What is Art?

Art has enriched every known world culture for over thirty thousand years.

From ancient cave paintings to contemporary installations, artists have experimented with the almost infinite possibilities of forms and images. Appreciating art is about exploring our ability to see and understanding art’s power to move, shock and thrill.

What is art? All visual art plays with two things: form and content. Form describes the many visual elements of an artwork, such as colour and its qualities, texture, line, perspective and more. It refers to the materials chosen and the ways artworks are put together. ‘Content’ concerns the work’s subject and the maker’s intended ‘message’, as well as how viewers decide what images and forms ‘mean’. What an artwork is ‘about’ is always more than what it is ‘of’.

Though ‘art’ is often used to mean skilled work, superior to mere craft or design, the idea that art appreciation is about refined taste and quality has faded. So has the idea that art history is about exceptional and beautiful works by individual geniuses, like Michelangelo or Van Gogh. Instead, art appreciation deals with how artworks work and how ideas of beauty function in culture and society: both shaping and reflecting it. The evolution and revolutions of art history teach us about the principles of art and creativity, how we see and why we like what we like. Art history reveals that there is more to art than meets the eye. A bit of background helps us to see differently.

The oldest art

What the oldest art is has been hotly debated. The Tan Tan figurine, a pebble shaped like a human figure from Morocco, is one candidate; it may be 350 000 year old art, but some think it was naturally formed. The oldest securely dated art date to the Stone Age. Rock paintings in Chauvet Cave in France are over 30 000 years old. Anything but ‘primitive’, their skill amazed the world. Located in dark caverns, this art was probably not made to be viewed and its beauty admired. Probably it was made to influence spirits and forces thought to shape people’s lives.

Egyptian art

Egyptian art of five thousand years ago was also not made for viewing, but placed in tombs for the pharaoh’s afterlife. Egyptian artists painted in conventional ways. For example, human figures were always painted from the side, but the eye was portrayed as if seen from the front. They imaged what they knew was there, rather than what they actually saw. The result is a distinctive, instantly recognisable style.

Greek art

Style can refer to individual style, a school of artists creating in similar ways or art typical of an entire civilization. Greek art, the next great landmark, exhibits a very different style. It emerged in the first millennium BC, inspired by Egyptian and Mesopotamian sculpture. Images of the gods gave way to imaging the human body. Male nudes (‘kouroi) were not portraits, but stood for abstract qualities, like honour and ideal beauty. The Greeks explored ‘natural forms’, depicting things as they actually appeared to the viewer.

In the Classical Period, Greek sculptors infused sculptures with more life, using natural poses and after, c. 500 BC, portraying people as individuals, not ideal types. Painted vases show a technical breakthrough, known as foreshortening: a perspective trick in which a foot (or other item) is drawn as it would actually look when viewed from the front. Classical sculpture was put to new uses, adorning public buildings (like the Elgin Marbles, formerly on the Parthenon).Two centuries later citizens were commissioning sculptures, including scenes of everyday life, for private homes. Famous sculptures of this, the Hellenistic phase, include the legendary Venus de Milo.

Roman art

As the Christian era dawned, Roman art placed new value on the likeness of image and subject. Busts of emperors showed them warts and all. Sculpted friezes, like Rome’s Trajan’s Column (about 117 AD), were used to report and celebrate battle victories. Judaism frowned on religious images, but early Christians embraced them to tell religious stories. From the fifth century onwards, Christian art adorned the great basilicas. Statues were too heathen but paintings and mosaics, like those in Istanbul’s Byzantine Hagia Sofia church, were acceptable.

Medieval art

Suprisingly, diverse arts in fact flourished in medieval times, in the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ after the Roman Empire. Best-known are medieval illuminated manuscripts, like the Book of Kells. The monks who copied and transcribed them were unconcerned with creating life-like depictions. Arranging religious symbols and creating harmonious forms focused attention instead on composition and conveying religious feeling.

Renaissance art

From the thirteenth century (the ‘quattrocentro’), new ideas revitalised art and architecture. In Italy, Giotto pioneered new devices, especially ways of simulating depth on a flat plane, in frescoes. The Renaissance, in the fifteenth century, saw a vast shift. Artists, led by Brunelleschi, confronted tradition At the same time, artists made a breakthrough, discovering the mathematical rules of ‘vanishing perspective’: how a small figure on the horizon creates the illusion of depth and distance on a flat surface. Renaissance painters across Europe refined the use of vanishing (or ‘linear’) perspective to produce works that powerfully evoked ‘reality’. Oil paints, fine detailing and new skill in painting light and shadow enhanced the illusion. Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini marriage’ (1434) seduces the viewer into believing that s/he is there, in the moment.

Italian art

In the 16th century (‘quinquecentro’) Italian art was riding high, as artists perfected new techniques. New anatomical knowledge, thanks to grave robbers and dissections, inspired different ways of seeing human figures. Michelangelo’s statue of David depended on new anatomical knowledge and drew on aspects of Classical Greek sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci (died 1521), introduced blurry outlines and blending colours that eliminated the stiffness of fourteenth century paintings. Michelangelo brought the new insights together: harmony, movement, perspective and emotional force. Titian and Correggio experimented with light and colour, stunning contemporaries. Italian art became renowned throughout Europe, though as artists tried to out-paint each other, the church worried that that art for its own sake might eclipse its religious message. Unlike older, traditional arts, painters like Tintoretto, El Greco and Holbein embraced the new.

Baroque art

The rebellious painter Caravaggio spearheaded a new movement known as Baroque. Some think he laid the foundations for modern art. By the early 17th century, Caravaggio had created a new vision, despite the dictates of the church. He was interested in ‘truths’– including ugly, shocking truths. His paintings of Biblical characters as ordinary, even poor, people often offended but his achievement was to paint psychological truths, rather than ordering religious symbols or merely perfecting technique.

Seventeenth century art

Seventeenth century painters, including Rubens, Van Dyck and Velasquez, continued to re-invent painting, paving the way for some of the greatest Dutch artists. As Protestants, they did not paint for popes and cardinals. Controversies over imaging religious subjects led them to perfect painting skies and seas, experiment with still lifes and invigorate portrait painting. Rembrandt’s simple portraits seem to expose the soul, while Vermeer’s domestic scenes capture timeless moments of ordinary life.

Eighteenth century art

Baroque art and architecture eventually became wildly over-extravagant. Eighteenth century art elsewhere took other paths. In France, Watteau harnessed the fashionable Rococo style, which was restrained and delicate. English art had long been inhibited by Protestantism. Eighteenth century English tastes were less puritanical but still valued genteel charm and reason. Hogarth’s paintings mocked pretentious refined sensibilities but his successors, like Reynolds, returned to more ‘tasteful’ painting. In the contemporary Romantic movement, Gainsborough and Turner painted picturesque landscapes that contrasted with spreading industrialization. But, with the French Revolution looming, another rupture threatened.

For centuries art was governed by ideas about correct styles and subjects. Hogarth questioned it and soon others did too. With artists’ choices freer than ever, political subjects gained popularity. David’s painting of the French revolutionary Marat, murdered in his bath, is one example. William Blake refused to follow any line and pursued his own visions. With ‘the right style’ up for grabs, the way was clear for Turner’s swirling experiments with colours. Reason, precise draftsmanship, art clichés and traditional taste were all questioned.

Nineteenth century art

By the mid-nineteenth century, painters like Courbet were painting life’s realities, ditching portraits of respectable citizens and even mocking bourgeois taste. Realism – nothing to do with matters of ‘realistic’ depiction, which is called ‘naturalism’ – championed sincerity, recalling Caravaggio’s quest for artistic ‘truth’. Modern art was part of a wider cultural movement called modernism that emerged as the century drew to a close. Artists’ new concerns echoed the past: the Greeks’ efforts to paint what they saw, not what they knew was there. We don’t see four legs on a galloping horse; so why paint them as if we do?

Impressionist painters like Monet and Renoir explored what we actually see, and how. A tree trunk is not solid colour, but comprises many shades that change with light. The Impressionists analysed vision as a series of impressions, swapping mellow colour blends for brightness and contrast.

In ‘Awaiting the Cue’, by Degas, ballerinas stretch in the foreground, surrounded by partial legs and skirts – as we, and as the new art of photography, would ‘see’ it. In sculpture, Rodin created famous works like ‘The Kiss’. He drew on impressionist ideas about texture and the effects of light, as well as the emerging expressionist fascination with emotion. The Impressionists made a powerful impact, despite initial mockery, but art was already moving on.

Twentieth century art

Cezanne’s paintings rethink Impressionist ideas, paving the way for Picasso and Braque’s famous Cubism. He updated impressionism’s focus on how we see but also imaged nature in a more abstract way. Post-impressionists like Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin abandoned ‘correct drawing’. Van Gogh’s vivid brushwork expresses feeling, rather than mimicking reality. Paintings like the symbolist painting ‘The Scream’, by Munch, also experimented with art’s power to express strong emotion. Emotion intrigued expressionist painters, like Schiele and Kollwitz in Germany and Austria, and the Russians Kandinsky and Chagall.

In the contemporary Art Nouveau movement, artists including Beardsley and Toulouse-Lautrec reacted to mass-produced artworks and industrial architecture with flowing lines and ideas borrowed from elsewhere, such as asymmetrical designs from Japanese prints. Gauguin escaped ‘civilised’ art’ and society in Tahiti. Twentieth century art experiments looked far and wide for new forms.

Picasso too rejected painting what we see and aimed to construct something entirely new. Inspired by the geometric qualities of African masks, the Cubists played with depth, volume, angle and perspective, painting everyday objects as no-one had ever seen them. The painter Mondrian took another path, exploring abstract designs made of straight lines and pure colours. Many artists, like Klee, were fascinated by the process of creating art. Freud’s psychoanalysis was becoming known and artists explored the visions of dreams and the unconscious mind. Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings swap logic for surprise: images are not what they seem, or are ambiguous.

Twentieth century modernism embraced the new machine age and criticised a fast-changing world. Architecture embraced industrial design, while artists explored abstract art. Henry Moore’s sculptures played with volume and space and Rothko’s paintings with colour and spirituality. The abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock involved dripping and splattering paint onto canvasses, exploring the properties of paint and methods of applying it.

Pollock was one of many influential American artists after World War II. Pop art was another radical art movement, that took mass-produced objects – like Andy Warhol’s soup tin – and made them into provocative food for thought about society. Questioning modern art’s principles led to the explosion of the different arts of today. These are broadly grouped together as contemporary or ‘postmodern’. Much postmodern art undermines old ideas about art as illusion by exposing its workings, but there are many strands.

Performance art uses the human body and plays with ideas of the viewer or audience. Conceptual art challenges ideas about what art is, as Marcel Duchamp had once done by exhibiting a urinal: his idea was that anything selected by an artist and exhibited as art could become ‘art’. Installation art works with exhibition spaces, often using multimedia, including video, computers and interactive technologies. Contemporary arts’ success led some to wonder about the ‘death of painting’, but painters still produce triumphantly innovative works.