We are all no more or no less than the sum of each of our histories. Our potential in this life is never greater than our ability to understand the past, and in art it is no different. What each generation of artists accomplishes is a veritable link to those artists’ work who came beforehand, whether immediately or 10,000 years ago. Too much of art today is about rebelling against the establishment (or the supposed act thereof); artists no longer embrace their predecessors, they are no longer the culmination of a discipline with a lineage of disciples. Therefore, art stands still, it is stagnant. With every artist searching merely for their own individuality within the media, the greater ideals of the profession are unfortunately lost into the abyss.
Nevertheless, my goal for this article is not just to comment on what I regard sometimes to be the twilight of a fading empire; rather, I hope to espouse somewhat on the connections between artists, who were beyond consigning themselves to being mere individualists. These are artists who sought linkage to the ghosts on the tip of their brushes or the fossils embedded in their heavy slabs of clay, and in doing so, pushed their own medium to its limits. Whether the artist is Michelangelo, pursuing the Greek ideals of form and content, or Pollock, conjuring the essence of Native American sand painting, and combining that with an esoteric wisdom of surrealism and the cubist grid, or finally, whether the artist is the purveyor of modern art himself, Picasso, whose new vision was locked in the firmest embrace with the history of art (both western and primitive), the conclusion will be the same, to trace the significance of understanding the past, while also culminating it into a unique future vision.
Barnett Newman once said, Read more »
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