NEOLITHIC
The earliest and possibly clearest examples of subject determining stylistic differences is to be found in Neolithic art.
With remarkable consistency Animals are portrayed with direct realism based on observation while hunting , and probably dissection occuring when eating. Humans are shown smaller in scale, rudimentary in anatomy , and represented as schemata. Landscape depiction is rare, small and diagrammatic, plan or map views prevail albeit with differing conventions. eg rock art pointers to real features which complete the map.
These were not aesthetic choices. They are linked to brain function, motivation and experience of their reality ,Reflecting developmental cognition like child art,emerging in defined stages . They lay at the birth of written language, and here we see the more abstract the forms the more useful. The specifics of realism were of no use in symbolic discourse.The symbol was to carry wider meaning via its level of abstraction
AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS
A recent find of australian rock art is very pertinent, Overlaying other rock painting was commonplace. Print. spray stencil.monocolour, ochres.Some works are clearly more potent and are sometimes retouched, but never defaced. In our example the whale depicted is clearly not local, and has been drawn to explain a story.. What is most odd is the conventions of drawing do not belong, it looks like the whale was only ever viewed in a book of white origin, illustations by a European hand.The reality is confined to the stylistic convention, since this is the only experience of the whale available for its viewers
RENOIR
When Renoir painted Les Grand Baigniuse he refused to let the light dissolve the forms of the girls. Yet he allowed this in the landscape behind them. Liberties could be taken with the landscape, but not the figure .I see this as clearly related to paleolithic practice.
BOSTON PAINTERS
The Boston Painters were almost all French trained in the French Academy methods,
.and when it came to Impressionism they too, like Renoir , would not abandon the nude to dissolution in a multitude of light sources outdoors, Studio lighting for the academy was single source, giving very strong shadows and bounced light into them, creating the core shadow between the bounced light and the line beginning the form shadow. By choosing a light source as dominant ,they were able to maintain the solidity of the studio figure while exploring the new palette (as adjunct to the old palette, it must be said) It is true this led to a thousand boring drawings, but most were at least competent,and for the educated eye some are exquisite.
CLASSIC GREECE
With the above examples in mind , we return to Ancient Greece.
Here the Gods became men, in our image and likeness. Noses a bit straighter, musculature more symmetrical, proportions more pleasing, but recognisably …..us. comforting except for the stories, and there it was the Gods who excelled at being unspeakable bastards, while we were fallible heroes,and admirable.. Judging by the art, it seems the Judeo Christian creator had Greek blood in his veins.The Classical Ideal ( actually there were several of them) seems so firmly rooted in our culture. It is fixed, abstract, mathematical, Platonic. And not to be tinkered with. In fact, because it is an ideal, it cant be tinkered with, Like the balloon full of water, it always returns to shape. Highly codified and conceptualized as relationships smoothly linking all parts with a whole, (“its all in the transitions,my dear”) there is no place for the “accidents of realism’ . Hellenism and Roman realism are another matter.,and Praxiteles a bridge.too far for my theses.It is usual for Academy students to begin depiction with the simplest ,most general forms, and to approximate these to the Platonic geometry. “Ignore the accidents of nature” was the advice. Clearly man was not part of nature ,was apart and above the animal world, the high product of creation– so .leave out the wrinkles , blemishes and pubic hair.At its most blatant, this attitude survives in the “girlie” centrefold. Most people don’t realise what confectioned and photoshopped ideals they are.
Darwin put a stop to all that nonsense, firmly putting us back in the evolutionary processes of the animal world and we are still trying to find an alternative moral view and visual image of man,, humankind. From this perspective, the ideal Classical forms are rendered irrelevant by Darwinism., unless we reinterpret their function.
CUBISM
It may be useful here to detour.Lets look briefly at Cubism/ In its primitive form landscape predominated. Cezanne had seen the essence of Idealism through Poussin.,” Everything can be shown as cylinder. Cube or sphere” or something like that. Forms in landscape tolerated these cubist generalisations, but when applied to the figure something odd happened. Either revisionist but clearly classic figures in pink or blue ,or geometric monsters based on primitive artifacts.. The art galleries provided no answers. It was the ethnographic ,anthropomorphic and archeological museums that provided the new image of man ..This could only be accomplished by shattering the classic in Analytical cubism and like Humpty Dumpty it could never be put together again..
My point is, that every attempt to move away from the classic ideal of the figure fails The ideal reasserts itself..Yet we tolerate experiments with landscape.IS this because we see ourselves apart from nature, abstracted, ideal, generalised. ?Nature is primarily infinite variability, hence vast, sublime, incomprehensible. In short Romanticism.Nature can sustain the imposition of another order, but without the “accidents” of variability, it looks barren, doll like., and anything but the awesome SUBLIME, touched by anarchy.
Idealism in landscape is as silly and about as interesting as realism in the nude. The natural order is Realism in landscape and Idealism in the nude
Now we see what Renoir, the Boston Painters, contemporary idealists, and Neolithic painters have in common. An abstract image of the human,,,,,,,,,an image so strong it cannot be altered. ,,,,Attempts to do so results in aberration .This occurs most often by incompetence rather than design. Quickly charicaturing itself, it is rare to find an artist who treats classic .idealism well.
Post script Reading Kenneth Clarke on the Nude again.One art critic and historian who dared to use his own eyes. If I manage a classic nude it will be with his guidance.It was twenty years ago, and my musing on idealism in this essay was arrived at independently. I say this because we must have had separate paths