Background to VANGUARDGIRL
IT ALL STARTED WHEN…
I was studying my A-Level's at New College, Swindon. I have always loved art and design - as a child I was always drawing and doodling and making things. This resulted in me undertaking Fine Art and Graphic Design & Communication at college. I had always loved history too, but I had never really thought about how these two passions could be combined. It was only when I was enrolling to college that I noticed that they offered a Art History course which covered art, design and architecture from the Italian Renaissance right up to twentieth century International Modernism. I immediately applied and stumbled upon what came to be my favourite subject...one that I would ultimately spend the following five years studying for in both my undergraduate and masters degrees!
Looking back, I began as a huge fan of Botticelli and the Italian Renaissance in general, mesmerised by the beautiful flowers in Primavera or the mythological characters of The Birth of Venus. The fact that Giorgio Vasari, (arguably the inventor of the field of Art History itself) considered Botticelli a bit of an outsider, made me like him even more. I had pretty much come to the conclusion that this was my niche. Until my second term of A-Level Art History, that is...
Until that point, I had come to understand that Art History as this fantastic linear timeline of artistic progression, a picture-book which captured the cultural, political and social imagery of centuries past. It was clear to visibly see the borrowing of techniques, how artists reinvented subject matter or challenged traditions of the past to make something new and relevant for their own age. From the Italian Renaissance to Baroque, from Rococo to Neoclassicism, the Romanticists to the Realists, Impressionism to Expressionism, you could quite easily distinguish where artists had taken inspiration from previous styles or movements. Then you get to 1900 and things get a little bit...messy. Everything kind of, exploded?!
Suddenly there was several schools art, movements and styles working simultaneously: Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art...so many 'isms'! Now appeared various types of art, all overlapping with each other and breaking from the past entirely. Non-objective art, unconventional techniques and blank canvases entirely challenged the very definition, practice and reception of Art. No longer was "good Art" measured by skill or aesthetic ideals or subject matter...in fact, the very concept of "good Art" was brought into question...and furthermore, the very question of what Art even is challenged entirely, by those in the field, and those out of it.
I remember my lecturer uploading Kazimir Malevich's Black Square of 1913 on the projector. I stared in disbelief. How could this possibly be...Art? Everything I thought I knew about Art History and its 'values' turned on its head. My eyebrows furrowed and my arms were crossed, pushing my pen and paper to the other end of the table.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913, oil on linen, 79.5 x 79.5cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square
Of course, despite my confusion, I was intrigued. I wanted to know why Art had changed so rapidly during this period. So I listened. The advent of photography, the painting of dreams, exploring the unconscious, two World Wars. I unfolded my arms. Disillusionment, the Great Depression, Nazi horrors. I reached for my pen and paper. Atomic bombs, consumerism, the Cold War. Of course Art had changed. Everything I had learnt in my first term came into question. This is where my interest in the history of twentieth century art and design truly began...sheer curiosity and the huge challenge of understanding it.
That is not to say that I don't still love the Italian Renaissance. I still stop by Botticelli's Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Brandini in the V&A's Medieval & Renaissance galleries whenever I pass by. The majority of Gallery Assistants I worked with consider themselves Medievalists. There are very few Modernists at the V&A, despite the vast collection of design pieces produced after 1900. It always makes me smile whenever I come across someone who wants to talk about how 'their five year old could make that'. I remember myself sat in my A-Level class and I tell them: "Give me 5 minutes...it could change your mind."
Over the course of studying my undergraduate degree in Art History at the University of Plymouth and then my postgraduate degree in History of Art: Histories & Interpretations of Art at the University of Bristol, my curiosity continued to grow. I realised how entirely narrow my original perspective of Art History was - and how it had to be - in order to understand how the very discipline and field of Art History has evolved. Art History after 1900 began to acknowledge its gaps. In some ways, its very similar to how Art itself changed in order to adequately depict - or rather, represent, embody and challenge - its own age, and that's another reason why I was particularly drawn to this particular era for study. Although it may not be entirely explicable to this turn of the century moment alone, to me, it has always stood out as a strong shifting moment, an axis in which everything before and everything after was never quite the same.
"...modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in...the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique."
- Jackson Pollock, 1950
Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950 quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York, 1990, p.17
My specific interest lies in the construction of a postwar identity for American art and the issues around the very concept of a national identity in art. I am also very interested in the environment in which the Abstract Expressionists worked, both in practice and in collaboration with each other; the interplay of text and image between the New York School painters and Beat Gen poets. I'm also really interested in issues of gender and performance within the Abstract Expressionists of mid-century America, especially with the emergence of cinema and celebrity culture.
Lastly, I'm very keen to make modern and contemporary art more accessible and approachable to all...from the art history advocates and gallery-goers to the modern art newcomers and contemporary art converts!