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What the Hell Was Modernism?

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Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#31

Post by [deleted] »

puranjay wrote: post #19
hestipod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I know with age and I hope "maturity" I appreciate many more forms of art. Things I didn't have the life experience or emotional depth to grasp when I was younger can deeply impact me now. An example would be Mark Rothko's paintings. I would have said "pfft anyone can do that...just some stripes or blocks" when I was a kid, and probably did, but have recently rediscover…

I never really understood modern art until I a) saw it in person, and b) saw it in the context of its time. I was at the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg. I'd done museum tour after museum tour in both Moscow and Petersburg. Nearly all of this art was classical/neo-classical or romantic, rococo, etc. By the end of your 1000th neo-classical painting, you get exhausted of the sameness of the realistic style. The theme…

[deleted]

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#32

Post by michaelscott »

tabtab wrote: post #3

Almost all eras have extreme, overdone, or ridiculous works done in it. We tend to forget such over time and remember the good ones, or at least the most controversial or novel ones. Some of the depictions of hell around the early renaissance can make one cringe just as much as some "modern" art. The flying wanker from the Roman Pompey ruins is also a hoot. The lack of perspective in medieval art is still a curious p…

The move toward a flatter perspective was deliberate and religiously motivated, in order to remove art from the potential for idolatry. It's why illuminated manuscript is such a big deal artistically and why there are so few sculptural works from the period as well.

There are parallels in Islamic art as well, where the artistic focus is on calligraphy and architecture as opposed to the more regular forms seen in the West before and after the medieval period.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#33

Post by watwut »

steve19 wrote: post #26
pasabagi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who's done a lot of life drawing, and a lot of classical stuff in general, I see the reason why it's no longer central to the curriculum. Ultimately, drawing is just another tool, just like stonecarving, crochet, or dance, and life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture - that was the economic lifeblood of art until daguerreotypes came on the scene. So re…

Computer Science (usually at least in my experience) both teaches programming and expects proficiency in programming. My friends who did mechanical engineering had to take classes on tool making. Meanwhile nowadays you have metal sculpturers who cannot weld.

My friend who was in art-adjacent school did had to do huge amount of technical exercises. It is just not true that artists nowadays don't learn fundamentals. They do, plenty of them both directly relevant to what they will do and not relevant. Pretty much all art schools spend a lot of time on it.

Not the same ones as you would pick perhaps.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#34

Post by watwut »

deogeo wrote: post #9
hestipod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I know with age and I hope "maturity" I appreciate many more forms of art. Things I didn't have the life experience or emotional depth to grasp when I was younger can deeply impact me now. An example would be Mark Rothko's paintings. I would have said "pfft anyone can do that...just some stripes or blocks" when I was a kid, and probably did, but have recently rediscover…

> I really regret not having more openness and ability to grasp these things before. Ironic - modern art has such a lack of this same openness, that the classic techniques it despises were nearly lost. It was not enough for modern art to be accepted - classical art had to be driven out from contemporary galleries: The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguish…

You have whole youtube channels with models for life drawing. There are whole web pages offering paid courses on life drawing.

Doublin art studio: https://www.dublinartstudio.com/monday-life-drawing.html

Edinburgh university course: https://www.course-bookings.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/courses/DP/dra...

For beginners: https://www.course-bookings.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/courses/DP/dra... Yeah, it totally disappeared.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#35

Post by watwut »

remarkEon wrote: post #16
catalogia wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly is not true of everybody that appreciation of modern art comes with age. I'd wager the majority of people, young or old, consider it inaccessible or worse.

I remember going to the museums on field trips and we kids would all love seeing what would've been the "modern" pieces that were on the tour list (I had some somewhat eccentric teachers in middle school). Even in young adulthood (read: in college) I took many a date to MCA in the summers because, and maybe chalk this up to typical youth rebellion, I liked it. Only recently, because I can travel more now, have I gott…

We had to go to see many classic drawings and renaissance etc. It was mostly boring to me whole time. It does not have that awesome feel when you are a kid who is not artist and seen a lot of the same already.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#36

Post by goto11 »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #2

What a great read. I think that we see the same thing in poetry as well -- the inaccessible modernist expiriments with form, while interesting to insiders, is at its conclusion an esoteric pursuit. I think that the turn back toward classical forms, towards a broader audience, and largely the turn inward (the self as the primary concern of the work, rather than it's form) really is a wonderful new wave across many gen…

Klimt, Monet, van Gogh are very popular though, and they are included in the definition of modernism in the article.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#37

Post by goto11 »

michaelscott wrote: post #32
tabtab wrote: post #3

Almost all eras have extreme, overdone, or ridiculous works done in it. We tend to forget such over time and remember the good ones, or at least the most controversial or novel ones. Some of the depictions of hell around the early renaissance can make one cringe just as much as some "modern" art. The flying wanker from the Roman Pompey ruins is also a hoot. The lack of perspective in medieval art is still a curious p…

The move toward a flatter perspective was deliberate and religiously motivated, in order to remove art from the potential for idolatry. It's why illuminated manuscript is such a big deal artistically and why there are so few sculptural works from the period as well. There are parallels in Islamic art as well, where the artistic focus is on calligraphy and architecture as opposed to the more regular forms seen in the…

How did a flatter perspective remove the potential for idolatry? You are still depicting religious figures.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#38

Post by yason »

pierremenard wrote: post #27

> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters. This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a…

For architecture, this exploration is fine but they mostly shouldn't have been allowed to use existing city centres as the playground for their explorations and in doing so ruin the social and architectural fabric that had been breathing life into these cities for generations and centuries.

Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains where nobody can see it unless they choose to travel and explicitly enjoy the sight, and leave the old streets and traditional houses in the city because they are there for a reason. The modernist architecture would have had a much better reputation had they just succumbed to their rightful position, and acknowledged that in their exploration they were still prototyping and far from having deliverables.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#40

Post by valiant55 »

yason wrote: post #38
pierremenard wrote: post #27

> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters. This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a…

For architecture, this exploration is fine but they mostly shouldn't have been allowed to use existing city centres as the playground for their explorations and in doing so ruin the social and architectural fabric that had been breathing life into these cities for generations and centuries. Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains w…

I'm not sure I agree that modern architecture ruined social and architectural fabric of cities. Holding up vernacular architecture as some sort of beacon because it's been in cities "for generations and centuries" is equivalent to not performing a change in say software, "because that's the we've always done it."

Besides a few notable examples of poor execution (20 Fenchurch Street in London, Richards Medical Research Laboratories off the top of my head) can you point to an instance where a piece of modern architecture was detrimental to the cityscape it inhabited?

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