Art criticism
[3] Also, wealthy patrons have employed, at least since the start of Renaissance, intermediary art-evaluators to assist them in the procurement of commissions and/or finished pieces.
The term he introduced quickly caught on, especially as the English middle class began to be more discerning in their art acquisitions, as symbols of their flaunted social status.
The demand for such commentary was a product of the similarly novel institution of regular, free, public exhibitions of the latest art".
[15] From the 19th century onwards, art criticism became a more common vocation and even a profession,[3] developing at times formalised methods based on particular aesthetic theories.
He was one of a rising tide of English critics that began to grow uneasy with the increasingly abstract direction J. M. W. Turner's landscape art was moving in.
Ruskin became renowned for his rich and flowing prose, and later in life he branched out to become an active and wide-ranging critic, publishing works on architecture and Renaissance art, including the Stones of Venice.
[28] When Édouard Manet's famous Olympia (1865), a portrait of a nude courtesan, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism,[29] Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend.
He tried to move the debate from the old binary positions of previous decades, declaring that "the true painter, will be he who can wring from contemporary life its epic aspect and make us see and understand, with colour or in drawing, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our polished boots".
[15] In 1877, John Ruskin derided Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket after the artist, James McNeill Whistler, showed it at Grosvenor Gallery:[31] "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
[35][36][37] Towards the end of the 19th century a movement towards abstraction, as opposed to specific content, began to gain ground in England, notably championed by the playwright Oscar Wilde.
By the early twentieth century these attitudes formally coalesced into a coherent philosophy, through the work of Bloomsbury Group members Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
He vigorously defended himself in a lecture, in which he argued that art had moved to attempt to discover the language of pure imagination, rather than the staid and, to his mind, dishonest scientific capturing of landscape.
He focused on the modernism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and published an influential 1929 essay on the meaning of art in The Listener.
[48][49] Later, French writer and hero of the Resistance André Malraux wrote extensively on art,[50] going well beyond the limits of his native Europe.
[51] His conviction that the vanguard in Latin America lay in Mexican Muralism (Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros)[citation needed] changed after his trip to Buenos Aires in 1958.
[citation needed] Squirru, a poet-critic who became Cultural Director of the OAS in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s, was the last to interview Edward Hopper before his death, contributing to a revival of interest in the American artist.
[57] Clement Greenberg advocated Abstract Expressionist and color field painters like Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Hans Hofmann.
Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image".
[70] Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work.
[5][57] As long time art critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation, he became an early and literate proponent of Abstract Expressionism.
[5] Artist Robert Motherwell, well-heeled, joined Greenberg in promoting a style that fit the political climate and the intellectual rebelliousness of the era.
Harold Rosenberg spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event".
[75] Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg were also important postwar art historians who voiced support for Abstract Expressionism.
[84][85] Many of these writers use social media resources like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+ to introduce readers to their opinions about art criticism.
