For more information on art criticism, visit Britannica.com.
Art criticism
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: art criticism |
| French Literature Companion: Art Criticism |
In France, from the mid-18th to the late 19th c., art criticism was indissociably linked to the Salons. These were government-sponsored exhibitions, first held in 1667 on Colbert's initiative and thereafter at irregular intervals until 1737, from when they were held either annually or biennially. From 1699 they had taken place in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, hence the name which remained in use even after the exhibition had been forced to change venues (in the mid-19th c.) as the need for greater exhibition space grew: by then the Salon had become the most important exhibition of contemporary art in Europe.
Initially reserved for the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791. Seven years later it was placed under the control of a selection committee chosen by the government. Since the members of this committee were also the professors of the Academy, the Salon became the showcase for what was in effect a state-controlled monopoly of the production and evaluation of art. The expansion of the art market, the growing diversity of public tastes in art, the increased numbers of painters (and, therefore, of works rejected by the jury) eventually made this monopoly untenable, and in 1880 the state handed over control of the Salon to the Société des Artistes Français.
Deprived of official patronage, undermined by Impressionism's challenge to its authority, and exposed to competition from exhibitions organized by dealers, private galleries, and artists themselves, the official Salon was unable to sustain its privileged position. The literary genre of Salon criticism in turn gave way to the increasingly professionalized literature of art necessitated by the proliferation and diversification of the avant-garde in painting from the beginning of the 20th c.
The literary genre of art criticism emerged in the mid-18th c. in response to the increased interest generated from 1737 by the regularity of the Salon exhibitions. In the 150 years which followed, the development of the press together with that of the art market transformed the demand for Salon reviews. For two main reasons the history of this Salon literature has still to be written. The first is that until quite recently art history considered it to be an irrelevant by-product of an academic system of painting discredited by the emergence of the modernist tradition from Impressionism onwards. The second is that, from an early stage in the 19th c., Salon literature had begun to establish its own canon, with the result that its histories have tended to focus on a small number of major figures: Diderot, known throughout the 19th c. as ‘le père de la critique d'art’, whose Salons (written between 1759 and 1781 for the Correspondance littèraire) were published in 1818, and his successors Baudelaire, the Goncourts, and Zola.
In art criticism the central question is that of the nature of the transfer of image to words. For Diderot the obligation to recreate the painting, in the imagination of readers unable to see it demanded ‘une variété de style qui répondît à la variété des pinceaux’ (Salon de 1763), the assimilation of the principles of representation which governed the painting, and the creation of a verbal analogue by means of which the reader might realize the transfer in the opposite direction. Within the academic tradition this system was based on principles of composition established in terms of a hierarchy of subjects whose summit was occupied by those derived from Greek and Roman mythology. In these cases the transfer from image to word was facilitated by the existence of a classical source which the painting illustrated and to which the critic could refer to evaluate the pictorial performance of the text. At the other end of the scale was still life; devoid of any ennobling text, this confronted the critic with the problem of verbalizing that for which no system of discourse existed. Diderot was defeated by the problem in the Salon of 1763 when faced with the work of Chardin—‘On n'entend rien à cette magie’—only for this defeat to become a posthumous triumph when, 100 years later, changes in the artistic field gave a new status to still life and to a discourse which stressed the self-referential function of the material signs of art at the expense of their narrative function.
The critic's role as intermediary between painter and public became a rich source of friction between critic and painter, each dependent on the other for recognition of his or her activity but each vying with the other for jurisdiction over the artistic field. From Delacroix onwards, the challenge to the authority of the academic system focused on the ambition to free the expressive potential of the medium from the subordinate role in the creation of narratives to which the academic system restricted it. A new role and significance was acquired in this process by colour, which confronted the critic with the limitations of discourse at the very time when literary Romanticism was creating a poetic art criticism which threatened to channel the artist's exploration of form into new types of subordination to language. Baudelaire's achievement in his art criticism is to have integrated his understanding of the formal systems at work in the art of Delacroix and Guys within a series of theoretical concepts which gave their formal research the weight needed to enter the modernist mainstream. Quite different but no less historically significant is the criticism of his great contemporary Gautier, whose engagement with the visual arts throughout the crucial period from the July Monarchy to the Second Empire constitutes an anthology of the methodological and rhetorical strategies available to the 19th-c. salonnier.
With the demise of the official Salon and of the literary genre of art criticism derived from it, 20th-c. writers were able to explore their interest in the visual arts within a broader framework. As a result, their writing has taken many different forms. The most notable examples include Valéry (on Degas), Claudel (Oriental art),
[James Kearns]
| Wikipedia: Art criticism |
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.
Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. One of criticism's goals is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation.
The variety of artistic movements has resulted in a division of art criticism into different disciplines, each using vastly different criteria for their judgements. The most common division in the field of criticism is between historical criticism and evaluation, a form of art history, and contemporary criticism of work by living artists.
Despite perceptions that art criticism is a much lower risk activity than making art, opinions of current art are always liable to drastic corrections with the passage of time. Critics of the past are often ridiculed for either favoring artists now derided (like the academic painters of the late 19th Century) or dismissing artists now venerated (like the early work of the Impressionists). Some art movements themselves were named disparagingly by critics, with the name later adopted as a sort of badge of honor by the artists of the style (e.g. Impressionism, Cubism), the original negative meaning forgotten.
John Ruskin famously compared one of James McNeill Whistler's paintings, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, to "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".
Artists have often had an uneasy relationship with their critics. Artists usually need positive opinions from critics for their work to be viewed and purchased; unfortunately for the artists, only later generations may understand it.
Contents |
History
Origins
Although critiques of art may have its origins in the origins of art itself, art criticism as a genre is credited to have acquired its modern form by the 18th century.
The first writer to acquire an individual reputation as an art critic in 18th C. France was La Font de Saint-Yenne who wrote about the Salon of 1737 and wrote primarily to entertain while including anti-monarchist rhetoric in his prose.
The 18th C. French writer Denis Diderot is usually credited with the invention of the modern medium of art criticism. Diderot's "The Salon of 1765" was one of the first real attempts to capture art in words. According to art historian Thomas E. Crow, "When Diderot took up art criticism it was on the heels of the first generation of professional writers who made it their business to offer descriptions and judgments of contemporary painting and sculpture. The demand for such commentary was a product of the similarly novel institution of regular, free, public exhibitions of the latest art." [Published in Diderot on Art I, p.x]
A dominating figure in 19th century art criticism was French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose first published work was his art review Salon of 1845, which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, including his championing of Delacroix and Courbet. When Manet's famous Olympia (1865), a portrait of a nude courtesan, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend.
Pre-World War II
Bloomsbury Group members Roger Fry and Clive Bell were notable English pre-war art critics. Fry introduced post-impressionism to the country, and Bell was one of the founders of the formalist approach to art. Herbert Read championed modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
In the U.S, Clement Greenberg first made his name as an art critic with his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, first published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939.
Post-World War II
As in the case of Baudelaire in the 19th century, the poet-as-critic phenomenon appears once again in the 20th, when French poet Apollinaire becomes the champion of cubism. Later, French writer and hero of the Resistance André Malraux writes extensively on art, going well beyond the limits of his native Europe. Interestingly, his conviction that the vanguard in Latin America lay in Mexican Muralism (Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros) changes after his trip to Buenos Aires in 1958. After visiting the studios of several Argentine artists in the company of the young Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires Rafael Squirru, Malraux declares the new vanguard to lie in Argentina's new artistic movements. Worthy of note is the fact that Squirru, a poet-critic of renown himself who became Cultural Director of the OAS in Washington D.C. during the Sixties, was the last to interview the well-nigh forgotten Edward Hopper before his death, creating a revival[1] which consecrated the American artist once and for all time.
In the 1940s there were not only few galleries (The Art of This Century) but also few critics who were willing to follow the work of the New York Vanguard. There were also a few artists with a literary background, among them Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman who functioned as critics as well.
As surprising as it may be, while New York and the world were unfamiliar with the New York avant-garde, by the late 1940s most of the artists who have become household names today had their well established patron critics: Clement Greenberg advocated Jackson Pollock and the Color field painters like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Hans Hofmann. Harold Rosenberg seemed to prefer the action painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Thomas B. Hess, the managing editor of Art News, championed Willem de Kooning.
The new critics elevated their proteges by casting other artists as "followers"[2] or ignoring those who did not serve their promotional goal.
As an example, in 1958, Mark Tobey "became the first American painter since Whistler (1895) to win top prize at the Biennale of Venice. New York's two leading art magazines were not interested. Arts mentioned the historic event only in a news column and Art News (Managing editor: Thomas B. Hess) ignored it completely. The New York Times and Life printed feature articles."[3]
Barnett Newman, a late member of the Uptown Group wrote catalogue forewords and reviews and by the late 1940s became an exhibiting artist at Betty Parsons Gallery. His first solo show was in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image."[4] Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter in April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis: ---It is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it."[5]
Strangely the person thought to have had most to do with the promotion of this style was a New York Trotskyist, Clement Greenberg. As long time art critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation, he became an early and literate proponent of abstract expressionism. Artist Robert Motherwell, well heeled, joined Greenberg in promoting a style that fit the political climate and the intellectual rebelliousness of the era.
Clement Greenberg proclaimed Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock in particular as the epitome of aesthetic value. It supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet, in which painting became ever 'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface.[6]
Jackson Pollock's work has always polarised critics. Harold Rosenberg spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event". "The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint'. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value--political, aesthetic, moral."[7]
One of the most vocal critics of Abstract expressionism at the time was New York Times art critic John Canaday. Meyer Shapiro, and Leo Steinberg were also important art historians of the post-war era who voiced support for Abstract expressionism. During the early to mid sixties younger art critics Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss and Robert Hughes (critic) added considerable insights into the critical dialectic that continues to grow around Abstract expressionism.
Other people, such as British comedian/satirist Craig Brown, have been astonished that decorative 'wallpaper', essentially brainless, could gain such a position in art history alongside Giotto, Titian and Velázquez.
Today
Art critics today work not only in print media-in specialist art magazines as well as newspapers, but also on the internet, on TV and on radio, and in museums and galleries. Many are also employed in Universities or as art educators for museums. Art critics curate exhibitions and are frequently employed to write exhibition catalogues. Art critics have their own organisation, a UNESCO non-governmental organisation, called the International Association of Art Critics which has around 76 national sections and a political non-aligned section for refugees and exiles [1].
Art Blogs
Since in the early 21st century, online art critical websites and art blogs have cropped up around the world to add their voices to the art world. Some notable blogs include anaba, ArtCal, Art Fag City, Bad at Sports, Art Critical, From the Mayors Doorstep, Bloggy, James Wagner, Fallon and Rosof, CultureGrrl, Winkleman Blog, Two Coats of Paint, Personism, The James Kalm Report, Beauty Flow Magazine, Sharkforum blog, Wooster Collective blog, and Brian Sherwin's Myartspace Blog.
See also
- Art history
- Art critic
- The Myth of Criticism in the 1980s by Howard Singerman in X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly
- For contemporary examples of art criticism see Documenta 12 magazines
References
- ^ Levin on Hopper, "An intimate biography"
- ^ Thomas B. Hess, "Willem de Kooning", George Braziller, Inc. New York, 1959 p.:13
- ^ William C. Seitz, Mark Tobey by William C. Seitz, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962.
- ^ Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews, (ed.) by John P. O'Neill, pgs.: 240-241, University of California Press, 1990
- ^ Barnett Newman Selected Writings Interviews, (ed.) by John P. O'Neill, p.: 201, University of California Press, 1990.
- ^ Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture Critical essays, ("The Crisis of the Easel Picture"), Beacon Press, 1961 pp.:154-157
- ^ Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, Chapter 2, "The American Action Painter", pp.:23-39
External links
- Our critics' advice - The Guardian July 8 2008.
- In this article Adrian Searle gives advice to ambitious, young, would-be art critics.
- Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism conference, reading room, and bibliography.
- Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning
|
|||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Learn More
 | After Modernism: The Dilemma of Influence (1992 Visual Arts Film) |
| La Farge, John (American artist) |
| Art (history 1450-1789) |
 | What are the four steps of art criticism? Read answer... |
| How did art critic Louis Vauxelles describe cubist art? Read answer... |
| What did art critics think about cubist art? Read answer... |
Help us answer these
 | What is art criticism? |
| What is art critic? |
| What are the levels of art criticism? |
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
 |
 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Art criticism". Read more |
Related answers
- 4 steps of art criticism?
- Is art criticism usually negative?
- What do art critics think of Botticelli?
- How do you become a paid art critic?
ADVERTISEMENT
Answer these
- What is an art critic?
- How do you be an art critic?
- What do art critics do?
- What is a art critic?
- What does an art critic do?
Mentioned in
- After Modernism: The Dilemma of Influence (1992 Visual Arts Film)
- La Farge, John (American artist)
- Art (history 1450-1789)
- Josef Čapek (Czech writer & painter)
- Eugène Fromentin (French painter & critic)
- August Vermeylen (Flemish-Literary critic writer)
- Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry (literature)
- Albert Aurier
- Adolphe Retté
- Mannerism (music)
- When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (Sources) (poem)
- Les Salons
- interpret
- Adolfo Venturi (Italian artist & historian)
