From Giotto around 1300 to Raphael around 1500, from the early Renaissance to the High Renaissance, from say Giotto’s Lamentation Over Christ to Raphael’s School Of Athens the struggle of the artist was to render three-dimensional reality convincingly on a two dimensional surface. It is all an illusion and things like perspective, which can be taught now in ten minutes, took about one hundred and eighty years to perfect and develop as something theoretical that could be easily passed from one artist to the next. In this time there were amazing artists and masterpieces created. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Simone Martini, Massacio, Van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Parmigianino. Montegna, to name just a few. Once these skills were mastered each artist could use them to articulate their vision and for the next three hundred and fifty years some phenomenal art was created. Everything from Bosch to Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Pousin, Claude Lorraine, David, Ingres, Goya, Turner, Delacroix. All amazing artists who left spectacular paintings. These works had so much depth and substance and were built on big themes for the most part. Think of music at the time and think of painting and the complexity was similar. Then something happened in 1862 that was the beginning of Modernism, of the modernist dialectic, the argument with painting about painting itself. The arrival of photography on the scene had something to do with it but it is only a fraction of the story. These people were artists and artists don't like convention and the world of art, commercially, was changing as well. An artist's survival was no longer dependant on a patron whether it be the church or the nobility. In 1862 Manet painted Olympia, a nude who is reclining and starring out of the picture directly at the viewer. She is a prostitute and she has a maid and a dog and lovely satin sheets on her bed. What Manet did was remove any sentimentality from his painting, and most of his subsequent painting. He said to himself, I will let the viewer decide how he feels. I will not manipulate the viewer’s feelings about this woman. No poor down trodden exploited sex worker. The viewer will have to confront her and meet her gaze. From Manet to Cézanne there was a progression of reducing the expectations, reducing the idea of what a painting was. Monet, Gaugin and Cézanne were the great innovators but there were great practitioners like Degas and Van Gogh as well. What happened is that with Cézanne, even the human form was reduced to it essential shapes. His fruits and his portraits and his bathers and his landscapes were all about reducing the existing reality to fundamental shapes. His work is powerful and when you really look at it you feel you are in a room with an artist thinking unlike any artist ever thought before. He is not called the "Father of Modern Art" for nothing. What was now no longer in a picture was any illusion of depth or perspective, and any attempt to disguise the fact that what you were regarding could not be anything but a painting. Flat picture space, no emotional content, no attempt at photographic representation. Then Matisse freed colour from its moorings of logic and Picasso threw out any of the previous rules and created Cubism which was a way of playing with the picture surface and having fun with the illusion of form. Following Matisse, Kandinsky in 1910 painted a picture that was purely abstract: an arrangement of shape and colour in a picture space. A composition in other words that was only about colour and form. All painting is such an arrangement though some forms sometimes represent things other do not nor in the modernist tradition do they have to. Think of how music was changing. Think of Satie. Think of Elvis Presley, think of Jazz. The painting in question, Voice of Fire by Barnett Newman, that the National Gallery bought for a million or so dollars was in this Modernist tradition. No one said you have to like it but it is important to know where it came from. With Cézanne and Picasso artists stopped making work for the sole pleasure of the viewer. Modernism demanded that the viewer bring something to the table. When that is possible the experience of art opens up enormously. One can take as great pleasure in beholding a room full of Rothkos as one can looking at a da Vinci. One's experience is different but the painting is the source of great pleasure and excitement and can stir the spirit and the soul.
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