The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  The work stands alone.

  Painting

  “There is no place for pretenders in the world of art”

  – Donald Mackenzie

  In our time, the once seemingly eternal disciplines of painting and sculpture have been dethroned to a kind of symbolic iconography. In the wake of this downfall, the other art forms (music, literature, theatre, architecture) have followed into abstraction, materialism and parody. While in some ways painting seems the least important of the muses (in a utilitarian sense, in comparison with, say, architecture), in other ways painting (at the root level drawing) is the most important of the disciplines. It feels like the first or prime creative impulse that is required for fully understanding all of the others – perhaps as an initial attempt at interpreting life or simply because it is the first art a child attempts, or the first that we attempt to teach.

  When we think of an artist, we instinctively think of a painter.

  However, the science of painting/drawing has of course been largely marginalized by Modernism and divided into illustration (commercial art, for a time) and pure abstraction (the new ‘fine’ art). Illustration was classed as an inferior practice by the new academy, though it retains the only remaining trace of traditional technique. Thus, the illustrators are prevented from reaching the lofty heights of famous ‘Fine Artists’ (a term one cannot help but find ironic) such as Andy Warhol, who did not even paint his own paintings, hiring other people to do so sardonically.

  This downfall is, of course, despite the noble efforts of early golden age ‘illustrators’ such as N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley and others. Their positioning as something lesser than Picasso and Duchamp in the fine art hierarchy indicates the inevitability of their being the last of their line. It goes without saying that abstract painting can only exist as long as there remains some trace of real art to deride and attack.

  “... the more one’s seeing varies from the average the greater an artist one must be. The spread of this idea among students and mediocre painters was one of the aftermaths of the acceptance of Impressionism. It is certainly one of the most attractive ideas ever held out to struggling, untalented young people, leading them to the triumphant discovery that their very clumsiness and stupidities were really signs manua of their being artists, merely results of their ‘personal vision.’ In contemporary ‘modern art’ we see where this idea can take them. The low esteem in which the rendering of physical beauty is now held is one of the oddest peculiarities of recent æsthetic fashion...

  “The ultimate importance of Modern Painting in the history of art will be seen to lie in the fact that it discredited and virtually destroyed the great technical traditions of European painting, laboriously built up through the centuries by a long succession of men of genius. The loss of these traditions has deprived our potential painters of their rightful heritage, a heritage without which it will be impossible for them to give full scope to such talent as they may possess.”

  – Twilight of Painting, R.H. Ives Gammell

  In the good old days, painting represented the forerunner medium for a shift in style that the other disciplines followed. Early examples of all the major styles were often pioneered in painting (Art Nouveau, Romanticism, Neoclassical, etc). Indeed, the origins of art itself could be said to be found in cave paintings.

  Painting and drawing is the creative impulse, the urge to imitate nature with a two-dimensional optical illusion. It is primal.

  And so it is primarily on the various movements of painting that our focus should fall in tracking the timeline of decline. While there is some cross-referencing in different art movements and mediums, and certain movements encapsulate a trend across all the visual mediums — and indeed most certainly do sculpturally — a focus solely on painting will keep things clear. In all other aspects of Western visual art, literature, and music, the trend and the message is the same.

  The origins of Modernism

  To tackle the problem of contemporary art and expose the hazards it poses, we must properly outline its origins. We must piece apart exactly what has happened, to locate the source of the lie so that we might once again in some future time enjoy the popular vocation of art.

  Bad ideas can seem like organisms with a will to live, irrespective of how ill considered they are. They can seem impossible to remove once they take root, like a tick. Their lies only end when they have killed the host organism. Whenever there is a lie at work, all efforts must be made to eradicate it.

  To start, we must re-examine the Modernist art textbooks, in particular their false claim that certain late nineteenth and early twentieth century art styles are in fact Modernism, despite being its polar opposite. To call out this academic falsehood and revisionism is to reclaim sense and sanity from obsfucating buzzwording, which has brazenly confused definitions by claiming art movements to which they have no right. This is where we must dismantle staid convention to have clear definitions.

  The natural power struggle for ideas is a very classical and medieval view that is ancillary to our present modes of popular thought, which teach us that ideas, like people and societies, are all magically equal in every aspect. It is a strange and childish idea but this is nevertheless the veil that conceals reality from us. The idea that Modernism is a hostile ideology imposed on us as a weapon can be hard to grasp in our confused, egalitarian age. To aid in tracing the origins and rise of such an unusual ethos, I will examine individually the popular movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during which it appeared. Such an examination exposes the gradual intellectual degradation that has occurred, hidden or disguised as progress by the support of quasi-Marxists, dishonest conformists, money laundering materialist capitalists, and a broader public apathy. The self-haters and opportunists who have trapped us in this cynical cycle of artistic moral cowardice, who after screeching victimhood until handed the steering wheel of this relativist locomotive have leveraged social conformity and crushing censorship to stay in power. And as mentioned, with artistic decline, rest assured, there follows all variations of societal decline.

  Contrary to what you might think, which is that abstraction was eased upon us indefinably, like the frog in the slow-boiling pot, there is actually an easily definable point of break where the traditional ends and the Modernist begins. That would obviously be the case, one supposes, as they are chalk and cheese, the latter no more than a mockery of the former.

  And so there was no gradual slide: one day there was art, and the next there were kiddy-scribbles.

  The day the scribbling started, a philosophy was born whose aim was to destroy, forever, the real art. Of course, all effort has been made to confound and confuse this inevitability of this war with middle-ground artists who exhibit traditional skill but also dabble in the abstract, and movements like Impressionism that truly and respectfully did push the boundaries of traditional art versus the splatter-painters who mocked everybody. But none of those midway movements alter the reality of having suffered a hoodwinkery.

  Nor has this rift been properly understood in terms of what it actually is. It has somehow evaded rationalization and seems a murky fog of ill-defined terms and generalized humanism. Modernism’s goal is degeneration. Traditionalism and Modernism are completely conflicting views of life and as we can see today in a Modernist environment, traditional art withers. Because we have Modernism, and because it is false and imposed, we are now publicly permitted only specific corridors of thought. In that sense, Modernism has somewhat sneakily become interwoven into the very moral and intellectual fabric of society. With the art philosophy of Modernism supported politically, academically and culturally, high art in total has been successfully toppled by the envious, the egalitarian, the nihilists and the industrialists. Modernism has survived communism — indeed, the Soviets seemed to have a limited though spirited indulgence in it, which speaks to the theory that it is materialist capitalism which represents more wholly the death knell of quality at the b
loody hands of quantity, quality’s oldest enemy. And in our post-Cold War world, Modernist thinking stands ever victorious over the efforts of Promethean man.

  So to examine the history, we must search for the first movement to actually fetishize abstraction. This is not Pointillism, as some may think, but Expressionism and as previously mentioned, the first culprit was Kandinsky, who I will review again in greater detail because nobody knows how starkly Modernism begins – and with whom.

  Kandinsky was a painter and art theorist credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. Whatever his motivations, it is possible they may have been somewhat innocent, as he was a painter of at least mediocre skill (for that time) and had passable works. Whether he falls into the category of a fraud or deluded egoist, judging from his background I would guess he was a mix of both. It is also possible he wanted to intentionally ‘attack’ tradition. But this can only be conjecture. There is an easy and visually apparent divide between art before and after Expressionism. See here an early Kandinsky work alongside a Rembrandt masterwork. The could a child have done this? test can be applied to the Kandinsky and the answer is emphatically yes.

  So we can see Expressionism came right out of the gate in full abstract regalia. However, Kandinsky perfectly exemplifies an example of the ‘crossover artist’ of this period. That is, he was admittedly a moderately competent, talented and trained painter of the classicist tradition, who was, for whatever reason, seduced by the idea of the abstract, or wanted a vehicle to denigrate European traditionalism, or was just goofing around. Whichever it was, he willingly lent his talents to create the first well-known abstract Modernist art.

  There could be many factors behind his motives, ranging from a rebellious desire for fame (attaching oneself to a popular whirlwind) to genuinely believing the philosophies of Modernism — that is, trying to prove that anything or everything is art. As with anything in life, variation is the norm. Whereas criminal characters like Duchamp were likely fraudulent crooks, Kandinsky, often warmly called the father of Expressionism, lent a certain air of sophistication. Many of his pre-abstract works are vaguely Impressionistic and generally of good quality. But he falls over the modernist precipice and into the abyss with his works of pure Expressionism, again for the simple reason of their assumed and unprovable genius, based on principles of nothing more than pure relativism. The random patterns and geometric characters quite visibly enter the realm of ‘shock value’ — to which we are now all very well accustomed. There is nothing to distinguish them from potentially being the work of a child or half-wit. Viewers utterly untrained in art may claim to like these works but it is probably from some total naivety or a desire to be seen as intellectual in a superficial and trendy sense. There are those who simply cannot bear to see things that exhibit excellence, as it reminds them of their own failure, and seek to destroy excellence rather than improve themselves.

  It is precisely his actual talent that makes Kandinsky as a bridge between the real world of traditional Western art and what came after. He applied (as others have) certain basic methods of painterly lore — primarily tricks such as composition — to create abstract works that may seem initially and mysteriously pleasing to the eye. To those not versed in the orders of higher culture, simply using primary or bright colours can be enough to get a good reaction, despite its vulgar obviousness. This, along with his ability to exhibit passable real work (as did Picasso in his early period), lent Kandinsky a sense of credence that excused the work of pure abstraction, which he and all Modernists since pretentiously describe as a journey or exploration. Regardless of what he did or its excuses, success was assured thanks to the Cultureberg mafia.

  But Kandinsky’s silly shapes and squiggle paintings are a direct progenitor of our modern two-bob mass-produced chain store paintings. In the absence of standards we were left undefended before exploitative materialism, to be slowly led down the dark path. Kandinsky has much conspiratorial baggage attached to his name and his background but we must allow that it is always possible he would never have intended for his little scam to blossom into an all-encompassing art ontology. Sadly, his personal motives are not relevant for our purpose and herein the initial blame of ‘first abstract artist’ likely lies. Nowhere in the centuries of European art history predating this do we see pointless, random abstraction considered as art.

  Nowhere.

  No single intentionally disjointed building erected, no conceptual random public space arrangements, no interpretive social commentary performance, no splatter paintings in galleries.

  This is not to confuse random abstraction and intentional ugliness with historical primitive style, such as early Greek ceramics or Egyptian relief carving, where a heavy style was employed which was quite different from, say, a Hellenistic-derived baroque sculpture. Style is of course a completely different thing, unrelated to the narrative-as-art that is our Greenbergian art philosophy. And the more primitive, heavy styles were still æsthetic, still resonate with us, and are within keeping with traditionalism, despite being occasionally claimed by abstractionists as evidence of a sort of primitive Modernism. Often, it is merely primitive because they were primitive, not out of a bizarre forced naivety.

  So to reiterate, Kandinsky can at least be said to have had a trace of talent – not like those who followed in his wake to be exonerated by Greenberg as ‘transcending good and bad’. And despite Kandinsky’s culpability, Greenberg remains the true criminal vehicle for popularising Modernist theory. Later critics and writers expanded and romanticized his bad root ideas, creating this insider cosmos of rationalising absurdity, and not one of them truly examined the root of their rotten tree, which was Greenberg’s glib and psuedo-rational abandoning of standards.

  If we can clearly locate with our eyes, while stepping over the biased art history texts, the original visual art deception, then perhaps we can hope to regain what was lost, to return to the crossroads and take the other path.

  A Truthful art history timeline

  Conformist contemporary art historians maintain the view that the fine arts have evolved along a logical trajectory, an ascending evolution of which contemporary art is in every way a natural progression from the art of Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence and Victorian England. For instance, within such art texts you may see a painting by Jackson Pollock (random splatters of paint) or Andy Warhol (Campbell’s soup cans) on a page facing an actual classical piece by an artist such as Rembrandt or Rubens and you will be thus expected to believe that they are all of equal genius. This will be completely despite your immediate instinct for truth, which is then superseded by our youthful brainwashing, which dictates that our natural instincts are wrong and we simply do not understand or have the skills to grasp why the Pollock painting is genius, despite looking childish and ugly. A great many further people scarcely require a brainwashing as they are mainly waiting to be told what to think. If anything, the implication then becomes that the Modern art on the first page is superior to the older work, as it is so good it defies our senses (which tell us it is bad). This further opens the doorway to reams of Artspeak explaining how the Pollock has done away with the shackles of representation and that it is the now, while Rembrandt was the then. This is to any independent thinker of the remotest intellectual honesty an act of the crudest doublethink. The association is implied, dreamily, but to the questioning mind takes much indoctrination to establish convincingly: a Rothko on the same page as a Titian, as though the parallels were obvious. There are no parallels. In reality, Titian would have called for Rothko to be jailed, or at least placed in a medieval shame helmet. To those reading these Modernist establishment art books (all of them) and not versed in the actual craft of painting – which is more people than ever now that drawing skills are not taught in schools – the genius of the abstract is implied, despite our instincts telling us it is nothing. By shifting the focus from actually making beautiful art to creating a hidden (generally political) message that must be inter
preted from the abstraction, students can be kept busy playing in a funny rat-maze with its own reward and punishment system. When they open their textbooks and see the Cole landscape beside the deKooning, deKooning’s genius is implied and remembered, if not garnered. It is purely a system of authority, genius by association being a subtle but effective sleight of hand. A trusting population simply does not expect to be deceived by its authority figures and so most people merely turn the page and accept that the world is a very funny place, and from there the lie of implied genius passes as a social norm.

  Despite Kandinsky being the first breakthrough abstractionist and thereby the first Modernist, if we are to follow the academic art history texts and online sources generally agree that the root of the break with tradition, the very wellspring of modern art, begins with Romanticism. Of course, this is nonsense that is again provable with observation and reason, despite ‘academic’ sources. In no way whatsoever does Romanticism lead logically into Cubism or Dadaism, or any of that rubbish, as Romanticism is entirely legitimate, retains beauty values and is the deserving heir of previous art movements. This is an example of typical social engineering lies, compelled by cowardly anxiety that shapes the bizarre quasi-religious belief in equality-rhetoric. History is exploited to peddle a false genius by association, simply by saying and doubling down on the proposition that Romanticism is the evolutionary precursor to squiggles for Greenbergian intellectual reasons. It is absolute nonsense, though widely believed because our elites hate our history and the masses still trust them. If, as is claimed by our art institutions, Modernism actually is the logical descendant of the genuine high art that is Romanticism (for the trite reason that Romanticism was also rebellious), then Modernism must be legitimate, despite our eyes telling us they are visually and ideologically opposed. The Modernists merely say it, then repeat it until it becomes socially true. Real truth means nothing to them. The side-by-side examples presented here should help to make it abundantly clear. Romanticism is objectively firmly grounded in true painterly skill. The Abstract Expressionist painting alongside it is not and is not related in any way to the Romantic painting, other than to juxtapose its high beauty standards with outrageously cheap shock value. The Romantic painting requires no further narrative to exist and be admired, the Modernist has no reason to exist other than as backdrop to creative writing defending it. We are to believe the two styles exhibited here are of the same overall movement?