Why a Painting Is Like a Pizza

A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art

Nancy G. Heller

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691207308
• Categoría: Kunst
• Categoría: Kunstgeschichte

The first time she made a pizza from scratch, art historian Nancy Heller made the observation that led her to write this entertaining guide to contemporary art. Comparing modern art not only to pizzas but also to traditional and children's art, Heller shows us how we can refine analytical tools we already possess to understand and enjoy even the most unfamiliar paintings and sculptures.
How is a painting like a pizza? Both depend on visual balance for much of their overall appeal and, though both can be judged by a set of established standards, pizzas and paintings must ultimately be evaluated in terms of individual taste. By using such commonsense examples and making unexpected connections, this book helps even the most skeptical viewers feel comfortable around contemporary art and see aspects of it they would otherwise miss. Heller discusses how nontraditional works of art are made--and thus how to talk about their composition and formal elements. She also considers why such art is made and what it "means."
At the same time, Heller reassures those of us who have felt uncomfortable around avant-garde art that we don't have to like all--or even any--of it. Yet, if we can relax, we can use the aesthetic awareness developed in everyday life to analyze almost any painting, sculpture, or installation. Heller also gives concise answers to the eight questions she is most frequently asked about contemporary art--from how to tell when an abstract painting is right side up to which works of art belong in a museum.
This book is for anyone who agrees with art critic Clement Greenberg that "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first." It's also for anyone who disagrees. It is for anyone who wants to get more out of a museum or gallery visit and would like to be able to say something more than just "yes" or "no" when asked if they like an artist's work.

1
EXACTLY WHAT IS “ABSTRACT” ART?

“Art. This word has no definition.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTURE with this discussion, I need to define a few words. This is particularly necessary since both modern and abstract art, two terms that are central to this book, have been used differently under various circumstances. For example, my Ph.D. was officially earned in the field called modern art history. Traditionally, this label referred almost exclusively to European painting, sculpture, and architecture produced between roughly 1789 and World War II. To make it even more confusing, some specialists in the Italian Renaissance call the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries modern. Moreover, many art historians, critics, and artists use the terms modern art or modernist art specifically in referring to the various movements such as Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism that developed in Europe during the first part of the twentieth century, plus later European and American spin-offs of those movements. Contemporary art, on the other hand, is recent art, the art of one’s own day.

In this book I will use the term modern art very generally, to refer to avant-garde art made from about 1900 to the present. However, even this requires some additional explanation, given the recent disputes among scholars concerning “avant-garde” art. The term avant-garde comes originally from the military, where it refers to the first set of troops sent into battle. In terms of visual art, avant-garde has generally been applied to the leaders of convention-breaking modern movements. Until recently, twentieth-century art history, in the Western world, was viewed largely as a succession of these revolutionary movements, all consciously designed to break away from the restrictive traditions of the past. Avant-garde art from the early 1900s emphasized the new, looking toward a future shaped by the extraordinary technological developments that emerged around the turn of that century. In such a world, these artists reasoned, old ideas about art could have no more relevance than outdated notions about science, technology, or anything else.¹

Because most gallery and museum visitors feel relatively comfortable dealing with traditional art, this book is focused on the unconventional, the avant-garde. Such art encompasses a broad range of approaches, but one of its most challenging aspects is still abstraction, even though abstraction has been around for nearly a hundred years. Abstraction is not an absolute term. It may refer to art that stylizes, simplifies, or deliberately distorts something that already exists in the real world. Alternatively, there is “pure” abstraction (also known as “nonobjective” or “nonrepresentational” art), which does not depict anything from the real world. Purely abstract art is an arrangement of colors and forms that are not intended to look like anything other than the artwork itself.

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

Pablo Picasso

Yet pure abstraction is not without content. There is a difference between subject matter, in the usual sense of the term (say, a person or a vase of flowers), and content. The content in a totally abstract painting is that intangible set of thoughts and emotions put there by the artist, which—in an ideal situation—can be communicated to a sympathetic viewer. Obviously, no one could discern the specific intellectual or emotional content that an artist has put into such a work. However, the viewer’s own, possibly very different ideas and feelings can often be triggered by a nonobjective painting or sculpture.

4. Rosa Bonheur (French, 1822–1899), The Horse Fair, 1853. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. × 16 ft. 8 in. (2.4 × 5.1 m). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887 (87.25)

Most artworks fall somewhere between realism (depicting things the way they appear in the observed world) and pure abstraction. Some sense of the many degrees between these two poles is evident from comparing five very different artworks, all based on the same real-world subject.

Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (plate 4)—an enormous, and enormously successful, nineteenth-century French painting—is clearly on the realist end of the spectrum. Coming from a tradition in which absolute fidelity to appearance and technical virtuosity were essential to an artist’s reputation, this canvas is based on Bonheur’s many years spent studying both painting and animal anatomy and behavior. It also reveals her great love of horses, which she owned throughout her long life. In this painting, Bonheur depicts a multitude of horses in various colors and wildly varied poses, carefully positioned within the clearly defined pictorial space. Her attention to detail is mesmerizing. Moreover, as men struggle to control the animals, the artist conveys a clear sense of the energy, drama, and danger inherent in such a scene.

5. Deborah Butterfield (American, born 1949), Horse, 1985. Construction of painted and rusted sheet steel, wire, and steel tubing, 6 ft. 10 in. × 9 ft. 11 in. × 2 ft. 10 in. (2.1 × 3 × 0.9 m). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Thomas M. Evans, Jerome L. Greene, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and Sydney and Frances Lewis Purchase Fund, 1985

The Large Blue Horses by Franz Marc (plate 3) differs from Bonheur’s picture in nearly every way imaginable. Instead of capturing the individual personalities of believable horses, the German painter created an equine trio that could never exist in real life. In addition to using an exaggerated color scheme, Marc intentionally stylized the horses’ heads and bodies. There are few details. Rather, he abstracted these creatures into a series of broad curves—curves that are echoed in the tree trunks, the foliage, and the red hills beyond. The Large Blue Horses was painted nearly sixty years after Bonheur’s canvas, by which time Expressionist artists like Marc had significantly changed their ideas about the purpose of art. Depicting actual horses was no longer enough; Marc had to reinvent them with his own highly personal sense of color and form.² Yet despite the liberties Marc took with his subjects, it is still easy to recognize them as horses.

The contemporary American sculptor Deborah Butterfield made her reputation during the late 1970s with a series of life-size horses fashioned from found materials (discarded bits of wire, wood, and steel). Like Bonheur, Butterfield has always been obsessed with horses—training them, riding them, even considering a career as a veterinarian. However, despite her in-depth knowledge of equine anatomy, Butterfield has chosen to create images of horses that merely suggest their forms and movements. The horse illustrated here (plate 5) is obviously not intended to seem real. It stands on hoofless, sticklike metal “legs”; it has no eyes, ears, nostrils, or mouth; and gaping holes go right through its torso and neck. It’s almost as though Butterfield has made a quick three-dimensional sketch of a horse. Yet her abstracted sculpture still manages to capture the strength and grace of the subject.

For the last century or so, cutting-edge art has tended to become more and more abstract. However, there have been exceptions to this trend, particularly among the so-called postmodern artists, who have frequently turned back the clock, stressing exquisite, detailed realism in their own work—but with an ironic twist. An example of this phenomenon is the art of the British painter Mark Wallinger, whose trompe-l’oeil horse pictures (so real that they look like photographs) were part of the notorious Sensation exhibition that opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in October 1999 (plate 6). At first, Wallinger’s extraordinary command of his medium (oil paint—the same as Bonheur’s), and his thorough knowledge of his subject make his horses seem like a throwback to an earlier era. But on second glance, his horses look completely different from Bonheur’s, except for the uncanny realism of their faces and coats. Whereas her canvas, like most traditional animal paintings, places the subject in an appropriate, clearly delineated context, Wallinger’s horses stand isolated within an unarticulated, unexplained, otherwise empty white space. They float, as though they were models for a print ad being photographed against a roll of seamless paper. In addition, the compositional device of simply implying the presence of human beings through the reins that curve off the edge of the pictures would never have appeared in a nineteenth-century painting. Wallinger’s evocative, and ironic, title for this series, Race Class Sex, further reveals the enormous gulf between his horse images and earlier examples.

“Art does not lie in copying nature. Nature furnishes the material by means of which to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature. The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.”

Henry James

6. Mark Wallinger (British, born 1959), Race Class Sex, 1992. Oil on canvas (set of four paintings), each painting 7 ft. 6 in. × 9 ft. 10 in. (2.3 × 3 m). The Saatchi Gallery, London

7. Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956), Number 3, 1949: Tiger, 1949. Oil, enamel, metallic enamel, string, and cigarette fragment on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 62⅛ × 37¼ in. (157.7 × 94.5 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972

2
WHY IS A PAINTING LIKE A PIZZA?

“To see is itself a creative operation, requiring an effort.”

Henri Matisse

TO SEE PRECISELY how a painting is like a pizza, let’s compare plates 7 and 8. This kind of comparison is known as a “formal analysis”—meaning that it concentrates exclusively on the appearance (form) of the object in question rather than considering other relevant points, such as the artist’s biography, the theoretical underpinnings of the work, or the historical context in which it was produced. There are fashions in scholarship, as in everything else, and art historians—like literary critics—have traditionally concentrated on formal analysis, sometimes to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations. In recent decades the emphasis has shifted—in both the art and the literary worlds—to examining a work in terms of its broader sociopolitical significance. Nevertheless, straightforward formal analysis can still provide a great deal of insight into a work of art.

The pizza illustrated in plate 8 is a relatively typical example: round, approximately sixteen inches across, with a golden brown crust, covered with a layer of melted cheese, tomato sauce, and diverse toppings, each of which adds its own color, texture, and shape to the whole. In contrast, Jackson Pollock’s Number 3, 1949: Tiger (plate 7) is rectangular and much larger: approximately three by five feet. It is made with three different kinds—and many colors—of paint, which have been poured across the canvas. Obviously, the purposes of these two objects are utterly different. And yet the presentation (how it looks when the waiter serves the pizza to the customer—or the art-moving company delivers the finished canvas to its new owner) is as important for the pizza as it is for the painting.

A well-made pizza, like the one illustrated here, generally offers a visually pleasing pattern of distinct ingredients—vivid red and green peppers, glossy black olives, translucent white bits of onion, light brown mushroom slices—arranged across the circular surface in a comfortably even way. Similarly, Pollock’s painting, like his other quintessentially Abstract Expressionist canvases, features many strands of colored pigment, distributed across the work with remarkable evenness.¹ The compositions of Poll...