Perfection

truth
BGW, by "art is of the present" I mean that its creation and appreciation should reflect a deep authentic involvement in the moment, not some reference to contemporary fashion, or with some concern for its "place" in history. Its meaning and merit should not be defined by the intellectual configurations of art historians.

I bought that for sure. Futurism as a gimmick I don't buy. "The City Rises" is just one of the recognized masterpieces in the movement:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/boccioni/boccioni_city.jpg.html

truth
I must confess, LW, that I was striving for a bumper sticker, But don't you agree that the illusion of MOVING things as represented in a painting is of far lesser importance than the movement of the eye in good composition and design?
Nude Descending....does move the eye effectively from left to right, but the moving feet of the leashed dog does nothing of the sort.

Science and philosophy have been married to art in Russian Constructivism and many other movements. They cannot be discounted and I have found myself in the area of becoming jaded about past art movments. It boils down to personal taste not that major respected art historians have given them their due. I'm perhaps overloaded with art history courses in college (I took the course in modern art twice) and have a tendency toward having an academic rather than artistic viewpoint.

I think you would like to read up on what Futurism is really all about and it's not all about movement or rhythm. "The City Rises" is likely the key masterpiece over and above "Nude Descending a Staircase" which received a lot of notariety for being in the first modern art exhibition in America and for some sly, critical responses from some critics. Well, the audience booed the first performance of "The Rite of Spring" also!

Louis Nevelson's sculptures are rhythmic
(what a tough word to spell?) with their repetition
of compartments....

I once had the honour of attending a John Cage lecture. He was enthralling and admitted right off to
no traditional training whatsoever. He had two
young girls sing songs from his chance operations.....very discordant and completely odd..... Artistic visionary or complete eccentric ?
Perhaps both!

I admired his chutzpah!

truth
I understand that the illusion of movement was not all that Futurism had to offer; it was also an expression of the movement's (no pun intended) anticipation of the dynamism of technological promise, which I understand was deflated by WW1. I agree that Boocioni's "The City Rises" is a great work, as good as his The Noise of the Street Permeates the House. The former moves the eye in a clockwise direction and the latter effectively pictures the cacophony of urban life. But Futurism's attention to the dynamism of movement is only a little less superficial than was Lewis' Vorticism that grew out of it (I suppose). Both anticipated one of the most superficial of artistic movements, one that made a veritable fetish of technique, an end in itself: Op Art.

truth
Chutzpah, now there's a hard word to spell, worse than even formaldehyde.

I'm not clear on how you believe Op Art is all technique -- there isn't much technique involved unless craftsmanship is considered a technique. There is also a scientific basis (which is mathematical in nature and Bach was mathematical) to Op Art. I don't believe science is anathema to art although the marriage of the two really relinquished only one major art form -- the motion picture. Such as it is, producing high art but more likely producing populist mediocre art.

Op Art was and is an exploration of illusion and color science. That it seems to have grown out of the lowly regarded populist pastime of optical illusions is basically false. It really grew out of studying the Dutch masters and their use of pictorial illusions for a basically synthetic reality. Photography reveals its limitations even tinkered with through digital alteration mainly because it's too mechanical.

(As you can tell, I'm not willing to pass off Futurism as a triviality. Nor Op Art.)

The formaldehyde and sharks, of course, refer
to Damien Hirst, but I expect now his genre barely evokes controversy....

LW....wow! Fascinating stuff, so the Baptistry
Doors with their illusion of persepective and then
later artists such as Vermeer with his black and white tiled floor were the prototypes
for Op Art? Powerful stuff!

There's threads back in time into every style of art and we generally go from the history to modern times and miss a lot. Op Art simply sums up all the mastery of illusion, the impact of color and value juxtoposition and contrast down to the basic elements. Of course, it doesn't just do that. Albers paintings have a sublime simplicity and I think really sparked the Van der Rohe "less is more" philosophy.

truth
NO FAIR, LW. You are arguing from a more complete knowledge of art history; I'm just expressing my very personal, & naive, gut feelings, which are subject to change given this new information.
I'm so glad to have stimulated you to reveal so much. Thanks.

Aw shucks, maybe I'm guilty as charged but I do try and be objective even though my art history studies were a long time ago. However, I do crack open the Arnanson text and other books on modern art fairly frequently. It's tough to make assessments without really going to museums consistantly and see all these works in person. I'm not that good in that respect any more. I have a Vasarely screenprint made in his studio "Raura" which is alternate colorway from the one in the MOMA collection. Actually, also being an interior designer, it's the color scheme for my bedroom. Despite the fact that he went pretty commercial in the 80's like Dali, Chagall and others, I appreciate the imagery for what it is.

Just as a matter of keeping with the topic, I'm going to walk out on a limb and state that Josef Albers is the artist who came as close to perfection as is humanly possible.

truth
Hmmm, some of his work IS sublime, but "perfection"? I don't know, as we've established already, what that means. But that was a brave statement.
Let me ask you, does that mean Albers is your favorite artist, or that some of his works are among your favorites? Or are you using some objective criterion having little to do with your own personal taste?

The work is as close to perfect in what it tries to achieve and I could say the same for many Dutch master paintings and especially about Titian's portraits. Where perfection is elusive is the fact that technique is one thing, concept, composition, color balance, et al play a part in the success of the imagery. It's difficult to say an abstract composition is "perfect," for instance. The striving for perfection and achieving it to the degree it can be achieved are in the eye of the artist.

Albers is one of my favorites. Willem DeKooning is my favorite painter and that hasn't changed much over the years.

i feel the need to mention here that i 'own' three prints (actually they own me); a Joseph albers, a Mark rothko, and a Jack Bush.

I think this trio somewhat demonstrates where my heart is in artistic terms.

and to add to this discussion;

one thing we have to be careful with is the categorization of works; not to overstate it, because having a way to group art over time is implicit in anyone's ability to get an overview of the wonders of expression over history, but virtually every work would under close examination fit quite comfortably into a number of 'pigeon holes', and touch numerous others.

i suspect lightW, that if you and i were to tour an art gallery - say the Albright Knox, in Buffalo, we would spend a lot of time in front of the same works!! (The Morris Lewis paintings, for example)

I love most of Morris Lewis' work as lyrical and minimalist abstraction. I did see a retrospect many years ago at, as I remember, the Guggenheim.

I once sat in front of one at the A. K. for two hours, drinking it in; they are an amazing 'tour de force' in simple complexity!