THE RETURN OF FIGURATIVE PAINTING?

One of the irrefutable bestsellers of art history is Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). The book is a survey of the history of art from ancient times to modernity. It remains critically acclaimed after almost 70 years because it provides a singular explanation for the entire flow of art history. In other words, Gombrich appears to provide one common theory that constitutes the backbone of why artistic style transitions from one to another. The author essentially argues that art history has always been an alternation between “art that attempts to represent the truth beyond the reality” and “art that prioritizes references to the real world.” While the book provides a detailed analysis of many historically significant works and their artists, there is a metacommentary that seems to unite and explain the entire art historical discourse. The gift of the book is that it enables us to apply this theory to individual paintings and better understand which side of the duality each one lies in (the abstract representation or the figurative reality) or if it is at the verge of a moment of transition. One philosophical theory that backs up Gombrich’s argument is dialectical materialism. Derived from Marx’s materialist approach, it is the theory that all things contain contradictory sides whose tension essentially becomes the driving force for change from figuration to abstraction, and vice versa. For instance, prehistoric art was created with the purpose of representing religious and communal beliefs, which did not necessarily require a realistic resemblance to our world. The depictions of humans, most notably, are flat and stylized in ancient Egyptian or Greek pottery. While this is also due to the lack of artistic technological development, Gombrich attributes this style of art to more or less “abstract” because the goal of these works were not realism. These artists were more like “artisans” who were commissioned to create objects of social purpose. However, entering the 4th century BC, Greco-Romans began to gear