Apr 13, 2016 07:45 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 13, 2016 07:49 PM by Magical Realist.)
"Amid all the cultural changes surrounding us every day, one of the most consequential has gone entirely unnoticed. We have not had a major artistic movement, in literature or art, for something like 30 years, not since the various offspring of postmodernism blew themselves out in the early 1980s.
Artistic movements were once engines that helped to power the culture and to shape the way that people looked at reality. In the present moment, when so much of our public life is simultaneously polarized and murky, it is striking to remember how an artistic movement could clarify the world around it, project the image of alternate possibilities and challenge artists and their audiences to apply their imaginations to grand new projects.
An artistic movement requires three conditions. One is a strong sense of contemporary context. The French Impressionist painters, for example, apprehended the new spirit of modernity with blurry canvases that reflected the increasingly rapid movement along Paris’s new wide boulevards, as well as capturing fast-changing mores.
Years earlier, in 1857, Gustave Courbet rocked the French art world by exhibiting, among other works, a painting of two prostitutes lying under a tree. The blunt lack of idealized femininity was shocking. Courbet himself referred to his work as “realism,” a term that the art critic Champfleury promptly made famous.
This was just five years after Napoleon III had seized the throne in a coup d’état and established himself as emperor. Courbet loathed Napoleon, and his jaundiced view of the emperor’s faux-democratic politics complemented his realist style of painting. Realism became not just an aesthetic but a way of regarding the world.
It would have been as difficult to talk about politics in 1857 without mentioning this new aesthetic as it would have been to discuss the French Revolution in the 1790s without referring to the Romantic poets, or to speak about the World War I in 1920 without talking about the jarring works of the Dadaists and the surrealists.
To be sure, in Europe art and politics have always been more closely aligned than in the U.S. But our own artistic movements have served no less as illuminations and even as organizing principles for historical understanding.
In the 1890s, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells published a series of essays in Harper’s magazine laying out a realist literary manifesto. Appearing at the end of the Gilded Age and the start of the Progressive era, his essays served as a guide to novelists and readers. The grit of everyday democratic politics was replacing an era in which prosperity had concealed social tensions. It was time for writers to part the mists of Romanticism and regard the world as it was.
The second condition that has to be fulfilled for an artistic movement to grow and take shape is a powerful sense of artistic history. It would have been impossible to talk about the Romantics without talking about the medieval and Renaissance history that they used in their work, or to discuss the modernists without referring to the Romantics, or to talk about the postmodern artists of the 1980s without bringing up the modernists.
Artistic movements reveal the past to be a living cause of present action. Cubism, which took much of its inspiration from early African art, also embodied, as if by osmosis, Einstein’s notions of time and space. Jackson Pollock, one of the fathers of abstract expressionism, was inspired by Native American sand paintings.
Finally an artistic movement has to offer a clear and commanding aesthetic that also possesses elements of a philosophy of life. When the Romantics rejected the neoclassical poets’ emphasis on stately and strict verse form and replaced it with simple ballads about ordinary experiences, they were also offering their readers a new way to live and to think about the world. Hemingway’s dictum, “grace under pressure,” grew out of his unflinching realist style and influenced not just a generation of writers but the attitudes toward life of a generation of ordinary people....."=====http://www.wsj.com/articles/time-for-a-n...1419451176
Artistic movements were once engines that helped to power the culture and to shape the way that people looked at reality. In the present moment, when so much of our public life is simultaneously polarized and murky, it is striking to remember how an artistic movement could clarify the world around it, project the image of alternate possibilities and challenge artists and their audiences to apply their imaginations to grand new projects.
An artistic movement requires three conditions. One is a strong sense of contemporary context. The French Impressionist painters, for example, apprehended the new spirit of modernity with blurry canvases that reflected the increasingly rapid movement along Paris’s new wide boulevards, as well as capturing fast-changing mores.
Years earlier, in 1857, Gustave Courbet rocked the French art world by exhibiting, among other works, a painting of two prostitutes lying under a tree. The blunt lack of idealized femininity was shocking. Courbet himself referred to his work as “realism,” a term that the art critic Champfleury promptly made famous.
This was just five years after Napoleon III had seized the throne in a coup d’état and established himself as emperor. Courbet loathed Napoleon, and his jaundiced view of the emperor’s faux-democratic politics complemented his realist style of painting. Realism became not just an aesthetic but a way of regarding the world.
It would have been as difficult to talk about politics in 1857 without mentioning this new aesthetic as it would have been to discuss the French Revolution in the 1790s without referring to the Romantic poets, or to speak about the World War I in 1920 without talking about the jarring works of the Dadaists and the surrealists.
To be sure, in Europe art and politics have always been more closely aligned than in the U.S. But our own artistic movements have served no less as illuminations and even as organizing principles for historical understanding.
In the 1890s, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells published a series of essays in Harper’s magazine laying out a realist literary manifesto. Appearing at the end of the Gilded Age and the start of the Progressive era, his essays served as a guide to novelists and readers. The grit of everyday democratic politics was replacing an era in which prosperity had concealed social tensions. It was time for writers to part the mists of Romanticism and regard the world as it was.
The second condition that has to be fulfilled for an artistic movement to grow and take shape is a powerful sense of artistic history. It would have been impossible to talk about the Romantics without talking about the medieval and Renaissance history that they used in their work, or to discuss the modernists without referring to the Romantics, or to talk about the postmodern artists of the 1980s without bringing up the modernists.
Artistic movements reveal the past to be a living cause of present action. Cubism, which took much of its inspiration from early African art, also embodied, as if by osmosis, Einstein’s notions of time and space. Jackson Pollock, one of the fathers of abstract expressionism, was inspired by Native American sand paintings.
Finally an artistic movement has to offer a clear and commanding aesthetic that also possesses elements of a philosophy of life. When the Romantics rejected the neoclassical poets’ emphasis on stately and strict verse form and replaced it with simple ballads about ordinary experiences, they were also offering their readers a new way to live and to think about the world. Hemingway’s dictum, “grace under pressure,” grew out of his unflinching realist style and influenced not just a generation of writers but the attitudes toward life of a generation of ordinary people....."=====http://www.wsj.com/articles/time-for-a-n...1419451176
