Academic Art

Tony S. posted two images side by side to make a point. One was Turner's "Slave Ship," the other Newman's Canadian "Voice of Fire," a sort of pennant with three vertical stripes.

The juxtaposition of those two paintings is instructive, but let's face it – few painters are Turners, and the painter of the pennant probably won't, two hundred years down the road, be as well known as Turner is now. Ex pede Herculam – you can recognize Hercules by his big feats.

There's also a point to be made about academic influences on art, I guess, though to make it I have to tell a personal story that points up my own shortcomings – Mortimer Snerd meets the Beaux Arts. Donkey's years ago, in the late unlamented 60's, I was summoned, along with other teachers of freshmen and sophomores, to a discussion, at the school's art gallery, of a recently acquired, recently painted work which we were supposed to use to inculcate in our sponge-brained charges the principles of Art Appreciation. The painting had the advantage of being explainable. It was a sort of bullseye target whose rings were different colors. They weren't the colors of the spectrum (too easy) but they were related somehow by a rule I now forget (thirty-five years of brain cells dissolved in alcohol) – it was the logarithmic ratio of the wavelengths of light reflected, or the alphabetical order of the names of the pigments, or something along those lines. Anyway it made Good Sense.

The center of the target, the bullseye itself, was an odd sort of greenish-gray. I could've understood white, I could've dug jet black, and of course if I'd done the painting it would've been blood red, but...greenish-gray? Our expositor had an answer, and again it made sense, but I don't think you'd guess it in a hundred years, because to come up with such an inspiration you have to be a board-certified Artist. It was made by mixing together what was left of all the other colors.

That apercu or epiphany should've provoked a general sigh of "Ahhhh!" or possibly cries of "Credo!" But I'm sorry to say the assembled teachers sat there grim-lipped, as if in a dentist's waiting room, while the guy in charge, like professors everywhere, rolled his eyes to heaven at his audience's inability to Get It.