Modern Art: Ornately Simple

The evolution of art through time.

This article is about the history of Art in too many paragraphs, a.k.a Why does this painting of nothing exist?

A long time ago: People painted things on cave walls and they continued to get painted on until someone decided to paint on smaller boxes. During this time, it was usually pictures of people, places and things. Most art was deeply related to the political and religious cultures of its era. In wealthier societies, the subjects are more diverse: rich people like paintings of themselves. And paintings of other people, preferably naked.

Following the Renaissance: With the rise of capitalism and science at around 1800–1900, and the entire time period’s huge subsequent changes, art is now taught in schools and the best artists are sought after by the richest people. Unfortunately people are heavily religious and there are fewer paintings of naked people.

The 19th Century: Art is going through a great period of refinement. New knowledge & ideas are everywhere and science has begun to pry out the secrets of color and light. The understanding of the human mind and how it is influenced by external stimuli is being refined. All this, combined with the advances in paints, allows art to increase the emotional capacity of paintings. The artists are continually rebelling against previous generations while also reflecting their times. The 19th Century is a very radical time for humans in Europe and art begins moving into a more abstract realm on the canvas, where the color and light within the painting is less realistic but deeply evocative in design.

New age art: The new art is beginning to be influenced by psychology along with the competing socio-political ideas of the time. In the cities, new ideas are flowing; social patterns are being broken and technology is changing life rapidly. And more naked people get painted.

The early 1900’s develop a new generation of artists steeped in ideas of revolution and freedom. The old world is being transformed dramatically and permanently and will require a transformed group of artists to react to it.

But where will they seek inspiration?

It is the era of Colonialism, remote lands are being explored and the objects of their peoples are being collected. Numerous museum exhibits are opening, showing exotic exhibits from across the oceans. The art designs are often bizarrely abstract and accompany cultural stories of a fantastic, superstitious nature.

These artifacts from primitive cultures shock and amaze its viewers. Artists like Picasso are blown away by the new patterns, but more importantly freed from formality by the abstraction they are seeing in these beautiful objects.

Early 20th century: Now it’s the early 20th century and politics, psychology & science have moved even further along. Freed into abstraction, artists are starting to think about color purely on its own. It’s now pretty clear that the human mind reacts with this world without the need for a subject. On a rainy day we are more likely to feel sad; in fact we even use a color, blue, to describe it. Art has been freed to explore color purely as an abstraction. The results are spectacular.

For example, you will have a different emotional reaction to this painting

than you would to this one

The artist (Mark Rothko) is ignoring subject and trying to master the basic elements of his world: canvas, paint, light and sight. He is seeking to elicit a response freed from history and knowledge, he is seeking the purity of color, an idea very much of his time.

And back to where we began: So my short summary of my entirely too long response is this: what you’re looking at is a culmination of thousands of years of art, where the last several hundred years of great technological advances, social change and economic advancement have allowed art to evolve to the point where its creation is freed from connection to concrete reality.

And this leaves us with a guy who’s painted one color on a canvas. As to why it sold for so much: it’s what rich people do and it’s the single greatest way to take their money: siphon it through an art dealer with the sales skills appropriate for rich people. (fine, they’re not that stupid, there’s actually some tax purposes to buying expensive art).

PS: Naked people are painted this way too.

Sources in case you want to dig deeper:

* NY Times article on the sale of the glorious blue painting

* Wikipedia entry for the history of art and a lot of links that stem from there

Recommendations:

* Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, A novel about the last years of a fictional abstract painter that talks about creating art with meaning.