Hogarth, Goya, and the Enlightenment Period

Francisco Goya, The Third of May (1814)

            William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) overlap well as artistic expressions about Europe, at least Western Europe, in political transition before and during the Enlightenment.  Hogarth the Englishman and Goya the Spaniard contrast in a few ways such as nationality (obviously), political atmosphere (English Parliamentary system with monarchy and Spain with a monarchy), and culture wherein both societies favored foreign artists somewhat over the locals.

    Parallels reveal themselves, however, upon closer look at the details of their lives.  Both had parents who had some kind of professional, if not class, pull; Richard Hogarth was a schoolmaster and Latin scholar, Jose Goya was the son of a notary as well as skilled as a gilder with a wife, Dona Gracia, who was a bidalgo, a member of the aristocratic lower strata.  Hogarth and Goya attended the primary and secondary levels of school after which both attended schools of trade either in engraving (Hogarth) or painting (Goya). 

    As artists, I see that they shared an outlook that included the common person without necessarily romanticizing or always satirizing their roles, similarly so with the aristocracy.  They did this sometime objectively, sometime subjectively, brutally so, to show the degradation of humanity in its trudging along their lives.  They displayed how hopes could become misfortunes, how a victory may backfire, and occasionally how humor may save the day.

    Living during the Enlightenment era, they saw and surely knew about some of the high hopes this new way of thinking raised, that people could vote for representatives instead of taking it for granted that clergy and royalty always knew what was best for the population.  Among its proponents, the faith was that humanity could employ Reason so as to find order in life and society, and figure out the next best step to take.  The notion that it was not witchcraft that was a problem but religious bigotry or that tolerance was preferable to prejudice, and that justice was a matter of public and private concern, remain admirable aspects of the Enlightenment legacy down to this day.

Nonetheless, society dissolution, if not also wartime invasion, dispelled these grand feelings of optimism, forcing these artists to present the challenge of reality in either a sarcastic or savage way.  Hogarth’s series Marriage a la Mode or “Marriage in the Current Fashion,” is one of many series of paintings and prints that offered severe criticism of urban life.  The “Election” series is one that, unfortunately, may hold true in democracies everywhere. 

Likewise, Goya, seeing the ruin of the promise of Charles IV and, later, the catastrophe of the Napoleonic invasion (1807-1814), offered many depictions about the tragedy of Spain.  His print series’ title The Disasters of War sums it up economically, exhibiting gory details of combat and torture, apathy and cruelty.

These artists presented the beginnings of our outlook, one that encompasses the Industrial Revolution as well as the current Information Age.  Sadly, it is an outlook that has inured us to scenes of malice and viciousness, accustomed as we are to seeing these on the television or internet news reports.  The good news is these artists still may prick our conscience when we may be prone to nod off during times of state-sanctioned violence and social corruption.

 

How to Make Art or Is That the Right Question?

Can you teach someone how to make art?   That’s a tough question to investigate so first let’s say that it seems simpler asking if you can teach someone how to draw, to sculpt, to play music, to design a poem, et cetera.

Let’s take painting as our field of expression.  Someone wants to learn how to paint artistically so they take a class on painting, and they learn rather well.  After they finish the course they prepare to construct a painting, buy all the right brushes, paints, and buy a sturdy support as a board for the surface upon which they’re going to paint the imagery.  And these are all the materials the instructor recommended.

So far, so good.

They already have a particular subject in mind, it may be their interpretation of a still-life or an expression of their mood, possibly both.  They know how to paint, they have the right tools, and now they have subject and off they go.  The confidence to do so is certainly there, they did very well in the class and are sure they will continue to do so outside the school studio.

Are they producing what we call art?

Now, if there were a school that claimed “study here and we will teach you how to make visual art” that would be quite a claim.  Because if there were a formula or primer or recipe for making visual art I think it would cease to be art.  I would say that would be more like a factory assembly line, similar to a paint-by-numbers image that does not re-present anything that the person wanted to express but only their mastery of the formula and technical skill in using the tools to get that result.

For instance, there have been and are those who are able to draw and paint as well as the 18^th century painter Chardin (you may insert any artist’s name here), but they are not half the artist he was. 

Don’t misunderstand me, technical skill and having the right tools to re-present an image are notable, maybe even foundational.  Granted, both may be topics for a lively debate—what do we mean by technical skill in the field of painting, what are the right tools?—but here I only mean that these are what are necessary for the painter to achieve the desired imagery, however they construe “technical skill” and “right tools.”

Further, you see images that were painted on a rock surface from, say, 20,000 or more years ago and you think they are beautiful.  You do not know the people who painted these images, don’t have a clue as to why they painted them, but you think that they are art.  Why is that?

And if they are art, who taught them?  Was there a “Bedrock School of Art”?  Certainly, someone tried to do this previously however long before, then after one or several generations of artists they had a handle on painting at least as a craft.  Although most of us would say that many if not all cave paintings fit what our society considers as art, it prods a re-thinking just what we mean by that term. 

E.g., did our ancestors think that they were “making art”?   If not, then what does that mean for the notion of teaching others to create art?

The Seed and Flower of Surrealism

Max Ernst, Quietude (1929)

            The late art critic Robert Hughes (1938-2012) concluded about Surrealism in “The Threshold of Liberty,” episode 5 of his documentary The Shock of the New (1980), “So what remains of Surrealism?  Not much.  It became exactly it set out not to be.  A style, and not a very durable style at that. …  Surrealism was completely digested within a matter of 50 years….”  

            Was Hughes correct?

First, there must be an agreement as to the beginnings of Surrealism.  Looking to someone who coined the word then that would have been the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), and his forward-looking approach to the Arts as a progressive human endeavor predates WW1.  Even before Apollinaire, and noting an individual the Surrealists liked to reference, was the writer Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), aka Comte de Lautreamont, and his Songs of Maldoror (1868-1869).

Also, because of his medical treatments of the depressed and the deviant using “the talking cure” of psychotherapy and the investigation of dreams, the surrealists counted Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as a foundational thinker.

True, there was nothing quite paralleling these ideas except for perhaps the symbolist painting in the 19^th century.  In any case, as an overall intellectual movement the roots of Surrealism began to develop in the late 19^th century in the literary approaches of Ducasse and Apollinaire as well as the work of Freud.

And then came the war to end all wars.

World War I, or as more usually labeled today as WW1, spurred several artists and literati to counter the reality of this disaster through the Dada movement.  Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara aka Samuel Rosenstock, Hannah Hoch, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp…well, you get the idea, many powerful creative minds combined to effect the catastrophe in literary and visual venues.  This journey to a reality that is meaningless in terms of naïve realism was one more catalyst to the formation of the surrealists.

Another foundation was the work of the painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and his imagery of haunting angst derived from the work of symbolists Max Klinger and Arnold Bocklin.  The odd juxtaposition of people, architecture, and objects led to another vision of the world that Apollinaire called “metaphysical.”  That did not straighten out a popular misunderstanding of that philosophical term, but it stuck.  Displaying people and architecture and objects even more prominently by their unusual placement gave de Chirico’s work the look of a dream.

Thus, following Dada and merging with it, including writers and artists of that movement, a group began to form in Paris in the 1920s, and the crystallization of that attitude was Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924).  Each of those in the group became well known in their fields and among them were Max Ernst (collage), Man Ray (photography), Rene Magritte (painting), Paul Eluard (poetry), Luis Bunuel (film), and of course, Andre Breton himself (literature).

The aspiration was freedom, liberte, in all things.  I do not know offhand if those as Breton or Louis Aragon explored the ancient movement of the Cynics, the “dog” philosophy, wherein one eschewed social convention for the convenience of nature.  I believe it makes for an intriguing parallel, however.

Following WW2, the Surrealist movement broke up as a unified group but the attitudes remained among each as they continued their work.  So, was Hughes right about them?  I don’t think he summed up the result in its entirety.  When I see abstract expressionism, I see the surrealist automatic writing of Andre Masson; when I view an assemblage or collage, I see the surrealist juxtaposition of materials of Max Ernst; when I see time-shifts or dislocations in movies, I see the film of Luis Bunuel; and when I see use of pop imagery, I see any number of surrealist painters as Rene Magritte. 

            It is now nearly 150 years later since the seeds of Surrealism fertilized the Art world and I see its growth continue in the various arts.  On that score of endurance, I think Hughes was incorrect.  And yet Hughes did add to his evaluation that Surrealism as a movement of the mind, if not of visual art, is “a very durable spirit, and it’s hard to exorcise.”