“The artists… reacted much more quickly and revolutionized the art…”
In case you don’t have a copy of Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician at hand, don’t worry. Google shows you the best parts, anyway (scroll to bottom of post). Chapter 10 is where the real magic starts, if you ask me. (Ok, so Ch. 9 has some really interesting bits on math and religion and the study of nature. Actually, read the whole thing. Kline presents the world almost as completely as Erik Larson, deftly pulling in the soc/psy/econ/philo/historical bits and wrapping them all up in something just short of geekly literary chocolate.)
It would be easy for me to spend an hour or so on just the first paragraph. When people roll their eyes at me for being bent out of shape over the second-class treatment of art, art education, and the role of the arts in our everyday lives – I just want to shake them. Don’t think art matters in ‘tough times’? Don’t understand why abstract paintings were ever a big deal? I’d be happy to point you to a reading list. I’ll be over here with crayon.
Now usually, I’m more of an ooh-ahh-er at the magnificent transition from realism to abstraction. Fine. I’ll do something completely rude and quote myself quoting from the web on another blog:
I think the revolutionary nature of abstract art is hard to comprehend these days – because the ‘revolutionary’ changes in our lifetimes have happened so fast, historically speaking. Example: look at a time line of DaVinci to the Wright Brothers to stepping on the moon. Our world changes at warp speed.
Painting wasn’t that lucky.
This is one of my favorite things in the world, this abstract revolution. It is awe-inspiring when you look at the tens of centuries of representational ‘art’ images in human history from cave drawings to Raphael… and realize that we’ve had less than two centuries of abstract art.
Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.
Hmmm. Underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.
(Dear EJ, I told you it was all about the math.)
So let’s talk about this science of perspective (from the Latin verb, ‘to see through’). We’ll take up the secular nature of art, as we move away from mysticism, sometime when you and I can share a glass of wine. Anyhoo… nature was fast becoming an authority all its own. Artists had already struggled with light. Page 215: “To capture the essence of forms, the organization of objects in space, and the structure of space, the artist [da Vinci, et al] decided that he must find the underlying mathematical laws.”
Reality lives in the math.
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