Kasimir Malevich, Title: Suprematist Composition: White on White
My last visit to the musem of modern art at new york confirmed my belief that most people apprecite the art not by its content, but rather who drew it. A huge line behind a Picaso painting while a a similar cubist painting by braque only got a careless glance! Embarassingly enough, after a while I too was looking for a picaso or a monet or a wharol while skipping the artists i didn't know of. Afterall any person can draw a white square on a white square( yes, thats an art!) so what is it about these art which makes them special? We tend to forget that skill and creativity are two different aspects of art and sometimes the later outweighs the former. Prior to the modern art era (late 18th century - today) we see paintings which were beautiful" in the traditional sense. Such was the trend so far and art was pretty, abeit, stagnant. Simplificaition of form began with impressionism and movements that followed took drastic steps which let art to gradually lose form and representaiton. This leap of creativity is what we should appreciate.
1 comment:
White on White is seen as a milestone because it is a conclusion of sorts to the modernist project of art that rejected realism and tried to convey through impressionism, cubism and other movements that a)the viewer mattered, putting the interpretation in his or her hands, b)the way you look at things depends on where you look at it from (hence Picasso's success) and
c) many of these painters were influenced by Nietzche and his perspective that there is not a preexistent reality but that instead the universe is a result of chaos, that there was no single truth because point of view altered the way facts were perceived. Modernist painting and art in general was a turn inwards.
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