Second Year Fine Art.
Seminar Course.
'Writers on Art - Methodologies in and the Approaches to the Histories of Fine Art.'
As the title suggests these will be about the 'histories' of art as opposed to the 'history'. Its designed to show that art criticism is often based in the fashions of the period and is as fallible as the art it aims to deconstruct. Critical methodologies are at the whim of society and culture and so tell as much about culture as art itself.
An essay question will be given at the end of these seminars so be critical of the critics!
The seminars:
Ruben de la Vialle was a potholer who found his way into a undisturbed cave network in 1660. He didn't care about the ancient artwork that appeared in the flickering candle light he'd brought with him. To him the important fact was that he had reached this remote underground location. So he scrawled his name and date on the wall .
In 1994 a similar scenario occurred. Another potholing group came upon an ancient chamber full of cave paintings. They had a completely different reaction to their centuries dead countryman.
“Alone in the vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we are seized by a strange feeling. Everything was so beautiful so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.” (The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
)
)
Why? Somewhere between in the intervening years human artifice had gained a value. What humans made became tied to history itself. Art histories had begun.
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This: (Principles of Art History
) is the book you should be looking for in the 
library. It an easy read and has all the technicalities of his critical systems in detail.
This lady spells it out: Clickety Click..
Recap:
Linear: Relates to the images visual coherence of contour in projected ideation of object.
Painterly: Relates to the observance of patches of undulation in colour. Making shadow and light integral and allowing them to supersede the dominance of colour.
Recap:
A predilection with the plane orders the picture in strata parallel to the picture plane, the narrative is regimented into rows.
Recession strives to make planes inapparent by emphasising the forward and backward relations often in diagonal by engaging the spectator in recessions.
Recap:
The closed tectonic form is built with a web of vertices and horizontals with relative symmetry that is regular and strict.
The open a-tectonic form favors a loosening and freedom with recessive diagonals and discordant irregular stratification.
Recap:
Absolute clarity: ‘Leonardo insists that even what is admittedly beauty should be sacrificed as soon as it interferes with clarity.’
Relative Clarity in the Baroque period was an aversion to ‘this acme of clarity’. Beauty no longer lived in fully apprehensible clarity but moved to an intuition of motives.
Recap:
Absolute clarity: ‘Leonardo insists that even what is admittedly beauty should be sacrificed as soon as it interferes with clarity.’
Relative Clarity in the Baroque period was an aversion to ‘this acme of clarity’. Beauty no longer lived in fully apprehensible clarity but moved to an intuition of motives.
Next Week we'll be looking at content analysis with Panofsky. In my opinion less boring that Wolfflin but a hell of a lot more complex.
Here's the main book I'll be referencing.
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Thank you so much for this, it has really helped with my revision!
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