The direct experience
Techniques. Resources. Creative Processes. Genres
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The direct experience and its importance for modern art
When we read about art history and, fundamentally, about the arrival of modernity in painting, we constantly find that a painter, a group, or an entire movement sought to “break with the academy.”
What does it mean “to break with the academy”?
“Academy” refers to tradition, to the classical norms of representation, which are taught and respected by the academies of the arts. Obviously, “breaking with the academy” means to disregard the rules that the academy dictates, not to follow its teachings, as well as not to pay attention to those traditional values about “what is right and what is wrong.”
But the matter does not stop there, and what is interesting and important is not so much that rupture in itself, but the artist’s attitude of wanting to have his own experience in front of what he is going to paint: the so-called “direct experience.” An attitude that motivates painters to paint outdoors, for example.
Artists have a new attitude and change their relationship with art: they used to be virtuosos, and now they are virtuosos who also involve their own perception of the world.
The artists want to be their own teachers; they want to “feel” on their own. And so their gaze becomes increasingly valuable and personal. These new artists start to include their feelings, their subjectivity, and their particular vision of the universe.
When the work involves the artist more, that is when modern art is born. And that begins precisely with the phrase “I want to experience it with my own eyes.”
Image: Bathers at La Grenouillère (1869). Claude Monet. We have chosen this painting because it is from when Monet and Renoir went out to paint in the open air, in search of the “real thing,” a few years before the first Impressionist exhibition.
Recommended links:
The Hay Wain (1821), John Constable.
Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), Turner.
Fundamental Painters of the Barbizon School.
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