Yesterday I made one of my intermittent “raids” on London in order to take in a couple of galleries. The contrast between these two experiences was really quite startling and could not have been chosen better in order to illustrate the way in which art changes, along with the way in which people view it. I began in the morning with the Estorick Collection and then moved after lunch to the National Gallery.
The Estorick Collection, in Islington, was founded by an eccentric American sociologist and his wife, who fell in love with Italian modern art, and when they died their collection became the core of a centre devoted to the communication of Italian art in Britain. The visiting exhibitions change every six months, and I have come to welcome them as a great opportunity to educate myself about Italian art.
The current exhibition presents the work of an artist about whom previously I knew nothing, Paolo Scheggi (1940-71). His work has a strongly 3D aspect to it, typically consisting of several canvases placed one over the other, but pierced in systematic ways to reveal an inner structure. These are usually finished in strong, monochrome colours. Other images consist of as many as 100 cubes arranged in a square, each pierced on the front by a circle permitting the viewer to see the inside. The inner surface that is then revealed will bear geometric forms developing in a regular sequence from one box to the next. His work has been categorised as “spatialism”, and it is easy to see why, as he is evidently interested in the way in which space and colour interact.
A fellow Italian artist, Lucio Fontana in a letter to Scheggi wrote, “….the arts are none other than manifestations of intelligence”, and this idea captures very will the highly rationalistic spirit of the work, which reminded me often of the way in which fractals might have a pleasing effect while simply working out some algorithm. It’s not at all my cup of tea, but I was glad to have the opportunity to see something so new to me, and to respond to it. I’m happy to accept it as “art” …. but not as I know it.
The contrast with my experience at the National Gallery could hardly have been greater. Of course the collection there is so huge that any visitor really has to focus on a small part of it. On an impulse I decided to look at their oldest material, and found myself looking at work from the earliest years of the Italian renaissance, and extending from the late thirteenth up into the fifteenth centuries.*
It became clear very soon that a tremendous cultural change had taken place over the interval in question. I don’t have in mind the stylistic changes that were the subject of my school art history lessons (more realistic modelling, and the development of perspective, and so on.) I was interested more by the theological changes that were represented in these works, and the social changes these seemed to imply.
I really feel some kind of affinity for the early work I was seeing, and not only because of the continuing influence of Byzantine style. What seemed to me to be more important was the fact that at the heart of the matter was a theology of incarnation, and the source of the imagery here was plainly biblical. Over time this faded into the background. The subjects of painting became more and more detached from the world of human experience. The central figures forming the focus of art were typically separated from the ordinary human viewer. The distance between viewer and the art object was emphasised by the height art with these were placed (high above some alter) by elaborate framing, and by a kind of “screen” of other figures, such as minor saints or angels, placed between the central figures and the viewer. Dress became more aristocratic, and the distinctive “holiness” of the principal actors was stressed by increasingly elaborate halos.
What was more remarkable in some respects was the disappearance of any interest in a theology of incarnation, or any biblical foundation for the themes chosen, and their replacement by material depicting non-biblical traditions of the Church. By this I mean not only stories of saints and martyrs, but more particularly themes relating to the life and death of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Over the two centuries or so that had produced the work I was viewing an extremely significant cultural shift had taken place that had several dimensions, particularly social and theological. More particularly, it seemed to me that artists were being required to play a markedly different role in this process.
So often we hear claims about what art “really” is, of one kind or another. Yesterday’s experience brought home to me, however, the succession of very radical changes that have taken place in our history, regarding the nature of art and the place of the artist within cultural communication. We really do need to be less dogmatic about our own preferences and practices. So the end result of my experience, oddly enough, was a “note to self” reminding me that perhaps I need to be a little more open to the interest of art that initially doesn’t interest me much …. such as that of Paolo Scheggi.
*Maybe even beyond. I ended with Ucello’s Battle of San Romano.