Art history, art comes first.

September 18th 2012

     In today's class we talked about New Land paintings done by European military soldiers who were severed in Canada. These paintings are not only treated as art but also sold for fairly high price. Their history value played bigger role then it is own artistic value. In my opinion, in art history, art should come first.


     Those paintings we saw in the lecture today were barely art to me. They are more like advertisements that these soldiers used to present to their families back in Europe. These paintings are formulated in certain ways. There were always churches, an open space, detailed and unnaturally arranged trees, well dressed immigrants, and Natives in their elaborate clothing in the corner. 

     Landscape art could be more than that. If we look at historical landscape paintings from China, they were able to capture the emotion when the artist was making the pieces. Compare these paintings to Western art at the time, they were highly abstract. However, viewers' eyes are able to travel through the space, like they were in the painting. 
They could also feel the movement of their heart, the movement of the animals, even the smell of flowers. 

     In both military art and Chinese art, they contain realistic details. The landscape represents no specific place. In its forms, the artist expresses the ideal forms behind appearance. Quoting from my art history text book:

The ability of Chinese landscape painters to take us out of ourselves and to let us wander freely through their sites in closely linked to the avoidance of perspective as it is understood in the West. European painters, searching for fidelity to appearance, developed a "scientific" system for recording exactly the view that could be seen from a single, fixed vantage point. The goal of Chinese painting is precisely to get away from such limits and show a totality beyond what we are normally given to see. If we can imagine the ideal for centuries of Western painters as a photography, which shows only what can be seen from a fixed view point, we can imagine the ideal from Chinese artists as a film camera aloft in a balloon; distant, all-seeing, and mobile.