The Paintings of Martin Berkovitz - In the last sixty years art has become remarkably depersonalized.

Essays / Heart, Art's Spirituality


In the last sixty years art has become remarkably depersonalized. When I lived in New York during the sixties I would often hear artist talking about how they felt the pressure to do something that had never been done before. That always meant stretching our views of art by pushing its form to unlikely configurations. It meant making art that didn't look like art. It meant innovation for innovations sake. And it always meant just changing the formal plastic elements of art making. It was in fact, an inside out approach.

Art is, and always has been, an expression of the artists life experience. This involves memory, impressions, feelings and associations. It is an internal vision that is the result of a lifetime. An inner world that reflects the outer world of experience and the inner one of thought and feeling. This was and is essentially art's direction, working from the inside, from the center out. This results in highly meaningful personal expression.

What I heard and saw many artists doing from the sixties onward was just the opposite. They were working only on the outside. In my own work I abandoned this approach after the mid-sixties. Life was far too rich for such impoverished experimentation. I also came to believe that truly innovative art is the by-product of the search for inner personal expression. All that should really involve an artist is that expression. If it turns out to be formally innovative then so much the better. Such art will function on the emotional, intellectual and spiritual planes simultaneously. This will inevitably give birth to new looking art without that forced desire to innovate.

And such art will have heart. Heart is something that hasn't had much of a place in recent art and understandably so for such real emotion (versus a shallow and artificial sentimentality) can only issue from the deepest inner expression, the distillation of a lifetime's experience.

It is my hope that young artists coming along will rediscover this timeless source of creativity. That formal innovation for itself will recede as an artistic priority and that the magic fusion of the outer and inner world of the artist's experience will once again become the wellspring for important art.

After all, the definition of spirituality as communion with that deepest and most profound part of ourselves is also the very definition of art itself.

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