Okay - before discussing any artist in detail or any artistic statement specifically, I want to dispense with some ideas about pictoral space.
Without diving into any cultural/historical/psychological overview of the subject, I just want to acknowledge that the pictorial frame pre-Cezanne is essentially a diorama.
In other words, at its zenith - when the image is done as we see as faithful - 'stuff looks like stuff' - the image itself is a box containing everything it needs to tell a story. Everything is in superb focus and the eye can find many attractive things between the main subject and the simplest element. The way a painting works - and this is still a pre-Cezanne-ish idea - is that it is a self-contained unit - it is a collection of things. In essence all painting is still life.
There are a lot of profound ideas contained within the frame - line, shape and form. Energy, rhythm and order. Multi-point perspective. The use of color, hot or cool, to push and pull the eye, to create a certain drama. There is a craft - a language in this kind of painting that in itself tells a story - a story I don't really want to tell here, right now. I just want to say that pre-Cezanne, all painting is a diorama - which is to say - it is a collection of things.
It does not work the way the eye works. It works the way memory works. It is about creating a narrative - a point a to point z scenario. Something self contained, containing its own life.
The way the eye works, and I want to get into this a lot more - is that seeing is not just a sensory act, it is also a cognitive act. When we 'see' we not only apprehend the object, but that object must fit into a context, both personal and situational.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a bit of pot-smokerish gibberish - one atom in one fingernail could be the center of a whole other universe - yeah yeah yeah. But. There is no escaping that fact that sight as much as any other sense, if not maybe more so, because we are such a sight intensive culture at the moment, is ALL about context. But I don't want to get too deep into this - I just want to say that all painting, pre-Cezanne, is about creating a diorama.
See: At its best, it might look pretty, but in the end, it has little to do with anything actual. It is simply craft of surface and illusion.
This is, I guess, a scattershot way of getting to a simple timeline - one that I am obsessed with, and one that, frankly? Bothers me.
Pre-Cezanne painting is about constructing the pictoral space along architectural lines - everything you need to know is contained within the boundaries of the frame. Masacchio, and De Vinci pretty much defined the space, and a whole bunch of other amazing people refined that space. They were all excellent and painting and drawing things that we could recognize as things.
Post-Cezanne (and why is it that the water is so damned murky around Cezanne? I can tie Courbet and Ingres to Cezanne, dammit) Painting is a much more modern psychological game - it is not only about the way the eye sees, but about questioning what the eye sees.
Painting goes from surface to interior. It goes from solely an ocular activity to a more philosophical activity.
This is all jibber-jabber, but this is my jibber-jabber. I just want a space to write down all the crap I think about while I paint and draw and look.
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This is good stuff, Ben—and it’s not jibber-jabber. You identified one of the major shifts in pictorial representation that only began in the nineteenth century. Prior to that—and dating all the way back to early Christian Medieval Art—Western artists were obsessed with storytelling, predominantly biblical reenactments, with exacting verisimilitude. Post-Cezanne painters broke the pictorial paradigm, but it didn’t happen overnight. The post-impressionist canvasses of Cézanne, Seurat and many others that paved the way for the radically different 20th century art world, owe their roots to oft-forgotten artist like Jean-François Millet.
ReplyDeleteI’m no art historian, but if memory serves, my graduate art history professor insisted that it was the The Sower, 1850 and The Gleaners, 1857, which sowed the seeds (pardon the pun) for the avant-garde movements that followed in the decades to come. These paintings of everyday peasant life fly in the face of high, aristocratic art. They shocked and disgusted the critics and art enthusiasts. It was Millet that helped define a new subject matter that marked a crucial transition from the didactic and sacred artwork of the old world to a new art of the commonplace and secular.