FIGURATIVE ART — ON FIGURING OUT FIGURATIVE ART
There has been a natural tendency for figurative art to be stereotyped by its representational nature into a homogeneous category. But in fact there is a vast diversity of abstraction inherent in figurative art. One could even go so far as to play the devil’s advocate, and suggest that purely abstract art is actually figurative in its own way, that all art is in some fashion figurative. Even a random brush stroke represents a brush stroke, after all. Semantics, perhaps, or more subversively, a philosophical card-trick of sorts. But it illustrates the point that figurative art is not as simple a category as “what stuff looks like.” On the contrary.
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It’s perfectly understandable when museum goers have trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians, for example, is really figurative art. But its radical abandonment of formal elements does not go so far as to divorce the work from representationalism. Jumbled and abstracted as they are, those are still figures in the frame, the three musicians, just rendered through the prism of Picasso’s developing cubistic method of interpretation. It’s an extreme example, for sure, and many academics will argue Three Musicians ventures outside the bounds of what can be considered representational. I would venture a counter-argument that Three Musicians is indeed representational: the depictions of Picasso’s friends Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob as the Pierrot and the Monk, respectively, was a thoroughly modern act of faithful representation in art. But regardless of wherever one comes down on that whole debate, the very fact that there is a debate at all, is prismatic of how diverse the horizons of figurative art can be.
In fact, the asymmetrically geometric forms which combine to represent human figures in Picasso’s cubist paintings, was of a language he had developed by inspiration of ancient figurative African art and sculpture. Cubism was a jazzy remix of the “Egyptian method,” a genre label which refers to the geometrically idealized figures one finds in ancient Egyptian art, and sculptures from Greek antiquity, as well as carved wood Nubian busts and the like. Upon juxtaposition, one can draw a direct thread from the cartoonish profile depictions of ancient Egyptian slaves worshipping pharaohs found in the sub-basements of the Great Pyramids of Giza, to the slightly-less cartoonish profile depictions of Saint Francis and his acolytes kneeling before the pope in Giotto di Bondone’s 14th century frescoes in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (that is if Giotto was in fact the author of those frescoes, a whole other epic debate in itself — Tweet it and see if a consensus arrives).
With the Renaissance came figurative masters of the 1600’s such as Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin. Those men faithfully studied human anatomy, and their works strived to faithfully render the visual realism of human bodies. They succeeded brilliantly. Rubens’ Prometheus Bound, and Poussin’s The Abduction of Europa, stand to this day as towering Ionic pillars of figurative art mastery. They would set the stage for the 19th century heavyweight champion of the form, Thomas Eakins, to come along and shut the loop on absolute realism of figurative art. For after the cumulative staggering glories of Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, The Gross Clinic, The Swimming Hole, Portrait of Maud Cook, and (my personal favorite) Between Rounds, there was simply nowhere else for figurative realism to go. You couldn’t invent a camera and a corresponding film stock which could accurately depict the human body as faithfully as Eakins did with brushes, oils, and canvas. One can imagine Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso collectively perusing a collection of the mad Philadelphian Eakins’ works, and muttering to themselves, “Why do we bother continuing to paint?” It makes us wonder if Eakins single-handedly coerced all those Europeans into inventing Impressionism and Cubism, just so they could avoid enduring the burden of attempting (attempting!) to compete with Eakins’ epic legacy.
Article by artmobia
