Saturday, May 24, 2003
So I got a copy of The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich from the library. This was mainly because I felt my ignorance of the state of art was a terrible thing and I was finding it difficult to articulate exactly why I disliked so much of modern art (though I don't think this has so much to do with art as it is with personality. The twentieth century was the first era when artists could first expect to achieve fame in their lifetime, the Sensations crew are just the logical extension of that). So, get an overview of art, which I learnt nothing about at school, then concentrate on the state of the art in the twentieth century.
So far, I'm a hundred and eighty pages in, at the start of the thirteenth century. I heartily recommend this book by the way, I thought it was going to be dry and dull but it's actually extremely readable and enjoyable. Reading it I've realised that on the one hand there was stuff I knew which I didn't realise I'd known, because when I was learning it I wasn't coming it from the art perspective, and on the other things which I should have realised myself. I thought that up to the end of the nineteenth century the quest in art had been for a true representation of the human body and the things the artists saw in the world around them (think Turner, think the Mona Lisa), that it was only when the camera was invented that artists began to experiment with other forms of expression. As the second millenium opens Gombrich talks about how Church art deviated away from the search for 'realism' that had run through the Greek and Roman artists as they looked for a way to represent the truth of the Holy stories they were commissioned to paint. Great stuff.
So far, I'm a hundred and eighty pages in, at the start of the thirteenth century. I heartily recommend this book by the way, I thought it was going to be dry and dull but it's actually extremely readable and enjoyable. Reading it I've realised that on the one hand there was stuff I knew which I didn't realise I'd known, because when I was learning it I wasn't coming it from the art perspective, and on the other things which I should have realised myself. I thought that up to the end of the nineteenth century the quest in art had been for a true representation of the human body and the things the artists saw in the world around them (think Turner, think the Mona Lisa), that it was only when the camera was invented that artists began to experiment with other forms of expression. As the second millenium opens Gombrich talks about how Church art deviated away from the search for 'realism' that had run through the Greek and Roman artists as they looked for a way to represent the truth of the Holy stories they were commissioned to paint. Great stuff.
