Posts Tagged ‘Pointillism’
“Early modern society created – and we have inherited – that paradoxical thing: a tradition of radical innovation”*…
A University of Chicago economist with a specialty in the economics of creativity, David Galenson, with an argument that the Impressionists contributed more than their works to the story of art…
Since the 1960s the art world has become accustomed to the arrival of startling new works by contemporary artists, from Yves Klein’s anthropometries created by nude models covered with blue paint, Piero Manzoni’s canned feces, and Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portraits, through Andres Serrano’s crucifix in urine, Damien Hirst’s sectioned animals in formaldehyde, and Tracey Emin’s soiled bed, to Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana. Yet few art experts understand that these radical works are only the most recent consequences of a fundamental change in the structure of art markets that occurred more than a century ago. And the artists who initiated this change are today so venerated that few people realize how radical they were in their own time…
Art historians have long recognized that a radical change occurred in the appearance of fine art during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but they have failed to explain why this happened when it did. The answer lies in a change in the structure of the market for art, initiated by Claude Monet and a small group of his friends. The Impressionist group exhibitions of 1874–86 effectively ended the official Salon’s monopoly of the ability to certify artists as qualified professionals, and began a new regime in which small independent group exhibitions competed for attention. The result was a new era of artistic freedom, as painters no longer had to satisfy the conservative Salon jury, and new styles challenged for leadership of the art world. The heightened demand for originality favored conceptual artists, who could innovate conspicuously and decisively. So ironically, Monet and his fellow experimental Impressionists came under attack from the supporters of Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, and other young conceptual artists. The growing independence of private galleries, which further contributed to fostering competition, would allow Matisse, Picasso, and their peers to consolidate this revolution early in the next century. And the products of this perpetual revolution have included such later works as Warhol’s silkscreened portraits, Hirst’s sectioned animals, and Cattelan’s duct-taped banana. Art historians have described the transformation of modern art in great detail, but have failed to recognize the causal role of economic forces, as the shift from monopsony to a competitive market gave artists a new freedom to innovate, and made the modern era a time of continuing radical innovation…
Fascinating: “Marketing modern art: how the impressionists started a perpetual revolution,” from @jcultecon.bsky.social.
Bay Area readers can peek at the process in motion at The MFA’s Legion of Honor in the “Manet & Morisot” exhibition, up through March 1.
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As we divvy up the difference, we might send avant-garde birthday greetings to a beneficiary of this emergent cultural mechanism, Francis Picabia; he was born on this date in 1879. A French avant-garde painter, poet, and typographist, Picabia experimented with Impressionism and Pointillism before becoming a Cubist. He then became one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, and was later briefly associated with Surrealism.
See his work at the record of a major retrospective hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 on their web site.
“All familiar things can open into strange worlds”*…
A thoughtful consideration of a modern master…
In the summer of 1953, after a stint in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment mixed in hot wax) with collage (often mere newspaper) on canvas…
Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold out, with three paintings immediately purchased by MoMA, and one piece appearing on the cover of ARTnews. Then 27, he had sized up the New York art world precisely, dominated as it then was by the formalist model of ‘modernist painting’ used by Clement Greenberg to champion Abstract Expressionism, and deftly deflected its discourse towards what Leo Steinberg would term ‘other criteria’.
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In a studied phrase Johns spoke of his position as one of ‘shunning statement’. This suggests an aversion to polemics, political as well as artistic, that goes beyond temperament, a fatigue with the heated ideologies of the period (the Korean conflict, the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War). And Johns did muffle his subjects along with his gestures; his large White Flag (1955) is literally whited out. Might this intimate a ‘painting degree zero’ in line with the ‘writing degree zero’ posed by Roland Barthes against Sartrean commitment at around this time? ‘I can’t imagine my work being used to accomplish anything socially,’ Johns said. This is less negation than neutrality à la Barthes, for whom ‘the neutral’ was a way to baffle conceptual binaries, to undo ideological oppositions, to mess with ‘the paradigm’…
On the occasion of the Whitney’s (@whitneymuseum) show (through February 13) “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” Hal Foster‘s “Which red is the real red?,” from @LRB.
* Jasper Johns
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As we look closely, we might spare a thought for Francis Picabia (Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia); he died on this date in 1953. A French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist, Picabia experimented with Impressionism and Pointillism before becoming a Cubist. He then became one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, and was later briefly associated with Surrealism.
See his work at the record of a major retrospective hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 on their web site.
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