The Art of Transformation

1. Art and Society

We all expect that is it possible to recognize the age to which a work of art belongs. We expect those who know anything about painting to be able to tell the difference between a seventeenth-century portrait and an eighteenth-century portrait, between Victorian painting and painting executed in the 1920s. We expect them to do this not on the basis of the fashions worn by any people who are depicted, or of other items of period material culture, but because of something intrinsic to the painting. So we also expect them to be able to recognize the place of origin or of the work of an artist, to be able to distinguish the French postimpressionist work of Vuillard from the English postimpressionist work of Sickert.

If we ask what are the differences between one portrait and another, or one landscape painting and another, the answer normally given is about the way they are painted. Different painters use a different range of colors, different strokes with different brushes. They also have different compositional preferences. We might even acknowledge that people brought up in one country see the world in different ways from those brought up in another, and that different things catch the eye of different painters.

When it comes to the study of the painted pottery produced in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the difference between the painted pottery of one generation and that of the succeeding generation has been accounted for almost entirely in terms of the graphic practices and preferences of different painters (1.1, 1.2), associating these graphic practices either with those on other pots signed by a painter — as here with pots signed by Phintias and Euphronios — or on other pots after which a particular artist's hand has been named. That was the way in which Sir John Beazley told his classic tale of The Development of Attic Black-Figure (1951), and it has remained the way the story of both black-figure and red-figure pottery has been told (see chapter 2, section 1).

This way of describing differences between art of different periods is not limited to painting. The same is true of sculpture. It was by close attention to the ways in which the same parts of the body were differently presented that Gisela Richter sought to distinguish from one another archaic kouroi (naked youths; 1.13–1.14) and korai (maidens; 1.11 and1.12). The fullest modern study of the whole history of Greek sculpture organizes itself in successive volumes dealing with The Archaic Style, The Severe Style, Fifth-Century Styles, and so forth. More importantly, it is in terms of stylistic change that the "Greek revolution" in sculpture has been described, the revolution that saw the formal and frontal kouros, who holds his body to attention, disappear from the sculptor's repertoire after 150 years to be replaced by supple bodies that refuse frontality and engage in definitive action, or at least gesture toward it.

There are good reasons why the story of change has been told in this way. Virtually no extant Greek sculptures and only a small percentage of Greek pots bear an artist's signature (see 1.9, 2.1, 2.7, 3.3–4, 3.10, 4.5, 4.7 and plate 15, 4.9–11, 4.15, 4.20–21, 5.5–6 and plate 21, 9.1, 9.4–5); it is only through differences in the detailed presentation of the body, and in the case of pottery differences in graphic technique, that the works of different workshops in sculpture and even different individuals, in the case of painted pottery, can be distinguished with any confidence.

But describing how the painting and sculpture of one period differs from that of a preceding or following period in this way should not be mistaken for offering an account of the change that has occurred. Not only do such descriptions not explain what makes the art of one period or place different from the art of another place or period or reveal why art changes over time, such descriptions frequently fail even to make the observations most relevant to an explanation.

When Michael Baxandall, writing in 1972 about the Italian Renaissance, coined the term "period eye," he analyzed its workings in terms of, among other things, "the body and its language," "figure patterns," "the value of colours," "volumes," "intervals and proportions," and "the moral eye." Baxandall was concerned in his essay "to show how the style of pictures is proper material of social history." For Baxandall, "Social facts ... lead to the development of distinctive visual skills and habits: and these visual skills and habits become identifiable elements in the painter's style," or, as he put it in the conclusion to the work, "the forms and styles of painting respond to social circumstances." But in that conclusion, he insisted also that "the forms and styles of painting may sharpen our perception of the society."

Baxandall effectively insists that art and experience are not separate things but intimately linked, but the mutual relationship between a society and its paintings that he conjures up has the initiative firmly with the society. Paintings may do things to us, "sharpen our perception of the society," but they seem not to do anything to society. Somehow, we can learn to see from looking at paintings, but contemporary viewers learned nothing from them.

T. J. Clark, writing in 1985, made the case for painting playing a very much more active role. Certainly for Clark painting is "a way of discovering what the values and excitements of the world amount to, by finding in practice what it takes to make a painting of them — what kind of play between flatness and depth, what kind of stress on the picture's limits, what sorts of insistence, ellipsis, showmanship, restraint." But Clark saw that painting was more than that, insisting that "when a painting recasts or restructures its own procedures — of visualizing, resemblance, address to the viewer, scale, touch, good drawing and modeling, articulate composition — ... it puts pressure on not just social detail but social structure."

If we acknowledge, with Baxandall, that how members of a culture see, indeed how members of a particular society see, is determined by many different factors, and that this visual experience affects what images those who draw or paint or sculpt in that culture or society will make, our description of those images, and of how those images change over time, needs to reflect this. In particular, the "period eye" affects choice of subject matter, choice of material, choice of color as well as affecting what features of the human body will be shown and in what ways. There will, of course, be particular...