Why Realism? by Frederick Ross- Part 8

So it is these core beliefs and the breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, its ideas and concepts, that are so crucial to understanding the context in which the artists of the 19th century lived. They were, in fact, addressing the very heart of Enlightenment thought. Bouguereau painted young peasant girls with a solemn dignity and a hushed and reverential beauty. One of his works shows a strong but beautiful peasant girl holding a staff and looking the viewer directly and unabashedly in the eye. She is standing her ground, so to speak. In another major work a life-size gypsy mother holds her daughter and both are standing on a mountain top looking down at the viewer. Their gaze, too, is direct but welcoming. In this painting Bouguereau is elevating these gypsies by silhouetting them against a vast sky with a low horizon line. We are looking up to them. Their kind and welcoming expressions implies their acceptance of us; the viewer is asked to return this show of respect, which can only be properly echoed by our acceptance of them regardless of the lowly status of their birth. The very truth and reality of their birth once a negative, now elevates them to the heavens... a status now where all of humanity resides.

Now, in the 19th Century, all people doing any and all activities, were considered worthy subjects and themes for the artists to address. Subjects included paintings of the poor and homeless, women thrown out in the cold or children toiling until late at night enduring 16 hour work days. There were scenes of marriage and children and family life; scenes of schools and courts and hospitals and industry, parks and mountains and countless other topics. For example, a new popular theme was of hypocritical clergy preaching to give up worldly possessions from their opulent apartments filled with art and antiques and personal servants. How revolutionary this was for artists. When Vibert, Brunery or Crogaert satirized the clergy, and painted cardinals in sumptuous surroundings, playing cards with pretty young socialites, or hiring the services of a fortune teller, they were saying that the clergy was human and vulnerable to the same weaknesses and frailty of character as other people. But beyond that, to spoof the clergy represented our new found freedom of speech. A modernist professor once said to me "how inane and silly to show cardinals in silly poses like that." His prejudice blinded him from even beginning to figure out what Vibert had done...what rules of conduct he had broken from the prior rulers of society. We have been taught to elevate artists for breaking rules and conventions of perspective or for undermining realistic drawing, or daring not to follow prior precepts, but the academic artists who had been on the front lines helping all of us to win our freedoms and rights, were also helping to create a climate where it was even possible to consider breaking the rules of art. ....which by comparison, were unimportant to the rule breaking which lead to freedom and justice for all. In previous centuries, an artist would have had his head cut off for spoofing cardinals in this way.

From exposing societal ills and portraying the value and equality of all people, it was but a half step away to explore the personal inner life of individuals and to value and elevate mankind's hopes, fantasies, and dreams. For academic artists and writers of the 19th Century, humanity was what counted, and everything that makes us human; how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Humanity was glorified and people of every type and shape, every nationality and color, every occupation and avocation. We were what counted...we were what were important and we were the greatest of all subjects for the creative bounty of the top artistic minds on earth. Everything about humanity became the new fodder for the unique forms of communication produced by the writers prose, the poet's pentameter, and the painter's pigments. And glorified we were, as thousands of artists produced millions of images, often new and original, and the best of the best of these were masterpieces of the highest order.

What Modernists have done has been to aid and abet the destruction of the only universal language by which artists can communicate our humanity to the rest of ...well humanity. It has been a goal of mine for many years to expose the truth of modernist art history, and it is very much on topic to bring into question any practice which purports to analyze art history in a way that deliberately suppresses a valid and correct understanding of what actually happened. And it is of the utmost importance that the history of what actually took place not be lost for all time due to the transitory prejudice and tastes of a single era. This must be done if art history as a field of scholarship is not to be ultimately discovered to have devolved into nothing more than documents of propaganda; geared towards market enhancement for valuable collections passed down as wealth conserving stores of value. Successful dealers, who derived great wealth by selling such works...works created in hours instead of weeks... had little trouble lining up articulate masters of our language to build complex jargon presented everywhere as brilliant analysis. These market influenced treatises insured the financial protection of these collections. Such "artspeak" as it has come to be known is a form of contrivance which uses self consciously complex and convoluted word combinations (babble) to impress, mesmerize and ultimately to silence the human instinct so that it cannot identify honestly what has been paraded before it. This is accomplished by brainwashing through authority, confounding the evidence of our senses that otherwise any sane person would question. The "authority" of high positions, and the "authority" of books and print, and the "authority" of certificates of accreditation attached to the names of the chief proponents of modernism, have all conspired to impress and humble those whose common sense would rise up in opposition to what would have been evident nonsense if it had emanated from the mouths and pens of anyone without such a preponderance of "authority" backing them up.

The best word describing this phenomenon is "prestige suggestion." Any time people or even product names hold the trappings and symbols of quality, value or expert authority, then people tend to see quality, value or importance due to those symbols. For example a wealthy consumer will see a purse with the name "Prada" or "Gucci" on it and will automatically assume value and quality. Perhaps the price will be $1800 and if it's on sale for $1200 she'll believe she got a good deal and be proud to wear it on her arm and show it to friends. Take the same bag without a label and try to sell it on a table on 42nd street with an $80 price tag and she just may think it's over priced and will try to get the price down perhaps to $40 if she'll buy it at all.The Prada name and the fact that it's being sold in Bergdorf's or Bloomingdale's tends to give it the prestige and assumed value which has been suggested into the mind of the consumer.

Many years ago I was given a tour in a General Motors assembly plant and saw them assemble a Chevrolet. Then another identical car came down the line and they placed a different grill and hood ornament on it and labeled it Oldsmobile. A third identical car came down and they put a still different grill on it with a label calling at a Cadillac. Nearly everything about it was the same but the Cadillac brand caused nearly double the price of the Oldsmobile to be accepted and the Olds was selling for a third more than the Chevy.

It's prestige suggestion and there is a difference between value due to prestige and value due to intrinsic quality. In very much the same way a canvas with little intrinsic value which has the signature of DeKooning, Pollack, Rothko or Mondrian are assigned high values because people with a PhD or Museum Director next to their name have told us what to think about their value, or major dealers or auction houses have assigned estimates of millions of dollars to their work, and told people how paying a million dollars today could lead to a ten million profit in the future.Most people do not feel themselves knowledgeable to know what has value or does not have value when it comes to pocket books Persian carpet or wrist watches, and much the less so with works of art, so even if their instincts are to reject something they keep silent lest they expose themselves to ridicule or being considered ignorant.