Art006: Week 8, 11/17 Readings

Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”

• Every work is art is a child of its time
• The art a culture produces can never be repeated
• However, the same goals may be striven for generation after generation
• The awakening soul is under the influence of materialism
• The movement toward the primitive must be short
• The spiritual life as a triangle going from a wide base of “today” and narrowing to a point where only a single man may be
• In every division, artists dwell and produce art comprehensible to his companions at their level
• The spiritual triangle moves slowly forward and upward
• The largest of the lower division are Marxists who are dragged upward by those above them but are unable to fathom the work performed by them
• The next lowest division also gets dragged upward but resist the efforts
• The higher divisions use the words of others to justify their atheism
• In the higher divisions other disciplines emerge: science and art, literature and music
• In the higher level, the fear exists that the man revered today was ridiculed yesterday, and the higher one goes, the sharper the fear
• External principles of art can only be valid for the past and not for the future
• The spirit that will lead us into the realms of tomorrow can only be recognized through feeling to which the talent of the artist is the path.
• Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive realms where spiritual change becomes noticeable in real form.
• The arts have never in recent times been closer to one another than in this latest period of spiritual transformation
• 2 effects when viewing color on a palette: 1) the physical effect of being charmed by the color itself and 2) the psychological effect and contemplation
• “tasting of colors” in highly developed spiritual people
• All senses may be interconnected
• Color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul

Rothko, “The Romantics were prompted”

• The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places.
• Not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental
• The unfriendliness of society can act as a lever for true liberation for the artist
• Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur
• The most important tool the artist fashions is his ability to produce miracles when they are needed
• Shapes: are unique elements in a unique situation, are organism with volition and a passion for self-assertion, move with internal freedom, have no direct association with any particular visible experience
• The archaic artist, as part of a ore practical society, was acknowledged as needing to create intermediaries to interact with the ordinary
• Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama

Newman, “The Sublime is Now”

• The beauty of the Greeks has been the bugbear of European art and aesthetic philosophies
• The European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity
• Longinus, Kant and Hegel each built theories of beauty from the Greek ideal
• Greek art is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in the perfect form
• The goal of the Renaissance artist was to make a cathedral out of man
• The Impressionist set to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the insistence on a surface of ugly strokes
• The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.
• Instead of evoking a new way of experience life they were able only to make a transfer of values
• The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to the blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity
• Modern art, caught without a sublime content was incapable of creating a new sublime image and unable to move away from the Renaissance imagery
• We are asserting man’s natural desire for the exalted for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.
• The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

Gottlieb, “Statement”

• The ole of the artist has always been that of image-maker
• Different times require different images
• Abstraction is the realism of our times

Newnan, “The Ideographic Picture”

• The abstract shape the artist used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding
• Shape as a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex
• The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea, the only thing that has meaning

Newman, “The First Man was an Artist”

• It is not enough for the artist to announce with arrogance his invincible position, but to also fashion it
• The sciences rushing in to claim the non-material world
• Science found the drive to conquer to protect the security of its own state of physics
• The dominance of science over the mind of modern man has been accomplished by the simple tactic of ignoring the prime scientific quest; the concern with its original question what?
• The importance of “what” in scientific inquiry
• The first man was an artist
• The aesthetic act always precedes the social one
• The necessity for dream is stronger than any utilitarian need
• Speech was of the first act at expressing man’s knowledge of his situation
• Language as an animal power
• The human in language if literature, not communication
• The myth came before the hunt
• Man built an idol before fashioning a tool
• The god image was the first manual act
• The artistic act is man’s personal birthright
• In our inability to live the life of a creator can be found the meaning of the fall of man

Lucie-Smith, “Abstract Expressionism”

• Abstract Expressionism had its roots in Surrealism which was rooted in Dadaism
• Internal strife weakened the movement
• European exiles established their presence and attracted converts in New York
• The Surrealists provided the catalyst for the birth of Abstract Expressionism
• The idea of a continuous dynamic was to play an important part
• To role of connecting to the wholeness of thought to be able to produce art
• The work of Pollack was trimmed down after completion to the desired dimensions, not pre-determined
• Inner reality as the only reality
• The artist being tortured with self-doubt and tormented by anxiety
• 2 sorts of abstract expressionism: 1) involving figuration and 2) purely abstract and tranquil
• The painting becomes both a focus for the spectator’s meditations and a screen before a mystery
• The bold central imagery became one of the trademarks of the new American painting
• Rhetoric in painting: the deliberate use of vague, expansive, generalized forms
• The significance in recognition of the symbol and its historical connection
• White writing: a way of covering the picture surface with an intricate network of signs
• The success of the Abstract Expressionists was to have important global consequences
• The faith in paint and canvas to communicate is being questioned, nothing further evolved
• The effect of the new American art on Europe was not altogether happy.
• Europeans misunderstood it
• The importance of Abstract Expressionism was arguably more to culture as a whole than to painting in particular.