Summer art questions, lay 'em on me. / modern painters

"Which way's the David?" "Is all this religious art?" "Did Rembrandt go blind at the end of his life?" "Did Rome steal all of Greece's ideas?" "Why does baby Jesus look like an old man?"

It must be summer because people are hitting the museums and putting their fingers right up to the canvases while betraying their perplexity at a greater volume than in previous months this year.

Art Guy is here to field any questions you might have about art. If I don't know the answer off the top of my head, I'll happily dig around and do some research for you. Throw it on the blog or e-mail me, do whatever works for you. I hope you don't mind if I quote your question on the blog anonymously when I publish my response.

Let's start with a question that I get asked a lot. I'm not sure if anyone really wants an answer, but they do ask me a lot, so they have it coming:

'Do modern painters avoid painting representational subject matter because they don't want to, or is it because they can't?'

I can't speak for every modern painter in the world, but I'm sure you would get a myriad of responses if you asked them this question. Don't ask them; they won't help you find your answer. They'll probably make fun of you, through art, which is more enduring than conversation.

My answer-and I've given it a lot of thought-is that it has nothing to do with their ability or lack thereof to paint representational subject matter. The great abstract modern art movements (we're talking early to mid twentieth century here, not contemporary) had bigger fish to fry. To many of them, academic, representational art needed to be taken off its pedestal and put on the shelf for a little while.

But it's not fair to put all abstract modern art under the same umbrella. There were literally thousands of modern abstract art movements, all with their separate coffee shop manifestos and traditions to uproot. For instance, Munich's Blaue Reiter group were exploring expression by means of emotive color. For all the people who stand before Kandinsky's Compositions and claim, 'I could paint that, and I'm not hailed as a great artist,' please note that abstract colorism is no walk in the park. These guys wrote several books on the emotion of tone and color, and it was easy to get it wrong. In a way, these painters were doing the hardest work of their time: they were abandoning local color, which any skilled art student could represent, for a creative universe of emotional color. Kandinsky spent months on his Compositions.

On the other hand, I'm not necessarily saying that every modern abstract painter could paint representational subjects like the old masters. Picasso is often praised for his 'mastery' of the traditional style before he could branch out into abstract art. To this, I pose an important question: at what point does one 'master' the traditional style? I want to dispel the myth of a young Picasso marching around the art market like the next Peter Paul Rubens and getting bored of being perfect. There's more than one traditional style, and to be any traditional artist of note you have to pick a combination of techniques that makes you unique. This was true of Claude Lorrain, David, and Ingres, and holds true of anyone we hold in high regard. I don't know what techniques Picasso 'mastered,' but I can guaruntee you that there were many greater masters of the traditional style, and Picasso distinguished himself with his abstract art. Certainly some modern artists were better at representing life than others, but we will never really know who the best ones were because they didn't care about painting traditional subject matter - it wasn't what they chose to distinguish themselves with.

To those who look at a minimalist painting, and say, "Anyone could paint that," and then turn to a Claude Lorrain and swoon, I need to throw it out there that in the early 20th century, people who could reproduce Claude Lorrain were a dime a dozen. In fact, now you can find them selling thirty copies a day of the same painting on the street outside museums: they are THAT talented as copyists. But plenty of people can do that. The important thing about Claude is he was the FIRST to make that painting, just as Marcel Duchamp was the first to turn a urinal on its side and present it as a work of art.

If any large umbrella-like statement can be made about 20th century abstract art, it might be that it conveyed, rather than represented, emotions and themes. This was a conscious innovation. Sometimes it's hard to understand some of this art: all the more reason to spend time with a particular piece and know it well. Sometimes it's ugly; sometimes it's beautiful. But it always makes you think. So do these artists paint this way because they don't want to paint traditional subject matter or because they can't? My answer, and you'll hear this phrase a lot, is:
I'm not saying they could, but it's not because they couldn't. In simple terms, they were too busy changing the world of art to worry about proving themselves to us.