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| Text 15
It should go without saying that modernism, expressly devoted to divorc- ing art from literature and to rejecting the parental control exercised by the academies, would also renounce the genres. Walter Pater’s monitory assertion that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”, in an essay on the paintings of Giorgione, was echoed by many artists of the modern movement. Yet even if we leave aside those who made a point of adhering to the tradi- tional categories and look only at the work of artists associated with the avant- garde, we find that the genres survive for the artist as matrices controlling not only content but also form and, for the spectator, as a system of signals guid- ing us in our approach to works that sometimes lack identifiable images. It is suggested that Abstract art relies particularly on the genres – so much so that it would seem the system, far from imposing artificial divisions on an activity routinely valued for its freedom, reflects inalienably common human experi- ence and our grasp upon it. Since the later 18 th century the genres have often been interbred, mostly with the intention of enhancing the meaning or communicative weight of the lower categories. The way to achieve this was to introduce into them unmis- takable elements of history painting’s strategies and mien. An aspiration “to the condition of istoria” typifies much in Romantic art and since; the problem is to show that this parody of Pater’s dictum is not actually contradictory of it. It was in fact Pater’s generation that made it possible to adopt both. Upgrading 139 genre subjects to the level of history by means of manner, scale, and symbol- ism provides striking examples of the promotion process before that time. For obvious reasons it was condemned by the conservative majority of artists and public whereas the grafting of history elements on to the portrait did not. A famous instance is Millet’s “The Sower” (1850): a typical peasant and a typical task but on the physical and spiritual scale of the Michelangelo, so that the image brings with it not only echoes of medieval and early Renaissance representations of the seasons but also, through its epic presence, thoughts of life and death as well as of the dignity of labor and of the common man. Baudelaire asked for an art celebrating modern man in his increasingly normal habitat, the city, but it was some time before urban man found epic celebra- tion. The quick visual response of the Impressionist was not suited to epic statements but the Neo-Impressionists showed a positive inclination to monu- mentality and Seurat’s masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte” (1886), may be seen as the first fully-fledged instance of the type – Courbet’s “A Burial at Ornans (1850), a generation earlier, offers a fit- ting country-town comparison. A triumphant 20 th -century example is Leger’s “The Constructors” (1950): the valuable but ordinary activity of ordinary men (“worse than ourselves”) is made into an heroic image by the use of scale, ide- alized rather than detailed and individualized representation, and composi- tional echoes of a much-used theme in religious history painting, always an occasion for particularly affecting images, the Deposition of Christ. George Grosz stated his wish to produce “modern history painting”, and his “Pillars of Society (1926) shows caricature of a genre sort adapted to istoria purpose, and it is reminiscent not only of the work of Hogarth – to whom Grosz specifically pointed – but also to the Northern tradition of the young Christ among the Doctors and its inverted reprise, later in the story, in “Christ before Pilate or Ecce Homo”. The Symbolists, in the 1880s and 1890s prized suggestion and mystery above the more direct instruction associated with epic poetry and is- toria, encouraging artists to explore a level of human experience known to us all and recognized since Romanticism as a source for artistic invention: the level of dream and fantasy and of unformed intimations all the more poignant for lack of verbal definition. This was Pater’s generation. His praise fur Gior- gione reminds us that elements of irrational communication, perhaps inescap- able in the visual arts, had played a major role in his art and that of artists who may be seen as his successors: Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, all re- nowned for a markedly personal vein of expression. The late 19 th -century’s belief in the efficacy of imprecise meaning, conveyed by images and also by the appeal of color, tone, and line, brilliantly expressed in Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From?” was strengthened by scientific investigation into the ef- 140 fective role of visual stimuli. This meant that a 20 th -century painter like Kand- insky could erase even the vestiges of recognizable imagery from his works and reasonably claim to communicate at a superrational level, like music and like the mystical doctrines to which he and others were drawn by Theosophy and similar spiritualist movement. Abstract painting did not elude the pull of tradition and can be shown to owe much of its efficacy to our shared conditioning by established types. To stress this association is not to question the validity or the originality of Ab- stract art but, again, to point to constants that reflect human processes. Many spectators have sensed formal conventions belonging to still life and to land- scape when confronting Abstract compositions. It is at least possible that the deeply religious effect exercised by Rothko’s famous two-part compositions depends on echoes struck in us of paintings of the “Transfiguration” and other scenes setting a supernatural event above a terrestrial plane. And the efficacy of Albers’ long “Homage to the Square” series, throughout which he em- ployed the same geometrical arrangement, derives from its echoing the rich tradition of the head-and-shoulders portrait in the way the High Renaissance, especially Raphael, established it, strongly constructed and monumental yet at the same time intimate. Such suggestions are of course speculative but there can be no doubt that, as formal types associated with particular dispositions of solids and spaces, and also as vehicles of meaning, the genres continue to ex- ercise some benign control over art, often at the subconscious level. Lynton N. The genres in modern art // The Encyclopedia of Visual Art. Vol. 10: Ency- clopaedia Britannica International. London, 1994. P. 92–95. |