Transitioning to Socialist Realism

During the early years of the Soviet Union many younger painters embraced Modernism. This was a continuation of a process that had been going on during Czarist days: the appeal of the avant-garde. Modernism's appeal was further fed by the idealistic notion among Bolshevik-leaning artists that the Revolution created a great opportunity to cast aside the past and build a future both better than and distinct from the bourgeois past.

Vladimir Lenin died in January, 1924 while modernist painting was still prevalent, and there is no way of knowing what would have happened to Soviet art had he lived to, say, age 70 in 1940. However, it is known that he did not favor extreme Modernism. Because his health began to fail in 1921 and following his 1922 stroke his active influence regarding Soviet artistic practices was probably limited. Which is why it took his successor Josef Stalin to complete the job of eliminating Modernism as state-supported art.

The emergence of what became known as Socialist Realism began with the 1932 decree calling for a universal artists union. More details are here. Considerable background regarding this is in the second chapter of this book. Regarding Socialist Realist painting style, Matthew Cullerne Brown writes on page 92:

"Stalin laid upon these artists the task of establishing their brand of realism, based on the methods of the Itenerants [a 19th century group of Russian painters] and Russian academics, as the dominant one. This approach reflected both Stalin's personal tastes (cf. his fondness for [Ilya] Repin) and his understanding that the resulting art would be the most easily understood by the masses; it would be both popular and, as a story-telling art, the best vehicle for propaganda."

In the logic of totalitarian statecraft, Stalin's position was entirely rational.

It took until the later 1930s for Socialist Realism to become established. Most artists complied for reasons ranging from ideological commitment to matters of personal well-being. Some artists remained true to earlier ideals and had to eke out a living. A few such as Lev Vyazmenski and Yakov Tsirelson were purged and liquidated in 1938.

When I was in Málaga, Spain in November I visited a branch of St. Petersburg's excellent Russian Museum. It was holding a year-long (ending February 2019) exhibit titled "The Radiant Future: Socialist Realism in Art." A fine exhibit. Plenty of examples, some of which I even knew about before I visited. Of course I took lots of snapshots. Some were of a few paintings made before and during the early years of the implementation of Socialist Realism. They are hardly representative of the Soviet artistic scene of 1930-1934, but provide a sense of modernist-influenced politically-themed art still considered acceptable. Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

Kuprin, Aleksandr - Steelmaking - 1930
The steelmaking equipment is given better detail than the workers in the foreground.

Adlivankin, Samuel - We Will Close the Gap - 1930
This seems to be an industrial setting where production targets are in danger of not being attained. The workers are about to heroically reach or even surpass those goals via collective action.

Adlivankin, Samuel - At Collective Farm Headquarters Before the Assault on the Gap - 1931
The same situation, but in a rural setting. In these two paintings the style is modernist-influenced, but basically representational bordering on being cartoon-like.

Dymschyz-Tolstaya, Sofia - Agitator Worker - 1931
A rather sickly-looking subject, hardly the strong sort of personality one might expect for a man in that role. The style here carries a whiff of Expressionism.

Lizak, Israil - Portrait of the Blacksmith S. Petran (Study) - 1934
Here we find faint Cubist overtones.

Lizak, Israil - Portrait of the Steel Founder Andrei Krylov (Study) - 1934
A softer portrayal by the same artist.  Getting closer to actual Socialist Realism, but still a ways from its classic forms. That this is a study and not a completed work might account for some of its style.

Pompeii People Portrayals

In November I visited the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (National Archaeological Museum, Naples) to view the better-quality paintings unearthed in Pompeii and nearby areas covered with the ash of Mt. Vesuvius. What remains on-site is generally badly faded or otherwise of poor quality.

This post deals with depictions of people because I've long been curious as to how good Classical era artists were at this. The problem is, paintings on wood, walls and other material are pretty perishable over two or more millennnia. So aside from Pompeii and some Roman-era Egyptian paintings, few portraits exist from those times.

I find it interesting that in most times and places sculptors did a much better job of depiction than painters. This seems to be true for Roman art if the Pompeii findings are any clue. Were the artists working in Pompeii as skilled as those in Rome itself? Probably not. Pompeii was a resort area before its destruction, so I suppose the painters working there were not much less able than those in the capital.

Another consideration is that the Pompeii paintings were found on walls. Painting on walls is less handy than on boards and canvasses that can be tilted or otherwise manipulated to suit a painter's needs at any given time. That is, wall painting can be awkward and the results might show it.

Many of the paintings displayed in the museum dealt with legendary subjects, so artists often didn't have the constraint of depicting real people. A result is that a number of faces are rather stilted versions of idealized faces seen on Greek and Roman statues. Others display more personality. And of course there is variation in the skill of the painters working in the decades before the AD 79 eruption.

Below are some snapshots I took using my iPhone. Click on them to enlarge.

Gallery

This probably shows a mask, but it has a lot of character.

A pair of images showing suspicion. The strong shading is unusual.

Women almost always were given whiter skin than men.

This reminds me of Roman-Egyptian portraits I've seen.

A bit of comedy or commentary here.

Interesting documentation of Roman helmets.

Note the shiny bells on the column. Here and in many of the other images artists exaggerated the size of eyes.

Good work on the man's expression, but he seems slightly off-balance.

This and some other paintings show that Pompeii artists were able to deal reasonably well with skin tones.

I find the disheveled hair at the left interesting and unique.

Honoring the Picture Plane: Sophistry in Action

"Honoring the picture plane" was a big deal when I was in art school, though the idea has lost some of its punch in Postmodern times. The gist of it was, since a canvas is normally a flat, two-dimensional object upon which things are painted, its nature is violated by attempting to depict three-dimensional things on it. More simply put: flat painting surfaces demand flat depictions.

What interests me nowadays is how seriously this was taken by intelligent people. My sophomore-year undergraduate art history course cast a deterministic process for Western art where the ultimate, end-of-history was abstract art as currently practiced by highly publicized New York City painters. I'm pretty sure our instructor, a senior staffer at the university's art museum, was largely influenced by Clement Greenberg (1909-1994).

The Greenberg Wikipedia link just cited has a sub-link to something called medium specificity, a fancy term for picture plane honoring that I hadn't been aware of.

Tom Wolfe in his often-hilarious way dealt with the business of flatness and abstraction in his 1975 book "The Painted Word." In it, he features the influence of important New York art critics, including Greenberg.

Here is a taste of Greenberg's writing from "The Role of Nature on Modern Painting," Partisan Review, January 1949. He was discussing the rise and importance of Cubism, but the passage below includes some of his thinking regarding flatness.

"By dint of their efforts to discover pictorially the structure of objects, of bodies, in nature, Picasso and Braque had come -- almost abruptly, it would seem -- to a new realization of, and a new respect for, the nature of the picture plane itself as a material object; and they came to the further realization that only by transposing the internal logic by which objects are organized in nature could aesthetic form be given to the irreducible flatness which defined the picture plane in its inviolable quality as a material object. This flatness became the final, all-powerful premise of the art of painting, and the experience of nature could be transposed into it only by analogy, not by imitative reproduction. Thus the painter abandoned his interest in the concrete appearance, for example, of a glass and tried instead to approximate by analogy the way in which nature had married the straight contours that defined the glass vertically to the curved ones that defined it laterally. Nature no longer offered appearances to imitate, but principles to parallel."

This is sophistry. Its premise and conclusion are that flat painting surfaces are determinative.

They are not. Great artists can and do whatever suits them on those innocent flat surfaces. They can paint flat color areas, they can create illusions of three-dimensionality, they can even go the collage route by pasting foreign objects on the canvas or board. Greenberg and his followers were placing art in a straightjacket through use of an arbitrary premise from which constrictive deductions were made.

Let's look at some examples.

Gallery

Number 1 - by Jackson Pollock - 1949
Greenberg was a huge Pollock fan, yet here was Pollock painting actual layers of colors atop a flat canvas.

Untitled - by Piet Mondrian
Mondrian, on the other hand, for many years painted very flat, not-curving images using only black, white and the three primary colors. Can't get more basic than that.

School of Athens - by Raphael - 1511
One-point perspective began appearing in Western painting in the early 1400s. "One point" refers to a single vanishing point, found here between the two figures framed by the most distant arch. Artists in Raphael's time were thrilled at this means of showing depth on a flat surface.  Eventually, two-point and three-point perspectives were discovered.

Canyon Green - by Franz Bischoff - c. 1915-25
Another way to portray distance is called "atmospheric perspective" which involves the greying-out of increasingly distant objects caused by particulate matter in the air.

Lady of Shalott - by John W. Waterhouse - 1888
Here Waterhouse uses both linear (mostly regarding the boat) and atmospheric perspective.

Ajax and Cassandra - by Solomon J. Solomon - 1886
The background pedestal has linear perspective. The figures are given three-dimensionality by use of light and shade to suggest their surface modeling.

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère - by Édouard Manet - 1882
Manet's paintings often had a flatter look, though the small figures reflected in the mirror behind the barmaid diminish in size with distance, just as Raphael's did in "Athens."

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne - c. 1903
Cézanne attempted to reconcile depicting a 3-D world on a 2-D canvas with crude, though influential, results.

Church of the Minorities II - by Lyonel Feininger - 1926
Feininger was influenced by Cubism, but only superficially. Note the one-point perspective and the atmospherics in this painting.

Variation #1 in Orange - by David Leffel
An impressive, comparatively recent painting making zero use of Greenberg's ideas.

The Vermeer Museum in Delft

Delft in South Holland was the place where famed painter Jan Vermeer (1634-1675) lived and made his comparatively small number of paintings. It is a pleasant small city that's worth a visit if you are in the Netherlands and would like to see more of the country than Amsterdam.

Besides getting a sense of Vermeer's roots, you can visit the Vermeer Centrum Deft which does its best to inform you about the artist. What you won't see there are original paintings due to their rarity and high market value. (I suspect that strongly attributed Vermeers are virtually "priceless" because they are in important museums, and no such museum would part with a Vermeer under any but the more dire of circumstances.)

What you can see are full-size reproductions of his paintings with explanatory captions that include the work's current location. Many are here in the United States; they can be found at the Met and the Frick in New York and in the National Gallery in Washington. Also pictured is a painting owned by casino owner Steve Wynn of Las Vegas, but its attribution is weak, as a glance at the image will suggest.

On the upper level of the museum are items of interest to artists and people interested in the technology of painting. Included is a camera obscura, but the museum does not commit itself to whether or to what extent the device was used by Vermeer. Below are some photos I took of that part of the museum. Click on them to enlarge.

This chart indicates the colors thought to be most often used by Vermeer.

In Vermeer's day, artists had to mix their own paints. This display explains how it was done.

Here a viewer can compare a reproduction of a Vermeer painting to a rough approximation of his studio setup.

Vermeer was careful in his used of perspective. This exhibit shows how he might have constructed perspective for multiple vanishing points along a horizon line.

What is Art?

I suppose some people who got better grades than me in university and graduate school will snicker and chalk it up to intellectual inferiority, and maybe they'd be correct. Nevertheless, I'm willing to admit that I am uneasy being in the same room with elaborate theories or thought structures pertaining to human behavior. So I am extremely reluctant to indulge in that sort of activity, being more comfortable with rules of thumb couched in probabilistic terms. (Theorizing done regarding the physical sciences is different because the subject matter does not possess volition.)

Why am I gun-shy? Perhaps because I was exposed to such theorizing in graduate school and couldn't see the sense of it (my IQ was never stellar). For example, in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington, Stewart Dodd was still around; years before, he had written about reducing human sociological behavior to something like mathematical formulas. I chalk up that effort of his as an exercise in trying something to find out if it was really workable. It turns out that it wasn't, though fans of Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon might disagree.

And then there was social theorist Talcott Parsons of Harvard who many at Washington and at Dear Old Penn worshiped in those days. I never worshiped him, but nevertheless forced myself to plow through some of his writings because I might have had to deal with his ideas in my Ph.D. examinations. As best I remember, his structure was elaborate and had many details, all of which were considered very important. Another failed effort, in my opinion.

So what does this have to do with art?

Reducing it to a matter of definition. The current Art Establishment seems to hold that just about anything can be considered art if a few people (for instance, an "artist," an art galley and an art reporter or critic) proclaim something as "art." And if someone fails to recognize that something is "art," well, they must be closed-minded or maybe have some other cultural or even mental deficiency. But if just about anything can be art, then art is nothing special. So how can that be, given that certain art objects are worth a good deal of money and might be found and venerated in large museums? A tricky situation, here.

Consider this "art" object, an assemblage titled "My Bed" by Tracey Emin. This article treats it as art, offering as justification that Emin put a good deal of thought and work into its creation.

Now consider "My Desktop," in the image above -- a photo I took just before writing this post. I did not put a lot of thought and energy into creating the fascinating tactile ensemble you see in the photo, but it is not entirely haphazard, either. Objects have their places. Near the upper right are bits of computer equipment. Next to it are writing instruments. Notes and notepads are at either end of the desk, and so on.

To some people, my desktop could, perhaps should be considered art. I don't think it is art. I do not think Emin's "My Bed" is art either. To me it is a kind of public relations stunt related to marketing the Tracey Emin brand and, by the way, has the virtue of being sold for real Pounds Sterling.

As I noted, in our modernist world, the definition of art lies in the eye or mind of the beholder. Some behold "My Bed" as art, other do not. However, it seems that Art Establishment beholders and their followers are definitely more equal than others -- especially compared to those dull-witted philistines incapable of appreciating the nuances of great works of art such as Emin's "My Bed."

Given my distrust of theoretical systems, I'm not going to offer a rigid definition of art, even though I disagree with the current art-is-just-about-anything ethos. But I will toss out an idea. Did you ever notice that young children supplied with a pencil, crayon or some similar tool and a surface to mark on, seem to enjoy creating images of objects they know in their world. This is the nub of art. Their messy beds are not.

Teachout , MoMA and the History of Abstract Art

I usually enjoy reading what Terry Teachout (biographer, playwright, librettist and theater critic for The Wall Street Journal) has to say about subjects I'm familiar with (art) and those more distant from my cultural radar (music, theater, dance). He strikes me as being a sensible man, something I suspect can be hard to find at times in the cultural world.

Not long ago on his blog "About Last Night" he posted "Getting out more" (scroll down to April 9, 2013) in which he mentions his visit to New York's Museum of Modern Art which was holding an exhibit dealing with early abstract painting. Here is one of his observations:

* * * * *MoMA has always been provincial about pre-1945 American modernism, and "Inventing Abstraction" (surprise, surprise!) is no exception to the rule. I was astonished to see that Arthur Dove, who can lay a serious claim to having invented abstraction, was fobbed off with two paintings tucked away in a corner--though I do give the curator full credit for devoting an appropriate amount of space to Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and Morton Schamberg. That corner installation was one of the best parts of the show.
* * * * *
I quite agree. About a year ago I wrote about Macdonald-Wright in this blog and I also dealt with him in my e-book "Art Adrift" (see sidebar to the right).

Up Close: Mead Schaeffer (1)

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Mead Schaeffer (1898-1980) when he was following the style that gained him success as an illustrator. Additional information on Schaeffer is here.

Featured here is an illustration for Stephen Meader's book "The Black Buccaneer" of 1929.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

* * * * *
The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

* * * * *

This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

From the lower right corner.

This is from near the center.
Early in his career, Schaeffer illustrated adventurous, swashbuckling subjects using brushwork with a boldness to match. The detail image in the middle could easily be a 1950s New York Abstract Expressionist work. Note that Schaeffer used his initials to sign the painting. The lower image features the "square brush" heavy impasto style he favored at the time.

Macdonald-Wright's Takedown of 1930s WPA Art

The New Deal era WPA art project and similar government-sponsored employment schemes for artists long ago became something of a sacred matter for many art historians and art followers in general. A number of artists who had reputations at the time or later gained fame participated in the projects. Examples include Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Marsden Hartley and Jackson Pollock (a link to names is here). Many of these projects involved murals on walls of public buildings; an example is shown in the image above (by Jacob Elshin, University Station post office, Seattle - 1939).

Like most other government spending programs of the Great Depression, the arts programs were criticized at the time as wasteful uses of taxpayer money. But that criticism melted away once World War 2 started and the arts programs began to be terminated.

Since I call this blog "Art Contrarian" I thought I might as well present a strongly contrarian view of the art programs that I recently stumbled across. It's a view by an insider who had responsibility for projects in southern California.

That insider was Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) who was one of the first painters to paint in a purely abstract manner. I recently posted about him here. Information about and views of one of Macdonald-Wright's own murals can be found here.

Macdonald-Wright has his say in an oral history interview: the link is
here. You might not agree with his point of view, but he has a strong one and it's pretty entertaining, given the usual solemnity when the subject of art is introduced. I need to add that quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1964 Apr. 13-Sept. 16, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The SM in the transcript is Macdonald-Wright and BH is Betty Lochrie Hogue, the interviewer. Extracts follow, but note the final exchange:

* * * * *
BH: Do you think that this Project did any good for painting in California at the time?

SM: I think it set back art all over the United States a hundred and fifty years.

BH: You do, really?

SM: I do! I think it was absolutely the worst thing that could possibly have happened.

BH: Why?

SM: Because they got five thousand and one hundred useless, untalented people in the place who went in saying they were artists, and nobody cared because what they wanted to do was to give money away. They had over 5,000 people, and when the Project ended in -- what was it, 1940? I guess it was about 1940 more or less, those people kept right on painting. And vast numbers of those people that you see exhibiting in galleries now are the same people. That's what's the matter with art....

There were competent artists, as I say, in this thing. I had some extremely competent artists here. This Feitelson was one of them, for instance. He's one of the finest draftsmen we have in the country. And the man who was the head of the mosaic department, Albert King, is more than competent. We had very competent men as far as that's concerned. And I immediately made them heads of departments so as to give them a little time to do some of their own work, something of that kind. But the general run of those people would have been better off if they'd starved to death as far as art is concerned. Eddie Cahill, who was the National Director at that time, said to me years afterward . . . . I happened to be back in New York, I think it was in 1955 when I was on my to Paris. I was having dinner with him, and he said, "Well, Stanton, now that this is all over, and it's all over for a long time, fifteen years, what is your real opinion of the Project?" Of course, he was a man who was dedicated to it, he was a sociologically-inclined baby, he was an institutional slave by temperament, a very sweet fellow. I said, "Eddie (his name was Holger but we all called him Eddie), I think it set art back a hundred years." He never spoke to me after that. I never came in contact with him again.

BH: Well a lot of people were actually eating who might not have been at the time . . . .

SM: Well I don't know of anybody who was eating that wouldn't have been that should have been eating at all. I think they would have been much better off and so would the world had they not eaten. I haven't much of the sociologist in me and my heart doesn't bleed very easily for those people. If you had been around there you would have realized what I mean by it. They spent most of their time complaining bitterly because we hadn't gone directly in with Russia . . . .

BH: Oh really!

SM: Most of them were what we would call (due to the law which they passed that nobody can call a person by their name) at that time Communists. They spent most of their time trying to get everybody that wasn't a Communist out of the place and to fill it up with Communists. And from what I hear, and this is not an opinion of mine but, from what I've heard from the National Director, most of the New York Project was made up of those babies. And that doesn't only go for New York but practically every other city, except this one out here. And I had my hands full to keep those people from taking over the whole work. Two or three of them even got to the point where they painted murals and sneaked in a picture of a hammer and sickle here and there on them.

BH: For heavens sake!

SM: And I had people watching those things all the time and I had a brigade of whitewashers there that would go right out and wipe that mural off the wall or cover it up with something. I had to do that how many times. Because at that time the public wasn't as thoroughly inured and used to and indifferent to those Communistic pastimes as it is now. They would welcome it now probably.

.... [W]hen I closed the door on that Project, as far as I was concerned I washed my hands not only of the dirt of Government indoctrination but also of the dirt of most of the pictures that were painted in it.

BH: Well, the fact that the Federal Arts Project gave such an impetus to him [Donald Hord] makes me think of something that you said in this little booklet which you loaned us and which I had microfilmed the other day. It is such an expressive statement. I'd like to read this one sentence you wrote. It is from an address that Mr. Wright made over the radio in Santa Barbara in October of 1941, on the occasion of opening a new gallery under Donald Hord's directorship. You said, "Let us also remove our criticism from out the ages of a spurious and grandeloquent jingoism. Let us recognize that our own consciousness of youthful vigor encouraged by the Federal Arts Project, has without the shadow of a doubt, raised the average standard of American painting. But let us not confuse topics with technique, and let us take a slightly longer time-view of our qualities than have been recently found in the writings of our critical tycoons." I thought it was very good that you made that remark. I presume you were referring to our consciousness of regionalism and having to stand on our own feet in painting coming out of the Project?

SM: Mrs. Hoag, I was working for the government at the time. I'm always loyal to the person I work for.

Blogger Visits Art School Open House

Actually, the Open House involved many of the departments at the University of Washington, but I went because (1) I could visit the University's Henry Art Gallery for free, and (2) there were supposed to be some interesting activities at the School of Art where I did my undergraduate work.

Let's look at some photos I took to set the scene, and then I'll do some follow-up commentary.

This is part of a timeline display in the Henry Gallery. I'm probably being delusional, but somehow the selection of events strikes me as having a political bias.

The founding collection of the Henry Gallery contains some noteworthy late 19th century paintings including a Bouguereau. Here, alone in a room, is the only item of traditional art I could find on display.

Two of several examples of Installation Art on view that day. The people at the far right of the lower photo are real, by the way.

These are student drawings for Art 190, the introductory drawing course. I was told that not all those taking 190 are art majors. Nevertheless, these are part of a hallway display that apparently serves to demonstrate what the students are up to. The items shown here are typical of the quality of the entire display. Note that perspective is poorly done and that ellipses are also incorrect. Why didn't the instructor actually teach the students how to do these basic tasks?

Another hall display, this probably from a life drawing class where the students must have been asked to draw with expression but not violate the model's proportions. The results are better.

An event at the School of Art that I wanted to attend was a set of lectures by Art History majors. Unfortunately, I was about to leave for Florida and didn't have the time. Here is a list of the lecture topics taken from a handout:

"Constructing a Colonial Identity: Eighteenth Century Paintings of Indigenous Families in New Spain"

"Magic and the Miracle - Working Image: The Interplay of Art and the Supernatural in Fifteenth Century Italy"

"Enduring Disassociation: Mixed Racial Identities and Historical Interpretations"

"Modernity and Artistic License: Neo-Victorianism as Other"

"Classicizing Proximity: The African in Seventeenth-century Rome"

Okay, let's unpack those lecture titles that with one exception are likely related to Masters theses and PhD dissertations of the presenters. Race/ethnicity? Three of the five seem to deal with that, an obsession of a certain line of politics common to most colleges and univerities.

The title mentioning "the Supernatural" is harder to puzzle out. Could it have to do with religion? That would make sense where Italy in the 1400s is concerned. I can't think of many (any?) paintings featuring ghosts from that era, but I'm no expert and could easily be wrong.

Wikipedia indicates that the term "Neo-Victorianism" has to do with a number of things including people doing dress-up in 1880s clothing and the Steampunk literary genre. The term "Other" has been used to refer to racial/ethnic/subcultural groups that are ignored by the mainstream, yet pose some kind of ominous threat or other to it. Well, that's my superficial impression. So where do Modernity, Artistic License and a possibly sinister Neo-Victorianism intersect? Beats me, so I'm sorry I couldn't get to that lecture.

What strikes me is that none of the titles suggests serious study of the history of art. I'll accept that MA theses aren't expected to be much more than dry runs for further scholarly exercises. But every subject listed above (the last two by PhD students) is trivial and to my mind greatly off-topic if the topic is art history. Where current academicians see scholarship, I find strong evidence of politically induced intellectual rot. If I were running the university I would fire the Art History faculty to ensure that no other students waste precious years of their lives on the study of the irrelevant.

"You had to have been there..."

The early decades of modernism in painting featured innovation and experimentation. I have nothing against these so long as the results don't congeal into dogma -- which they did to some degree, unfortunately.

When reading about painters active in the early 20th century, I am struck by how often Paul Cézanne is cited as having been an important influence on artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. For my part, when in my brainwashed-by-modernism days, I never cottoned to Cézanne's paintings. And even now I have difficulty understanding just what it was that so inspired those other artists.

After years of puzzling over this, I'm coming to the conclusion that it was a case of "You had to have been there."

When reading history, one usually knows the outcome and this affects one's perception. But of course the actors in that history were prisoners of their time and had to make do while ignorant of future outcomes. And their frames of reference can be hard to understand by those of us from later times; it can be difficult indeed for us to strip away what we know and put ourselves exactly in the place of Picasso, Matisse, et. al., when confronted by Cézanne's works.

To illustrate this, consider special effects in science fiction movies. Actually, the following example won't work for readers under age 45 or thereabouts, but it's the best I can come up with because I can personally relate to it, not having seen Avatar.

Here are some space ships depicted in sci-fi movies over a 40-year span:

Flash Gordon serial - 1936 or 1938

The Day the Earth Stood Still - 1951

Destination Moon - 1950

2001 A Space Odyssey - 1968

Star Wars - 1977

Yes, these aren't in motion, so the main visual effects are missing. But the moving images become increasingly realistic over time. Space Odyssey images were sensational in their day, as were those for the earlier Destination Moon in 1950. But the technological leap that had the greatest impact was that of the original 1977 episode of Star Wars. In it, space ships were not static from a viewing angle (as in Space Odyssey), being made to maneuver realistically while not appearing to be the models they actually were (in contrast to the Flash Gordon example). Since 1977, models in matte environments have been replaced by computer graphics, but the visual difference has been relatively minor.

I haven't seen the 1977 Star Wars since it was new. At the time I found the effects stunning. I suspect that if I saw it again now they would seem less impressive. Moreover, I imagine that a teenage boy of today would consider the effects ho-hum: nothing special at all. That hypothetical teenager is my likely position regarding Cézanne compared to Matisse whose position was analogous to mine when I first viewed Star Wars.