Sensuality in Art: the Erotic versus the Pornographic

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aesthetic philosophy, art, art criticism, art versus pornography debate, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Leonardo Pereznieto, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sensual art, sensuality, Sensuality in Art: The Erotic versus the Pornographic, the erotic versus the pornographic

Quite justifiably, we believe that there’s a fine line between sensuality and sexuality. We also believe that there’s a difference between pornography and art. In fact, these two distinctions often blend together: we tend to regard art as sensual and pornography as more overtly sexual. Warding off the charge of pornography, photography, sculpture and painting often veil the human body, especially the more eroticized female nude, by representing it in aesthetic poses and allegorical situations that evoke thoughts, emotions and dreams, not only carnal desires.

If the boundary between pornography and art is so heatedly debated, however, it’s partly because it’s drawn by our own subjective reactions. Romantic and postromantic art confront this problem by illustrating palpably the distinction between sensuality and sexuality. Like Romantic art, postromantic art celebrates the beauty of the human body and of sensual images and relations. I invoke the broad concept of beauty (in the abstract) only to limit it to a category that’s easier to define and more relevant to postromantic art: the beauty of sensuality. Let me explain why.

Philosophers, from Plato and Plotinus to Shaftesbury and Diderot, despite their overwhelming differences, have described beauty as an underlying harmony that has a pleasing sensory effect. In so doing, aesthetic philosophers confront several problems already anticipated by Socrates in The Symposium—Plato’s dialogue that deals most directly with subjects of love and beauty. How can we account for changing standards of beauty? What draws us to the beautiful? Is there an underlying notion of beauty that can apply equally well to the magic of a sunset, a pretty woman and a beautiful painting? And if there is, then how can such a general definition serve to explain specific categories of the beautiful, such as the beauty of human beings, of emotions, of architecture or of classical art? Moreover, is it really helpful to define beauty in terms of other difficult concepts, such as harmony, order or agreeability? Doesn’t this process lead to an infinite regress of definitions, each unknown defined in terms of yet another unknown, as Socrates had cautioned? Not having found satisfactory answers to these questions, I’m daunted by the difficulties inherent in defining beauty in the abstract. The beauty of sensual images and objects seems to me a more approachable subject as well as one that’s more useful to understanding Romantic and postromantic art. So let us ask: what is sensuality? And why does it have the power to move us?

As is customary, I’ll begin with a provisional definition. Sensuality is that which titillates the senses without making any specific promises or, much less, delivering. Sensuality leaves our desires, wishes, expectations, emotions, thoughts and impulses in a state of confusion and ambiguity. It provokes what Descartes called a sense of “admiration” or “wonder” that is inseparable from pleasure yet far removed from satisfaction.

Sensuality has little to do with degrees of unveiling, with explicitness. Like sexuality—its foil and companion—it’s more of a psychological rather than physical state. Just imagine the following images placed side by side: one featuring a woman who is fully dressed, with bright red lips puckered in a kiss and a come-hither gaze. Her body is clothed, but her (supposed, staged) intent is crystal-clear. The effect is sexual. Now imagine a picture of a woman who is completely nude. Her looks are understated; her demeanor and glance ambiguous. The viewer is not sure what she desires, thinks or feels. Physically she is revealed. Psychologically, however, she remains a mystery, an enticement. The effect is sensual.

These hypothetical examples lead me to supplement my initial description of sensuality. I will now say that sensuality hints at human subjectivity—at implicit desires, needs, dreams and thoughts—in both the viewer and the viewed. Sexual images and imagery—even when the women or men represented are clothed—tend to strip the image of its psychological content, reducing it to a few body parts in the viewed and a few analogous needs in the viewers. By way of contrast, sensuality, even when the women or men represented are nude, veils the body in a psychological richness and depth that touches upon the artistic.

To probe a little further the nature of sensuality, let us consider another illustration. I’ll borrow my second example from Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her (Hable con Ella), one of my favorite movies. The story focuses upon the obsessive love and desire of Benigno, a male nurse, for a young and beautiful ballerina named Alicia. Upon meeting her, Benigno is entirely captivated by the young woman. Yet he doesn’t get the opportunity to know Alicia and neither do we, the viewers. Almost as soon as they meet, she’s hit by a car when crossing the street and lapses into a coma. Consequently all viewers see of Alicia after the accident is her body, her purely physical beauty. Conversely, as Benigno takes care of his beloved, talks to her and treats her as a human being capable of understanding and responding to him, we become intimately familiar with his personality. We come to understand his loneliness, his obsessive love, his uncontrollable urges, his unwavering devotion.

In coming to multidimensional life for Benigno, however, Alicia also comes to life before our eyes. Almodovar has the immense talent of bringing out psychological richness and intensity in sensual depictions of physical beauty. Through Benigno’s loving gaze, care and compassion, we see more in Alicia than a beautiful body even though that’s exactly what she has been reduced to as a result of the car accident. Sensual art and photography can perform the same magical operation as this movie. They give birth to a soul, to a living personality, in representing sometimes nothing more than the body, its movements and expressions. Which is why our own responses to these images tend to be more complex than physical desire. Sensual photography, literature and art call for the viewer’s or reader’s participation in imagining another person, another life. They’re not just stimulating; they’re also creative.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the way in which sensuality rivets the attention and excites the mind. Although René Descartes is best known for being the father of rationalism, he’s also one of the most sensitive readers of sensuality and emotion. His reflections on the subject were prompted by his discussions with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, both of whom were cultivated, sensitive women who found that Cartesian rationalism could not explain the better part of human behavior. Why do we fall in love? Why do we desire? Why do we feel emotion? Why do we respond to beauty? To address these important questions, Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul (1649).

That which touches our senses, thoughts and feelings, the philosopher explains, ignites the response of admiration or marvel. Admiration is not a coup de foudre, or the feeling of falling in love on the spot. It is, in Descartes’ own words, “a sudden surprise of the soul which manifests itself in considering with special attention objects which seem rare and extraordinary.” (The Passions of the Soul, 116) To catch our attention, these objects or subjects have to either be or appear to be rare and special. Alicia may have been an ordinary girl, but in Aldomovar’s movie, despite being deprived of the capacity to think, feel and speak, she appeared tragically unique in her predicament, sympathetic, moving.

Sensual images or scenarios—especially when artistic—have the power to transform what may be ordinary into something—or someone—quite extraordinary. In turn, as Descartes elaborates, our appreciation of sensual beauty has calmer, more thoughtful manifestations than stimulating our visceral drives and emotions: “And this passion has something special about it since we don’t notice that it’s accompanied by any transformation of the heart or the blood as we do with the other passions.” (116) Which is not to say that this more psychological form of passion is less powerful. On the contrary, as Descartes explains: “Which doesn’t prevent it from having a lot of force, caused by surprise or marvel, which is to say, the sudden and unforeseen reception of an impression which changes the movements of the soul.” (117)

For Descartes, passion is the opposite of action. An action is something one does through an act of will. By way of contrast, a passion is what happens to someone more or less involuntarily. Not all passions, however, overwhelm the senses and unleash complex sensations, thoughts and feelings. In fact, the kind of passions that provoke such unsettling, exciting movements—that attract our admiration—are quite rare. So how do sensual representations motivate, to use Descartes’ expression, the movements of the soul? By triggering complex forms of identification in us, the readers or viewers. By taking a two-dimensional image on a screen or series of words on a page and creating the contours of other human beings with rare powers to captivate the attention and inspire the imagination. Sensual photography, creative writing, cinema and art reflect back into our eyes not so much another human being as our own complexity. The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil has said that when a very pretty woman looks in the mirror, she doesn’t realize there’s more to her than external beauty. Whereas when an unattractive woman looks in the mirror, she knows there’s more to her than what she sees. In sensual Romantic and postromantic art and literature, it’s apparent that beautiful and sensual images conceal much more than meets the eye.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Reviews of Romanticism and Postromanticism

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art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Edward Kaplan, fineartebooks, literary criticism, Marshall Olds, postromanticism, Reviews of Romanticism and Postromanticism, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the Romantic movement, William C. Carter

In Romanticism and Postromanticism, Claudia Moscovici writes that “art criticism, like philosophy, like love itself, depends upon cultivating a lucid passion.” This book, which brings a breath of fresh air to the study of enduring themes, is the lucid, engaging result of Moscovici’s own passion for literature, philosophy, and art. And it is much more, an enthusiastic appeal to seize the day, to live life to the fullest, complete with a manifesto and a roster of artists who epitomize the aspirations of the postromantic movement.

—William C. Carter, Distinguished Professor of French, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Addressing both a revolution in esthetics and an important development in the history of thought, Claudia Moscovici argues that in its break from the Enlightenment, Romanticism promoted core values such as verisimilitude, expressivity, and sensuality, that have become an important postromantic opposition — in our contemporary visual arts, especially — to Modernism and postmodernism. The discussion is fresh and engaging.

—Marshall C. Olds, Willa Cather Professor and Professor of Modern Languages, University of Nebraska

Claudia Moscovici is a historian of ideas, astute reader of literature, and sensitive interpreter of art. Her unusual, original book, vividly written, solidly researched, is both academically sound and passionately committed. Lucid chapters on Rousseau, Mme de Staël, Diderot, Wordsworth and Baudelaire define the aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology of the movement she calls postromanticism, alive today. Exciting to read.

—Edward K. Kaplan, Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities, Brandeis University

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Realism in Contemporary Art

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art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, fine art, fineartebooks, Realism, Realism in Contemporary Art, realist art, Romanticism and Postromanticism

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.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Postromantic Aesthetics: Verisimilitude, Expressivity and Sensuality in Art

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aesthetics, art, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, postromantic aesthetics, Romanticism and Postromanticism, What is Postromanticism

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.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Outlines and Contours: The Evocative Sketches of Thierry Bonnaffé

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art, Claudia Moscovici, fine art, fineartebooks, painting, paintings, postromantic art, postromanticism, realist painting, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sketches, Thierry Bonnaffé

“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. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Fragmentary Visions: The Sculptures of Chad Awalt

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art, art criticism, Chad Awalt, classical sculpture, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Greek art, Greek sculpture, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sculpture

Chad Awalt was inspired by his grandfather to pursue woodcarving from an early age. Awalt studied anatomy at the University of Colorado and has spent the past twenty years expanding his knowledge of classical art and design. For over fifteen years, he has been creating works of art that are sought after by clients and galleries all over the country. His work can also be found in many corporate and private collections.

Since the Renaissance, sculptors have traced the fine line between tradition and innovation. This line is not a straight path from the classical period to, let’s say, Donatello’s delicate sculpture of David. During the Renaissance, and even more so in our days–when artists are obsessed with originality–it was important to carry on a respected tradition only if done in an innovative way that filled the needs of one’s patrons, public and culture. Perpetuating any kind of tradition—be it religious or artistic—is the art of making something old be new and relevant again; of preserving tradition within the space of historical gaps and transformations. The problem of cultural continuity, in other words, is inseparable from the one of discontinuity.

Chad Awalt’s sculpture gives material form to this link between artistic continuity and rupture. His sculptures clearly evoke the classical style and ideal body types of ancient Greek sculptors such as Praxiteles and Lysippos. They also allude to the cultural mixture and discontinuities that are part and parcel of respecting the classical heritage. Awalt sculpts the ancient goddesses—such as Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt; Clio, one of the muses who presided over the arts and sciences and Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility and motherhood–in an unmistakably classical style. Yet, much as these statues are often destroyed, amputated and transformed by time in a way that reflects the fragility of their beauty, so all of Awalt’s sculptures are marked by bodily discontinuities that call to mind the topological experiments of modern sculpture. Supple, hollowed, balanced, fluid and harmonious yet also floating and amorphous, Awalt’s sculptures are fragmentary, haunting visions of long-gone epochs that can be admired and emulated, but not preserved intact, by contemporary art. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Henry Asencio’s Art: The Cutting Edge of Realism

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art, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Henry Asencio, painting, postromantic painting, postromanticism, realist painting, Romantic painting, Romanticism and Postromanticism

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. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Guido Argentini’s Sculptural Photography: Introducing “Silvereye”

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art, artistic photography, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Guido Argentini, photography, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Silvereye

Guido Argentini was born in Florence, Italy in 1966. He studied medicine for three years at the University of Florence. At 23, he decided to turn his passion for photography into a profession. His work has been published by some of the leading magazines in the world, including Marie Claire, Moda and Vogue. His book, Silvereye, is a favorite among artistic photography lovers.

Guido Argentini is an artistic and fashion photographer. However, these labels don’t even begin to explain the uniqueness of his art. There are literally thousands of photographers who feature artistic nudes and fashion photography, which count as two of Argentini’s specialties. Yet he stands apart from them all. What makes him unique and, even more importantly, what makes his uniqueness significant, suggesting a new trend in artistic photography? In The Critique of Judgment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant elaborated the standards for artistic uniqueness. True art is original, exemplary and inimitable, he wrote. Original, because it stands out from the rest. Exemplary, because it’s worth following. Inimitable, because it stands out despite all imitations. Guido Argentini’s photography meets all of these criteria.

Photography is often said to replace the need for representational painting. This claim, which has some truth to it, has become a cliché. It suggests that of all the visual arts, photography is closest to representing reality as we see it. It also suggests that the visual arts have been compelled by the invention of photography to move towards expressing an inner reality—reality as we imagine it or idealize it–rather than the external reality of visual appearances.

Guido Argentini’s silvery, sculptural photography nuances these assumptions that have become the foundation of modern art. He shows us that photography is not so much about capturing visual reality—its ephemeral, changing, dynamic states—but rather about attempting to immortalize form. His images freeze in time a representative pose and movement.

Photography, Guido’s unique art persuades us, can be as monumental and enduring as sculpture. Not surprisingly, the artist finds inspiration in three of the greatest sculptors of all times: Michelangelo, Rodin and Brancusi. “I try to put into the ‘poverty’ of two dimensional photography the strength of the three dimensional shapes of the marble of Michelangelo and the polished bronze of Brancusi,” he explains.

His focus is not on the face’s expressive powers, but on the expressiveness of the body itself. Sculpture, from Hellenistic times to the modernism of Brancusi, has always been about the ways in which the human body, captured statically in a single moment, appears dynamic and timeless.

In Argentini’s Studio Series, photography usurps the timelessness of sculpture. Silvery, shimmery, muscular, exquisite bodies exhibit the elasticity and beauty of the female form. Similarly, in the Nature Series, the sensual nudes blend into the stark immobility of their natural surroundings. Cliff, ocean, grass, stone become one with the female subjects. Rather than being reduced to the natural or biological, however, women are elevated to the status of the monumental. They become as timeless as the rounded, polished stones which echo the curves of their bodies. Argentini’s talent endows photography, the art of the ephemeral and the medium of advertising, with a timelessness and importance that go far beyond what can be seen, consumed, bought or touched.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Introducing “Opera” by Edson Campos: Delacroix with a Postromantic Twist

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Edson Campos’s spectacular new painting, “Opera,” puts a postromantic twist on Eugene Delacroix’s famous Romantic masterpiece, “Death of Sardanapalus” (1827), which is, in turn, inspired by one of Lord Byron’s plays. Delacroix is widely known as the leader of the Romantic movement in art.  Yet his brand of Romanticism never gave way to sentimentality: it was distinct, bold and individualist. The poet Charles Baudelaire captured the painter’s style best when he said: “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”

In the “Death of Sardanapalus,” Delacroix depicts the last moments of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, his harem and his servants, before the inevitable defeat. The color scheme is warm—vibrant reds, yellows, browns and shades of shimmering gold. It captures the tragic energy of the events as well as the exotic setting. The king, however, remains expressionless as he orders the guards to kill his servants, concubines and animals, whom he regards as his rightful property. If he must fall defeated to the enemy, he refuses to leave behind for his enemies any of his belongings. Most shocking—and yet also most moving—is the scene which is entirely absent from Byron’s play: the sacrifice of a beautiful nude woman, perhaps the king’s favorite concubine, who is being stabbed from behind by one of the guards.   The fierce, merciless concentration of her assailant sharply contrasts with her passive, defenseless pose and quiet suffering.  In this Romantic allegory, the women are property and victims. There is  striking beauty in the composition and color scheme of the painting, but sheer brutality in its message.

In Campos’ postromantic pastiche of Delacroix’s painting, the violent central scene of the concubine being stabbed has been removed. Campos still recreates, however, with a stunning likeness, some of the elements of Delacroix’s original. He depicts the king’s unemotional expression, as he supervises the murder of his harem, servants and horses. He also shows a seminude concubine, a helpless victim that has already been murdered. The most compelling scene, which captures movement and emotion, is represented by a horse. We see it rearing its body to escape death, its eyes opened wide with fear.  However, instead of the brutal murder scene of the nude concubine, a beautiful young woman with long, flowing hair, enveloped in a satin red gown, forms the focus of Campos’ rendition of Delacroix’s masterpiece. Her expression still reflects the resignation of Delacroix’s female victims. Yet Campos attenuates the brutal violence of the scene.   Her stance may be passive and resigned, but she’s still very much alive. The transposition of this new representation of femininity—which replaces the central scene of sacrifice and violence of Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus”—endows Campos’s “Opera” with a sense of promise, hope and a languid, almost sensual, spirituality that are glaringly absent from the original. Under Campos’ creative touch, Delacroix’s Romantic nightmare vision turns into a more ambivalent postromantic image that sharply contrasts brutal violence with possible hope and redemption. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

What is Postromanticism?

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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.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754