Critical Realism

The Stuckists are not the only people who are concerned about the direction modern art is taking. There is increasing opposition coming from other quarters such as the Critical Realists. Critical realism originated with the ideas of Georg Lucaks, a Marxist political thinker and art critic. The ideas of the Critical Realists are best expressed in a short manifesto by David John Beesley, a former Stuckist:

Work Should Have (Manifesto)

1- Intention to communicate something that is about, or can affect life. Be it political, personal or environmental, they are all relevant and can affect each other.

2 - To answer our own questions. To make work about our own beliefs, can cause them to change, as we gather knowledge on subjects. This in turn can be criticised by other people and causes debate, the essence of Critical Realism, to seek a truth,
through debate and understanding.

3 - Work can be in any medium.

For more about Critical Realism, I would recommend David John Beesley's site, Critical Realist and especially his page on Post Modernism where he discusses the problems of the current art scene and the solution offered by the critical realist. Beesley's page on the Stuckist site.

David John Beeseley Straw Dogs.

William Kentridge (1955--) Untitled (Man with Megaphone) I first encountered Kentridge at an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 2009. His works, mainly charcoal drawings and prints, also include animations and film. While he does not call himself a critical realist, his work exemplifies their ideas.

Allen Sekula Shipwreck and Workers Allen Sekula is a photographer and filmmaker whose work falls clearly withing the definition of the critical realists. Here are photographs from his exhibit "Shipwreck and Workers." And here you can find a description of his film project "A Short Film for Laos."

Leon Golub(1922-2004)White Squad (1982) Leon Golub deals with stress and violence and the ways in which these things affect our own world.

Phillip Guston (1913-1980) City Limits (1969). Phillip Guston was an abstract expressionist whose work in the late 1960s turned to cartoon-like figures that comment on social conditions. He often included Ku Klux Klan characters as in this painting.

Because these artists all embrace figurative or representational art, their work falls clearly within the parameters of the Stuckist Manifesto. However, they limit their art to that which addresses social and political conditions.

The Stuckist Challenge

In 1999, a group of artists in England, alarmed at the direction modern art was taking -- especially in regard to conceptualism -- founded a movement called "Stuckism." The basic premise of Stuckism is that "Artists paint paintings with ideas." They are opposed to the word "art" being applied to such things as installation art, video art, conceptual art, performance art, minimal art and anything that "incorporates dead animals or beds."

Stuckism is not a style of art, but rather an attitude about the ends of art. Consequently, it embraces outsider art as well as that by trained artists, holding that the expertise and acquired techniques of the artist need be no more than what his particular form of expression calls for. The complete philosophy of the Stuckists is contained in their many manifestos and writings.

Here is a sampling of their work.

Charles Thompson, Khatereh After Dinner.


Joe Machine My Mother's Last Cigarette.



Paul Harvey Nicolas Serota



Ella Guru,, Lissie Von Stockhausen


Mark D Lindsey Lohan Driving School


Phillip Absolon College Canteen


Charles Williams The Couple That Communicates


Peter McArdle The Kiss

How did this blog happen?

Anyone looking at the world of art today would be completely confused as to what art really is. Generally, the writers on art divide contemporary art into several categories -- modern art, post-modern art and conceptualism. Around the middle of the 20th century the answer was simple and given by Clive Bell. The thing that made something art was "significant form." If a work had significant form, it was art, if not, it was something else. But this simple solution broke down in the 1960s with the introduction of subject matter that was taken from commercial art--pop art. It was quickly followed by a number of other "deviations" -- happenings, installation art, environmental art and finally conceptualism.

A lot of the recent innovations in art have been due to the commercialization of art by the art dealers who increasingly use advertising practices to create fads and fashions that appeal to what I call "trust fund babies" -- the idle rich. A good example is conceptual art that has been promoted by Charles Saatchi, an advertising executive. The result is that many educated artists today have abandoned modernism and skill in favor of "business models." We might call most of the art production today "hype art" since it is simply valued by the fact that it is well promoted regardless of any intrinsic value it may actually have. However, this raises the question of how do we determine if something has genuine intrinsic value (some value like Classical Greek art that will still be recognized thousands of years from now) or if it is just transient "hype." That will be the challenge of this blog. Let's start by taking a quick tour of the development of modern art.

MODERN ART CONSIDERED TO BE "HIGH ART"

IMPRESSIONISM Argenteuil (1875) by Claude Monet (1840 - 1826) It is generally agreed that Modern Art begins with the impressionists painters in France in the 1860s. The impressionists abandoned the traditional subjects of the Academic school which centered around history and mythology and began painting paintings of everyday life and of the landscape.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM Still Life with Apples (1879) by Paul Cezanne (1939-1906) The post-impressionists include a large number of artists who came after the impressionists and who explored form and expressionism in art. Cezanne has generally been considered the leading figure in the subsequent development of modern art because of his intense exploration of many aspects of form.

EXPRESSIONISM The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). While many artists were following the lead of Cezanne by exploring form, there was a parallel development of artists pursuing expressionism while adopting many of the liberated practices of the impressionists and post-impressionists. These included Van Gogh and the German and Scandinavian expressionists.

EARLY 20TH CENTURY ART In the early 20th century, artists began exploring pure form in painting and began moving more and more toward completely abstract art. This painting is by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), a leader of early 20th century art.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Excavation (1950) by Willem de Kooning. Abstract expressionism evolved in New York in the 1940s as a result of the influence of many European artists fleeing the Nazi regime. Indeed, many of the abstract expressionists like de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Hoffman and others were from Europe. One of the leading teachers of the time, Hans Hoffman, came from Germany and established an art school in Provinctown, MA that was attended by many artists in the abstract expressionist school. The abstract expressionists often go under the labels of "Non-Objective," "The New York School" and "Action Painting."

BAY AREA FIGURATIVE MOVEMENT Figures in a Room by Richard Diebenkorn Many painters in the San Francisco Bay Area centered around the California School of Fine arts, University of California, Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, led by David Park and Elmer Bischoff rebelled against the sterility of abstract expressionism. Believing that abstract expressionism was a cop out to pure formalism and was "too easy," they reintroduced the figure to abstract art while keeping many of the developments in abstract expressionism such as gestural painting.

REPRESENTATIONAL ART Coastal Scene by Millard Sheets (1907-1989). Representational art is any art that has a recognizable subject matter although it generally does not attempt to depict things photographically. Most artists throughout history have been representational. It generally also incorporates good design and composition as well as technique. It encompasses the majority of art that one finds in commercial galleries since it is easily understood by the general public. Often, representational artist belong to various schools or movements by which they are recognized such as expressionism, impressionism, pop, etc. Millard Sheets is recognized as a member of the "California School of Watercolor" just as Monet was an "impressionist."

POP ART & POST-MODERNISM Campbell's Soup (1968) by Andy Warhol (1928-1987). The "repainting" of commercial products as art objects and introduction of industrial processes into art is generally said to be the end of "modernism" and beginning of "post-modernism" in art.

REALISM Paul's Corner Cushion (1970) by Ralph Goings. Realism seeks to reproduce nature as accurately as possible. Ralph Goings is a "Photo-Realist," a movement of the late 1960s that grew out of pop art. Photo-Realists usually copy directly from photographs and try to create a realistic copy of the photograph. From an artistic viewpoint, their work takes the general formal ideas informing the art of photography and applies it to their paintings.


CONCEPTUALISM The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) by Damien Hirst (b. 1965) Sol LeWitt has described conceptual art as follows: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." You can find more conceptual artist here.

CONTEMPORARY ART NOT CONSIDERED TO BE "HIGH ART"OUTSIDER ART Outsider art encompasses that art that is done by untrained artists, the art of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, street art, skater art, graffiti and underground comics, etc.

DECORATIVE ART Decorative art on exhibit at the Veterans Hospital, Mather, California. Paintings like these are reproduced as giclee prints, distributed by interior decorating firms and used mainly to decorate offices and public buildings. Successful artists in this field, have fairly good incomes. (That's a reflection of me in the glass, taking the picture.)

COMMERCIAL ART Illustration by Eric Bonhomme. Commercial Art is art that is done according to the specifications of the client. Usually it is illustration like this for a magazine story but includes many diverse types such as logos, advertising, cartooning, etc. Illustrators are probably the most technically proficient of all artists. Most are masters at drawing and composition.