Why Realist Art Matters

Ardith Starostka, "Persephone. " Oil on linen, 30 in x 20 in. (Courtesy of the artist)

First I would like to thank Don Clapper, Vala Ola, and the International Guild of Realism (IGOR) for inviting me to be a guest judge at this fantastic event, and also for giving me an excuse to come to beautiful Carmel, California. I had the privilege of visiting this gallery two years ago when a spectacular painting by IGOR charter member and also ARC Living Master, Duffy Sheridan, placed prominently in the window, pulled us in. Patricia Terwilliger and the Jones Terwilliger Galleries, in the time I have known them, have always been strong advocates for Contemporary Realism and sanity in the arts, and I am sure everyone here and all of IGOR’s members are grateful to them for hosting this exhibition.

As many of you may already know I am Kara Lysandra Ross, and I’m the Director of Operations for the Art Renewal Center, a non-profit educational foundation dedicated to the return of traditional training techniques to the visual arts and the promotion of art education through our scholarships and the support of approved atelier schools which have grown when ARC was founded from 14 schools and only 100 or so students to over 70 schools and over 2,000 students. We also supply to the public articles, artist biographies, our ARC Living Master’s gallery, database of now over 80,000 images by artists throughout history and of course our Annual International ARC Salon. This year with the collaboration of groups like IGOR we expect the number of entries to be larger than ever. In addition we have secured extra publicity for our winners of the upcoming 2012/2013 salon with featured articles in The Epoch Times, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, and Plein Air Magazine. We are accepting entries now through December 31st and would love all of IGOR’s members to participate.

I want to talk a bit today about the importance of art in society, something that for the most part is underestimated. I was in Epcot Center in Disney World last year, and in the Innovations Center they had a computerized survey, which had already been taken by thousands of people. The survey was based on what broad issues or groups the participants thought were going to be the most important and influential in the next 20 years, and out of all the items people could choose from, art was near the bottom in terms of importance. Many people view art as a luxury, something to decorate a home with or simply something for people to view or create for fun or relaxation. In truth, art lies at the core of human existence, and with it has the power to not only influence an individual’s thoughts or beliefs, but can actually shape nations.

Determination under Persecution, by Qing Xin, winner of the gold award at NTDTV’s 3rd International Chinese Figure Painting Competition. (Courtesy of Zhengjian.org)

As some of you may know I write a monthly column in The Epoch Times, which is a large international newspaper that publishes in 35 countries and 19 languages. This newspaper was founded by Chinese ex-patriots who fled China due to  persecution. Falun Gong, which is wide spread with about 100,000,000 practitioners, was developed based on pre-communist traditions in the post Mao era, similar to Buddhism in that it is non violent and is deeply founded in meditation. One of the founders of the newspaper, Dana Cheng, told me that in China they believe in two kinds of weapons. The first is arms, such as guns, bombs and tanks, and the other is Art and Culture. It is as possible to destroy a society by stripping away its art and culture as it is to do so with conventional weapons. This is why in the 1960s and during the rise of Chairman Mao in China, all books on traditional Chinese culture and art were burned, and the paintings and art objects themselves were destroyed. This period is known as the Cultural Revolution and over 10,000,000 people were killed, many trying to protect their heritage. Today the practice of Falun Gong is banned in China and those who practice are imprisoned, and in some cases tortured and killed. Paintings depicting religious Falun Gong images and those that show the wrongdoing of Chinese citizens by the Chinese regime are banned. Some artists who do not wish to stay silent and paint images that are banned in defiance of the laws, know that if they are caught they will go to prison or worse. The winner of the most recent NTDTV art competition is one such example. The painting depicts a Falun Gong member being tortured, and the work already is showing signs of cracking from the conditions required to smuggle the painting out of China. Realist art and literature have the ability to communicate, shaping beliefs and therefore societies, which is why many governments view the arts as something that needs to be controlled. Nothing says more about a culture than the art it idolizes. It represents what it values, what it thinks about, and essentially what it deems worth remembering. Art is the representation of a people, encapsulating its essence on every level. By attacking the art of a culture you attack the culture itself.

China is not the only country that banned art for this purpose. It has been said that the English banned the Scottish bagpipes in the 1700s as a way of attacking their heritage. The Polish press was liquidated, the libraries and bookshops were burned, and their paintings and sculptures destroyed by the Nazi during WWII, and in addition we are told over and over again that many Arab countries view the spread of American art and culture, such as film, painting, and music, as both a threat and an attack of their beliefs and society. Art is indeed a power of its own otherwise it would not be viewed as such a threat.

Randy Ford, “Checkered Past.” Oil on Hybrid Panel, 36 in x 48 in. (Courtesy of the artist)

Much of modern art such as Abstract Expressionism and Dadaism was intended as an attack on society because at its essence it says that the human form, our hopes, dreams, and fears, were not important, that they are not worth painting or sculpting. In an article titled To Create = to Destroy? put out by UCLA, they state that, “The idea of destruction was built into the ideology of modernism: old culture and its arts have to be destroyed to make room for the new: modernism wants to begin from ‘tabula rasa,’ or ‘point zero.’… The idea of destructing the old was already present in Cubism (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque): their paintings and collages destroyed the Renaissance tradition” and the modern movement of Futurism was “a passionate attack on bourgeois society and its values.” Modernism has claimed that their intent was to attack the wealthy, but in actuality they attacked humanity as a whole. You need a lot of education to understand and appreciate an abstract expressionist work, but anyone can recognize and sympathize with an image of a grieving mother or a painting of a beautiful garden. Those things are universal to the human condition. Splotches of paint are just splotches of paint and are nothing but a cynical statement of mankind and its accomplishments which as far as the modernists are concerned amount to nothing more than Duchamp’s fountain, aka a toilet. Modernist leader F. T. Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote the 1st Futurist Manifesto stated, “We will destroy all museums and libraries, and academies of all sorts; we will battle against moralism, feminism, and all vile opportunism and utilitarianism.” Although the modernists never burned the museums, they did remove most of the fine art from their walls, hiding many of the best works in the basement and in their stead hung canvases painted with solid color, or in some cases nothing at all. Today most modernist works take a fraction of the time that a realist one does and therefore the galleries have a larger inventory to work from. In addition, modernist works bring much higher prices at auction than those by the artists they claimed at the time to be opportunistic.

Duffy Sheridan, "Decoration Red & Gold," 38 in x 42 in. (Courtesy of the artist)

In an article recently published in the New English Review, titled The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism, Mark Anthony Signorelli writes,“Nothing is so important to the spiritual and mental flourishing of a people as its art. The stories they tell, the buildings they inhabit, the public spaces in which they gather, the songs they sing, the fashioned images they gaze upon, these things shape their souls more permanently and effectively than anything else. We live in a time when the art all around us accustoms men to, and insinuates into their souls, the most erroneous and degrading ideas imaginable about themselves and their world. A humane society can hardly be expected to grow out of such an adverse cultural environment.”

On a more uplifting note, there are also many examples of how the creation of art has impacted societies. Jacques-Luis David, The Death of Marat in 1793, became the symbol of the French Revolution and rallied men to battle against the Reign of Terror. Rembrandt is considered to have changed the way the world viewed depictions of Jesus Christ when in the mid 1600s he painted eight heads of Christ with a non western European look that sent the religious world spinning. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle played a role in improving working conditions in factories, Elizabeth Thompson’s battle paintings spurred military reform, Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped bring about an end to slavery, and the writings of Dickens and his painter and sculptor counterparts such as Auguste Mulready,J.G. Brown, and William Bouguereau helped bring about awareness of the need to help the poor, to name a few.

I apologize if this has seemed a depressing speech. In reality it is meant to be uplifting in that it hopefully has demonstrated to you the importance of the work you are all doing. So remember, artists play one of the most important roles in our society. And for those who do believe in a higher power, is not the earth or the universe God’s artistic creation? I hope you walk away from this with an extra level of appreciation for the work you do, inspired not to be discouraged when you encounter difficulties. You are shaping our nation and the world into a better place, where once again freedom of thought and real communication can be disseminated though a canvas. With your diligence and effort, a picture is once again worth a thousand words versus needing a thousand words to understand it. So on behalf of the Art Renewal Center, and of my father and ARC Chairman Fred Ross, and as an art lover and historian myself, I thank you for pushing against the current and rescuing our heritage from those who have wished to destroy it.

Kara Lysandra Ross, the director of operations for the Art Renewal Center, is an expert in 19th century European painting.

The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 19 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter.

• http://www.facebook.com/OldWorldSwine Timothy Jones

  Thank you. There is some good and true stuff here, but the perspective still seems a bit utilitarian; art is good primarily because it is useful for some other goal (to educate and inform, etc..).

  This is part of what drives me crazy about modern art patronage. Art is not appreciated or supported until it is tied to some “worthy” political cause… Inner City Poverty, Women’s Issues, Climate Change, blah, blah…

  I doubt Kara Ross accepts this logic, but the article does begin to sound something like that. I love the quote by Mark Anthony Signorelli, which hits closer to home for me, on the value and purpose of art. Art shapes the human soul, and is in turn shaped by it.

• http://www.facebook.com/bill.garrison.9461 Bill Garrison

  Timothy, I think you missed the point of Kara Ross’s speech. The paintings she was referencing were not modern art but realist art that impact society. The painting of the tortured woman probably would not exist if there were not a society on the planet where such conditions exist. In relation to modern art, her statement that “once again a picture is worth a thousand words versus a thousand words needed to understand it” says it all. Brilliant speech in my book!

• http://www.facebook.com/OldWorldSwine Timothy Jones

  Oh, I agree it’s a good speech. Wish I could have heard it in person! I just think we need to be careful not to focus too much on art as activism, which strikes me as a modernist mindset. Given that the title of the article is “Why Realist Art Matters”, I think it’s important to acknowledge that beautiful art has intrinsic value to humanity, prior to and apart from any usefulness it may have for educating and informing, changing the culture, etc. That’s all.

  The power of art to create positive social change is great, and I’m all for it, so long as we recognize that beautiful art needs no agenda at all.

• Pasquino

  Kara, the ‘Death of Marat’ was painted in support of the murdered man who was actually responsible for much of the reign of Terror. However one could quite easily think of other paintings by David that espouse a moral cultural truth that is less opaque, such as his two companion canvases, ‘The Intervention of the Sabine Women’ and the ‘Thermopylae’, which addressed France’s internal and external identity respectively.
  I totally agree with you that Modernism has a lot to answer for in regard to the disassociation of aesthetics from cultural morality. However I do feel the ARCs articulation of this could be more scholarly, refined and subtle.
  There is also a need to address many of the weaknesses within the modern academic movement itself, such as the propensity to produce painters who regurgitate studies rather than the culturally significant narratives you speak of. In many respects these movements are as tied to a Modernist aesthetic discourse as are their avant garde counterparts. For example, consider how George Bridgman’s book on drawing terms the human body in the same ‘Corbusian’ language for humanity and the house with the title, ‘The Human Machine.’
  ‘Realism’ becomes nothing more than an embodiment of an aesthetics of positivism vs the avant garde with its internalized, existentialist and perception based paradigm. Reality is neither ‘out there’ or ‘in me’ but rather a continuum from one to the other. What BOTH these perspectives lack is what Aristotle termed the ‘unity of the action/subject’ that is an art that paints not an external reality to be ‘copied’ or an internal reality that is isolate from the rest of us, but rather that creates an invented and GENERAL idea of reality that expresses our cultural moral identity through the poetically ‘mute’ actions of the protagonists in an image/painting.

• http://www.facebook.com/art.cyprus Art Cyprus

  There seems to be a fundamental problem in this speech emanating from a confusion between humanity and human depiction.

  Ms Ross argues against modernism because she sees it as inhuman. She tells us this inhumanity manifests itself in two principle ways. The first is the modernists’ hostility towards figurative art. This leads the denigration and banishment of figurative art to the cellars of museums. The second is the modernists’ abandonment of figuration in their own work. This leads to a literal dehumanisation of art.

  There is some truth in what Ms Ross says on the first point. Some modernist artists, curators and critics did have a tendency to dislike some figurative art. However, for the most part this was a dislike for the salon type of painting Ms Ross’s Art Renewal Centre espouses. Constable, Turner, Velazquez, Titian, Michelangelo and many other figurative artists were never attacked in the way suggested. It also has to be remembered that modernist art outside the United States was never dominated by the absolute abstraction of the New York School. In fact much of it was figurative itself.

  The second point is more interesting. This is Ms Ross’s claim that by abandoning the figure in their own work abstract artists were making art inhuman. What this amounts to is an argument that unless one shows the human figure one is somehow attacking humanity. A side issue to address here is the question whether a landscape with no human figures in it is also inhuman.

  I think this is a fascinating line of enquiry, but unfortunately Ms Ross’s poor knowledge of history undermines her point. Sometimes the little things in life do matter, so while it might seem trivial to complain against her suggestion that the English banned bagpipes in Scotland (they never did, it is a myth), it is so wrong one has to question the veracity of the rest of he speech.

  More serious is her comments on David. In this you cannot help thinking that Ms Ross is so blinded in her desire to see figurative painters working in a quasi-salon style as the good guys she fails to recognise that David was politically a pretty objectionable fellow who demeaned Rococo artists with a vehemence that would put even the most dogmatic follower of Greenberg to shame. He was, as another commentator has mentioned, also involved in the executions associated with the Terror of the French Revolution.

  With that in mind, we might also want to remember that throughout the modernist period the most enthusiastic supporters of figurative art (and in particular salon-style figurative art) were Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Not much humanity from them as they sent many a modernist artist to their death. I don’t know why this fact is absent from Ms Ross’s discussion.

  And so Ms Ross’s simplistic “figurative good, abstract bad” argument falls apart quite easily.

  But still I think there is something of interest in exploring the question whether abstract art is inhuman. Certainly very few abstract artists during the modernist period would have thought this true. On the contrary they would have thought their work was a celebration of humanity, or in times of trial, a mourning of the destruction of humanity. For example, Ms Ross cites Picasso without mentioning modernist masterpiece Guernica.

  I have been trying to think of any modernist artist who willfully sought to demean humanity through abstraction, and I cannot think of one. So even if Ms Ross’s basic thesis is right, I don’t think we can see this as a deliberate act.

  The issue of destruction being central to art is of interest here, and the key figure who should probably have been mentioned was Francesco de Sanctis, who did say something along the lines of, “to create a reality the artist must first destroy the old one.” That sounds astonishingly nihilistic, but the truth is de Sanctis was defining a function for art that is in many ways still attractive. He was suggesting that the purpose of art is the creation of autonomous realities, or (to put it in specific terms relating to painters) to create a fully functioning universe on the canvas that is different to our universe. The purpose of art is not, he was suggesting, to reflect or illustrate the reality of our world, it is to establish new worlds. This idea was not new when de Sanctis put it forward. It goes back to the early origin or the Western art tradition in Greek icon painting, where the function of the painting was also to show to us (or to establish) other worlds, albeit for the icon painters that other world was Heaven.

  This seems to me a very important point because it suggests the ‘destruction’ of the old reality is not necessarily literal or violent. Instead it suggests the ‘destruction’ comes about because the artist has simply to leave behind the old reality in order to visualise a new reality.

  To use an analogy, we can imagine it as like having a clapped out old car. If you buy a new car it doesn’t necessarily mean you will take a hammer to your old car and literally destroy it. It simply means you tend you use your nice new car more often because it functions better. So the old car is not ‘destroyed’ literally, it is destroyed by being left behind or discarded. At some point in the future your nice new car will not be nice and new any more and so you might get another car, and so the process will repeat itself, with each nice new car (each nice new reality) replacing the old car (the old reality) when that old car ceases to function. Certainly that is how one of the most influential modernist theorists, Herbert Read, saw the ‘destruction’ that Ms Ross mentions.

  So if we talk about about the move towards abstraction not as a destruction of the historic art tradition but as a move away from pre-existing reality in order to try to create new realities, what we are looking at is not a destructive iconoclasm, but an extension of human vision. The old reality was figurative, so what if a proposed new reality was so unlike our everyday world it became abstract? That is how abstract artists tended to see their own work – so outside everyday reality it had to be extraordinarily different to that everyday reality. But I think that would apply just as much to Titian and Poussin as it would Mondrian and Gorky.

  However, in this process I would argue we have an essential humanism and humanity, even if the art work is not a depiction of the human figure.

  We live in a world where we are subject to what sociologists call cultural conditioning. We are shaped by our societies, our cultures, our political systems and so on. In short, by our socialisation. That process is in itself inhuman as we are assumed to have no true self, no true human identity, only an identity that is imposed on us by a society that is dominated by wealthy, powerful organisations and individuals. Ms Ross mentions this herself in relation to China. So sticking with that example, why is it more wrong for the Chinese Communist Party to tell people what to think and do than it is for the Art Renewal Centre to tell people what to think and do? Surely both are impositions, and both are wrong. Being told you should draw like Ingres is as wrong as being told you should think like Mao. In saying this I would argue that freedom does not mean being free to impose your will on someone, instead of having someone else’s will imposed on you. As Schapenhauer argued, true freedom if it exists is freedom from will – all will. In other words, freedom means the ability to destroy old realities that are imposed on you by the rich and powerful, in order to visualise a new reality that you create for yourself.

  The artist who sets out to paint or draw like Ingres is not doing that. Instead they are allowing Ingres will to imprison them. A salon-style art school that tells its students they must paint and draw like Ingres creates and institutional framework for this imprisonment. But the painter who says I do not want to paint like Ingres, or paint like anyone other than myself, at this moment in time, and whilst working on this painting painting is free. And to be free is to be human.

  From a personal perspective I would never argue that art students and artists should not look at historic art. In the same way I learned to write by reading other writers, so artists probably need to learn to paint or sculpt or even make found object art by looking at earlier artists. But I wound not claim the right to impose that on them, even amongst my own students. It is a decision they must come to themselves, or not as the case might be, and for which they must accept the consequences. And if by studying Ingres, or Titian, or Turner an art student is led to create a brave new world that is wholly abstract, why should that be considered wrong? Isn’t it the case that to say it is wrong is to be as dogmatic as Clement Greenberg when he said figurative art is wrong. And surely it is dogmatism is the true enemy of humanity.

  Dr Michael Paraskos
  Director of the Cornaro Institute