Tag: art history

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What makes a painting a masterpiece?

Serenade 1628, Judith Leyster, courtesy Rijksmuseum

I have a student who asks me, “What makes this painting a masterpiece?” There is no easy answer, but I’ll try.

A masterpiece was, historically, a work made by a journeyman to obtain full membership in a guild. (Women masters were so rare that the Dutch painter Judith Leyster is an oft-cited exception.)  Diego Velázquez’s The Waterseller of Seville is an example of such a masterpiece.

Guilds were very careful about this; for example, to prevent cheating the 17th century Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths made apprentices create their masterpieces under supervision at a workhouse.

Today, we use the term ‘masterpiece’ to describe a work that has gained widespread critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person’s career.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665, Johannes Vermeer, courtesy the Mauritshuis

The word itself is slippery

First off, whether we like a work or not doesn’t matter. I am completely unmoved by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, but the majority of critics disagree with me so for now it stays in the canon.

Masterpieces aren’t defined by style, school or trend. They’re not necessarily big or larded with meaning; Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is a simple Dutch tronie, a mere 17.5 x 15 inches. But it has inspired many other works of art.

Innovation within tradition

Many masterpieces are revolutionary, but they emerge from tradition and then push it forward. Édouard Manet’s Olympia scandalized Paris not because it depicted a nude, but because it stripped away the tissue of mythology that had legitimized earlier nudes. Its flat planes, direct gaze, and contemporary setting were outrageous at the time. Today, we see Olympia as a logical step in art history.  

Olympia, 1863, Édouard Manet, courtesy Musée d’Orsay

Cultural resonance

Masterpieces crystallize the anxieties or aspirations of their time. “Everything that is made reveals the beliefs and preoccupations of the people who made it,” wrote Stephen Bayley, and that’s particularly true of masterpieces.

Mastery of the fundamentals

A masterpiece shows technical command. Whether you’re looking at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch or a Peter Doig landscape, you can feel the structure underneath the style.

Emotional resonance

Technical excellence alone isn’t enough. There are perfectly competent paintings that leave us cold, but a masterpiece engages our minds and hearts. It makes us feel something—wonder, sorrow, awe, joy, recognition.

Think about Wheat Field with Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh. The drawing is idiosyncratic. The brushwork is restless. The color is exaggerated. And it pulses with intensity. It feels alive. A masterpiece connects the artist’s inner life to the viewer’s. That connection is what people remember.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889, Vincent van Gogh, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Unity of vision and execution

A masterpiece feels mature, almost as if its execution was inevitable. There’s nothing that jars. When you stand before a Claude Monet painting you are able to lean into his total immersion. The color, scale, and repetition all serve the same visual idea, even when he’s experimenting (as he so often was).

Time is the final judge

Artists are the worst judges of their own work, and seldom know if they’ve created a masterpiece. And that isn’t their primary goal anyway.

Time is the ultimate arbiter. Work that continues to move viewers across generations are masterpieces. They survive changing tastes and critical fashions. They speak beyond their moment.

A masterpiece alters the trajectory of art, reflects its historical moment, demonstrates extraordinary command of form and continues to matter long after its maker is gone.

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Meaning Is a Moving Target

Byzantine Church mosaics, Monreale, Sicily, late 12th century, courtesy Wikipedia.

In my Tuesday class, I ask students to think like artists from different historical periods. I want them to understand why they choose a certain style. Is it popular right now, or does it truly fit their personality and goals?

We looked at The Census of Bethlehem by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. One student asked, “Would this be considered a masterpiece today? And was it a masterpiece when it was painted?” I think the answer to the first question is yes. Contemporary painting is searching for the Next Big Thing, even though no one knows what that will be. The second question is harder to answer. Much of the art from Brueghel’s time no longer exists. Historians estimate that about 90% of religious art in England was destroyed during the early Protestant Reformation, and the losses in the Low Countries and Germany were probably just as great.

Mary Magdalen announcing the Resurrection to the Apostles, St Albans Psalter, English, 1120–1145, courtesy Wikipedia.

We discussed two art terms that have changed meaning since the Renaissance. Naturalism once meant careful, accurate depiction of the visible world. Today, it also has social justice implications. Humanism has always emphasized human reason and potential, but for Renaissance thinkers, those ideas were still firmly grounded in belief in God.

I didn’t spend enough time explaining the Medieval mindset that the Renaissance rejected. Medieval art was not meant to be understood the way we approach art today. Ideas we now take for granted, like realism, self-expression and originality, were not important to Medieval artists or audiences.

Late 14th century French Gothic triptych, probably for a lay owner, with scenes from the Life of the Virgin, courtesy Wikipedia.

Medieval art is symbolic. Paintings, manuscripts, and mosaics were not created mainly for beauty, but to teach theology. Every color, gesture, and figure had meaning that would have been obvious to a Medieval viewer steeped in Christian belief. Blue symbolized heaven, purity, and the Virgin Mary. Gold represented God’s eternal, unchanging realm. When Christ appears larger than other figures, it is not a mistake in perspective but a statement of spiritual importance.

Medieval artists were not trying to imitate the visible world. Their goal was to show what the world meant, not what it looked like. Perspective, shadows and anatomical accuracy mattered little when the purpose of art was spiritual salvation. These works were tools for prayer, meditation and instruction.

The Bamberg Apocalypse, from the Ottonian Reichenau School, achieves monumentality in a small scale. 1000–1020, courtesy Wikipedia.

Today, much of that symbolic language is lost. Without understanding the visual code, we see only stiff figures in strange clothing.

Medieval art existed within churches, monasteries and manuscripts. It was part of a world filled with ritual, incense, music and shared belief. Removed from that setting, it becomes harder to understand. We ask, “Is this good art?” when the original question was, “Does this lead the soul toward God?”

Most Medieval artists remain anonymous because individual fame did not matter. The work belonged to the church, the community and ultimately to God. Tradition carried authority, and innovation was viewed with suspicion. This stands in sharp contrast to our modern idea of the genius artist.

Recently, a friend sent me the above cartoon. Another friend, who has advanced degrees in art history and religion, replied, “At this point, any art hanging on a wall is hopelessly traditional. Piling it on the floor is the only way forward.”

The post-modern art world, as secular as it is, has much in common with Medieval art. Skill at depicting the natural world is less important than the message, and the message is often still inscrutable.

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A brief history of nudes in art

Musicians and dancers on fresco at Tomb of Nebamun, c. 1420–1375 BC, British Museum

We live in curiously divided times. Pop media is suffused with sexuality, but nudes in art are aggressively quashed in social media. Ten years ago, I didn’t hesitate to illustrate a blog post with my own figure paintings; now I hope the algorithms are fooled by ancient Egyptian stylings into not seeing the painting above as figures.

The ancient world

One of the earliest known examples of nudes in art is the Venus of Willendorf, a small Paleolithic figurine. It has exaggerated breasts and hips and although it is said to be a fertility symbol, its purpose is, of course, unknown.

In ancient Egypt, nudes in art represented youth, fertility, and servitude. Nude subjects were children and servants, while gods and rulers were depicted clothed. In nearby Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, where some speculate the Garden of Eden was located), nudity was linked to religion and sex.

Detail from tympanum depicting the Last Judgment from the Saint-Lazare Cathedral, Autun, France. c. 1120-1145. Courtesy Alberti’s Window

What were our ancestors doing?

The Greeks adored the nude male body, which represented heroism, virtue, athleticism, and divine beauty. But nude images of women were far less common, and limited to goddesses, prostitutes, and scenes of violence or suffering. Respectable Greek matrons simply didn’t wander around naked.

Ancient Rome shamelessly aped Greek art and attitudes. However, nudity in Roman art also represented an artistic confrontation with the new religion of Christianity.

As Christianity made inroads into the old religions of Rome, the old forms of Greco-Roman art began to be seen as sinful. The only safe expression of nudes in art were the ancient myths of gods and goddesses.

By the Middle Ages, Christianity was the dominant factor in western art. While casual nudity was avoided, there were exceptions. In Judeo-Christian tradition, Adam and Eve were happily naked until they ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Then, they were ashamed. They could be painted nude as a cautionary tale. The infant Jesus could be painted nude because he was innocent of sin.

There were also naked depictions of the Last Judgment and martyrdoms of the saints, and the occasional symbolic nudes in Byzantine art and illuminated manuscripts.

The Renaissance meant a revival of Greco-Roman artistic ideals, which in turn led to an interest in mastering the human form. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Sondro Botticelli sought to tie anatomical accuracy with spiritual or allegorical meaning. These artists struck a balance between the spiritual and temporal realms.

The Blonde Odalisque, François Boucher, 1753, courtesy Alte Pinakothek

By the 17th century, however, Baroque artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Caravaggio had tipped the scales to the fleshly, fleshy world. Rococo painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher turned toward voluptuous eroticism and fantasy.

But all pendulums swing, and once again, in the late 18th and early 19th century, artists like Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres returned to heroic, idealized forms, often referencing mythology. Romantic artists like Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix used nudity to express emotion, suffering, and passion.

Reclining Nude, 1917, Amedeo Modigliani, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Our modern life

French Realists and Impressionists like Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas began to openly portray the nude provocatively. Courbet, in particular, was scandalous; in fact, he still shocks me.

Modernists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani deconstructed and dehumanized the nude. As the 20th century wore on, the nude became the battleground of both personal expression and sociopolitical challenge. That continues today, as the human form remains the locus for challenging gender norms, arguing politics, and discussing body image. That’s a lot of baggage for the poor old human body to carry.

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Top ten cat portraits

For several years I had a feline student in my zoom classes. Wylie attended faithfully every week, ‘assisting’ his human, Pam Otis, by standing on her drawing board, snaking himself around her monitor, jumping into her lap, and using every other cat trick that assures that work never gets done. I posted so many pictures of Wylie on Facebook that people assumed he lived with me.

Wylie (2009-2025)

After I posted Dogs in art: ten great dog paintings and why I love them, I expected an email from Wylie demanding equal time for cats. Perhaps his silence meant he was already not feeling well, because last week he passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 16. Wylie, here are the cat portraits you meant to ask for.

Top ten cat portraits

Study for the Madonna of the Cat, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1478–1481, courtesy British Museum

Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of the Virgin and Child playing with or carrying a cat six times. Either the painting never materialized or it didn’t survive, but it’s clear from this and his other cat drawings that he had a real cat at home. This one is a cat that’s had just about enough, thank you, which in turn humanizes the Infant Jesus.

Miss Olson, 1952, Andrew Wyeth, courtesy Brandywine Museum

This painting was done just four years after Christina’s World. The model was Christina Olson, the inspiration for the earlier painting. She was the victim of a wasting disease, although its exact character is unknown. Much of how we perceive our pets is based on our interactions with them. This is a moment of tenderness to which anyone can relate.

Maine Coon Cat, 1998, Jamie Wyeth, courtesy Farnsworth Art Museum

Then there’s Jamie Wyeth, whose relationship with animals is more astringent and far funnier. I have known many Maine Coon Cats and think of them as overlarge house cats mainly interested in their baskets. The idea of them caterwauling in unison in the tall grass strikes me as very funny indeed.

Black Cat and Tomato Plant, 1931, woodblock print, Takahashi Hiroaki, courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Cats have been an important motif in Chinese, Japanese and Korean art for centuries. They have a symbolic meaning that’s missing for westerners, representing good luck, prosperity, protection from evil, and longevity. Part of that has to do with their skill at eradicating pests. Here we have a shrewdly-observed cat’s eye view of hunting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Child with Cat (Julie Manet), 1887, courtesy Musée d’Orsay

Many artists, including me, have a hard time liking Renoir. This painting differs from much of his work in that it’s a real girl with a real cat. That cuts through his “syrupy, falsified take on reality,” as critic Sebastian Smee described Renoir’s oeuvre. That’s a happy but very real cat.

The Cat, 1914, Bart van der Leck, courtesy Kröller-Müller Museum

Bart van der Leck’s principal fame to claim is as a cofounder of De Stijl with Piet Mondrian et al. That said, he ultimately backed off pure abstraction to being satisfied with simplifying representational forms. This cat would be just another clever motif if not for that knowing face.

Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, 1850, woodcut print, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, private collection.

The Tōkaidō road linked the shōgun‘s capital, Edo, to the imperial capital, Kyōto, making it the most important road of old Japan. The ‘stations’ were its rest stops, and they were a popular subject for prints. You could probably get a nice fat thesis paper out of comparing this with Utagawa Hiroshige’s far-more-literal Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Or, how would you represent the rest stops on I-90 as cats?

Boys and Kitten, 1873, watercolor, Winslow Homer, courtesy Worcester Art Museum

The star of this painting isn’t the light-grey kitten, which you can barely see cradled in the middle boy’s arms. It’s not even the three youngsters, raptly attentive to their pet. It’s Mama Cat, sitting up so proudly to the left.

Black Cat and Abyssinian Cat, 2003, etching and aquatint, Elizabeth Blackadder, courtesy Royal Scottish Academy

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts. She did so while embracing ‘feminine’ subjects like cats and flowers. She lived a long, happy, productive life, and her cats (for which she’s well-known) are fat, sleek, and content creatures.

Happy Flower Cat, undated, Louis Wain

Louis Wain was another famous painter of cats, but his story isn’t nearly as happy. His early cat paintings are precious and anthropomorphic. “English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves,” said  H. G. Wells. In 1914, he suffered a severe head injury and was eventually certified insane. I tried to find an example of his work that bridges the work of his younger years and the more troubling work he did post-brain injury.

If you still want more cats in art, check out these cats who walked across manuscripts hundreds of years ago.

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Art is not a luxury

Luristan bronze griffins, first millennium BC, Museum of Ancient Near East, Berlin courtesy Wolfgang Sauber.

The Torah describes Bezalel and his assistant, Aholiab, as having decorated the Tabernacle sometime between 1400 and 500 BCE. Polygnotus of Thasos, who worked in the mid-5th century BC, was a superstar in ancient Greece, as was his student Pheidias.

All of the original work of these men is now lost; we know nothing about it except copies and descriptions.

Before them, art was anonymous, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t made. Before homo sapiens were in Europe, their Neanderthal cousins were making art on the Iberian Peninsula. Prehistoric cave art is a human universal, found worldwide. Why?

Restored griffin fresco in the Throne Room, Palace of Knossos, Crete, original from Bronze Age. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=179033

Enter the griffin

The griffin (or griffon) is a mythical beast with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. By the Middle Ages, it had assumed legendary status, but the oldest known depiction of a griffin is carved into slate on a cosmetics palette, c. 3300–3100 BC.

Because people in the Middle Ages could read and write, we more or less understand the medieval bestiary, including the legends of the griffin. For ancient Egyptians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, central Asians, etc., all of whom used the griffin symbol, its meaning is less clear. All cultures, apparently, saw them as supernaturally powerful. And they were thought to be real, if the accounts of ancient naturalists like Pliny the Elder and others are to be believed. The griffin lives on to this day in heraldry, logos and mascots. It meant something to an Egyptian makeup artist, to a feudal warlord, to the Victorian art theorist John Ruskin, and even to animators of Disney movies. Even concrete hasn’t lasted that long.

Medieval tapestry, Basel, c. 1450 CE.

Art tells the story of human history

The tabernacle and Polygnotus’ paintings may no longer exist, but much ancient art does. We may not know why the unnamed painters at Chauvet Cave painted animals, but there is no question that their art evokes a response in us. For one thing, it’s highly realistic, even when the animals it portrays are extinct.

I wrote on Monday that art history is the pictorial history of mankind. It is the most powerful and enduring record of human civilization, equaling the written word in recording the values, beliefs, emotions, and daily lives of people throughout history. And in general it’s more succinct.

In its narrowest sense, art is visual documentation, and we like to say that purpose has been rendered obsolete by photography. However, if you’ve ever tried to identify a plant, you know that a good botanical illustration is often more useful than a photograph.

More than that, art reflects the cultural, social, and political contexts of its time. It is rich in symbolism, experience, meaning and metaphor. Somehow those elements speak to us even when we can’t put what they say into words.

That is because art works in universal themes, such as love, grief, death, power, or vulnerability.

A statue of a griffin on the Basilica di S. Marco, Venice

Art is not a luxury

Art is no more of a luxury than civilization itself, for the two are deeply entwined. That’s why human culture has always supported art, and that’s one of the many stories the griffin tells us.

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Top ten painters of all time

Portrait of Sir Thomas Elyot, c. 1532–34, Hans Holbein the Younger, courtesy Royal Collection, Windsor Castle. Drawing is important, especially if you’re the artist to a famously murderous king.

I’m certain that as soon as I publish this, one of my pals is going to say, “but what about ___? You love his work!” But here’s my list of the top ten painters of all time, in date order.

The ‘ten’ thing is a joke, of course. This is after I weeded it down to 33.

Jan van Eyck (1390-1441). If he’d never painted anything but the Ghent Altarpiece and the The Arnolfini Portrait, he’d still rank in the top tier of art history.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). His engravings and woodcuts dazzle with their perspective, complexity, delicacy and religious sensibility.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). If you love Tudor history, you’ll love Holbein. Not only did he paint the definitive portraits of Henry VIII and his movers and shakers, his painting of Anne of Cleves changed the course of history.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1528-1569). He taught me the difference between subject and focal point in a painting.

Bronzino, (1503-1572). I’m not sure which I like more, his treatment of fabric or the arrogance of his models.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Yeah, he’s the best of the Baroque tenebrists, but it’s the gritty realism of his religious paintings that slays me.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Everyone carries on about his plump women, but I think his action paintings are the forerunner of modern comic books.

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). Tenebrism with a saturnine Spanish twist, and oh, so human.

El Perro, c 1819-23, Francisco de Goya, oil mural on plaster transferred to canvas, courtesy Museo del Prado. Accidental or not, this was the birth of modernism.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828). He was a bit of a misery-guts, but he depicted the horrors of war like no other artist ever.

William Blake (1757-1827). He was eccentric to the point of madness and singular in his beliefs and he gave us the words to the hymn Jerusalem.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). You could write him off as just another Romantic, except his symbolism is so deep it’s narrative.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). It’s all about the fabric, although I do think Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne is brilliant social commentary.

Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, c 1824, John Constable, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

John Constable (1776-1837). He invented plein air, and then went to France and explained it to the Barbizon School. His field studies are as fresh as any modern painter’s.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Nobody could build a showstopping theatrical painting like Church.

Édouard Manet (1832-1883). Yes, his social commentary is incisive, but I’m also moved by the little still lives he did while dying.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910). He painted two of my favorite places—the Adirondacks and the Maine coast—and he taught me everything I know about diagonals in composition.

Claude Monet (1840-1926). Everything we know about optics and color can be credited to him.

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) I love his Joan of Arc for the way it weaves visions into the landscape, but he also had a real feel for the French peasantry.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The older I get, the more I appreciate him as a color and brushwork revolutionary. I just wish he could have been happier.

Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923). He edges past the other two greats of Edwardian-era painting, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. It’s the color of the light.

The Teamster, 1916, George Bellows, courtesy Farnsworth Art Museum

George Bellows (1882-1925). Whether he was painting in New York or on the Maine coast, he was a man of the people. Which is not to downplay the importance of his color or composition.

Arthur Streeton (1867-1943). He’s my favorite of the Heidelberg School painters for his ethereal depictions of the Australian bush.

David Davies, (1864-1939) runs a very close second to Streeton, particularly for his bush nocturnes.

Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) He’s on my list for the way he organizes the chaos and color of the western landscape.

John F. Carlson (1875-1947). His gloomy winter skies, flat landscapes and sweeping woods are a dead giveaway that he grew up in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. Somehow, he manages to make them look good.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) He treats a subject I love (the woods and water of Ontario) with a raw, vital and uniquely North American version of Impressionism.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). He was a brilliant designer, and a painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, and adventurer. That’s a life to emulate.

Francis Cadell (1883-1937) is my favorite of the Scottish Colourists, both for his impeccable design and for his light and lovely depictions of Iona.

Greenland Mountains, c. 1930, Lawren Harris, courtesy National Gallery of Canada

Lawren Harris (1885-1920). Of all the Group of Seven, he’s the one who took the longest stylistic and spiritual journey, and most revered the notion of the Great White North.

Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). He was too soft to protect himself against a designing woman, but his depictions of English life, his Biblical narratives and his paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel are all moving.

Clyfford Still (1904-1980). Whether you’re a figurative or abstract painter, you can learn so much about design from him.

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021). Everyone knows him for his pies, lipsticks, cakes and hot dogs, but he was a brilliant landscape painter.

Lois Dodd (1927-present). She’s a keen observer who knows how to simplify exactly the right amount. She never gets stuck in the weeds.

What painters have influenced you? Who did I miss on my list? Who would you have never included? And why?

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Why I write this blog

The Vineyard, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The consistent top-ranked post on my blog when it was on Blogger was about folding a plastic bag to fit in your paint kit. It remains useful even with plastic bag bans in some parts of the country.

The consistent top-ranked post on this platform is Debunkery #1: No, you’re probably not a tetrachromat. Month after month, it outperforms every other post. Most visitors stay on it for an average of just 1m 16s before flitting away, either to another page on this website or to someone who humors their dreams of tetrochromacy.

I’m surprised they stay that long. Eight years after I first wrote it, there’s still no evidence for tetrachromacy in humans. The idea should be consigned to the intellectual dustbin along with things like phrenology and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But if tetrachromacy introduces them to my blog, I’ll gladly take it.

The Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

A reader sent me this review of the upcoming Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker. It tallies with my goddaughter’s career in New York. Sandy made the error of getting her BFA and MA at prestigious schools without having a bean in her pocket. Gallerists mistook her for a trust-fund baby who could bask in their reflected glory rather than earn a living wage.

“Art devotees spoke like they were trapped in dictionaries and being forced to chew their way out,” Bosker wrote. For any of us forced to listen to or read near-incomprehensible drivel about near-incomprehensible art, that rings true.

I was a terrible student. Voted ‘most likely to drop out’ by my sixth-grade class, I did not materially change by college. Yet I’m well-read, literate and numerate, and my unconventional education has been a blessing. My brain is cluttered up with the bad ideas of my own choosing.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, 30X48, $5579 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

There’s a lot of dreck written about art. Art isn’t that difficult, but lard it with lashings of pompous blather, and it rolls off most normal people. Obviously, there are many excellent art scholars out there, but they’re often outmaneuvered by the bloviators. (According to Warren G. Harding, bloviation is “the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing.”)

I hope I can say something intelligent about art without being caught up in the art-speak that drives me mad. I want to motivate people to learn to make and appreciate art, to buy it intelligently, and to understand its importance for the 99% of us who aren’t perusing it in Chelsea.

I can no longer remember why I started blogging so many years ago. In fact, I don’t have records of the first iteration of this blog on WordPress, before I went to the Bangor Daily News. I do know why I keep writing it, however.

Readers of this blog, this month.

A few years ago, I was happy to have readers in the US and Canada, with a smattering in the UK. That has grown now to a worldwide audience (see above). I teach to students from across the US and Canada and just had a student enroll from Scotland. On Monday I demoed to an art group in England. The internet is full of lots of schlock, but it also compresses distances and allows us to bypass the most egregious blowhards. As a person who could never thrive in the rigid systems of my youth, I find it liberating.

On Friday, I released Step 5, the Foundation Layer, of my Seven Protocols for Successful Painters. This is the heart of painting, where the first layer of color is applied, and it’s very useful information.

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Art is not eternal

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

“Art is eternal,” read yet another meme on Facebook. Not surprisingly, artists like to repeat this. But art is no more eternal than any other handiwork of man.

History is replete with examples of art that is gone. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Great Library of Alexandria and all it contained. The Great Hypostyle Hall of the Temple of Karnak. The 69 ancient Greek bronze statues of Olympic victors that once graced the sanctuary of Olympia. The menorah from the Second Temple, which was stolen when the Romans sacked Jerusalem; then it disappeared from Rome. The Imperial Seal of China.

Pinkie, pastel, ~6X8, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Whole cities have been sacked, like Athens, Constantinople, or Kaifeng. Their art was destroyed with them. Insurgency and war destroy art, as in the French Revolution. Conquerors loot and lose it; Napoleon and the Nazis are just two examples.

This fall we had a massive fire in Port Clyde, ME. It destroyed several historic buildings and paintings by Jamie Wyeth and Kevin Beers. They were gone with sudden finality, and we were shocked and grieved.

There are spasms of iconoclastic fury that convulse humankind. The Beeldenstorm of the 16th century is the most well-known. The Reformation wanted to purge Northern Europe of Catholic ideology. What better way to attack it than through art? In England, 90% of religious art was destroyed. The percentages were probably similar in Germany and the Low Countries.

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Occasionally, great works are saved from iconoclasm by very brave people. The Van Eycks‘ Ghent Altarpiece, is an outstanding example of Early Netherlandish painting. It was already famous in August of 1556 when the Beeldenstorm hit Ghent. The first attack on the Cathedral was repelled by guards. On the second try, the rioters used a tree trunk to batter through the doors. But by then the panels and the guards had been hidden on a narrow spiral staircase within the tower. They were eventually moved to a new hiding spot in the town hall, but the original frame, itself a work of art, was destroyed.

To put that in context, imagine trying to stop the Taliban as they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyam.

Art isn’t even above fickle fashion. It’s easy to date paintings because every era has its tropes. Right now, we’re in a long period where color is ascendent over detail. To the next generation, that will look as old-fashioned as leg o’ mutton sleeves look to us.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I told my daughter that when I die, AI should be able to reproduce me well enough to go on teaching my classes without me. “I won’t do that,” she said. “Your paintings will go up in value when you’re dead.” That is probably, true, but I’m not painting to impress people after I’m gone. Nor should you.

Our job as artists is to speak to the living. The Beeldenstorm happened because Protestants knew how powerful art is. The Nazis destroyed ‘degenerate’ art for the same reason. That’s what motivated the Taliban.

Of course, art can reach across the centuries to speak to us. Consider paleolithic cave art and its makers. We know almost nothing of their culture: we have no dishes, spears, firepits, foods, dwellings or traces of language. All we have is art: figurines, bone carvings, a few decorated tools and lots of cave paintings from all over the world. These speak to us powerfully but wordlessly. I don’t care if my own painting lasts 500 years, let alone 35,000 years, but I’m sure glad their art has.

Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off these or any other painting on my website. Shipping and handling are always included within the continental US, but I’m afraid I’ll no longer be able to get them to you by Christmas.

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Art without religion

Painting of Gaṇeśa riding on his Indian rat or bandicoot, c. 1820, courtesy British Museum

It has always baffled me that an art historian is required to learn German, French, or Italian but not to study religious history. Religious paintings comprise the bulk of art through the ages, from the shamanistic cave art of paleolithic man right up to the 18th century. That’s not just true for Christendom, but for every culture worldwide. Art is a primary way people have explored the meaning of their existence, and that is the fundamental question of religion.

I can only speak for my own culture, but my own grounding in Christianity makes reading western paintings easy. I do not need stories and symbols explained to me; even deeply buried allegorical references make sense without a lot of clarification.

Ladder of Divine Ascent, 12th century, icon, courtesy Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Egypt

(That’s also true, by the way, for paintings based on Greco-Roman myth, because we learned those stories in school. Today I wonder why they spent so much time on them, but apparently there was a lot more time in the school day back before STEM. Peter Paul Rubens had it right when he painted those fat gods and goddesses as cartoon characters.)

I’ve often wondered how students of art history read the symbols in religious art when they don’t have a grounding in the thinking underlying them. Art historians are famous for their capacity to pontificate. In the post-church era, how can their students discern what in all that blather is reasonable and what is nonsense?

Thangka Depicting Vajrabhairava, ca. 1740, courtesy Sotheby’s

Go back in time with me to my first visit to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan and central Asian art. Tibetan art is overwhelmingly religious and conservative and, I suspect, cautionary. The Tārās are, like the Greco-Roman gods, partly personifications, or representations of abstract ideas in the form of personages. Looking at the work totally divorced from its religious underpinnings, all I saw were five floors of ferocious figurines.

I suppose my response was like a non-Christian’s reading of a crucifixion painting. They can be frightening, especially in a culture as divorced from death as we are. However, crucifixion was an historical reality running from pre-Roman times to the modern world (it’s still a rare but legal form of punishment in parts of the world). To the Christian, the crucifixion of Jesus represents the absolute low point of the story, but it also points to the ultimate redemption of humanity.

My art-historian goddaughter was raised in a traditional Chinese household, so Tibetan house shrines don’t seem that strange to her. She was able to explain the rough outlines of the Tārā permutations to me. I still wouldn’t want any of it in my house, but, then again, I wouldn’t want The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus by Dieric Bouts in my house, either.

Tiles from the courtyard of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, c. 1557

I’m not an art historian, just a simple painter who loves paintings. And I think it’s important that I understand those works from the viewpoint of the artist. So when I read Breaking a taboo: religion is being invited into three major museums, my first reaction was, “it’s about time.” Art should never have been divorced from its cultural underpinnings in the first place. Its absence reflects a longstanding, anti-religious bias on the part of academia.

We’ve had a century or more of sneering at religion and the faithful. Are there any art historians left who are qualified to interpret art in the language and culture in which it was made? Where’s Sister Wendy when we need her?

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Talk about a frustrating commission

American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain (unfinished oil sketch), c. 1783-84, Benjamin West, courtesy Winterthur Museum

On Wednesday, I mentioned that Norman Mailer finished the first volume of a planned trilogy right before his death at age 84. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned.

Benjamin West was a British-American painter best known for historical scenes, including the highly-romanticized The Death of General Wolfe. West was born in Springfield, PA, near Philadelphia, the youngest of ten children. He was entirely self-taught as an artist, but even from his youth, he attracted the interest and admiration of collectors.

Perhaps it was the persona in which he cloaked himself. Later in England, he reminisced that as a child, he was taught by Native Americans to mix paint using clay and bear grease. Today, that story would get you laughed right into Congress; the indigenous people had been pushed out of the lower Delaware River before he was born.

Still, West taught himself to paint, and he did so very well, being widely acclaimed as the first Colonial artist of serious skill. He began to attract the interest of wealthy collectors. At age 22 he set off for a Grand Tour, paid for by two sponsors. At the time, anyone with pretensions to be a gentleman or serious artist went to Italy to moon over the art and architecture. West used his time productively, making copies of Renaissance paintings and expanding his network of friends.

Self-portrait of Benjamin West (c. 1763, copy), courtesy National Gallery of Art

A detour

Three years later, West stopped in England for a short visit on his way home. In fact, he never moved on. After pottering about in Bath and Reading, he settled in London, eventually sending back to Pennsylvania for his fiancée. West went on to become one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and earned the patronage and custom of King George III himself.

That didn’t mean he didn’t consider himself a Colonial. He frequently revisited North American themes for his grand-scale history paintings, including the bizarre General Johnson Saving a Wounded French Officer from the Tomahawk of a North American Indian. When the British and Americans came to hammer blows in 1776, he maintained a careful neutrality.

The Death of General Wolfe is West’s most famous painting. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

Peace breaks out

Perhaps his idea behind The Treaty of Paris was, “never mind that, we’re all friends again.” However, it didn’t work out as planned. It was intended to be the first in a series on the American Revolution, in the same vein as his cycles of historical paintings at Windsor Castle. It was intended to commemorate the commission that negotiated the end of the American Revolution. On the American side, that was John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin (Benjamin Franklin’s grandson).

The Americans were easy. All but Benjamin Franklin agreed to sit for him, and Franklin’s likeness was easy enough to find. West drew him from an engraving; once you realize that, you can see how he was slotted in to the composition.

The British representatives were a Scottish merchant and slave trader called Richard Oswald and his secretary, Caleb Whitefoord. Whitefoord was a beautiful young man, judging by his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oswald flat out refused to sit. He said he had a bad eye, and a previous portrait made him look ugly.

We don’t have the pictorial evidence to judge, but I’d like to believe that a slave trader with sharp business practices was ugly, inside and out. However, there also must have been a fair amount of bad feeling on the part of the British envoys at that moment. Who really wants to commemorate losing a war?

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c. 1816, Benjamin West, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

“As I very strongly expressed my regret that this picture should be left unfinished, Mr. West said he thought he could finish it,” John Quincy Adams later wrote in his diary. “I understood his intention to be to make a present of it to Congress.”

Instead, it languished, and West’s Revolutionary War painting cycle never got off the ground. Still, it’s more accessible and interesting in its half-finished state than it ever would have been had it been finished and presented to Congress.

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