BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

                                                                                --> Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici. Detail from the fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Cappella dei Magi, at Palazzo Medici Riccardi Florence, --> By Alexandra A. Jopp The notion of magnificence is often associated with fifteenth-century Italian art, especially with monarchies and Italian courts whose art commissions were inspired by motives of commemoration, prestige, power, and fame. According to this context, magnificence consists of various series of expensive building projects. How...

--> --> Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511-12  BY ALEXANDRA A. JOPP The relationship between an artist and a patron during the Renaissance was a subtle one. Money can buy a lot of material objects, and in Renaissance Italy, it could buy even more important things, including status, respect and “the long lasting of [a patron’s] name and reputation, for which man’s desire is infinite.” (Nelson, Zeckhauser, 42.) All of these could be acquired by becoming a patron of the arts and commissioning a work that proclaimed one’s devotion to God, city, even oneself. Jonathan Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser in The Patron’s Payoff cite the example of the Florentine merchant and patron Giovanni Rucellai who “spent a great deal of money on his house, the façade of the church of Santa Maria Novella, the chapel and tomb in the church of San Pancrazio, and other projects.” These commissions, Rucellai said, brought him “the greatest contentment and the greatest plea...

By Alexandra A. Jopp As Dutch-born historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon said, “The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.” [1] Indeed, art can tell us with remarkable accuracy a great deal about lives and cultures, both our own and those in other parts of the world. It can illustrate the tides of social and political change, the strengths and weaknesses of new trends, and the flaws and crimes of oppressive regimes. American artists in the 1960s had the good fortune to be working in a free environment that allowed them the opportunity to change the nature of the creative process. Their revised fields of vision explored the ways in which artists changed the core of formalist aesthetics, which resulted in changes of perception, as well as, to quote Morris, an “attempt to contradict one’s taste.” Morris further remarks in Notes on Sculpture IV that “changes in form can be thought of as a vertical sc...

By Alexandra A. Jopp Modernism was the “cultural outcome of modernity, the social experience of living in the modern world.” [1] Many artists and critics, starting in the 1940s, abandoned traditional historicism and art forms in favor of a search for new standards, leading to an abundance of original writings, actions, reactions and artistic developments. When reflecting on how Modernism influenced art in the 1960s, it is important to note the role of American art critic and formalist Clement Greenberg, who had great influence as an arbiter of artistic quality, taste and value. His “Greenbergian Modernism” linked “high modern” art with artists who worked to refine a medium-specific approach to their work, and he preferred, above all, painterly Abstract Expressionism, especially Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. For Greenberg, the highest form of art was that which concerned itself so strictly with its medium and essential materials that the work was about the medium and noth...

By Alexandra Jopp Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)  (CONT.) About the Artist The Independent: "Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is the great painter of loss and longing. He painted Romantic landscapes – ruins, forests, mountains, oceans, nights. He said: "Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye; then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in darkness, so that it may react on others from the outside inwards." He composes scenes in mystic symmetry. He obscures things in mist or distance. He puts a mute element bang in the middle – a back-turned figure, a rugged cross. And the imagination rushes in." Religion Friedrich’s introspection paralleled his religious convictions and inspired him to paint nature scene combined with mysticism. Friedrich was once quoted as “the spirit of the world which is God reveals itself visibly and completely in nature…” (Siegel 35). The spiritual elements often make con...