The language of Arts

Panos and Thanos Kessaris

THE LANGUAGE

ARTS

Of

An Initiation to architecture – sculpture – painting

THE LANGUAGE

ARTS

Of

An Initiation to architecture – sculpture – painting

by Panos and Thanos Kessaris

Panos Kessaris, was born in Athens of Greece, in 1968.

He was trained at Baylor University Medical Center of Dallas, Texas, (with a scholarship) to become a Maxillofacial Surgeon. Loves to travel, teach and write. Married to a wonderful wife, Jenny, with whom they raise three boys.

Thanos Kessaris, was born in Athens of Greece, in 2004.

Currently, he is a studious member of the University of Nebraska High School and a certified PADI Rescue Diver.

He loves the oceans and its creatures.

Design-Printing-Binding: CLOUDPRINT IKE Copyright 2020: Panagiotis Kessaris, Athanasios Kessaris ISBN: 978-618-00-1920-9 Printed on March 13th, 2020 Cover by: Athanasopoulou Jenny (The Spark through the Arts) Back Cover by: Bardis Yannis (The Getaway to the Future)

In the memory of my father Pericles And to my mother Elizabeth who was always by his side�

“Clouds come floating to my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.�

R. Tagore

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AUTHOR’S NOTE It was back in the beginning of the 80’s when we started as a family to travel abroad. We were just the four of us (me, my brother Chris and our parents, Pericles and Elizabeth). And we kept doing it for the following five years, every single summer. Each trip was taking 25-45 days. Only by driving a car. My father, like a modern Ulysses, was the only driver, who was taking us from Athens (of Greece) through the Yugoslavian land (as this was its name back then), all the way up to Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway; and then back down through Netherlands, to France, UK, Spain, Czechoslovakia (named back then) and Hungary. As he was a philologist, he studied classic and modern art and took a scholarship for a whole year at the University of New Delhi, in India, to “touch” the east civilizations; and teaches History of Arts at the School of Fine Arts of Panormos in Tenos Island for 10 years.

During these trips, there was not a single house of a celebrity (like Hugo, Freud, Mozart…) or a museum and monument (major or minor) that we didn’t visit 3-4 times each. The paintings, the statues, the buildings are still fresh in my mind, while he was explaining to us the styles, the periods, the creators’ personalities. Nowadays, I faced this same challenge taking our boys, with my wife, around those same places, to transfer them this spark, the one of internal research. Our century was supposed to be the one of the spiritual and emotional amplification. Is it really coming?

Who is teaching the growing generations? What is art? With simple words; not by aiming to memorization of names and numbers. As history and art go along in time. And the life of every creator – artist, is affecting his work. The evolution and revolution in the course of arts is what keeps us alive.

Otherwise, we will end up, soon, to take a ride in space, getting unbelievably bored. Then we will vanish as the species with the shortest living period on earth. Hope dies last though. And classical and general education starts within our house. Our parents are also our mentors. Our will to enhance the interests of the future generations lies upon our patience to inspire them. We will see if we have this ability.

Meanwhile, let’s all of us try to do more for the Museum Vorres of Athens, 1986 others than we do for ourselves…P.K. 5

PROLOGUE

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ur mess of teaching art in high-school classes is desperate, here in Greece, despite our brilliant legacy from the past. Contrary to our literature from where a couple of names descried and crossed the borderlines of our country (Elytis, Kazantzakis, Cavafy), in the artistic part, we never made an international stature. Was this due to the narrow minded and strict teaching of our times? Maybe not, as this was always a matter. It could be though, our apathy, regarding this, although our ancestors left behind more ruined marbles than parchments. Not a single hour a week is teached to our high schools upon the history of Fine Arts.

For this, the result is horrible. It is not only the uneducated who stand behind to the appreciation of Art. If you subtract the graduates of the Fine Arts Schools and a few more, the rest are unable to distinguish a masterpiece from a cheap commercial creation. Take some of those certified wise professors of ours to the Acropolis and ask them to explain the substance and the value of this “easy” classic art; if you hear anything else than hollowed superlative words than “wonderful” and “magnificent”, this would have been the consoling exception.

The art lovers, to their total, buy measly cheapness from galleries or auctions and most of the times none of them accommodate a single piece of genuine art, even from a fourth class artist. And in their deplorable foolishness they find the nerve to accuse the authentic art, if it doesn’t suit their photographic fraud.

Under these circumstances it is hard to meet the acceptable level of knowledge upon art. The fake ones are encouraged and the artists are starving while they keep high standards, waiting for a capable estimator (if they get lucky) to buy their creations. They remain inaccessible and embittered, totally detached from the artistically un7

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fed audience. We have a gap between the tree of art and the needed ground for the roots to grow. This gap has been enlarged in our century through the complicated artistic searches. Although the brokers – merchants obfuscate the reality, abroad, they manage, somehow, to stay close to the extreme explorations of the modern art. And that’s a progress. Through this study we proceed with certainty that the initiated experts have nothing to earn from. Though, there is a lot for the beginners who seek for truthful knowledge. For them, our approach is less theoretical and systematic and more practical. As it is important to look at art up to a point where you taste its obvious gifts and distinguish the good from the bad aspects, and become able to study over it the human evolutionary course.

THE ARTS IN GENERAL From all these creations around, man is the only one who found a way to redeem him from the legislation of nature, which is a commitment. Since after he broke the chains of nature upon mute reproduction and self – preservation, he keeps violating those bounds by getting some security and comfort, and internal wealth and self consciousness.

This first spark which shined in the human spirit keeps widening due to another virtue of his: the ability to transfer his experience to others, follows his enlightenment.

This transfer cannot be achieved unless it takes a certain scheme, expression and vocalization; otherwise it won’t come out of us this internal liquidity of our personal experience. And it becomes polymorphic, multilingual, you could say, as the human mansion has many openings; the sun of perception enters airy and fresh through the wide openings or roughly and dull from its impenetrable windows.

These blocks of the human mind and soul, with their openings towards the outside, resemble the tree brunches, the large and the smaller ones, divisions of the former. The action, the science, the art, the new religion, ethics, they all belong to the large branches.

The smaller keep bifurcating and with time they give a resource to the person, taking him out of the rat race and enriching his internal world and life; each one with its own way and never abundantly. Af8

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ter Buddha asked for the absolute, found himself mute.

Reality itself, with its inconceivable essence, made the man, the one of all species who was responding more or less, to deploy as many “languages”, antennas, emitters and receivers together; to catch and transmit the coded signals of the surrounding world.

The science and its branches, the invisible – sensitive “octopus legs”, receive the truth and give it to the audience with finical accuracy and clarity. And this is when art comes to see things to their intense ferocity as related to the humans; to their almost beauty, in the sense of the wild and wide truth. And not to its drained meaning that crams the mind. Only one truth shakes the human body, mind and soul. Even the religion, when it comes as an internal need, which doesn’t slide to disavowal and death of the surrounding life, aims towards the equilibration from the perpetual chase of the thirsty soul.

The moral action brings the man from the birth of the spirit to the soil of the eternal earth, where everything is tried to prove their authentic or fraud existence.

It is accepted that since all these branches derive from the man, they are united to their roots and never get separated by any great wall.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ART The art can never be the copy of its surrounding reality. Creation means autonomous existence, something that cannot coincide with a prior. Did the Creator ever copy something?

Those who wanted the art totally independent from the human problems, they made it poorer and worthless ending up to the famous phrase: ´Art for the Art”. This way, it became dead inside their empty and sick loveliness.

The art cannot be anyone’s slave. Neither religion, nor ideology, nor political party can enslave it to its dark aspirations, as it will automatically die. Unless, something from the above inspires the artist in a way to take the initial idea further, to widen it, refresh it, and enlighten it. This way, we get a re-creation.

Art has always content, without though becoming a catechism.

We may find it to the most adventurous pursuits, most likely in the societies where all the basic problems are solved. Without content 9

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there’s no genuine form. But again, if you call a content the fact of “how nicely the rain falls”, while been in front of a train wreck, we should better be ashamed of ourselves.

Every totalitarianism which enslaved the art to its aims, managed to make it vanish. Every “liberal” who seek for the absolute purity in art, pauperized it to formalism. The dogmatic accelerated his aspiration but the “free- minded” cried over the suicide of his beloved one.

The fine arts are not like moil, for sure. They aim towards the human soul. Let them save it then! But our soul depends on our body, which depends on our stomach. So, let’s not forget that most of the ancient civilizations were tributary, where the people had insured the basics of life.

If the art ignores these essentials, it becomes empty and unreal. And if it goes after them, the way politics does, it coincides with it and commits suicide. Let art stay in its own kingdom then, so we get truth through it, content with essential beauty, renewed by its own purport.

THE LANGUAGE OF EACH ART Literature, dancing, music, architecture, sculpture, painting and lately, cinematography are included in the human Fine Arts. Each one is using its own language to express itself. The word, the sound, the volumes, the outline and the color are the media and the organs each one articulates in its own way, to be transmitted. Otherwise we wouldn’t differentiate the variety of arts.

Using every possible way, we surround this multi-faceted inconceivable reality to give it a form, a crystallized shape, so to become a possession of ours, artistically transubstantiated, in the case of arts.

What about the content? Can we see the same theme in different type of arts? Yes, up to a point. Many common titles in painting, poetry, music etc there are. But also, great differences between them exist.

Otherwise, if art A or B the sound or the color, could alone express everything, the rest of the arts wouldn’t survive. If the word through speech could describe whatever the music presents, for a soul’s or a storm’s ebullition, or for a nightly peacefulness, we wouldn’t have music. And if the prose or poetry alone could describe the human agony, the theatre wouldn’t be born as a synthesis of all those arts which use acting drama. The progress brought cinematography with its own expressive abilities which the theater couldn’t follow through its mature 10

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reality. No other art could distinguish time to past – present – future in the human soul so impalpable and with such expressive results. Which other art can present simultaneously three or more spots of one space?

Could you ever see and feel the expression from the actor’s eye movement, in a theater, no matter how close you get to him?

PROSE AND ARTISTICS Strictly artistic are countered only the following crafts: architecture, sculpture, and painting. Their role needs to be presented thoroughly. And since the most familiar art to everyone is the literature, we will compare them with it, to find out what they can and what they cannot present (especially the sculpture and painting, since architecture has a distinct oddity).

Some themes are made only for the prose. The myth of Athena’s birth through Zeus’ headache after he got hit by Hephaestus’ axe would have been a horrible monstrosity if given by a classic artistic way. Though, as a story, it carries a unique appeal. But if you figure through a painting or even a marble, the head of Zeus taking a strike and through his smashed forehead getting another figure… definitely repulsive. The imagery used to depict such scenes is too devious for some types of arts.

Contrary to this, the naval battle of Salamis (Themistocles against Xerxes) would be described either by painting or literature, better. Certainly not by sculpture. As the masts and the ropes have no plasticity.

Maybe we get some through the carved surface. Only, like in every other case, the art can show one phase from the whole fact. If we wanted to get more, we would see an array of consecutive scenes. But this cannot resemble the prose or the cinema, where time flows continuously, compounding many static points together. This narrating array of icons was happening often in the past (mixture of prose and arts). It was when the borderlines of the different arts (even those of the different sciences) were quite different. Let’s not forget that once, all writings were iconic.

And with time, every subject – branch found and keeps finding its own course and language. From the period where the primitive witchery was conquering, till today, to the division of the nucleus, we came a long way.

But they all come together to their root and source: the human being.

The crucifixion of Christ cannot be given more graphically than from the expressive abilities of the icon. The optical view, here, talks straight 11

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to our soul. On the other hand, the complete life of Christ was given breathtakingly by the gospels, meaning the art of written word. Sometimes, our fantasy’s extension works much better.

THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE ART The artistic are cosmopolitan. They speak a direct and international language. They don’t need translation and you are not obliged to learn 20-30 languages to conquer all the civilizations of the world. All you need is a slight – basic initiation into their special speech and little by little you are exposed to their secrets all around the world.

Too bad, for our busy periods, we can’t find enough time to save our souls by entering all these doors together, to win the fruits of knowledge. Two months are not enough to get to know Balzac’s works. But in two hours you can absorb Picasso’s meanings in a good-colored reproduction. Which description with words can ever bring live to our eyes the “Christ” of Salvador Dali or the “Sibyl of Michelangelo”? Most likely, none of the two.

The language? Or the language of Arts? Let some whispers be heard, to be followed by the latter’s irreplaceable charm…

The Christ of Dali 12

The Sibyl of Michelangelo

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THE DETERMINANTS AND THEIR BLIGHT The arts are following an evolution. If they stop moving, they die.

They follow the place and the time and the transitory human, if they want eternity. On first sight, it is easy to distinguish the medieval painting from the one made in the Renaissance.

It would have been absurd, today, for an artist to follow the inspirations of Phidias. Undoubtedly great templates, but only because they expressed their time with sincerity. The emotions that inspired their art couldn’t have their roots elsewhere. And if they touched eternal strands for the human soul, (a must for a great art), it was according to the atmosphere of their times. And as the archetypes in the history of man are getting richer, wider, and more logical and enlightened, they became ideas, theories, and aspects. They are incubated along with their times’ tendencies. The human mind is molded (fabricated) with time differently.

So are the rocks, as time changes their shape.

We deal with eternal templates but not with eternal fettles. The latter, up to a point, is a result of its core. There is no doubt that the fettles are repeating themselves. And this is due to the fact that the man is not deeply modified and the times look alike although they don’t coincide.

The term resemblance means that there are only, some, common characteristics; and not everything is the same between two or more compared things. The classic years have some resemblances, with those of Renaissance but also some differences, as we see them impressed through their art. The post-classical years look like those of our times but how seriously can someone support this, after 2000 years of Christianity, one industrial revolution, a deep psychology period and the bloodstream of two World Wars? Could the motives ever be free of any influence? Once, and only once, there was a time when a monk was carving a whole rhapsody over an olive pit. But now, the human hand goes much faster, and thus our emotions are influenced by the art, formed in our time.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to copy, externally, our period. Life is not just a peel. On the contrary, saturation or any reaction may lead the current art to different pathways, even adverse. And it never stays on a knife-edge, out of its time, since art starts from that time. It works the same way with the artist, who expresses what he is 13

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but also what he isn’t (meaning what he wishes to be). Every period leads to the same or to adverse contents and expressions. As there is a connection cable. In the case where it turns to the past, art will never copy getting enslaved; it will see through the refractions of the present time and assimilate it lively and organically, getting richer and never unnatural.

Everything we mentioned, so far, doesn’t only apply to the artistic.

Even better. This way, we understand the photographic appearance in painting: fishes, flowers, valleys, fruits, faces and more come to the light under the illusion of the real.

“They look like real!” Why paint them then? Why not taking a picture of them, instead, more synchronous and more relaxing, more decent and more authentic from the manual work? “Monkeys and children will admire you” says Faust to the dry-soul Wagner. “And it is fine, if that’s to your taste, but you’ll never touch men’s hearts…”

These works pass only through the eye of the artist. Maybe through his miserable logic too. They can’t touch him deeper as there are not sublimated artistically; there is no internal pursuance, no study of configurations and colors; his presence between the main subject and his work, is not obvious. He just transferred nature to the canvas, which makes the still life look unpleasing. No real art will remain at the surface of its subject. Imagine the music funs, if you have them listen to some city noise, only, in a festival.

The competent art never copied accurately, not even through its phases of realism or naturalism. It always found a way to subjugate the details to its most important characteristics. We got ethical graphics but never got lifeless secularism. And if we ever meet, in any type of art, a small part of realism, this is supported by enlightenment; which doesn’t happen in photography and its admirers.

The hyperbolic attachment to the main theme makes the latter artistically spiritless. It transforms a landscape to a photography and Buddha to an anatomy. Art, is then, carried away to foreign valleys (or maybe grounds) and stops being creative.

The local conditions generally influence the arts, since they mostly influence the human nature. But they never get to the point where they become absolute creators of the spirit; neither of course, should they be copied superficially. The place and the climate play a definite role, not only upon the materials which configure the sculpture and 14

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architecture but they also dictate the rules of evolution; further and deeper than that, the wetness offers art-making with its diffusions and the transparency contributes to the clear outline which is required by sculpture. Though, if sculpture owed its existence only to those mentioned, the Pentelic marble and the nudity in the palestra, as supported by Adolph Taine, shouldn’t be found in the northern countries, as well. Neither drawing should have been met in ancient Greece, if this was a fact, with so many differences from around the geographic longitudes and latitudes.

The place, the transition, the historical moment, the social environment, the interaction, fate and race, subconscious and intangible or personal factors craft the essence and the form of an art inside the human soul in a profound and apparent way; mysterious enough, so that no definition could be given to it and these lines, only to a point could introduce us to its kingdom. Further than that, the artist has to feel, personally, that profound delectation which depends on his own hypostasis and talent. The nature of the articles suggests that the spectator becomes, to some level, a co-creator. This is a fact which lots of artists forget, by insisting to cram into the viewers’ mind every single detail. Unavoidably, since every creation is made in the dark, from the genesis of this world to the conception of man and up to every capture and spiritual execution. We really cannot figure how this would have been else, if man ever dashes this darkness, but, for now, this is the only known way.

So, naturalism is unsustainable; meaning the bad naturalism, out of place and time, the photographic animation which plagues a great part of our world. Someone can always express himself naturalistically, with a new dimension – meaning and the style is not what matters to create pure art. Even nowadays, you’ll find out there impressionists and modernists of any kind, with emptiness; no matter where you live, the “-ists” are ruling indistinguishably. Is this due to the cosmopolitan spirit of our times? Though, you don’t find such a mess in other type of arts. Is it because the language of arts is international? Is it the chase of the original art? Which often leads to the opposite? By any means, this juggernaut is artificial and unnatural.

No matter our living through the machines, travelling for social and personal reasons, racial or traditional, constitute our beingness, even in our days where the world offers variety, by been a “cosmos” which 15

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enriches our mind and soul. All these factors, no matter how, some, may standardize itselves through the funnel of the artist’s personality, they got an inconceivable variety of blended expressions. It works great as long as someone finds its seam and remains sincere without overdoing it with arbitrary personal operations over honesty of art.

Or else the payback is close‌ Though, there is no algebraic equation regarding the rules upon creating art, as this comes only after been exposed enough, in its works.

After threading around and closer to our subject, it is time to get to the live center of it.

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ARCHITECTURE

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mateur architects do not exist, like in painting, as every talented one, passed through a school to study it. So, these lines, aim to those who wish to learn something from the person who stands over those buildings.

But is really architecture artistic? Isn’t it a group’s creation? From the drawings of the architect to the last brushstroke of the painter, how many dozens of artisans and maestros passed through its scaffolds? Contrary to this, in sculpture and painting we rarely have cases where a second hand is interfered from the conception to the completion of the work. We might be seeing co-operations of many agents in cinema and theatre; though, they both remain in the art classification since a film or a performance carries the seal of their director. The same happens with architecture; it coordinates the individual proffers under the inspiration of the architect.

Three are the characteristics of every building: practicality, solidity (firmness – stability) and beauty. The last one seems to connect the architecture with the artistic creations. Though, practicality exists through the rest of the arts too, since redemption is not at all a luxury.

And alack if solidity is missing from any of the arts, even from literature or music… Architecture is the skeleton of the construction; if it is gone, we get mud. Of course, architecture, to its parts, is repeated, but to its whole, becomes personal and not unremarkable, since this is its essence, a fact which stems from its practicality; this, along with the comfort it offers, has tremendous positive psychological results to the human soul. Even the most basic structure protects us from the bad weather and from the evil eyes sparing us freedom and redemption. Two thirds of our lives are spent in our house; “If this shelter is decorous, we easily get rid of the everyday worries”, said Pericles of the golden century, back then.

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Architecture mimics nothing but itself, and its parts. It is born from the time and place it belongs to. And that makes it artistic. The fashion or an internal compulsion can lead the painter or the sculptor back to the Neolithic times. The architect though, cannot take us back to the shacks neither can he ignore the elements of his place and of his period. And generally he has to respect the synchronous man with his all kind of needs, material and spiritual.

Today, steel and concrete, travel together in every corner of the earth, except for the places where the local economy doesn’t allow it.

A little more than a century ago, the local elements exclusively defined and restricted the type of a building: soil, wood, stone etc. The climate as well, constitutes the origin of a structure, according to the needs. The ancient Greeks could enjoy the sun in their open yards and galleries. Northern, though, the constructions had to be less exposed and mostly protective from the misty weather conditions. Nothing is absolute, of course. In the west, the Romanesque and Gothic rhythms blossomed in the same places but they were elaborated differently by the internal world of man which changed and keeps changing.

In Greece’s old times we have the Classic and then the Byzantine temples, with dissimilar consistency each one. Though, these two, get closer to each other, if you compare them, with a temple from India.

The latter, born in a jungle, is far apart from the simple austerity, the Greek Parthenon has ; which sprouts between the rocks and the creeping thymes.

Let’s follow another pathway, the one that connects buildings and humans and ages even tighter.

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Indian temple, jungle in decoration

Parthenon, nude and simple

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IN ITS INFANCY After the caves, the first natural habitat of man, and leaving behind his sacks, the first step of architecture on earth we find in the megalithic monuments of the stone ages. Impressive start, rough, simple. Unkempt boulders, icon and simulacrum of the man who set them; it was when he became a team member for a common purpose. The behemoth man is present, the cyclope who was just starting to have a spark in his raw mind; he could go only so far, to set standing rocks, in a circle, and as a ceiling for protection from some magical – religious threats.

Megalithic monument, first step of architecture

Here, like in our known pyramid, the metaphysical is what counts.

The Pharaohs were living to die, since they didn’t leave behind palaces and castles but only pyramids and graves. The human mind matured though, became wiser. We are still on basic architecture but a well based one, eternally. Its first permanent characteristic was achieved: solidity!

The message from the pyramid cannot be given here. No matter 20

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how many ratios we calculate or equations we solve, or metaphors we use (i.e. 150m height, tall as a mountain etc). There is nothing like literally standing by its site. Only then we will hear its language.

The awe we will feel, the contemplations it will throw us in, without the slightest translation, they constitute its essence. We might try transferring this feeding using the English language, but only to a certain level.

One more step forward and we approach our castle-troopers, the ancient Greeks. They knew how to live their lives these artfuls, so they influenced their future pathways meaningfully. Granite walls and megalithic, in Mycenae, Tirintha and elsewhere; carved, this time, as the man himself, also carved his mind (as he is not a savage anymore). Away from the Cyclopes, we reach the Ajaxes: resonant, gruff, but also formed and carved like the stones they chopped with their hands leaving over them their soul stamp, desperately. The French castles carry something similarly heavy. Still a great difference exists between the two. If you enter their dark buildings there, you will feel the steely Middle age, walking over your back, agonizing your temples. In Greece though, the air of freedom, and the man out of nature, are more obvious. Still heavy the atmosphere though, as the Kouros’ (elegant youth) ancestor is wandering around.

MATURE AND BEAUTIFUL In the classic Greece, architecture achieved its second characteristic: Beauty! The temple still has traces from its older wooden ancestor, like the columns and the triglyphs; but everything is adjusted to the new land and the new man. An ancient Greek poet said: “You would think the mountain got pregnant and gave birth to the Parthenon”.

That much is attached to its surrounding rocky mountains, clean-cut not at all numinous, taken out like Athena came from Zeus’ head.

The temple remains open towards the nature, the sun, the air, the man kind, surrounded by columns, earns the image of the liberal host who can’t leave without nature’s embrace. The climate, pushes the style to remain open but not by itself and not without the guiding spiritual 21

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reality of the locals. True, as within the next centuries, this spirit is lost.

In Egypt, for example, where the climate is warmer, the temples were designed with tall, dark – blind walls, as the priests kept everything in secret… In Greece, a little further down from this rock, in the open field, everything was discussed under the luminous minds…

Every temple has its timing, so it is a spawn of its times. Whoever tried to mimic the ancients without been fertile, they were mistaken as those who tried to become famous just by wearing their chiton and speaking their language. Look how lifeless seem the Academy and National Library buildings of Athens, as they didn’t come in good timing. After the monolithic style passed away, and the Ajaxes were gone, along with the versatile Ulysses, the human mind broadened the common sense, the mammals’ skeleton and the architecture developed; the new constructed buildings are out now, under the light, stable, appealing and useful.

The vertical and horizontal elements of the temple are now obvious more than ever; underlined by a color, each function, the etiology and the result, talk about their role; when God’s Word acquires consciousness of itself, the structure takes a shape. Like an animal whose skeleton got evolved, offering greater stability and it willingly starved to show its new acquisition.

The ancient Greek temple looks like a statue over its base, showing its beauty but keeping a balance between the external and internal attractiveness, contrary to the later byzantine temple. The ideal, here, goes along with the classic phrase “healthy mind in a healthy body”.

The beauty rules aside the solidity without conceding to practicality.

Though, nowadays, the latter rules over the other two, starting from the Roman period, which follows.

PRACTICAL AND ERRATIC It is well known that the Romans were very practical. Their laws, the imperium and the architecture they created, attest the primum vivere, the “now” and the “here” as their best interest. Comfy, private habitats, bridges, baths, narrow buildings with manifested destiny and then the temples. The importance of the underworld for the Egyptians was equilibrated by the moderation of the Greeks and totally changed by the Romans, to: first you live, and then you philosophize.

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The Roman Colosseum

The oversized buildings, like their colossal empire, were aiming to amaze the people for the emperor’s divinity, so not to ask for more than food and shows. You would think that the Middle ages rise as you look at the smoked buildings which remind of Byzantine temples.

The elements are falsified, like their times did. The marble is used only as a coating of the brick-walls. The Roman couldn’t be as certain as Pericles was, to say: “The future will stand with admiration in front of us”.

What rules now, is the curved line, the arches, the bows, the domes.

Issues the Greeks avoided to use as their elements they had in their hands never brought the need for the above; they could close the gaps with long boulders, or maybe the curves would have been contrary to the simplicity of the straight lines. The luxury is found through the Corinthian rhythm adopted by the Romans (out of the three Greek available – Ionic, Doric and Corinthian).

Don’t look for consistency. It is absent here. The multi-facial and erratic empire can easily be read over its buildings: eastern and Greek rhythms mixed together, without any coordination can be seen in the 23

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same structure. Mismatched decorations and quaintness don’t go along with their volume. This synthesis remained unfinished as a rise of a heinous man who was stopped by Christianity; it was an outcome, or better, a demand of those times.

THE SYNTHESIS The Byzantium was build over Greece and Rome digested in the spirit of Christianity. This combination was tough to be executed in the language of architecture. The dome roofed easily the cyclic buildings of Rome; the same happened by the saddled ceiling over the straight buildings. Practically, here, we need the symbolic existence of the dome – heaven over a long – narrow structure; as congregation doesn’t need a cyclic lineup (parataxis) for a view to beasty battles.

On the contrary, the frontal parataxis was a God send one; this way, his greatness would be set as the only one to view.

The coincidence of a straight line and a curved one was a problem which needed to be solved. And it did get solved by the Messiah between the square and the cyclic, and by the spherical triangles which bifurcate to the arches of a quadrilateral column. With gradual transfer, the straight line was translated to a curve without endangering the stability. The unconnected conciliated the action and the symbol, the earth and the heaven; thanks to the brilliance of two men (Anthemius and Isidorus), who, despite the low scientific levels of those times, they managed to assimilate creatively, whatever was known from the past, to show what those times could truthfully deliver in architecture.

Aghia Sophia’s breakthrough

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The temple of Aghia Sophia resembles to polyphony with bold contrasts and with many turnovers; it remains one organism though, as if you take down just one of its columns, the whole structure will collapse to the ground.

This is an accomplishment and a requirement of a monotheistic faith, like in the times of Solomon. It is a sign of economical acme and imperial aggregation; even Rome and Asia, lovers of the Colosseum, met each other, here, under the Christianity. Not the modern one; but the old one, the authentic, the cordial and humble one, the victorious which wanted to be established by its brilliance and graciousness.

Later on, the Greek style dominates again, with average dimensions, like with the temples of the Macedonian ages, crossed, symmetric, in harmony. After the French empire was smashed and divided, the temples got smaller in size, like if they were sympathizing; then the Turkish rule which enforces its own religion and the churches are build smaller and in distant places to protect the weak families from annihilation.

Through all of its phases, the style shows a contrast with the ancient Greek. The latter is beautiful inside – out and open to nature. The former is closed to nature, with internal only content, a type of the new religion which aimed towards the spiritual accomplishment. It is like at looking at Apollo and Christ side by side. The former, with equilibrated beauty, beams externally. The latter, barefoot and dusty, wounded, bleeding, with the barbwire over his head externally, hides internally the matchless beautiful feeling of climbing the cross to save the people.

EVOLUTION IN THE WEST The Medieval Time in the West was really static, in the beginning.

But later, it took an unexpected evolution due to the social changes of that period. The Romanesque and Gothic rhythms evolved with a beaming and enlightened architecture, coming out of the Middle Ages. The Romanesque reminds of a dark castle, heavy and priestly (hieratic), more depressing than the Byzantine temple, as the souls were not as carved here, by continual civilizations, as in the East. Decoration exists only on one face of the temple, the west one, which is flat, carved, one – dimensional, frontal; the depth is absent, and the only existing reality is the one of the underworld. Internally you feel definite relaxation, as there is no fraught line anywhere. We deal with the man who trusts everything on 25

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God’s hand, the person who hasn’t escaped yet from the Middle Age society.

Romanesque, the ease, the static

Reims, Notre Dame, dynamism

The Gothic rhythm starts with Notre Dame. The aspect is open, the gaps dominate, and the walls get lighter to reach a dangerous sliming in the Reims. A new reality, the city, the new man, the civic is here, a flutter, as he is commercializing and the gold attracts him. He gets distant from the divine bliss, constituting his new unique and dynamic face. We pass from the static to the dynamic, with crossed arches inside – out, which get stronger, mirroring the battler of debating; the latter rises irrevocably. The man, from now on, has no ending, no upshot, no anchoring to his race. That’s why we have so many gothic temples, ceaseless, staying to the fire and brimstone. The architecture, now, evolves, till the heavy walls are replaced by external braces endangering one of its basic characteristics: solidity. It now looks like an animal whose spine lies outside his back. Every art pays a high price for its flings, as in those moments needs a mythological support, a deus ex machina, since the miracle became its weakness. Even our supreme spiritual diathesis becomes a delicate fragile feeling.

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since the temple still keeps one main aspect. Though, the relief evolves to the carved and the sense of the real, the earthly, is a fact. The man reaches the sky, not with symbols but through the scissoring arts that he invented. You cannot count on the given data as the conquered becomes a reality; the holiness is not found to the priest but to the truly righteous. This new reality can be read over the gothic temple which is still incomplete – but does the dynamic find an end, ever?

The Middle Age of the West and the East meet with ancient Greece to present something, neither medieval nor classic. The west keeps the dome, the arch and – from the Greeks – the columns with their eternal smile. Cosmic buildings, not religions, as the man is brought under the light, saw the sun, the valleys and found happiness; architecture followed him. Somewhere, in between, we get infertile emulations, like baroque and neoclassicism. Society and Science brought new premises for exceptional growth. A fertile synthesis is coming up next.

MODERN AND POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE

Baroque, the overloaded of the West

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The carved decoration over the buildings never hided the skeleton; and either they were underlining it or they were driving your mind crazy by overloading the structure. For example, in ancient Greece the pediment surrounds the frieze, without letting the carved decoration climb towards the columns. On the other hand, during the Renaissance, the Baroque buildings are overloaded by statues. And the East, the Indian temples were part of a rock, carved inside or a cave of granite, loaded with useless columns. Architecture here, never met science or abstract art.

Here’s a short story about the “Dante of Architecture” or if you wish the so called “God’s architect”, Antonio Gaudi. The greatest exponent of the Catalan Modernism is well known for his unfinished Sagrada Familia (the Cathedral of the poor). His work was influenced by his passions of architecture (neo – Gothic art), religion and nature. The phrase of his Director of the Barcelona Architecture School was kind of tragic: “We’ve given this diploma either to a fool or to a genius and only time will show”. The artist’s rheumatism contributed to his reserved character but his lengthy fasts led him to more life – threatening illness.

In the World Fair of 1888 where 27 countries participated (including USA and Japan) he displayed his work and composed a key point in the history of Sagrada Familia Modernism movement.

The sequence of fragmentation with holes and partitions over this Cathedral creates divisions with open spaces holding them with infinite barriers. Rich in contrasts with exceptional plasticity reflects the prosperity of the human spirit while reaching the heavens. The language of nature becomes a language of architecture as he used the structure of a tree for the nave.

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After the steel was introduced in constructions, during the 19th century the stone was ostracized. The nude, undecorated architecture dominated.

Huge buildings, railway stations, and bridges were made of this element.

Man heads for the sky

Ministry of Education in Rio-Brazil

In the beginning of the 20th century, the cement is worked along with steel now. Cost effective, more stable structure, conductive material by making a place habitable. Whatever the piety of the Middle Age never made possible, by the restricted ability of the arc, it was achieved by Science. The gothic temple had the faith to fly to the heavens, and that’s why it couldn’t stand over its feet. Today, step by step, the construction heads for the sky, fed by earthly needs; the same ones they fed the Gothic temples, which never culminated them.

The machines pile up the people into the major cities by making skyscrapers. No free span to spread in width, no time to decorate the buildings. The aim now is to comfort with safety. Straight to “Ithaca” with a helicopter. The pathway of the journey is shorter. Completely nude becomes the architecture, as the only thing is left to do now, is to push buttons by stacking cigarettes desperately.

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Just compare any skyscraper with an Indian temple. It might terrify you thinking up to which point the architecture mirrors the conditions under which it is born. It is not only the lack (or not) of the land, or the existence of the machine, that make the difference. Free from his past, the American, without the load of tradition; bent on his knees, the Indian, from his past, unable to walk, since he carries over his back, the whole jungle of his holy tradition. The sacral cow keeps him heavy as an elephant. The American adores the steel, the cement and the glass. He is free to become gigantic. Where to? This is another story‌

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The futuristic architectural movement of Deconstructivism is the final one till today. Does the fragmentation from the above figure remind you of something? Maybe this creator was inspired by the Sagrada Familia?

How fool could he be, Antonio Gaudi, according to his director? May be he was far ahead of his time… This wave promotes fragmentation over the constructed buildings were the absence of symmetry, harmony and continuity is obvious. Distortion and dislocation rule.

Should the building be attached to the environment, demeanorly, historically, spiritually to present a sensational personality? Surely, if we want architecture outlined by strict geometry. And it should be acceptable, as a spawn of our time, affecting the furniture styles and the rest of the arts.

Isn’t this shape, complexion, and achievement, something attractive? Isn’t it close to the outline of your utensils? Where is now, the heavy, old curved line, the babbling one, which looks provincial?

Though, tradition remains strong, just to make a difference. You still read the human soul and mind through it. The man cannot be more conservative than religion itself. This is why the temples keep their old aspect, the curved lines, the arcs, the domes and those elements which go along with them.

These temples do not represent the art of architecture nowadays. In the old times, the temples, the tombs, the palaces were ruling. Today, we see instead, the boiling art of the townie. Over these buildings, the man’s fairy tale is readable, to its many tones. So, architecture has its own language.

We gave, so far, just a few whispers of it. We challenge those who are interested, to evolve it…

Heydar Aliyev Center, the infinitude 31

SCULPTURE

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culpture and painting are the purely artistic, according to the meaning of the essence: imaging something, or even mimicking, we could say – if we totally subtract the bad meaning of this word. By unwrapping these arts, you get to read the spiritual man, mostly, and not the man of the merciless necessity we meet in architecture. Here, we can see a head over a statue totally out of proportion (larger or smaller) from the rest of the body, which can be a great idea instead of being a disadvantage. In architecture, though, you won’t find rooms 1x1 meters or smaller. So, these two arts are addressed to some other parts of the human body, speaking their own language, of course.

Both of them, speak clearly about the reality and while being descriptive, they talk by using icons in an optical way, which is engraved with the most clear outline, into our spirit, compared with literature or music. But sculpture constructs with volumes, and painting with colors and figures.

The former is expressed in three – dimensional spaces and the latter is restricted to a two dimensional surface, and only by illusion we get the sense of the background, when needed. The sculpture wants you to walk around it, as it has millions of views, while it becomes debatable and cosmic; contrary to the painting, which has only one aspect, and requires a single position to stare it. The first one is optical and tactile, and the second works just optically only. Again, the first has more materialization, the second one wins in spiritualization. By its nature, the sculpture wants to tell you everything; but the drawing poses most of its information. For all of the above reasons, every tension and curve in world history was strongly expressed through sculpture; remember of the Byzantium which asked the expression to be printed only through the paintings; it vanished. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the two arts don’t communicate with each other.

There are sculptures that look more like drawings and there is painting that is depicted like carving. An artist who makes dressed statues, hardly 33

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avoids painting; curved or massive female hair overflowing her shoulders, become anti-curved, as they match – up to painting. Sculpture is nude; and when it steps over the drawing land, it requires lots of abstraction, not to lose its essence. The curving doesn’t need prolixity, ornaments or delicate prominences. In other words, it is an anti-naturalistic art.

The daring motions are forbidden to the sculptor, unless we are talking for a bronze work. The marble, the gypsum (cast), the pot, even the mood, do not take acrobatic motions. Michelangelo, with hyperbole, mentioned that the sculpture should remain in one piece after rolling it down from the top of a mountain. And he was not talking about its endurance in time. Our senses cannot accept any “unsafe” standing position of theirs, as it seems to us that we are also not safe from where we stand. Its elements, themselves, take sculpture to the land of eternity, so any amputation of a work would be a crime.

Sculptor Yannis Bardis at his Lab (casts, pot, marble)

From this standpoint, Laokoon (a) becomes a defective product.

The work should be grouped, well based, conical, without gaps or superficial pads. Just look at the works of Chalepas (the so called “Greek Rodin”) and Henry Moore.

(a) The delicate Laokoon followed by (b) Yannoulis Chalepas and (c) Henry Moore

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The expression from the last two creators springs from deep cogitation, otherwise, this art this language wouldn’t exist for long. They talk through their plasticity and the photoshop of their volumes. What is the essence of plasticity? A bullet, a watermelon, is anti-carving.

Contrary to this, the potato, a head, a contracted body of a wrestler has excellent plasticity and they offer great values in sculpture.

Some accuse the marble, in this art, because it reminds of a cemetery’s coldness. It is true, that the carving out of clay attracts better our view. Not only because of its color shades, but also because, there, you will find the breath of the creator, the initial inebriation that comes from inspiration, the tremors from his fingertips. The work, after getting out of the cast to be copied on the marble, misses on the way some of the first breath’s warmth, even if it finished by the same creator. Different color, different material resistance, instruments, measurements, and the crummy sense will end up to a different result. Though, a work cannot be eternal if made by clay, no matter how well it is preserved. It must end up to marble or bronze, which both get, with time, warmer and attractive rust.

Between sculpture and painting stands the repousse. This can have daring motions, like painting, as it defies braking due to its support from its background. There’s no rule regarding how extruded this repousse can be but there’s a limit to how we perceive it. Only with detestation, we would see half a head or half a body coming out of a wall. The authentic repousse is minimally extruded and it resembles a subject which was squeezed to stick it against the wall. The popular column of Mnesicles at the Acropolis makes a great example.

As with every artistic, sculpture has beauty, optical and graphic, having the volumes set with plasticity and in harmony over the three dimensions. Tucked but dynamic, like a beast in a cage. Real trunk, not a shadow. Theater in action, not cinema. Hammer and chisel not brush or tambour. You got the fairy tale of the centuries from it, as it waits more than all other arts through time.

Let’s learn a few details, now.

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A fine repousse

THE EVOLUTION THROUGH TIME: First Phase The Paleolithic man was naturally uncut, like the stones he was using. This is why whatever he left behind was naturalistic, of his own nature; he became its effigy, identical to it. Contrary to this, the man of Neolithic times, started to get “out of the box”, and while been attached to earth, he cultivated it, leaving the caves and making a shack; becoming a technician, engraved inside him the new man, the spiritual person who gets a shape; an abstraction is made leading to the permanent characteristic of logic.

You won’t find this man in any anthropologic recreation. You’ll read his real internal face though, over the engraved menhir.

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come from the creator’s inner world. The outline printed on the rock starts to move now inside his soul. The stature of this Neolithic man stands where he gave two or three cuts to make the stone handier.

His hand cannot go any further, as his mind keeps holding him back.

Menhir, the carved human soul

This will go further with the flat Cycladic figurines, while the man is struggling to take a human shape, and become three dimensional, full body, intact. His short history on earth and his social chains still keep him backwards. His completed statue will be set during the Classic ages, at his spiritual zenith. So, in the prehistoric period, his three – dimensional attribution is not achievable, like the four – dimensional assignation of our times. Getting closer though…

The human recreation in the prehistoric time is rarely found, as those populations were not really “human”. The first signs of man’s spiritual nature are introduced in the ancient Greek ages, where we face the human deification. Not only sculpture becomes artistic, as we said, but also concrete and earthly, finding its vindication over the naked human body, its greatest merit to its boldness. Justification came through these rocky places and the statue of the human nature and spirit was based here better than anywhere else. Even the Romans cringed their heads to the post – classic Greece. The well based creations live eternally.

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Second Phase The theory that civilizations return to their roots is very schematic.

The man, through the ages passes from similar, not identical, stages, and always in different levels. The following becomes a consequence, which is more compound from the prior, since more archetypes are included.

Evolution is following a continuously opening spiral path.

Every civilization finishes and starts with geometry; we see this well over the monuments which are emblematic. When the blood runs weak through the veins, the latter shrinks too. The fresh Minoan – Cretan – Mycenaean art forms, which met acme, change through time, becoming longer, shady, ending up linear. The Christmas tree we keep at home, made of plastic, was once rooted in the mountain fresh and alive, as an idea. Its nude branches will vanish in time, having a single picket to represent its spirit. It will be hard then to assume its lineage. Something live will have to replace this, or else the human kind is long gone. The humanity then, has nothing else but to “wait for the barbarians”, as Cavafy said through his poems.

The death of plasticity brought the geometrical on stage. This new blood is running fast through the veins of his new idea. The geometric is thrifty, simple, a basic skeleton, a summary which means mature abstraction; something spiritual which starts getting flesh and bones. Even the children start drawing with outlines, giving the idea of the abstract.

Instead of a goat’s head they draw a triangle. Although this is a little far ahead, this is how the idea of contemporary cubism started from.

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Like in the Neolithic ages, our Greek ancestors, through their historical times, started geometrically. The jars of Dipilos, the decoration, painting, and then the Kouros and the Kore statues (a and b), the first marble trunks, straight, like columns, initially; some internal power inspires them, and they start filling up, rounding their extremities, taking plasticity, natural and artistic (b). In the Kores (Greek meaning: daughters) the lines give their place to folds till we get to the classic or post – classic (c) as a synthesis of all those which were gestated in the geometrical scheme. The ancient Greeks were great because they were not narrow – minded and because they worked after integrating whatever feedback they had from their neighbors. And they never copied anyone or anything. The “Kouros” statues remind of Egyptian statues, of course.

Its forwarding step though is unique, and it delineates its brilliant start.

a: Hera, early archaic

b: Kouros, advanced archaic

c: Aghias, classic and sinewy

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Elements from place and time, former, and current, fall in the funnel of the Greeks’ broad soul, till we get an art with complete plasticity (c and d).

Spirit and technique came along together, here, as they matured side by side, normally, synthetically: the decayed Achaean, the effeminate Ionian and the brutal Doric met each other marrying the Kouros with the Kore, giving through this emotional lift, to the world, something unique; to be followed as a pathway and as an achievement. No othd: Art form in Olympia, er artistic course in any civilization reached the genuine classic its zenith with such a stable rhythm and creativity, without misfires and drawbacks, so to offer a measurement worldwide, something to compare with.

This miracle came as a result of two factors: of synthesis and of times’ spawn. Heart and mind were fed widely, worked equally, gave birth to the man of his period, after completing their cycle. There is definitely something involved from the nature’s evolution in here: the balance of mind and heart, the equilibration between sense and sensation, which give the Olympic peacefulness of the classic (d), born from the local land and history together. Under the transparent, clear Hellenic sky, where everything is presented with its real aspect, without hyperbole, you could get nothing less but the promotion of science and logic which have a precise outline. Those two, do not permit stagnation, as history showed. And the unwrapping of history (Reign, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy), the decline of man, the consciousness of obligation, constitute altogether the feeling of tragic, which is a strong feeling.

The ancient Greeks balanced logic and emotion into the classic art.

There’s one more equilibration over the bliss classic forms: of the person and the state. Since those times, this balance between the two was never met again, so freely and so perfectly. The person then was a real “civilian”.

He lived and died for the city and the city, in return, was giving back to him everything. The ideal was a fact then, as the person wasn’t strangulated by the state’s acts, since the latter existed under the essence of the big family.

He would voluntarily sacrifice himself when he would feel sorry for his fellow citizen’s pain. And the latter’s death was making him weaker too.

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The generality is an obvious characteristic over the marbles of that age. The sculptors didn’t ever make portraits – faces till the 5th century BC. You’ll never recognize through the sculptures, freezes and repousse of the Parthenon anyone. None of these faces, bodies and broader syntheses are copies of any natural originals, contrary to what we see through the ages that follow. After the city – state descents, the person rises. Wars, marasmus, disintegration after integration followed.

The man becomes dramatic: all the great things he achieved, keep him trapped into their net. The balanced attribution of Phidias, which rests over a synthetic completeness, disintegrates into three characteristics:

a: Hermes, effeminacy

b: Meleagrus of Scopas, the passion

c: Laokoon, the exclamation

effeminacy (by Praxiteles), passion (by Scopas), coarseness (by Lysippus). In the Aghias statue we see the anger and nervousness of the creator dominating. The head of Scopas (b) holds the emotion and the passion, darkening its aspect and shadowing the eyelids of his works; in proportion with the Euripidean tragedy, it is proved that arts join hands quite often.

As time goes by, the fragmentation continues, the portraits are as many as the faces and the person meets his apotheosis. All the known busts come from the Hellenistic and roman periods (d). The legend is dead. It is only a certain face on the base. The aristocracy of the classic sculpture doesn’t exist anymore.

From the city – state we end up in the chaos of the empires, where the person is discovered and exceptionally “free”, floats. d: Roman bust

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The civil centers brought the merchant and the competitor and the person gets invigorated; portraying came ahead in the recent years, after Renaissance, like the wave from Netherlands (Flanders) which promotes the flounce pose of the parvenu, under the brush of those artists. No paintings are saved from the ancient years. Sculpture, though, describes life correctly, using its own language.

What can the person who hovers unfinished do, in the chaos, to keep himself standing? What else but cry, cry constantly like if he could banish or fill up the chasm with this scream of his? The passion which shadowed the faces by Scopas now starts to gallop furiously. Looking at the head of Laokoon (c): what is left after this scream? What else but fizzling out, emptying deadness, a lifeless mask, a gargoyle head – like the one of Laokoon?

Look again at the difference between Phidias’ and Lysippus’ heads, to horror yourself by the calamity. The person empties, to let Christianity intrude in him; the person writhes by the medieval totalitarianism.

When the sculptures get overloaded, this is a sign of decline, a lack of authentic breath. And this doesn’t pertain to the East civilizations which have a different background. The passionate dancing around the tomb of Pergamon shows the last effort of that age to make its presence noted while it feels that it is about to vanish. There is no passion anymore. Just exhaustion.

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When do we see a woman getting embellished excessively? When her real beauty vanishes. The more a man empties inside, the more he gets overloaded outside, to equilibrate his loss. Some Roman sculptures, with obvious crudity, climb up the gates and as they don’t leave a single blank spot to breath-through, they cause you dyspnea just by looking at them. Nothing spacious like from the classic years, no nudity or simplicity burst with freedom. It was said that the “horror of emptiness” caused this over – decoration of the statues; true? It was the emptiness inside the human mind and soul that created this. Like the well polished academic speech, this is meaningless to the most.

Most of the common people understand better the values of an authentic work, than some “expert art critics” who stick in those “polished statues”.

a: Paolina of Canova, the emptiness

b: German head (13th century), the dynamism

By looking at (a) which belongs to the recent classicism, we find lots of this “beam”. Most people admire it. But if you go closely, you’ll understand that it resembles to a lifeless doll, although it is a work from a known artist. Now look at (b), which overflows by spiritual power; it pushes you, it hangs you at the wall, there’s no emptiness here.

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Third Phase

Theresia of Bernini, flummery

The heavy passion now finds itself expressed in the west, over the styles called Baroque and Rococo. The former was a product of counter – regulation, so it naturally remained without spontaneity. The pulpit which rants and gestures with rhetoric schemes with emptiness stands here. Let’s not misunderstand Greco’s baroque in painting. As he didn’t enslave himself to any masters. He expressed himself sincerely. Whenever he aims the underworld he achieves it without jarring flummery. Painting is offered for extensions. The colorations it provides along with the bold shadowing create submission.

The plasticity of sculpture hardly drifts hardly drifts from the clear outline unless it steps over “foreign lands”. The work of Bernini belongs to a baroque style but it resembles more to a painting than to a 44

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David of Michelangelo the silent power of total equilibration

work of sculpture. The unnecessary and flummery folds and shadowing totally kill the plasticity here. The stage of Theresia leaving her soul over the angel’s hands while the latter sweetly smiles, reminds not of a death.

Contrary to this, in Rococo style nothing comes heavy. It is small, elegant, light and shiny, often flummery. Somehow similar and opposite to baroque. Still a product of emptiness. Those cold angels we see at the Venetian ceilings between fancy garlands and over the fountains, what else could they show except of the infinite yawning which stroke the aristocracy till the French revolution came?

A lot were given, though, through the two centuries of the Renaissance, by Michelangelo and his contemporaneous.

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Contrary to this, the following two centuries of the European monarchy were poor, without any internal impulse. Looking at Canova’s Paolina you could easily take it as a copy of another work. Its smooth surface doesn’t replace its lifeless spirit. You can’t go back to the classics as a man of the 21st century. The Egyptian statues are polished and smooth too, but they show great power while you stare them. Canova’s work cannot be justified by its theme or by the female tenderness, as this is not a complete sculpture; there’s so much emptiness inside it, and maybe it is because it echoes the spiritless periods it was created through.

The recent times’ creators try to find power from the primitivism. Our calculating – digitalized age has dried up the human heart; the artists carve their souls exploring the counterpart archetypes.

All the faces of primitivism, the geometrical, the archaic, the childish, the rough, the awkward, the fetal (spawn of the subconscious), can be read in the modern sculpture, called anti – classic. We need some barbarity, someone could easily say, to equilibrate. The wild howling of the jungle you hear in the night clubs, thrills the souls, as it’s a general inquiry of our times.

Some cannot accept this wave in arts. Returning to our roots is not enough though. Thank goodness, there a few titans who struggle to assimilate creatively every fertile element of the past ages to digest every known civilization of this planet. This is how synthesis is evolved and the wildest and widest blossoming occurs.

The French sculptor Rodin, who was influenced by Michelangelo, is a progenitor of the modern sculpture. The first small plaster version of his “Thinker” was made in 1881. His works upon the human body finely rendered the musculature. So perfectly, that the critics rejected him once thinking that “he had cast his work from a living model”! In 1889 he was invited by the Paris salon to be a judge of the artistic jury, though. Michelangelo might have inspired him but at the same time he was the one who freed him from the academic sculpture. This way, he turned away from the canons of the Greeks and the overloaded baroque.

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The Thinker of Rodin. Speechless…

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Michelangelo staring Rodin’s greatness

Rodin thinking: competent enough to the master?

The next giant of the modern sculpture is Braque. But since he is mostly known for his paintings we will mention his style in the next chapter.

These are the trends of our modern sculpture. It leaves behind the acrobatic and garOrder and emotion by Braque rulous motions that suit mostly to painting – always in moderation, of course. It is grouped without gaps, between its volumes and forms, balancing its masses around an axis. The polished smoothness, here, has another meaning, which doesn’t go along with emptiness. The surface of the work can be freely given as a coarse creation transmitting a fresh sensation though, from a different aspect. And this is the impressionism of sculpture.

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The total absence of plasticity

By looking at the above work, we conclude that some overdo it with abstraction. Some others go further by adding steel sticks and springs and many kind of “machines”; but the language of arts betrays them, as there is no sign of plasticity in their work. Perhaps we should also play music without sounds and speak without plosives… These types of creations do not transfer any emotions. The artist of this work said he was “trying to make vibrating forms through space”. Let him believe that. The only thing that may vibrate us a little is his dare. We wish to him and his similar to be justified in the future; this way our receptivity will become richer. After all art is a personal matter. And any view can be subjective. What matters is not to accept all the critics’ points as authentic. All human beings have feelings and emotional intelligence. They shouldn’t be underestimated by anyone.

A smaller abstraction, to the point where it stops to cubism, which abolishes the rounding, gives an angulated plasticity, creating a sensational emotion to our days, as it mirrors the spirit of our ages.

The abstraction style of Moore has influenced most of them (look by the sculpture of Chalepas). The here originates mostly from the subconscious leading to surrealism. This artist, been faithful to the human body, 49

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which owns the richest plasticity, angulates it minimally, reconciling the refractory line with the curve, attractively and imposingly. This work shakes our spirit and mind; it is not made only for the eyes. The less it means by logic, the richer is the feedback.

Despiau was Rodin’s student. By looking at his Asia, although it seems so classic you can’t get enough from it, since the artist didn’t copy forms from the past. He created truthfully. There are very few words to express this beauty. Silence is mostly appreciated. This work will speak by itself its own language, the one of plasticity. All you need to understand, is to expose yourself more to it, to its similar, to its different and to its opposite. Then the moment of the divine enlightenment will come to you!

Asia by Despiau, the modern classic 50

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ainting doesn’t belong to the three – dimensional space like sculpture does. It needs a surface, canvas, board, or a wall to spread its media – not the volumes, but – the color, the shapes and the lines. The shape becomes its logic and the color shows its emotion. Both of them cooperate and influence each other to achieve the result, build its language. The third dimension, here, the depth, only by illusion techniques can be achieved.

With time, painting found its independence. During the 19th century, it finally found its essence. Whatever was lost superficially was gained internally. On the contrary, after sculpture was exiled from architecture and stripped from drawing, it didn’t find new ways to express itself and become richer in depth for what was lost in range. Sculpture on demand is not easily possible. Most of the times, it will have to be approved by public authorities for where it should stand, in a park or over a square.

Painting, though, is destined for private tastes, is always more flexible, took millions of pathways and found many faces. The painter can carry his merchandise in a suitcase. This is not the case for the sculptor.

Painting is not so materialized, like sculpture. It belongs mostly to the land of shadows and not to the concrete reality; it withstands longer to deformation, this way so it is more capable for a richer expression, enhanced by its color. It is placed closed to music, where the sounds of reality are accredited in a lesser degree. It is offered mostly to express the polymorphic personality of each artist, has the ability to trace itself to the underworld; perhaps this is why it was favored by the twilight of the Byzantium.

THE PREHISTORIC TIMES A little more than a century ago, painting found itself with Impressionism. The art understood that its identity comes from its colors and 51

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the shapes catch and hold of, often, more reality, even if they don’t look alike the real objects. Among others, it divorced any babbling from its course, like sculpture did.

With time, more specialization is required, not only by the science, but it became also a general phenomenon of the spiritual section. Back in the old times, you couldn’t distinguish the sciences or the arts and everything was covered by religious movements or even by witching, if you go further back. In those ages, the arts existed with many hazy limits. And as time goes by, each one finds its own jurisprudence and gets restricted to the abilities of its language, so to express deeper and authentically its applicability.

Since their birth, painting and sculpture were extremely narrating; as they were precursors of all kinds of writing, to the roots of the iconic one.

Then, when they became artistic, for many centuries, they were the book for the masses, where they could read from, their great fairy tale, which helped them stand on their feet, further from the common “eat and drink”: over the freezes of the Parthenon, over the Crucified, over the cathedral temples of the western countries, over the columns of the Romans and the Pharaohs.

But at the time when the book became a common acquisition and the narrating picture became flexible – by the cinematography - , all the arts gathered to their own space, to gain dynamism. Some ignorant keep demanding from today’s arts the ideas the latter used to present.

Narration and theme play no role today in painting. Look at the “boots” or the “chair” of Van Gogh and speak truthfully: could a regular speech ever reproduce the feelings you get from the clear language of this art?

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The Chair of Van Gogh

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Two apples from a small painting of Cezanne worth a lot more from the endless feat of the Vatican and hide more juices from the whole work of Rococo.

A few apples from Cezanne...

When Jean – Baptiste Greuze (leader in his time over rococo) overdid it with narration and flummery through his paintings, the upcoming impressionists who discovered painting as an art got really furious with the former.

Degas’s last words to a close friend of his, are compendious: “if any waffler shows up, to become loquacious over my funeral, just stop him and say, my friend was a painter, man!”

It took centuries for painting to conquer the third dimension, the ability to administer the illusion of the depth, an element which brings it closer to sculpture. And today, it neglects it or even gives it up as a worthless and aggravating principle.

The realistic (naturalism) which need a third dimension is found even in the caves of the Paleolithic ages through the hunting scenes, and 53

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were a part of the caveman. It is the opposite of the schematic, which is more or less spiritual. Naturalism is attached to the earthly, and to the real human tendencies, as its materialism is obvious. We meet this in ancient Greece, later – but not in the Byzantium – with adequate perspective; not to the level it reached in the recent years through the Renaissance, of course. The natural man, in those ages, has become the axis of the world, and nothing captivates him, not even the city. After the space around him broadened, the perspective became an object of study and science, not only a matter of experience. Multi – personal syntheses are taking flesh and bones, with hundreds of faces, resembling a meteor relief, spinning around.

The Avenue by Hobbema, the 3rd dimension to its zenith

Today, such achievements are admired only as attainments of virtuosity and of insisted labor; not as a fresh work which revitalizes the souls. Even the most deficient talents can achieve some depth, an 54

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element which is enough for the most, who seek for a “real” drawing.

Maybe because the most amateur painters are aware of the fact that, to create a background, all you need to do is shrink the objects in the back and make their colors’ tones look sparse, contrary to those who stand on the front.

The artists that follow keep a more primitive style, ignoring the perspective, either due to low perception or on purpose; basically they didn’t care about it, as their way of living was molded, one – way, preferring frontage. Lief ignorance of the depth existed during the byzantine period. Egypt and ancient east civilizations ignored it due to technical clumsiness.

Primitive perspective in ancient Egypt

In the above figure the depth rendering is missing. The artist places the adult bodies in oblique manner without convincing us that they belong to different levels. The same goes with the children, making the confusion worse. While the heads are profiled, the chests are given to their frontal view. The easiness of flatness maybe rules here…It is true though, that sometimes the eastern art illustrates animals with five feet, like if they are seen from the side and frontal view together.

Clearly the artist made a combination of aspects from different standpoints through time, seeming more impressive to him. The modern 55

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painters, with Picasso leading, made analogue combinations: faces showing their lateral and frontal view simultaneously. This syneresis of time inside the same synthesis belongs to the screen and the art is trying to expropriate it. At the time when cinema wasn’t around, perhaps this art had a reason to exist. But how about nowadays?

Parallel to the perspective, the filling of the space with faces or objects, named synthesis, found its perfect expression during the Renaissance. It is not a simple thing to put everything in the right place.

Not only to serve the theme eloquently, without any additional illustrations but also to have the masses in balance allocated, to look attached, visibly and invisibly, not stowed; to be aligned through the colors and have a harmonic attraction and dimension to each other, similarity and contrast, in one word: intensity.

The last supper of da Vinci, the studied synthesis

Looking at da Vinci’s work we understand how well this scenery was studied. Ceiling and walls are converging towards the background creating an endless depth which extends outside the windows.

The faces of the students have nothing uniform, if you group them.

Christ overtops in the middle, without been greatest in volume; in eastern civilizations the deities are greater in dimensions. The existing gaps from right and left along with projection over the middle opening 56

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behind him, lead passively to his dominance. They are all connected with Christ and not to each other as they all react to his word “someone of you will betray me tonight”, at the same time, while each one stands alone and because everyone reacts with his own way, his own different expression or gesture.

It is obvious that there are neither consecutive scenes nor narration here. This theme goes along with some restricted and condensed literary meaning; the “expectant moment”: the startle of the students after Christ’s phrase. There is something dynamic in this moment and philological as the theme and its history play their role. The modern painting got rid of this and concentrated to the synthesis, the harmony of colors and shapes; and lots of times, none of the shapes are included, as the abstract drawings are harmonized through the language of painting.

Crivelli, the laminar

Raphael, light and shadow Greco, the expressiveness

Comparing the last head with the first two: the third is the one close to painting but the other two are closer to sculpture. The outline of Crivelli’s head is rough, it doesn’t come out of its background, it is intact, it beams like if it was a statue. Over this painting lies the famous chiaroscuro or sfumato technique. Black and white, shadow and light, reflected shadow over the fallen light. We see it also in Mona Lisa as well “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke”, as described by da Vinci himself.

So, the first head’s outline comes more linear while the second one (of Raphael) has more plasticity with an intermediate gradation between the light and shadow, regarding the contour only. We could call the former as anti – painting since it favors sculpture. The latter is a conquest of Re57

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naissance, inspired by the ancient Greek ages. The one of El Greco is a northern creation, where the climate is more wet causing proportional refractions in the atmosphere, with submissive results; the known religious spiritual factors which affect the creation of baroque are present too.

Some of those creators are worth of an extra paragraph regarding their impact in arts. Starting with Leonardo da Vinci, who was not only an architect, a sculptor and a painter, but also a scientist, an inventor, an engineer and more than anything else, “a very great philosopher” (as said by Cellini). Much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in art; the androgyny and eroticism is manifested through his works (like in St John the Baptist or the Bacchus).

His inventive imagination gave a new breath in arts though, and inspired lots of his followers for many years after. Too bad we didn’t have another one like him in the course of art in the following centuries.

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El Greco, the Greek painter from Crete who lived in Spain, was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. His dramatic and expressionistic style was the precursor of expressionism and cubism which came centuries later. He doesn’t belong to a conventional school. His elongated figures marry the byzantine tradition with the style of the western painting. Maestro Domenico had a great knowledge of the Latin classics and of the platonic philosophy. As a mannerist he created his own style. Though, nowadays, physicians and ophthalmologists propose that El Greco painted such elongated figures due to strabismus or astigmatism; or even because he could have used marijuana. The fact though is that his expressiveness and colors influenced Manet, Delacroix, Cezanne, the symbolism of Picasso and Pollock’s abstract expressionism.

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On his work here, the heavenly and earthly leave together compositionally. Each figure carries its own light from an uncertain source with great mysticism. Gifted or misunderstood? Mad or eccentric?

Does it really matter? He was the only one who resisted and survived the sacral Inquisition of Spain by giving his truthful light to the generations that followed.

Though, the dryness of Europe, since the times of Rococo (Watteau) and Baroque (Rubens, Rembrandt, Caravaggio), never let painting to take the road of rejuvenation; it followed the course of Neoclassicism (Ingres, Greuze) with its branches, straggling from life and continuing anhydrous and nude to the door step of Romanticism (Delacroix, Gericault, Goya) and Realism (Courbet) in the beginning of the 19th century. This humanism, which was never inspired by a human spirit, took its selective and academic form, from the professors, who used to teach it at the Schools of Arts, although they never painted in their whole life… The deadness peaked at the times of Louis XIV when art became directed, as the “chosen” of the Sun King determined who the geniuses were, while he ignored the existence of some comedian named Moliere.

Odalisque, cold neoclassicism

If we exempt Goya, and somehow Watteau, there’s no spiritual painting, in Europe, after Rembrandt, for almost 200 years. The “Odalisque” of Ingres, is just a characteristic example of this (not 60

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of the worse), although this artist was distinguished. No matter how much you squeeze this work, you won’t get a single trace of sensation.

Cold, shapely, lacquered, with a contrast between the white flesh and its dark background, this tries to match with the dark and white folds, shows that logic walks alone here, to make this artistic.

Rubens, the Flemish artist, who was inspired by the giants of Renaissance (da Vinci, Michelangelo), is one of the most influential artists of Baroque. His themes, large mythical men with aggressive actions are filled with movement, color and sensuality. Perhaps his actions in the various royal courts as a spy turned his syntheses to become allegorical.

Τhe hippo and crocodile hunt by Rubens

The other great (perhaps the greatest) representative of the baroque wave, Rembrandt, uses biblical and mythological themes. His empathy for the human civilization is obvious. Admired by many.

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Delacroix said: “he is greater than Raphael”. Van Gogh called him a “magician, with deep and mysterious meanings”. Rodin: “Compare me not (!) with him”. Like most artists, he managed to live in poverty and wealth alternately. His mysterious life is mirrored over his works. The “night watch” was a day’s event…

The night watch by Rembrandt

Caravaggio was more realistic upon the observation of the human state. Influenced by the two previous artists (the so called “shadowists”) who came a generation ahead. His erratic and bizarre behavior was due to his exposure to the plaque from which he lost his father at a young age. This is why the scenes from his works express violence, torture and death. His fears are obvious. His style is emotional by using a dramatic lighting with psychological realism. As he was arrested and imprisoned many times he used to sleep fully armed in his 62

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clothes. His erotic interest in males is still questionable. Some believe that the use of increased amounts of lead salts in his paints caused his violent behavior and maybe his poisoning. Looking at the Denial of St. Peter, you could easily say that through his works he promoted the modern painting.

The denial of St. Peter, the shame, the power of truth

A comparison with the romantic painting of Gericault, which follows in the next chapter, presents a new blowing wind. Even the dark landscapes, full of classic buildings, by Poussin and Claude (Lorrain), are presented without a single trace of affinity with the real world.

Fake, by all means, like all humanists, even regarding their love for antiquity, they knocked down a few buildings over their drawings – even those which are still standing nowadays. They were fairly given the title of “crock – graphers”.

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et in Arcadia ego by Poussin, ruins…

THE PREPARATION (of the upcoming Impressionism)

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After the French revolution, all the spiritual juices arose with Romanticism and Realism. This movement brought in the front stage the people, the source of every authentic creation since ever. Without those kinds of roots, every effort for new art wave is intolerant.

Politically, the Romanticism wasn’t always following the revolution; but its nature is always revolutionary and restless. Delacroix escaped from the civilization of France by travelling to Morocco. Gericault, who was influenced by Michelangelo and indulged to the study of horses, died young. And the entrepreneurial Greuze committed suicide.

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Themes like the Massacre at Chios, the Death of Sardanapalus, Liberty leading the people (all works by Delacroix) present knife and fire, rampageous horses, winnowed flags, outraged freedom, troopers with pistols, a rebellion which was born in the human heart, first. The man gets stormy too, not only the horses in the capture of the wild horse of Gericault. The shadows freshen the painting, the colors are juicy and the neglected perfection of the drawing dares the swiftness of the work; all these omen the rise of impressionism. The same artist, painted several portraits of the insane, exhibiting a different affliction; his experience through a friendship with a psychiatrist helped him point the expressive realism in his creations. He died of tuberculosis after a long suffering period.

Another artist who considered Rembrandt as one of his masters is the romantic Goya. The strokes from his hypertension caused him deafness and affected his balance center. Or it could be from poisoning from the white lead in his paints (like Caravaggio). He turned his misfortune around though, claiming that his illness allowed him the insight to produce informal works.

The “madhouse” and the “yard with lunatics” show his fear of insanity projecting his despair of the social alienation.

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Another hymn for the Man, from another optical angle, is the realism. The laboring will be given, not with a fancy way but with a photographic manner. This is the real everyday man, who is rooted in reality.

Its followers work for years to create a painting to restore the slightest ruffle over the worker’s clothing or to achieve a naturalistic rendition over an earthly lump. Sometimes they didn’t hesitate to use a torch; the match of Zola, the leader of the theoretical naturalism, is here (a).

a: Painter’s studio, naturalism, precision by Goya

b: Man going mad by Courbet

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c: A funeral at Ornans

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Realism was not only naturalistic, not just a superficial rendering of the natural. It was a raw pragmatism with traces of ethical issues.

For example, in the “Burial at Ornans” -a manifest of realism in (c), those priests make a speech with ignorance over the dead man, as their mind is on the expected payment…

And a symbolism from (d): those quarries, which you can hardly separate from the flints, bent all day with only a trickle of open sky over their heads. The colors became earthly and cindered. We are now deeply rooted in mother earth, collecting through reality some authentic shudders. We got rid of belles’ lettres and of the emptiness of humanism, building now our own future.

Now look at the man going mad: this unfinished work of Courbet is also attached to realism since it is interested upon the precise characteristics. Going one step ahead, the portrait illustrates the morality, reading more clearly now the human types. The best is coming: the psychographs with which we enter into the soul of the illustrated face.

Over this matter, a lot were achieved later, by the expressionist Kokoschka from Austria, assisted by Freud’s psychoanalysis, infiltrated to the most occult, and dark edged of the beingness to retract the man completely stripped. Although we seem to run ahead, we interpolate this artist to exhibit the evolution of portraying the human soul.

The immigrant, the insecurity

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Definitely realism fed the body of painting. The progress doesn’t stop here though. It is not only the lack of coloring which makes this art limb: when the artist is trying to narrate everything, in details, he makes you respond negatively, as he doesn’t let you any open space to compliment from your side; to let you feel like a co-creator, to have his work extend inside you; impressionism makes this happen first; the modern painting follows.

At the end, the photography came, which threw away the realism, as futile. Painting started over with deeper and esoteric inspirations, inaccessible to the technological devices.

IMPRESSIONISM The boldest revolution in coloration and shading was made by impressionism. This doesn’t mean that good colorists didn’t exist before.

Those combinations though, were a result of mixture over the artist’s palette. This time, the impressionists used the color as it comes out of the tube, without gradual transitions from one hue to another. They abruptly take you from red to green, from white to blue, sometimes placing the colors over the canvas by using a spatula. The brushstrokes are often thick, so the artist is not wasting time for details; an instant impression of the painter has to be illustrated fast, or else it is lost.

This is why every work of this movement needs to be viewed from a distance or with eyes half way shut, if you wish to remove the painting’s imperfections. The art making is authentic, pure, free from chasing a fancy theme, as what counts now, is not what but how to paint.

The studio’s light doesn’t matter anymore. The light of nature, outdoors, changes the aspect in minutes, as the color and the beam, and not as much the shape, follow these gradations. This meaningful, clear and juicy accreditation is what interests the impressionist who endangers the object by striking it with color and light.

We never saw before such color-flooding and light mixed together. You feel like all the previous painting works should be thrown in the litter box after seeing pieces from Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro, since, from now on, all the works go through impressionism, and none can ignore this achievement; as this, is painting.

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before and what it became. You can’t put all the impressionists in the same bucket, but at this point they all get intoxicated from the light of the countryside. Renoir and Manet followed the trends of classicism in the beginning of their career. They, both, established the wave of impressionism and the latter was one of the founders of modern art.

It is amazing that Manet was thrown out of the Academy’s exhibition twice, when he dared to present himself. Even more illuminated are the works of Monet, who was one of the very few artists who died wealthy and recognized upon his work. The beaming tornado has scattered the icon, the volumes, the shapes and the shadows. This forced Seurat to initiate pointillism, which constructed piece by piece the shattered volumes of the tablet.

Following their career closer and starting with the leading artist of the impressionistic style, Renoir, we find him many times in poverty, not having enough money to buy paint. He was the last of the traditional painters in the period from Rubens to Watteau. He traveled to Algeria (looking after Delacroix’s colors). His trips to Spain and Italy, to see the Renaissance’s legacy kept him back in his style. His arthritis and ancylosis of his shoulder pushed him to change his technique and give a vibrant light to his works. He discovered that the diffuse reflection, meaning the reflected color of the surrounding objects, results to the coloration of the shadows, which is not black or brown.

In 1887, when Queen Victoria celebrated her golden jubilee, the painter donated a good part of his work, after her request.

Madame Charpentier and children – 1878

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Notice how Renoir’s style evolves after 10 years period upon portraying.

Continuing with Monet, the founder of French impressionist painting, close friend of Renoir, we find him in Algeria serving the military. The cataract of his eyes made him give a reddish tone to his paintings. After the corrective surgery, the perception of colors changed and this is why we see him repainting the Water Lilies bluer.

The ultraviolet wavelengths are not seen by a human eye, but no one knows how the cataract surgery back in those times affected his vision.

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Sunrise, the paint which named the artistic wave

La Grenuillere, the broadly intense color

Windmill at Amsterdam, yellow-red-blue

Water Lilies, the bluer phase

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We continue with Manet, the French modernist painter who became the transition from realism to impressionism. He belonged to the friendship circle of Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne. He also invigorated his relationships by becoming a friend with Zola, Mallarme, and Baudelaire. The last one supported him to depict life as it is. His paintings caused many painters’ and critics’ eyes to open and their jaws to drop. He was deeply influenced by Goya.

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b: 3rd of May 1808, by Goya the influencer

The influence is obvious through these paintings of theirs. Though, the light comes from different sources. Goya gives a lead to the modernists, too. So, if you compare the two with Picasso’s Guernica (c) just stay to the feeling of horror before you decide which one impresses or expresses you, more…

After a Nazi entered Picasso’s office, his eyes fell on a card illustrating Guernica. Upon the former’s question “Is this your work Maestro?” the answer was “No! This is your work!”

c: The greatest fear, horror, sorrow is here,

by Picasso

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d: Dead Christ with angels, more realistic

e: Woman with a parrot, the impression

Manet developed a locomotor ataxia (partial lower extremity paralysis) in his mid-forties (due to syphilis) which led to gangrene and amputation.

The last of the impressionists we will mention is Edgar Degas who is famous for his ballerinas.

He showed great respect for his masters, Ingres and Delacroix.

Photography was his passion and through his portraits he notes the human isolation.

In the apposed below painting of Pissarro, we see the fast and free work of the impressionist who doesn’t pursue the details and lets you get involved to the finish of the drawing; as the beam is flooding the painting sets on fire leaving around shadThe ballet class, ows; the latter are not fake but glowing by Degas 75

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they really exist because they create light themselves. If you look at the painting to its whole, the colors take the place of the shadows, attesting if the work is authentically tinted or not. Light and shadow here are balanced and emerge each other, without bridging with gradual transitions and garnishes that appease even the presence of the painting.

Village entrance, the beaming rain by Pissarro

The eyes are filled up with joy after impressionism. What happens if we seek for deeper meanings though?

BYZANTINE PREPOSTEROUS For the required supreme spiritualization, the expressionism complemented impressionism. The former means expression while the latter means impression. The terms of their origin testify their essence.

The byzantine painting gets between those two, although the former precedes in time quite much. The beam includes abstraction, which refers to spiritual zones.

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The art of the Byzantium had a special seal, no matter if it wasn’t uniform everywhere and all the time. It started doubtfully and apprehensively, sometimes childish, mimicking ideas it didn’t wish to include and threatened by erosion due to the reformation of the iconoclasts. It was saved though, thanks to the art-form adoration of the Greeks. This type of Hellenism is obvious from the beginning to the configuration of its acme, as it owns the set up of an ancient Greek statue: same valiance, same plasticity.

Basically and generally the art in Byzantium exists out of the earthly, having a spiritual entity and formality. It is missing the sculpture and, from the painting, the third dimension; in one word, every form of materialism is gone and the colors are not natural, as they don’t copy existing syntheses; for example, you will often see a blue face combined with a golden sky.

The mosaic spreads in the background the golden pebbles and matches over them other colors which cannot be placed randomly, due to the work’s nature. The elements of this art, which are beaming and shiny, made it impressionistic and easy for the human eye to catch the details, as they are quite obvious from a distance. The eye makes the whole mixture possible and if it goes a little further from the material world, as this religion requires it, you end up in your own mystic cosmos.

The fact that the colors do not copy earthly synthesis along with their harmony which derives from our inner reality, maintaining a symbolism, is the second factor (close to the lack of depth) which create spirituality. Mature is not always pretty, and it doesn’t belong to the classic values. The work has to have self-efficiency and stand by itself. The byzantine painting catches up the whole post-impressionistic period.

The asceticism of the Byzantium, the waif – like body condition which works like an internal flame, is another spiritual element. If you add some warp, more or less, which makes the shapes like if they came from another world; you get the final idea of this art. Contrary to this, the west, since the Medieval Times, was more earthly. The sculpture and the three – dimensional painting were well accepted in Western Europe, while through those chubby, florid figures, a familiar person of yours may come to your mind, while you are looking at them.

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The Birth, byzantine mosaic

Woman’s head, by Rouault, advanced abstraction

In the detail from the Birth we appose the byzantine abstraction, the lack of depth, the “out of this world”. The expressionist Rouault, who is a late grandson of this wave, went further with deformation painting with childish innocence, and seems pithy with fresh spirituality.

To finish with The Holy Mother, Grieved, from the Temple of Resurrection at Jerusalem was a work which was created by memory, by this artist and took her about three years to encapsulate Her authentic expression of sorrow; perhaps as long as it took the smile of Mona Lisa for Da Vinci... There’s a thin Our Lady of the Crucified line between the tears of happiness

by Eliz. Kessaris and the tears of sadness. It takes a lot of courage, patience, and experience to become an artist who is capable of balancing this feeling between heaven and earth.

EXPRESSIONISM This wave did not rise in the beginning of the 20th century. The spirit of man, naturally, found – way back in time – several ways to express itself with bold cognizable means. The arts of the East civilizations are 78

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often expressionistic. The little statues of China are full of grimaces. The Japanese painting has found a peaceful way to express the internal life of this race; like a branch with two birds, over which a whole story trembles, undivided, with nobility and circumspection. The strong head we saw in sculpture, which belongs to the German Middle Ages is expressionistic; generally the German – Slavish people had proportional trends in their arts. Baroque was aiming the same way but its expediency and its program, the eternal sexton of any art, didn’t work to its benefit.

El Greco was the most deliberate expressionist, centuries before the wave came back broader to dig through the human soul. Always a wiggler, this artist creates faces and trunks insubstantial, jointless, from the despair, but also the clothes and the backgrounds in his works are expressed like a musical consonance to the main theme. As the theme was still the front stage of the painting, back then.

Contrary to this, for the expressionists, the theme means nothing and the spirituality spurts from the most insignificant objects; two apples, one chair, a faded door, an ugly gypsy. This way, impressionism gained an internal gravity, complimented by the spirituality of expressionism, which includes all the characteristics it inherited from the former.

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Spiritually flammable are the landscapes of Van Gogh, while the artist’s heart is on fire; that same fire burned him at a young age. The yellow Crucified of the restless and cosmopolitan Gauguin goes along with his personal style. The two months he lived together with Van Gogh back in 1888 didn’t end up well, as their depression led them to a strong disagreement ending up to Van Gogh’s ear mutilation before the latter threatened to kill the former. Their period left some important legacy, though; as they competed each other upon painting the same subjects (see below).

Les Alyscamps by van Gogh, the people in center

Les Alyscamps by Gauguin, the tombs in center

Cezanne is trying to find the skeleton, under every subject, to support the cloudy impressionism which is about to vanish; and maybe base it deeper than the pebbles of Seurat, to mathematically become the precursor of cubism. He insists that “everything in nature traces to a sphere, cylinder and cube”. Truly, there is a solid architecture through his whole work, with earthly colors beautifully covering the artistic gaps. From now on, every branch of art will use the trunk of the spirit of expressionism.

The deformation will become an intense expression in painting.

We met this in Byzantium; we saw it through the elongated figures of El Greco. With this, Rouault transferred his religious passions over the canvas. Imagine, like an ocean, the human soul and the endless 80

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shapes of expressionism takes, the most impalpable agitations of the spirit to the abstract figures.

Taking them separately, we will start with Vincent van Gogh.

This poor genius was tortured through his whole life; by his friends, by the women, by the people. His brother, Theo, was his only support. He would eat poorly to save the money sent by his brother to buy paints. His diet included bread, coffee, tobacco and plenty of absinthes. Perhaps this is why most of his creations look like they came from another world. His initial works present somber earth tones and his mature ones engrave vivid colors, as he evolves through his tumultuous state of mind. This is when he protests for his austere and cold youth. A couple of his paintings, below, show his sarcasm.

Night Cafe is a place where one can ruin himself

Skull with burning cigarette, sarcastic‌

With the Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts he bought, he incorporated their style to the background at some of his works.

A mathematical analysis, in many of his paintings, show that the stormy patterns, for example in Starry Night, present a real turbulence. The luminance of the probability distribution shows clearly the Kolmogorov scaling. Did his prolonged psychotic agitation promote this foreshadowing? No one is sure if he committed suicide of 81

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if he was killed. But there is one thing definite: his madness and creativity converge.

Starry Night, turbulent flow

We will continue with Gauguin, the artist who deeply influenced Matisse and Picasso and had a great impact on the Symbolists.

His exceptional style upon primitivism was engraved over his work through his long lasting trips to India, Panama, Martinique, Polynesia and Tahiti. The exotic locations and his close contact with the natives and their deities are seen in his paintings with vivid colors, loosely pointed in the outdoor scenery. The psychology behind his work is connected with his friendship with Schopenhauer and Mallarme. Although his friendship with van Gogh didn’t last, the one he had with Degas was a long-lasting one. His cardiovascular syphilis never stopped him from travelling. An overdose with laudanum though ended up his life. His most famous phrase was: 82

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“Everyone is good and evil; our life is a small thing but also enough to do great things.”

a: The seed of Areoi, by Gauguin, bold use of pure color

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From (a) we see a new race and style. In (b) we find him experimenting with monochromatic images (1889). Gauguin was widely influenced by the Japanese art.

b: Leda, a zincography by Gauguin

Another artist, who bridged the gap between impressionism and cubism, was Cezanne with his airy painting style. Matisse and Picasso considered him as their “father�. In the year 1883 he painted with Renoir and Monet. But his constructive year was 1888. Through his portraits he changed the earlier ideas of perspective (see below).

Some researchers claim retinopathy of his.

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Uncle Dominique

Man with straw hat

Boy with red vest

House with cracked walls by Cezanne

His architectural style of painting is obvious through his work on the house with cracked walls. After breaking his friendship with Zola, he died of pneumonia in a rainy day. Along with van Gogh and Gauguin, the three of them, influenced the painting of the great fauvist Matisse.

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Modigliani, who started taking painting lessons from his 14 years of age, and has been exposed to drugs (chassis) a little later, was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, leading himself to the conclusion that the only authentic creativity is found through defiance and disarrangement. His chronic disease (tuberculosis) along with the alcohol abuse never kept back his passion for creativity. Very few are aware that he made several exceptional creations in sculpture. In the beginning of his career he paints showing his technical bumbling without any reservations. He draws badly, he misses lines, the shoulders come too close in his works, and the eyes are engraved half way shut. But look at the kindness and sensitivity his lines have, in general; and his oversubtle colorations present the melancholy from this prince’s rough life that died unappreciated in the blossom of his youth. If you shorten his long neck portraits and try to correct the eyes, you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll ruin his unique creations.

For those who would dare to disapprove Modigliani, due to the lack of an orthodox drawing, they could easily get the same response from the following episode: someone who admired an exceptional dancer, said: “he didn’t follow the rhythm though”. “Then it must have been the rhythm wrong”, he was answered. Any drawing with its relentless logic carries the artist away from his inspiration. It makes the latter a mannerist, who expresses only the ability of his hand over his art. Quite a few times I have met great artist, in front of children’s drawings, saying: “If only I could perform something like this!”

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All the beauty of Modigliani’s necks!

All the beauty of Modigliani’s necks!

Looking at the figure of Soutine’s painting, the modern neo-realist might say: “Why on earth, someone would ever capture the ugliness of this person? Could he not find anything prettier?”

“No, I didn’t find anything prettier in our world, your world”, the Russian – French painter of Jewish origin, would have answered. The artist bridged the traditional along with the abstract expressionism through the horror he lived regarding the persecution of this people. The bitterness in his soul settled down and was preserved, not as a 87

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chanted preach, but as a sublimated art. The scraggy, from deprivation, figures of his, the deformed, the twisted, the wormy, show a great beauty in art; it is a juicy painting for those who know how to look at them, especially under the coloration. Others would prefer to see a raw formality, corpses, skeletons and crematoriums. This should happen if the conditions demand a human race salvation first and afterwards his art. Generally, though, you can’t say that art is a copy of the superficiality; some may paint the planets, to follow the rhythms of their time but no one knows yet how the space will influence our soul and art.

And if anyone eavesdrops earlier this and starts giving it artistically, it is likely that he will be stoned in his days, and become adored much later. The past and present circumstances have proven that.

Nude of Modigliani, deformation full of sophistication

Soutine, expressed painting!!

There’s one more pioneer in this movement: Toulouse – Lautrec. His osteogenesis imperfecta, a bone disease that makes the skeleton fragile, left him behind in his growth. His alcohol (absinthes) abuse was due to his physical appearance. In 1888 he presents 11 pieces of his to an exhibition in Brussels. The next year, Moulin rouge cabaret opens and there he finds most of his models. He contracts syphilis from one of them and the visits to the doctors are endless. He was the illustrator of the colorful theatrical and the cabaret life of the Parisians. The third one (c) was his last painting.

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a: Opera

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b: Moulin Rouge

c: Examination of Medical faculty

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Sappho

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Palace Athena

Around the same period of this movement, lived a prominent member of the Vienna Secession wave: Gustav Klimt. He was also influenced by the Japanese art. The history of art doesn’t concern us here. His effect to this, for some, it was negligible. Maybe for his time, he work was considered pornographic but today his truthful eroticism for the female body is more than obvious. He was young when he lost his father, so he took over the responsibilities of his family. The golden phase of his career could have been influenced by the fact that his father was an engraver of gold. Following the phrase of Schiller: “to please many is bad”, he made a difference by evolving his intuitive feelings . The Greek lyric poet Sappho shows a refined archaism with an influence from the Renaissance.

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Kiss is thought to be an image of himself and his companion. In the same period he created the Goldfish which reminds of the Kiss’ bareback, a sculpture made by Rodin in 1882. In 1888 he received the Golden Order of merit from the Emperor of Austria. He died of the worldwide epidemic influenza.

Goldfish

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At this point we have to mention the Japanese spirit of Hokusai.

And what a spirit inside this mind! His initial style was the so called ukiyo-e (meaning: pictures of the floating world). Soon, after changing to different art schools, he made his popular 36 views of mountain Fuji.

The masculine wave by Hokusai, the power

His main themes are around the landscapes and the daily life of the Japanese people. To show his limitless spirit, we will demonstrate this example: Once, there was a competition. His painting consisted of drawing a line on paper, while he was chasing a chick94

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en across it. The bird’s legs were dipped in a red paint. This is how he described the result at the end: a landscape showing a certain river with red maple leaves spread around the field. Of course, he won the competition.

Last but not least among our pioneers of these ages: Rabindranath Tagore. He was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Very few are aware of his exceptional paintings. The Bard of Bengal expressed the Indian art with contextual modernism. His brother’s wife, Devi, was a powerful influence to him. Her suicide, in 1884, left him distraught for many years. Was he an expressionist, a fauvist or a modernist?

Woman portraits, colors to his sunset sky, the Modigliani of India singing

THE MODERN TRENDS In the beginning of the 20th century, the branches of expressionism will come and enrich the language of painting. This wave’s spirituality was pregnant and gave birth to a self – contained figure.

The followers erupted with an unusual haste: “fire to the past art, let 95

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the museums burn!” They were unfair though, as the past art, present the man, with his positives and negatives. The man is internally excavated, once again, to every direction of his: the mind, the heart, the subconscious. Reaction and frustration, you would think, against the technocracy of this period, similarity and opposition to have the suffering man balanced.

Repulsion towards the photographic production and spiritual thirst will lead to the contempt of the art which represents existing forms in the outer world. The seed of cubism was dropped by Cezanne and now comes the theory of the color which says: “remember that before it becomes a horse or a story, a figure, more than anything else, is a surface, covered by colorations, not placed accidentally.” The abstract knocked the gates of painting theoretically and bilaterally; from internally as a skeleton, and externally as a color only, without the third dimension.

Fauvism and Cubism, similar but also counter to each other, projected in the proscenium to complete their course on their own.

FAUVISM AND CUBISM They were called beasts too, as the word fauvism is the style of les Fauves (in French: the wild beast). They adored the color itself, the absolute; realism was their enemy. They take their themes from nature and they don’t belong to the abstract art, to the point where they don’t want the detail. Wide strips, colored brush strokes, clear, autonomous, harmonized with their asides, so to propound each other with a new technical way. The prior colorist impressionist seems, now, in front of Fauvism, as an academic.

They were blamed that they were cluttering up colors by the bucket: the function of color was never better though. Look at the works of Matisse. At the age of 20 and after an appendicitis episode, his mother brought to him his first art supplies. It was then when he found his paradise. Deciding to become an artist he deeply disappointed his father. His style was always bold with shine colors, either if he painted portraits or still life. Pure, juicy, the painting of color!

Matisse was influenced by Watteau, Rodin, Gauguin, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Manet and by the Japanese art. He resisted to the Nazis by not leaving France during the war. His cancer turned him to decoupage as painting was impossible. He never became a prisoner of 96

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Young sailor and Olive trees by Matisse, the painting of color!

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success. A real hero in life and in painting, undoubtedly he was.

We cannot miss the emotions from another great fauvist: the Russian – French with Jewish origin, Marc Chagall. After Matisse died, Picasso said: “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is”.

His first recognition came from poets who saw that his colors follow a rhythm. Most of his scenes come from the dream world.

The surrealists were widely influenced from his paintings. Even the Dadaists found a partner for their metaphors. He saw his work as the dream of humanity. His artistic language upon modernism is unique.

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Τhe circus horse, happiness

Painting has more faces though; as the reaction to fauvism came really fast, within the first decade of the 20th century. Painting continues to construct its language towards the side of the shape and the synthesis.

The fauvists took and developed the color from Cezanne; cubism started from his works’ geometry though. The latter is fighting now to present itself naked in front of our eyes, when Cezanne was covering it with plasticity. Cubism finds the solid structure, the skeleton of the theme, undressing it from any cover. This pursuit guides him to the point where it ignores the color, with the purpose to adduce better the geometric analysis.

Picasso and Braque are the most important representatives of cubism, each one with his own way. Through the early paintings of the former we are not yet in front of the extremes of the movement. The work is quite simplified but the object very readable. The nose resembles a cone, the hair are cut quite inline but the rest of the head levels keep their round plasticity.

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Picasso, first steps of cubism

Picasso is the most synthetic among those who didn’t ignore the past. The genius, who rejuvenated the knowledge of art and sealed it with his presence in the 20th century, remains to be one of the best.

Never as an anthologist, like most fastidious are, as much as a selective. The art was not an occupation to him so to fill his free time.

Integrated man, as he was, caring for his time’s problems, art was an internal need to contribute in the promotion of his period. He found strength by living extreme momentums which he brought to higher levels of more conscious and radical solutions.

His art shows nothing else but his adoration to the human kind. “Then why did the latter humiliate him?” some opponents could ask. The answer is simple: “Who presents better the man of today? The one who paints him with pretty hair and clothes or the one who puts over his canvas a freakish picture of his? Eyes, nostrils, tongues, all stretched to grab, to milk, to suck everything around him? The former lies on a lie, as he presents it, superficially; the latter has captured the man’s essence”.

Picasso looks forward and dynamically, not statically, as dynamic are our eyes. Nothing is given for a fact, art, science, ethics, politics, all controlled by the man; and if not, he rises. Over the perspective of every object or form which is given initially by its outline, there internal lines, trends, dynamic values, and those are the ones we need to project by pillaging the object. This way we attribute its significance, not its cover. Man is on the center. Against the nature and the established, more than anything else comes the value, the meaning, the sense for our times.

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The artistic stops mimicking and becomes an organism with independent life, which carries the fetus of the future. Art becomes a priestess. And if the future takes another track, the sappers will be the Picassos, not the routine artists.

Contrary to this, in Braque’s work, the man with the Guitar, you can hardly distinguish or imagine a human figure; maybe just an ear; and even less, the synthetic elements of the painting will bring to your mind any guitar. As a synthesis, the work is harmonically structured; this is obvious through its geometrical shapes and its tones; light and shadow creating an optical essence of music. But without knowing the title or without a “guided tour” it would have been hard to see something more than its abstract balance. His head injury from WWI caused him temporary blindness. His quiet nature though never left the geometry and the complexed perspective. His themes changed to still life with a strong emphasis to structure. If he was not coetaneous to Picasso, perhaps his fame would have not been eclipsed by the one of the latter artist. Still, he was the only one who gave emphasis to the strongly defined volumes.

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Braque, Man with a guitar, studio, clear cubism

Through its effort to a language with plasticity, cubism reached encrypted symbolisms that cannot be broken. Of course, a surrealistic cinematography would not be appreciated it by an amateur. Hermetism in art has become unbroken even by the experts, in a way where it is hard to distinguish the authentic work from the bluff. And an inaccessible language, to our mind and to our heart, a totally subjective language is not a language. We are not talking for geniuses like Picasso and Braque. More research will enable us to get closer and understand them. But when any new artist, even a modern poet, starts saying “through my verses I mean this and that, from my personal experience…” and that we may have to follow his traces to understand him/her, this becomes a bad philology; and then, every cultured man has the right to answer: If you do not make art, Sir, not even for me, then for whom do you paint and exhibit and where do you ask from a recognition?” Some other times there is an effort to introduce painting into the fourth dimension, of time. Then, you may 10 2

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see a face, frontally and profiled and by any other way your memory brings it over. But this belongs to cinematography, and every art can step over its space, up to a point.

They make painting by using bricks, threads, fabrics, glasses and all kind of elements you can imagine. Once, a stretched sack full of excrement, took a prize in a festival. In another case they had monkeys paint horse tails. And sometimes, over your tablet you see coming out the best combination of colors you ever created, by mixing subconsciously. Through all these, there is an ongoing research to the darkest and most barren human edges. And this is how we end up to all the anti-s: anti – poetical, anti – painting etc. maybe even through negativity, the man gets enriched, but a viable art, with the above material, cannot be authentic.

FUTURISM AND DADAISM Art cannot happen under a schedule, no matter how reasonable this might seem, in theory. Like all inspirations, it jumps out by itself without asking if and how we want it. We are running through the 20th century extreme technology. What a triumph! The ancient Greek art won’t matter under the sound of a fast car. So, art, now, should follow the clean – cut forms of a last generation engine.

The futurists claim. In the ages of speed, they should paint like if the objects are on the run, give them a dynamic expression. Like when you see them move through your train window. A running horse won’t show only 4 legs, but 20. But when you start copying machines and cars doesn’t mean that you follow your time. All those matters will affect you in general and help you see more behind a painting, with different eye, either if you want it or not.

Then art will come out of your bloodstream transformed; as it won’t survive if it runs through a programmed schedule.

Dadaism was mortal, as the movement to its root was negative and contradictory, although it presented with a great urge. The Dadaists rejected the man of their period after looking through the ruins it created the WWI: “Look where our creations led us”, they said. “Our civilization, so far, was rotten our values, pure vanity as the human sentiments are fake. The man apologizes and feels guilty for the aunt he stepped over while at the same time he eats 10 3

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without moderation human flesh and butchers millions of people without a cause, in one war. But basically, man is a logic creature; and logic bankrupted him; crash the dishonest logic! Hooray the absurdity! We will build a world from zero, demolishing everything old. Our first alphabet will be the ridicule of logic, the humiliation of the values. Here are some of our art works: a bicycle wheel standing upside down over a table, the Mona Lisa with a moustache, a crowned urinal. We are a slap over the man’s face, to bring a new balance between the underworld and heaven. Do you call us insane? You couldn’t honor us more!”

Though, logic cannot be fought … logically. And if logic threw us in so many calamities, where would paralogism have taken us?

However, this movement wasn’t beyond anything … reasonable; and the proof, today, is that we have been convinced of the value of the irrational and we are about to get acquainted with it. We understand that either if we want it or not, most of our actions are out of any logic, like the wars in the past and present. Before one thing gets grinded through the gears of logic, to take its casts, it was for us totally irrational, and this is how man went through his knowledge course, to our days. The feeding of logic, comes always after the experience, good or bad.

It is important not to leave the upcoming generation in its ignorance; the subconscious is something the students need to get familiar with, to expose it under the light, domesticate it and let it plow through creativity. Some extreme political “-isms” took advantage of this blindness of the youth, setting their souls on fire and sending them to kill themselves over the battlefields, for no pure purpose.

SURREALISM While taking the curve to the depth of the human soul, into the irrational, Dadaism gave a positive effect. Under its arm, surrealism found a shape. Freud was the first and Jung was the second one who said that a whole world exists in our inner self, buried from our childhood, repelled, distorted, heritage from our ancestors. It influences our conscious life critically and crucially. When this world emerges properly, under the light, the man enriches his soul and mostly breaks free.

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Along with poetry, painting spread the flames and got on fire. And this was expected, as the subconscious, as we see it in our dreams, has an iconic language more than a verbal one. The allure, the odd, the spiritualism you find in works like de Chirico’s, is the atmosphere of surrealism. Although there are empty spaces around, and lifeless objects, all these create a bold presence, a mystery. No need to say more.

Just look at the whole picture and let your soul absorb from this radiated energy. The more it talks the less it means as a drawing. The more it can be analyzed with the known gestures, the less speechless new messages it brings to us.

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Night ghost on a beach by Dali

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Another great authentic surrealist is Dali. His painting Night ghost on a beach composes an authentic internal spout, which can be seen even by an amateur. The whole work has the sensitivity of a neurasthenic. And in his Civil War where one hand, like a vampire grabs so convincingly, in a way which the implicit with the subconscious symbolism, here, doesn’t need any further explanation; any attempt will ruin it. Picasso’s Guernica is very eloquent – mixed in the carnage men and animals. The synthesis easily readable and the hearty spontaneity is all over. These paintings show clearly the quality of these two creators. Their work is a consequence of their life, in general. In the many exhibitions Dali was called, he expressed his peculiarities without reservations. He could respond only to the underground calls of his mind.

Contrary to him, Picasso was always seeing clear human objects which were channeled to his work without betraying it by making it preaching. He was combining the internal excavation with the study of whatever his times offered to him, under a great variety. He is the man of synthesis. Dali was thinking in one – way and was getting in unseen and unimaginable spiritual depth.

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Essay

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Here is another great surrealist, painter and sculptor, from Spain: Joan Miro. Inspired by Fauvism and Cubism he becomes another great paradigm of this movement.

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The last, but not least of our surrealists will be Frida Kahlo from Mexico. Her life is also depicted over her work influenced by primitivism, Renaissance and cubism. Her sad childhood, the period she went through polio and the buss-accident during her youth had a great impact upon her inspirations. The tree of hope though, shows her light at the end of her tunnel between the heaven and the underworld.

ABSTRACT ART After WWI we observe, for a period, a general turn towards realism, like if the abstract – which started little by little from the impressionism and expressionism reaching the cubism – exerted and took a curve backwards. Now, through the dialectic reaction, we return to the abstract. The abstract art doesn’t need anything which reminds of nature, as nothing represents, here, existing figures. A harmony made of colors and shapes taken from fantasy or geometry or, if possible, from nowhere. They have got to the point where, one time, an empty painting was hanged in an exhibition. Complete abstract. Mondrian is the main representative.

Mondrian, a synthesis with extreme abstraction

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The abstract can be applied only upon the colorations. For example, a painting made by white and blue sponge-brushes presents a Greek island from Cyclades, as seen here. The artist ignored the solid object and used only the quintessence of color from the white of the houses and the blue of the sea.

Abstraction upon the color

From the other side of the Atlantic comes the American Jackson Pollock, His painting is delineated by splashing liquid on a horizontal surface. This “action painting” in a frenetic dancing style is guided by the internal music of the artist. Did he suffer of a bipolar disorder? Losing his parents at a very young age, he was adopted.

He was getting expelled from the high schools he followed due to his “angry behavior”. He led and let himself on the easy escape of the alcohol abuse. There are archetypes expressed in his paintings.

He admired the American-Indian sand-painting. He died in a car accident while he was drunk.

His distinctive style was described by a mathematical formula. Pollock’s drip paintings bear distinct fractal patterns. Only van Gogh’s works follow an analogue pattern – of the Kolmogorov turbulence effect.

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Here are a few more abstract expressionists who continued the movement with their own style. No comments will be added, as you should already be on the way to speak the language of Arts.

Arthur Dove, Clouds and Water

Marsden Hartley, Lobster fishermen

Georgia O’ Keefe, Black Iris

Mark Rothko, White red on Yellow

POP ART Digging inside them, the abstract artist, to find fantastic syntheses, they stumble to the unconscious mind, the iconic, and the realistic.

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the back door, the one of anti – abstract; meaning to the most certain in existence: the neo – Dadaism. This is a search coming from denial, in the beginning of the ‘60s and its name (Pop – art) means art of the people. This style houses everything: coarse, demagogic, of the street, everyday, commercial, expensive, engine product and more… Like in music, the term folk tends to embrace jazz, bouzouki, artisan, and everything that belongs to the people, internationally. In painting, we have something broader and dapple, like the populations.

an example of pop art

And the way it evolved, it didn’t include only folklore, or the oldies, but also everything that rules and interests the most. Placards, newspapers, cards, football, tags, advertisements, from the garbage to the space, given photographically, with or without details, elements which characterize the massive production, all is in this. Between all these, only the man is missing, as he is not present from now on. And whenever he is around, he just repeats himself. His absence makes him intensively and dramatically searchable, creating on the other hand, a bold presence of his.

POSTMODERNISM Many are the names and the works upon postmodernism. We will exhibit just a couple of them, popular or not popular, and let your soul decide which ones speak to your mind and heart. You may whisper if you wish but show some respect among your neighbor’s silent thoughts.

As if you think loud you might ruin their spontaneous connotation.

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Jasper John’s White Flag

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Anna-Maria Sclavounos, Teatro (finger painting) 116

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THE SYNTHESIS All these currents, since the impressionism, worked in the land of painting and conquered every country’s serious culture; except of those who never communed from its substance and kept floundering between the many art lovers and dilettantes, by following the photographic standards. Those who just want to fraternize with their country’s traditions are excluded.

Today’s Chinese artist, with respect to traditional landscaping

So, between the mentioned currents, cubism and surrealism overtop, as they rooted deeply in the man’s logic, the former, and in the human heart, the latter. All the movements boil in today’s hopper like if they want to create a psychological counterweight for our dry technological age. Primitive and childish, classic, archaic, popular, formative and essence, color and drawing, geometry and sentiment, irrational and logic, condemnation and revolution head for the promising future by molding the art of today.

Hopefully, the arts will keep feeling the human soul in depth and width giving it enormous dimensions, as nowadays it is starving, compared with the human intellectual development. The human structure was made like this: advance the sciences always additionally but when it comes to his soul (except for the intellect), his heart and volition, he always starts from the beginning. We are wiser than Archimedes and Galileo today, but we are not better than Phidias or Socrates, as it is impossible to take advantage from anything given, here; we have to start from zero and any conquest 117

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will be our personal achievement. How, then, are we going to balance ourselves, when we are born so inequitable? Which path can take us out of this insanity of our times, unless we make proportionally gigantic our hearts, equally to our mind? The authentic art is our only salvation.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT

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Michelangelo

Rembrandt

Machiette

Durer

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Delacroix

Courbet

Manet

Degas

Renoir

Cezanne

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Cezanne

Gauguin

Gauguin

Gauguin

Gauguin

Seurat

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Matisse

Chagall

Braque

Picasso

Picasso

Picasso

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Picasso

Picasso

Dali

de Chirico

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Dunham

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These paintings have only one thing in common: the title “Bathers”. As soon as you will be able to cover the names under the drawings and become able to identify the creators’ names, you have understood the language of Arts. Good luck!

ART LOVERS AND AMATEURS If you are looking for more, you may freely walk in any bookstore and browse the impressionists and the priors to find the differences.

You will understand when painting was discovered. You’ll walk in the kingdom of Arts which justifies life and redeems our inner world.

Then you look broader around you; quality cinema films, every minimal decoration, clothing, your furniture, which are not heavy anymore. Why then do you wish your art to be rustic?

And if you’d like to try using brushes, be it known that many great painters came out without significant studies but also without promoting themselves with arrogance. Take things simply. Look how well the red tie matches over a white shirt. The white house with the grey doors is not attractive but the other one with the bold green windows seems repulsive. Over the dark sea, which colored waves, boats or rocks seem to match better? Won’t the green cause bitterness in your throat? But if you fit it with yellow or red you’ll feel that warmth is produced, although the green itself belong to the cold colors. The opposing red works complimentary as they help and intensify each other. Imagine a green tree with red dots around, like Renoir’s paintings. I won’t deploy any theory upon coloring. I just want to say that any random placement of colors, which copy nature, will not produce art. Nature is not always pretty. A butterfly could easily inspire harmonic colorations. But what can an olive – grove produce? Through all of these actions, man was trying – since always – to go further from where nature left him. Why then only in arts should he remain its slave? Should he not let unprecedented syntheses and harmonies arise?

After you get used to the combinations, letting yourself relaxed and your soul free to see how they match, look after the synthesis.

The work to be well placed in the panel, the shapes balanced, without leaving empty spaces between overloaded spots. Match the colors by contradicting or complementing them: red – green, yellow – blue.

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Warm: red, yellow and their products, like orange. Cold: green, blue, grey and their mixtures. Similarity and contrast should base your work. Using only the former, you get a goldbrick. By using just the latter you get dimension. The two together create cohesion and tension, meaning harmony.

In the exhibitions you’ll see some great works and some sweetened sunsets. You’ll remember our sincere notes and there will be a moment where the language of arts will touch you and talk straight to your heart. Then you won’t need this handbook anymore. You may throw it away. And this is its only ambition: to become surpassed.

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This is NOT a book about the History of Arts; neither a touristic guide upon the wonders of art through time.

It is only an initiation for interpreting and NOT for translating artistic works, through paradigms. No artist is better or worse than another. As there is only one language from which our soul benefits: the one through which our mind, our soul and our heart unite and give birth to the spark of creativity; the internal one, mostly.

After you finish reading it, it is useless to keep it on your shelf. You may start enjoying this world by gaining back all these beauties that you ignored their existence. Or perhaps understand how art works, by making us better people; by sharing, loving, inspiring and – why not – creating truthfully.

In our critical times we face different and invisible enemies. The human mind and soul cannot be restricted and may travel widely through art, even while been seated in a small room. After all, the period where we will be going for a ride to the space is close enough. By depriving our soul the joy of art, we will be terribly bored, there, too, missing all the “ef zein” (ευ ζειν). It is time to share, and do more for our nigh than we do for ourselves. Warm up your souls!

The Gateway to the Future (by Y. Bardis) ISBN: 978-618-00-1920-9