The Story of Art

上一章最后提到塞尚、梵高和高更造成了3场运动： ...Cezanne's solution ultimately led to Cubism...Van Gogh's to Expressionism..and Gauguin's to the various forms of Primitivism.. //解释现代主义绘画的根源 But what should a painter experiment with and why can he not be content to sit down before nature and paint it to the best of his abilities?...art has lost its bearings because artists have discovered that the simple demandthat they should 'paint what they see' is self-contradictory...With some self-discipline and self-observation we can all find out for ourselves that what we call seeing is invariably colored and shaped by our knowledge(or belief)of what we see.. ...THE 'EGYPTIAN' IN US CAN BE SUPPRESSED,BUT HE CAN NEVER BE QUITE DEFEATED.(Egyptian代表那些画what we know而不是what we see的) For if the 'Egyptian' or the child in us remains stubbornly there,why not face the basic facts of image-making ?..Art Nouveau had called in Japanese prints..Was it not better to begin again at the beginning and search out the art of the true 'primitives'....During the revolution in art that mounted to its climax before the First World War,and admiration of Negro sculpture was indeed one of the enthusiasms that bound together young artists of the most varied tendencies.

...African sculpture...neither that 'truth of beauty' nor that 'ideal beauty'..seemed to have troubled the minds of these craftsmen,but their works processed precisely...intense expressiveness,clarity of struture and a forthright simplicity of technique. ... //Munch ...But the idea of a serious caricature,of an art which deliberately changed the appearance of things not to express a sense of superiority,..proved indeed a stumbling block..

The scream

..'The scream'..It aims at expressing how a sudden excitement transforms all our sense impressions.All the lines seems to lead towards the one focus of the print--the shouting head.It looks as if all the scenery shared in the anguish and excitement of that scream.The face of the shouting person is indeed distorted like that of a caricature.The staring eyes and hollow cheeks recall a death's head.Something terrible must have happened,and the print is all the more disquieting because we shall never know what the scream meant. What upset the public about Expressionism art was,perhaps,not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty..But Munch might have retorted that a shout of anguish is not beautiful,and that if would be insincere to look only at the pleasing side of life.FOR EXPRESSIONISM FELT SO STRONGLY ABOUT HUMAN SUFFERING,POWERTY,VIOLENCE AND PASSION,THAT THEY WERE INCLINED TO THINK THAT THE INSISTENCE ON HARMONY AND BEAUTY IN ART WAS ONLY BORN OUT OF A REFUSAL TO BE HONEST....They want wanted to face the stark faces of our existence,and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly.

//Matisse ...'La Desserte'..Matisse went much further in the tranformation of the sight before him into a decorative pattern.The interplay of the wallpaper design and the fabric of the tablecloth with the objects on the table forms the main motif od the picture.Even the human figure and the landscape seen through the window have become part of this pattern,making it appear quite consistent that the woman and the trees are much simplified in their outlines and even distorted in their form to fit in the flowers of the wallpaper...There is something of the decorative effect of children's drawings in the bright colors and simple outlines of these paintings..This was his strength,but also his weakness,because he failed to show a way out fo the impasse.(哈哈反正我本来也不喜欢马蒂斯

Le Desserte

//Picasso

Picasso..and began to study primitive art...he learned how it is possible to build up an image of a face or an object out of a few very simple elements..This was something different from the simplification of the visual impression which the earlier arstists had practised....Cezanne had advised him to look at nature in terms of spheres,cones and cylinders.He presumably meant that he should always keep these basic solid shapes in mind when organizing his pictures.But Picasso and his friends decided to take this advice literally.(哈哈哈)...'Why not be consistent and accpet the fact that our real aim is rather to contruct something than to copy something?...We can..THINK OF ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS AT THE SAME TIME,some of them stand out so clearly that we feel that we can touch and handle them;other are somehow blurred'..

Violin and grapes(图反了)

The scroll and one peg are seen from the side as we imagine them when we think of a violin..the curve of the rim is greatly exaggerated...Despite this apparent jumble of disconnected froms,the picture does not really look messy.The reason is that the artist has constructed his picture out of more or less uniform parts so that the whole presents an appearance of consistency.. ..there is one drawback in this method of building up the image of an objects..IT CAN BE DONE ONLY WITH MORE OR LESS FAMILIAR FORMS.That is the reason why the Cubist painters usually chose familiar motifs...Critics considered it an insult to their intelligence to be expected to believe that a violin 'looks like that'(哈哈哈)...The artist..invited them(cirtics) to share him in his sophisticated game of building up the idea of a tangible solid object out of THE FEW FLAT FRAGMENTS on his canvas.

//Primitive

Recumbent figure by Henry Moore

...the modern artists want to create things.The stress is on create and on things.He wants to feel that he was made something which had no existence before.Not just a copy of a real object.. ..Henry Moore...He did not try to make a woman of stone but a stone which suggests a woman.It is this attitude which has given the artists of the 20th century a new feeling for the values of the arts of the primitives.

there were three tangible achievements of the Italian masters to which they could point. One was the discovery of scientific perspective, the second the knowledge of autonomy,--and with it the perfect rendering of the beautiful human body-- and thirdly the knowledge of the classical forms of building, which seemed to the period to stand for everything that was dignified and beautiful.

It is a fascinating spectacle to watch the reactions of various artists and traditions to the impact of this new knowledge, and to see how they asserted themselves-- or as sometimes happened, how they succumbed-- according to the strength of their character and the breadth of their vision. Architects were perhaps in the most difficult position. both the Gothic system, to which they were accustomed, and the new revival of ancient buildings are, at least in theory, utterly logical and consistent, but as different from each other in aim and spirit as two styles could possibly be.

建筑师会借用一些细节，但是画家不满足于borrowing a figure or a gesture from an Italian engraving which had come their way.Any real artist was bound to feel the urge thoroughly to understand the new principles of art and to make up his mind about their usefulness.丢勒就是其中的翘楚。

....

Gruenewald’s work may thus remind us once more that an artist can be very great indeed without being progressive, because the greatness of art does not lie in new discoveries. That Gruenewald was familiar with these discoveries he showed plainly enough whenever they helped him to express what he wanted to convey.And just as he used his brush to depict the dead and tormented body of Christ, he used it on another panel to convey its Transfiguration at the resurrection into an unearthly apparition of heavenly light.

Grünewald-The Resurrection

It is difficult to describe this picture because ,once more ,so much depends on its colors. It seems as if Christ has just soared out of the grave, leaving a trail of radiant light-- the shroud in which the body has been swathed reflecting the colored rays of the halo.... there is a poignant contrast between the risen Christ, who is hovering over the scene, and the helpless Jester's of the soldiers on the ground, who are dazzled and overwhelmed by this sudden apparition of light. we feel the violence of the shock in the way in which they writhe in their armor. As we cannot access the distance between foreground and background, the two soldiers behind the grave look like puppets who have tumbled over, and their distorted shapes only serve to throw into relief the serene and majestic calm of the transfigured body of Christ.

“We have long recognized that this quality is not a fault of works of art, to be regretted and looked down upon, but that it is possible to achieve artistic perfection within any style.”

It is not their standard of craftsmanship which is different from ours, but their ideas. It is important to realize this from the outset, because the whole sotry of art is not a story of progress in technical proficiency, but a story of changing ideas and requirements.