More notes on Modern Art over the years
Looking back on some old notebooks, these quotes have remained in my thoughts about modern art and especially abstract art and its history. The turning point in the thinking of artists like Cezanne, Picasso and the father of abstract art-Kandinsky. The sequence that led to the rejection of the art that preceded it.
They coincided with my own thoughts but better articulated by various writers.
“The Art of Australia” by Robert Hughes.
“ Good taste” feeds on the past... Being nostalgic it is a useless instrument for measuring the worth of the new.
If an artist depends on it...his ability to expand his consciousness will gradually atrophy, his style will close in on him like Poe’s shrinking room, and in the end he will be left with nothing but copied variations on a prototype he barely understands.
“Times of luxury art recur. Their feature is that art loses its ritual and dynamic character. It becomes decorative. Pictures are passive; no longer outlets through which emotion and ideas are directed on experience with intense force, they exist on plesantly equal terms with the bureau above which they hang. Both are simple objects, Art abdicates its true role, which is to intensify experience; instead, it makes life more ingratiating by giving it a little twist here and a tweak there, drawing what sustenance it has from simple materal value. The spiritual life of its society is not strong enough to insist on some kind of expression through symbols.
Painting in the 20th Century by Werner Haftmann-
Ideas underlying modern art
“ Modern Art differs radically from art of the past because of a profound change in the thinking of artist concerned. They arose to a lesser extent from the thinking of Hegel, Fieller, Croce and Bergson, but a larger extent from diliberations which could not be disregarded, as they arose in actual artistic practice, in the dialogue of the painter with visible nature and the search for the elements which could make the painting a self existent organism and for the expressional power of purely pictorial means.
... the interactivity of intuition and intellect in which spontaneous vision is intellectually scrutinized is highly characteristic of modern painting.
...to be appreciated (a modern painting) one has to look with discerning scrutinity, and with an understanding of the true nature: the products of observation, the visual experiences of reality, of creation, and with the confrontation with the colours and forms evoked by these experiences.
... it arose (the new relationship) in the revolutionary discovery that visible reality is only one manifestation of the real, that the inner world posseses just as concrete a reality, as much truth and reality as the images.
Much more notes are hidden in other notebooks, to be continued in the future.
