free himself from the corrupting sophistication of the modern industrial world, and to renew his spirit, by contact with an innocence and sense of mystery that he sought in non-industrial societies. He constantly described painting in terms of an analogy with music, of color harmonies, of color and lines as forms of abstract expression. In his search he was attracted, to a greater degree even than most of his generation, to so-called"primitive" art. In his work we find the expression of modern primitivism, the tendency to understand non-Western or pre-industrial societies as more pure, more authentic than those of the West. Primitivism simultaneously valorizes and denigrates pre-industrial cultures, because their appeal rests in their perceived simplicity and resistance to progress.

Only by casting these societies as relatively naive and ineffectual could their potential as sources for aesthetic as well as economic exploitation be justified. Such notions were, of course, forged at a time when European countries were aggressively colonizing the very societies Western artists sought to emulate. For Gauguin, primitivism held appeal as a means of relieving himself of the burden of Western cul-ture, industrialization, and urbanization. Attracted not only to primitive-seeming motifs, Gauguin also cultivated a deliberately naive style. Like the paintings of Henri Rousseau, Gauguin's works convey an immediacy and authenticity that is generally absent in academic art.


History of Modern Art, H.H. Arnason  page 59

Takashi Kuribayashi: Roots

Wade Guyton - curation by Nicolas Trembley

George Rouy The Bleed, Part II

CLAIRE TABOURET Moonlight Shadow

JANE SWAVELY - Supernatural

Frieze Los Angeles 2025

Charlie Engelman Pith

Sam McKinniss The Perfect Tense & Lesley Vance Paintings, Watercolors

January 11 – February 23, 2025

David Kordansky, Los Angeles

Sam McKinniss

Lesley Vance

The Monster Curated by Robert Nava

Hadi Falapishi Edge of the World & Yoshitomo Nara My Imperfect Self

BLUM Los Angeles,

January 18–March 22, 2025
Nara
Falapishi

curated by Mizuki Endo, Hikotaro Kanehira, and Tomoya Iwata

Yosuke Amemiya|WATARI-UM, The Watari Museum of Art, which has not melted yet.

Hiroshi Senju, Tanabe Chikuunsai Ⅳ Beyond Nature

2024.11.6 [wed] – 12.21 [sat]

YUKIKOMIZUTANI, Tokyo
report by Liee

Martine Syms Total

Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris

Exhibition from 16 Oct 2024 to 09 Feb 2025

Report by Emma de Felice

New history of western art

Where, until relatively recently, these aspects of art history were viewed as stable factors, it is now increasingly likely to be stressed that this is not correct at all. An artist's thinking evolves, and it is safe to assume that even Rembrandt and Poussin had days when they achieved very little. People are fallible, after all. Furthermore, a work of art is a record of its history: paint discolours, restoration alters the physical condition. It was discovered only recently, for example, that the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the most innovative paintings in Western art, had as much as 50-70% of its surface overpainted in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years, countless thousands of people had been admiring the handiwork of a sixteenth-century master with a little Van Eyck thrown in for good measure. The perception of an image is not a stable factor either: everyone brings their personal baggage with them and looks at things with their own specific pattern of expectations. The period eye', as the renowned art historian Michael Baxandall called it, simply cannot be reconstructed in its entirety. In response, a third viewpoint was added to the traditional pairing of iconography and iconology, namely that of semiotics. Through cross-fertilisation with linguistics and the social sciences, which had analysed communication models for much longer, the understanding has grown that meaning is not only provided by the sender (the artist) of a message (the artwork), but that the recipient (the viewer of the artwork) adds meaning too. The brain invariably makes associations and these are similar for everyone but also distinctly individual. When two Europeans see an image of Christ, a non-believer will respond to it emotionally and cognitively in a very different way to a devout Catholic. A strict Protestant with an aversion to idolatry' will view it in another way again.

The challenge when seeking a good understanding of style and iconography (or of form and content) is to grasp the interaction between the two and its constant instability. Why do we see what we see and why do we interpret it the way we do? The way people respond to an image is highly sensitive to shifts and sudden ruptures in context. A photograph of the twin towers of the World Trade Center had an entirely different significance for New Yorkers (and not only them) the day before 11 September 2001 (9/11) than it did the day after. Art historians have not always taken account of this phenomenon.

New history of western art Page 362

Chiharu Shiota The Soul Trembles

Mohri Yuko On Physis

Mark Manders | Silent Studio