The Paintings of Martin Berkovitz - The twentieth century is over. Modernism is over. An era has ended. It' s time to take stock, to re-evaluate, to move on.

Essays / The Geography of the Visual Arts


The twentieth century is over. Modernism is over. An era has ended. It's time to take stock, to re-evaluate, to move on.

Perceptions and values formulated a century ago have become frozen. What was new, vital and original a hundred years ago has become tired orthodoxy. The old modernism is now the new academy that has replaced its nineteenth century counterpart. The circle is complete. It is time to break it and forge a new path into a new century.

Early modernists felt the urgent necessity to free themselves from a tradition that placed primacy of subject matter above purely plastic values. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century young artists must free themselves from the primacy of purely plastic values, or as it is called, “pure art”. This ideology has taken on the authority of a secular religion.

This leads me to what I call the geography of visual art. Like our planet it has two poles. One is design, the other is illustration.

When Picasso and colleagues formulated cubism with its emphasis on the purely formal aspects of picture making, they inaugurated what would become the dominant direction, tone and belief system of twentieth century art. With a near obliteration of pictorial themes, plasticity henceforth would become arts new and “pure” subject matter.

This was largely a reaction to the nineteenth century salon tradition with its heavy emphasis on subject matter, religious, mythological, historical, social, etc., art's illustration pole. In the new century the design pole would come to be seen as the sole legitimate direction for “true” art.

Just as in the early twentieth century academic artists saw the new emerging pole as nonsense and non-art, so after a century of modernism do contemporary artists and art professionals view new art that moves toward the illustration pole as non-art. The very word illustration has come to mean non-art.

At this point in art history both extreme views should be seen as an outdated and unproductive way of assessing art. Both poles exist, will always exist and artists will always shuttle between them.

A point about illustration. Before the early twentieth century the radical distinction between illustration and fine art was far more permeable. Daumier, Dore, Beardsley, the posters of Lautrec and Muncha were appreciated as true art. This is not to mention such literature-dependant schools as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists. In other traditions Japanese woodblock print-makers, Persian miniaturists, and medieval illuminated manuscript artists were and are regarded as some of history's greatest artists. By contemporary values this is all illustration, yet contemporary art is okay with all this because its historical. However, should a present day artist move in this direction it is seen as backsliding non-art.

What is important to keep in mind is that this only reflects the bias and prejudice of modernism, itself already an historical movement. It in no way reflects a universal ultimate truth about art. No movement, past present, or future can make such a claim. All that can be said of succeeding periods is that they express their unique truth and power.

Surely, it is now overdue to jettison such prejudiced perceptions. It is my belief that artists and art professionals who can free themselves from such antique intimidation and who can forge a synthesis between the poles will be able to lay a foundation for art in our century. Such art will have the liberty to utilize all arts options, sprung from ideological constraint. From this new freedom a truly new art will emerge.

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