Why Contemporary Artists Should Study the Old Masters: Introduction

Foreword

I recently attended a painting workshop at the Carnegie Center with Lois Woolley and Hongnian Zhang. Woolley and Zhang are instructors at the Woodstock School of Art in Woodstock, New York, but make an annual trip to North Tonawanda, New York every summer to share their vast knowledge of art history and traditional painting techniques with students. Between the two of them, they teach classes on still life, landscape, portrait, genre, florals, interiors, and more. On the second day of the workshop, Zhang shared with me an article from the Financial Times by Chloe Stead about young artists studying the works of old masters. The article observed that “a new generation has embraced the exquisite pigments and brushwork of Caravaggio and Rembrandt.” It went on to explore three artists—Ally Fallon, Lewis Hammond, Anna Freeman Bentley—and their reasons for investigating the methods of these monumental figures of art history. Zhang encouraged me to read the article and write something of my own on the topic. I accepted the challenge, as it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect upon the history of art and my own creative and technical aspirations. Also, as a lifelong learner, I like to be a good student and not let my teachers down!

A Return to Painterly Mastery

Students of art history will be familiar with art’s development and trajectory from early cave paintings to the larger-than-life canvases of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Artists have continuously pushed forward, experimenting with new methods and challenging ideas about the nature of art. It’s a familiar story: impressionists, such as Claude Monet, explored the nature of light and perception, and utilized painting techniques, such as broken color, to capture our lived experience of the world. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain taught us that anything – even a urinal—can be considered art. And pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, created art in a “factory,” and transformed objects from everyday experience (e.g., Campbell’s soup cans) and celebrity culture (Marilyn Monroe) into fine art. It is often thought that to be a great artist, one must be a rebel, a revolutionary; one must abandon traditional ways of doing things and introduce a completely original way of seeing and rendering the world. One must devise an entirely new way of making art. It is for this reason, perhaps, that highly realistic figurative oil paintings have for some time fallen out of fashion. As Chloe Stead notes, artists have instead followed the trend of “sloppy figuration, a painting style that embraces loose, messy and seemingly careless techniques.” To paint in this “liberated” style—to abandon the ways and techniques of the past—may seem bold, expressive, and original.

But what if art history has come to an end and there is nowhere else for art to go? Art critic, Arthur Danto, famously proclaimed that art is dead. To be sure, he did not mean that art is dead in the sense that people no longer make art. He instead meant that art as a kind of unified, collective enterprise had reached its conclusion and had nowhere else to go. Artists, such as Andy Warhol, had engaged in efforts at self-understanding through their work and thereby merged art with philosophy. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, for example, prompted us (or at least Danto) to consider the difference between ordinary Brillo boxes that we might find in our kitchen cupboard and the ones on display in an art gallery. Why do we consider one a work of fine art but not the other if they are nearly indiscernible? Art had given way to philosophy, and in so doing had brought the narrative—the teleological story that we construct about the history of art—to its conclusion. If art is dead in this sense, then there can only be “change without development” (85).

After the end of art, there would be no single movement—no one direction in which the artworld would move. While this conclusion might seem bleak, it can be interpreted in a positive fashion. Artists are now free to create however they wish. Artists should no longer experience pressure to initiate the next great movement in art. Some artists might produce highly expressive art, others might create conceptual art, and still others might make art that is preoccupied with beauty for beauty’s sake. In this world of artistic exploration, there is much that we can learn from the old masters. Given Danto’s account of this post-historical art period, it makes sense that artists would return to figurative painting and the techniques of the old masters

The works of the old masters do not amaze and inspire us because of their pivotal role in art history; rather, we value them for the timeless beauty, skill, and craftsmanship that they embody. Admittedly, history and context may play some role in contributing to our reverence for certain pieces in this category. However, these factors can never fully account for our appreciation of them. For example, the Mona Lisa’s theft from and subsequent return to the Louvre has no doubt contributed to its fame. But surely, we would recognize it as a great painting even if it had never been stolen; it was, after all, housed in the Louvre even before the events transpired that catapulted into next-level fame. It would be exceedingly difficult to contest the greatness of the Mona Lisa as a painting. A work of art, even the Mona Lisa, may not be your style or fit into your personal aesthetic. But it would be hard to deny the value of the painting and the skill and craftsmanship that went into its creation.

In today’s artworld, there may still be social or financial pressure for artists to push forward and be completely original. But it can be worthwhile to create something beautiful and technically impressive for its own sake. In addition to this, contemporary artists can develop the methods and techniques of the old masters in new and innovative ways. And they can incorporate traditional artmaking techniques into their own creative vision, using technical abilities to construct a narrative or suggest a feeling or mood.

In this series of posts, I will explore three lessons that contemporary artists can learn from the old masters and incorporate into their work. While these posts will be most useful for makers of art, they will—I hope—be of some interest to viewers and admirers of art as well. By understanding the methods and techniques of the old masters, we can understand and appreciate their work more deeply. My plan for the remaining posts is as follows: The next post (2) will look at value composition, the third post (3) will discuss brushwork and paint handling, and the fourth (4) will look at how to direct attention in a painting through selective detail and development.