A BRIEF UNDERSTANDING OF ART

UP UNTIL 'MODERNISM'

 

 

Dated: 19/01/2009

 

Provided by:

 

PAT BULLEN-WHATLING BA Fine Art (Hons)

 

www.patbullenwhatlinggallery.co.uk

 

From the end of the classical period, up until the Renaissance, the story of Western Art has primarily been the story of art produced for the church or, mainly, religious art produced under patronage of the aristocracy – art that tells a story.

 

The artist was generally limited to the status of an artisan. He (almost always He) was instructed as to what work to complete and as to the style he should complete it in. Even during the Renaissance, that great flowering, or rebirth, of art across the western world, art was still firmly tied to looking back at the iconic and the classical periods it stemmed from. Its motifs, its morality, its stories all sprang from what was supposed to be a golden age of mankind.

 

However, during the Age of Enlightenment everything changed. The emphasis turned away from God and his works (from superstition and ignorance) to Man and his works. Anything, indeed, everything seemed achievable through Reason. It was believed that through the processes of logic and reason the World, the lot of Mankind and even Mankind itself could be bettered.

 

The newly arisen bourgeois class enthusiastically supported this new art form as the previously all-powerful aristocracy began to lose sway. It enforced the message that through hard work and sacrifice a new world could arise. A professional class of artists arose with it and their subject matter was greatly different to that of the preceding period. Rather than restricting its scope to History painting the newly landed classes, their land, Britain as a nation became the new subjects – and the common workers, men, women and children, and the industries they worked in. Art was not only looking at the here and now it was looking to the future.

Gainsborough, Thomas (1727-88) Mr. and Mrs. Andrews c.1750; Oil on canvas; National Gallery at London