EVOLUTIONS OF ART

I Believe!

I believe in Art. Yes I have Faith, and believe in God... and have strong ideas where He is concerned, but I am talking here about a different kind of faith. My study of history has shown me some important facts which I rely upon today- and this confidence is embedded deep... a faith if you will, in Art as an important element in community and international communication and social healing. Therefore some form of art will always be necessary. Yes it will change to different mediums... substrates, adapt to new technologies. But we have to have art... our culture does, our society does, in order to advance and prosper.

Art provides several powerful, essential services. It is a bridge between cultures, and generations, and is a basic form of communication- of philosophies and values and social priorities. It can be mere decoration, or be harnessed to manipulate the masses through advertisements, or it can educate and inspire. Or just provide a cheap vacation on a hectic day. It can be entertainment, or propaganda or even a channel for physical healing. Our society cannot function without it.

In these times when factions of our society are literally turning against many statements of art around the country, with protests and destruction and anarchy... hopefully just temporary group insanity, I look to history for what to expect next. As America goes through a moment not dissimilar to the French Revolution, which was a class war that erupted against most forms of power and wealth, we as artists can see how our kinsmen in France, led by a mother and the most famous painter of mothers, served their society and eventually became a unified voice in it.

Berthe Morisot with her mentor and lover, Aime Millet, 
who tried to make a sculptor out of her. She broke off 

their engagement and followed her destiny as a painter 

instead. France and art would never be the same after 

she gathered a bunch of rejected artists and goaded them 

beyond their individual potentials. When her daughter 

Julie was born, Berthe put her art career in the backseat,
 and raised a beautiful girl who became a legendary model
 for herself and eventually Renoir.

[Among the hundreds of historical tintypes I discovered in what I refer to as the Harper Bros image boneyard, were scores of photographs of the French Impressionists and their friends, models and families. The world is seeing these rare images for the first time in this blog. They might well have posed for Edgar Degas, who was quick to recognize the importance of photography and learned the techniques of it.]

In the blink of an eye, the dominance of Italian art, firmly associated with the Vatican, which had ruled all art trends and standards of art for a thousand years, became an anachronism and voila- gone and replaced with Humanism, Deism, even Agnosticism. It was harsh, that's the nature of social change... but it was, for the first time, an “even playing field.” Ignored today is what a killing field it was first.

After Napoleon was routed and then the French people revolted in response to a century of terrible losses and the depravity in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, the French, and the world, were ripe for a pleasant breeze of rest and peace... a true refuge. And artists led the way. Needless to say, art had not been an important factor in all the death and destruction which saturated French history. War and the guillotine had repeatedly stifled, if not snuffed most artistic aspirations.

 Monet

The Impressionists, then just a bunch of undisciplined, privileged youth who would not even attend art schools to learn their craft, the equivalent of 1970's “hippies,” had been drafted into the fray, or fled to England. Monet and Pissarro found refuge across the English Channel, while Monet's best friend Frederic Bazille joined the army, and Renoir and Degas were conscripted into the National Guard. The elder mentor of this motley group, Gustave Courbet led the “Communards,” a militant group of socialists and anarchists.

Pissarro

The occupying Prussian army commandeered and destroyed Pissarro's home and studio, using his canvases for aprons and groundcloths. In the end Courbet went to prison for his communist passions and then was banished from France. Renoir, still determined to paint plein air in his off-time, was suspected as a spy and almost executed, but at the last minute his former sympathies to a Communard leader in a similar crunch won him mercy and he escaped with his life. Poor, generous and vastly talented Bazille, perhaps the most gifted of all of them, was killed in an inglorious retreat on a muddy road in a useless war. France lost a great talent and a greater human being, and Monet lost his benefactor and painting partner.

Pierre August Renoir with his two baby sitters,

 Paule and Jeannie Gobillard, and son Jean.

Massive class indignation had led to the trashing of the old France, the near extermination of the educated and professional class, abandonment of the church, destruction of proud French archives and institutions, and the tearing down of the Monarchy, their statues, many government museums, and in its place ushered in a new nationalism built on hatred of the merchant class and any symbols of wealth. This animosity soon evolved into fascism and totalitarianism, a return to the Napoleonic model, which led to total disaster... and eventually the obliteration of national pride.

Devoted yet constantly fighting friends, 

Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt pose

 with a beautiful  model, on the left.

Yet somehow, and this is the point of this diatribe, after the smoke had evaporated, the bloody revolution, the hubristic Napoleonic aggressions, and civil war and total bankruptcy of the country... Art blossomed. Miraculously France soon led the world in art and fashion from that time on... until WWI. Unbelievably, draft dodgers and communists and National Guardsmen came together and the love of art and beauty united them.

When she first came to France, Mary Cassatt 

studied under Jean Leon Gerome, a rare opportunity

 for an American female.  She found him too rigid 

and obsessed with his process and minutia, then 

found a home among the Impressionists, whom 

Jerome persecuted as a Salon judge out of spite.

Humility and desperation helped all of them to gain a new desire for tolerance and freedom of expression. And eventually, actually led by two strong women, who shared almost none of their affinities, the French Impressionists emerged and prevailed in spite of organized, institutional opposition, to become the vanguard of the modern art movement.

Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot were very different

 but quite unified in steering the Impressionists and 

their movement. When Morisot got married and was

distracted with motherhood, American Cassatt stepped

 in and provided crucial consistency, and timely financing and vision.

France was the place to be. American artists, Belgians, Brits, Germans, Dutch, all came to sup from the French stream of consciousness. The pain had turned into gain. Truly great art has always emerged out of some significant human struggle. Spanish and Italian artists took note... and began to look to France for direction. Truly the Spanish masters such as Goya and Velasquez had been a great influence on them, with their painterly style, and strongly injected with political fire, and Courbet's socialistic ideals, the French artists chose genre art as their platform. Popes and generals and kings and queens no longer mattered. It was the working man's and woman's life which was worthy of study and edification. Regular people... living their peaceful lives, enjoying French food and wine and culture, and their children... or a simple picnic or boating on the lake... these former trivialities would now occupy their canvases. And this had never been done before. These were subjects considered, up until then to have been unworthy of Art.

Edouard Manet (center) with his best friend Emmanuel Chabrier (left)

and brother Eugene Manet, (right) who married Berthe Morisot.

Being of French ancestry, I am glad to acknowledge these achievements, and since I count myself as an American Impressionist, a descendant of their traditions, and someone who appreciates their artistic vision, and the fact that their movement was the last sane moment in the history of art!

We as artists, the real ones, the ones who paint or sculpt because we must or lose our sanity, we must not give up because sales are down. We are the only true free voices in society. No publishers, no art police to constrain us, free from the political agendas of most of the Media and other sources of information.

Do not quit, or get discouraged because Americans are not buying art right now... and galleries (mostly irrelevant parasites), are going out of style... or because a social upheaval is disturbing the flow of our economy, or worse the flow of our creativity... These things are temporary.

WE MUST PAINT. I believe in art. It was art that lifted France out of her own self-inflicted mire, and began a century of art experimentation; an infinite evolution of art “isms” and a great gift of a myriad of the art choices we enjoy today. Hard times, social change, even cultural change, can be another door... the next avenue for artists to lead the next cultural revolution. Our country, in fact the developing world needs us more than ever, to paint... create, to feel our way through the dark, to help define what is our next platform for peaceful, artistic exchange; to establish the positive fruits of our negative human struggles: To discover the new “isms,” the new technologies which will speak to the people... in a universal language. Without words.

That is how and why I don't just make art, I BELIEVE IN IT.

The public is distracted right now. Ignore the lull, believe in your role as an important outlet- for yourself and for our social conscience, and understand the important role that free artists play in the lasting threads of our social fabric. We are the strands which hold our culture together... it's a thankless job... it's never been about the money... it is a calling... like a missionary. Besides raising children, it's the most important thing you will ever do.