Theory of painting

Last updated

The idea of founding a theory of painting after the model of music theory, was suggested by Goethe in 1807, and gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of the 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee. [1] [2]

Music theory Considers the practices and possibilities of music

Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory":

The first is what is otherwise called "rudiments", currently taught as the elements of notation, of key signatures, of time signatures, of rhythmic notation, and so on. [...] The second is the study of writings about music from ancient times onwards. [...] The third is an area of current musicological study that seeks to define processes and general principles in music—a sphere of research that can be distinguished from analysis in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 18th/19th-century German writer, artist, and politician

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and statesman. His works include: four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him have survived.

Weimar culture

Weimar culture was the emergence of the arts and sciences that happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the latter during that part of the interwar period between Germany's defeat in World War I in 1918 and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture. Although not part of the Weimar Republic, some authors also include the German-speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, as part of Weimar culture.

Contents

From Goethe to Klee

Goethe famously said in 1807 that painting "lacks any established, accepted theory as exists in music". [2] [3] Kandinsky, in 1911, reprised Goethe, agreeing that painting needed a solid foundational theory, and such theory should be patterned after the model of music theory, [2] and adding that there is a deep relationship between all the arts, not only between music and painting. [4]

Wassily Kandinsky Russian painter and art theorist

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist.

The comparison of painting with music gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of the 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee. [1]

Paul Klee German painter

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Structural semantic rhetoric

The Belgian semioticians known under the name Groupe µ , developed a method of painting research called structural semantic rhetoric; the aim of this method is to determine the stylistic and aesthetic features of any painting by means of the rhetorical operations of addition, omission, permutation and transposition. [5] [6]

In classical rhetoric, figures of speech are classified as one of the four fundamental rhetorical operations or quadripartita ratio: addition (adiectio), omission (detractio), permutation (immutatio) and transposition (transmutatio).

See also

Aesthetics of music branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music

Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant. Through their writing, the ancient term aesthetics, meaning sensory perception, received its present-day connotation. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues besides beauty and enjoyment. For example, music's capacity to express emotion has been a central issue.

Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. Some basic questions in the philosophy of music are:

The phrase synesthesia in art has historically referred to a wide variety of artists' experiments that have explored the co-operation of the senses in the genres of visual music, music visualization, audiovisual art, abstract film, and intermedia. The age-old artistic views on synesthesia have some overlap with the current neuroscientific view on neurological synesthesia, but also some major differences, e.g. in the contexts of investigations, types of synesthesia selected, and definitions. While in neuroscientific studies synesthesia is defined as the elicitation of perceptual experiences in the absence of the normal sensory stimulation, in the arts the concept of synaesthesia is more often defined as the simultaneous perception of two or more stimuli as one gestalt experience. The usage of the term synesthesia in art should, therefore, be differentiated from neurological synesthesia in scientific research. Synesthesia is by no means unique to artists or musicians. Only in the last decades have scientific methods become available to assess synesthesia in persons. For synesthesia in artists before that time one has to interpret (auto)biographical information. For instance, there has been debate on the neurological synesthesia of historical artists like Kandinsky and Scriabin. Additionally, Synesthetic art may refer to either art created by synesthetes or art created to elicit synesthetic experience in the general audience.

Notes

  1. 1 2 Marcel Franciscono Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, part 6 'The Bauhaus and Düsseldorf', chap. 'Klee's theory courses', p. 246 and under 'notes to pages 245–54' p. 365
  2. 1 2 3 Moshe Barasch (2000) Theories of art – from impressionism to Kandinsky , part IV 'Abstract art', chap. 'Color' pp. 332–3
  3. ↑ Goethe 19 May 1807, conversation with Riemer
  4. ↑ Kandinsky p. 27
  5. ↑ Winfried Nöth (1995) Handbook of semiotics pp. 342, 459
  6. ↑ Jean-Marie Klinkenberg et al. (Groupe µ) (1980) Plan d'une rhétorique de l'image, pp. 249–68

Related Research Articles

Avant-garde works that are experimental or innovative

The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.

Expressionism modernist art movement

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Degenerate art Term used by Nazi party for modern art

Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.

<i>Der Blaue Reiter</i> group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany

Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. They considered that the principles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict and traditional.

Synchromism art movement

Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973) and Morgan Russell (1886-1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Though it was short-lived and did not attract many adherents, Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention. One of the difficulties inherent in describing Synchromism as a coherent style is connected to the fact that some Synchromist works are purely abstract while others include representational imagery.

Gabriele Münter German painter

Gabriele Münter was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. She studied and lived with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and was a founding member of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter.

Vadym Meller painter

Vadym Meller or Vadim Meller, was a Ukrainian-Russian Soviet painter, avant-garde Cubist, Constructivist and Expressionist artist, theatrical designer, book illustrator, and architect. In 1925, he was the first artist to be awarded a gold medal in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.

The Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), formed in 1909 in Munich around Wassily Kandinsky, and prefigured Der Blaue Reiter, the first modernist secession which is regarded as a forerunner and pathfinder for Modern art in 20th-century Germany.

Vincent Pepi is an abstract expressionist painter associated with the New York School. His contribution to American art includes some of the foremost examples of action painting, produced consistently over the course of the second half of the 20th century. His art parallels the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Conrad Marca-Relli and others. He adapted the automatic techniques of the Surrealists and transformed it into his own kind of gesture painting.

Painting Practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used. The final work is also called a painting.

Paul Klee Notebooks is a two-volume work by Paul Klee that collects his lectures at the Bauhaus schools in 1920s Germany and his other main essays on modern art. These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. Herbert Read called the collection "the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton's in the realm of physics."

Thilo Friedrich Maatsch was a German artist and an exponent of abstract art, constructivism and concrete art.

The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus was a small European avant-garde artistic tendency that arose out of the breakup of COBRA, and was initiated by contact between former COBRA member Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo of the Nuclear Art Movement.

Galka Scheyer German-American painter, art collector, art dealer, teacher

Galka Scheyer was a German-American painter, art dealer, art collector, and teacher. She was the founder of the "Blue Four," an artists' group that consisted of Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej Jawlensky.

Florence Henri French photographer and painter

Florence Henri was a photographer and artist. She grew up in Europe and studied in Rome, where she met the Futurists, and in Berlin, then in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, and finally at the Dessau Bauhaus before returning to Paris where she started with photography. Her work includes experimental photography, advertising, and portraits, many of artists.

Linien was an artists association in Denmark in the 1930s and 1940s focusing on Abstraction and Symbolism. The group's exhibitions in Copenhagen created wide international participation. After the Second World War, the association was revived as Linien II with emphasis on Concrete art.

Emmy Worringer (1878–1961) was a German artist and cofounder of the Gereonsklub, an avant-garde artists' association in Cologne in the years immediately preceding World War I.

Gereonsklub

The Gereonsklub was an avant-garde artists' association in Cologne in the years immediately prior to World War I.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.