Copyright © 2025 by Robert Florczak

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Interior design by Robert Florczak

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan with Robert Florczak

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-8158-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-8188-7

Printed in China

For Dennis Prager, the finest man I know

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of indispensable people helped with the realization of the book you hold in your hands, and for that I would like to thank them:

Dennis Prager for believing in the principles I espoused in my original manuscript and promoting it to Skyhorse Publishing; Tony Lyons at Skyhorse, who agreed to acquire it; Daniela Rapp, who did wonderful work editing the manuscript and helping me maneuver through the ups and downs of making it presentable for publication; Pilot Peppler, who produced the QR codes throughout; all at Kloster Graefenthal, who opened their doors to the thirteenth-century monastery where I wrote much of the manuscript; and my wife Annette, who always supports and encourages my creative endeavors.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A number of images in the book are represented by QR codes. There are two reasons for this: the estate of an artist didn’t respond to a request to include an image of the respective artist’s work, or the estate denied a request outright. A QR code allowed for the work in question to be included in the book. Should any of the QR code sources change or become inactive, the reader is encouraged to search out the respective image in other locations on the internet.

INTRODUCTION: WHY THE NEED FOR THIS BOOK

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I attended and graduated from one of the world’s most prestigious art schools, The Cooper Union in New York City. The school was, and still is, a bastion of the most up-to-date, cutting-edge art, much of it conceptual. While I was there, it quickly became apparent how easy it was for certain students to bamboozle their way through school and, by extension, how fraudulent “art” could permeate and even succeed in the marketplace. Some of my classmates and I, who gravitated to a more traditional approach to art, were often at odds with what we were being taught. We didn’t think many of the modern works we were told were great were, in fact, great. But we didn’t speak up because we thought that perhaps we “just didn’t understand” and feared ridicule for being behind the times, and that we might possibly be penalized with poor grades. A few of us quietly preferred the great artists of the past that some of our instructors dismissed as passé and no longer worth emulating.

Now, if we Cooper Union art students didn’t “understand” modern art,* think of how bewildered the average museum visitor today must feel; if we art students were too intimidated to speak up and ask why certain modern artists were hailed for creating what to us was clearly rubbish, think of how intimidated the average art aficionado or occasional museum-goer is to speak up and challenge today’s prevailing elitist “art establishment”—the critics, museums, galleries, and even many art schools

Being somewhat in the public eye, I receive much correspondence from people who believe that a lot of modern art is not worthy of the term “good.” People rightly sense there is farce and fraud in the arguments for much of today’s dismal art and yearn for commonsense counterpoints with which to confidently challenge these notions. This book provides those counterpoints (the most serviceable of them presented in red pull quotes), building a case, point by point, as to what makes for good and bad art and how to identify and differentiate it.

Art history has been overwhelmingly written and taught not by artists, but by those in the humanities and social sciences.

For the last century or so, art history has been overwhelmingly written and taught not by artists, but by those in the humanities and social sciences, who generally know or care little about the inner motivations of the artist. Not having an artist’s point of view or experience, these authors and teachers have therefore framed art in the only language they understand: meaning, theory, and sociohistorical significance. However, the great artists of the past cared not one whit about what their work meant in a sociohistorical context. They cared primarily about creating art that looked good. But this is rarely taught today. As a result, people have long come away with the idea that:

1. Art is simply a reflection of its time.

It can be a reflection, but not necessarily. The brilliant artist Maxfield Parrish, for instance, exclusively painted unique, imaginary landscapes during the last decades of his life from the 1930s to the 1960s, message-free and in complete contrast to the contemporaneous movements of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art.

2. Art isn’t about skill, it’s about making you think.

Making one think is a very narrow and limited experience to derive from art. Since other modes of creativity also stimulate us to think, we’re still left to consider what is unique about art. That uniqueness is, of course, the visual, and visual excellence requires technical proficiency. Why, one might reasonably ask, do we require skill in movies, music, literature, and even sports, but somehow not in art? Would we gravitate to those if they primarily made us think?

3. Art is a matter of personal taste; there’s no such thing as good art or bad art.

Though people generally conflate the two, quality and taste are distinct. Quality is based on long-developed and agreed-upon standards of excellence, while taste is simply personal preference.

Quality and taste are distinct. Quality is based on long-developed, agreed-upon standards of excellence, while taste is simply personal preference.

The difference between my perspective versus that of a nonartist is the difference between a builder vs. an architectural historian, a practitioner vs. an academically oriented analyst. Historians and critics can provide much valuable information and insight, but builders are experts in the how and why buildings are built. As a professional artist, I’m not interested in offering yet another theory or analysis of the meanings behind works of art, nor how works of art fit into and/or mirror the society around them, and I don’t think the average person is interested in reading another either. I am interested in what makes art visually great, sharing it with art enthusiasts, and informing the next generation of talented artists what it takes to produce art of excellence. To be direct, this book proposes that there is an ideal in art, that we can define and identify it, and that we should maintain it as an aspiration. Even if many artists cannot fully reach those heights, the ideal should be acknowledged as the visual best that a society can accomplish. I am arguing that, for the survival of art, we need to promote this mindset and to begin to also understand and evaluate art from the artist’s point of view, and not only from the point of view of art historians and critics.

In these pages I pose a simple, clear, and rational method for understanding and evaluating art which, when applied to any visual art form in any movement or era, can cut through the miasma of “explanations,” “statements,” and “theories,” and soundly establish excellence or expose garbage.

Quality in art can actually be assessed by way of enduring standards which transcend history, culture, and passing fads. To give an example, for a number of years I was one of four art university instructors of graduate-level illustration who sat on a review board. At the end of each semester, students hoping to graduate or advance to the next level would present their work to us and, for one hour per student, we would analyze and judge the quality of their current semester’s output. Though each of us instructors had differing styles and techniques in our own work, it was amazing to watch how we each could immediately zero in on the same weaknesses or strengths of any given student piece, such was the result of decades of experience we brought to the reviews. That demonstration represented years of producing art that needed to measure up to the critical eye of an art director (or even fellow artists), and was based upon the standards which will be discussed in this book. These standards, based on the philosophy of aesthetics, are present at various levels of effectiveness in any drawing, painting, or sculpture. Given ample time to truly absorb oneself in looking at art with these standards as a guide, one can slowly begin to detect, like we review board instructors could, what it is about certain works that makes them stand taller than others.

With this in mind, I have devoted a portion of the text to explaining aesthetics, with the hope that a basic understanding of its principles will help the viewer of art know what to look for—identifying their presence in good works of art, while recognizing their absence in bad. These principles are critical to know because they are the very same principles used by the great artists themselves to create their art.

I’ve included a number of images of history’s most notable works of art, good and bad. Not all “bad” artworks in the book are truly bad; many are simply less than great. When I include no accompanying images to points being made, I encourage the reader to seek out the works to which I refer. Museums and, secondarily, well-printed art books are the best ways to explore art. Though the internet unfortunately relies on the proper settings of one’s computer screen to accurately present imagery, it is an acceptable alternative. It will no doubt seem to some that I’ve cherry-picked the selections, i.e., the best of the past vs. the worst of the present. On the contrary, the works I discuss are those that their own respective eras have hailed as some of their best representatives. To be certain, there has been less-than-great art in the past, and wonderful art being created in our own time. But, unfortunately, today’s masterpieces need to be sought out, since the “art establishment,” in not subscribing to universal standards of excellence, generally prefers to ignore them in favor of presenting the world and future societies with often the most inane, offensive, and poorly executed examples of today’s art. Accompanying a number of the images are, where available, quotes from the respective artists. These will be illuminating and instructive.

Championing excellence in art is of profound cultural importance. This book provides an easy-to-navigate guide for anyone who believes in that cause and wishes to defend it with sound, rational arguments. I hope you find it of value.

RF

robertflorczak.com

Pfalzdorf, Germany 2025

* In the same way that there is a specific era within classical music called the Classical period (roughly 1730–1820), I use the term “modern art” as a general description of nontraditional art after about the 1860s, even though there was a specific era called Modern Art that lasted from the 1860s to the mid-1970s.

ART: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT ISN’T

The belief that there is a difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and vapid, exciting and banal—this belief was once fundamental. . . . But it offends against political correctness. Today there is only my taste and yours. —Sir Roger Scruton

In searching out a definition of art, one discovers a plethora of verbose, theory-heavy descriptions that tell us more about their authors than about art. It is not that complex. Simply stated, art is the visually creative depiction of an idea and/or emotion. It is visual, not verbal or aural; it is not functional like a road sign or PowerPoint presentation; nor can it be an accident. If it is any of these things, even in part, it becomes something else, and no longer art. But far more important than the definition of art is quality in art. This book focuses on the latter.

Art is the visually creative depiction of an idea and/or emotion.

Drawing, painting, and sculpture in all their varieties are the main avenues of art and embody the full range of potential visual expression. It is essential to note that each of these categories is one in which the artist is in complete control over every aspect of a work. Therefore, the accidental, the unplanned, cannot be considered legitimate art; a splash of mud on a wall coincidentally looking like the face of Elvis may be fascinating, but an artist claiming the freak occurrence as his or her own work would be disingenuous. (This does not apply to the chance, micro accidents that can happen within the controlled creation of a work, but of a piece as a whole.)

Some people will claim that “meaning” is as important as the visual. But all mediums— literature, music, etc.—can invoke meaning. Since the visual is what uniquely distinguishes art, the visual is, therefore, what most matters. In fact, a great work can and should be able to stand on its own without the viewer knowing anything about its meaning. A mythological piece, for instance Apollo and Daphne (Fig. 1), loses none of its artistic power when the viewer is unfamiliar with its narrative; familiarity only deepens the already deep experience of a great work. We should, therefore, be careful not to place the prime emphasis on meaning, otherwise art risks becoming commentary that just happens to be illustrated. Art is first and foremost visual and therein lies the priority. As it happens, many great artists of the past also used their art to make statements at times, but never at the expense of the visual excellence of their work. In his painting The Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 2), Théodore Géricault, for example, strongly condemned the French government’s treatment of the lower classes, yet even without knowledge of the work’s meaning, the viewer can be thoroughly taken by the painting’s powerful visual as painting alone. To further the point, despite what has been commonly assumed, the subject is the vehicle through which an artist demonstrates skill, not an artist’s skill being the vehicle by which to present a subject. In fact, we may think the subject trite or even detestable, but it is irrelevant to the level of visual quality embodied in the respective piece.

Since the visual is what uniquely distinguishes art, the visual is, therefore, what most matters.

A great work can and should be able to stand on its own without the viewer knowing anything about its meaning.

Properly, the subject is the vehicle through which an artist demonstrates skill, not an artist’s skill being the vehicle by which to present a subject.

(Fig. 1) Apollo and Daphne, before 1688

Jakob Auer

The variety of textures achieved by Auer—earth, flora, fabric, gems, hair, and, of course, flawless skin—are all the more impressive when considering the relatively small size of this piece. All of this is presented within an upward, undulating movement of the intertwining figures and laurel branches.

(Fig. 2) The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819

Théodore Géricault

While art historians will focus on the undeniably interesting symbolism of Géricault’s masterpiece, the viewer should first focus on the dynamic composition, made dramatic by the mast and rigging lines forming a pyramid on the left, and the rising grouping of figures forming a pyramid on the right. Drama is also heightened through the large and small patterns of light and dark flickering throughout, and the almost monochromatic color scheme, which helps accentuate the patches of bloodlike red here and there. A wondrous accomplishment to behold, especially when standing before the original in all its 16 by 23-foot monumentality.

There are those who will insist that too much emphasis is put on technical skill, and that art is more than about how good it “looks.” This is akin to saying that music is more than about how it “sounds.” John Cage’s 4'33" (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of patience-trying silence) is an example of how this analogy has been taken to a ridiculous extreme. Relatedly, if art is now about concept and theory, why do we need art schools? If technical skill is irrelevant, what then would be taught? Can conceptual thinking be imparted by an instructor? How would the students’ concepts be assessed? When young children begin to draw and proudly show us their results, do we now tell them, “That’s very nice, Johnny, but crumpling the drawing paper itself is also art!”?

As the nineteenth-century French Academic painter Léon Bonnat noted, ”Drawing and form: from those foundations we never stray; we cannot, we ought not to, because they are the conditions absolutely requisite to eternal beauty; and from antique art to contemporary, in passing through all the great epochs; Gothic art, the French and Flemish primitives, the Italian Renaissance, our classic art of the last three centuries, it is by form and drawing alone that the world has been enriched with so many masterpieces.”

Today, visual excellence has been almost completely replaced by statement and theory (I’ve actually been told that we don’t even need to see a modern work of art to appreciate it!). When a work’s meaning—its theory, message, statement—and not its visual excellence becomes as or more important than the visual, the work has failed as art. My Bed (Fig. 3) may be sociologically interesting, but it is something else—journalism, perhaps—not art. Untitled No. 17, 1961 (Fig. 4) may have a provocative, intellectual purpose (crown that movement with the name Color Field and it is swathed in instant gravitas), but it is still a visual work and as such falls within the demands of two-dimensional artistic criteria. To the eye of someone concerned with aesthetic excellence, a piece like this is seriously wanting, and an insult even to the casual viewer expecting skillful art in a serious museum.

When a work’s meaning—its theory, message, statement— and not its visual excellence becomes as or more important than the visual, the work has failed as art.

(Fig. 3) My Bed, 1998

Tracey Emin

When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in art— and it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique. —Emin

Would it matter to the overall effect of the viewing experience if a pillow were removed, or the rug and its items were relocated to the foot of the bed? When message is the predominant value, the visual choices can become aesthetically arbitrary.

(Fig. 4) Untitled No. 17, 1961, 1961

Mark Rothko

I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures! —Rothko

Rothko’s quote exposes that there has indeed existed value judgment in modern times regarding artistic quality, what with the condescending comment about “pretty pictures.” But did he mean that representational art in general is “pretty?” Or was he implying that making representational art would be beneath him? Or both?

That people can jump through hoops to come up with every possible justification for a messy bed or two swaths of color being great art is no longer surprising, but this is increasingly despairing for the future of artistic excellence. Definitions are critical, for the moment we begin to distort or stretch them, the more meaningless and pointless they become. A cauliflower with wings is no longer a vegetable; a work of art that is more words than visuals is no longer art. As the twentieth-century artist Edward Hopper said, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”

If an artist needs to verbally “explain” their work, you know the work probably can’t visually stand on its own.

Something to look out for: if an artist needs to verbally “explain” their work, you know the work probably can’t visually stand on its own. And often being full of self-admiration, that artist can pontificate ad nauseam.

How then, might we analyze art and determine its quality? In the same way a doctor has tools and methods by which to examine and establish the condition of the human body, so too does the viewer possess similar means for assessing the quality of a work of art. Though not as concrete as that which may be determined in the sciences, these means, the very guides used by artists themselves for centuries to create their works, are nevertheless universal and invaluable and can be understood through the realm of aesthetics.

AESTHETICS: THE ANATOMY OF ART

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

—Johannes Brahms

Beauty is that which positively captivates and fulfills the senses, whether visually, aurally, mentally, or even physically, and the artist’s pursuit of it is, in truth, the pursuit of perfection. Aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty. It has been formulated by artists and thinkers over many centuries and concerns itself with analyzing that which universally most attracts the eye and spirit. That the principles are indeed universal, and transcend culture, can be found in the many anthropological studies that have discovered commonalities of visual experience and preferences among different peoples and over many centuries.

Beauty is that which positively captivates and fulfills the senses, whether visually, aurally, mentally, or even physically.

Aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty.

It is now acknowledged, for instance, that humans are attracted to faces and bodies that exhibit symmetry, which, evolutionarily, appears to represent health and security. This is revealing in that it begins to show how certain aspects of aesthetic preferences can be hardwired within us, and are not always the result of cultural influence.

Another way to look at this is to ask a simple question: Is there anyone anywhere who would not call a day with clear, blue skies and a mild temperature beautiful? Or a field of colorful wildflowers? Or a rainbow? Is this not a most basic starting point from which to recognize the human innateness of certain aesthetic universalities?

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, it is important to keep in mind that quality should not be confused with taste; quality is based on acknowledged standards, developed by artists themselves. Taste is simply one’s personal preference. While different cultures may prefer certain subjects or even certain color schemes, these are taste issues and not qualitative (it is interesting that, counter to predictable assumptions, the Japanese are some of the biggest fans and performers of the music of Bach and Beethoven—both German and a distant culture away). Also, one may enjoy a work of art or music or literature while recognizing its lesser quality, or be uninterested in a work while at the same time admitting to its greatness.

Quality in a work of art—its beauty, if you will—is found in the skillful execution of the respective medium: namely drawing, painting, and sculpture. It is in the observable touch and movement of the human hand across a physical surface, in the observable ingenuity of masterful design. It is the artist’s visual journey that should most captivate us, and not simply the destination: how a sunset was painted is more important than the fact that it looks like a sunset (this will be discussed in more detail later). And while subject matter may be captivating, it is secondary to the visual, for ideas are not art; ideas can become art. An interesting idea about a building does not render someone an architect. Therefore, it is skillful execution that is paramount, with the “idea” being its vehicle.

Quality in a work of art—its beauty, if you will—is found in the skillful execution of the respective medium: namely drawing, painting, and sculpture.

How a sunset was painted is more important than the fact that it looks like a sunset.

Ideas are not art.

Skillful execution can be determined by observing and analyzing the elements inherent to each respective medium, some of those elements being: composition, line, color, form, movement, and the subheadings: texture, value (light and dark), contrast, proportion, and spatiality. Works of lesser quality will display definite weaknesses in these areas, and while classical works can also have their flaws here and there, they are usually not at a level to seriously undermine the overall impact of a piece.

We will now examine the most principal of these, after which you’ll be able to see through the eyes of an artist, and objectively evaluate artistic quality in any art, including in this book—and not just rely on feelings or the pronouncements of the so-called experts.

Composition

Most two-dimensional art—drawings and paintings—is created within a flat, rectangular or circular format on paper, canvas, walls, etc. Composition is the positioning of shapes or objects, large or small, within a framework of these formats. A combination of balance and dynamics can be achieved by the specific positioning of the items in relation to each other and/or to the picture edge itself. Its value is similar to that of the outline of a novel, the lack of which would leave the reader no logical journey through the plot.

Composition is the positioning of shapes or objects, large or small, within a framework.

Some artists compose based on their natural visual instincts for balance and/or dynamics (Fig. 5), while others (mostly in the past) utilize diagrams that potentiate the most effective organization of objects within a frame (Fig. 6).

(Fig. 5) View of Kangawa at Sunset, 1833–1834

Utagawa Hiroshige

An example of intuitional composition, this print shows the combination of balance: a horizon parallel to the top and bottom edges, bisected by perpendicular boat sails and masts, all countered by the dynamic angles of the lines of boats and canoes, and the rising and arcing street scene and foliage at the right. Without those added angles, the composition would be static and dull.

(Fig. 6) The Last Supper, c. 1490s

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s Last Supper demonstrates the imaginative and controlled arrangement of thirteen figures within a symmetrically designed room. The white and red lines bring to light how carefully this was done: the windows, the rectangular patterns on the walls, the ceiling, the table surface, and the corners of the picture frame, intersect at different points to create dynamic angles and pyramids of figures (blue lines) all pointing toward the Christ figure at the painting’s center.

Composition diagrams can divide layouts by simple halves, thirds, or quarters, or by highly complex mathematical equations. One method, for example, believed to be based on design in nature, is dynamic symmetry. It is derived from the ancient concept of the golden ratio. Simply explained, dynamic symmetry is a system of composing a painting by breaking down the rectangle into sub-rectangles, each of which is geometrically proportional to the others and the whole. The placement of objects within certain of the rectangles, or along intersections, key lines, or angles formed by the diagramming, can create a subconscious, moving effect on the viewer (Fig. 7).

(Fig. 7) Study for Daybreak, 1922

Maxfield Parrish

The study above that Parrish constructed for his painting Daybreak, one of the most popular images of the twentieth century, demonstrates his use of dynamic symmetry as a schematic guide for the optimal placement of objects and edges in the rectangle (Parrish’s actual lines have been darkened here for greater visibility).

Problems of composition that can be seen in poorly designed art might be:

1. the arbitrary and imbalanced placement of objects (Fig. 8),

2. the edges of objects placed too close to each other or the picture edge (sometimes referred to as tangents), creating areas uncomfortable to the eye, confusing the spatiality, and drawing unwanted attention (Figs. 9 & 10), or

3. the awkward overlapping of objects (an arm of one figure crossing over the face of another, for instance) (Figs. 9 & 10).

(Fig. 8) Woman I, 1950–1952

Willem de Kooning

Unlike The Last Supper and Study for Daybreak, Willem de Kooning’s painting of a woman exhibits none of that organizational expertise, but instead places the woman awkwardly in the rectangle, creating a tangent with her foot and the bottom edge of the painting. The major lines of her figure are indicated in red, exposing their haphazard (non) relation to each other, the picture frame, and negative space. In short, one’s eyes don’t know where to go.

(Fig. 9) Laocoön, 1610–1614

Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos (El Greco)

Despite the powerful mood conveyed by El Greco in his depiction of the Trojan horse myth, the painting exposes at least seven troublesome tangents (circled in white), the most egregious between the two figures on the far right: the edges of those figures line up unnaturally perfectly with each other, and, acknowledging the fact that light objects generally appear closer than dark objects, the figure at the far right appears closer to the viewer than the figure in front of it to the left. Added to both of them is a disembodied head, made more uneasy by an overlap from the head to its left (circled in yellow). Along with a confusing rendering of the ground areas, the figures there have dark outlines around them that serve to oddly separate them from their surroundings. The National Gallery offers on its website its grandiloquent theory that this choice “plainly exposes the men’s plight and imparts a flickering, spectral quality to their freely painted flesh.” Might it also be possible that this was simply one of El Greco’s weaknesses as a painter?

(Fig. 10) Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888

Paul Gauguin

Few notable works of art offer as many examples of compositional problems as this painting by Gauguin. Beginning with tangents, there are at least seven noticeable ones (circled in white) that make for awkward spots around the piece. Circled in yellow is an uncomfortable overlapping of a man’s nose, and traversing the scene at a diagonal is a tree that oddly cuts across the entire composition, restricting natural eye movement from the left side to the right. One can reasonably wonder if these were simply oversights by the Post-Impressionist master, or issues that mattered little to him. Either way, once pointed out to the viewer, it becomes impossible to ever unsee them.

Line

While brushes, charcoal, pastels, etc., can provide various widths of application, the tools of drawing—pencils, pens, crayons, etc.—create lines, and the beauty of drawing is in the quality of its line work. In the hands of a master, lines are rendered thick or thin, light or dark, these variations maintained through expert hand-eye coordination to produce the artist’s precisely desired effect (Fig. 11). The artist might, for example, carry a single line along the back of a figure, delicately manipulating its boldness or fineness as it moves from one contour to another. The viewer can follow the artist’s journey along that single line, and experience—sometimes many centuries later—the evidence of a human hand’s orchestrated pressure upon the surface. Good line quality is clear and sure, and flows in a controlled and (when used as shading) consistent direction.

The beauty of drawing is in the quality of its line work.

(Fig. 11) The Violinist Niccolò Paganini, 1819

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Lines of great variety and sensitivity compose the figure in Ingres’s portrait of Paganini. The gentle elegance of the pencil work following the curve around the back of the forward upper arm to the bottom of the sleeve is contrasted by the bold darkness on the inside of that same upper arm where it enfolds the violin. One can almost sense the material and thickness of the coat from the treatment of its lines alone, and the economy of lines in the body is set apart by the refined detail in the face and mass of curls in the hair.

Drawings of a lesser caliber are easily recognized by the absence of this control, which often presents itself in line work that is monotonous in character, arbitrary in its display of weight and tonality, or directionless in its sense of flow and motion (Fig. 12).

(Fig. 12) Self Portrait, Baden-Baden, 10th June 1999, 1999

David Hockney

Hockney’s portrait displays none of the mastery of the Ingres drawing, instead relying solely on gesture and facial expression for any impact. The line work is haphazard, scribbled rather than controlled, devoid of variety (most lines being of equal weight and value) and with several randomly dark areas: the irises, the fingers, and the line of the mouth.

Form

The shape of an object becomes form when it is given volume. In drawing and painting this is achieved through shading and perspective, and in sculpture through modeling (carving) a piece’s height, width, and depth. In two-dimensional art, for example (Fig. 13 a–e), a simple triangle (a) is transformed into a pyramid (b) or cone (c) by the addition of shadows on its surface, and, if tipped, the peak can spatially appear to move away from (d) or closer to (e) the viewer. This also applies to other shapes such as the circle, square, and rectangle which, with shading, become (respectively) a sphere, cube, and cuboid. Both two- and three-dimensional forms also create negative shapes, those areas around the forms which themselves are often of visual interest and harmoniously relative to the positive forms.

(Fig. 13 a–e)

When looking at paintings and drawings, a viewer can see weaknesses of form most readily in unappealing shapes (Fig. 15). From there, weakness of form shows up as inconsistent or unconvincing shading. In sculpture it shows itself in clumsy and undisciplined modeling (Fig. 17).

(Fig. 14) Venus in Front of the Mirror, c. 1613–1614

Peter Paul Rubens

The figures of Venus and her two attendants in the painting by Rubens offer an excellent demonstration of the artist’s ability to create believable volume through careful shading. Each form within the figures exhibits a controlled variety of shadow edges, from the soft, gradual modeling around Venus’s left upper arm as well as Cupid’s right upper arm that indicate cylindrical structures, to the deep, hard-edged shadow of Venus’s upper right back that indicates the shelf of the shoulder blade. The vertical crease of Venus’s spine varies in depth and darkness depending on the volumes aside it at each level—rounder volumes on either side of the spine at the lower back, flatter volumes nearer the top.

(Fig. 15) The Coiffure, 1901

Henri Matisse

By comparison, the shadow edges of the left arm in Matisse’s figure are hard and unvaried, suggesting two rectangular timbers rather than cylinders. Also, the shadowed edges along the spine appear haphazard, and present anatomically unclear volumes on either side. (It is interesting to note that the master painter William Bouguereau, Matisse’s early teacher, scolded his student that he “will never learn to draw.”)

(Fig. 16) The Dying Gaul, first or second century AD

Anonymous Roman

Similar to those in the Rubens painting, the forms within the figure of The Dying Gaul display a clear understanding of anatomical volume, as well as satisfying proportion and balance. Weight is also in evidence throughout the gesture of the Gaul where, for instance, one can readily sense in the figure’s right arm the stress and, therefore, the emotion in holding up the torso while dying.

(Fig. 17) Draped Reclining Woman, 1957–1958

Henry Moore

Henry Moore’s sculpture depicts a pose similar to that of the Gaul, yet the right arm in the Moore piece is in an unnatural position to support the torso. Also, while the Gaul’s left hand is positioned naturally and believably over his right leg, which itself is convincingly tucked under the other leg as it might realistically be after having fallen in battle, the same arm in Moore’s sculpture is awkwardly placed upon its left thigh, and the legs are positioned and separated too evenly and statically to convey any clear, dynamic movement or emotion. Finally, in comparing the heads of the two figures, the Gaul’s hangs down heavily, consistent with the emotional narrative of the subject, while the head of the Moore piece is vague in both gesture and expression.

Color

This element of art may possibly be the most difficult to master, since it embodies further complexities not found in the other elements, the science of light being one of them. To begin with, color is made up of three properties: hue, value, and intensity.

Color is made up of three properties: hue, value, and intensity.

1. Hue is the general color itself—very simply, the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, and their respective complements of green, orange, and violet.

2. Value represents the lightness or darkness of any color; a hue of blue, for instance, can be made lighter or darker, while retaining its same hue.

3. Intensity (sometimes called saturation) represents how much of a pure hue is in a mixture of colors: a hue of pure red, for example, is made less intense by the addition of another hue, often its complementary color (in this case green). Making things more complex, another hue added to the red may also lighten or darken the original red, affecting the mixed color’s overall value as well. So, for instance, if a little yellow is mixed into red, the final hue is still a form of red (in this case orange), but it is now also lighter in value.

There are a number of analogies that can help illustrate the complexity of an artist’s color usage. As a start, imagine in music the three notes of a simple C major chord played on a piano: C, E, and G. More and more notes can be added to that basic triad, creating richer textures and moods. The basic C chord can become a C major 7 when a B note is added, or a C major 7 add 9 when a D is then included, and so forth. At some point, though, uncomfortable dissonance will occur if certain notes are added that are outside the natural harmonic realm of the original chord (think of the sound a small child makes when slamming his hands down indiscriminately on the piano keys, or when individual notes are out of tune). The same can be seen in the works of artists whose grasp of color harmony is not firm. Certain mismatches of colors will be as naturally unappealing to the eye as certain mismatches of musical notes are to the ear. Imagine, for instance, how unharmonious the painting in Fig. 24 would appear had the artist given the woman a chartreuse outfit.

Another analogy illustrates the almost infinite amount of controlled color variation that a master colorist is able to juggle. Using digital imaging, a color reproduction of a portrait study by William Bouguereau can be reduced to, let us say, eighty pixels, each pixel containing a single color (Fig. 18). That version of the portrait then has only eighty possible variations of hue, value, and intensity within it. Some artists can only manage this limited complexity of palette. By creating a half step between those pixels, we can now see twice as many variations of colors (Fig. 19), thus expanding the chromatic complexity. Dividing the pixels by yet another half step, even more variations become noticeable (Fig. 20). This can, of course, be repeated (Fig. 21) until we arrive at a high-resolution version of the original image (Fig. 22, pg. 34), where the unlimited color variations of the painter are now clearly apparent. Bouguereau’s keen eye afforded him the ability to mix and balance a greater array of subtle skin tone variations than almost any other painter.

(Fig. 18)

(Fig. 19)

(Fig. 20)

(Fig. 21)

When placed against the work of an artist of far less color aptitude (Fig. 23), the superior talents of Bouguereau are readily discernible: the Freud portrait has a color range roughly equivalent to that in Fig. 19.

(Fig. 22) Head of a Young Girl, 1898

William Bouguereau

(Fig. 23) Woman with Bared Breast, (detail)

1970–1972

Lucian Freud

It should not be assumed that the lack of color range in Freud’s painting is only because he has not blended his colors together as tightly as has Bouguereau. The issue is that Bouguereau has applied far more individual color variations of paint to any given area than has Freud, allowing him to make finer, more precise blendings. An artist can choose to blend two colors together— or, in a sense, twenty-two.

(Fig. 24) An Oleander, 1882

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In this painting by Alma-Tadema, a central, dominant color of a warm, earthy, brick-red is surrounded by an array of secondary earthy colors, including complementary cool greens in the woman’s dress, in select marble tiles, and in the leaves of the titular oleander bush. Everything is in controlled, harmonious balance, including the rich blacks here and there that quietly serve to anchor the piece with its deepest areas of value.

(Fig. 25) Three Studies for a Crucifixion (central panel), 1962

Francis Bacon

Bacon has created an interior with a color scheme similar to Alma-Tadema’s in Fig. 24, but Bacon’s red and orange are both of equally strong intensity, overwhelming the eye rather than carefully drawing it in. Like Alma-Tadema, Bacon uses black, but the color is sloppily applied and smears its surrounding colors, deadening them and rendering them unappealing to the eye in the process. Supporters of the piece will no doubt justify these choices as in keeping with the horrors of the subject, however, on its own, the painting as a visual is ultimately garish.

Movement

A skillful artist can create work that both draws the eye in at a specific point in a piece, and then lead it around it in a visual journey. Drawing the eye in is done by prioritizing certain areas by way of accenting color, lights and darks, or detail, for instance, while shapes, lines, or patterns are the means through which the artist can guide the eye through and around a piece. Paintings and sculpture devoid of controlled movement will send the eye aimlessly from one area to another, or to a dead end, leaving the work lifeless.

(Fig. 26) Tannhäuser and Venus, c. 1878

Gabriel von Max

(Fig. 27) Ajax and Cassandra, 1886

Solomon Joseph Solomon

Two excellent examples of movement in two-dimensional art are the narrative paintings by Gabriel von Max and Solomon Joseph Solomon shown here. In the first (Fig. 26), Max has drawn us in at the bottom from where the composition blossoms upward (white arrows), leading our eyes in a flowing arc (red arrows) through Venus’s body, sweeping along her uplifted arm, and then curving leftward, over and around the man’s head and the moon, finally settling on the ship and horizon. In the second example (Fig. 27), Solomon strongly draws the viewer in through the fallen incense pot at the bottom left (red arrows) and shoots up through Ajax’s right leg and torso, across to the top of Cassandra’s chest, finally arcing around her uplifted arm. Our eyes are then drawn back in from the top left (blue arrows) down through the triangular sheer and her right hand, curving through her body and across her and Ajax’s thighs, both of which point back to the viewer.

(Fig. 28) Two Nudes (Lovers), 1913

Oskar Kokoschka

Two similar subjects from the modern era expose weakness of visual movement. First, Kokoschka’s self-portrait dancing with Gustav Mahler’s daughter, Alma (Fig. 28), presents the couple in a somewhat upward moving pyramidal shape (yellow arrows), but any clear visual flow through the figures is hampered by the dancers’ clumsily tangled legs, and by multidirectional brushstrokes (red arrows) within the figures as well as in the background. These counter our eyes’ natural desire to move unimpeded throughout the piece. The museum that owns the painting describes the haphazard brushstrokes as “bold,” while the awkward pose of the figures is translated as “ambiguous.”

(Fig. 29) The Embrace, 1903

Pablo Picasso

Next, Picasso’s pastel of a couple embracing (Fig. 29) presents the beginnings of visual movement—the woman’s bent right leg (blue arrow)—but this is immediately halted by the rigid vertical gesture of the man (red arrow), and the hard vertical planting of the woman’s oddly shortened left leg and foot. The overall shape of the couple is a static rectangle within the rectangle of the frame, made more static by the perfectly perpendicular edges of the bed (white lines). It is interesting to note that the museum that houses the piece focuses not on any of its visual aspects in official descriptions (other than the simple duo-color palette), but on its subject and narrative. In fact, Picasso himself stated about the piece that, “What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.” It indeed does nothing more than that.

(Fig. 30 a & b) The Kiss, 1882

Auguste Rodin

Movement can also inhabit three-dimensional art like sculpture, and constitutes an important part of the viewing experience. In The Kiss (Fig. 30 a), the intimacy of the gesture is enhanced by the gentle flowing curves of both figures (blue and red arrows). Even when viewed from another direction (Fig. 30 b), the piece still maintains that flow, from this side emphasizing the entwining lines of the man’s arms.

(Fig. 31 a & b) The Kiss, 1910

Constantin Brâncuşi

Thirty years later, Brâncuşi chose an identically titled intimate moment to depict, but his rendition is devoid of any movement that would suggest the kind of tenderness seen in the Rodin piece. Instead, the sculptor has compressed the two figures within a static, squarish block of stone. All lines and forms are rigidly vertical, horizontal, and perpendicular to each other (red and blue lines), except for three short angles (yellow lines). Even when viewed from another position (Fig. 31 b), the only movement of form appears in the slight angle and curve of the embracing arms (red and yellow lines), yet they still convey a general stiffness of gesture. At work here is merely cleverness of concept—the intellectual reduction of a gesture to its basic geometric elements—but lacking in any display of a great sculptor’s understanding of and command over complex and alluring form and movement.

(Fig. 32 a & b) David, 1623–1624

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

In another example of movement in sculpture, Bernini’s David (Fig. 32 a), basically a tall, elongated pyramid, is made dynamic through the tilting of the figure and the curving forms moving upward to the apex of the piece (red arrows), an impressive demonstration of kinetic energy in motion. When viewed from the side (Fig. 32 b), the pyramidal form is still there, but movement is taken over by the potential energy within the tension created by the figure’s action of slinging. We feel the taut, pulling back of the stone through the lines creating a triangular form rearward from the sling (red arrows), countered by the potential energy of the left arm pulling forward, the tension in this case visually aided by the triangle formed by the edges of the figure’s waistline and shoulder strap (white arrows).

(Fig. 33) Marmor, 1914

Jacques Lipchitz

A marble by Lipchitz is a later example of a predominantly pyramidal figure (red arrows), though any movement upward or down is hampered by diagonal edges (yellow lines) acting as visual roadblocks impeding the flow. And while the piece does contain directional, triangular shapes (blue arrows) that could potentially lead the viewer’s eye movement, they follow no consistent path, instead sending the eye in arbitrary directions. The marble is a pleasant piece, nonetheless, though not of commanding design.

Execution

Though not specifically a principle within aesthetics, few aspects of art are more critical—and now more ignored—than the execution of a medium. As mentioned on page 17, the “how” of a work is more important than the “what;” how a sunset was rendered is more important than that it looks like a sunset. Because of the development of the internet, the former experience of viewing art in person has largely been replaced with viewing it online. This, of course (along with viewing art in books), rules out the ability to see the execution of a piece at its fullest: the thickness of brushstrokes (painting is really three-dimensional), the true colors, the surface (in sculpture) of carved or formed marble, wood, modeled clay, or metal.

The “how” of a work is more important than the “what.”

In drawing, as previously discussed, execution is observed in the application of lines. Clarity of line is essential; smudging, with pencil for instance, undermines the purity of a drawing’s lines, and serious artists refrain from doing so, choosing instead to create tones through the proper manipulation of the pencil’s point. In painting, the application of the medium (oil, watercolor, gouache, etc.) offers more variants than drawing. A brush can apply paint thick or thin, wide or narrow, opaque or transparent. And with all these possibilities it can be applied deftly or clumsily, the former in the hands of the adept (Fig. 34 & 36), the latter in the hands of the less adept (Fig. 8). The same applies to sculpture, with masterful hands carefully and knowingly shaping forms, from the large masses to the smallest details (Fig. 37), while the works of less talented hands present carvings of unsure and imperfect surfaces and edges (Fig. 17). Skillful execution, it may be said, is the heart of artistic excellence.

Skillful execution, it may be said, is the heart of artistic excellence.

(Fig. 34) Woman with a Water Jug, 1660–1662

Johannes Vermeer

Edges are a vital part of painterly execution. In Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug (Fig. 34), the artist gifts the viewer with a range of controlled edges throughout the entire piece: from the sharp upper edge of the woman’s forearm at the window, to the deliberately varying sharpness of edge down the left side of the skirt. When we look more closely at the soft, curved edge between the woman’s arm and her sleeve (enlarged in the white square) we can see that it was achieved by Vermeer’s delicate and perfectly manipulated application of paint. This is the very essence of artistic quality. This is where to look when one wants an example of fine art at its finest.

(Fig. 35) A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881–1882

Édouard Manet

In a somewhat similar setup to Vermeer’s “Woman with a Water Jug,” Manet has presented us with an opportunity to compare execution (Fig. 35). When we look closely here at the curved edge between the woman’s arm and her sleeve (enlarged in the white square), we can see that the artist has treated it more haphazardly and with far less sensitivity. The same can be observed of the outer edges of the arms, shoulders, and lower half of the woman’s dark coat. Comparisons of color reveal that the pasty, opaque, monochrome of the arm shares nothing with Vermeer’s complex, variegated color of the skin in his painting of the arm, which treats the eye to an array of subtle pinks, blues, umbers, and grays. Further observation of the Manet shows the woman’s reflected hip creating a tangent with the side of her left arm, making the hip appear closer to the viewer than the arm (as similarly occurring in Fig. 9). Defenders of Manet’s technique will say that precision was not his goal, that freshness and looseness was. Yet this approach is attainable without surrendering sensitivity, as the following example will demonstrate.

(Fig. 36) Portrait of Blanche Marchesi de Castrone, before 1927

Solomon Joseph Solomon

Solomon’s fine portrait (Fig. 36) shows how it is possible to maintain controlled edges even when working loosely (enlarged in the white square). It also exhibits an impressive range of color in the skin tones, giving the figure much more depth and life than would result from a more monochromatic color choice.

(Fig. 37) The Deposition (The Florentine Pietà), c. 1547–1555

Michelangelo Buonarroti

By leaving this sculpture incomplete (Fig. 37), Michelangelo has given us an opportunity to peer into his working method. In the close-up we can see a variety of stages in his sculpting process, from the broader, crosshatched grooves in the robes of the top figure where he chiseled out the general forms, to a subsequent stage seen in the neck area of the lower figure where he used finer tools to further refine forms of musculature. Finally, the lower figure’s torso exhibits the smooth, finished look the master achieved through long, careful hand-polishing of its surface with pumice. No shortcuts were taken in the quest for perfection in stone.

(Fig. 38) Woman on White Wicker Rocker, 1984–1985

George Segal

Shortcuts are precisely what Segal employed in much of his work by, instead of sculpting, wrapping a live model in gauze strips of wet plaster and removing the cast when it was dry. He employed little or no drafting, designing, chiseling, or refined polishing; only the expected results of hardened plaster, complete with surface artifacts and imperfections of the medium. The model’s actual body provided all the design and form necessary for Segal to realize his creation, and, without the modern requisite backstory to accompany the piece, it holds no visual interest vis-à-vis its execution skills.

With all this being understood, we must yet keep in mind that a work of art that solidly employs the full range of aesthetic elements still has no guarantee of being great—or even good. One other, somewhat intangible component must be present: imagination. In a room full of excellent Baroque paintings of equal proficiency, for example, certain pieces will stand out to the experienced eye as (taste aside) more captivating than others. A very few works even exude an almost mystical “other” when in their presence. But this is exceedingly rare.

THE “WAR ON BEAUTY”

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. —Oscar Wilde

For many centuries, artists have enriched our lives with works of astonishing achievement and beauty. Consider Michelangelo’s Pietà (Fig. 39), Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Fig. 40), Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print (Fig. 41), or Bouguereau’s Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros (Fig. 42).

What mode of thinking motivated the great masters to accomplish these works? One essential trait is that these artists demanded of themselves the highest standards of visual excellence. They knew well the history and techniques of the masters who had preceded them, and they expanded on the work of those earlier masters by endeavoring to create works of even higher quality. These endeavors were always undergirded by the idea that standards of excellence were real and central to creating great art.

But something happened on the way to the twentieth century: The profound, the inspiring, and the beautiful were replaced by the new, the different . . . and the ugly. Today, the puerile, the pointless, and the purely offensive are lauded as examples of our best art. The puerile would include Bad Dog (Fig. 43), the giant sculpture of a dog urinating on the wall of an art museum; the painting of a plain black square with the inspired title Black Square (Fig. 44) is an example of the pointless; the purely offensive is represented by Sacred Heart (Sagrado Corazón) (Fig. 45).

(Fig. 39) The Pietà, 1498–1499

Michelangelo Buonarroti

The mind, the soul, become ennobled by the endeavor to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something divine. —Michelangelo

As one can see from artists’ quotes throughout this book, the great Masters not only did not shy away from the pursuit of perfection, they consciously strove for it. Michelangelo’s Pietà (Fig. 39) represents possibly the closest a sculptor has ever come to achieving it, so astonishing is his grasp of form, flow, and execution. Later sculptors would come to refuse the aspiration, rationalizing that perfection was not their goal. Their work often firmly demonstrated their preference for non-perfection.

(Fig. 40) Mona Lisa, 1503–1506

Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is concerned with all the ten attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest. —Leonardo

Many great works of art have become clichés due to their over-familarity. This is unfortunate, as a renewed look can reveal the reasons for a piece’s initial attention. The Mona Lisa (Fig. 40) may not be the world’s finest painting, but looking closely at the original (or as closely as one can at the Louvre) one will see expertly controlled and sensitive brushwork establishing some of the very attributes specified by Leonardo in his quote above.

(Fig. 41) The Hundred Guilder Print, 1649

Rembrandt van Rijn

In order to etch, take white turpentine oil, and add half the turpentine to it; pour the mixture into a small glass bottle and let it boil in pure water for half an hour. —Rembrandt

With just a fine chisel to carve the thinnest lines into copper, Rembrandt has presented us with an array of visual experiences: the depth of shadows in the background, dazzling light of the foreground, wood, stone, earth, texture and details of clothing—and a range of human expression. And all not much larger than the page of this book.

(Fig. 42) Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, 1880

William Bouguereau

The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. —Bouguereau

Bouguereau, along with his many other artistic strengths, was surely history’s greatest painter of human skin. His ability to render its many almost imperceptible changes in hue, value, and intensity was incomparable. Focus, for instance (Fig. 42), on just the torso of the young girl and observe the many subtle variations in light and dark (the hollow in the hip at the edge of the blue cloak), and cool to warm hues (the violet-grays and pale oranges in the torso’s shadows). Remember: it’s called a painting—it’s all about the paint.

(Fig. 43) Bad Dog, 2013

Richard Jackson

I have an audience of young people with no money, and I don’t want to disappoint them. —Jackson

When recognizing the obvious lack of any serious attention Jackson paid to sculptural aesthetics, the viewer is left to surmise that the artist wished only that the statement of his work be considered—meaning the puerile, the vulgar, and the unsavory. Surely a depressing example of our contemporary artistic legacy on which future generations will look back.

(Fig. 44) Black Square, 1915

Kazimir Malevich

The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art. —Malevich

A black square. Nothing more. How does one assess its artistic value? Could another black square be done better?

(Fig. 45) Sacred Heart (Sagrado Corazón), 2000

León Ferrari

I am a little old fashioned because I continue to make paintings and sculptures. —Ferrari

An interviewer once commended Ferrari that, in the artist’s work, “there is courage, a strength to say certain political, sexual, religious things without fear.” How much courage does it take to make provocative statements against a certain Christian populace, knowing there will be no consequences?

Michelangelo hand-carved his monumental David out of a huge rock (Fig. 46); today the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers us just a rock, Levitated Mass (Fig. 47)— a rock, all 340 tons of it and nothing more. That’s how far standards have fallen.

(Fig. 46) David, September 13, 1501–June 8, 1504

Michelangelo Buonarroti

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. —Michelangelo

Michelangelo’s quote displays a disarming modesty, for the finished David (Fig. 46) not only needed his incomparable skill at sculpting, it required him to be able to work with innate flaws in the chosen piece of marble—and also around carvings in that marble that had been attempted by two previous sculptors who were not up to the enormous task of the project.

(Fig. 47) Levitated Mass, 2012

Michael Heizer

I make static art, not dynamic art. That’s what I do. —Heizer

It can be instructive to hear the supportive reactions to controversial works. Heizer’s rock will frequently elicit excited comments about how fascinating it is to walk underneath the huge bolder—the same reaction one hears about other equally impressive science projects.

How did this happen? How did the thousand-year ascent toward visual excellence and artistic perfection suddenly die out? The answer is, it didn’t—it was pushed out, gradually, by the coming modern artists of the late nineteenth century. And this slow death has transported us from a world which gave us the Alba Madonna (Fig. 48), a masterpiece of devotion and sublime execution, to a contrasting world which offers The Holy Virgin Mary (Fig. 49), a painting fashioned out of elephant dung and pornographic images and celebrated as progressive and significant. Likewise, subject matter in art has gone from the transcendent to the trashy: from the noble realms of mythology, religion, literature, and history, to arch political statements, base eroticism, and even scatology. We’re now told that art is whatever you want it to be (or what you can get away with, as Andy Warhol quipped), and that standards don’t matter; that all techniques are equally valid—or even irrelevant. Anyone is free to make art, even from excrement, but if we call it dung, if we argue that there is such a thing as universal standards of excellence that should be upheld in the arts, we will find ourselves labeled, at best, ignorant rubes or, at worst, intolerant fascists who support censorship.

(Fig. 48) The Alba Madonna, 1510

Rafael Sanzio

When one is painting one does not think. —Raphael

Much can be learned from Raphael’s simple quote. Great art need not be created intellectually, nor appreciated thusly. Great art need only—perhaps, should only be appreciated for its ability to satisfy the eye and the heart. If one needs more, it is an issue with the viewer, not with the art.

(Fig. 49) The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996

Chris Ofili

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realized I could feed that directly into my work. —Ofili

Even if one agrees that the insult of mixing pornographic images with a subject deeply venerated by hundreds of millions of religious devotees worldwide is acceptable, one is left with the pure aesthetics of this piece. Minus its backstory, the painting exhibits the beginnings of interesting design and color work, but is marred by visually disturbing blotches that ruin an otherwise balanced composition. Statement again defeats beauty.

The idea of a universal standard of quality in art—which is what this book advocates—is often met with strong resistance, if not open ridicule. The challenge is raised, “How can art be objectively measured?” In responding, one simply needs to point to the results produced within the standards of universal aesthetics compared with those produced by relativism. The former gave the world Donatello’s David (Fig. 50), an early apotheosis of three-dimensional art; the latter has given us Vorm-Fellows-Attitude (Fig. 51), four enormous sculptures of feces.

Positions like this are often accused of being similar to that which the Nazis proposed in their condemning of and forbidding what they called “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst). I, for one, never say or even imply that there should be a ban on any art, or that only certain types of art can be enjoyed. In fact, we should stand up for the right of artists to create whatever garbage they please, while maintaining the right to call it garbage when it is. No one can tell anyone what they must enjoy, but enjoyment is distinct from the quality of what one enjoys.

(Fig. 50) David, c. 1440s

Donatello

Speak, damn you, speak! —Donatello

Donatello’s David (Fig. 50) is historically significant: it was the first freestanding, sculpted nude in over a millenium, the first freestanding bronze of the Renaissance, and unusual in depicting David as a young shepherd boy rather than the customary depiction of him as king. But more than its history, it is the exquisitely rendered natural anatomy and accurate proportions that should draw our attention. The piece as a whole, mildly suggestive as it is, served as a major influence on future sculptors like Bernini and Michelangelo, the latter on his own magnificent marble of David (Fig. 46). Donatello’s quote shows how emotionally involved with his sculptures he could be.

(Fig. 51) Vorm-Fellows-Attitude, 2018

Gelitin, a collective of four Austrian artists, founded c. 1993

The uglier it is, the better. —Gelitin

There is an inexplicable obsession some artists have with the purely scatological, and this work may well be the nadir in that obsession. It is difficult to imagine how much lower art can descend than this, but artists have a bottomless well of lurid imagination, so the descent may not be over.

Standards of quality offer a bar of excellence to which the artist, and therefore a society, can aspire. These standards are not rules which demand, but guidelines which advise. Without them we can determine neither quality nor inferiority; for if we cannot deem what is good, we cannot claim what is bad.

But again, how did all this happen?

Art history, the true history before it was hijacked by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians and critics, followed a sure, gradual path from period to period, whereby artists focused on high craft as a goal, and, most importantly, for the benefit of the viewer. Though styles and methods changed along the way, one can clearly see a natural and logical continuum of excellence of execution from the earliest tomb paintings and stone reliefs of the ancient Egyptians (Fig. 52), right through to the late nineteenth-century works of the French and English Academics. In between there were the monumental sculptures of the Greeks and Romans (Fig. 53), the painstaking mosaics of Byzantium (Fig. 54), the delicate fourteenth- and fifteenth-century illuminated Persian manuscripts (Fig. 55), the meticulous religious woodcarvings of the late Middle Ages (Fig. 56), the explosion of creativity and super-craftsmanship of the Renaissance (Fig. 57), the shimmering grandeur of the Baroque era (Fig. 58), the graceful landscapes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China (Fig. 59), the vibrant Japanese woodblock prints of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Fig. 60), and onward through the eras of Neoclassicism (Fig. 61), Romanticism (Fig. 62), and Realism (Fig. 63) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout all of these periods, one thing remained constant: visual excellence.

(Fig. 52) Relief from the Royal Tomb el-Amarna, c. 1353–1336 BC

Despite the early time period, this elegant relief (Fig. 52) displays the sculptor’s decided understanding of composition and movement. All elements are clearly positioned around the rectangle, with the figures slowly increasing in size left to right, raised gestures breaking what could have been staid poses. Aiding in this forward and upward movement are the angled rays of the sun, which also create a spatial middle ground between the figures and the wall behind them.

(Fig. 53) Laocoön and His Sons, between 27 BC and 68 AD

Anonymous Roman

The unknown sculptor of this ancient masterpiece (Fig. 53), discovered in 1506, was able to convey a combination of human anguish and helplessness in nothing but cold, white stone. As with Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss (Fig. 30), the eye is drawn through and around this piece by the sculptor’s expert arrangement of gestured limbs and intertwining serpent.

(Fig. 54) Christ Pantocrator (detail from the Deëis mosaic), c. thirteenth century

Artist unknown

There may be few finer examples of skill combined with patience, dedication, and devotion than this exquisite and beloved mosaic, created with thousands of tiny colored glass tiles.

(Fig. 55) Rustam Recovers Rakhsh From Afrasiyab’s Herd (cropped), c. 1525–1535

Mirza ‘Ali (attributed)

Persian illuminations treat the eyes to a dazzling array of movement and color. Every square inch is alive with items of visual interest and narrative, all lovingly rendered.

(Fig. 56) The Holy Blood Altar (detail), c. 1500–1555

Tilman Riemenschneider

The carving skills Michelangelo and Bernini applied to marble, Riemenschneider similarly applied to wood (Fig. 56). And though only wood, a variety of textures and materials are convincingly effected in his depiction of the Last Supper: skin, hair, robes, wood, metal, marble, etc. The telescoped illusion of depth is also truly remarkable, considering the sculpted scene is only 4.8 inches deep.

(Fig. 57) Abduction of a Sabine Woman, 1579–1583

Giambologna

Giambologna’s masterpiece (Fig. 57) is a fine example of figura serpentinata, the compositional concept championed by sculptors after its introduction through the recent discovery of the Laocoön and His Sons (Fig. 53). The concept proposed the ideal of combining three figures with a twisting, serpentine movement throughout, all within a pyramidal shape.

(Fig. 58) Supper at Emmaus, 1601

Caravaggio

All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles . . . unless they are made and painted from life. —Caravaggio

Properly putting aside meaning and the artist’s controversial biography (he had a violent temper and once killed a man), and instead addressing Caravaggio’s painting as a visual (Fig. 58), we see his ability to accentuate perspective through the gestures of Christ’s right hand and the left hand of the disciple on the right. They reach out dramatically in almost three-dimensional fashion, drawing the viewer into the scene. This, along with Caravaggio’s dramatic, theatrical lighting, was quite novel for the time.

(Fig. 59) White Clouds on the Xiao-Xiang River, 1668

Wang Jian

Watercolor being the most challenging and unforgiving of mediums, a delicate and elegant work such as this (Fig. 59) becomes all the more impressive. Wang infuses the composition with a variety of large and small treatments, the former in the broad washes of the ground and mountain areas, and the latter in the fine details of foliage and villages.

(Fig. 60) Poem by Tenchi Tennō, 1839

Katsushika Hokusai

I have drawn things since I was 6.

All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. —Hokusai

Hokusai’s popular woodblock prints (they influenced the Impressionists) are proof that there exist universalities in certain elements of art. His imaginative compositions, clarity of objects, and commanding sense of space were (and are) as appealing to Western sensibilities as to Eastern. This piece (Fig. 60) illustrates a poem by the seventh-century emperor Tennō:

Coarse the rush-mat roof

Sheltering the harvest-hut

Of the autumn rice-field

And my sleeves are growing wet

With the moisture dripping through

(Fig. 61) Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1787–1793

Antonio Canova

I have read that the ancients, when they had produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch without departing from the rules of harmony.

So must the artist do in working at the nude. —Canova

More than 200 years after the works of Michelangelo, Canova demonstrated that the disciplines of classical sculpture could still be valid and challenging—and produce greatness (Fig. 61). “What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work,” Delacroix said, “is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

(Fig. 62) The Sea of Ice, 1823–1824

Caspar David Friedrich

What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. —Friedrich

A sea of ice, and a sea of triangles (Fig. 62). Friedrich produced a most dramatic canvas of violent movement (from lower right to upper left), dramatizing Romanticism’s fascination with nature and its power over man—in this case, a wrecked sailing ship (center right). The unusual choice of warm colors for the ice blocks in the foreground gives the painting an eerie, unsettling quality, perfectly in keeping with the fate of the ship. This painting gives lie to the oft-heard complaint, “Why should I go to classical art museums? They’re only filled with boring old portraits.” Though there can be an overabundance of portraits, especially of royalty from the eighteenth century, the history of art is filled with examples of exciting subject matter expertly crafted to give the viewer a visual experience similar to that derived from today’s motion pictures.

(Fig. 63) The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855

Gustave Courbet

Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects. . . . An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting. —Courbet

Courbet’s massive painting has long offered art historians an opportunity to wax verbose on all things unrelated to a painter’s most important objective: an engaging visual. Admittedly, Courbet himself filled this work with a wealth of symbolism, but after the dust has cleared of the historian’s inventory of hidden meanings (as if Courbet were a mystery novelist), one is still left with the painting itself: its composition, color, brushwork, etc. And here we find a great work with a number of weaknesses (mostly the large, uninteresting area at the top left), though this is understandable due to the artist not having ever finished the work.

By the early nineteenth century, two major and influential European art institutions had formed—the British Royal Academy of Art in 1768 and the French Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1816—both with the purpose of showcasing artists who worked toward producing art of the highest quality, based upon principles that had long been devised and agreed upon over the centuries. The Academies’ yearly competitions were not only opportunities for artists to exhibit their latest creations with which to further their reputations and success, but were eagerly anticipated by the paying public, who turned out in multitudes to stand in awe before the finest works current artists had to offer. The juries were made up of Academy members who were themselves fellow artists and who best understood what went into the making of great art. Critics (seeding a burgeoning new field), who were also well-versed in the stringent aesthetic demands of the Academies, added their verdicts on which works merited the highest accolades.

For the 1874 competition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (also referred to as the Salon) in Paris there were 3,657 entries, among them Homer and His Guide by William Adolph Bouguereau (Fig. 64), Death of the Pharaoh’s First Born Son by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Fig. 65), La Falaise by Jules Breton (Fig. 66), and Éminence Grise by Jean-Léon Gérôme (Fig. 67) that year’s Grand Medal of Honor winner. Here among just these few titles we see examples ranging from history to religion to genre painting, the level of craftsmanship undeniable in each.

(Fig. 64) Homer and His Guide, 1874

William-Adolph Bouguereau

In painting, I am an idealist. I see only the beautiful in art and, for me, art is the beautiful. —Bouguereau

Arguably the most successful artist of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bouguereau applied to each work the full range of his artistic talents, producing completed paintings that were the result of copious rough sketches, color studies, and perfecting of designs (Fig. 64). The finished works are breathtaking when viewed in real life, each exhibiting the full potential of a master artist’s skills and understanding of the medium, none of which is subordinate to statement or message.

(Fig. 65) Death of the Pharaoh’s First Born Son, 1872

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

If you want to know what those Greeks and Romans looked like . . . come to me. I can show not only what I think but what I know. —Alma-Tadema

Long before the medium of film, Alma-Tadema was transporting the viewer back to antiquity with the accuracy of one who studied and visited these lands, and through awe-inspiring painterly skills (Fig. 65). Modern audiences, familiar as we are with widescreen motion pictures filled with fantasy and special effects, cannot easily imagine the deep, startling impression his works made on Victorian audiences. Not surprisingly, Alma-Tadema’s art influenced filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and later Ridley Scott.

(Fig. 66) La Falaise, 1874

Jules Breton

Beauty will always remain the highest aim of art. —Breton

Though immensely popular in his day (Fig. 66)—a painting of his was sold for the second-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist, and Van Gogh was an enthusiast—Breton is little known today by the general public. That there will inevitably be those who counter Breton’s quote shown here with the cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in no way detracts from the timeless truth of the artist’s simple counsel.

(Fig. 67) Éminence Grise, 1873

Jean-Léon Gérôme

What lessons are our young artists going to receive from now on? They’ll all start to do Impressionism! Ah! these people believe they are painting nature, nature so admirable in all its manifestations! What pretension!

—Gérôme

Gérôme goes further in his assured quote than did Breton. However, the artist, whose incomparable skills (Fig. 67) gave him the credibility to confidently make the claim, never could have realized how healthy the condition of art really was in his time, compared to how truly it would deteriorate in the coming decades.

However, on April 15th of that year, an event took place in Paris that proved to be a portentous moment in art history, and which future art historians have exploited ever since, as will be discussed later. The deliberate journey away from visual excellence took its inaugural steps when a group of artists, whose submissions to the annual Salon had regularly been declined by the Académie due to inferior execution and mundane subject matter, held a competing exhibit of their paintings, the Salon des Refusés (Exhibit of Rejects), at a private studio in another area of Paris. The group consisted of thirty artists, from among which were paintings exhibited by Paul Cézanne (Fig. 68), Berthe Morisot (Fig. 69), Camille Pissarro (Fig. 70), Jean Renoir (Fig. 71), and Edgar Degas (Fig. 72). Though approximately 3,500 people attended during the course of the monthlong showing (compared with 450,000 to that year’s Salon exhibit), it was not a success. Few of the works sold, Degas and Morisot selling not a single piece.

The public as well as the critics were brutal in their assessment of the work. The former thought the art to be unfinished and amateurish, the latter equally disapproving and with no less flattering language. Critic Jules Claretie opined that some of the artists “appear to have declared war on beauty.” Another critic called the artists in the exhibit “lunatics.” Yet another called Cézanne “a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens.” Even fellow exhibitor Pissarro balked at including the work of Cézanne. “What, get myself mixed up with that buffoon?,” he asked. “Not likely!”

(Fig. 68) A Modern Olympia, c. 1873–1874

Paul Cézanne

I was very pleased with myself when I discovered that sunlight could not be reproduced; it had to be represented by something else . . . by color. —Cézanne

Does it require much on the part of the viewer to recognize the qualitative difference between this painting (Fig 68) and the Gérôme from the same year (Fig. 67)? By what reasoning could Cézanne have possibly concluded that his work qualified to be included in that year’s Paris Salon alongside that of Alma-Tadema and Bouguereau? The century and a half that has transpired since that time has slowly served to arm viewers with a plethora of ideological defenses with which to support work such as this, pitting rationalization against visual common sense.

(Fig. 69) Le Berceau (The Cradle), 1872

Berthe Morisot

I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they’re not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It’s a dream that won’t come true. —Morisot

Morisot’s painting (Fig. 69), exhibited in the Salon des Refusés, was not without its charm. However, its unfinished condition assured it would be seen as merely an oil color sketch, something far from fresh and new, as oil sketches had been produced by artists for centuries. The piece also suffered somewhat from areas of dullness (the curtain at top left and the bottom of the bassinet), not to be confused with large areas chosen to work as dynamic compositional devices as seen in Howard Pyle’s painting Marooned (Fig. 102).

(Fig. 70) Hoarfrost, 1873

Camille Pissarro

It is absurd to look for perfection. —Pissarro

For centuries, the idea of perfection had been the aim of the artist. Some, such as Bouguereau, explicitly aspired to achieving perfection. He stated to his students, “There’s only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection.” And some, like Pissarro (Fig. 70), justified giving up on the pursuit by claiming the search was “absurd.” He evidently knew better than the Masters of hundreds of years before him. To paraphrase an ancient rabbinic admonition in the Ethics of Our Fathers, one may never achieve perfection, but one may never desist from trying.

(Fig. 71) The Reapers, 1873

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One morning, one of us ran out of the black [paint]; it was the birth of Impressionism. —Renoir

Renoir’s candid description of the birth of Impressionism needs no embellishment. The movement wasn’t about the loosening up of tight execution; that existed in oil sketches long before 1873. And it wasn’t about the move away from subject matter of literary, historical, or biblical themes; landscapes, still lifes, and genre works were a staple of painters for centuries. No, as Renoir confessed, it was the new infatuation with saturated colors, made convenient by the removal of black from the palette. It gave their works a weightlessness, freed of the difficult-to-master black that had so infused visual depth and gravitas into the works of painters prior to this novel mania. In the work shown here (Fig. 71) which was included in the Salon des Refusés show, Renoir was still painting with black. The use of the color is further mentioned on pages 112–113.

(Fig. 72) The Laundress, 1873

Edgar Degas

Beauty is a mystery, but no one knows it anymore. The recipes, the secrets are forgotten. —Degas

Dega’s quote is similar to Renoir’s naked admission on the previous page, but he takes the subject further by lamenting the loss of the nearly divine knowledge possessed by artists of the past. He, more than most of his Impressionist peers, tried to maintain vestiges of classical aesthetics by adhering to strong composition and more mature and sophisticated color work. His later paintings, particularly the ambitious ballet works, were evidence of this noble concern, and were considerably stronger than The Laundress (Fig. 72), his inclusion in the Salon des Refusés show.

One painting that did sell was Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (Fig. 73). The journalist Louis Elroy quipped about it at the time, “Impression! Of course. There must be an impression somewhere. What freedom . . . what flexibility of style! Wallpaper in its early stages is more finished than that.” And with that, a new label for the rebel artists was coined: the Impressionists. There were some lovely works among the paintings, to be sure, but less than impressive in the shadow of the Academic titans, as comparisons of their work in this volume bear out. (Ironically, there had always been “impressionistic” paintings; they were simply known as studies [Fig. 74 & 75], but classical artists hesitated to exhibit them as finished pieces, considering that to be unfair to their adoring and demanding public. It would have been akin to a theatrical producer presenting a rehearsal as a finished play— and charging for it). A second and third exhibition by the Impressionists in the next two years did little to convince the public and the critics who continued to ridicule the output of the group.

There have always been “impressionistic” paintings; they were simply known as studies.

(Fig. 73) Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872

Claude Monet

I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room.

To draw, yes; to paint, no. —Monet

Monet, possibly the favorite of Impressionism aficionados, seemed to venture farther and longer than most of his contemporaries into the movement’s ideology. A true believer, he appeared to have the most vehement stance against anything the classicists represented, as can be gleaned from his quote here. No scene or object he painted was free from rapidity of execution, no shadow lacking in exaggerated color. For someone keen on observing nature, his observations were far more imagination than truth, ironic considering that imagination can be just as successfully realized “shutting oneself up in a room” as painting directly from nature.

(Fig. 74) Malin Head, Donegal, 1874

Frederic, Lord Leighton

Impressionism is a reaction from the old conventionalism, but an impressionist must not forget that it is the deep-sinking and not the fugitive impressions which are the best. —Leighton

The preeminent British painter of the late nineteenth century, Leighton (president of the Royal Academy) was a consummate, diligent worker, preparing even the most incidental areas of his paintings with copious studies like the one above. In it we see all the rapidity and freshness that would pass as the finished work of any Impressionist, yet the Impressionists received history’s acclaim, while Leighton is largely forgotten (Fig. 118).

(Fig. 75) Harbor View with Rocky Edge, c. 1880–1890

Henryk Siemiradzki

Studies are my domain. —Siemiradzki

It is a curious thing, this statement by Siemiradzki, considering he is best known (in circles beyond mainstream art history) as the creator of truly monumental paintings (see Fig. 128), in both size and visual grandeur. Despite studies being his “domain,” he never stopped at that stage in the creative process, but used them only as building blocks for serious, finished masterpieces.

Over the coming decades, though, the art of the Impressionists slowly began to be accepted. Modern history tells us this was because its “quality” was finally affirmed by both the public and the critics who had simply been slow to recognize it. But there is a more nefarious reason behind its ascent: a deliberate scheme utilizing journalistic hype to inflate the value of the artwork that had heretofore been understandably considered amateurish.

Up until this time, collectors, dealers, critics, and the public were accustomed to art of great skill and recognized it when they saw it, without the need of elaborate descriptions as a schematic for understanding. But that need was very real for the new works being created by the Impressionists and, more so, their successors, and over the next few decades several collectors of their paintings enlisted journalists to publish impressive theories about the new and often mediocre work (some of the philosophies were disingenuously claimed to have originated from the artists themselves). Critic Roger Frye contributed to this evolution by promoting art as philosophy, free of history, setting the stage for later avant-garde art. He invented the idea of taste being either “fashionable” or “old-fashioned,” which promoted elitism and fanned an antiestablishment mentality in the arts, and which had a natural appeal to unskilled, would-be artists. The follower of modern art was now considered more fashionable and “in the know,” and in a move that presaged Orwell, Frye began rebranding modern artists as “Old Masters.”

Here then was the genesis of a whole new way of evaluating art, which has continued to the present: that theories and backstory, not demonstrable visual excellence, give art its importance. Monet’s haystacks are experiments in color, not just hastily executed paintings of a mundane subject to the viewer who is “not in the know.” To the viewer “in the know,” Gauguin’s paintings were a scientific approach to flatness, not simply examples of form devoid of dimension.

No artist benefited more from this new approach to evaluating art than the Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh (Fig. 76). Before his tragic life became widely known through the posthumous publishing of his private letters to his brother, Van Gogh’s work had been almost completely dismissed. With his personal trials revealed, the romance of the troubled, starving artist was born, and thereafter public fascination with the private lives of artists began to undermine any objective estimation of an artist’s work itself. Van Gogh’s art was respectable, though not without its aesthetic weaknesses, and it needed a backstory to divert attention from them. Consider this: were it possible to undo our knowledge of Van Gogh’s pitiful personal saga, his work would have none of the perceived gravitas connected to it, and would likely be seen today as similar to the colorful work of any number of later illustrators who were gifted with a certain recognizable stylistic flair. In comparison, almost nothing is known of the life of Johannes Vermeer, arguably history’s greatest painter, yet the quality of his work clearly stands on its own—as all art ideally should—without an accompanying melodramatic biography.

(Fig. 76) The Red Vineyards at Arles (Montmajour), 1888

Vincent van Gogh

I know very well that it is neither drawn nor painted as correctly as a Bouguereau and I rather regret this, because I have an earnest desire to be correct. —Van Gogh

History has been generous to Van Gogh, attributing qualities to his work that he himself would not have accepted, as evidenced by his quote here. But an honest look at this otherwise pleasant painting will reveal just what the artist was lamenting: that the pasted-on look of the figures, haphazard brushwork in many areas, and muddy colors here and there fall short of the “correctness” he so envied. The usual retort of “but what is correctness?” would presumably be as tedious to Van Gogh as it is to many of us today.

To be sure, new roads of expression are part of the natural journey of art throughout history, and the art of these dissenters should certainly be welcome, even if only as a curious offshoot. But a crime was perpetrated by their promoters in not simply championing this new art; no, the traditional, the art of the Salon, needed to be belittled and then buried to further validate the new. Sadly, this was achieved (many of the works of the great Masters of the late nineteenth century were consigned to museum basements or barroom walls, and some were even destroyed). The propaganda that took hold included the slander that the Academies were stuffy and close-minded to change. Yet this is belied by the fact that they had long exhibited many Impressionist works (“New Painting,” as the movement was originally described), and were even willing to display the unusual work of the Realists and Pre-Raphaelites (Fig. 77), some of whose artists were openly critical of the Academies (the Pre-Raphaelites felt the work of the Academics had become too idealized). What the Academies in actuality demanded was an adherence to standards of excellence and execution, regardless of style, as opposed to newness for its own sake. Today’s insular art establishment, which determines what may or may not be considered important art, is far more restrictive and closed than the Academies of the nineteenth century ever were. Today, for instance, traditional, naturalistic figure painting is completely shunned and denigrated by much of the art establishment and art schools. The propaganda also fostered the fallacy that the traditional academic artists were seen as passé, yet luminaries like Chopin, Dickens, and Henry James lauded their greatness. In fact, Monet and Degas both believed Bouguereau would in the future be considered the greatest French artist of the nineteenth century, and Van Gogh himself bemoaned the reality that he would never be able to draw as well as that great French Master.

(Fig. 77) Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep), 1852

William Holman Hunt

I work and work until I feel my brain as dry as an old bit of cork. —Hunt

Hunt was one of the three founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a radical group of British artists as defiant toward the principles of the Royal Academy as the most fervent Impressionists were the Paris Salon. Yet with long hindsight, and consideration of his quote, we can now see that he was more in line with the Academy via their shared work ethic than might have been acknowledged. What separated them was primarily subject matter; what united them was a passion for visual excellence, and the painting here displays Hunt’s observational skills and quality of finish—his “correctness”—for which Van Gogh would surely have yearned.

Not all shared this sentiment: when Renoir was being fitted with new glasses to correct his myopia, he threw the spectacles to the floor, crying, “Bon Dieu, je vois comme Bouguereau!” (“Good God, I see like Bouguereau!”). And yet he admitted that “The so-called ‘discoveries’ of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects.” Bouguereau himself chimed in when he said of the new wave of artists that “They hide their shortcomings under a display of childish tricks.”

Finally, the anti-academic campaign succeeded in its goal to inflate the value of an art form that was far easier to produce than that of the traditionalists (an academic artist might produce one or two paintings per month, a modernist many, many more), aiding the dealers who would now have a much greater amount of “product” to sell.

In 1912, Roger Frye hosted a major exhibit in London of what he coined Post-Impressionists. It eerily coincided with the memorial exhibit in that same city of the great Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema—a symbolic burial of the past and ascent of the modern. By this point, Alma-Tadema, as well as his Academic peers, was well on his way to being completely forgotten, as the anti-classicism propaganda had triumphed and art history books from that point on would ignore the last classicists in favor of the moderns. The work of Bouguereau, for instance, representing some of history’s finest examples of draftsmanship and paint application, would eventually be described as the “worst of bourgeois sentimentality“ (what better example of cultural cynicism can be found?). If the traditionalists are referenced at all, it is with derision. H. W. Janson’s History of Art, considered the bible on the subject, bypasses these artists completely, leapfrogging from the Realists of the mid-century right over to the Impressionists. The tome (almost 1,000 pages) is a masterpiece of modern art pretense: Monet’s paintings possessed an “inner coherence;” Cézanne sought to “uncover the permanent qualities beneath the accident of appearance;” Gauguin turned the canvas “from a representation of the external world into an aesthetic object that projects an internal idea without using narrative or literal symbols.” Janson also perpetuates the myth that “painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera.” If this were true, how does one account for traditional sculpture dying out at the same time as traditional painting? No, it wasn’t the camera that killed traditional art, it was imposed ideology.

The Impressionists were the victory of heart over mind, of feeling over proficiency.

The Impressionists were the victory of heart over mind, of feeling over proficiency. Whatever their intentions, these new modernists sowed the seeds of aesthetic relativism—the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” mentality, one of the most damaging concepts to the arts ever advocated. As with most revolutions, the first generation or so produced work of some merit. Monet, Renoir, and Degas still displayed elements of disciplined design and execution, but once they and their promoters germinated the idea that there is no such thing as universal standards of excellence, that it is about nothing more than personal expression, it was only a matter of time before the modernist hype spread, and all the virtuosity embodied in the Académie des Beaux Arts was pushed to the brink of extinction. In the same way that hindsight reveals how most revolutions worsen the societies against whom they revolt, the revolution of the Impressionists opened the floodgates to the vacuity and narcissism we see in today’s art world. They obviously could not see into the future, but if the Impressionists could have witnessed the ultimate fruits of their rebellion, such as Warrior (Fig. 78), or even sculpturally Die (Fig. 79), it would be interesting to know if they would still have rebelled.

(Fig. 78) Warrior, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child. —Basquiat

Judging by Basquiat’s output, he achieved his quoted goal. His works are, after all, an exercise in amateurish execution and problematic design. They do admittedly have a certain identifiable “look,” which presumably accounts for his popularity, but it is a look that is achieved at the expense of demonstrable skills. In the end, undemanding collectors disagree: Warrior sold at auction in 2020 for over $41 million.

(Fig. 79) Die, 1962

Tony Smith

I find the art world very oppressive. —Smith

Here is art brought below its lowest common denominator: devoid of creative form, engaging color, and admirable craftsmanship. It simply exists, as any nondescript block of steel might exist. But this block has the convenient advantage of an artist’s theory behind it. We can either accept that theory, as modern critics willingly and without embarrassment do, or we can reject the theory as pretentious, and see the piece for what it really is—a nondescript block of steel. One wonders if Mr. Smith felt a sense of “oppression” when standing before another block: the one of marble in the guise of The Pietà (Fig. 39).

THE FLEETING PARADE OF “ISMS” . . . AND BEYOND

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry, and a hundred in dress. Lord Byron

Byzantine art lasted fully 1,100 years, followed by Gothic and Renaissance art, each lasting over three centuries; the Baroque period then prevailed for about 130 years, after which Romanticism lasted about seventy years into the mid-nineteenth century when the first sproutings of modernism began to present themselves. The depth of the art created in these early eras justified the extended periods of immersion and development, and presented history with a thorough and noble representation of the respective cultures’ capabilities.

But like children who have been freed of parental restrictions and run giddily through inadvisable activities of which they quickly tire, the new generations of artists who impudently broke away from the disciplines of tradition created movement after movement that lost steam ever more quickly: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism together lasted all of forty-five years, Fauvism thirty-five, Cubism seven, and onward to the twenty-first century when a dizzying variety of isms seemed to come and go overnight.

There are reasons for this. Art before the modern era concerned itself primarily with skill and visual excellence. Later art became more concerned with theories, experiments, and statements, each of which has a shorter shelf life of public interest than the art of previous centuries. Furthermore, while classical art was created for the fulfillment and benefit of the viewing public, later art displayed a certain arrogance in separating itself from the public whom they derisively accused of being less able to comprehend the “special knowledge” behind the increasingly incomprehensible work. Classical art made the viewer admire the art itself; modern art made the viewer wonder just who it was behind these outrageous works. In a perfect display of narcissism, the artist had become more important than the art.

Art that was denounced or even suppressed in the past was treated so because of content, often perceived as immoral or decadent in the context of the times. It was rarely if ever over the quality of execution of the work in question.

As many will point out, there have also been occasions in the past where art that was later deemed great was initially resisted by the critics and public of the time: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Goya’s Naked Maja, and Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, to name a few. But this is not an entirely fair comparison. In most instances, art that was denounced or even suppressed in the past was treated so because of content, often perceived as immoral or decadent in the context of the times. The criticism was rarely if ever over the quality of execution of the work in question (the later work of Rembrandt being a rare exception because he drastically loosened his technique, unusual for the time; to this day it remains the least impressive segment of his body of work). This was not the case with Impressionism, in which the movement’s usual unpolished execution represented almost the entirety of the critics’ and society’s reason for aversion to the work. Later movements went further in not only diminishing the visual quality and value of art, but openly offending the public, something even the most rebellious artists of the past never did.

It would be cumbersome to comment on each of the many “isms” that have overpopulated the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries—Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, Minimalism, Postmodernism, and the isms-in-essence: Op Art, Happenings, Performance Art, etc. What follows, instead, is a brief, clear-eyed overview of several of the more significant modern movements. The commentaries will appear to some as near sacrilege, considering over a century and a half of thorough indoctrination by art historians and critics who have dominated the discussion of how positively works of these genres of art should be perceived. It bears repeating that one’s enjoyment of the art of any of these movements is not at all being challenged, only their long-accepted artistic merit.

IMPRESSIONISM (1865–85)—Very little was actually new with Impressionist painting. It was loose and somewhat spontaneous, to be sure, but as mentioned earlier, art of this nature had long been produced as oil sketches, though never intended as finished pieces to be exhibited. Yet looseness and spontaneity became the gods of the new, as if those methods were inherently superior. In fact, they continue to be the preferred way of approaching painting and drawing right up to the present time. (It is almost comical how contemporary schools and instructors will often demand that students “free up” their entire bodies and flourish their brushes like swords; try working in the style of Van Eyck with that gymnastic method.) What the Impressionists did do, along with abandoning long-revered subjects of depth like mythology, history, literature, and religion, was to begin to drastically change the traditional color palette (Fig. 80 & 81). Until this point, artists had been schooled in sophisticated color schemes that were complex and often difficult to achieve and balance (in fact, many of the Impressionists had little schooling in art at all and were often self-trained). Coinciding with the Impressionists’ insistence on doing paintings quickly on the spot in nature, outside of studios, the color schemes they employed dispensed with time-consuming subtlety and were instead concocted quickly and at an exaggerated saturation level, often unmixed and directly from the tubes of paint (tubes being a relatively new invention from 1841).

Some artists were so dogmatic that they eschewed the use of the color black, incorrectly believing it did not exist in nature, a prejudice that endures in some art circles even today. In reality, there exists a natural black content which can be observed, if looking carefully, in various levels of intensity in both shadow and light areas. The mastery of black pigments, the most difficult color to master, was essential to the highly developed color palettes of the Old Masters, something that helped give their work the optical profundity we can still readily see.

Regarding beauty as it relates to the Impressionists, the American thinker and theologian Dennis Prager has often pointed out the critical difference between happiness and fun. The former, he notes, is deeper and longer-lasting and, as in the bearing and raising of children, often comes as a result of effort and even pain; the latter is superficial and brief, like the excitement one feels on an amusement park ride. In the visual realm, a similar distinction exists between beauty and prettiness. While true depth of beauty can be experienced in the works of, say, Bernini or Vermeer, the work of the Impressionists is primarily pretty, requiring no engagement with involving subject matter, and functioning perfectly as mere decoration. One can enjoy it simply on its surface: hang a reproduction of it on a wall, look at it now and then for some momentary visual “fun,” and then move on without ever having been truly “moved.”

To conclude, many works of the Impressionists were undeniably pleasurable and still maintained some of the classical aesthetic disciplines, but, despite the narrative of art histories on the subject, their work itself was not a sea change; breaking away from tradition was, an act made more dramatic by the invented value of their work propagated by their promoters.

(Fig. 80) Row of Poplars in Moret, 1888

Alfred Sisley

I always start a painting with the sky. —Sisley

In the world of art forgery, there is a reason works by Van Eyck, Holbein, or Ingres are rarely if ever attempted—they require immense skill. Contrarily, there is also a reason the works of the Impressionists are some of the most forged, and Sisley’s paintings are near the top of that list. “Row of Poplars in Moret” (Fig. 80) presents a good example of why a forgery of his work would not be very challenging, given the artist’s unremarkable brushwork, scattered color scheme, and imbalanced composition. These weaknesses, however, have had no bearing on the artist’s popularity.

(Fig. 81) Millstones, 1890 (though signed in 1891)

Claude Monet

I’m not performing miracles; I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint. —Monet

Monet’s vast oeuvre—at least 2,500 works—represents some of the most popular paintings of all Impressionism, if not all of art. This amount could not have been achieved had he chosen a more refined and time-demanding color palette and execution, rather than generally that of pure hues undisturbed by subtlety, and hurriedly applied. The public, naturally resistant to Monet’s candy-colored world at first, was eventually brought around to accepting it as a result of a patient campaign by the artist’s defenders and stockpilers. The public finally fully embraced it after the slow but steady closeting of the concurrent academic artists who couldn’t stem the tide of modernism after centuries of revered classicism. It was ultimately a losing battle for the traditionalists when contemporary critics like Felix Fénéon were praising Millstones (Fig. 81) with, “When did Monet’s colors ever come together in more harmonious clamor, with more sparkling impetus?” In 2019 the painting sold at auction for $110.7 million.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM (1885–1910)—This movement was represented by painters such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh, and was not as singular in look as the work of the Impressionists.

Where the Impressionists simply desired to free themselves from the rigorous demands of traditional disciplines, the Post-Impressionists displayed the first hints of change for the sake of change. It was the birth of what would become art as pure experimentation. Gauguin, for instance, turned away from elegant human proportion and subtle color schemes altogether, and replaced them with flattened, formless figures in often primary-pigmented surroundings (Fig. 10). There was even a term for this philosophy: Synthetism, which proposed that everything in reality could actually be viewed flat and two-dimensional. Japanese artists of the same time period (Fig. 60) also created work relatively devoid of form, but their nondimensional figures worked in concert with the designed whole, rather than appearing to be cutout figures applied to a surrounding landscape.

Rousseau produced some interesting canvases (Fig. 82), though they are somewhat amateur-looking in their absence of a clear light source (supporters will no doubt claim he intended it to look that way). Contemporary historians awarded him questionable status as a fine artist, as they have a number of other Post-Impressionists, when in reality, his work, if removed from the context of an art museum, would have been more properly suited to illustration, which can demand less aesthetic discipline and where stylistic flair can be sufficient for the purposes. Another should-have-been illustrator, Georges Seurat, took art as experimentation to new heights by inventing pointillism (Fig. 83), a finicky breaking down of color blending into thousands of tiny dots of paint on the canvas; fascinating, of course, but much more a gimmick than historians will admit. Toulouse-Lautrec, who did work as an illustrator, created some of the best Post-Impressionist painting in exhibiting a strong sense of composition and, at times, pleasing color work (Fig 83).

But, as already mentioned, experimentation in art can only keep the public interested for so long, and without that interest in those times, artists themselves quickly got bored. After less that twenty years, the Post-Impressionism experiment had run its course and new isms were waiting in the wings.

(Fig. 82) The Equatorial Jungle, 1909

Henri Rousseau

We are the two great painters of this era; you [Pablo Picasso] are in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style. —Rousseau

When viewed simply as innocently colorful and imaginative, Rousseau’s work (Fig. 82) can be enjoyed as pleasant diversion. When discovered to be sharing walls of the National Gallery of Art with the likes of Leonardo, Vermeer, and La Tour—whose works are far more than a pleasant diversion—the inclusion of Rousseau’s work raises an eyebrow.

(Fig. 83) Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, 1888

Georges Seurat

Some say they see Poetry in my paintings; I see only science. . . . I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it. —Seurat

Along with a touch of humility within Seurat’s quote, there is indeed a certain level of poetry to his work. Each of his paintings possesses a notable delicacy, and can delight the eye with its methodical Pointillism (Fig. 83)—but to a point. In short, it is charming gimmickry. The fastidious technique, which places scientific theory on par with beauty, gets old and in the way rather quickly, and it’s a wonder that Seurat stayed with the technique as long as he did.

(Fig. 84) At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore. —Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec gave the world a fascinating slice of life of nineteenth-century Paris through hundreds of paintings, drawings, and lithographs. Now and then, problems crept up in his work, as in the composition of the painting shown (Fig. 84). The reader will notice the great similarities in design between Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting and Seurat’s of the previous page: one has a riverbank and the other a floor edge across the backgrounds of their pieces, and a tree branch on the right side of Seurat’s painting peeks into the frame in the same way Toulouse-Lautrec’s woman does on the right side of his painting. But though they both draw a large, angled swath across the bottom left areas of their paintings, Seurat invites the eye to wander a pleasant path of earth, plants, and trees, while Toulouse-Lautrec’s railing creates a halting barrier to eye movement around his composition, by allowing it to take up far too much dead space, containing little of interest with which to invite the eye.

CUBISM (1907–14)—Art as experiment achieved full stride with Cubism, as the movement undertook to one-up Synthetism (see page 158) by reducing all objects to their most basic forms: those being cube, cuboid, sphere, cylinder, and cone. Imagery from nature, especially human figures, was analyzed, taken apart, and reconstructed, often with little or no light source to establish dimensionality, and sometimes presenting objects from multiple points of view at the same time. Art had been placed on an examining table and become more than ever a cerebral activity primarily interesting to other artists and the limited number of promoters and supporters of the movement. Painters like Pablo Picasso (Fig. 85), Juan Gris, and Georges Braque created works that required the virtual equivalent of an instruction manual to translate what was being seen, and the public at large, once art’s most devoted follower, had essentially become ignored.

(Fig. 85) Femme Assise (Seated Woman), 1909

Pablo Picasso

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. —Picasso

As with Pointillism, Cubism promoted intellectual experiment. It formulated the visual into a somewhat hidden language, which exhausted the viewer by requiring him or her to spend at least as much time analyzing as enjoying. This painting by Picasso, complete with shoddy brushwork and areas of indecisive form and space, inexplicably sold for $63 million in 2016. The experiment of Cubism lasted all of seven years—considerably less than the Renaissance.

ABSTRACT ART (in numerous variants from the 1910s to the 1950s)—Imagine, if you will, a novel, totally written in invented words having no connection to anything identifiable. Each word might sound interesting, even pleasant, when read or pronounced, and vaguely indicate an emotion, but adding up to no discernible storyline or characters. Few people would care much for it. Yet, in the visual realm, this is precisely what is known as Abstract Expressionist Art. (Instrumental music, though also devoid of representational markers, is not the same as Abstract Art, since music possesses an inherent, universally understood “language,” so to speak, that the listener can readily follow as it moves in time from beginning to end.) An identifiable object offers the viewer a reference point from life, and is essential for a visual and emotional connection through which the artist’s take on a subject can be more fully understood and appreciated by the viewer. This inherent need is as natural as the need to feel our feet planted firmly on the ground. It is not to say, however, that art needs to be “realistic,” because realism is simply a stylistic choice. The twenty-thousand-year-old drawings of bison in the caves at Lascaux are far from “realistic,” yet they are beautifully rendered and clearly understood. But keep in mind that an abstract work is still either a two- or three-dimensional creation and, as such, subject to the same criteria used to assess all two- and three-dimensional art. Falling short of a meaningful visual assessment—composition, form, color balance, etc.—much of the value in abstract art to the viewer remains solely within the realms of a personal, sensual experience, in other words, pure taste, which is not calculable. At best this art is sophisticatedly decorative. Some noteworthy abstract artists were Wassily Kandinsky (Fig. 86), Piet Mondrian (Fig. 87), and Robert Delaunay (Fig. 88), who experimented with nonrepresentational imagery.

Art need not be realistic to be good; realism is simply a stylistic choice.

(Fig. 86) Composition VII, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky

The task that is assigned to [an artist] is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear. —Kandinsky

Some artists willingly take on that “painful” task and turn it into art that is elegant to the eye and uplifting to the soul. Others pass on their “heavy cross” to the viewer to bear. With nothing of recognizable aesthetic value to assess—logical color scheme, balanced composition, coherent movement—viewers are left with only personal taste to explain their enjoyment of a piece like this. Many do, as is their right.

(Fig. 87) Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, 1921

Piet Mondrian

The subjectivization of the universal in art brings the universal downward on one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal. —Mondrian

The reader will begin to notice that as art moves forward in time from the turn of the twentieth century, artists’ philosophies and explanations of their work grow more verbose and perplexing. Mondrian’s work doesn’t need this; it is simple and inoffensive. Not deep, as he may have wanted us to believe, but not unpleasant either, though more suited to the design industry than museum walls.

(Fig. 88) Circular Forms, 1930

Robert Delaunay

My only science is the choice of impressions that the light in the universe furnishes to my consciousness as an artisan which I try, by imposing an Order, and Art, an appropriate representative life, to organize. —Delaunay

Delaunay embraced yet the latest “ism,” Orphism, whose meaning its followers themselves were hard-pressed to explain. Regardless, Delaunay seemed to hop effortlessly from one “ism” to another, at each stop producing work that was generally quite easy on the eye, if one could ignore the attending descriptions. Circular Forms, like many of the artist’s works, exhibits at least a lyrical sense of color, more than can be said of the work of Delaunay’s abstractionist colleague, Kandinsky.

I have a friend who creates abstract art. He once told me that his work allows the viewer to come away with whatever interpretation or experience he or she chooses. “Why is that a good thing?” I asked. “Doesn’t an artist, like a film director, make creative decisions each step of the way in order to take the viewer on his intended journey? And if it’s not his intention, what was the point of making any of those specific decisions at all?” My friend had no answer.

In the 1940s, abstract art moved completely away from the need for formal design and on to pure expression, which focused solely on emotion in the creation of art. As the historian Harold Rosenberg noted, “What was to go on the canvas was [now] not a picture but an event.” Jackson Pollock (pages 130 and 184–186), sculptor David Smith (Fig. 89), and Franz Kline (Fig. 90) exemplified this new ism, which itself spawned an array of subsidiary -isms. It was becoming increasingly difficult to assess the quality of new art (critics themselves were divided on its legitimacy), so far beyond the realms of accepted aesthetic consideration had it drifted. Any value perceived was from within the narrow sphere of fellow artists themselves and potential investor/collectors, the latter a growing and worrisome new influence on the future of art, for investing would eventually become the main determiner of an artwork’s value.

(Fig. 89) Cubi XIX, 1964

David Smith

I haven’t named this work nor thought where it would go.

I haven’t thought what it is for, except that it is made to be seen. —Smith

Artists in the past held great regard for the public, their audience. It mattered to artists that their work was enjoyed and understood. Sometime during the twentieth century this concern evaporated, with artists overwhelmingly producing art for themselves and other artists. As can be seen in Smith’s quote, the public was left to figure out for themselves what the artist had in mind when presenting them with work that was made only “to be seen.”

(Fig. 90) Composition, c. 1950

Franz Kline

You instinctively like what you can’t do. —Kline

Delve into the many art critics’ and historians’ discussions of Kline’s work and you will find as many interpretations as there are interpretors—his paintings are that elusive. Or maybe not. Maybe they are a lot simpler than the “experts” would have you believe. Kline’s work is the perfect candidate to apply that which this book advocates: the ignoring of explanations, theories, and backstories in favor of visually assessing the work itself and its success or failure aesthetically. On that basis, there is little to go on with Kline’s work (Fig. 90). The key, really, is the word “expression” positioned in the name Abstract Expressionism. Aesthetic considerations become irrelevant when the “expression” of the artist is “felt” by the viewer. “Is the painting good or bad?” a serious observer might ask. “It doesn’t matter,” the ardent supporter will reply, “it moves me.” End of discussion.

Regarding Pollock, I conducted a test with graduate students of mine each semester for a number of years at a noted art institute. A truncated version of it has been presented and discussed in various places around the internet, but here is the complete test as I actually gave it:

“As an exercise in judging quality, I would like you all to compare the early Jackson Pollock painting on the left with an art student’s painting of that time done in a similar manner on the right, and make a case for why the Pollock is superior.” Almost every student out of several hundred, all experienced and learned artists, described in detail why the painting on the left was aesthetically superior to the painting on the right. When all analyses were in, I let them in on the fact that the student work on the right was actually the true Pollock (Silver and Black, 1950, 21" × 16" at the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio) while the supposed Pollock was, in reality, a close-up of my studio apron. (Noteworthy is that not a single student was offended at having been fooled; in fact, most students expressed amusement at their duping.) As the infamous test has made its way around the internet, numerous viewers have commented that they would have instantly known the apron was not a Pollock. But this response misses the real point of the lesson: it was not a test to identify the work of a particular artist; it was a test to demonstrate that the identical aesthetic criteria used to assess a work of Abstract Expressionism could be applied to a paint-splattered apron, with the same results one might expect from an assessment of an actual Abstract Expressionist painting.

This exercise was critically instructive, as it exposed how difficult it has become to reliably recognize quality in much of modern art, even when trained artists were doing the evaluation. In truth, much of the value of modern works is derived from ancillary aspects, not the least of which is the notoriety of the artist. Context can also deceptively inflate the perceived value of a work, a topic that will be further discussed later. Consider this: every now and then in some museum a painting from the classic era, a Rembrandt, for instance, will be reexamined and found not to have been created by the Old Master to whom it had previously been attributed. Though its monetary value may understandably decrease somewhat, the museum usually keeps the work hanging, but with a new, accompanying description correcting its identity. However, if a modern painting, a Mark Rothko, for instance (Fig. 4), were to be reexamined and found not to be of his creation, how likely would it be that the work would retain much of its monetary value (if any at all), and how likely would it be that the museum would continue displaying the work? The question is, of course, rhetorical. As food for thought, here is a further revealing question posed to me by contemporary artist Gil Adams: How does an abstract artist know when his work is improving?

How does an abstract artist know when his work is improving?

POP ART (1950s–1960s)—Art continued to drift farther away from any semblance of assessable skill, and as Abstract Art lost its popularity and influence in the late 1950s, it was replaced by yet another movement. While earlier in the century art focused more on experimentation, Pop Art largely appropriated existing, familiar imagery from popular culture, repackaging it in a kitschy and not-so-subtly mocking way. Echoing Roger Frye’s social hierarchy of public taste, Pop Art very clearly drew a line between those in the know and the clueless outsider. Andy Warhol’s paintings, prints, and “sculptures” (Fig. 91) were the exemplars of this movement, but many other artists (Jasper Johns [Fig. 92], Roy Lichtenstein [Fig. 93], Robert Rauschenberg [Fig. 94], etc.) jumped on the bandwagon, easy as it was to “create” works of this nature and get wide attention and industry acclaim for one’s ultra-trendy statement.

(Fig. 91) Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box, 1964

Andy Warhol

I am a deeply superficial person. —Warhol

Are we looking here at the inspired work of Warhol, or at the work of Campbell’s Soup company employee Herberton L. Williams, who in 1898 chose red and white as the new product’s color scheme (red and yellow for its shipping boxes), followed by company employees agreeing upon a cursive-styled typeface to complete the logo? How many remember 20th Century Fox photographer Eugene Kornman? He shot the original photo of Marilyn Monroe that Warhol used to create the popular lithographs of the actress. It is interesting to note that works by Warhol that appropriate images originally produced by someone else are protected by copyright laws. In other words, if Williams and Kornman were still living and wanted to sell Warhol’s works that used their imagery, they could be sued. It would appear that all’s fair in love, war—and art.

(Fig. 92) Three Flags, 1958

Jasper Johns

What’s interesting to me is the fact that it isn’t designed, but taken. It’s not mine. —Johns

Interesting, perhaps, but not admirable. Like so much work of this and succeeding eras, the real interest exists primarily in the conflicting, often risible theories offered by critics.

(Fig. 93) Drowning Girl, 1963

Roy Lichtenstein

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me. —Lichtenstein

Sampling—the blatant confiscation of musical pieces from the works of others—may have had its genesis in Pop Art. Lichtenstein’s enlarged, appropriated comic strips, complete with magnified half-tone dots, demonstrate this activity. The hip posturing of the works allowed the aesthetic weaknesses of some of the source material to be completely overlooked in the appropriations, while in other cases, a number of Lichtenstein’s pieces lacked the draftsmanship of the more accomplished of the pilfered comic artists. Sadly, many of the original artists, as noted in the documentary “WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation,” suffered financially as Lichtenstein’s works commanded upward of $165 million.

(Fig. 94) Retroactive II, 1963

Robert Rauschenberg

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone’s imagination. —Rauschenberg

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, “the art of decorating surfaces by applying cutouts (as of paper) and then coating with usually several layers of finish (such as lacquer or varnish),” is called decoupage, an eighteenth-century technique that became a fad in crafting circles of the latter decades of the twentieth century. According to the Museum of Contemporary Art, decoupage, represented by Retroactive II, is called high art.

PHOTOREALISM (1960s & 1970s)—As Cubism gave us experimentation and dissection, Abstract Art pure emotion and abandon, and Pop Art the wholesale lifting of existing imagery, art now offered pure gimmickry with Photorealism. The photo-realist boasted a pointless ability to precisely copy photographs. It was as sterile and machinelike as the camera itself, and in an odd circling back to the nineteenth century, played with the claim that photography rendered classical painting obsolete. Now the photograph became the painting. Artists like Richard Estes (Fig. 95), Chuck Close (Fig. 96), and Audrey Flack (Fig. 117) displayed a dedication to reproducing in paint the exact details of a purposely mundane photograph. To be precise, the photos were often snapshots (as opposed to composed photographs) and the enlarged painted versions of them reproduced and magnified all the awkward, unplanned artifacts that come with the typical snapshot (unwanted tree branches, items uncomfortably interfering with other items, objects out of focus, etc.), and which a serious photographer, no doubt, would not want to be there. In Close’s case, he added the novel concept of larger-than-life close-ups of faces.

(Fig. 95) Diner, 1971

Richard Estes

Basically I wanted to paint realism, not abstraction. It’s only photographic because it’s easier to do. —Estes

The camera, non-discriminating as it is, faithfully provided an awkward tangent of windows along the top edge of the diner, telephone booths crowding the diner’s entryway, and documented what might possibly be urine on the ground in the bottom right corner. The artist, visually discriminating as he should be, chose instead to transfer these disconcerting anomalies and unappealing realities to canvas. He could have spared himself the pointless effort by simply presenting us with the original image and calling himself a photographer.

(Fig. 96) Big Self Portrait, 1967–1968

Chuck Close

I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. —Close

Note to artists: When you start to run out of ideas, enlarge. But beware your large work being seen in reduced versions, where they expose how unremarkable the works really are. Close’s paintings are examples of art whose methodology is more interesting than the works themselves. Eavesdrop on any group standing before one of his portraits and listen to the expressions of “wow” concerning the technique, but not the unsavory portrait itself.

CONCEPTUAL ART (mid 1960s onward)—By the 1970s the world of art had arrived at a point as far from its original objective as one could have imagined. In many cases the visual was the least important component of a piece, the accompanying description supplying everything the viewer needed to know, especially with works in what is known as Installation Art. In fact, it has been said to me that one need not even see a conceptual work to know how good it is (might one possibly know the greatness of a musical piece without hearing it?).

The visual, what little there often was, had fully become the vehicle for what Thomas Wolfe described as “the painted word.” It was now reportage disguised as art. The popular comedian Albert Brooks used to do a hilarious routine wherein he would come onstage stage in a mime costume and begin to do a classic routine pretending he was trapped in an invisible box. But instead of allowing the audience to visually construe his predicament, he would verbally explain every movement he was making. This is the equivalent of the description accompanying a conceptual art piece, though the artist and viewer usually don’t realize the inanity of it.

At The Cooper Union we art students took beginning courses in photography which included learning to print our photos in the darkroom. As was to be expected, the new-to-us environment and tools inspired our eager minds to experiment with the darkroom chemicals in every possible way. Proud of our inaugural accomplishments, we tacked them to the wall for the professor to evaluate. We received a shock: “You’re not being photographers here,” he scolded. “You’re being painters with developing and fixing fluids!” With that one, curt critique, it became instantly clear that every medium has aspects inherent to itself, and that using a medium in a way that was better suited to another medium was being, in a sense, artistically dishonest. In other words, when a work can be done as well or even better in another medium, it has failed its own medium.

When a work can be done as well or even better in another medium, it has failed its own medium.

Some prominent purveyors of conceptual art include Tracey Emin (Fig. 3), Joseph Kosuth (Fig. 97), Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Fig. 98), Damien Hirst (Fig. 99), and Banksy (Fig. 100).

This brings us to the all-important issue of context. In the overwhelming majority of instances with Conceptual Art, what would otherwise be completely passed by in normal, everyday circumstances is given undue prominence simply through a change of context. In the cases of Emin and Kosuth, for instance, their banal installations of, respectively, an unmade bed and wooden folding chair invite attention only through being given the status of a museum exhibit. The possibilities of this kind of “art” are endless, and have resulted in humorous and embarrassing stories of gallery patrons or attendants mistaking dropped or discarded items for an installation piece—and even the opposite: an item brushed aside that was actually an exhibited work of art. With Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the everyday act of wrapping an item in soft material is somehow suddenly “art” because the item in question is huge, like their wrapped Reichstag building in Berlin or their wrapped Pont Neuf in Paris. Large or small, the item is still only an object wrapped in material; nothing about it is aesthetically different.

With Conceptual Art, what would otherwise be completely passed by in normal, everyday circumstances is given undue prominence simply through a change of context.

(Fig. 97) One and Three Chairs, 1965

Joseph Kosuth

Anything can be art. —Kosuth

If skill is the key casualty of modern art, One and Three Chairs is a strong contender for the clearest proof of that reality. It is also solid evidence of the claim that today certain works of art need not even be seen in order to derive the fullness of their statements, what with statement being the primary motive of artists like Kosuth.

(Fig. 98) Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 (temporary)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn’t exist. —Christo

Would a wrapped miniature version of the Reichstag be as supposedly inspiring, or is inspiration affected by scale? Were Michelangelo’s Pietà five times its current size would it be a much greater work of art than it already is?

Hirst also benefits from context. His works, like the dead shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde (and given the pretentious title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living [Fig. 99]) are exhibited in major art museums, but they are works that were at one time more accurately called science projects. Place the identical display in the Museum of Natural History, shorn of any art world imprimatur, and its multimillion-dollar value would plummet. Probably the most egregious example of context giving undeserved attention is the work of street artist Banksy (Fig. 100). The anonymous artist’s legion of fans and supporters applaud each new (illegal) work of graffiti, never seeming to occur to them that what they are really looking at is nothing more than what was heretofore known as political cartoons, now only magnified. Were it not for the strained sociopolitical messages, the works themselves would merely be poorly executed, spray-painted stencils, with imagery sometimes appropriated from other sources. But these realities are willfully rejected by, or lost on, his fervent followers, for whom statement (and delinquency) are everything.

(Fig. 99) The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

Damien Hirst

That’s the great thing about art.

Anybody can do it if you just believe it. . . . Anyone can be like Rembrandt. —Hirst

Claiming that anyone who “believes” can be like Rembrandt doesn’t elevate the status of that “anyone,” it reduces the status of Rembrandt. Hirst’s statement is not surprising coming from one who gathers found objects and presents them in a provocative manner as art.

(Fig. 100) Flower Thrower, 2003

Banksy

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else. —Banksy

Imagine an art scholar who has just spent a long day in deep study of an original painting by La Tour (Fig. 101): its deftly applied brushwork, subtle color scheme, and elevating subject matter. The scholar then comes out into the light of day and is met by this giant splash of graffiti by Banksy on a wall before him. One would be hard-pressed to imagine it being an uplifting encounter, above and beyond that which the scholar had just experienced with the seventeenth-century masterpiece.

(Fig. 101) The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1635–1637

Georges de La Tour

Like his slightly older Italian counterpart, Caravaggio, La Tour was a master of chiaroscuro, the painterly technique of dramatic light and shadow. The paint strokes in this piece, though seemingly imperceptible, are quite apparent when viewed up close, such is the control of this artist’s brush. Of added interest are the deepest shadows in which much detail is surprisingly maintained despite the darkness, and can be fully appreciated when viewing the original painting. This work, unlike the one-dimensional graffiti by Banksy, provides an ongoing, deepening experience each time it is revisited in real life.

The reduction to statement in art does have its understandable appeal: it allows everyone to become an artist, since no demonstrable skill is necessary.

Admittedly, the reduction to statement in art does have its understandable appeal: it allows everyone to become an artist, since no demonstrable skill is necessary. In this age of worshiping equality, “art as idea” is a great equalizer. The twentieth-century American poet Archibald MacLeish in his “Ars Poetica” sagely instructed:

“A poem should not mean

But be.”

Today, Conceptual Art continues to labor at making a point at the expense of skill and visual excellence (the epitome of this genre may have been attained with exhibits of “invisible art” going back as far as 1959; an artist’s sly sense of humor if nothing else). The public has today become almost completely estranged from the former sympathetic marriage of artist and viewer. Instead, many of today’s well-known artists find connection exclusively with investors and speculators, the result of a questionable cabal that has developed among artist, museum or gallery, and auction house. As author Tom Wolfe keenly noted, “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.” The 2017 documentary film Blurred Lines: Inside The Art World does an admirable job of exposing this travesty. The schemes of Paul Durand-Ruel and Roger Frye a century and a half earlier to contrive value have arrived at an unimaginable level. Sadly, the art world has come to accept anything and everything as art, regardless of how vapid or unsavory. But if everything is art, then, of course, nothing is art.

If everything is art, then, of course, nothing is art.

ILLUSTRATION—Great talent will out. In the early part of the twentieth century, classical music devolved into atonal insanity. Luckily, the new art form of motion pictures offered an outlet to the great remaining traditionalists of that era—composers like Erich Korngold and Max Steiner were favored over modernists like Schoenberg and Webern. Likewise, when the art world of the late nineteenth century began to turn away from craftsmanship, the craftsman artists moved on to a new art form and gave us what became known as the Golden Age of Illustration—Howard Pyle (Fig. 102) and N. C. Wyeth (Fig. 103) were favored over Monet and Picasso. The work of Maxfield Parrish (Fig. 104) from the turn of the century to the 1960s bridged the gap between fine art and pure illustration, so steeped in classical design and techniques were his otherworldly paintings.

(Fig. 102) Marooned, 1909

Howard Pyle

I take back all I ever said about the Old Masters. They give great lessons. —Pyle

While his contemporaries in the fine arts were abandoning the influences of past masters, Pyle was integrating them into his work. In this painting he has chosen a bold composition, giving over large portions to sky and sand, with a thin spit of ocean and horizon between, all serving to accentuate the lonely abandonment of the pirate. Yet, upon close examination, those large areas are not without interesting brushwork and variations of color.

(Fig. 103) Blind Pew, 1911

N. C. Wyeth

Both illustrator and painter [Fine Artist] are artists who are in pictorial communication. Both should be measured by their competence not by artificial compartments contrived by critics. —Wyeth

In a wonderful demonstration of dynamic movement, the inverted V-shape perspective of the road edges, along with the man’s cane and left arm, left leg, and cane’s shadow, all sweep up toward his head. Direction toward the head is aided by the arc of his right arm and the lower edge of the inn’s roof. All these things expertly draw the eye to the most important element in the painting—a blind man’s pained face.

(Fig. 104) Garden of Allah, 1918

Maxfield Parrish

It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color. —Parrish

It is astounding to consider that this painting was an illustration for a box of chocolates. More astounding is that, in creating it, Parrish used time-consuming techniques (which he describes here in a simplified way) that originated in the Renaissance. His popularity in the early twentieth century was such that it has been estimated that by 1925 one in every five American households had a Parrish print in it.

But the fine art world in the twentieth century gradually looked down its nose at illustration, judging it functional, old-fashioned, and lacking in meaning. I myself was confronted with that reality while a traditionalist painter among the modernists at The Cooper Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One instructor demeaned my painting-in-progress with, “this looks like something that would be on the cover of a paperback novel!” It was my patient and understanding mentor there, respected painter Will Barnet, who made me realize that, in the end, the value of a work is in its execution, not in its intent or meaning. He showed, for instance, how American illustrator Norman Rockwell’s paintings, some of whose subjects were terribly sentimental, nevertheless displayed a deep understanding of the disciplines demanded by the respective medium, and if we could put aside our prejudices regarding the subjects, we could find great enjoyment in observing Rockwell’s “journey” as we followed his masterful handwork of oil brushed upon canvas (Fig. 105).

Ironically, illustration was often the only mainstay of skillful art during much of the twentieth century. One illustrator who burst upon the scene in the 1960s was Frank Frazetta, whose fresh and original paintings for the Robert E. Howard “Conan” stories (Fig. 106) were so phenomenally popular they spawned an industry of copycat artists that has continued to this day. His work, often gracing the “cover of a paperback novel,” as my art school instructor had so mocked, exhibited a clear understanding of the materials and techniques of traditional painting. Eventually and predictably, though, illustrators began leaving tradition and moving into the sterile world of digital art.

(Fig. 105) Saying Grace, 1951

Norman Rockwell

The abstractionists and the extreme modern painters have the advantage of us realists. . . . They can paint a face pale green or bright blue and get away with it. —Rockwell

For most, the appeal of this wonderful painting is its theme of simple devotion and the curiosity of the restaurant’s patrons (representing us) watching the young boy and his grandmother. But the human emotions of subject matter can easily divert one’s attention from the handiwork of an expert artist. Moving from the general to the specific, notice his grouping of people circling the two main characters, all backlit from the large restaurant window and the gray, rainy day casting a soft light over the whole. Then alight upon detail after detail: the array of textures, myriad objects on the tables and floor, expressions of each individual patron, all demonstrating Rockwell’s keen observational eye. And everything is brought to life by his mastery of color, composition, and paint application.

(Fig. 106) Conan the Barbarian, 1965

Frank Frazetta

A painting, it’s something important; you want to look at it, maybe forever. —Frazetta

Frazetta used the most basic materials—often painting on small canvas boards—but the work he produced betrayed that economy through his irrefutable skill.

DIGITAL ART—As mentioned earlier, if a piece could be done just as or more effectively in another medium, it has failed its own. A good example of where artists have ignored this caution is in the modern practice of so called digital “painting” (Fig. 107). Digital is a perfectly legitimate tool like any other when addressing its unique properties (in animation, for instance) (Fig. 108), but it is overwhelmingly used in a way to give the false impression of another medium—painting—and where only the resultant effect, not the process, is of any value to the artist or viewer. In truth, digital “painting” is to art what the cubic zirconium is to gems. The field has also, in recent years, moved into the realm of artificial intelligence, in which the art is almost completely the work of technology. Its results are pure deception (Fig. 109) and may represent the final removal of any sense of the human touch.

Digital “painting” is to art what the cubic zirconium is to gems.

(Fig. 107) Scene for the film Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest, 2006 (Digital illustration)

Walt Disney Studios

In an effort to save time (mistakes could be undone with the push of a button, for instance), the Disney studio employed artists to create digital facsimiles of the look of background paintings from the studio’s earlier Golden Era. In this case, forest scenes that were originally rendered in beautiful yet time-consuming oil in the 1942 version of Bambi, were now given the illusion of oil in the assumption that audiences wouldn’t notice—or even care.

(Fig. 108) Frame from the film Toy Story, 1995 (Digital animation)

Pixar Studios

Toy Story broke fresh ground in filmmaking by presenting a relatively new style of animation. The look was a cross between live-action film and stop-motion animation, and showed what possibilities the digital medium was capable of. In short, it looked like nothing else, which is what a medium should rightly deliver.

(Fig. 109) A Girl with Glowing Earrings, 2023

Julian van Dieken

I don’t want to replace Vermeer, and I don’t think it can or will be done with any technology. —van Dieken

There is a point at which art can become sterile. That point is arrived at when little or no evidence of the human hand in its creation is apparent, and detail is rendered to an unnecessary, almost microscopic level. Since it is possible to achieve, why not show the actual pores of the model? Why stop at one level before that?

PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM (MOTION PICTURES)—Are photography and film art? This is a somewhat complex question, as both can indeed be beautiful and visually compelling. To begin with, the uniqueness of photography is its ability to capture the unexpected activity of the world through the click of the shutter button in the precise moment the photographer has chosen. This characteristic is what is most potentially compelling about photography (Fig. 110, for example), and not the more “painterly” stylings of a portrait or landscape (Fig. 111). Yet everything other than that clicking decision on the part of the photographer has been created by the tool itself, the camera. The key drawback to photography being fully considered art—and this is critically important—is that the camera is non-discriminating; it unselectively records everything that the lens sees. If a tree has an ugly branch destroying the composition, that branch remains; if something moves more quickly than the shutter speed can hold, that blurred object remains. Contrarily, an artist can change and improve upon what the camera can only coldly document. An artist edits, censors, and refines what is before her, over every square inch of the framed surface, regardless of how “realistic” or abstract the style. The photographer possesses no such total control of the image, and can only manipulate the photograph after the fact, thus utilizing realms outside the medium of photography.

The uniqueness of photography is its ability to capture the unexpected activity of the world through the click of the shutter button in the precise moment the photographer has chosen.

An artist can change and improve upon what the camera can only coldly document.

(Fig. 110) World’s Fair, New York, 1964

Garry Winogrand

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs. —Winogrand

Winogrand’s abbreviated career offered us the purest lesson in photography’s unique ability to capture not a painterly portrait, still life, or landscape, but the fascinating, sometimes bizarre activity within an instant of life.

(Fig. 111) Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, c. 1937

Ansel Adams

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

—Adams

In truth, dodging and burning are painterly actions done after the camera has served its function. Where a painter has created every detail seen in a spectacular landscape, nature—or God—carried out that effort for the lens of a camera.

This issue also exists in film, complicated by the fact that it is a collective endeavor: who is to be credited for a successful finished motion picture? Certainly not one “artist.” Film’s uniqueness lies in the ability to capture moving images, allow the action on the screen to instantly occupy different locations and times, move in three dimensions around a scene and its actors, and employ other mediums within it, like writing and music. The results of any film, created by a legion of “artists” from director, to actors, to screenwriter, to cinematographer, to composer, and onward, are understandably a hit-and-miss proposition, and one where a favorable result borders on the miraculous. It remains the equivalent of calling a building a beautiful creation of the architect when, in truth, the hands of many different craftspeople went into its production. Photography and film, it can therefore be said, are more “art forms” than pure art.

Film’s uniqueness lies in the ability to capture moving images, of the action on the screen to instantly occupy different locations and times, move in three dimensions around a scene and its actors, and employ other mediums within it, like writing and music.

Photography and film, it can therefore be said, are more “art forms” than pure art.

ARCHITECTURE—While this book does not address architecture per se, a brief word on the subject, describing its equal demise in the visual world, is relevant and can be instructive:

Visit Notre Dame cathedral in Paris (Fig. 112) on any day and witness the thousands of visitors who have been drawn from around the world to marvel at its almost unbelievable craft—from the exquisitely designed structure itself, to the artistic mastery of the portals, doors, statuary, and stained glass. The monumentality of the experience will fill even the most agnostic of hearts with a sense of the holy and transcendent (its very purpose, after all). Next, visit the 300 block of Park Avenue in New York on any day and witness the thousands of people from around the world who walk by the Seagram building (Fig. 113)—the exemplification of Bauhaus/International architecture—never bothering to look up at the glass-and-steel monolith, let alone enter or feel inspired by it.

In many ways, the Bauhaus and its philosophy, founded in Germany in 1919, concretized (at the time) a budding standard for the goals of art, architecture, and design that still reverberates today. This standard was one that placed ideology before aesthetics and, in this case, the idea that function should be as essential to the creative process as that of the purely visual. And typical of ideologies with utopian and society-transforming motives, the results were more often cold and severe rather than inspirational—think of the drab, Maoist clothing style applied to architectural design. One could rightly say that the movement was “antistyle,” with its aversion to the decorative, placing utility over beauty (its mantra was “form follows function”), and producing blockish, often unbalanced buildings, cold and uninviting tubular steel furniture, and paintings devoid of painterly skills.

(Fig. 112) Notre-Dame de Paris,

initial construction between 1163 and 1260

Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well. —Victor Hugo

Among the many churches and basilicas in Paris, Notre Dame draws the most visitors to it. What mind, what heart, indeed what soul would prefer a cold steel-and-glass silo over this stone cathedral, made warm by the faith and devotion of its builders?

(Fig. 113) The Seagram Building, constructed between 1956 and 1958

Designed by Mies van der Rohe

Less is more. . . . Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject. . . .

I do not make every building different. —van der Rohe

Compared to the hours that many spend marveling at and even climbing Notre Dame, how much time does anyone really spend taking in the Seagram Building? What inspiration could possibly be gleaned after those first five minutes?

Several decades earlier in 1861, William Morris also created an ideological workshop with the purpose of marrying design with function, but its output of decorative design, typography, architecture, and furniture (Fig. 114) was never subordinate to utility; its design remained aesthetically captivating, and, more importantly, retained a sense of human warmth.

In the creative realms, when a movement’s ideology is more interesting than its output, it has deflected focus away from the most important and sadly forgotten question in the arts: does it look good? The moment a work induces you to first ask “what does it mean?” we are left to admit that the work is more “interesting” than visually appealing. This is not to say that there aren’t those who somehow find Bauhaus works greatly appealing, but as I continue to remind, quality and taste are distinct. Fortunately, the daily masses crowding in and around Notre Dame cathedral are proof that both can still be entwined.

(Fig. 114) Saville Armchair, c. 1890

The William Morris Co. (George Jack design)

With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.

—William Morris (English, 1834–1896)

The Morris chair, like the fabrics, tapestries, wallpaper, and stained glass that the company produced, did serve a function. But it did so with detailed craftsmanship and elegant lines. Function followed form. And it was created for the satisfaction of the public, not for the admiration of other craftspeople.

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY STUDENTS

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. —Orson Welles

The concepts discussed so far in this book can be further understood through discussions I held with my college art students over the years. Along with classes on painting, drawing, and perspective were weekly topics I offered on subjects designed to get them thinking about concepts outside the applied course I was teaching. The following are selections of student comments on various topics, together with my responses. You will no doubt recognize some of the principles as having been earlier presented in this book.

Student: What is art? has become a question which contains innumerable answers. Duchamp made a toilet art (Fig. 115).

RF: A perfect example of the paucity of skill and ideas already apparent at that early stage of modernism. The mere fact that someone produced it is enough for us to now accept it. Ideas have become “art;” but they require no demonstrable skill.

Ideas have become “art;” but they require no demonstrable skill.

Student: Quality and value lie within the veracity and ingenuity of the idea itself. Ideas are subjective. There are no absolutes when it comes to art. It is completely subjective unless the artist has expressed, predefined, a purpose and expected outcome of the work. Only then can we attempt to measure objectively whether or not such targets have been hit or missed.

RF: The conclusions you offer here perfectly describe the aesthetic relativism I address in these discussions. However, within your own statements concerning subjectivity are included words like “veracity” and “ingenuity.” I’m curious just how the value of one’s ingenuity could be determined. And if the individual artist is the sole arbiter of objectivity through their own predefined purpose, why should anyone care but that artist whether their goals are met, especially if the bar of achievement they set is only inches off the ground? The master artist, architect, musician of the past felt as much an obligation to elevating the society around him as they did their own interests. Does it not concern you that the “predefined” value system of the contemporary artist, unconcerned with creating for something or someone other than themselves, invariably leads to artistic narcissism?

(Fig. 115) Fountain, 1917

Marcel Duchamp

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products. —Duchamp

In some ways, Duchamp’s urinal is a valuable work of art. It served as a lesson that the art world had become so “open-minded” it could take seriously something that was secretly Duchamp’s practical joke. Our current age proves the lesson was not learned: the gullible, “open-minded” continue to fall for and hail absurdity.

Student: We need to consider if an indigenous person from the Amazon saw the Mona Lisa would his evaluation be relevant to the qualities we hold fast to the object of art?

RF: The evaluations of particular cultures may be interesting in the labs of the departments of anthropology, but the purely visual experience—unrelated to the specifics of culture and subject matter—is universal and objectively traceable. The Amazonian might not relate to the person or environment of the Mona Lisa any more than we would the particulars in the works of an Amazonian (Fig. 116), for instance, but that would not inhibit his universal, purely human enjoyment of the visual.

Student: Does the “soul” and empathy with the creator of the work enter into the treatise?

RF: The “soul” certainly does, allowing the greatest of art to rise above the mere sum of its technical proficiency. It’s something I refer to as “that mysterious other,” something intangible that seems to be present only in the finest of work ever produced. I am aware of this phenomenon when, for instance, standing before an original Vermeer. It is admittedly not as quantifiable as other areas of aesthetics, but it is an important ingredient in the mix nevertheless. As for the creator, the artist himself, it’s actually best not to enter his motives or biography into the equation. The greatest of art should ideally be completely independent, able to stand apart from the artist and be universally appealing and understood. Knowing more of the behind-the-scenes details is interesting and can add another dimension to our appreciation of the artist, but ultimately it should be irrelevant to the art.

(Fig. 116) Burial Urn, c. 1000–1250

Marajoara culture

A beautiful example of craft from the indigenous people of the Amazon, showing imagination of design and confidence of execution. It is as easy for the modern day individual from Western culture to enjoy on a purely visual level as it would be the Amazonian to enjoy the Mona Lisa.

Student: I think the idea is to create a very precise, very accurate “super realist’”style work of art using careful computer illustration in much the same way other artists (like Audrey Flack) would use an air brush.

RF: Unfortunately its value is more in concept than execution. Paint sprayed on a surface tells us more about a nozzle than the human hand (Fig. 117). “What’s the point?” is the question that applies to her work.

Student: Are you saying that the only kind of artwork that you believe has a point— or is Ideal—is artwork done specifically by paintbrush?

RF: I would never claim that one tool of art is superior to another; it would be a foolish claim. The paintbrush is no more “ideal” than an etching burin, pastel stick, or computer program. To repeat, my point is that a medium is most effective, most in line with an artistic ideal, when it is addressing and utilizing its uniqueness.

Student: I would like to point out that photography could technically make tons of traditional art dishonest.

RF: Technically, but not in practice. A photograph is nondiscretionary—it records everything before the lens, unlike an artist who edits, censors, and refines what is before him. This is a good place to mention the long-held theory that photography killed classical art by making realism in painting unnecessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, it was never the goal of the classical artist to create realistic or photographic-looking paintings. Their goal was to make paintings that were well-executed and looked good, regardless of style, realism being only one stylistic choice. Secondly, classical art continued long after the growth of photography, with both patrons and public still eagerly looking forward to the latest, impressive works by the masters of the day. The popularity only began to dim when later generations of artists were sold on the hype of the “new,” which often meant the ability to create work less demanding and therefore in greater numbers. Finally, if it was photography that killed classical painting, how does one account for the death of classical sculpture at the same time? No, the camera didn’t kill classical art. Ideology did.

(Fig. 117) Leonardo’s Lady, 1974

Audrey Flack

If you can’t paint, paint Big. —Flack

Aside from the purposeless activity of precisely copying a photo, Flack’s painting displays a weakness of execution in an unappealing slickness through the over-softening of shadings and edges, along with several tangents. The lack of a unified color scheme and a scattered composition don’t help matters.

It was never the goal of the classical artist to create realistic or photographic-looking paintings. Their goal was to make paintings that were well-executed and looked good, regardless of style, realism being only one stylistic choice.

If it was photography that killed classical painting, how does one account for the death of classical sculpture at the same time?

Student: Take a picture of it now, and you have the real thing rendered. If you want to draw or paint something real, you will hardly ever make it as real as a photograph can.

RF: And shouldn’t.

Student: A good painter who uses watercolor or oil or a computer is still a good painter.

RF: Not exactly. A good racer would not be a good racer whether running, biking, or driving. They are obviously all methods of moving swiftly forward, but each is unique with different disciplines. A painter is “good” if the painting medium in which he works is used in a “good” way.

Student: Maybe the Campbell Soup Can is not up to the “value” of other technical artists for some people, however Andy Warhol was a big contributor to an entire new Art Movement altogether. That alone could create more “value” and can be deemed what we accept as a worthy art form. We might contrast this style to other more disciplined artists, but to make a direct comparison across different art forms in completely different periods lacks progression and ignores transition of the direction in which art has evolved over the years. That being said, I don’t completely disagree with the argument you have made. It is possible that maybe I have just fallen subject to participating in believing the tailors of the Emperor’s new clothes. I just wanted to point out a different angle of looking at the statement you were making.

RF: The creation of a new movement in art is not, in and of itself, cause for accepting and respecting it. It may simply be a new movement. As art and time move on, certain elements of aesthetic demands are added and/or dropped. Unfortunately, one of the newer additions in the last century has been the importance of an artist’s “statement” (social criticism, theory, etc.), something I find particularly troubling for several reasons. For one thing, statements are not always translatable over eras and throughout cultures, and can better be serviced by other media; secondly, the advent of the “statement” has inevitably elevated the artist above the art, and a cursory look at the last hundred years will clearly show how the cult of personality has relegated artwork to a position subservient to the artist. What has become more interesting than a painting of a Campbell Soup can is that there was an artist who had the gall to present it as art, and whose name became more important than his work. That never did—nor ever could—happen with Vermeer, for instance, whose life we know little about, but which in no way diminishes the monumental value of his art.

Student: Now if we examine the concept of a greater, unspoken set of standards of traditional art history, we can demonstrate that these existential criteria have only an illusion of cohesiveness when compressed into an arbitrary whole, instead of examined as responses, products of their own eras.

RF: On the contrary, the standards applied to high art were anything but “unspoken,” they were clearly promoted. Your use of words like “illusion of” and “arbitrary” shows how thoroughly inculcated aesthetic relativism has become. These words simply beg the question and represent exactly what I’m trying to make students aware of in discussions about this topic. “Arbitrary” is precisely what we don’t want in artistic judgment.

Student: Michelangelo and DaVinci both thought of themselves as something more like an architect or engineer, and DaVinci preferred designing weapons to painting. Michelangelo had no respect at all for oil painters, since oil paint could be wiped off the canvas if the artist didn’t like it. He preferred Fresco, where if you made a mistake, you had to re-plaster the whole thing. To him, Caravaggio’s work would’ve been like tennis without a net.

RF: Artists’ intentions are irrelevant. It is the level of visual excellence to which they aspired in their own work (and may or may not have succeeded) that should be our only concern. Michelangelo could have intended his Pietà for a Florence amusement park and it wouldn’t minimize the grand achievement of the work itself.

Student: Those with money and great influence in the community are the ones who decided the standard just like today when the NY designers reveal their “spring collection” or whatever (I don’t follow it so forgive the lack of accurate terms). Suddenly those types of “styles” are now featured in every store and it is “in.” I think the line between standards and taste can very easily get blurred by those with the biggest pockets and loudest voices.

RF: This is a commonly held assumption and misconception about historical aesthetic standards. To simplify for our purposes here, though the “wealthy and influential” invariably played a role in approving standards from the earliest times, we must remember that until the Industrial Revolution, they were also the only educated class, thereby in the best position to understand and recognize meaningful standards in the art they commissioned. And the artists themselves welcomed the challenge of that competitive environment. Rembrandt, for instance, whose latter career was marked by notable defiances toward the governing art world, only challenged the prevailing aesthetic assumptions; he didn’t, like so many destructive revolutionaries after him, throw out the standards completely.

—A student asked me if I’d read David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge or seen the documentary Tim’s Vermeer. They seemed to convince the student that the great masters used camera obscura tools to create their work and that with those same tools you could paint like Vermeer. He asked me if I believed that. No, I answered, not in the slightest. Great artists worked long and hard to master drawing skills and could draw from life with great precision. They didn’t need special aids to help them. In fact, the French art critic Léandre Vaillat reported that Bouguereau could do impressive oil studies of a head from life (like the one in Fig. 22) in just four hours. Hockney’s book comes across as a mediocre artist compensating for his mediocrity by bringing down to his level the abilities of artists with greater talent than he.

As for the Vermeer documentary, it may be true that one could use a camera obscura (a darkened room with a lens to project the outline of an image from life onto a surface) to transfer an image to the working surface of a painting, but this ignores several critical items: (1) the original setup of the scene to be projected must first be created by the artist; in the hands of a lesser artist than Vermeer, the scene might be dull and of weak composition; (2) the artist must still choose balanced and compelling coloring for his painting, often different than what is simply there in reality, and no small feat to accomplish; and (3) most importantly, the camera obscura cannot apply the paint for the artist, paint application being possibly the most important ingredient in determining the success or failure of a work.

—Another student suggested that there was a need for ugly art, since there are a lot of ugly things that happen in life. I responded that, although there are ugly things in life worthy of addressing in art, the art itself need not be ugly. The murder of Jean-Paul Marat was an ugly event that took place during the French Revolution, but Jacques-Louis David’s painting of that scene (Marat was his friend) followed all the conventions of aesthetics and still conveyed the horror in a magnificent way (Fig. 118).

Although there are ugly things in life worthy of addressing in art, the art itself need not be ugly

(Fig. 118) The Death of Marat, 1793

Jacques-Louis David

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself. —David

Can a horrific event be portrayed “beautifully?” David answered this question by producing a painting that was “beautiful” in every way a painting aesthetically should be, while losing none of the ugliness of the crime.

Each semester, one topic seemed to engage the students more than others. I presented a treatise on quality, composed of a number of principles (introduced with the quote below by art historian Jacob Rosenberg) from which each student was to choose one to address. Here are six of those principles, followed by selections of those many discussions:

Artistic value or quality in a work of art is not merely a matter of personal opinion, but to a high degree . . . objectively traceable. —Jacob Rosenberg

1. Quality and taste are distinct. Quality is based on standards, taste is based on personal preference.

2. Beauty in a work of art appears in the observable execution of the respective medium, not in the resultant effect. It is in the observable touch and movement of the human hand across a physical surface; it is the artist’s manipulated journey within the piece that should most captivate us, not the destination. In other words, how the sunset was painted is more important than the fact that it looks like a sunset. An example of where we’ve allowed ourselves to fall short of this discipline is in the modern medium of so-called digital “painting,” digital being a perfectly legitimate tool like any other when addressing its unique characteristics, but overwhelmingly used in a way to mimic another medium, and where only the resultant effect is of any interest.

3. Every artistic medium has unique aspects unto itself, and a work of art is most effective when it addresses the challenges of those unique aspects. If a work of art could be done more or just as effectively through another medium, it has failed its own medium.

4. There are levels of aesthetic value in the arts from low to high, from craft to fine art. The higher the art form, the greater the disciplines required and the deeper the experience. Insisting that lower art forms are of equal value to the higher or finer arts, doesn’t elevate the lesser, but only reduces the higher. Without a stratification of value, we deny ourselves the opportunity to aim for art’s highest, often most transcendent, ideals.

5. Deciding who gets to judge quality in art is not nearly as important as recognizing that there are universal standards of quality that ought to be upheld. We all know of situations where professional expertise is acknowledged and depended upon. Take figure skating in the Olympics, where artistic excellence is judged by a panel of experts in the field. Surely we would flinch at the contestant who indiscriminately threw himself across the ice and demanded that his routine be accepted as worthy of value as that of the most disciplined skater.

6. Without aesthetic standards we can determine neither quality nor inferiority, i.e., if we cannot deem what is good, we cannot claim what is bad.

Student: Addressing the opening quote by Jacob Rosenberg, this is true if one is concerned merely with aesthetics and has predefined specific standards. However if one is looking for conceptual depth and exploration of certain issues, which might make the perceived quality or value diminished in order to convey a specific mood or idea, then the above statement might not suffice.

RF: In the arts, aesthetics can never be “mere.” They are the very core of art’s value. “Conceptual depth and exploration” are not unimportant, but since those concerns exist in all of the arts, we are still left with addressing the specifics of the medium at hand. Shakespeare and Millais both created works dealing with Ophelia, and both in great depth. But if we’re considering Millais’s painting (Fig. 119) we can’t approach it in the same manner we would Shakespeare’s written word; other, unique elements are at work in one that, by definition, aren’t at play in the other.

(Fig. 119) Ophelia, 1851–1852

Sir John Everett Millais

Work should always look as though it had been done with ease, however elaborate; what we see should appear to have been done without effort, whatever may be the agonies beneath the surface. —Millais

The subject and message were similar, but what Shakespeare did with language, Millais did with paint. This is why the distinctions among mediums are most important, otherwise there would be little difference in experience moving from one to the other.

Student: [The Rosenberg] statement also begs for a very narrow and specific definition for the words quality and value. Do they lie merely in the realm of a precise technical skill? What determines quality? It’s a presumption that the definitions be narrow. Technical skill was, and always should be, one consideration within the larger picture of aesthetics. We can hardly define the word art any more.

RF: Only because we’ve allowed that to happen through the natural tendency to defy the demands of excellence, as well as artistic authority. It’s a sad reminder of the devolution of a grand and noble part of our civilization in the name of “progress.”

Student: [Principle #1] does strike me as a true statement. When I think of the word “quality” I like to think of something that had a lot of hard work put into it, time spent focused on making something the way it should be. When I hear of “taste”, it really has nothing to do with quality, because a person can like something regardless of the quality of it. For instance, I could like cartoons that took five minutes to make, over a five year process to make an animated film.

RF: Well said, but the amount of time involved in creating a work of art is generally irrelevant in establishing its quality. A five-minute master drawing by Rembrandt is far superior to a mural that took five years to make but follows no aesthetic standards.

The amount of time involved in creating a work of art is generally irrelevant in establishing its quality.

Student: Being an artist, I felt [principle #2] is valuable and an accurate quote. I always admire all talented artists’ thoughtful creations and they are brilliant thinkers and observers. I totally agree that the artist’s visualization is the most decisive factor behind the successful creation. The creator finds his inspiration through observation, develops his ideas and gives a fabulous masterpiece. Each artist has different imagination. In my opinion, the artist’s own observation, thought process, developing ideas and hard work are a long and weightier task than the final result. I have learned from the renowned artist’s work that they will not worry about how successful their achievement is.

RF: First, I want to clarify that I’m not speaking in philosophical or abstract ways when I use the terms “process” and “journey.” I mean them very concretely and pragmatically. In painting, for instance, it is in the observable strokes of paint masterfully laid down by the artist that the beauty of the painting is found, not in the resultant “effect” of a perceived sunset that those strokes add up to. This is why so much of digital painting, in our age of uncultivated aesthetic sensitivities, can be seen as equal in value to traditional, hand-painted methods, because the focus is only on the resultant effect and not on an observable, physical, touchable medium, since it only exists in the theoretical world of the ether. In an Ingres portrait we can look closely and observe the very stroke—its thickness, depth, behavior on the surface—of a dab of paint in the creation of a woman’s arm. The fact that it is a recognizable arm of a woman is secondary in value to the beauty of the application of the paint that is making the arm recognizable.

Student: This quote [principle #2] brought an immediate flash back to my modern art history class. Jackson Pollock and those around his time of the New York School, really embodied this quote. Pollock is known for his splatter paintings and the controversy of an artist’s talent vs. “a child could do that” type of work. I have watched an interesting video about him some time ago and it included an interview with him. He talks all about the process of each drop of paint being thrown and how each movement itself is important. There were times when he would rig up a pulley system and drop paint down as he literally flew over the canvas. He also spoke about how this was the ultimate form of expression for him as well as thrusting the medium to the foreground. He made paintings that weren’t disguised as photos. I still am unsure about how I feel about this sort of work, but I certainly can appreciate the thought and theory behind it.

In many ways we have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by certain areas of the arts, and have lost our ability to recognize the ridiculous when it stands before us.

It is possible to enjoy something without having to attribute greatness to it.

RF: In actuality, Jackson Pollock and the New York School were the biggest deniers of this principle. They completely threw out aesthetic standards in favor of pure emotionalism, making it very difficult to apply any serious analysis to their work. In the process, they put the audience in the awkward position of having either to accept the “new and the different,” or look uninformed by calling it as they really saw it. In many ways we have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by certain areas of the arts, and have lost our ability to recognize the ridiculous when it stands before us. Because an artist can describe the Rube Goldberg–esque methods of applying paint to a canvas through hoists and pulleys doesn’t mean his work deserves our respect. Our amused curiosity, perhaps, but it is possible to enjoy something without having to attribute greatness to it.

Student: Pollock’s drip paintings go beyond mimicking nature but actually use the language of nature-fractals, which I understand to be something like the patterns of chaos in nature. Of course fractals and chaos had not yet been scientifically discovered when Pollock was painting, but I think this speaks to judge-able standards as well as the beauty of the observable process that you talk about in your treatise. When you look at a Pollock painting, you might logically think that it is only splattered paint on canvas and could be easily duplicated; but something intuitively informs us that there is something more to it—even though he may not have been conscious of using such a high standard, he was definitely aiming for art’s loftiest possibilities.

RF: Good insights, but, unfortunately, Pollock is one of the worst examples of an artist working within the parameters of universal aesthetics. One of the proofs is that his work leaves us needing to intellectualize far beyond what the visual experience should require. The cerebral gymnastics make for impressive fodder in academia, but ultimately his work is more the emperor’s new clothes than “hidden patterns of chaos.” We’ve so impressed ourselves with our modernism and progressiveness that we’ve become blind to the forest for the trees: that, in fact, it really is nothing more than spatters of paint. But how many of us in the arts are willing to risk accusations of being ignorant by standing up and admitting it? Remember, I’m not addressing taste and have no problem accepting someone’s honest enjoyment of whatever art pleases them, including Pollock’s.

Student: I feel like [principle #2] has a particularly grave perspective on digital art as a whole. However, I certainly cannot disagree. While there are superficial similarities between digital painting and traditional painting, I cannot argue that most traditional painting lays bare the process of creation. The viewer of said art can look close enough to see the individual strokes, the texture of those strokes, and even the quality of the paint itself. Traditional art exposes the raw talent of the artist, making their technique, their journey, a very real part of the whole. So I am torn as I struggle with this. On the one hand is the clear and obvious truth regarding the differences between these mediums and techniques. But on the other hand we have, as a consequence, the wholesale dismissal of a vast multitude of artists, the flat denial that their work, by the nature of their medium, can ever aspire to the same level of beauty, or quality, as that of a traditional artist. And, of course, I struggle with this most because of what it says about my work. Because my chosen medium is 3D animation. Because my end result only exists through the assistance of computers, is crafted, in very large part, entirely within a digital system. Because, to be entirely honest, there simply exists no analogue counterpart. So to accept this proposition is to internalize a lower set of standards for myself, to willingly accept that the product of my creation, by its very nature, is inferior in beauty and quality. I hope I have not strayed in my exploration of this proposition. I would very much appreciate any insight, or advice, or even a means to a rationalization, in order to make better sense of this struggle.

RF: An excellent post, and one of the most thought-through I’ve ever read concerning the treatise. First of all, I must salute your honesty and humility in considering the possible devaluation of your work. Fret not, though, because, as I gather, what you do seems to be true to your medium. Let me explain. You are correct about the questionable aspects of digital art, but that is because most digital art is the product of artists using the medium to give the illusion of something it is not: a painted surface. Keep in mind that, as I explain in the treatise, every medium has characteristics unique unto itself, therefore, no medium in and of itself is good or bad. But they can be used inadvisedly and poorly. Digital tools are as legitimate as paint, paintbrush, pencil, pen, and ink. But they are most effective—aesthetically honest—when producing imagery that cannot be done in any other medium. In your case, 3D animation is a fairly unique medium that produces visual results that would be near impossible to produce through any other medium. So, without having seen any of your work, I assume that what I’ve described is what you do. One other consideration to ease your mind: I take greater issue with the artist who uses his medium in a less-than-pure manner yet demands an equal level of respect, than the artist who works in the same way but acknowledges its limitations and recognizes that there is a higher bar of standards that his medium offers should he want to aim for that. In the end, what is most important is maintaining standards of excellence to which we can aspire but possibly fall short of, rather than casting aside standards altogether so as to feel better about what we do.

Student: You discuss the division of mediums having unique aspects for each, every medium has its merits [principle #3]. To say that a work is less because it could have been done better in another medium is considering hindsight into an artist’s equation. Just last week I thought E.T. could be remade better now just because the medium of special effects has advanced since then. However the movie was a timely piece of art that doesn’t need to be revised anymore.

RF: Your example of E.T. is not relevant to the point in that it only has to do with a technology which had advanced over time, not one that created a new and unique medium.

Student: If film’s uniqueness is the fact that it can house [many] mediums, this statement [principle #3] implies that any successful work of literature, that is in turn made into a successful movie, is aesthetically dishonest. And that is flawed. The same principle when applied to considering the aesthetics of a particularly successful shot in a movie, this statement says a successful photograph cannot be a successful shot, though both cinema and photography rely on the same basic principles as a visual medium. Generally this is best represented through the lighting and composition vs the mood of the subject. Film’s relationship with photography and literature renders this statement invalid. That is to say, this statement is correct, minus film. If film’s uniqueness is montage, consider that montage is nothing more than an arranging of individual compositions--or spacial relations--within the mind of the viewer. Since each shot needs to be individually composed, and considered, thinking of a film as a whole is like thinking of a whole album or series of paintings—apples to oranges.

RF: When I say that each medium has unique aspects, I don’t mean to say that they are exclusive. Obviously some aspects will overlap. Yes, film encompasses literature, for instance, but the “literature” is simply a vehicle for the film, as is the particular subject matter in any painting. Let me give you a more concrete example where a medium is not aesthetically effective. As a hypothetical, if a film does nothing but show the drama of a story taking place within one room, with perhaps one or two camera angles, it is doing nothing more than can be accomplished in a stage play adaptation of that piece. It has not utilized film’s uniqueness. This is not to say the film isn’t interesting and doesn’t hold our attention. But is it good filmmaking? Filmmaking’s uniqueness is not that it can “house” other media; in part it’s in its singular ability to telescope time and rapidly jump back and forth from the macro to the micro. Another way of understanding this concept is to simply ask “what about this medium can no other medium replicate?” It is in the answer to that question that we find the true goal for which a medium should strive.

Student: With every aspect of life, we have to define and categorize everything [principle #4]. It is our nature. In order for something to be important there must be an opposite to be unimportant. Whether these categories are being correctly labeled or organized is never relevant. Who gets to decide? What credentials do they have to make such claims? It is just society being itself.

RF: Like a democracy, we get to decide, and we should decide that working experts in the field should be the arbiters of quality, and not critics or historians. Further, our decision should be based upon a common trust in the knowledge and experience—the credentials—of those we choose to guide us. It’s not perfect, but in art, as in democracy, it is the only bulwark against chaos.

Student: I picked [principle #4] because it brings up an issue that I have my own conflicting views on. I don’t necessarily designate craft as a lower art form and ergo something that is reducing the value of fine art. What we typically think of as crafts can also be fine art. If you apply the elements of design to something like embroidery or knitting, you can really create a very special piece. This merge of art and craft is something I’m particularly interested in because it adds a whole new dimension to traditional arts. I like to think of embroidered works that are based on my hand drawn illustrations as “textile paintings.” Anyway, my final point is that yes, insisting something that is of lesser quality is equal to something of higher quality, only serves the purpose of bringing down the higher quality piece. I don’t believe that if something is a “craft” it automatically designates it as the lower quality piece.

RF: Your points are interesting and well stated. If I may counter them, I’d like to start by saying that my choice of wording is very precise. I use the word “value,” not “quality” in the treatise. A craft can be of particularly high quality but, referencing my quote, does it rise above the decorative and/or functional to satisfy the potentially deeper demands and disciplines of the fine arts? You are quite right when you suggest that something like embroidery or knitting can theoretically be considered a higher art form when elements of fine art design are applied; but in that case you’ve simply moved the medium—embroidery—from the realms of the decorative into that of fine art because you’ve applied higher standards to the medium. The concept, then, still holds true, as can be seen with great tapestries. If your original drawings display higher standards than the purely decorative, then embroidery as a vehicle to represent them will be of a higher level than what that particular craft generally produces.

Student: Your ice skating metaphor [principle #5] is interesting to pursue in greater depth as an exploration of the application of standards. The example you mention is first of all, a competition, and that means there are rigidly defined standards as well as traditional ones. There are specifically defined times for exact length of performance, a certain number of types of athletic actions to be performed, and penalties for specific infractions such as falling, or missing a move. It is the competitive nature of a sport to demand that these structures are imposed. How else could there be a winner?

RF: You miss the point here. Though the event is, of course, a competition with relevant restrictions applied, my reason for choosing this analogy is that it is an event of an aesthetic nature, where the beauty of the performance is what is primarily being judged. And it’s that aspect that I present as an example of public acceptance of a judgeable standard.

Student: Such construct is already in place [principle #5]. There are standards within art. The issue is our humanity. Different judges look for different things. Within the same ice skating analogy, there are several judges and they hardly ever all give the same amount of points to any skater. They may all be professionals, all with the same knowledge about the standards by which to judge. However, they all have personal preferences, they all value certain aspects of the performance more than others, they all form their own subjective if not similar opinions. This happens in art as well. A professional artist or critic will bring their personal opinion, preference, and bias into the decision making process. They will choose whether or not to adhere to the standards and which standards to give preference over the others.

RF: You make very good points here, few with which I disagree. But remember, I’ve said all along that the judging itself is not the real concern. It is the existence and agreed-upon standards of quality themselves that are paramount. For the sake of the arts, it should concern us less that individual experts, like the Olympic judges, will disagree by degree, than that there be a framework of accepted standards of excellence from which those experts form their conclusions, however out of perfect sync they may be. Personal opinions, preferences, and biases, as you mention, are the very things against which a universal standard would protect the arts, preventing the arts from devolving into a miasma of relativism.

Student: Standards are guidelines [principle #6] but are often used as hard and fast rules of exclusion.

RF: Why is “exclusion” necessarily bad? As I’ve analogized, the undisciplined free-form figure skater would certainly be “excluded” from competing in that particular organization, and none of us with any artistic common sense would disagree with the decision. Yet it is not being suggested here that an artist (or skater) be prevented from doing anything he likes. What is being discussed is whether universally agreed-upon standards have any ultimate value to the world of art.

At times, discussions turned to the subject of digital art:

Student: [Regarding digital] I’ve always thought that a person who paints well, whatever the medium, paints well.

RF: Only if the artist is truly “painting.” Does a violinist demonstrate his excellence on the violin when playing the keyboard of a synthesizer that sounds like a violin?

Student: Serious, professional artists have only explored digital techniques for the last thirty years or so. I think we are only scratching the surface here. Are we concerned that “digital painting” falls short of achieving what traditional painting has mastered for years? If we are, I think we are wasting our time “judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.”

RF: Not a precise analogy. The “falling short” has nothing to do with its age but with the application of the medium from its very inception as primarily a facsimile of paint on canvas. It didn’t need time to find its unique identity; it was already there, but was ignored in favor of using it in a different manner. As a comparison, when oil painting was developed (beginning roughly in the fifteenth century), it was as the first permanent, transparent medium (before that, the two most common pigment mediums were watercolor and tempera, the former transparent but nonpermanent, the latter opaque), but artists began effectively taking advantage of its unique qualities from the very start, as the earliest examples prove.

I once asked my classes how they would feel about attending an exhibit of a master artist only to discover the works exhibited were extremely high-resolution prints of the originals. They all said they would feel cheated. Why? Because, as they admitted, they wouldn’t be able to observe the actual paint and brushwork of the originals. I reminded them that extremely high-resolution prints are all they’d ever be able to observe at an exhibition of digital art.

I am impressed by your ambitiousness in engaging in this most important topic of standards in art. I, and more than a handful of others in the field, believe there’s a battle for the future of art that needs to be fought, and though the classroom may not be the perfect arena, it nevertheless affords the opportunity to grapple with fellow artists over the details of this subject.

I will begin by saying that you all, for the most part, speak fluently the positions held by most contemporary, liberal-minded artists, voicing exactly the positions that we on the other side of the fence are so concerned about. What many people fail to do in certain areas of life is ask themselves one critical question: what are the consequences of my positions?

Someone commented here that if they had to follow standards they would soon grow bored. This is sad. For four to five centuries, those standards of art produced masterpiece after masterpiece, with hardly the indication of boredom. Individual artists knew their challenge was to beautify the world for their fellow man. Sometime around the mid-nineteenth century artists began to think differently. Rather than expanding upon the previous generations, they slowly began to throw out standards altogether. What were the consequences? Five hundred years of the highest ideals that gave us the monumental works of Bernini’s devotions in marble, Rembrandt’s soul-searching self-portraits, Vermeer’s otherworldly perfection, Bouguereau’s unparalleled brushwork, slowly degraded into the self-indulgence of Picasso’s deconstructed anatomies, Mark Rothko’s blocks of nondescript colors, Jackson Pollock’s paint drippings, and Andy Warhol’s clownish reproductions of soup cans. Throwing out disciplines is anarchic, not progressive, and is often more a case of impatience and ennui than one of courage and growth.

Throwing out disciplines is anarchic, not progressive, and is often more a case of impatience and boredom than one of courage and growth.

We’ve become, in the last generation or so, a somewhat “feelings-drunk” society, conferring great importance upon the visceral (“go with your feelings,” “if it feels good . . . ,” “trust your heart,” etc.). What an artist feels and conveys of his feelings is an integral part of the equation, but hardly its totality. Being visual artists, the visual is our first priority, otherwise we could just as well spin the media wheel and choose whatever comes up to express our “feelings.”

The standards that have been debated here all have the goal of aspiring to the ideal, and ideals are what civilizations have used to propel themselves forward and upward. Standards should not be confused with rules, and no one is claiming a censoring of creative intentions; there is room for everything to be both created and enjoyed. However, the mire into which art has sunk over the last century and a half is one of aesthetic relativism—”It’s good because I, the artist, say so.” This is pure narcissism, putting the desires of the individual before the greater responsibility to art and society.

Let me conclude with the point in my treatise that I feel is most critically important to you as artists: The essence of artistic beauty is not the “illusion” of, say, a man sitting at a table in a Holbein painting (Fig. 120), but the observable application of a medium (oil paint, in this case) by the commanding human hand in the journey toward his visual goal. The beauty is not that of the man’s representational face, it is that of Holbein’s guided brushstrokes of paint that formed that face. Computer-generated art is sadly devoid of this tangible beauty, leaving us with only the resultant illusion.

My words will no doubt spur even more debate, but, ultimately, I ask only that each of you be intellectually honest and ask yourself: Do I arrive at my positions through my emotions, or have I thought them through rationally? Is pleasing myself my only responsibility as an artist or do I have some responsibility to help enhance and beautify society? Do I truly believe in my own self-prescribed notions of artistic value, or am I just too intimidated to live up to something higher and more demanding? Only you know the answer.

Thank you.

(Fig. 120) Portrait of the Merchant Georg Giese, 1532

Hans Holbein, the younger

Though viewers are usually awed by the almost photographic look of Holbein’s portrait—a futuristic concept that would have been alien to him—this characteristic ignores the true value of the painting: the masterful application of paint. It would make for an instructive experience if one could closely examine, side by side, the original of this painting with an original from the modern genre of Photorealism, like that of Fig. 95 by Richard Estes. The differences would become instantly obvious, as Holbein’s work demonstrates the clearly observable and beautifully manipulated brushstrokes, while in the Estes piece, the paint is applied only in a manner intended to give the piece the appearance of a photograph. One is aesthetic, the other merely illusory.

SUMMARY

Roots are more vital than grafts. —Will Durant

So, what is at stake? Unless we build on the standards and ideals of past masters, new art will inevitably be aimless and unable to contribute in any respectable way to the evolution of great art in our culture. It is the foundational ideals, ideals like beauty and depth, that are responsible for the great works, and of which we are now in most dire need.

Echoing historian Will Durant’s quote above, today, without continued ideals, we have lost the culmination of all the forward-propelling greatness from the past—the roots—and instead witness lateral extensions—the grafts—which have little or no connection to anything in our artistic legacy. Like branches growing farther and farther away from the tree, they soon have nothing to support them, and break off under their own weight.

We have arrived at a time where the idea, the theory, even the artist, all have reached unimagined prominence in the arts. Conceptual art, for instance, wherein the idea is more important than its execution, renders skill irrelevant. Again, these “artworks” are the grafts.

To be sure, the replacement of classical art and ideas with rule-breaking and concepts-over-skill is depleting society of that which is culturally most rich and noble. Continuing to replace roots with grafts, as Durant cautioned, has surely resulted in a dying tree.

Some deem skill and beauty to be irrelevant and retrograde. Others mock art of the past, like the Sistine Sibyls by Michelangelo and The Night Watch by Rembrandt because they believe those works were tainted in being commissioned by the Church and the aristocracy, yet fully accept government support of some of today’s most distasteful creations like Holly Hughes’s pornographic performance art and Robbie Conal’s politically charged graffiti posters.

Others counter that following classical standards would lead to “tired repetitions” of earlier art. But it is easy to produce something completely new; it happens each time an artist breathes and claims his breath to be a work of art. What is truly difficult and potentially profound is to produce something new within the demanding expectations of universally held, centuries-old, aesthetic criteria.

And universal and timeless the criteria truly are. Early nineteenth-century Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige created elegant woodblock prints (Fig. 121), and though his cultural background and subjects of interest were entirely different from those of the Western masters of, say, the Renaissance, they both embraced similar ideals. His visual principles were in perfect harmony with those of the Dutch painter Van Eyck (Fig. 122). Nineteenth-century Italian sculptor Pietro Magni (Fig. 123) was centuries beyond and a continent away from the anonymous eleventh-century Chinese sculptor of Fig. 124, but their common aesthetic principles were shared and respected. However, this cultural continuum over time and place can’t occur when the “rules” of art are being invented with each new work, or when art is produced that either offends or distances the public.

(Fig. 121) Moonlight View of Tsukuda with Lady on a Balcony, 1853

Utagawa Hiroshige

I leave my brush in the East,

And set forth on my journey.

I shall see the famous places in the Western Land. —Hiroshige

This tender work, part of a triptych, is a study in the hard, zigzagging angles of a pavilion enveloping the soft, organic forms of an elegant woman and her flowing robes. A simple, two-hued, complementary color scheme of grayed-down blues and oranges adds a sense of quiet to the contemplative woman and evening surroundings.

(Fig. 122) The Virgin Mary detail from The Ghent Altarpiece, c. 1420s–1432

Jan Van Eyck

As best I can, not as I would. —Van Eyck

Similar to Hiroshige’s woodblock (Fig. 121), this detail of the Holy Mother also depicts a woman in deep contemplation, echoes the figure’s same triangular shape, and presents the hands in a comparable, gentle pose. The Van Eyck may have taken longer to render, but both artists demonstrated great care in design and attention to detail, showing that looking “photographic” is irrelevant in establishing visual quality and beauty.

(Fig. 123) The Reading Girl (La Leggitrice), 1861

Pietro Magni

Continuing a theme, Magni’s sculpture of a lone, preoccupied woman exhibits graceful lines throughout the figure and garment, breathing such life into the piece that one almost forgets it is cold marble, instead believing it is warm flesh and fabric.

(Fig. 124) Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in Water Moon Form (Shuiyue Guanyin), eleventh century

Anonymous, Chinese

He or she may have lived eighteen hundred years before, but the Chinese artist treated the figure and garments of their sculpture to as much loving detail as did Magni (Fig. 123). The separation of centuries and dissimilar cultures seem to have had little effect on how each artist viewed gesture, form, movement, and execution. As stated in these pages, the basics of aesthetics are universal.

We have also elevated the idea of “in my opinion” to the exalted level which once belonged to those who were trained, vastly experienced, and keenly aware of what disciplines each medium required to pass muster as a masterpiece. “No one’s gonna tell ME what is good or bad,” is what’s left of five centuries of measurable excellence having been tossed out. And so now, no Michelangelos, no Leonardos, no Rembrandts, no Leightons, no Rockwells. The consequences? Betty Tompkins’s pornographic canvases, Piero Manzoni’s cans of his own excrement, Salvatore Garau’s invisible sculptures. Other than showcasing personal, unbridled license of expression, these works of art are hardly that which future civilizations will deem as having made our society as noble as the Renaissance.

To be clear, the death of visual quality and beauty in art is not exclusively the fault of artists; it is equally the fault of the so-called art community: the museum heads, gallery owners, and critics who encourage and financially enable the production of rubbish. It is they who champion graffiti and call it genius, promote the scatological and call it meaningful. It is they who, in reality, are the naked emperors of art, for who else would spend $10 million on a rock (Fig. 47) and call it art? Most depressing of all are government agencies that funnel tax money as grants to some of the worst offenders in the field of art.

Thankfully, there is currently a slow but steady reevaluation of the late classicists, the very artists unfairly scorned by the early modernists. Freed of the emotional upheavals of the times, those classical masterpieces are again being seen for their inherent, eternal beauty (Fig. 125), while flash-in-the-pan movements like Pop and Op Art are already looked at for the fads they were—interesting and amusing, but only momentarily, and far from elevating.

Perhaps this reevaluation will continue to have an effect on future artists, which will benefit the public as well. To be sure, there is a growing body of artists worldwide who have been working in and promoting classical ideals. It only needs greater exposure and a supportive public to foster that growth

(Fig. 125) The Garden of the Hesperides, 1891

Frederic, Lord Leighton

The enemy, then, is this indifference in the presence of the ugly. —Leighton

Leighton devoted his life to bequeathing to society the results of his dedication to the very highest level of quality. The scorning and burying of his and other classicists’ work by the critics and historians of the early years of modern art left later generations bereft of some of art’s greatest masterpieces.

Our experience with a classical artwork deepens over time and with each viewing, while the experience one derives from a work of modern art is generally instantaneous, and, like a joke that requires a punch line, is over once one “gets it” (Fig. 126).

(Fig. 126) Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994–2000

Jeff Koons

Art is about profundity. . . . I’m making some of the greatest art being made now. . . . I try to create work that doesn’t make viewers feel they’re being spoken down to. —Koons

This sculpture is an example of how a work of art can both amuse and insult. Koons might indeed believe his work is “profound” but it more often elicits snickers, because viewers find it comical that the artist expects them to take an oversize toy seriously. After the initial humor fades, viewers then experience the insult of knowing they are being conned into accepting that, because it is in a museum, the sculpture must be respectable art, though it displays no noticeable skill or originality of concept. It is just common. And big. And worth $58.4 million.

(Fig. 127) Tree, 2014

Paul McCarthy

Described as an installation piece, this work presents the perfect example of statement over aesthetics; there is little in the way of craft to recommend it visually, an uninspired conical shape being its only “design.” The artist’s sole purpose was to exhibit a thinly disguised, prurient joke (the object is a giant version of a sexual toy) masquerading as a stylized Christmas tree. Parisians saw through it and were not amused, one incensed citizen bringing it down by deflating it before it was even three days old.

In the end, there is one thing that art produced within classical standards can’t do—it can’t fool you. Its level of quality is readily apparent to anyone who can see, independent of its meaning or theory (Fig. 128). On the contrary, you might be thoroughly impressed with the work of a modern, cutting-edge artist with its deep-sounding theory or backstory, but you have no way of knowing if you’re being taken for a sucker (Fig. 129). May I offer an observation? Movies depend on box office. The more tickets the public purchases the more successful the movie, resulting in a cinematic environment rich in creative competition. The same goes for music and book publishing; if the public isn’t interested in buying the songs of a musician or the books of an author, that musician or author fails. The only area in which this creative/economic relationship with the public doesn’t exist is in art. Not only is the art world almost completely detached from the public, it often sneers at that public while producing work in direct contradiction to the public’s tastes and morals. This wouldn’t be the case were artists dependent upon a “box office.” If they were, we might be treated to work at the same level of quality as the finest films, music, and literature produced today. Another way to look at it would be to ask: how likely is it that millions of patrons would line up outside world movie theaters to pay a hefty ticket price to view films that are the creative equivalent of the Twombly piece in Fig. 129?

There is one thing that art produced within classical standards can’t do—it can’t fool you.

(Fig. 128) Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis, 1889

Henryk Siemiradzki

So much can be taken in when viewing a work such as this that it often requires repeated visits. Siemiradzki, one of Poland’s academic masters of the nineteenth century, was known for his huge canvases of historical, religious, and mythological themes. Paintings such as this exhibit the results of both his undeniable artistic skills as well as the well-researched backgrounds of the respective subject. In a sense, Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis offers the fullness of painting, so attended to is every potential aspect of the medium. Sadly, the art establishment promotes no equal today of a Siemiradzki (though they may exist). Sadder still is his own complete exclusion from modern histories of art.

(Fig. 129) Untitled (New York City), 1968, 1968

Cy Twombly

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history.

It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization. —Twombly

How might this visual honestly be perceived if discovered outside the context of a museum exhibit? Any reasonable person might question if Twombly (and his gobbledegook personal statement) is serious. Certainly, if one wanted to get away with scamming the art world, there could be no better example. If it was a scam, it was a scam that garnered $70.5 million at a 2015 Sotheby’s auction.

What we’ve missed for well over a century is that which earlier societies experienced on a regular basis when standing before the art of their eras: awe—awe before monumental works that showcased the highest level of visual skill attainable, like those of Fig. 130 and 131. Isn’t awe preferable to the merely interesting or clever? Preferable to needing some elite, “special knowledge” to “understand” art which is confusing or even offensive?

When we place ideas above skill—to be blunt, if we ignore skill, artistic excellence suffers, and, in great measure, so does society. Would it not be a noble and worthy cause to return skill to its supremacy in the arts?

The very survival of art is in the answer to that question. This is what is at stake.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

(Fig. 130) Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–1652

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Three things are needed for success in painting and sculpture: to see beauty when young and accustom oneself to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice. —Bernini

Few sculptors had the ability to convey something as emotionally complex as Saint Teresa’s religious ecstasy, described by her as “the sweetness of pain.” It is seen here in both her absorbing facial expression and undulating folds of her flowing robe.

(Fig. 131) A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866

Albert Bierstadt

Man is so fortunate to dwell in this American Garden of Eden. —Bierstadt

Before Americans could easily venture to the great western expanses of their new land, they relied on artists (and later, photographers) to show them what that vast part of the country looked like. Painters would spend months and even years traveling by horseback and covered wagon across the wide wilderness, doing studies at stunning locations and bringing the research back to their eastern studios for completion. Bierstadt was arguably the best of what became known as the Hudson River School, and his massive paintings were arguably the most popular. A single painting like this one would go on tour from city to city, drawing great, paying crowds for each showing. Bierstadt’s were not “pretty pictures” (see page 8); they were powerful masterpieces of paint, expertly executed, sometimes over several years. They were also not replaced by photography, since each painting was an artistically crafted and romanticized version of the respective scene, something no photograph is capable of doing without manual, “painterly” revision. Fortunately, we still have the opportunity to experience what those long-ago crowds did, by visiting museums that showcase these works. We can then stand before them in awe and wonderment at the great heights artists were once able to reach, before their services were sadly rendered no longer necessary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ahmari, Sohrab. The New Philistines. Biteback Publishing, 2017.

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Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press, 1954.

Barrington, Mrs. Russell. The Life, Letters, and Work of Frederic Leighton. (in two volumes) New York, The Macmillan Company, 1906.

Bartoli, Damien, and Frederick C. Ross. William Bouguereau—His Life and Works. Antique Collectors’ Club, 2010, 2014.

Barzun, Jacques. The Use and Abuse of Art. Princeton University Press, 1973.

Becker, Edwin (editor). Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Rizzoli, 1996.

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Born, Annick, and Maximilliaan P. J. Martens. Van Eyck In Detail. Abrams, 2012.

Buck, Stephanie. Hans Holbein. Könemann, 1999.

Buechner, Thomas S. Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1970.

Čelebonović, Aleksa. Some Call It Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1974.

Coyle, Heather Campbell (editor). Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Dell, John Edward (editor). Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists. Watson-Guptill, 2000.

Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Bloomsbury Press, 2008.

Elia, Miriam, and Ezra Elia. We Go to the Gallery. Dung Beetle, 2014.

Fenner, Arnie, and Cathy Fenner. Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master Of Fantastic Art: Frank Frazetta. Underwood Books, 1998.

Haak, Bob. Rembrandt: His Life, His Work, His Time. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1969.

Hambidge, Jay. The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry. Yale University Press, 1926.

Harding, James. Artistes Pompiers. Rizzoli, 1979.

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Jennings, Kate F. N. C. Wyeth. Knickerbocker Press, 1998.

Johnson, Paul. Art: A New History. HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.

Jones, Stephen, Christopher Newall, Leonée Ormond, Richard Ormond, and Benedict Read. Frederic, Lord Leighton: Eminent Victorian Artist. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.

Kamhi, Michelle Marder. Who Says That’s Art?. Pro Arte Books, 2014.

Kendall, Richard, John Leighton, and Sjraar van Heugten. Van Gogh’s Van Goghs. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

Kiekol, Daniel. Russian Painting. Könneman, 2018.

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Michaelis, David. N. C. Wyeth: A Biography. Knopf, 1998.

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Parry, Linda. William Morris. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.

Peltre, Christine. Orientalism in Art. Abbeville Press, 1997.

Riding, Elizbeth. The Art Game—How the Art of Painting Was Destroyed By Modern Art. Marula Books, 2015.

Rosenberg, Jakob. On Quality In Art. Princeton University Press, 1967.

Salmi, Mario, and various contributors. The Complete Works of Raphael. Reynal & Company, 1969.

———. The Complete Works of Michelangelo. Reynal & Company, 1966.

Scruton Sir Roger. The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. St. Augustine’s Press, 1983.

———. Beauty. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Strong, Roy. Recreating the Past: British History and the Victorian Painter. Thames & Hudson, 1978.

Thuillier, Jacques. Georges De La Tour. Flammarion, 1993.

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———. Olympian Dreamers: Victorian Classical Painters. Constable, 1983.

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Zöllner, Frank. Leonardo: The Complete Paintings. Taschen, 2004.

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Magazines

Dalrymple, Theodore. “Beauty and the Best.” The New English Review, January, 2009.

Deutsch, David. “Interview with Kristin Lynn Sainani about Objective Beauty.” Nature Magazine, October, 2015.

Fagin, Abigail. “Why Links Between Colors and Emotions May Be Universal.” Psychology Today (online), February 8, 2022.

Florczak, Robert. “Classical Ideals Give Culture Depth.” The Epoch Times, October 28, 2015.

Grammer, Prof. Karl. “Interview with Kristin Lynn about Beauty and Evolution; Sainani.” Nature Magazine, October, 2015.

Wald, Chelsea. “Neuroscience: The Aesthetic Brain.” Nature Magazine, October, 2015.

Media

Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World. 2017. Documentary about the economics behind the scenes of the contemporary art market featuring interviews with key figures in the field include this author.

O Fim Da Beleza. 2022. Three part Brazilian documentary about the degradtaion of art and architecure featuring interviews with international thinkers on the subject including this author.

WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. 2023. Documentary on the comic book artists whose images were stolen by Lichtenstein for his works.

Why Beauty Matters. 2009. BBC documentary by Sir Roger Scruton on the importance of beauty in our lives.

Why Is Classical Art So Good? 2023. PragerU video by Robert Florczak.

Why Is Modern Art So Bad? 2014. PragerU video by Robert Florczak.

ARTIST INDEX

(pages with images in bold italics)

Adams, Ansel, 162

Adams, Gil, 131

Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 35, 36, 84, 86, 91, 105, 214, 215

Anonymous, 29, 71, 72, 73, 172, 202

Auer, Jakob, 3

Bacon, Francis, 36

Banksy, 141, 144, 146, 147

Barnet, Will, 153

Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 107

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 43, 67, 75, 113, 193, 212

Bierstadt, Albert, 213, 214

Bonnat, Léon, 5

Bouguereau, William, 28, 33, 34, 52, 56, 84, 85, 91, 93, 102, 103, 105, 178, 193, 214, 216

Brâncuşi, Constantin, 42

Braque, Georges, 121

Breton, Jules, 84, 87, 88

Canova, Antonio, 80

Caravaggio, 77, 146, 177

Cézanne, Paul, 89, 90, 91, 105,

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 141, 143,

Close, Chuck, 137, 139

Conal, Robbie, 198

Courbet, Gustave, 82

David, Jacques-Louis, 178, 179,

Degas, Edgar, 89, 95, 103, 106,

De Kooning, Willem, 19

Delaunay, Robert, 123, 126

Donatello, 67

Duchamp, Marcel, 169, 170

El Greco, 20,

Emin, Tracey, 7, 141

Estes, Richard, 137, 138, 196

Ferrari, León, 59

Flack, Audrey, 137, 173, 174

Frazetta, Frank, 153, 155, 215

Friedrich, Caspar David, 81

Freud, Lucian, 34

Garau, Salvatore, 203

Gauguin, Paul, 21, 106, 116, 100

Gelatin, 68

Géricault, Théodore, 2, 4

Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 84, 88, 91, 214

Giambologna, 76

Gris, Juan, 121, Heizer, Michael, 62

Hiroshige, Utagawa, 14, 198, 199, 200

Hirst, Damien, 141, 144, 145

Hockney, David, 25, 177, 178

Hokusai, Katsushika, 79

Holbein the younger, Hans, 114, 195, 196, 214

Hopper, Edward, 9

Hunt, William Holman, 104

Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 23, 25, 114, 184, 216

Jackson, Richard, 57

Johns, Jasper, 132, 134

Kandinsky, Wassily, 123, 124, 126

Kline, Franz, 127, 129,

Kokoschka, Oskar, 39

Koons, Jeff, 206

Kosuth, Joseph, 141, 142,

La Tour, Georges de, 118, 146, 147, 216,

Leighton, Frederic, 98, 204, 214, 215

Leonardo da Vinci, 15, 54, 118, 177, 203, 216

Lichtenstein, Roy, 132, 135, 217

Lipchitz, Jacques, 44

Magni, Pietro, 198, 201, 202

Malevich, Kazimir, 58

Manet, Édouard, 47, 110

Manzoni, Piero, 203

Matisse, Henri, 28,

McCarthy, Paul, 207

Michelangelo Buonarroti, 49, 52, 53, 60, 61, 67, 75, 80, 110, 143, 177, 198, 203, 216

Millais, John Everett, 181, 182,

Mirza ‘Ali, 74

Mondrian, Piet, 123, 125

Monet, Claude, 96, 97, 100, 103, 105, 106, 115, 149,

Moore, Henry, 30

Morisot, Berthe, 89, 92,

Morris, William, 167, 168, 216

Ofili, Chris, 65

Parrish, Maxfield, viii, 17, 149, 152, 215

Picasso, Pablo, 40, 118, 121, 122, 149, 193

Pissarro, Camille, 89, 90, 93,

Pixar Studios, 158

Pollock, Jackson, 127, 130, 131, 184, 185, 186, 193

Pyle, Howard, 149, 150, 214

Raphael Sanzio, 64, 216

Rauschenberg, Robert, 132, 136

Rembrandt van Rijn, cover, 52, 55, 110, 131, 144, 177, 183, 193, 198, 203, 215

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 89, 94, 95, 105, 106

Riemenschneider, Tilman, 75

Rockwell, Norman, 153, 154, 203, 214

Rodin, Auguste, 41, 42, 72

Rothko, Mark, 8, 131, 193

Rousseau, Henri, 116, 117, 118

Rubens, Peter Paul, 27, 29

Segal, George, 50

Seurat, Georges, 116, 117, 119, 120,

Siemiradzki, Henryk, 99, 209,

Sisley, Alfred, 114

Smith, David, 127, 128

Smith, Tony, 108

Solomon, Solomon Joseph, 38, 48

Tompkins, Betty, 203

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry de, 116, 117, 120

Twombly, Cy, 208, 210

Van der Rohe, Mies, 166,

Van Dieken, Julian, 159

Van Eyck, Jan, 112, 114, 122, 200, 214,

Van Gogh, Vincent, 87, 101, 102, 103, 104, 116,

Vermeer, Johannes, 46, 47, 101, 113, 118, 159, 171, 176, 177, 178, 193, 216

Von Max, Gabriel, 38

Wang Jian, 78

Walt Disney Studios, 157

Warhol, Andy, 63, 132, 133, 175, 193

Winogrand, Garry, 161

Wyeth, N. C., 149, 151, 214, 215

INDEX OF ARTWORKS

All images in the public domain unless specifically noted

(Cover Left) Self Portrait at 34, 1640 (oil on canvas, 40" × 31"),

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)

The National Gallery, London

(Cover Right) Woman in Pink, c. 1924 (oil on canvas, 28.75" × 21.4"),

Chaim Soutine (French, 1893–1943)

Saint Louis Art Museum

(Fig 1) Apollo and Daphne, before 1688 (ivory, 17.3"),

Jakob Auer (Austrian, 1645–1706)

The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Wiki Commons, attribution: Manfred Werner/ Tsui)

(Fig. 2) The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819 (oil on canvas, 16' × 23.5'),

Théodore Géricault (French, 1791–1824)

The Louvre, Paris

(Fig. 3) My Bed, 1998 (full-size, disheveled bed with various belongings),

Tracey Emin (English, 1963–)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 4) Untitled No. 17, 1961, 1961 (oil on canvas, 93" × 76"),

Mark Rothko (Latvian-American, 1903–1970)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 5) View of Kangawa at Sunset, 1833–1834 (polychrome woodblock print; ink and dyes on paper, 9.5" × 14"),

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

(Fig. 6) The Last Supper, c. 1490s (tempera on gesso, 15' × 29.2'),

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)

The Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

(Fig. 7) Study For Daybreak, 1922 (watercolor and collage, 15" × 24"), Maxfield Parrish (American, 1870–1966)

Private collection

(Fig. 8) Woman I, 1950–52 (oil and metallic paint on canvas, 76" × 58"), Willem de Kooning (Dutch-

American, 1904–1997)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 9) Laocoön, 1610–1614 (oil on canvas, 56" × 76"),

Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos (El Greco) (Venetian-Greek and Spanish, 1541–1614)

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 10) Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888 (oil on canvas, 28.4" × 35.8"),

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)

The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

(Fig. 11) The Violinist Niccolò Paganini, 1819 (pencil, 11.7" × 8.6"),

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)

The Louvre

(Fig. 12) Sarika II, 1922 (chalk on paper, 25" × 18.9"),

Max Beckmann (German, 1884–1950)

Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (QR code)

(Fig. 14) Venus in Front of the Mirror, c. 1613–1614 (oil on canvas, 48.8" × 38.5"),

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640)

The Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

(Fig. 15) La Coiffure, 1901 (oil on canvas, 37.4" × 31.5"),

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 16) The Dying Gaul, 1st or 2nd century AD (marble, 37" × 73.5" × 35"),

Anonymous Roman

The Capitoline Museums, Rome (Wiki Commons, attribution: Alonso de Mendoza)

(Fig. 17) Draped Reclining Woman, 1957–1958 (bronze, 43" × 82" × 36")

Henry Moore (English, 1898–1986),

The Tate Museum, London (Wiki Commons, attribution: Rufus46)

(Fig. 18–22) Head of a Young Girl, 1898 (oil on canvas, 15.5" × 12.5"),

William Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

Private collection

(Fig. 23) Woman with Bared Breast, (detail) 1970–1972 (oil on canvas, 25" × 19.5" full size),

Lucian Freud (German-English, 1922–2011)

The Saatchi Gallery, London (QR code)

(Fig. 24) An Oleander, 1882 (oil on canvas, 35.9" × 25.7"),

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Dutch-British denizen, 1836– 1912)

Private collection

(Fig. 25) Three Studies for a Crucifixion (central panel), 1962 (oil with sand on canvas, three panels, 58" × 57"),

Francis Bacon (Irish-English, 1909–1992)

The Guggenheim Museum, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 26) Tannhäuser and Venus, c. 1878 (oil on canvas, 76.3" × 54.7"),

Gabriel von Max (Czech, 1840–1915)

The National Museum of Warsaw

(Fig. 27) Ajax and Cassandra, 1886 (oil on canvas 9' 9" × 5'),

Solomon J. Solomon (English, 1860–1927)

The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Australia

(Fig. 28) Two Nudes (Lovers), 1913 (oil on canvas, 64.25" × 38.5"),

Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian, 1886–1980)

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 29) The Embrace, 1903 (pastel on paper, 39.3" × 23.5"),

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)

Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 30 a) The Kiss, 1882 (marble, 71.5"H × 44.3"W × 46"D),

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917)

Musée Rodin, Paris (Wiki Commons, attribution: Szilas)

(Fig. 30 b) The Kiss, 1882 (marble, 71.5"H × 44.3"W × 46"D),

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917)

Musée Rodin, Paris (Wiki Commons, attribution: Caeciliusinhorto)

(Fig. 31 a) The Kiss, 1910 (stone, 35.4"H),

Constantin Brâncuşi (Romanian, 1876–1957)

Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 31 b) The Kiss, 1910 (stone, 35.4"H),

Constantin Brâncuşi (Romanian, 1876–1957)

Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 32 a) David, 1623–1624 (marble, 67"H),

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680)

The Galleria Borghese, Rome (photo, Robert Florczak)

(Fig. 32) David, 1623–1624 (marble, 67"H),

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680)

The Galleria Borghese, Rome (photo, Robert Florczak)

(Fig. 33) Marmor, 1914 (marble, 17.4"H × 5.3"W × 3.9"D),

Jacques Lipchitz (Lithuanian-American, 1891–1973)

Private collection (Fair use, transformative)

(Fig. 34) Woman with a Water Jug, 1660–1662 (oil on canvas, 18" × 16"),

Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

(Fig. 35) A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881–1882 (oil on canvas, 37.7" × 51.1"),

Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)

The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

(Fig. 36) Portrait of Blanche Marchesi de Castrone, 1927 (oil on canvas, 36" × 27.75"),

Solomon Joseph Solomon (English, 1860–1927)

Private collection

(Fig. 37) The Deposition (The Florentine Pietà), c. 1547–1555 (marble, 109" tall),

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564)

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence (Wiki Commons, attribution: Luca Aless)

(Fig. 38) Woman on White Wicker Rocker, 1984–1985 (bronze with white patina, life size, 42.5" × 36" × 44"),

George Segal (American, 1924–2000)

Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ (QR code)

(Fig. 39) The Pietà, 1498–1499 (marble, 68.5" × 76.8"),

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564)

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City (Wiki Commons, attribution: Stanislav Traykov)

(Fig. 40) Mona Lisa, 1503–1506 (oil on poplar panel, 30" × 21"),

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)

Musée du Louvre, Paris

(Fig. 41) The Hundred Guilder Print, 1649 (etching, engraving, and drypoint; second state of two, 11" × 15.5"),

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)

Various collections

(Fig. 42) Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, 1880 (oil on canvas, 32.25" × 22.75"),

William Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

(Fig. 43) Bad Dog, 2013 (fiberglass, 28'),

Richard Jackson (American, 1939–)

First exhibited at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (QR code)

(Fig. 44) Black Square, 1915 (oil on linen, 31.3" × 31.3"),

Kazimir Malevich (Russian, 1878–1935)

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

(Fig. 45) Sacred Heart (Sagrado Corazón), 2000 (plastic figurine and iron meat grinder, 14.5" × 9.8" × 4"),

León Ferrari (Argentinian, 1920-2013)

The Ferrari family collection

(Fig. 46) David, September 13, 1501–June 8, 1504 (marble, 17' × 6.5'),

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564)

Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy (Wiki Commons, attribution: Jörg Bittner)

(Fig. 47) Levitated Mass, 2012 (Rock, 21.5'),

Michael Heizer (American, 1944–)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (QR code)

(Fig. 48) The Alba Madonna, 1510 (oil transferred from wood to canvas, 37.25" round),

Rafael Sanzio (Italian, 1483–1520)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 49) The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996 (oil, elephant dung, glitter, polyester resin, and pornographic images, 8' × 6'),

Chris Ofili (English, 1968–)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 50) David, c. 1440s (bronze, 62.2" H × 21.5" diam.),

Donatello (Italian, c. 1386–1466)

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (Wiki Commons, attribution: Tetraktys)

(Fig. 51) Vorm-Fellows-Attitude, 2018 (plaster and brown clay, various oversizes),

Gelitin (a collective of four Austrian artists, founded c. 1993)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 52) Relief from the Royal Tomb el-Amarna, c. 1353–1336 BC (limestone, 20.5" × 18.9"),

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo (Photo credit: Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, San Jose, CA)

(Fig. 53) Laocoön and His Sons, between 27 BC and 68 AD (marble, 6.83' H × 5.3' W × 3.7' D),

Anonymous, (Roman)

Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City Wiki Commons, attribution: Livioandronico2013)

(Fig. 54) Christ Pantocrator, (detail from the Deësis mosaic) c. 13th century (mosaic, 17' × 19.7', complete mural),

Artist unknown

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

(Fig. 55) Rustam Recovers Rakhsh From Afrasiyab’s Herd (cropped), c. 1525–1535 (gouache and ink heightened with gold on paper, 13.5" × 11" uncropped),

Mirza ‘Ali (attributed) (Iranian, active c. 1525–1575)

Private collection

(Fig. 56) The Holy Blood Altar (detail), c. 1500–1555 (limewood, 29.5' total height),

Tilman Riemenschneider (German, c. 1460–1531)

Sankt Jakob Church, Rothenburg on the Tauber, Germany (Wiki Commons, attribution: CSvBibra)

(Fig. 57) Abduction of a Sabine Woman, 1579–1583 (marble, 13'5" H),

Giambologna (Flemish-Italian, 1529–1608)

Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence (Wiki Commons, attribution: Arnoldius)

(Fig. 58) Supper at Emmaus, 1601 (oil on canvas, 55" × 77"),

Caravaggio (Italian, 1571–1610)

The National Gallery, London

(Fig. 59) White Clouds on the Xiao-Xiang River, 1668 (ink and color on paper, 53.6" × 24.9"),

Wang Jian (Chinese, 1598–1677)

National Museum of Asian Art at The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 60) Poem by Tenchi Tennō, 1839 (woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 9.9" × 14.3"),

Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

(Fig. 61) Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1787–1793 (marble, 61" × 66"),

Antonio Canova (Italian, 1757–1822)

The Louvre, Paris (Wiki Commons, attribution: Jean-Pol Grandmont)

(Fig. 62) The Sea of Ice, 1823–1824 (oil on canvas, 38" × 49.9"),

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany

(Fig. 63) The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855 (oil on canvas, 142" × 235"),

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

(Fig. 64) Homer and His Guide, 1874 (oil on canvas, 82.2" × 56.2"),

William-Adolph Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

The Milwaukee Art Museum

(Fig. 65) Death of the Pharaoh’s First Born Son, 1872 (oil on canvas, 30.3" × 49"),

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Dutch-British denizen, 1836– 1912)

The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

(Fig. 66) La Falaise, 1874 (oil on canvas, 32.25" × 46.5"),

Jules Breton (French, 1827–1906)

Private collection

(Fig. 67) Éminence Grise, 1873 (oil on canvas, 27" × 39.7"),

Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

(Fig. 68) A Modern Olympia, c. 1873–1874 (oil on canvas, 18.1" × 21.6"),

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906)

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

(Fig. 69) Le Berceau (The Cradle), 1872 (oil on canvas, 22" × 18.1"),

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

(Fig. 70) Hoarfrost, 1873 (oil on canvas, 25.5" × 36.6"),

Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

(Fig. 71) Les Moissonneurs (The Reapers), 1873 (oil on canvas, 23.6" × 29.1"),

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Private collection

(Fig. 72) The Laundress, 1873 (oil on canvas, 9.9" × 7.6"),

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA

(Fig. 73) Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872 (oil on canvas, 18.9" × 24.8"),

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)

Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

(Fig. 74) Malin Head, Donegal, 1874 (oil study on canvas, 10.2" × 11.2")

Frederic, Lord Leighton (English, 1830–1896),

The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

(Fig. 75) Harbor View with Rocky Edge, c. 1880–1890 (oil study on canvas, 10.8" × 15.1")

Henryk Siemiradzki (Polish, 1843–1902),

The National Museum, Warsaw

(Fig. 76) The Red Vineyards at Arles (Montmajour), 1888 (oil on canvas, 29.5" × 36.6"),

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

(Fig. 77) Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep), 1852 (oil on canvas, 17" × 23"),

William Holman Hunt (English, 1827–1910)

The Tate, London

(Fig. 78) Warrior, 1982 (acrylic and oilstick on wood panel, 72" × 48"),

Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 79) Die, 1962 (Steel, 72.38" cubed),

Tony Smith (American, 1912–1980)

The Whitney Museum of American Art New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 80) Row of Poplars in Moret, 1888 (oil on canvas, 21.25" × 28.75"),

Alfred Sisley (French, 1839–1899)

Private collection

(Fig. 81) Millstones, 1890 (though signed in 1891) (oil on canvas, 25.63" × 36.75"),

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)

Private collection

(Fig. 82) The Equatorial Jungle, 1909 (oil on canvas, 55.3" × 50.9"),

Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910)

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 83) Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, 1888 (oil on canvas, 70.5" × 80.4"),

Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(Fig. 84) At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895 (oil on canvas, 48" × 55"),

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)

The Art Institute of Chicago

(Fig. 85) Femme Assise (Seated Woman), 1909 (oil on canvas, 31.8" × 25.6"),

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)

Private collection

(Fig. 86) Composition VII, 1913 (oil on canvas, 78.75" × 118"),

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944)

The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

(Fig. 87) Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, 1921 (oil on canvas, 23.4" sq.),

Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944)

The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

(Fig. 88) Circular Forms, 1930 (oil on canvas, 26.5" × 43.2")

Robert Delaunay (French, 1885–1941),

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City

(Fig. 89) Composition, c. 1950 (oil on board mounted on Masonite, 76.8" × 30.25"),

Franz Kline (American, 1910–1962)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 90) Cubi XIX, 1964 (stainless steel, 9.4' × 4.9' × 3.3')

David Smith (American, 1906–1965),

The Tate, London (QR code)

Pg. 176 (no Fig. Number) Silver and Black, 1950 (oil on canvas, 21" × 16"),

Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956)

The Butler Institute, Youngstown, Ohio

(Fig. 91) Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box, 1964 (synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, 10" × 19" × 9.5"),

Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 92) Three Flags, 1958 (encaustic on canvas, 30.5" × 45.5" × 4.5"),

Jasper Johns (American, 1930–)

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 93) Drowning Girl, 1963 (oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 67.5" × 66.75"),

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 94) Retroactive II, 1963 (oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 84" × 60"),

Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925–2008)

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Fair use)

(Fig. 95) Diner, 1971 (oil on canvas, 40.25" × 50"),

Richard Estes (American, 1932–)

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (QR code)

(Fig. 96) Big Self-Portrait, 1967–1968 (acrylic on gessoed canvas, 107.5" × 83.5"),

Chuck Close (American, 1940–2021)

The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (QR code)

(Fig. 97) One and Three Chairs, 1965 (life-size objects),

Joseph Kosuth (American, 1940–2021)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 98) Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 (temporary) (1,076,000 square feet of fabric),

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Bulgarian, 1935–2020; Moroccan, 1935–2009)

Berlin (QR code)

(Fig. 99) The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 (tiger shark in a glass and steel display, with 5% formaldehyde solution, 84" × 204" × 84"),

Damien Hirst (English, 1965–)

The Tate, London (QR code)

(Fig. 100) Flower Thrower, 2003 (spray paint on building outer wall, 84" × 204"),

Banksy (English, 1974–)

Bethlehem, Israel (QR code)

(Fig. 101) The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, c. 1635–1637 (oil on canvas, 46" × 36.25"),

Georges de La Tour (French, 1593–1652)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

(Fig. 102) Marooned, 1909 (oil on canvas, 40" × 60"),

Howard Pyle (American, 1853–1911)

The Delaware Art Museum

(Fig. 103) Blind Pew, 1911 (oil on canvas, 47" × 38"),

N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)

Private collection

(Fig. 104) Garden of Allah, 1918 (oil on panel, 15" × 30"),

Maxfield Parrish (American, 1870–1966)

Private collection

(Fig. 105) Saying Grace, 1951 (oil on canvas, 42" × 40"),

Norman Rockwell (American, 1894–1978)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 106) Conan the Barbarian, 1965 (oil on canvas, 30" × 20"),

Frank Frazetta (American, 1928–2010)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 107) Background scene for the film Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest, 2006 (digital illustration),

Walt Disney Studios (QR code)

(Fig. 108) Frame from the film Toy Story, 1995 (digital animation),

Pixar Studios (QR code)

(Fig. 109) A Girl with Glowing Earrings, 2023 (A.I. generated image),

Julian van Dieken (German, 1985–)

(Fig. 110) World’s Fair, New York, 1964 (gelatin silver print, 11" × 14"),

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984) (QR code)

(Fig. 111) Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, c. 1937,

Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984) (QR code)

(Fig. 112) Notre-Dame de Paris, initial construction between 1163 and 1260,

Paris, France

(photo, Robert Florczak)

(Fig. 113) The Seagram Building, constructed between 1956 and 1958,

designed by Mies van der Rohe (German-American, 1886–1969)

New York City (photo, Lukas Florczak)

(Fig. 114) Saville Armchair c. 1890,

The William Morris Co. (George Jack design) (QR code)

(Fig. 115) Fountain, 1917 (porcelain urinal),

Marcel Duchamp (French 1887–1968)

(Fig. 116) Burial Urn, c. 1000–1250 (ceramic),

Marajoara culture

The American Museum of Natural History, New York City

(Fig. 117) Leonardo’s Lady, 1974 (oil over synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 74" × 80"),

Audrey Flack (American, 1931–2024)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (QR code)

(Fig. 118) The Death of Marat, 1793 (oil on canvas, 64" × 50"),

Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

(Fig. 119) Ophelia, 1851–1852 (oil on canvas, 30" × 44"),

Sir John Everett Millais (English, 1829–1896)

The Tate Museum, London

(Fig. 120) Portrait of the Merchant Georg Giese, 1532 (oil and tempera on oak panel, 34" × 38"),

Hans Holbein, the younger (German, c. 1497–1543)

The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

(Fig. 121) Moonlight View of Tsukuda with Lady on a Balcony, 1853 (woodblock print, 14" × 10"),

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858)

The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York

(Fig. 122) The Virgin Mary detail from The Ghent Altarpiece, c. 1420s-1432 (oil and tempera on wood, 11'6" × 15'1" overall size),

Jan Van Eyck (Belgium, 1390–1441)

St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium

(Fig. 123) The Reading Girl (La Leggitrice), 1861 (marble, 48.1")

Pietro Magni (Italian, 1817–1877),

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Wiki Commons, attribution: Brwz)

(Fig. 124) Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in Water Moon Form (Shuiyue Guanyin), 11th century (willow wood with traces of pigment, 46.5" H × 37.5" W × 28" D),

Anonymous (Chinese)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Wiki Commons, attribution: Pharos)

(Fig. 125) The Garden of the Hesperides, 1891 (oil on canvas, 66.7" in radius)

Frederic, Lord Leighton (English, 1830–1896),

The Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight, England

(Fig. 126) Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994–2000 (mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 121" H × 143" W × 45" D),

Jeff Koons (American, 1955–)

One of five versions in various locations (QR code)

(Fig. 127) Tree, 2014 (inflated plastic canvas, 79' H),

Paul McCarthy (American, 1945–)

Installed in the Place Vendôme, Paris; since destroyed (QR code)

(Fig. 128) Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis, 1889 (oil on canvas, 150" × 300.5"),

Henryk Siemiradzki (Polish, 1843–1902)

State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

(Fig. 129) Untitled (New York City), 1968, 1968 (oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 68" × 90"),

Cy Twombly (American, 1928–2011)

Private collection (QR code)

(Fig. 130) Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–1652 (marble, life-size),

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680)

The Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (Wiki Commons, attribution: Benjamin Nuñez Gonzales)

(Fig. 131) A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866 (oil on canvas, 83" × 142.25"),

Albert Bierstadt (German-American, 1830–1902)

The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY