Why art needs history

  Art becomes meaningful because it has the power to express important things that would in all likelihood remain unstated, or stated in less coherent or moving ways, in any other language. And this power is borne out by the fact that so much of the greatest in modern art…paintings, sculptures, and buildings that have come to seem the supreme monuments of our time..survive to triumph over the critical and popular hostility that greeted their first appearance. At no time has this been more evident than now, when a century-old modernist aesthetic is being contested by a healthy appetite for antiformalist experiment, bringing to art a new vibrancy comparable to the energy that charged the pioneer modernist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Clearly, great art can stand alone and speak directly to the perceptive viewer, regardless of how we or other writers may explicate it. Yet, like so many of the finest things in life, art for those who have been enriched by it constitutes an acquired taste, as worth cultivating, through an exchange of ideas, as fluency and freshness in verbal discourse.  As the painter Wilem de Kooning said some forty years ago: “There’s no way of looking at a work of art by itself; it’s not self-evident…it needs a history, it needs a lot of talking about; it’s part of a whole man’s life.” And so we have written about the modernist experience..not only its forms, sources, and influences but also its cultural context and expressive content…fully  confident that we cannot exhaust an inexhaustible subject, but nonetheless hopeful that we may bring alert readers together with some remarkable manifestations of recent civilization and thus expand their capacity to confront their own world with heightned awareness and pleasure.

January 31, 2010. Uncategorized.