Plus ca change…
One of the fascinations of art is the paradox that it’s always evolving with new movements but certain themes remain constant.
In our art course this week we studied the final two of the abstract pathfinders (Kandinsky was the first) Malevich and Mondrian.
Malevich was born in Belarus but regarded himself as Polish.
Though he soon acquired an international reputation he fell foul of Lenin and Stalin and was even arrested by the KGB.
When ordered to produce a certain type of art he responded with those blocks of colour in red and black that are his trademark.
He advocated art that was not decorative and figurative v abstract was a debate which dominated art, especially British art of the 20th Century.
Alfred Munnings as President of the Royal Academy, castigated Picasso who counter-attacked by calling English art “too pretty”.
Francis Bacon was quite prepared to be confrontational in attacking prettiness. Mondrian led an ascetic life with few friends and possessions. You could not say the same of Bacon whose life style of overblown excess has been charted in a recent biography. Aside from drugs, champagne and perverted male sex, he was intensely sociable holding court in the Colony Club in Soho where he was a founder member.
Conversely I feel Ted Seago and Ken Howard are insufficiently esteemed for being “decorative “ because of their supreme depiction of light. I’m in the figurative camp but I ‘get’ abstract art where the artist starts with an empty canvas, no object and no conventional fore and background, whereas in cubism the two fuse and Kandinsky and Malevich introduce kinetic movement by diagonal strokes on a flat surface
Mondrian is regarded as formulaic for his oblong primary colours with no border.
The sort of comment I despise is “Anyone can paint that …” when they did not and they cannot.
In fact our study of early Mondrian revealed a Dutch painter rooted in his country’s traditions of landscape and seascape until he discovered cubism when visiting Paris.
There is also a complex symbolism to his structure – the vertical lines are female, horizontal male, and their intersections unity. The image here of “New York boogy woogy” is based on the grid lay out of the city and numerous yellow taxis. He has moved on from black to primary coloured lines
In fact in the highly disordered world in which he lived – World Wars One and Two and the Spanish flu, Mondrian was seeking to impose order on chaos.
I would not be at all surpeised to see a similar trend arise out of Covid.
In our Thursday class we studied English art of the eighteenth century (Joseph Wright, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Wilson and Josiah Wedgwood).
Like Damien Hirst, Gainsborough had a big studio and delegated to artists like Van Ackem.
You could commission a Gainsborough or Reynolds portrait and they would have painted none of it. Gainsborough in particular was an astute businessman and marketeer . He was to be found in the affluent cities of Norwich and Bath seeking commissions. He liked painting landscapes the best but made a rich living from portraiture Like the Golden Age of Dutch art 200 years before a thriving mercantile economy was the driver behind English art of this period but it was more constrained than Dutch art by the Royal Academy and wealthy patronage
William Hogarth in particular was damning of the continental influencers like Canaletto and assuredly would have been a Brexiteer.
