Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 12
Abstraction vs. Realism
by Joan Altabe - 10/05/2006
There's no such thing as the right style. The ongoing argument between Abstract art and realism prompts this letter to you today.
The argument started over one hundred years ago in a Victorian London courtroom when James McNeill Whistler sued art critic John Ruskin for what he believed was a libelous review of his hazy nighttime view of the Thames, "Arrangement - Black and Gold.'' Ruskin said the painting was tantamount to "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.'' Whistler told the court that the content of a painting wasn't important, only the arrangement of line, form and color.
The abstraction/realism quarrel re-surfaced some five years ago in a New York Times Magazine article by Thomas Wolfe about the realist sculptor Frederick Hart.
Hart, famous for the Vietnam Veterans memorial "Three Soldiers'' in Washington, D.C., died in August, bitter over the art world's disregard of his art idea. His Web page presents the idea:
"I have no patience with obscure or unintelligible art,'' he wrote, calling for "a rebirth of forgotten standards of past art and the ancient trinity of truth, beauty and goodness.''
Boy, was Hart wrong about those standards of past art he loved so much.
The classical style wasn't the only one that inspired art of the Western world, and it's not the only one about truth, beauty and goodness.
The art idea of ancient Asia held that the worth of a picture has nothing to do with its resemblance to the world around it. Real-world images are to be translated into artful idioms. The Song Dynasty in the 11th century went so far as to say that anyone who talked about painting in terms of likeness deserved to be classed with children.
Whistler, who won his court case, took instruction from Asian art.
Other non-classical art that held sway over Western art includes that of the Celts and Germanic peoples, who didn't care about showing the way the world looks, preferring, instead, ornament and abstract design.
Hart's disregard for non-classical art, his outright chauvinism, makes him a latter-day Ruskin.
Not that I think less of Hart's work. I stuck up for him back in ‘97, saying that in the movie "The Devil's Advocate,'' Warner Bros. studio twisted the meaning of his sculpture about Genesis on the Washington National Cathedral. While Hart showed male and female nudes coming into being, the movie, which portrays Al Pacino as Satan, showed the same figures committing a variety of sexual acts on Pacino's apartment wall.
I have nothing against recognizable images. But there's a "but'' ...
Back when abstract expressionism was in and realism was out, a dozen art majors at a university in New York painted at their easels with feverish intensity. They labored not for grade points, but for commendation from their teacher, one of the inventors of abstract expressionism, Robert Motherwell. With hero-worshipping enthusiasm, they spent their studio hours mimicking his trademark amorphic shapes on giant canvases.
I ought to know. I was one of them.
One student, though, as feverish at his easel, painted only tight little still lifes of assorted fruit. Naturally, we Motherwell groupies figured the fruit paintings would get the grand put-down by the modern master.
But we figured wrong. The little still lifes ended up lasting object lessons on artmaking. The lesson: It doesn't matter what or how one paints, only that one does it with integrity, with incorruptibility.
— Joan Altabe | October 5, 2006
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