Art from the Renaissance to the Contemporary: A Mirror of Civilization
By Michael Boyajian
Before one studies Renaissance art one must look at the Gothic Art that preceded it and which ruled most of the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire. In a word this art celebrated religion and the greatness of God, man was a mere backdrop.
Then came the Renaissance born in Florence. This art celebrated the greatness of God’s creation, man. The greatness of man can be seen in both the imagery of the art and in the sophisticated techniques of the artists. It all harked back to man’s greatest achievement, the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.
Next we have Baroque which elaborated on what came before with this leading to Romanticism which called forth the emotions of man. This gave rise to landscape painting and then Impressionism which tempered man’s emotions with soothing nature scenes or a calming play of light on landscape.
We then enter the madness of the 20th Century with the rise of the twin horrors of Fascism and Communism and the genocides and the world wars. This period traumatized the artist. We have a perfect example of this trauma in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica which hung in New York until the madness ended in Spain and was then returned to Madrid. It is marked by the tortured imagery of man and animal all caused by man himself. Supporting this is the nightmare surrealism of Salvador Dali.
The Abstract form of Modern Art followed on this with man being left out of the art or missing if you will with the imagery becoming dependent on shape and color while only indirectly celebrating the advanced technique of man solely as the artist. This was a particularly prolific movement marked by diverse artists that included Joan Miro, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Mark Rothko.
Following is Pop Art which dared to make fun of man by celebrating man’s own unimportant creations, Brillo boxes and soup cans, as reproduced ingeniously by Andy Warhol or comic book art as typified by the works of Roy Lichtenstein.
And this brings us to the Contemporary Art of today. This can only be described through the Whitney Biennial looking glass as a hodgepodge sort of intermediate period with artists searching for the next leap forward marked by both the failure and madness of man as seen in Katrina, Climate Change, 9-11 and the wars that followed in its aftermath and the yet to be expressed BP spill. There is also now the hope that may be turning to disillusionment of the Obama age.
This is the mix with no sign of a progression unless you consider the wrappings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as a leap with its blend of the grandeur of man and nature or is it just their media that we find important. After all it must not be forgotten that many say that today the media is the message and man has become secondary to that media, powerful, destructive to the planet yet inconsequential to the artist now in complete contradistinction to his high standing during the Renaissance.
End