2007, Vol., No.21

The School of London and Realism-Focused on the works of Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud-

Park, Young-Sin | 2007, (21) | pp.7~40 | number of Cited : 1

British contemporary art, including the work of young British artists (often abbreviated as yBa), has received international attention in the past decade. The question now arises: On what understructure is the successful reputation of British contemporary art based? I have begun this research with that question and suggest the context of British realism and figurative paintings, especially the works of the "School of London," as the most immediate source for British contemporary art. R. B. Kitaj, the American artist who worked and achieved celebrity in Britain, coined the term "School of London" in 1979. It has been used to describe post-war British figurative painters and been adopted by British critics as an analogue to the old School of Paris before and after the First World War. Though the notion of the term is indeterminate, the painters who belong to this group were gradually restricted to those six whose exhibitions were held under the title 'the School of London': Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, and R. B. Kitaj. After the Second World War, Britain took pains to emancipate itself from its sense of cultural inferiority. This was the moment when the seeds were sown for the international reputation British art enjoys today, and when British art was internationalized through realism and figurative paintings. Here, the School of London painters laid the ground for the subsequent generation of British artists. The works of contemporary British artists, such as the yBa, emphasize realistic aspects that are rooted in the works of their predecessors since the postwar period. Indeed the School of London was born when abstract art was in its heyday. In the middle of the 20th century, abstract art such as Informel and Abstract Expressionism, dominated the art world in Europe and the United States. However, at the same period, there was significant development in the figurative arts in Britain, which was led in large part by the School of London's painters. Eschewing the abstraction of the 1950s, these artists struggled to sustain the continuity of the British figurative tradition. The return of figuration would become one of the most important elements of contemporary British painting. It is very interesting that the figurative tradition has remained virtually intact and realism has maintained its eminence over the modernism's formal self-criticism and theoretical debates. Thus it is worthwhile to investigate features of the School of London and realism in modern British art. My research positions the School of London in the mainstream of modern British realistic painting through the context its painters formed between British realist painters in the prewar generation and contemporary British artists working in most recent decade. I read their works as an amalgam of international influence and an indigenous tradition: Existentialism and British empiricism. Understanding the background and appearance of the School of London requires an understanding of the influence of worldwide art trends and Existentialism on British art in the postwar period. The School of London painters' works have been widely considered derivative from French models, especially Existentialist art. That developed mainly in Paris, as represented by Informel. Existentialism as revealed in the works of the School of London, however, is less a follower of French Existentialism than it is something filtered through traditional humanism and empiricism in the social context and through personal experience and creativity in the individual context. I considers British empiricism as another base of the School of London painters: 18th century British empiricist George Berkeley's theory of vision, which was revived in mid-20th century Britain, and the works of A. J. Ayer, a logical positivist regarded as an offshoot of British empiricism in the first half of 20th century. Those empirical factors in the works of the School of London painters can be linked to the realist figurative painters of an earlier generation. In certain contexts of British realism, the School of London painters demonstrated various practices that influence contemporary British artists in many aspects. I propose that the realism of the School of London should be considered in the current of specific realism that goes back to the Euston Road School and the Camden Town Group. In this research, I emphasize that the School of London had a significant role in the unprecedented prosperity of figurative painting and the internationalization of the British modern art. I focus on the figurative traits and realism of the School of London painters' work and regard it as a very different inflection placed on appropriations of French Existentialist art including Informel. Perhaps the most meaningful characteristic of British art could be its stronghold on the empirical sphere of life itself. Such a realistic tradition and empirical foundation are the conceptual ground for the appropriation and transformation of the School of London's work. This study of the School of London's social and cultural contexts could spur a more diverse discussion about modern British art.

The Expended concept of Ready-made in Jean Tinguely’s Works

park yunjo | 2007, (21) | pp.41~84 | number of Cited : 0

This thesis is a study about the work of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) through the concept of Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-made and the technique of ‘appropriation’ deduced from the concept. Tinguely, who began his kinetic sculpting since 1955, produced numerous works, as he worked on several sculptures displayed in public, such as many performance events and fountains, and participating in the construction of performing stages and carnivals. However, it is somewhat difficult to explain the complex nature of his artworks by conventionally approaching them through Kinetic art or Nouveau Realism. That is why this author is trying to define his work by investigating the relationship of Tinguely and Duchamp. The Duchamp’s inclination toward Dada and Ready-made, which changed the trend of the art history in the 20thCentury, coincided with Tinguely’s anarchistic thinking, thereby influencing the overall work-idea of Tinguely as well as the themes of his artworks. Tringuely openly admitted how his work had been influenced by Duchamp, and their continued exchanges attested to the fact. Since the Second World War, many artists took the notice of the readymade works by Duchamp thirty years earlier, and embraced his concept to reflect the era. Duchamp’s indifferent use of everyday products made it possible for them to utilize the technique of appropriation. Tinguely also adapted it as a possibility to grope for a new relationship between the life and art, so he was able to represent a subversive and paradoxical attitude in his work. In addition to this, the objects of his efforts to borrow from Duchamp’s technique of appropriation are largely divided into five, and they were existing art products, immaterial elements, the real time and existing space, and the role of audience. His acts of borrowing approached the works by the artists of the era and their concepts with parodies and pastiches, and thus the transient relationship between the artist and his or her work made it possible to insert immaterial elements found in daily life. As a result, he was able to accommodate a dimension different from the concept of time dimension, where the logical causal relationship exists, or to put it simply, the real time which makes up our daily life as a sort of the readymade element. He also applied the traces of daily life into the realm of space, so his work is related to the physical, cultural, economical, and historical context of a specific place. Accordingly, the borrowed elements brought the participation of the audience, so he threw fresh light on it. One can, so to speak,find in his work that the audience is being appropriated as the utmostlimit of the ready-made concept which is useful on its own right. To Tinguely, the concept of readymade-ism was a part of the art history, and was a direct comment about life. The attempt was his way to realistically reflect the life to accommodate all the existing context of the artist, his work and the audience as the innermost element of the work. In other words, his work was "readymade-ism", that is, he did not stop at borrowing objects found in daily life, but his work went further by directing commenting on readymade-ism itself and including the before and after of the trend in totality. In this manner, Tinguely found new aesthetics of appropriation from the concept of Ready-made, which was proposed by Duchamp to deny the existing social and aesthetic values. Through it, he showed the close relationship between artworks and conditions set by the time and place of their creation, while revealing the falsehood of the image of artist as the autonomous principal and the concept of work as the subjective expression. This thesis, which came about in this context, discovers the expansion of the concept where, to Tinguely, "Ready-made"is a metaphor for freedom which overcame the existing orders or customized values and restored the relationship between art and life. This study is special because it provides a different interpretation of the work of Jean Tinguely by analyzing his work, which was materialized in various types of media, through using the concept of Duchamp’s Ready-made, that is, the technique ofappropriation to be more exact.

Baudelaire's Modernity and Genre Painting

Hyosil Yang | 2007, (21) | pp.85~114 | number of Cited : 4

The Modernity of Baudelaire as the mental base of Modernism, needs a revision from the aesthetics of transiency to that of the transfiguration of reality by the artist's aesthetic competence. His essay in 1863 entitled ‘the painter of modern life’ includes both definitions but until now the implication of the latter has been forgotten because of the power and influence of modernist theorists. The Postmodern reading changes the meaning of Baudelaire's modernity. By the concept of Modernity, Baudelaire formulates the theory of the art of modern life. In his view, the new art should be independent of moral value, which exists prior to the artistic practice and constrains it. The proper value of art lies in its ability to make the actual the aesthetic. Baudelaire's modernity posits art as the aesthetization of the actuality. He despises the modern values such as progress, utopian future, and utility. So He rids the art of the moral values of his time and gives it sovereignty and autonomy. The modern artist referred to as "the painter of modern life" by Baudelaire was an anonymous genre painter C. Guys, not the great artists like Courbet or Manet. Baudelaire did know his modernity's painter belonged to the category of minor art or a vulgar culture. Baudelaire gives C. Guys various names such as ‘dandy,’ ‘convalescent,’ ‘man among the world,’ ‘flâneur’ so on. Before drawing and painting at the studio, C. Guys experiences street scenes and absorbs the essence of life, and then he returns to the studio. Baudelaire calls his "finished" painting a sketch. It is not a painting in the strict sense of painting because it looks like an unfinished drawing. Baudelaire's modernity does not fall on the context of the tradition of art. His concern is not about what art is but about the new method of art to represent modern life. Baudelaire's action of naming C. Guys ‘the painter of modern life’is very calculating and correct. It is outside the tradition of Modernism criticism. So the postmodern reading of Baudelaire reveals the gap between the appropriation of Baudelaire by Modernism and the real implication of his Modernity. It restores the authentic significance of Baudelaire's theory of art concentrating on the transcendence over modern life by artistic transfiguration. What the painter of modern life, not the modern painter, thinks important is primarily how to represent modern life not how to rupture the traditional techniques of art.

Interpretation of social meaning in Ilya Kabakov's Ten Characters: communal apartment and narratives of diasporic intimacy

Namhee Park | 2007, (21) | pp.115~148 | number of Cited : 1

Winckelmann and Modern Art History- after Deconstruction of Historical Analysis -

Cho, Eun-Jung | 2007, (21) | pp.149~180 | number of Cited : 2

The estrangement of the traditional discipline of art history from contemporary art is one of the fundamental problems of modern art history. During past decades many artists, estheticians, and critics as well as art historians have raised questions in argument whether conception of the linear history or a universal and coherent history of art is valid any more or not, insisting that now is the time of post-historical period of art. It is the reason to reappraise J. J. Winckelmann and his method of historical analysis in this study that he took an active hand to art in his own period by applying the value system and criteria obtained from the past history of art to contemporary one, which contrasts with the disciplinary restraint of modern art historians. A historicizing perspective on art provided by Winckelmann became the key standard in the field of art history during last two centuries, and somehow, it results in the parting of the scholarly practice of art history and the contemporary experience of art. The schema Winckelmann established provided later viewers with a basis for assessing classical Greek art as a model for modern artist to follow and for neglecting contemporary art in favor of the art of the past. Still Winckelmann's analysis stands in present day speculation about art and its history, as his account of the history of ancient art is presented as a conceptual structure to grasp developmental pattern and historical fact into an entity. The increasing doubt and question of the validity of historical analysis are caused by the particular feature of modern art which refuse art history as a progress toward the new. Also there is the dilemmas of historicism in the 20th century to abandon the idea of a unified human history and objective historical cognition. As a consequence, art history today confronts the deconstruction of both the concept of 'art' and of 'history'. However, if art history gives up the object of study to establish a general disintegration of coherent methods and instead, concentrates on the particular and the passing, it would not be able to claim the position of an independent field of humanistic discipline. This is the reason why the intensity of Winckelmann's endeavor to establish a concept of "ideal" and developmental system through the historical analysis of ancient art would be the lasting legacy to modern art history.

The phenomena of trend of the contemporary art and the Crisis of the plurality

Sang-Yong Sim | 2007, (21) | pp.181~224 | number of Cited : 2

Today, as ·to the flow of the art, the unique nature of one individual and the value of diversity - or pluralism - made with that are faced with the crisis. Because the creative individuality of the private legacy of the subject and its the expression level have became to be seriously intensified for shrinkage deepening by the collective code phenomena called as 'Trend'. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to examine closely how the 'Trend' could be the main phenomena in the flow of the contemporary art, how it could infringe the base of the individuality of the subject and demolish the foundation of the art. A trend is revealed as visible phenomena through the accumulation of motivations, which are more inclining toward the desire for joining in the reaction and action of the peer population instead of walking the route of a self in each art subjects. The result of that causing makes to miss own route by feeling the crisis of an identity when being out of the collective category in which a self belongs. Furthermore, it brings forth more big result of repressing one era of potential aesthetic achievement and a balance as it makes creative working subjects to imitate each other in the various levels and has given as an index. In the lower side of this trend phenomena, the complex factors have been including the dramatic uncertainty of the era, which has been undergo the sudden simultaneous dismantlement of the aesthetic norm and belief and the psychological disturbance for an isolation and estrangement, and etc. Though a fashion is the phenomenon that has existing any era or society, its action is naked, authoritarian, radical and accelerated era in the present age comparing to the past times. Among them, in the area of the contemporary art, recently phenomena occurring for about 10 years are the fact to have been having the really dramatic mode. Furthermore, the trend of the modern art field has been changing the aspect of authoritarianism and suppression in the process of aesthetically being justified and formulated. It is the reason why the phenomena of trend cannot be dealt with the light status for the inevitable social phenomena of the mass-culture era. With the awareness of the issues, this paper has been intended to focus on the style which more outstandingly shows up in the trend of the rapid globalization, a trend of formality, and the phenomena caused in the special condition of Korea. It tried to make clear in the forming process of a trend, the being powerful and ripple effect, and the harmfulness which has affected directly or indirectly the ontological base of art as the unique nature of each subject and its pluralism.

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Journal of History of Modern Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.77

2007, Vol., No.21