Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

A survey of the work of official war artists and others

1

It was shown in the last chapter how at the beginning of the present century the art world was deluged with theories and ‘isms’, while several of the pictures illustrated afforded evidence that a sinister violence and subterranean unrest became manifest in European painting before it exploded in European politics and precipitated a great war. On the Continent—and to a slighter extent in England also—the ‘wild men’ of painting had betrayed in form and color that spirit of merciless aggression which eventually provoked Armageddon. The principal British contribution to the extreme left of modern painting was a development of Cubism known as ‘Vorticism,’ and it is not altogether without significance that the leader of this movement, Mr P Wyndham Lewis, should have begun in the early spring of 1914 a series of abstract paintings with titles taken from military textbooks. His ‘Plan of Campaign’, exhibited at London in June 1914, was based not on any vision of landscapes and figures, but on such a diagram of a battle disposition as we may find in any history book. The parallel lines and blocks stand for the divisions of contending forces, and the heavy blocks in the upper right hand corner are supposed to represent te extended left wing of one army outflanking and falling with superior on the right wing of the other army. This is the ‘plan of campaign’. Here again we have a curious premonition of the War expressed in paint. The case of Mr Wyndham Lewis typifies the general effect the War had on art. When a student at the Slade School Mr Lewis made himself remarked by the uncommon power of his drawing. Caught up in the vortex which swept so many ambitious young artists into the whirlpool of ‘abstract painting’ because of their desire to attain novelty at all costs, Mr Lewis was led in the years immediately preceding the War to paint ‘abstract’ pictures, incomprehensible to the multitude and difficult for even the initiated to understand. Then in 1918, after two years experience with the heavy artillery in France, he returned to London and returned to realism. ‘The Gun Pit,’ which he painted for the Canadian War Memorials, was no abstract picture, but a perfectly comprehensible painting based on vision, on his remembered experience with the big guns and of the big-built men who worked them.

The chief effect of the War on painting, therefore, was to bring about a return to realism, but it was a new realism modified, as we shall see, by certain principles derived from movements which, in themselves, appeared to be extravagant. Not only did the War restore to sanity many of the most promising of the younger artists, it also prepared the public to accept and understand their works. Youthful artists, who in peace time might have waited till middle age before their talent was recognized, became famous in a year or two. The wall of prejudice was broken down by the unparalleled unheaval of our normal world, so that even conservative minds were ready to consider impartially a new vision of new events. Further, though there was no slackness on the part of the younger artists in joining the colors, the artistic activity of Great Britain may be said to have reached its zenith during the years of War. Never before had so much official and State patronage been given to British artists, never before did the British public so clearly recognize that picture-making was not a mere pasttime but an activity which had its own function and purpose of usefulness to humanity.

As early as 1914-15 the first public recognition of the artist’s value to the State in war time came in connection with the recruiting campaign. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was dead and done with, but in its place was substituted a new gospel of ‘Art for the Idea’s sake.’ Art was recognized as an element of education and social progress, because nothing else in the world could impress an idea so vividly and lastingly on the human memory. During the first winter and spring of the War close on a hundred posters were commissioned from various artists by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, and 2,500,000 copies of these posters were distributed throughout the United Kingdom. In addition to these official posters, generous contributions were made to the campaign by several private firms. The recruiting posters issued by the London Electric Railways will be long remembered for their efficiency and artistic qualities, notably Mr Brangwyn’s ‘Remember Belgium’ and Mr G Spencer Pryse’s ‘The Only Road for an Englishman’. Later the use as a poster during the War Savings Campaign of a reproduction of Whistler’s portrait of his Mother—as a gentle reminder that ‘Old Age Must Come’—was significant of a growing belief on the part of Authority that the most artistic picture can make the widest public appeal.

Simultaneously with the appearance of the recruiting posters on the hoardings, came the war cartoons in the newspapers. It is impracticable to give a list of the British artists who did excellent work in this direction—every reader will remember notable drawings.

Meanwhile what of painting? It was said rather bitterly in 1916 that ‘no visitor to the Royal Academy would know that there was a war on.’ It may be admitted frankly that the exhibitions in these years looked much the same as those in years of peace. Pictures of the War were infrequent, and when present they were rarely successful. The failure of the older artists to grapple with the situation was neither surprising nor shameful. They did not possess the requisite experience. Some endeavored to the topical, and envisaged the War after their memory of Crimean pictures, changing the uniforms into khaki but repeating the old arrangements. But sword-waving officers, swaggering cavalrymen, and neatly brushed infantry were no longer convincing even to civilians. Standing before an Academy picture of a charge, a wounded New Zealander was overheard to remark: ‘That’s absurd! One man with a machine gun would wipe out the lot.’ New methods of warfare demanded new methods of painting for their efficient expression. The battle in art, as at the Front, was for the young, and the first man to capture the imagination of London by his war pictures was a young artist hitherto practically unknown.

Art During The Great War (continued)

The Diamond Trading Company Update

(via idexonline) The Diamond Trading Company (DTC) has released the full list of its Sightholders, broken down into UK, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa Canada and industrial Sightholders @ www.dtcsightholderdirectory.com

The info was educational and useful.

Ullens Center For Contemporary Art

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was founded in Beijing by collectors Guy + Myriam Ullens + I think they have created a unique platform for emerging artists to share and learn.

A must-visit.

Useful link:
www.ucca.org.cn

Simple Visuals

Explanatory videos = simple + creative + clear = sticks! The simple visuals are great. I liked it.

Useful link:
www.commoncraft.com

Ayala Museum

(via Wiki) The Ayala Museum is an art and history museum located at the corner of Makati Avenue and Dela Rosa Street, beside the Greenbelt Mall in Makati City, The Philippines + it is one of the leading museums in the Philippines, as well as one of the most modern.

A must-visit.

Useful links:
www.ayalamuseum.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayala_Museum
http://www.newsweek.com/id/134270

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The first phase of Cubism is simple in comparison with the second, for if the first consisted in cutting up natural objects into geometrical shapes, the second consisted in shuffling the pieces. This curious development, with which the name of Picasso is chiefly associated, professed to show, not merely one aspect of objects, but a number of sectional aspects seen from different standpoints and arbitrarily grouped together in one composition. By this method the painting of a simple object like a teacup is transfigured into an unrecognizable fugue—consisting of fragments of the cup as seen from above, from the sides, and, as held up in the air, from below. These ingenious conglomerations, professing to give us ‘the greater reality’ of things seen, leave us as bewildered, confused, and uninformed as a metaphysician’s analysis of truth and error. As an example of the second phase of Cubism we give Picasso’s ‘Portrait of M Kahnweiler’, in which all we can recognize are fragmentary frontal aspects of his waistcoat (with watch-chain), left eye, left ear, and one side of his nose drowned in a chaotic sea of various aspects of receipt-files and other unrecognizable objects. Thus a movement which originated in an attempt to secure a primitive simplicity was led astray by false doctrine, till it finally wandered into a blind alley of complexity, for the complications of neo-Impressionist painting were child’s play in comparison with the entaglements of the puzzle-pictures of the later Cubists.

Following upon the distortions of M Matisse and the strange pictures of the Cubists, in which the facts of vision were either ignored or so juggled with that they became incomprehensible, it is not surprising that yet another school of painters arose who abandoned representation as an indispensable element in picture-making and argued that painting should be as free as music to give emotional pleasure without any appeal to association of material ideas. This claim that painting should be abstract, and not concern itself with the concrete, was argued by the Polish artist Wassily Kandinsky, working at Munich in 1914, more convincingly in his book The Art of Spiritual Harmony than in his kaleidoscopic pictures. In theory it seems plausible enough that if a musician is free to weave melodies without reference to natural sounds, a painter should be free to construct compositions without reference to natural forms. It is also true that the emotional pleasure we derive from the stained-glass windows of an old cathedral does not depend on the subject painted. We are enchanted with the radiant beauty of the pattern of color. So far so good, but now comes the point that no artist living or dead has yet succeeded in convincing the world that these stained-glass windows would give us any keener or purer emotional pleasure if they had no subjects, or been able himself to produce an abstract painting more beautiful in color and pattern than paintings based on concrete forms.

Kandinsky, however, went a step further, and claimed that his abstract paintings were not mere dream patterns, but had a meaning for the initiated in that they were based on the psychological effect on the observer of various lines and colors. But these effects are by no means definitely established, they are still a subject for speculation, and till they are fixed by the common consent of mankind, experiments in the ‘art of spiritual harmony’ must necessarily be uncertain and inconclusive. Indeed, in Kandinsky’s own ‘Compositions’—as his abstract paintings are entitled—outward and visible signs alone give us a clue to the inward and spiritual meaning, and it is by discerning faint traces of a gun carriage, a puff of smoke, and falling houses in one of his pre-War pictures, painted in 1913, that we obtain a sense of that ‘clash and conflict of ideas in the spiritual world’ that the painting is said to express.

The sectional representation of divers aspects of different objects was developed with an added emphasis on the expression of movement, by the group of Italian painters known as the ‘Futurists’. Futurism was a literary as well as an artistic movement, and it was largely a protest against the tyranny of the past on the part of ardent nationalists, who resented that the present achievements of their country should be obscured by the glory of its past. The leader of the movement was a writer, Signor Marinetti, and his skilled pen justified the extraordinary practices of his artist friends by sonorous phrases. A pictorial record of the commonplace fact that the seat of a chair is visible after the sitter has got up and walked away, was majestically alluded to as an example of ‘the plastic interpenetration of matter.’ As regards color, the Futurists accepted the divisionism and complementarism of the neo-Impressionists, but in the rendering of form they sought to introduce new principles: ‘Universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation; movement and light destroy te materiality of bodies.’ An amusing example of the ‘dynamic decomposition of matter’ is Giacomo Balla’s painting ‘A Lady and her Dog’, which may be regarded as a synthesis of rapid motion photography. A multiplicity of paws and tails indicates that the animal is trotting with wagging tail, four ghostly chains suggest the whirling of his lead, and an army of shoes presents the movement of his owner’s feet. In concentrating their endeavors on the expression of movement, the Futurists attempted to convert painting from an art of space to an art of time. Their daring experiments have produced few pictures likely to stand the test of time, but possibly an exception may be made for Signor Balla’s ‘Centrifugal Force’. This painting of revolving spheres shooting forth golden sparks into an azure void was not only decorative in design and color, but also nobly expressive of the Force that shoots meteorolites through the universe. An abstract painting that succeeds in expressing an abstract idea is clearly legitimate art, but pictures of this calibre are unfortunately the exception among abstract paintings.

Nevertheless it would be wrong to assert that the experiments of the modern extremists in painting have been wholly valueless. Technically they have widened the horizon of painting and opened the road to a new realism in which the firm structure and rigid design of te Cubists can be combined with a truth and beauty of color derived from the Impressionists. Psychologically their work is of profound interest to every student of history. Coming events cast their shadow before them on the field of art. The patient reader who has followed this history thus far will have observed the increasing endeavor on the part of painters to give an expression of strength. In examining their works he will have noticed that, however greatly they may vary in their aspects and styles, nearly all of them contain en element of violence. These Fauviste, Cubist, and Futurist paintings never soothe us to rest; they aim at galvanising us into action. All of them must be regarded as symptoms, as expressions in art of the unrest, agitation, and suppressed violence seething subterraneously in Europe prior to the oubreak of the Great War.

Heard On The Street

I guess that suckers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors and that at one time or another, we're all suckers.

Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider is an artist + his art works/concepts are interesting because they are different from the mainstream, but in my view some are shocking, really.

Useful link:
www.gregorschneider.de

Environment Update

It's always good to learn that scientists/inventors/entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new ways to save the environemnt, I found the ideas @ http://www.newsweek.com/id/130625/page/1 interesting. I think they were brilliant.

John Calleija

There is something special about John Calleija's jewelry designs: beauty and soul.

Useful link:
www.calleija.com.au

All the Money In The World

All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make--and Spend--Their Fortunes by Peter W. Bernstein + Annalyn Swan is an inspiring book + provides insider's view of what makes them tick and how they got to the top.

Distance Learning vs Nearness Learning

I found the article on distance learning @ http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11088431 very interesting, in fact, I think Nearness learning is more appropriate term than Distance learning.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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If we look at the southern landscape by Cézanne, we shall perceive that in his desire to make the objects look solid and enduring the artist has sharpened some curves into angles and emphasized cubic forms. This method of expressing the volume of objects was seen to be powerful and effective, and was seized upon by certain of the Fauves, who, desirous above all things of being forcible, elaborated their discovery into a dogma. Further, they supported their practice by a specious theory based on a smattering of science. We have seen how at the beginning of the present century there was a craze for the Primitive among a certain section of artists. These young men picked up from mineralogists the idea that crystal was the primitive form of all things. A strange new test was applied to pictures: Did they or did they not show evidence of crystallization? A phrase torn from a scientific handbook was adopted as an aesthetic watchword:

All secondary forms arise from the decrement of particles from the edges and angles of these primitive forms.

Therefore to restore natural objects and human beings to their ‘primitive’ forms, it was necessary to eliminate all curved lines and to reconstruct forms and faces in their ‘primary form’, octahedraon, dodecahedron, six-sided prism or whatever other geometrical figure might be most suitable. Among the earliest pictures embodying this new doctrine were landscapes in which meadows were crumpled up into crisp, candy-like masses, and marines in which all the waves had a sharp edge. These pictures were the work of a young Frenchman names Georges Bracque; and it is still a matter for considerable argument whether Bracque or the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is to be regarded as the true founder of Cubism.

Picasso was born at Malaga in 1881, and appeared in Paris about the end of the nineteenth century as an accomplished and masterly draughtsman. His early work ‘Mother and Child’ shows the normality of his art and his genuine gifts before he attached himself definitely to the Fauviste movement. Possessed of the quick and fertile brain of an inventive engineer, Picasso poured forth in quick succession a number of paintings of startling novelty in a variety of styles before he reached the mode that is now known as Cubism. On his practice, the outcome of a restless search for novelty of effect and of tireless experiments in pattern-making, others built up a new pseudo-philosophy of art. As a theory Cubism was based on two dogmatic assertions and a fallacious conclusion. It was argued:

1. Strength is beauty.
2. A straight line is stronger than a curved line.

It is hardly necessary to point out how fairly are both these contentions, for in the first place nothing is more beautiful or weaker than a flower, and in the second it is a commonplace of construction that an arch is stronger than a horizontal on two perpendiculars. Nevertheless, blind to the error of their major and minor premise, the Cubists with a parade of logic proceeded to the conclusion that a painting wholly composed of straight lines is stronger and therefore more beautiful than a painting containing curved lines. Picasso’s ‘Head of a Lady in a Mantilla’ illustrates the first phase of Cubism, in which the human body is cut up into geometrical forms. It is a ‘crystallization’ of a human head, which looks less like a painting than a woodcarving executed by a savage with a blunt instrument, yet once our eyes have grown accustomed to the strange barbarism of the technique we have to acknowledge that this head is not altogether wanting in expression.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)

Lucas Cranach

Souren Melikian writes about Lucas Cranach and his earliest masterpieces + other viewpoints @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/24/arts/melik26.php

Cranach: 8 Mar—8 Jun 2008 @ The Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Useful links:
www.royalacademy.org.uk
www.staedelmuseum.de

Indiana Jones Escapades

(via budgettravel) Expedia has created unique travel deals either based on or inspired by Indiana Jones escapades @ www.expedia.com/indianajones

Brilliant!

Useful link:
www.expedia.com

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahneman + Paul Slovic + Amos Tversky is a fascinating book + I found it useful in analyzing market behavior.

Useful links:
http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman
www.decisionresearch.org

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, then, Gauguin appeared to Paris, not only as the inventor of a new style of picture, but also as the protagonist of a new mental attitude towards life and art. At that period there was a certain lassitude among the highly cultured, expressed by the term fin de siècle—and it was not difficult to make out a case for regarding modern civilization as a disease. There is much in city life that is repugnant to some temperaments, and the yearning for simplicity among artists had its parallel in the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement in politics. The argument put forward by a new generation of artists was this: ‘If modern life is diseased, modern art must be diseased also. We can only restore art to health by starting it afresh like children or savages.’ Thus began the reaction against the complexity of neo-Impressionist painting, and this movement, chiefly influenced by the example of Gauguin, gave birth to a group of painters known in Paris as the fauves (i.e wild beasts). This Fauviste movement was an extreme emotional reaction against the cold intellectual tendencies of hyperscientific painting. In so far as these ‘wild beasts’ painters sought to make painting simpler and less complicated, it may be argued that they were moving in a right direction. A similar reaction in England, fifty years earlier, had led Holman Hunt and Millais to go back to the painters before Raphael for qualities of line and color which they though desirable. But the French painters, in their rage against civilization, went much further back: one by one all the Old Masters were swept away by revolutionaries who sought inspiration from the rudimentary art of savages and barbarians. Forcible, childlike scrawls began to appear in Paris exhibitions, and these paintings were based not so much on my new view of Nature as on the savage art of Polynesia and Central Africa. The rough-hewn intensity of negro carvings excited jaded minds which were satiated with the plastic perfection of the sculpture of Michael Angelo.

The passion for simplicity and the desire to secure a maximum of expression with a minimum of means—which are the chief virtues of the Fauves—are found in the highest degree in the work of Henri Matisse, who is generally regarded as the leading exponent of this school. Born in the North of France in 1869, Matisse as a young man made a great reputation among connoisseurs by the extraordinary power of his drawing. Beginning as an almost academic draughtsman, influenced at first by Impressionism and then by Gauguin, painting landscapes, figures, and still-life, the art of Matisse has passed through a number of phases, each of which has had offshoots in a band of imitators. If Gauguin has been the most lasting influence, Matisse is in no sense an imitator of this master. Though he retained the high-keyed Impressionist palette of bright, clean colors, Matisse abandoned the mosaic method of painting, using a sweeping brush and large planes of color to fill in the masses of what are essentially linear designs. Many of his drawings are wonderful in their summary expression of form and movement, but while in his pictures we admire the masterly sureness and simplicity of his drawing, we are often bewildered by his wilful distortion of natural form.

One of his defenders has sought to explain that Matisse exaggerates deformity in a model by a temperamental necessity which pushes him to affirm a truth without discretion to the point of paradox. Most people will find it difficult to accept a passion for realism as a reasonable explanation why an artist should present the calf of a leg as having a greater circumference than a thigh! On the other hand, decorative intent is patent in all the pictures of Matisse, and we frequently find that distortions of form are used to help and emphasize the rhythm and equilibrium of the linear pattern; accordingly it seems more reasonable to conclude that these distortions are wilful, not accidental, and that the painter subordinates natural representation to formal design, and desires us to admire his pictures, not because they are ‘true,’ but because he has created a pattern of line and color which should appeal to pure aesthetic sensibilities. Matisse is historically important, therefore, as a pioneer of the doctrine that mere ‘actuality’ is unimportant to pictorial art. He may also be regarded as the introducer of ‘shock tactics’ into art. Even if we dislike his pictures, we find it difficult to forget them, because they make so forcible an impact on our vision. His ‘Head of a Woman’ is an example of the powerful effect he achieves with the utmost simplicity and economy of means.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)

Praying Mantis In Amber

Experts believe an 87-million-year-old praying mantis found encased in amber in Japan's northeastern Iwate Prefecture may be a missing link between mantises from the Cretaceous period and modern-day insects.

Julian Ryall writes @ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080425-amber-mantis.html

Useful links:
www.kuji.co.jp
www.kmnh.jp
www.amnh.org

Nano Art

I found the Nano photos via Materials Research Society @ http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/04/gallery_nano_art stunningly beautiful + the eye-catching images are truly a unique convergence of science and art.

Useful link:
www.mrs.org

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

(via Wiki) Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books -- that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognisable likeness of the portrait subject.

I liked The Arcimboldo Effect because they have double meaning + that otherness.

Useful links:
www.nhm-wien.ac.at
www.kunsthistorischesmuseum.at
www.palazzograssi.it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2276324,00.html