Padova by Belisario Contreras
Introduction by Maya Contreras
My grandfather passed away twenty years ago leaving behind various incandescent works on the subjects of Art & Literature that I would like to share over the next few months on the DDD website. As a former professor at American University, Dr. Contreras’ novel “Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art” has been a consistence source for highly esteemed Art History professors, as well as sited in various dissertations.
Belisario, whose name is that of Byzantine origin, meaning “Protector of the Beautiful” was true to this moniker. He was indeed the protector of those creative individuals who strive to contribute no matter what the circumstance or environment.
These first excerpts will be from his paper on “The Problem of The Human Form in Painting.” This will be a five part series published ever Wednesday on the Art page of the DDD.
Thank you,
Maya Contreras, Editor-in-Chief
The Problem of the Human Form in Painting the Human
Written by Belisario Contreras
Chapter 1 - Introduction
“Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” – James Joyce, Ulysses.
Dr. Norbert Wiener, the author of “Cybernetics and Society” deals with a contingent universe, where order is least probable and chaos is most probable. He refers to control and communication, by which man fights nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and destroy the meaningful, and to the term “information” as a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world.
It is the process of man adjusting to the contingency of his outer environment and making his adjustment felt upon it. This philosophical concept, bounded within its own stark framework, states the position of the artist in his quest for order, permanency, and significance from time immemorial. The artist has had to deal with order as a structural framework that would defy the ravages of time, and embody ideal perfection and truth, depending upon the culture and the values of the age. The use of the human form in art has been controlled by the artist’s adjustment to the outer world, varied by each particular age that attempted to state its own peculiarity in its own terms.
I will consider the problem of the human form in painting from two premises: (a) the philosophical basis, (b) the emotional basis; and correlate these views with two broad concepts of the human form in painting, Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization. My own conclusions with respect to the problem will be reflected in the series of painting that I will have done to define my position, and express my own convictions.
The terms, Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization, contain too much to explain them simply; and linking them to the human form in painting does not lessen the problem of trying to define these terms. But I hope to do so, by tracing the historical antecedents of the human form with its changes and attitudes to the present age.
I suppose that it is not unusual to retain the term, unique, when we are reducing our relationship to the outer world. I remember the scene from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce in which he turned to the flyleaf of the geography book and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
Man believes in the uniqueness of his personality that extends to the place where he lives, the age that he lives in, and in some instances, to the uniqueness of a deep-rooted problem that seems vital and important to resolve. I have given myself the pleasure of that weakness, the belief that there is a problem of the human form in painting to consider and that it is unique for the age that I live in.
“The obligation to recast the visible fabric of things in order to make them an expression of creative subjectivity entails now inevitable drawbacks, now accidental failures and causes many victims. The first victim was the human figure. “ – Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.
There has been a marked trend to dismiss the human form in art as an important value, leaving the artist in doubt as to its use in painting. Although Matisse, Picasso and Rouault have affirmed the human form in their work, others like Mondrian, Duchamp and the American school of abstract expressionists have either denied or negated the human form in painting. “We are not stuff that abides but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
Wiener has reduced the organism of man to the metaphor of the pattern, as a message that may be transmitted by radio or TV.
Certainly, if he were given the listing from Joyce’s geography scene, he would leave out the name of Stephan Dedalus and sharply reduce the listing to “Class of Elements” and “The Universe”. So, in the broadest aspect, the artist either affirms the world that he lives in, as Albert Schweitzer has done with his doctrine of “Reverence for Life”; or deny it as Wiener had defined it, of life as an island here and now in a dying world.
