Good or new?

We make some comments outside our area of expertise.

Our photographer had an appointment in downtown Washington, DC last week.  It was a short bit of dealing with paperwork, and he found himself free of obligations by mid-morning.  Since he was already in the area, he decided to visit the National Gallery of Art.  Now, the NGA is a big place, not to be digested in a single visit of any length, so he confined himself to a couple of galleries for the day.  The first exhibited photographs from the 1970s by various photographers with various styles.  He was impressed by many of them and puzzled by a few, while mentally noting that others were worth more thought.  He may have more to say on them in a later post.

From there he went on to a gallery mostly given over to sculpture, chiefly bronze figures.  Several eras were represented but he noted many French works from the late nineteenth century, almost all of them on Classical Greek and Roman themes and in the Classical style.  As far as he is any judge they were excellently well done, capturing the dynamic moment and with a fluid beauty he could only admire.  Several were clearly echoes of ancient compositions he’d seen in person or in books.  All of them were, therefore, somewhat backward-looking.

In the same gallery were a few Impressionist paintings of the same era and area.  They were definitely not looking backward to Classical styles (leaving aside the fact that we have almost no ancient paintings to compare them to).  As far as your Art History course goes, they were easily the more important of the items on display.  And yet, there’s something to be said for anything done with talent and skill.

Indeed, our tutor with too many books reminded us of some passages from The Spectator.  This was a sort of forerunner of the newspaper column or the blog post, published in London about 1711-12.  He has a collected set, running to eight volumes, inherited from a great-great-grandfather.  You might call it the flood tide of the Enlightenment, when there was every hope (at least among some intellectuals) of reducing society and art and politics to order by means of rationality and good sense.  In it, there is a pervading idea that there are objective rules to follow, together with the feeling that the ancient writers were much better than contemporary ones.  Novelty is not highly valued; in Number 253, “Wit and fine-writing do not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn.  It is impossible for us, who live in the latter ages of the world, to make observations of criticism, morality, or in any act of science, which have not been touched upon by others.  We have little left to us, but to represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.”

Nowadays of course novelty is the important thing, in art as in many other fields.  To call a work repetitive or derivative is a condemnation, and new ideas and techniques are eagerly sought for.  Progress has been our aim since, perhaps, the Romantics of the turn of the nineteenth century.  Certainly we would not welcome anything that looked like stagnation.

But we do think that, somehow, the French-Classical bronzes are worth your attention.  If you’re in the DC area, we suggest you stop in.