Line can control an viewer's eye. Within the rock shelters and caves of the northern and central areas of the . To rid himself of that ‘obsession’ was the main preoccupation of his later thought. But who would claim that science does not lead to responsive action or that it is ‘freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence’? Realism as Critique. Taking as his stalking horse a Symbolist literary theory, Shklovsky outlines an opposing view of the nature of art. Form in relation to positive and negative space . Satta Hashem, email to Suheyla Takesh, November 25, 2017. For Fry seeks the aesthetic element precisely in the contemplation of form apart from its purpose and divorced from the content which it forms. I admit, of course, that it is always conditioned more or less by economic changes, but these are rather conditions of its existence at all than directive influences. 35. … Adolf Hitler: Speech Inaugurating the 'Great Exhibition of German Art' 1937. Chernyshevski’s conception, on the other hand, anticipates the theories of William Morris and of all modern exponents of ‘functional’ design. On the one hand the poet is tempted and passionately desires to escape into the ‘God-like isolation’ of pure art, [16] on the other hand he realizes that isolation will lead him to despair and death. Both agree that the real world in its rich and concrete actuality has no aesthetic significance. Such works will be, as it were, composed on themes set by life.’. ‘Everything that interests man in life’ includes the ugly, as well as the beautiful, the forces that frustrate and crush life, as well as those that support it, death as well as life. The significance of muralism in the United States has received considerable attention in art historical treatments of the period.5 The modernisation and revitalisation of American wall painting was the result of a number of cultural factors, perhaps most importantly the establishment from 1933 of federal funding for public art under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal administration.6 Scant mention can be found of the influence of the American example for artists in England, yet renewed interest in muralis… Francis Klingender: 'Content and Form in Art' 1935. The statement ‘this is beautifully painted’ means that the artist has succeeded in expressing what he intended to convey. I admit that there is also a queer hybrid art of sense and illustration, but it can only arouse particular and definitely conditioned emotions, whereas the emotions of music and pure painting and poetry when it approaches purity are really free abstract and universal.’ [2]. The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era: Form, Content, Consequence. Form may also be defined by change in texture, even when hue and value remain essentially consistent. It’s horribly difficult to analyse out of all the complex feelings just this one peculiar feeling, but I think that in proportion as poetry becomes more intense the content is entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all. In Animals in Art and Thought Francis Klingender discusses these various attitudes in a survey which ranges from prehistoric cave art to the later Middle Ages. Of all the critics who have helped to mould our present standards of appreciation none can equal the influence of Roger Fry, the founder of British post-impressionism. 21 24 25 Introduction First writing assignment – what is art? Francis Donald Klingender (1907 – 9 July 1955) was a Marxist art historian and exponent of Kunstsoziologie whose uncompromising views meant that he never quite fitted into the British art … On the one hand the poet is tempted and passionately desires to escape into the ‘God-like isolation’ of pure art, on the other hand he realizes that isolation will lead him to despair and death. But whereas the Victorians tolerated a realistic attitude to Nature and society only if it was overlayed with sentimentality, as in Dickens or in the later work of George Cruikshank, the tradition of uncompromising realism continued to advance in nineteenth-century France and Russia. Animals in Art and Thought to the End a/the Middle Ages: the wily stratagems of the fox, part hero, part villain, appealed to all classes of society. ‘What matters in art is the contemplation of form’ and ‘in proportion as art gets purer, the number of people to whom it appeals gets less’, say the formalists. Klingender & Alsop dissolved their partnership in 1920 as a result of Alsop’s ill health, and Klingender formed a new partnership with R B Hamilton. Francis Klingender: 'Content and Form in Art' 1935. Realism: Chernyshevski. This passage is particularly revealing, first, because it emphasizes the goal to which Fry’s aesthetic development was inevitably leading him – he himself admitted that any attempt he might make to explain ‘significant’ form would land him ‘in the depths of mysticism’ – and secondly because it illustrates his peculiar method of analysis. His major works included Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) , Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948) and his posthumously published Animals in Art and Thought (1971). Indeed, moral behaviour not infrequently implies the suppression of inherited responses: to act morally, when faced by a bull, I must curb my impulse of self-preservation sufficiently to help my less agile companion. Francis Klingender, Evelyn Antal, John P Harthan. It was not, therefore, to the conflicts and the squalor of the real world that Tennyson returned, but to the sham idealism with which the Victorian squire and business man sought to conceal the contradictions of that world. Though brilliant and plausible, this argument will not bear examination. ‘The most universal of all things cherished by men and the one cherished more than anything else in the world is life itself; most of all the life men would like to live but also every other kind of life, for it is in any case better to live than not to live and all live things by their very nature are afraid of death, of extinction – and they all love life. Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop ... 2020. The idea is sounder and more interesting than Klingender's Freudian orthodoxy allows him to admit. André Breton: from the First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924. Only the aesthetes still assert that art is superior to life and to reality.’, Chernyshevski sums up by stating that it is the essential function of art ‘to reproduce everything that interests man in life’. 36. 1935. Secondly, moreover, it is untrue that artistic perception itself is never followed by responsive action. Against this theory Chernyshevski advances the claim: ‘Reality is greater than dreams and essential significance more important than fantastic pretensions.’ Hence he seeks beauty not in any ideal sphere remote from reality and opposed to it, but in the essence of reality itself. "This pioneer investigation remains one of the most original and arresting accounts of the impact of the new industry and technology upon the landscape of England and the English mind. Andre Breton: from the First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924. However, most typically, form is defined by a combination of these factors, as is the case in this print by Max Ernst. The Renard stories became one of tbe most powerful vehicles for satire in the late Middle Ages. To quote Fry’s own account, the discussion stimulated by the appearance of ‘post-impressionism’ revealed ‘that some artists who were peculiarly sensitive to the formal relations of works of art... had almost no sense of the emotions’ of life which he had supposed them to convey. The assumption which is inherent in all idealist theories of aesthetics, including formalism, that the general is necessarily more fundamental and significant than the particular is thus a fallacy. Our specialist interests are Australian Indigenous Art, Australian Art, Oceanic Art, Modern and Contemporary Art. Louis Aragon et al. 11. The image that would result from such an attempt to distil only what is general from a multitude of living individuals, would be of the type which is only too familiar from hundreds of war memorials up and down the country. He even compared them favourably with those of the thirteenth century, although he regarded the latter period as more artistic. Tim Klingender Fine Art. This does not mean that a work of art can always be justly valued in terms of the moral standards ruling at the time – on the contrary, one need only think of Goya’s Caprichos or of a book like The Grapes of Wrath to realize how often art has been an indictment of those standards. ‘Science and art (poetry) are textbooks for those who are beginning to study life. It has an endless number of uses in the creation of art. In Art and Form Rose engages mainly with fellow authors in Nonsite, notably Todd Cronan and Patrick McCreless, noting intentionalist assumptions malgré eux, but his thesis is more strongly indebted to Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). For the moment let us note that it entails a great impoverishment: by restricting aesthetic feeling to ‘pure’ form, i.e. Though greatly accentuated since the beginning of the twentieth century, this isolation of the artists was not new, and in Fry’s case, too, the tendency of divorcing art from life was already implicit in his theory of 1909. Chernyshevski’s conception of ‘life’ as the content of art is thus dynamic, dialectical, it is the struggle of life, life as it is in reality and not in blissful dreams. Francis Klingender: 'Content and Form in Art' 1935. What did he teach concerning the nature of art and its relation to life? Dec. 31st, 2020. But, as Chernyshevski points out, ‘alcohol is not wine’. André Breton: from the First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924. Chernyshevski admits that beauty in this sense of perfection of form, or in the language of classical philosophy, of the ‘unity of idea and image’, is an essential element of art. Stuart Davis and Clarence Weinstock: 'Abstract Painting in America', 'Contradictions in Abstractions' and 'A Medium of 2 Dimensions' 1935. In other words, the interval of reflection which Fry claims as the distinguishing feature of artistic perception, is just as essential in any behaviour that can be subjected to a moral test. Francis Klingender: 'Content and Form in Art' 1935. The minds of such people are not very active and if a person of this type happens to be a poet or an artist, his work will have no significance beyond reproducing the particular aspects of life which he prefers. And in so far as he communicates the image of his perception to his fellow men, the artist is morally responsible for it. Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism by F. D. Klingender 1943. Chernyshevski’s conception of the moral function of art has nothing in common with that of Tennyson: ‘The attitude of some people to the phenomena of life consists almost entirely in a preference for certain aspects of reality and avoidance of others. He might attempt to compose an ideal figure embodying courage, toughness, a weather-beaten appearance, all those general qualities, in short, which the experience of desert warfare has imprinted on each member of that veteran force. Those capable of doing so are, he admits, but few: ‘in proportion as art becomes purer, the number of people to whom it appeals gets less’, [9] he had already told the Fabians in 1917. It will be necessary at a later stage to enquire whether this assumption is valid in so individual, so richly varied and so constantly changing a sphere as art. Although, in his view, beauty is that which evokes life and although art reproduces what interests man in life, it by no means follows that art reproduces only what is beautiful in nature. Night Workers. Chernyshevski anticipated Fry in pointing out that beauty in nature is entirely distinct from the aesthetic element in art. David A. Siqueiros: 'Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts' 1934. Science does not claim to be anything else, nor do the poets in their cursory remarks about the essence of their work. His mother, also British, was Florence Hoette (Klingender) (d. 1944). It can describe edges. Adolf Hitler: Speech Inaugurating the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art' 1937. Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism by F. D. Klingender 1943. ‘The usual assumption of a direct and decisive connection between life and art is by no means correct’, he told the Fabian Society in 1917, ‘if we consider this special spiritual activity of art we find it no doubt open at times to influences from life, but in the main self-contained – we find the rhythmic sequences of change determined more by its own internal forces – and by the readjustment within it of its own elements – than by external forces. Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism by F. D. Klingender 1943. … I mean this, that since the imaginative life comes in the course of time to represent more or less what mankind feels to be the completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate capacities, the actual life may be explained and justified by its approximation here and there, however partially and inadequately, to that freer and fuller life.’ [6], It is interesting to note that Fry was by no means critical of the moral standards of his own age, when he wrote this passage. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975); and Francis D. Klingender, “Content and Form in Art,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000, ed. listeners cannot directly identify. I know that I have no right to detach myself so completely from the fate of my kind, but I have never been able to believe in political values.’ [11] In the light of this confession it is not difficult to understand the curious phrase which Fry used in a letter to D. S. MacColl (1912) to define his own aim as a practising artist: ‘I’ve always been searching for a style to express my petite sensation in.’ [12] Estranged from life and indifferent to the fate of mankind, art, as here defined, has no other function but to cultivate the sensibility of the few elect. It is therefore necessary to amplify the previous definition of the function of form in art – the complete expression of the artist’s aim – by stating: to paint, model, write, compose, act, film, etc., beautifully means so to express the particular that it attains general significance. For Klingender, they exist in a form of duality, open and closed, individual and collective. In other words, it refers to the form and not to the content of the artist’s work. THE ART OF THE WANJINA. The same applies to the theories put forward by Fry’s successors: those who regard art as an emanation of the ‘sub-conscious’ exclude the whole vast realm of human consciousness; while the advocates of a biological ‘sense of form’ reduce art to the level of a pre-human, because pre-social, reflex. Harrison and Wood, 437. If this were true, there could be no art: what else is the work of art but the creative reproduction of the artist’s perception? Leon Trotsky: from Literature and Revolution 1922-23. ‘In real life all happenings are true and correct, there are no oversights, none of that one-sided narrowness of vision which attaches to all human works. This mythical element is progressively destroyed by the advance of science which, consequently, results in a decline of art. Realism as Critique. Wood This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s. Unable to comprehend the causes of the collapse, he was glad to escape into what now appeared to him as a ‘revolutionary advance’ in art – i.e. The idea is sounder and more interesting than Klingender's Freudian orthodoxy allows him to admit. the reflex behaviour inherited from the pre-human stage of our evolution – ends. Klingender's father, Louis Henry Weston Klingender (1861-1950), a native of Liverpool, was a painter of animals, a subject which the younger Klingender would return to himself late in life. Realism as Critique. 11. the tame still-lives and the harmless holiday scenes of the post-impressionists (not, it is significant to note, what was really new in English art, the war paintings of 1914-18). Francis Klingender: 'Content and Form in Art' 1935. Although by 1909 Fry had already abandoned the ‘idea of likeness to Nature, of correctness or incorrectness as a test’ – he had just discovered Cézanne – he was, as he himself says, ‘still obsessed by ideas about the content of a work of art’, for he still felt that the ‘aesthetic whole’ somehow reflected ‘the emotions of life’. … Form in relation to positive and negative space . But life does not trouble to explain its phenomena to us nor to draw conclusions as men do in the works of science and art. Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas Charles Harrison , Paul J. Action implies moral responsibility. I conceived the form and the emotion which it conveyed as being inextricably bound together in the aesthetic whole.’ [1]. In our own tradition this was true of Shelley and Constable, no less than of Fielding and Hogarth. Klingender "Content and Form in Art" (437-9). To quote his own words: ‘Art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of the imaginative life, which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action. Fry admits that art is communication, i.e. In 1920 he added: ‘true art is becoming more and more esoteric and hidden, like an heretical sect – or rather like science in the middle ages’. Forms and shapes can be thought of as positive or negative. For Klingender, they exist in a form of duality, open and closed, individual and collective. In terms of art, line is considered to be a moving dot. (Francis Donald). In 1909 Fry still seems to have felt this, for he was prepared to accept the idealist point of view that life, far from being the touchstone of aesthetic value, should, on the contrary, itself be judged by the standards of art: ‘It might even be’, he wrote, ‘that from this point of view we should rather justify actual life by its relation to the imaginative, justify nature by its likeness to art. ‘It would seem that the definitions “Beauty is life,” “Beautiful are all things in which we see life as, according to our conceptions, it should be,” “Beautiful is an object which expresses life or reminds us of it” give a satisfactory explanation of all the ways in which the feeling of beauty is roused in us.’ [18]. It freed the artist from complete subservience to a false morality and enabled him to preserve something, at least, of his integrity. Stuart Davis and Clarence Weinstock: 'Abstract Painting in America', 'Contradictions in Abstractions' and 'A Medium of 2 Dimensions' 1935. ‘The beautiful’, says Chernyshevski, ‘is an individual, live object and not an abstract thought’. Art and the Industrial Revolution. In 1902 the family moved to Goslar in While rejecting the escape into pure art in the name of morals, he made his art the handmaid of an even baser form of escape, the escape of insincerity. As Francis Klingender states in . But had they not been drawn for us by men of genius, our own conclusions would be even more narrow and inadequate. But to deny that the general is more significant than the particular does not imply the reverse proposition that the particular as such is what matters in art. by Klingender, Francis D., 1907-1955 and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.com. Adolf Hitler: Speech Inaugurating the 'Great Exhibition of German Art' 1937. 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