Posted on 06/29/2002 5:33:04 PM PDT by LadyDoc
For over 90 years, there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names, and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th Century. Fueled by a cooperative press, the ruling powers have held the global art establishment in an iron grip.
Equally, there was a successful effort to remove from our institutions of higher learning all the methods, techniques and knowledge of how to train skilled artists.
Five centuries of critical data was nearly thrown into the trash. It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism.
We at the Art Renewal Center have fully and fairly analyzed their theories and have found them wanting in every respect, devoid of substance and built on a labyrinth of easily disproved fallacies, suppositions and hypotheses. If, dear reader, you are not already one of their propaganda successes, I encourage you to read on.
Against all odds, and in the face of the worst kind of ridicule and personal and editorial assault, only a small handful of well-trained artists managed to stay true to their beliefs. Then, like the heroes who protected a few rare manuscripts during inquisitional book-burnings of the past, these 20th Century art world heroes managed to protect and preserve the core technical knowledge of western art. Somehow, they succeeded to train a few dozen determined disciples.
Today, many of those former students, have established their own schools or ateliers, and are currently training many hundreds more.
This movement is now expanding exponentially. They are regaining the traditions of the past, so that art may once again move forward on a solid footing. We are committed in every way possible to record, preserve and perpetuate this priceless knowledge.
We have painstakingly unraveled an understanding of how and why great traditional art nearly perished. For the sake of our children, our culture, and posterity, the Art Renewal Center is dedicated to traditional humanist art, which is essential to the health and welfare of mankind, and to a critical and truthful analysis of the modernist onslaught by which it was nearly consumed...
As you read, you will be seeing images of masterpieces by some of those artists whose names and art were so ruthlessly maligned: William Bouguereau, John William Waterhouse, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Leon L'hermitte, John William Godward, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Jules Joseph Tissot, and Frederick Lord Leighton, amongst others. All giants in their lives, they were amongst history's greatest, yet prior to the last fifth of the twentieth century, virtually no mention or knowledge of their work was being taught, analyzed or exhibited anywhere...
Art, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
One day a wag—what would the wretch be at?—
Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
And said it was a god's name! Straight arose
Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,
And, inly edified to learn that two
Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,
Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts,
And sell their garments to support the priests.
He was highly offended when some of the public dismissed his magnum opus, referring to them as "cattle" for their lack of sophisticated art taste and appreciation.
This is a true story.
Especially in the medium of instrumental music, many of the great works aren't really "about" anything beyond themselves and the music expressed therein. What is Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in d minor about other than, well, d minor? And what is his Well Tempered Clavier about, other than a demonstration of how to write music to take advantage of the different intervals in a well-tempered scale? I rather like Chopin's Etudes, but am not aware of them being "about" anything in particular (though some of them sound like silent movie music, I don't think they were written for that purpose since the cinematograph had not yet been invented).
I always thought that she was still better than Van Gogh, who's only apparent claim to fame is that he killed himeslf...
In 100 years, will Van Gogh, Monet, Gaughin (sp?) be worth what a bunch of fairies says they were last week?
I enjoy art. I appreciate art. However, I think the underlined part is going a little overboard.
Maybe. It's already been more than 100 years since those guys worked and they're still greatly admired. Although contemporary with the Victorian painters, they predate the "moderne" period.
If they were all we had, people would be crying out for Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian and the rest of the moderns. Much of modern painting is vile or ugly or vapid. But just as there are other ways of decorating a room than heavy Victorian upholstery and other ways of building houses than Victorian gothic, so there are other ways of painting than ponderous Victorian realism. We would be much poorer without the impressionists, who took painting out into the open air, or Matisse, who brought the spirit of the Mediterranean into his work.
http://perso.club-internet.fr/pyduc/Promenades/musees/orsay/renoir_bal.htm
I look forward to your reply.
Art changes, it swirls, but it reflects its time. It even peers into the future a bit.
Compare this with the Sistine Chapel, and it's sheer skill, scale, and ability to render a stylized world, or Escher's renditions of carefully drafted confusion, and then let's talk about marching in lockstep to the French Impressionists. Question authority. Just who says they were any good?
We are talking here about the direct ancestors of the guy who urinates on a white painted floor and calls it an artistic expression of modern Capitalism, and watches a bunch of idly rich Euro-trash swoon and whip themselves into a sexual frenzy over the 'meaning'.
Sorry, I'll take Wythe and Norman Rockwell...
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