Page 16 - Attila Konnyu

is experiencing and change us. What is strongly involved is inter- subjectivity - what he feels, we feel, too, our feelings are doubled.
In modern culture art is a personal act. The artist creates out of need to communicate his feeling, to challenge the values of social system, to attack the cultural beliefs. Before 19th century the subject matter and execution of art was dictated by a patron. Many consider Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe, exhibited in 1863 the beginning of Modern Art. Why? The reason is that this artwork is outside of the subject matter institutionalized by the Academy. This is one of the many critical reactions to Manet’s work, written for Le Jury at les exposants, 1863 by Louis Etienne: “A commonplace woman of the demi-monde, as naked as possible, shamelessly lolls between two overdressed fops, who look like school boys on a holiday doing something naughty to play at being grown-up. I search in vain for any meaning to this unbecoming riddle.”
The viewer searching for the narrative is puzzled, because as a narrative it does not make sense. The narrative is meaning only ostensibly. When we engage in it, it is unclear, as well as the emotions on the faces. This must lead to one conclusion and that is - it is irrelevant. She is not sitting naked in her company, she is a nude painted in order to show line, form, shape and color. The real meaning of the art work lies in viewing the nude, the drapery, the still life (basket of food in lower left corner), the landscape. From this time on art becomes a personal act and artist decides what shall be the proper subject. Avantgarde is born - a cultural elite that stands in opposition to the dominant culture. It provides an alternative view to dominant culture.
Here another issue of Modern Art is presented, so it seems, and that is the issue of beauty. Theophile Thore writes about the Dejeuner...in 1863: “Unfortunately the nude hasn’t a good gure and one can’t think of anything uglier than the man stretched out beside her, who hasn’t even thought of taking off...his horrid padded cap. It is a contrast of a creature so inappropriate in a pastoral scene with this naked bather that is so shocking.”
We already know it is not a pastoral scene. But what about the nude that “hasn’t got a good gure”? Artist is not interested in painting beauty and does not want to be prescribed to it. Modern art is not interested in beauty because beauty is subject to fashion.
What is it that makes more obvious that representational characteristics grow less important? In the Impressionistic
painting the artist, in order to turn away the desire of the viewer from rushing into the narrative, leaves the objects/place hardly recognizable, abstraction and representational quality interlock. If we look at the ‘Impression - Sunrise’ by Claude Monet, which is considered to be the rst Impressionistic painting, we see that artist is concern with exploration of pigment orange, he paints the light and its re ection where fragmentation of the naturalistic element becomes abstraction. The color is a greater abstraction.
What is remarkable is that interest in color as emancipated element was heralded already by Whistler, who painted variations of white where the starting point was the portrait of his mother which he named ‘Symphony in White No. 5’ not only because he studied music and pointed out correlations between visual art and music but in order to reveal his interest in exploration of the nuance of white in all the possible variations.
Unfortunately, in order to simplify the title, the general public knows this work under the name ‘Whistler’s Mother’ which is a throwback in directing the untrained in art viewer who is left with admiration for the artist’s craft.
In the ‘Impression - Sunrise’ issue of pigment orange in all its variations is presented, as we conclude from all the constituent elements. To intensify the orange artist uses its compliment - blue. (Complimentary colors are opposed to each other on the color wheel and they intensify each other when placed next to each other.) With this, the artist successfully documents the essential characteristic of the place. In order to show the ideal characteristic, he engages abstraction. However, for the artist to be dependent upon inadequate criticism is a loss. At this time only the elite understood this concept. Uneducated audience rejected the work for the very reason of inter-subjectivity (the viewer feels what the artist felt, too) that could not occur. This kind of objective representation relies on inter-subjectivity! The viewer was surprised and turned off.
Here comes to importance the “Father of Modern Art”, Cezanne, who presents a process of the picture making. Let us take an example of ‘Mont St. Victoire’, 1885. He reveals every stroke. The theme he paints expresses itself through the structure. He paints the structure itself. Cezanne doesn’t paint the Mont St. Victoire but a variation on the theme in this case color patches of green, brown, purple that are repeated throughout the painting. The painting is an object in itself, it does not respond to the reality,
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