Topic: Review
This website is awesome. Finally, an on-line gallery with hi-resolution images for those of us who can't fly to distant art collections.
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| Une Vocation, W Bouguereau | God Speed, Edmund Blair-Leighton | Pelt Merchant of Cairo, Jean-Leon Gerome |
The Art Renewal Center website has thousands! of images of paintings (and some photos of sculptures) from hundreds of Academic, Classical and Romantic artists. It has a deep commitment to excellence in representational art, and the academic skills necessary to execute them. "Additionally, the Art Renewal Center is a non-profit educational organization committed to reviving standards of craftsmanship and excellence. Only by gaining a full command of the skills of the past Masters can we create the Masters of tomorrow. This is a step forward for our culture. Experimentation and creativity can only succeed and prosper when built on a solid foundation of past accomplishments, with the tools which empower artists to realize their visions.
I know their view is not a popular one - how can it be when fashionable and snobby art world fawns all over a toilet seat covered in cheese and called art because the artist claimed it is so? But how can a person call themselves an artist when they can't convincingly draw a human figure, or reproduce perspective, or give the illusion of texture with only one medium?
When I go to art museums I tend to skip over the "modern" wings - where someone has nailed a shellaqued car tyre to the ceiling, for example - and spend my limited time in the exhibits that move me - a finely painted lace collar in a portrait, the almost touchable "pearling" of a new-born lamb's wool. I can stand all day before a finely executed portrait of a woman, and wonder who she was, what she liked, what life she led. This special sense of wonder hardly ever comes to me when I'm looking at modernist non-representational works. It's always been the way I felt about art, and now I am old enough to understand that I needn't feel inferior because the trendies tell me I "just don't understand."
I do not understand modernism, but I know clever trend-driven marketing when I see it.
This is not to say that I turn away from all "installations". For example, at the San Diego Mingei Museum, I have frequently enjoyed excellent exhibits of room-size installations full of texture, color, and movement - such as ART THAT SOARS - Kites and Tails by Jackie Matisse. However, the Mingei is not really a place for modern art - "Mingei is a special word increasingly used throughout the world for "arts of the people." It was coined by the revered scholar, the late Dr. Soetsu Yanagi, through combining the Japanese words for all people (min) and art (gei). His keen eye observed that many useful, pre-industrial articles made by unknown craftsmen were of a beauty seldom equaled by artists of modern societies.
"Within these timeless arts of the people (Mingei), he recognized a quality of expression in which there was no fragmentation of body, mind and spirit. He realized that to balance the weight of increasing technology there is a growing urgency for man to continue to make and use objects that express his whole being
For me, this is very different than the modernist movement of the trendy art world. Objects that are beautiful because they are used, have a grace all their own, and because they were obviously made and used by people. When I look at a Shaker chair on display in the museum I can close my eyes and imagine the straight-backed black-clad woman who may have sat in it with her prayer-book at one time, and almost feel like I'm with her standing behind me and with every other person who have ever looked upon this object. How can anyone get this feeling of connectedness, of humanity, when all there is to look at is a wall of paint splatters?
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| Shaker chairs as displayed in the exhibition From Mt. Lebanon to the World, at the Shaker Museum and Library in the main gallery. |
