Changing Tastes - A Text-Book On The History Of Painting By John Charles Van Dyke
A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Nowadays it presents the modern reader not just potted, period critiques of crucial artists, but additionally a exceptional insight into how aesthetics transform from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke's assessments of some function will surprise today's reader, specifically his attitudes towards some contemporary artists who received rather hostile reactions from some quarters when their work was 1st exhibited.
The book bargains with all the European tradition. It makes no excuses for this. At the time, non-European art was perhaps less well known in Western important circles. Probably also, it was regarded as somehow inferior, perhaps also merely since it was not European in origin. But Van Dyke does give us a functioning distinction that excludes most non-European art from his survey, that from the difference between observation and expression. Only that which aims at expression, for van Dyke no less than, is worthy in the label "art". Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes it in to the oeuvre, possibly simply because it was also represented in museums that have been close at hand and accessible.
Two painters in specific illustrate the difference in treatment in between van Dyke's age and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. El Greco is hardly mentioned as a figure in sixteenth century Spain, his achievements apparently being regarded as rather localised on Toledo. As a result a figure now regarded as a one of a kind stylist and visionary hardly figures in this text. Alma-Tadema, whose academicism and detail may possibly currently supply summary and epitome with the staid Victorian England that toyed euphemistically using the erotic can also be dismissed. And one in the few English painters to be raised for the peerage, Frederick Leighton, also did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it seems, did Albrecht Durer.
Central to Van Dyke's aesthetic is often a judgment as to regardless of whether the painter not merely represents, interprets and expresses, but in addition constructs a painting. Mere reality is never ever adequate,
jasa foto wedding seems, life requiring the ability of an editor or architect to render its knowledge communicable. It is actually fascinating to reflect on just how much or small we nevertheless value this aspect of aesthetics in today's painting.
A few of Van Dyke's observations will no less than entertain. Franz Hals, we learn, lived a rather careless life. William Blake was hardly a painter at all. A Dutchman is attributed together with the faint praise of becoming a special painter of poultry. Matthew Maris is criticised for becoming a recorder of visions and dreams instead of the substantial items of earth, whilst Turner is dismissed as bizarre and extravagant, qualities that today may boost instead of diminish his reputation.
But Van Dyke's book remains an interesting, informative and rewarding read, regardless of its distance from contemporary thinking. He's particularly sturdy in his summary descriptions on the diverse Italian schools from the late Gothic and Renaissance eras. It can be far more than
