Jeff Cornell was born and raised in Connecticut. He studied at the Paier School of Art in Hamden. He is a nationally acclaimed artist who specializes in figure painting. His delicate drawings and pastels of the female form capture not only beauty, but also moments of contemplation and tranquility suspended in time and far removed from worldly problems. He exhibits his paintings in galleries throughout the country.
“The female form is of arresting beauty; there is no other thing I would care as much to portray through my work,” states Jeff Cornell, describing the main inspiration for his art. And, certainly, his appreciation for feminine beauty shows in every contour, every line. What is perhaps more unique and surprising, however, is how fully Cornell can convey the mood of feminine serenity, contemplation and sensuality with so little use of color, such delicate texture and such an economy of lines.
“I want my work to speak to every person who views it, but it is important to me that the message be whispered rather than shouted,” the artist states. His message is certainly whispered, if not softly sung.
With very little use of shading, his paintings show rounded, sinuous forms, volume. With very little use of color, they show vibrancy, emotion. With an economy of lines, they reach a level of astonishing realism, but only through suggestion. With almost no texture, they are nonetheless palpable. And with very little narrative structure, they hint at movement, thought, feeling and action.
Jeff Cornell’s art is perhaps the most difficult of all: the art of understatement. The art of suggesting human subjectivity—unexpressed thoughts, subcurrents of emotions and hidden desires—rather than displaying them dramatically on the canvas.
Damien Hirst is probably the most controversial and successful artist of our times, particularly if one measures success by how much critical attention art gets and how much it sells for. The founder of the avant-garde Young British Artists and considered to be the richest living artist in Great Britain, Hirst has had more than his share of both positive and negative media attention. The critical and artistic elite, however, hails him as one of the most innovative neoconceptual artists of our times. This is a very high honor, indeed, given that conceptual art has dominated the latter part of the twentieth century and continues to be very popular with critics today.
In most of his work, the philosopher and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto, explains the rise of conceptual art. His artistic heroes are Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who arguably contributed most visibly to make art what it is today: aesthetic in the critical and reflexive ideas it raises about art rather than in the way it represents objects. Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s brillo boxes, Danto argues, are not artistic in their materiality. There’s nothing intrinsic to these objects that makes them different from ordinary household objects. Their aesthetic qualities, Danto suggests, lie in the way their make us question the nature and existence of art in a new and provocative way. The millennia-old Platonic tradition of understanding art as some kind of inferior mimesis or imitation of reality is clearly gone in such readymade objects and pop art assemblages. Gone is also the equally old tradition, famously initiated by Plato and resurrected by the Romantics, of art as a special, almost daemonic, force that inspires artists to create works of beauty. Last but not least, in reading Danto we get the impression that the notion of creativity and originality, defended by the French writer Emile Zola in his ardent defense of Manet, has been pushed to the extreme by Duchamp, Warhol and , more recently, by Hirst himself.
Much of Damien Hirst’s art explicitly evokes the concept (and reality) of death. His most famous readymade, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, features a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in an aquarium. This piece was created in 1991, bought by the artist’s original patron, Charles Saatchi, and redone in 2006 (since the original began to rot). Hirst’s other controversial readymades include dead and dissected animals, a cow and a sheep (Away from the Flock), also preserved in formaldehyde. My personal favorite is In and Out of Love, which consists of colorful and delicate butterflies whose beauty in death is preserved by art.
Those familiar with the world of art already know everything I’ve just summarized. Now I’d like to examine Hirst’s art in terms of its cultural role as well as in terms of its complementarity to my own contemporary art movement, postromanticism.com. I will first consider Hirst’s powerful impact in the field of contemporary art, then his striking conceptualization of death, which will lead me to explore the continuity between the themes of Eros and Thanatos: desire and the life force represented by my movement postromanticism.com and death and mortality being represented by Hirst’s conceptual art.
1. The Field of Cultural Production and Shock Value. Although sympathetic to those who value the role of conceptual art to provoke thought, ideas and change assumptions about what is art, I tend to look at art more pragmatically and sociologically, relying upon the works of the French sociologist of art, Pierre Bourdieu (The Field of Cultural Production and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste). I believe that art is what “the field of cultural production”—namely, art critics, artists, patrons, art schools, art teachers and professors and museum curators—say it is. The art considered most valuable by these cultural forums—meaning not only the art that sells for most money, but also the art that gets most critical attention (even if not always of the positive variety!)—is what defines art for a given context. This may seem somewhat relativistic, but it doesn’t have to be: if one assumes that critics, artists, etc. propose valid and defensible standards of aesthetic value and judge art accordingly. Hirst’s works have probably made the biggest impact in the recent history of art, where conceptual art dominates the art scene, particularly in critical reviews and museums of contemporary art. (Of course, in other essays, I argue that conceptual art shouldn’t dominate those venues, and that curators and art critics should become more open to different styles of art, including more traditional styles inspired by the Romantic and realist traditions, which are very popular with galleries and the general public).
Hirst’s works are not original in the traditional Kantian sense of inimitability. In fact, the artist imitated his own work of art by placing a second shark in formaldehyde when the first one started to decompose. His work is original, however, in the sense of making a huge cultural splash and in being the first—or one of the first–of its kind to make that kind of impact or statement. This sense of originality is not far removed from shock value, a term which many (including me) have used to criticize postmodern art. The more I’ve opened my mind to all types of art since starting my art blog, however, the less critical and the more positive I’ve become about shock value. In fact, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that shock value may be necessary to keeping art alive in culture.
Art runs the risk of becoming increasingly culturally irrelevant. If you look at what attracts most public attention nowadays it’s the latest shenanigans of the Kardashians; the latest fashions and shoe trends; the cutest purses; the latest Hollywood hookups and scandals, the juiciest political sex scandals and–let’s not forget–the Royal Wedding. Not just art, but also politics risk falling by the wayside. As you may recall, in the not-so-distant past, it used to be that every major newspaper had foreign correspondents. Now we see the proliferation of entertainment editors and blogs, which have replaced, for the most part, foreign correspondents. In the U.S., rather sadly, international news has become almost exclusively a matter of headlines pertaining strictly to our foreign policy. We have to dig hard, as Americans, to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world outside of the area of high-profile celebrities, the wars we start, political scandals, or natural disasters. If international politics has become less relevant—in selling newspapers–than Kim Kardashian’s new engagement ring, you can imagine that the world of art risks being left even further behind.
The number of entertainment editors and blogs keep growing, while the number of high-profile art critics keeps falling, as the art and book critics are being swallowed up into the general rubric of Arts or Entertainment, which for the most part focuses on best-selling books and film reviews. In this context, if artists do not create something very entertaining, shocking and provocative to get the arts and entertainment critics and, more importantly, the general public interested in them, the world of art is likely to fade in the background of culture like a shy wallflower. Artists like Damien Hirst offer aesthetic objects that are so provocative that whether or not you like that kind of art or even find it “artistic,” it places art, once again, at the center of public discussion, which is where it should be. As George Bernard Shaw famously stated, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
2. From Eros to Thanatos: Postromanticism and Damien Hirst’s art. Judging by its own aesthetic standards, I also appreciate the way Damien Hirst’s neoconceptual art makes us think about the continuity between love and death, or between Eros and Thanatos. In many respects, his artworks are opposite of and complementary to the art movement I co-founded with Leonardo Pereznieto in 2002, postromanticism.com. Postromanticism emphasizes the importance of beauty, sensuality and passion in contemporary representational art. While being original and edgy, postromantic art maintains the verisimilitude of the artistic objects—be they paintings, photographs or sculptures—which resemble the objects they depict.
By way of contrast, the notion of verisimilitude isn’t really applicable as a standard by which to judge Damien Hirst’s art. Hirst often exhibits the real object: the real sheep, the real shark, the real butterflies, in the same way that Warhol exhibited the real brillo boxes and Duchamp an actual latrine. Postromantic art is all about the importance of desire, love and passion in human life. Hirst’s artworks show us the ephemeral nature of such emotions. They often represent the literal embodiment of mortality, underscoring the fleeting nature of biological life itself. Postromanticism and Hirst’s conceptual art may therefore seem polar opposites, and in some respects they are. But every major anthropological and psychological study of love and death has depicted these oppositions as inextricably connected. Freud is known for discussing the link between love and death in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, or between the life force (Eros, desire, sexuality) and the death force (or Thanatos, a term made popular by Paul Federn). Looking at the life and death forces in terms of energy flow, psychoanalysis looks at desire as a dissipation of energy, where every orgasm represents a “small death.”
Anthropologists make the link between love and death even more explicitly by looking at desire in the context of human sacrifice. The best book I’ve read on this subject is Georges Bataille’s L’Erotisme. For Bataille, love represents the hopeless search for our lost continuity. It’s hopeless because the unions we attain through sex and love are very fleeting. After copulation we return once again to our individuated, solitary selves. As they say, we’re all alone in pain and death. “In essence,” Bataille states, “the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation… The most violent thing of all for us is death which jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our discontinuous being.”
Postromantic passion, as expressed by the artists associated with postromanticism.com, is a celebration of desire, respect, love and obsession for as long as these deep and powerful emotions can last. This art also celebrates passing on and transforming artistic traditions—the Romantic movement, neoclassicism and art nouveau—for our contemporary times. Hirst’s art provokes us to think about the obverse sides of love and desire: how quickly they can dissipate; how contingent human emotions can be; how wrong we often are about the objects of our desire; how idealization often turns into the devaluation of the object of love (or just lust); how even when love lasts, unfortunately, our lives do not. The danger represented by his tiger sharks or the mortality displayed by his dissected animals is, after all, also our own mortality and the danger we can pose to each other.
To emphasize the importance of this complementarity between postromanticism and Hirst’s neoconceptual art, I’d like to allude to one last cultural figure: Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous Russian formalist critic. Bakhtin argued that art and literary are chronotopic rather than just diachronic. By this he meant that artistic and literary movements don’t happen just in linear/temporal sequence, one following the other, as they’re often taught in art and literary history. New art movements often go back in time to find inspiration in much older movements, the way Neo-Classicism found inspiration in Greek and Roman art and Romanticism went back to Medieval art.
The relation between postromanticism and Hirst’s neoconceptual is similar: each finds inspiration in older movements. Moreover, they end up depicting the themes of love and death in a way analogous to how the Romantic and Symbolist movements did this centuries earlier. Postromanticism draws more from the Romantic tradition while Hirst’s art echoes Symbolist obsessions (with death, decay, the unconscious, fears, and pushing the boundaries of art). I believe that the tension and complementarity between these two contemporary art movements is exciting and necessary. After all, a worthwhile human life must entail both the appreciation and celebration of love and beauty and the resignation and sense of irony towards our cosmic insignificance and transience. It all depends, like in the illusionist picture of the young or old woman featured below, upon your perspective.
Vesa Peltonen has dedicated not only his art, but also his life to protecting and celebrating human rights. His paintings have a softened Cubist feel about them: as if the viewer were examining not just the shapes themselves, but also their shadows and the shades of color, from all angles. The effect is dazzling. Like in post-Impressionism, his paintings allow the eye to mix the colors from afar. Because the emphasis is placed on shades of striking colors, however, the images seem to float despite their underlying realism.
Vesa’s paintings are multicultural in theme, as the artist finds the beauty and flavor of each location where he travels to bring art to students all over the world. Vesa Peltonen’s art and his human rights activism are, in many respects, inseparable. He founded the Global ArtExchanges Program, which, in his own words, views art as “an integral part of helping enliven the learning of youth, and thus enriches their neighbourhood and community, large or small.”
This program collaborates with local art group directors to motivate youth across the globe to express themselves artistically. Global ArtXchanges works hand in hand with human rights organizations, like Amnesty International, to bring the beauty of art to impoverished areas of the world, where artistic expression might be viewed as a luxury, not a necessity. Art may not be essential to basic material survival, but, Global ArtXchanges maintains, it’s nonetheless essential to our spiritual and creative flourishing. You can find out more about Vesa Peltonen’s visionary art and the Global ArtXchanges Program on his website, GLOBALArtXchanges.org.
Before the Impressionists overturned many of the criteria established by the Academies and the Salons, the art of portraiture was considered to be the most important in the hierarchy of genres. Portraits of kings, queens and aristocrats were valued most, but there were notable exceptions to this trend. The Dutch Renaissance masters and, later, Chardin, made portraits of regular, middle class people (and their servants) not only acceptable, but also considered to be the highest form of art.
In several of my articles on this blog, I express some regret that with the advent of Modernism, postmodernism and, more generally, nonrepresentational art, we’ve lost so many valuable artistic traditions, including the art of realistic portraiture. The Cuban-born American artist Enrique Flores-Galbis helps brings portraiture back to our contemporary times. Trained at the New York University Graduate School under the photorealist, Adelle Weber, Enrique Flores-Galbis also received a Master of Fine Arts from the prestigious Parsons School of Design.
Great portraits can be appreciated by anyone: they’re nearly universal in their accessibility and appeal. Moreover, it takes great talent to execute them right, as Enrique Flores-Galbis clearly does. In Swing, shown below, the artist foregrounds a little girl, traditionally dressed, as if she were back from communion or Church. Her expression is frank and even a little awkward: exactly as it would be if she had posed for a photographer. In the background, we see featured Fragonard’s famous eighteenth-century Rococo painting, The Swing, commissioned by an aristocrat to feature the flirtatious games he played with his mistress. In this way, Flores-Galbis pays homage to the rich tradition of representational art to which his own painting belongs.
The painting Double Figure with Landscape, below, may be a study in forms (as its title suggests), but it’s also much more than that. Its vibrant colors and tender expression capture a mother’s love for her daughter. In managing to express sweetness without any sentimentality, this painting also evokes–in theme, if not in style–some of Renoir’s paintings of the maternal bond.
As a cat lover, I can’t neglect the painting Cat, below. It has a generic title, but it’s adorably personal in capturing the cat’s expression: eyes fixated on the painter or viewer, ears cocked back, on the defensive. Cats don’t really pose for a camera or for a painter. There’s nothing postcard-ish or staged about this painting: Cat is a unique, endearing and personalized portrait.
You can see more of Enrique Flores-Galbis’s stunning realist portraits on his website, http://www.efgportraits.com/.
The aesthetic revolution that occurred during the twentieth-century is unprecedented in the history of Western art. Even the invention of one-point perspective and the soft shading that gives the illusion of depth (chiaroscuro) during the Renaissance didn’t change aesthetic standards as radically as the creation of non-representational, or what has also been called “conceptual” art. Since Marcel Duchamp we have come to believe that a latrine, if placed in a museum, is a work of art. Since Andy Warhol we have come to accept that brillo boxes and other ordinary household objects, if placed in a museum, are objets d’art. And since Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism we have come to realize that what may appear to be randomly spilled paint, globs and other kinds of smudges are not only artistic, but also considered by many to be the deepest expressions of human talent, thought and feeling.
Once art took a conceptual turn, it also became philosophical. As Arthur Danto argues in representational art what constituted “art” was more or less obvious. The only question that was always difficult to determine was: is it good art? By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical–namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it–but also sociological. Art is, as Danto himself declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it–by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books about it, critiquing and reviewing it, etc– says it is.
A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. But it isn’t everything for the simple reason that not everything is consecrated as art. What may seem, by older standards, to be art—such as contemporary Impressionist-style paintings–may not be considered art (but only cheap imitation) by the public or critics, while, conversely, what doesn’t seem to be art—a brillo box—can be perceived as the highest manifestation of artistic genius.
As noted, what makes twentieth- and twenty-first century art conceptual is the fact that what makes it be “art” can no longer be seen with the eye. We can’t see the aesthetic difference between the brillo boxes we discard and Warhol’s brillo boxes. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. Clearly, it’s not the physical qualities of the object, but rather the assumptions of a community that determine what is (good) art. I cannot dispute this argument—made in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur Danto–because, given everything I observe is being called art, I see it as the most compelling explanation of the term “art” as it’s being used today. Having conceded the artistic nature and value of nonrepresentational art, however, postromantic aesthetics argues that just because nonrepresentational art is valued doesn’t mean that contemporary representational art should be dismissed.
To explain the conceptual revolution that occurred in art at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some art historians claim that photography eliminated the need for representational art, or the kind of art that tries to imitate “nature” by depicting faithfully what the eye can see. We can add in parentheses, as E. H. Gombrich observes in The Story of Art, that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, it too is shaped by social assumptions. Nonetheless, the difference between a kind of art that aims at faithful visual imitation of the three-dimensional qualities of physical objects and one that doesn’t remains relatively easy to discern.
For instance, even without reading the descriptive title of the painting, it’s clear to tell by just looking at Renoir’s Girl Bathing (1892) that it features a nude girl bathing. Without its explanatory (or deceptive) title, however, it would be impossible to know what Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911) is supposed to represent The last thing that might occur to those who look at it–if it were not for the title–is that it shows a nude.
The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts. The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. But that doesn’t mean that artisanship–or hand-made beautiful objects–are no longer valuable. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines. The texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic.
Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, already existed in classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinuosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures. In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed (what was perceived as) the essence of beauty: the glorification of divine powers and aesthetic ideals were embodied in the human form. Philip Scott’s Johnson’s spectacular video vividly captures the beauty of classical sculptures:
While Greek paintings and especially sculptures showed knowledge of human anatomy, movement and foreshortening, it’s Renaissance artists who discovered the two other key components of verisimilitude in painting: one point-perspective and shading, which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to two-dimensional painted forms. Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. (The Story of Art, 228-9).
The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art seem almost real. His most famous painting Mona Lisa is said to deceive the viewers into believing that the woman’s eyes move, returning and even following their gaze with her eyes. Likewise, many have speculated about the meaning of Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, whose lips have a mobility that renders her at once impenetrable and expressive. Leonardo was able to achieve these complex visual and psychological effects through the technique called sfumato, or the smoky blurring the contours of the object depicted—especially the corners of Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth—to leave their outline and expression more open to interpretation.
The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms — all these techniques which took centuries to develop–have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes. This kind of naturalistic art is not necessarily “realistic” in the sense of capturing human life as it actually is. For instance, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality.
In its preference for visual resemblance (as opposed to realism or plausibility), postromanticism argues that the artistic techniques that give a sense of three-dimensionality and life-like quality to art are difficult skills that require both patience and technical talent and that are worth preserving and appreciating in art today. There’s no reason to discard the masterful qualities that made art artistic for five hundred years. Nor do such techniques have only a purely historical value. In an artistic world that prides itself upon pluralism, openness and variety, artists who desire to continue the legacy of realistic representation should be able to coexist with those that have rejected it. Postromanticism presents not a rival, but an alternative to modern and postmodern conceptual art. For in a world of such diverse tastes and sensibilities, there’s certainly room for both.
The aesthetic revolution that occurred during the twentieth century is unprecedented in the history of Western art. Even the invention of one-point perspective and the soft shading that gives the illusion of depth (chiaroscuro) during the Renaissance didn’t change aesthetic standards as radically as the creation of non-representational, or what has also been called “conceptual” art. Since Marcel Duchamp we have come to believe that a latrine, if placed in a museum, is a work of art. Since Andy Warhol we have come to accept that brillo boxes and other ordinary household objects, if placed in a museum, are objets d’art. And since Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism we have come to realize that what may appear to be randomly spilled paint, globs and other kinds of smudges are not only artistic, but also considered by many to be the deepest expressions of human talent, thought and feeling.
Once art took a conceptual turn, it also became philosophical. As Arthur Danto argues in representational art what constituted “art” was more or less obvious. The only question that was always difficult to determine was: is it good art? By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical–namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it–but also sociological. Art is, as Danto himself declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it–by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books about it, critiquing and reviewing it, etc– says it is.
A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. But it isn’t everything for the simple reason that not everything is consecrated as art. What may seem, by older standards, to be art—such as contemporary Impressionist-style paintings–may not be considered art (but only cheap imitation) by the public or critics, while, conversely, what doesn’t seem to be art—a brillo box—can be perceived as the highest manifestation of artistic genius.
As noted, what makes twentieth- and twenty-first century art conceptual is the fact that what makes it be “art” can no longer be seen with the eye. We can’t see the aesthetic difference between the brillo boxes we discard and Warhol’s brillo boxes. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. Clearly, it’s not the physical qualities of the object, but rather the assumptions of a community that determine what is (good) art. I cannot dispute this argument—made in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur Danto–because, given everything I observe is being called art, I see it as the most compelling explanation of the term “art” as it’s being used today. Having conceded the artistic nature and value of nonrepresentational art, however, postromantic aesthetics argues that just because nonrepresentational art is valued doesn’t mean that contemporary representational art should be dismissed.
To explain the conceptual revolution that occurred in art at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some art historians claim that photography eliminated the need for representational art, or the kind of art that tries to imitate “nature” by depicting faithfully what the eye can see. We can add in parentheses, as E. H. Gombrich observes in The Story of Art, that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, it too is shaped by social assumptions. Nonetheless, the difference between a kind of art that aims at faithful visual imitation of the three-dimensional qualities of physical objects and one that doesn’t remains relatively easy to discern.
For instance, even without reading the descriptive title of the painting, it’s clear to tell by just looking at Renoir’s Girl Bathing (1892) that it features a nude girl bathing. Without its explanatory (or deceptive) title, however, it would be impossible to know what Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911) is supposed to represent The last thing that might occur to those who look at it–if it were not for the title–is that it shows a nude.
The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts. The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. But that doesn’t mean that artisanship–or hand-made beautiful objects–are no longer valuable. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines. The texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic.
Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, already existed in classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinuosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures. In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed (what was perceived as) the essence of beauty: the glorification of divine powers and aesthetic ideals were embodied in the human form. While Greek paintings and especially sculptures showed knowledge of human anatomy, movement and foreshortening, it’s Renaissance artists who discovered the two other key components of verisimilitude in painting: one point-perspective and shading, which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to two-dimensional painted forms. Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. (The Story of Art, 228-9).
The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art seem almost real. His most famous painting Mona Lisa is said to deceive the viewers into believing that the woman’s eyes move, returning and even following their gaze with her eyes. Likewise, many have speculated about the meaning of Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, whose lips have a mobility that renders her at once impenetrable and expressive. Leonardo was able to achieve these complex visual and psychological effects through the technique called sfumato, or the smoky blurring the contours of the object depicted—especially the corners of Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth—to leave their outline and expression more open to interpretation.
The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms — all these techniques which took centuries to develop–have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes. This kind of naturalistic art is not necessarily “realistic” in the sense of capturing human life as it actually is. For instance, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality.
In its preference for visual resemblance (as opposed to realism or plausibility), postromanticism argues that the artistic techniques that give a sense of three-dimensionality and life-like quality to art are difficult skills that require both patience and technical talent and that are worth preserving and appreciating in art today. There’s no reason to discard the masterful qualities that made art artistic for five hundred years. Nor do such techniques have only a purely historical value. In an artistic world that prides itself upon pluralism, openness and variety, artists who desire to continue the legacy of realistic representation should be able to coexist with those that have rejected it. Postromanticism presents not a rival, but an alternative to modern and postmodern conceptual art. For in a world of such diverse tastes and sensibilities, there’s certainly room for both.
Don’t you see that, for my work on modeling, I have not only to possess a complete knowledge of the human form, but also a deep feeling for every aspect of it? I have, as it were, to incorporate the lines of the human body, and they must become part of myself, deeply seated in my instincts. I must feel them at the end of my fingers …My object is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.
- Auguste Rodin (from Anthony Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin, 1926)
Romantic and postromantic aesthetics share three principles or approaches to art: 1) verisimilitude or a “naturalist,” seemingly true-to-life, representation of objects and especially of human figures; 2) a primary emphasis upon the expression of emotion in art, and 3) a focus upon beauty and sensuality. These are, roughly, postromanticism’s coordinates in a kind of three-dimensional space of aesthetics.
What makes an artistic movement unique is in some respects analogous to what makes a person unique. Suppose you want to describe the particularity of a person you know well and care about. Usually you list a set of important or dominant traits: his sensuality, his intelligence, his obsessions, his like for certain sports, his creativity, his tastes and dislikes, etc. Very likely, you’ll find many individuals who have some of these traits. But if you have described him well and thoroughly enough, nobody will share all or even most of the traits you listed. This is the process I’ll follow in this chapter to present the coordinates of postromanticism. Each of the features I will list, by itself, will not be sufficient to distinguish postromanticism from other artistic movements. However, the combination of qualities I attribute to postromanticism will give it a specific place in (so to speak) aesthetic space that no other artistic movement has occupied or can occupy.
Before we begin identifying the coordinates of postromanticism, let’s take one obvious and quite legitimate objection. In a moment I will say, for instance, that the expression of emotion defines postromantic aesthetics. One can immediately counter that emotion is often prevalent in many movements in art and, in fact, that few of them are completely devoid of emotion. Impressionism can be said to be emotive; expressionism and abstract expressionism are even more so. So what makes postromanticism unique?
I have two answers to this question. First, I believe that few other movements place emotion at the foreground of every part of the artistic process: the inspiration of the artist; the feelings conveyed by the artistic object itself; the impact upon the viewers. Emotion may exist in most art, but it’s rarely the most essential characteristic of all aspects of an artistic movement. Romanticism and postromanticism share an all-pervasive emphasis upon emotion.
Suppose, however, that the person making this objection answers that the same can be said about German expressionism. She grants me that, for instance, Rococo art or Impressionism don’t privilege emotion in the same way that Romanticism does, but she can still point to several other artistic movements, such as expressionism and even abstract expressionism, that do. How do I answer this more fine-tuned follow-up objection? By falling back upon my original statement that describing a movement takes several, not just one, coordinates. Which is why I define postromantic aesthetics in terms of at least three intersecting features: 1. verisimilitude; 2. the primary emphasis upon the expression of emotion and 3. the embodiment of sensuality. It’s unlikely that other movements, aside from Romanticism of course, will share the intersection of all three points in the same way.
The description of postromantic aesthetics, moreover, can be thought of as only one axis in a three-dimensional philosophical space. I’ll also give the details of two other axes: postromantic ontology (or sense of being in time) and ethics (that emphasize passion). Furthermore, in these last two sections of the chapter I will explain some of the differences between Romanticism and postromanticism. This is hardest to do given that, obviously, postromanticism is heavily inspired by Romanticism. This three-axis sketch of the coordinates of postromanticism—in terms of its aesthetic, ontological and ethical qualities—will hopefully give readers a better idea of what I mean by this movement and what constitutes its specificity. It also follows the basic format of the first section of the book, which discussed the Romantic movement and its precursors.
“I always strive for a well balanced, restful composition, in which the technical aspects get as much attention as the aesthetic ones,” states Thierry Bonnaffé, a Belgian artist who works in the tradition of figure painting established during the Renaissance and pursued until Impressionism. In his search for harmony and balance in the representation of feminine beauty and sensuality, Bonnaffé manifests affinities with postromantic art. His charcoal and sanguine sketches combine a rare delicacy and sureness of touch with creativity of vision.
From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, meaning all the way to the Impressionists, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France privileged the drawing of outlines and contours—a technique inherited from the Renaissance masters—as opposed to focusing upon blocks of color as a way of teaching painting. The implicit assumption behind this hierarchy was that color was found in nature whereas outlining the human form was a more difficult, acquired skill. Whether or not we agree with this claim, Thierry Bonnaffé’s “Cindy” shows how impressive painting can be when an artist captures the essence of both color and form.
Cindy’s body is painted with the soft contours inherited from Renaissance techniques. The body is fluid form, revealed through minimal outlines, subtle shading and a sure touch. The shading, however, is not performed through the contrast of specks of color that has become familiar to us since the Impressionists. Instead, it employs the Renaissance techniques of chiaroscuro and sfumato, the gradual shading that leaves forms just enough to the imagination to render them all the more expressive.
Only a few curved lines reveal that the young woman’s troubled emotions belie her repose. To complement the subtlety of form, the color is equally understated. A fire-hot, agitated red—and that’s all—bathes her body in a luminous warmth. In the way it conveys the human form and moods so minimalistically—through such lightness of color and touch—this painting is exquisite.
Contemporary painter Henry Asencio is one of the most original young painters working today. He skillfully combines traditional figure painting with abstract art in a congruous manner. In 1996, Asencio was sponsored by the art supply company Thayer and Chandler, which enabled him to exhibit his work in galleries in the United States, Germany and Paris. His painting has won several awards and is exhibited in dozens of galleries throughout the world.
Henry Asencio, though so fresh and modern in style, clearly hasn’t forgotten the importance of tradition. In his technique, we find the influences of some of his favorite artists: the honest naturalism of Lucien Freud; the vigor of Willem de Kooning’s energetic brushstrokes; the decorative appeal of Gustav Klimt’s dazzling paintings.
Just consider the paintings themselves. In “Ascending,” the composition, texture and color of the painting express its central theme. We move from the fervent red of the bottom of the canvas to the woman that seems to float on the cloudy whiteness of the bed. These colors—bright reds touched by dark shadows; soft whites enshrouding the shape of the reposing woman; the luminosity of shades of orange-yellow above—all suggest the elevation of mood, thoughts and feelings evoked by the title. The female figure seems immersed in a world of dreams that carry her—and us—to a different vision of what counts as reality.
“Afternoon Light” is as much about the wistful tranquility of the young girl in the painting—beautiful, nude yet, paradoxically, partly hidden from view by her own contemplative pose—as about the bold patches of white light that illuminate her breast and shoulder. Nevertheless, when Asencio draws our eyes to the paint—to the medium of expression itself—we do not return to the formalism celebrated by the New York critic Clement Greenberg in Jackson Pollock’s art. For Asencio, art is clearly not primarily about the expressivity of the medium itself. Through his emphasis upon the artistic medium, Asencio brings us closer to the naturalism of Renoir, where the flesh comes alive, glowing from the inside. Just as the body conveys mood, so the expression of psychology offers a better, fuller way of understanding bodily movement and form.
Asencio congruously combines the age-old tradition of representational art with the twentieth-century tradition of conceptual art to create a style that is truly young, expressive and beautiful. His painting challenges viewers with its plausible combination of new and old techniques. To invoke Picasso’s famous words of advice to Françoise Gilot, to subvert older traditions one must first show that one can master them.
Some artistic movements happen organically. The Impressionist and Fauve movements, for example, emerged naturally from the artists’ friendship and practice. The name and the aesthetic philosophy of Impressionism came almost as an afterthought, accidentally. Yet both the name and the concept stuck. An insulting word cast by an art critic about Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise became the seed that eventually gave this group of artists a recognizable image. Other artistic movements happen prescriptively. The Surrealists could not have been what they were without the philosophical structure and sometimes dogmatically narrow focus that the writer André Breton gave to their art. Today movements can come together in virtual space. The Internet connects artists from all corners of the world who would never have met, created together, seen that they share the same vision, become friends. This is how postromanticism happened. Before I met any of the artists, I had written about the aesthetic values contemporary art had lost and should attempt to recapture. I called that aesthetic “postromanticism” and posted it on the internet. Postromanticism as a movement, however, didn’t come into being until one artist, the Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto, saw his art reflected in my words. Since then we have discovered dozens of artists who identify their art with our aesthetic vision. My book, Romanticism and Postromanticism (Lexington Books, hardcover 2007, paperback 2010) introduces some of these artists and the postromantic movement. This brief essay will describe how it originated.
A logical way to explain the nature of postromantic art is to begin with its name. Surely with a name like postromanticism, this movement has something to do with Romantic art. Yet since we put the post- in there, it must also come after Romanticism and be contemporary in some way. Postromanticism is, indeed, primarily, but not exclusively, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantic art. Postromantic painters admire the art of Bouguereau, whose sensual, palpable images of angelic women and shepherd girls were eventually displaced by the less idealized style of the Impressionists. They also find inspiration in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, which shocked Victorian society only to stand the test of time as one of the period’s most interesting artistic legacies. Postromantic sculptors identify with the art of the sculptor Rodin, who revolutionized sculpture as the expression of passion, sensuality and emotion.
When I spoke to a journalist about postromantic art to offer an introduction to one of our collective exhibits, she raised several questions that were crucial to explaining this movement. She asked me: where is the “post” in postromanticism? What makes postromantic art original? What makes this group of individual artists scattered all over the world a movement? Here I will answer these questions.
1. Romantic in Inspiration
It’s relatively easy to point to the continuity between the Romantic and Postromantic movements. Like Romantic artists, the Postromantics capture human passion, sensuality and beauty in their works. They mirror and at the same time idealize visual reality. When you look at the sculptures of Leonardo Pereznieto or Nguyen Tuan, you immediately detect the influence of Rodin. Similarly, Edson Campos’ paintings evoke the sensual purity of Maxfield Parrish and the allegorical narratives and elegance of the Pre-Raphaelites.
The postromantic artists, however, also incorporate other styles of art into their own. Which is why what renders them postromantic is not only the inspiration they find in the Romantic movement, but also the fact that like the Romantics, they privilege the expression of beauty, passion and sensuality in their art.
2. Original in Creation
The issue of originality is rather complicated. One might legitimately ask, how are these artists original when they clearly imitate styles of art that are at least two hundred years old? Moreover, haven’t modern styles of art—abstract expressionism, pop art and postmodern installations, ready-mades, pastiches—displaced the tradition of art that imitates and idealizes reality? To explain why and how postromanticism is original, let’s see first what originality means. What makes art be original? As opposed to new? As opposed to a passing fad? As opposed to something that has mere shock-value?
The whole notion that art had to be above all else original began in the nineteenth-century, with the Impressionist movement. Artists such as Manet and Monet staked the value of art on its ability to go against the norms established by the Academy and the Salons. They presented reality in an entirely new way. As the famous French novelist Emile Zola explained, Manet and the Impressionists set the new standard for what makes art be artistic: originality, which implies not mere newness of style, but a relevant and revolutionary newness. A novelty, in other words, that is important to society. After Impressionism, modern art was perceived as provoking thought rather than only stimulating pleasure or emotion. And so art became, as the critic Arthur Danto puts it, increasingly conceptual.
Modern art—the trends of cubism, abstract expressionism, pop art and postmodern art—stakes its worth on establishing this relevant newness. However, contemporary art that continues the trends that began during the early twentieth-century can no longer take it for granted that they’re being new and relevant to their society. When Duchamp placed his urinal on exhibit in New York during the early twentieth-century, he was certainly shocking, not fully serious and arguably original. But anybody who does postmodern ready-mades and installations today will need to think critically about how his or her art is original. Doing what Duchamp did eighty years ago cannot be assumed to be cutting-edge nowadays. Similarly, when Jackson Pollock splattered paint on a canvas and helped establish New York as the epicenter of international art, he was controversial and original. Now the tradition of abstraction is eighty years old. Any artist who paints in an abstract style cannot automatically present his or her work as original, fresh and modern.
I haven’t yet established the originality of postromantic art, but I have shown that its competitors haven’t either. We’re all in the same boat. In fact, it’s arguably more new and different to find inspiration in styles of art that are three hundred years old than to imitate those that are fifty years old. Modernist trends are much more common and accepted by today’s artistic establishment. Does this mean that we should abandon looking for originality in contemporary art?
Absolutely not. Art today can still be original if it puts a new twist on whatever tradition in the history of art it follows and if it shows that this twist is still interesting and relevant to the society and culture of its own times. For art is even more about the public—promotion, sales, influence, consecration—than it is about the creative process and the individual artists.
To illustrate this point, I’ll borrow an analogy from the novelist and paradox-maker, Borges. Borges once wrote a story about an author, named Pierre Menard, who tried to rewrite the novel Don Quixote in the twentieth-century. Menard reproduced Cervantes’ text word by word. Yet from a certain perspective his novel was entirely different. When you transpose fiction into a whole new context, Borges illustrates, everything changes.
Cervantes was creating a whole new lay Spanish language that was unpretentious and easy to understand for his times. Writing in the same prose several centuries later, Menard, however, sounded stale and quaint to his readers. Furthermore, the social and religious assumptions Cervantes could take for granted, Menard had to learn with great effort by reading biography, history and learning the classical languages. Last but not least, while Cervantes’ novel fit with his context and established the tradition of novel writing, Menard’s Don Quixote stuck out like a sore thumb in the context of twentieth-century literature. By then readers were used to the train of thought style and fragmentation of modern fiction. In this context, a novel like Don Quixote seemed glaringly traditional. Borges’ story shows that art is never just its content, but is in large part a product of its social context. Writing and readers, art and the public, are inextricably intertwined. Which is why one can’t bring back the past exactly as it was even if one reproduces older styles down to their smallest details.
3. Sticking Out
Much like Menard’s twentieth-century version of Don Quixote, postromantic art deliberately sticks out against the background of contemporary art, so heavily dominated by modern and especially postmodern art. But postromantic art is not reactionary. Postromantic artists realize, as Borges’ parable illustrates, that bringing back nineteenth-century Romanticism intact would be an impossible goal. We do not wish to freeze any art movement in time. Instead, postromantic artists preserve the best of tradition—by placing emphasis upon technical skill, beauty and passion—while still keeping up with the times—by using new media, being sensitive to our contemporary public and creating new styles.
I consider artistic movements to be not only chronological, or following one another in art history and then dissipating and dying forever. Rather, art is also, at the same time, “chronotopic” (to use Bakhtin’s famous formulation): new art is constantly fertilized by various former styles and movements, which it renews for its own context. Which is why you will discover postmodern pastiche mixed with a traditional techniques in the paintings of Edson Campos and David Graux and the use of new media—acrylics and fiber optic illumination—in the Rodin-like sculptures of Leonardo Pereznieto. Not to speak of the exquisite photography of Guido Argentini, which endows modern images with the beauty, immobility, expressivity and endurance of Romantic and modernist sculpture. In this balance between old and new lies our originality. We are new in our unique and harmonious combination of modern and traditional techniques. We are relevant in providing the sophistication critics seek with the beauty, passion and accessibility that the public prefers.
4. The Postromantic Movement
Does the fact we’re original in some ways make us a movement? More generally, what makes something be an art movement? First, a movement has to include a significant number of artists, a group. Such a group needs to be formed by artists who have a reputation on their own, as individuals. Our movement, which has just begun to form, already includes dozens of artists from several countries, including Mexico, Brazil, the United States, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Italy. And we’re growing rapidly as more artists see the appeal of postromantic art.
Second, to be a movement, a group of artists has to propose some shared techniques and a cohesive vision. The postromantic artists do have that in common implicitly. My job as a writer is to help render what they have in common more obvious by articulating an aesthetic vision.
Third, and most importantly, a movement has to move. An art movement affects the public; is discussed by art critics and the media; adapts to society; is challenged and reacted against (otherwise it becomes complacent and stale); it spreads and mutates; is imitated or followed by other artists. We’re starting to meet this much tougher standard as well. The postromantic artists have had articles written on their art all over the world. They had several collective exhibits, including at the Biennale di Firenze, the art expo in Florence, Italy, where a section of the museum was devoted to postromantic art. However, what ultimately will make this movement move is you—our public and readers—for whom we paint, sculpt, photograph and write. It’s to you that we devote postromanticism, the art of passion.
