Thumbing through a magazine today I stumbled across reference to a “school” of art which has escaped my notice until now. No doubt some reader or another will respond with remarks along the lines of “Where on earth have you been?” Running that risk, however, I admit it that I have never previously encountered the “CoBrA” artists. Apparently they got together shortly after the end of the Second World War, and their name is an acronym composed of the initial letters of the cities from which they were drawn …. Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
My mind headed off (as it does) in a direction at right angles to the trajectory of the article, and I began to wonder about the purpose of the myriad “schools” of art with which art history is populated. I know that this is a useful mnemonic when it comes to teaching the history of art (that was certainly my experience going through a secondary education) but it does seem to me that to take this idea too seriously is often to run the risk of reducing the development of art to a pile of loosely-related fragments instead of a fluid process …. which is how it ought to be understood.
The relevance of this kind of preoccupation with named groups is called into question for me by the shortness of their life. The CoBrA group, founded in 1948, fizzled out after 1953. I fell to thinking about one of my own interests, in Italian modernism, and the questionable integrity of “movements” or “schools” such as Novocento, Corrente, La Scuola della Via Cavour or the Sei di Torino. I don’t think that any of them had any real integrity, let alone a lasting legacy. Individual artists’ names crop up in accounts of several of these, and (frankly) I have difficulty in distinguishing clearly between them. A cynical conclusion to which I am drawn is that artists (and critics) enjoy a bit of polemic, and the designation of schools or groups or movements is a first-class vehicle for the depiction of the world of art as a series of battle-fields.
Let’s face it, often the most interesting figures in the development of art have managed to resist this kind of categorisation. You can select your own candidates, but while I’m on the subject of Italian art, where on earth do you place Giorgio Morandi?