Philosophy of Art: Impressionist / Modern / Post Modern Art

[karene]

Philosophy of Art: Gallery of Modern Art
Impressionist to Post Modernism

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. (Francisco de Goya)





















The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth, which sweeps you along in his passion.
The pain passes, the beauty remains. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)





There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)













It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
(Vincent Van Gogh)










The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time. (Henri Matisse)








From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest. (Pablo Picasso, 1952)




Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. (Pablo Picasso)


We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. (Pablo Picasso)









I am a deeply superficial person ... In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes (Andy Warhol)

Post Modern Art

The Postmodern belief in no Absolute Truth has detrimentally affected modern Art, resulting in artistic confusion, lack of meaning and decay.

'Art historians speak of modern art as concerned primarily with essential qualities of colour and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter.' (Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Roots of Modernism)



I detest most postmodern art and think we are experiencing a terrible decay intellectually in the arts. I will be writing more about my gripes with postmodernism. Until then ...

Karene


http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Art-Truth.htm
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Postmodernism-Post-Modernism.htm