In chapter 3 of Steve Shipps book "Re-Thinking Art",
... he talks about the work (that was pioneering at its time) of Johann Winkleman who was born in 1719. During the time that he lived (i.e. mid 18th century), there was a burgeoning middle class, as we approach the time of The Enlightenment and the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.Winkelmann was a historian, and is also today known as 'the father of art history' (according to Steve Shipps). He developed a fascination for collecting and classifying that all the arts that he could lay his hands on; from the classical and Greek art of (arguably the first true enlightenment during the Greek and Roman 1st centurys); and then all the way through until the (what was current then), 18th century.
In 1768, when Winkelmann died, he had, already by that time, become such an expert and knowledgeable scholar of art, to enable him to be the 'Superintendent of Antiquities' in Rome... Considering he was not an Italien by birth, this in itself was quite an achievement!
What is important here, is that Winkelmann, in his cataloguing and study of all the art that he knew of, is that he was basically laying the foundations for 'a history of ancient art'. As a result of all of this fabulous knowledge and indexing, he published a book, entitled with the same phrase; 'The History of Ancient Art' which was fully released in 1764.
It took some time before other scholars started to emulate (and think in the same way), that Winkelmann had first thought; with regards to 'making sense of what they understood to be art' and of their "idea" of art, - much of the "idea" of which had in fact, been formed some 300 years or so earlier during the Renaissance.
So what Steve Shipps says in Chapter 3, is that the awareness that 'the idea was just an idea' had begun to be lost in some of the translations, between all of these scholars talking about art; which in in their terms was a "thing" or an object; - something tangible of course.
What Winkelmann actually did was to create a history of art, based on the 'then current knowledge' of what art was available; this leads me to suggest that you only know what you know - you don't know what you don't know!...
As a result there was a heavy bias on what was Greek and Roman classical arts, - which then followed through the knowledge that Winkelmann, and other historians had been able to gather through the 18th-century only. Furthermore, this was also (mainly) based on Western art or perhaps arguably just European art, and tended to neglect any of the Third World development from art created by indigenous Indians and so on.
So, what Winkelmann's book did, and in his 'History of Art' was to set a kind of foundation; or perhaps even a yardstick, with which to look, measure and compare art against. Again, that content was mainly limited to paintings and sculpture of some sort. In other words, what was curated and what was collected by Winklemann and the established 'Acadamy' for art, were the ideas buried within the historians own minds, of what they thought art actually was. And so this set precedents.
Therefore the original concept that 'art is a sense perception', seems to have got distorted and somewhat lost; as it has been, in Shipps words, "drawn-down" through the ages.
"Rethinking Art" - By Steve Shipps, - Chapter 4
In the next chapter (Chapter 4) Steve Shipps describes the concept of Modernism, and explains how it is often confused because the misunderstanding of the words. Modern as a word with a small 'm', in simple terms just means up-to-date, or lately. However even that can be confusing because everything that is new at any moment in time can be considered as being modern. For instance when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, at the specific time when it was painted, it represented the 'then modern' idea of what heaven might look like. So at that time it was modern with a small 'm'.
Unfortunately at the end of the 19th century, it really started to get confusing, because artists in particular as well as architects, having lived through the periods of enlightenment and the industrial revolution, started to push the envelope with respect to what they created. New forms of both art and architecture were being produced in tandem with a very quickly adapting culture, where the masses or the proletariat or just the general people were able to say and do whatever they wanted to do with much more freedom. The control of those people was becoming much more relaxed. Ideas as to how societies should be established and government were changing radically. In fact everything was changing at an extremely fast pace, much faster than it had ever been witnessed before. Eventually all these tensions over spilled and in some ways fuelled the arguments which broke into World War I and some 20 or so years later into World War II.
Because of all this newness, and when particularly applied to and considered with respect to art and architecture, the idea of Modernism, with a capital M, virtually became a political drive. Indeed there was in fact a Modernist manifesto, as much a political manifesto as a cultural one.
Therefore this name stuck for a particular period of time. Modernism and Modernist paintings created initially by Paul Cézanne, and those whom I like to refer to as his disciples such as Monet and Renoir, and then later, by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, particularly caught the eye of the general public, together with Henri Matisse, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and many others, really actually relate to a period of time from around the 1880s through to perhaps the 1940s. Most of the art that was being created during this period, which did not conform true to traditional or classical representations of what the general public thought of as being art, were therefore classified as Modern, or Modernist. So the term modern or Modernist with a capital M, is really a classification of art, (and also architecture, but arguably there is even more confusion here, because the start and finish dates of the Modernist period for architecture are rather longer and extend from around 1850 right the way through to the 1970s, and even these boundaries of dates can be disputed).
This general loosening up of control of the people, of the proletariat et cetera, was not just confined to the sociopolitical arena. It was sort of happening everywhere, a general push for freedom from the master and slave relationship, for example the abolition of slavery, the establishment of workers rights; and eventually and much later votes for women and their own freedom from the masculine control that had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years. This loss of control generally also applied to the control of arts, and as described previously, the loss of control from the Academy. The most prominent example of this, in the art world, was the establishment of the Impressionists, and in particular the submission by Claude Monet in 1872, of a very new style of painting to the annual Academy exhibitions in Paris, which was rejected outright. So very courageously, Monet decided to hold is own exhibition together with his friends and other disciples of Paul Cézanne in complete disobedience to the Academy.
During all of this time of course, one of the most radical changes to visual arts had also been introduced. That being the advent of the invention of photography, which gave the ability for anybody, not just a trained artist who may have spent years developing and improving his craftsmanship, to simply look at an image or scene and capture it.
So the idea that art was based on something that a human would copy, or imitate in some way, often known as mimesis, started to lose ground simply because a camera, which is a type of machine, was able to copy something instantly and with the result that was perhaps better and more accurate than anything a human could do with a pencil or a paintbrush. This naturally led to the question opening up again as to 'what' art was. Why do we create art? What is it for? What is art? And so on…
A simple visualisation, the expression of an idea, a mimesis of an event and so on, wasn't simply enough to satisfy all these new enquiring minds, who perhaps some 200 years ago had never had any access to art other than that which may have been painted in a religious setting, or for the exclusive review of the elite and extremely wealthy. In this new cultural environment therefore, the spectator or viewer of art pieces took it upon themselves to start to think much more deeply and critically about what was being presented to them.
So coming back to the work of Claude Monet, it was clear that he was creating something that was so special, that it was beyond simple copying or mimesis. It was better than photography, because instead of just capturing an image, his and his companions artistic style seemed to be capturing and representing so much more! They seem to capture a kind of mood. How therefore, could art historians, such as those that studied the doctrine of Johann Winkelmann, classify such artworks? Impressionist paintings broke all the rules about mimesis and copying. Those artists, the Impressionists, are now considered as being pre-modern, as well as Modernist. Unknowingly, perhaps they were exploring some of the foundations of the true meanings of art, that being of sense perception.
This led on to a natural challenge by other artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 20th century to create something even more "modern", and their own thinking about three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional plane… The emergence of Cubism. And so the gates of creativity were opened. New artists started to challenge all previous held concepts of art and what it was, and that even goes on to this very day.
Conclusions;
It might be worth pointing out at this point, that it seems to be built into the human psyche that we have to quantify everything. We have to measure it somehow, to put it in a pigeon hole, to categorise it, to compare it with something that has gone before, to validate it against something else that may have been created by somebody we believe to be very accomplished, and so on. This in a way as a defining characteristic of what makes us human.But if I may be so bold, all of this making, doing, categorising, quantifying, measuring, et cetera et cetera, if you were to strip away all the hyperbole from all those academics and without question, highly intelligent and articulate human beings, ultimately, Art and "being an artist" is an occupation. It occupies us. It is a past time. We pass our time on this planet through art, by either making it or looking at it, measuring it, criticising it, thinking about it. ...It's a pastime. How we choose to pass our time now that we have all this freedom, this drive to create something new, something unique, (the seeds of which were sown some 200 years ago or so, during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution), could in itself the the described as the bedrock of what art, and particularly contemporary art actually is today.
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