Modern Painting and Art History

Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Oil on canvas, 153 cm × 118 cm

Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Hegel famously said that we are all children of our times. In the context of art history, the implication is that we have to study the cultural conditions under which artworks are made in order to fully understand and appreciate them: “For, on account of its nature, at once material and individual, the work of art issues essentially from particular conditions of the most varied sort, amongst them especially the time and place of its origin, then the specific individuality of the artist, and above all the technical development of his art.  Attention to all these aspects is indispensable for a distinct and thorough insight into, and acquaintance with, a work of art, and indeed for the enjoyment of it…” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1998, a34-5).

Hegel’s idea here is that art history starts with the dissolution of art, the condition under which our experience of artworks is mediated by theory.  Once our experience of art is unhitched from its role in our sittlich (or “social-worldly”) religious practices, it becomes mediated by art historical knowledge.  That’s true not only for the viewer but also for the painter, who in the modern period must act from some emic view of art history, some native sense of what the available moves are.  Therefore our knowledge of any painting, but especially a modern one, must include the details of how the painter viewed art history and his or her location in it.  So a full explanation of how a modern painting physically looks may often involve reference to the painter’s self-perception and self-interpretation.  Painters deliberately engage in dialogue with other painters and artists, and it’s within this dialogue that any one personal effort makes sense.  The work of an artist is now not to represent or transcend nature, nor merely to express their own times, but to find for themselves a location in art history.