http://www.batemanideas.com/Bateman on Art
As part of a seminar on Current Theories and Criticisms in Art History, I was asked to give some opinions on the topic of "High art, decorative art and wildlife art, is it mere illustration?"
Another approach to carving up the art field is to make the categories Tough Art and Easy Art. Through most of the history of humankind art has been a natural part of the elaborated life and therefore easy for the public to appreciate. We see it on human bodies in New Guinea, on cave walls at Altamira, on pots, frescoes and canvasses adorning the walls of stately homes. Great composers, playwrights and painters were artisans who were paid workmen's wages for doing a job. Generally speaking, their works fitted comfortably with society and made the world more handsome and, in some cases, more noble and lofty.
During the 20th century an elite group has established itself as a sort of priesthood. They see the artist as a rebel leading the way onto thin ice and difficult tracks. The curator and critic priesthood holds the keys to the kingdom of "High Art". If the painting, music, literature is popular and easily appreciated, it is of no interest to the priesthood. Now that abstract art has become a branch of decorating, the aficionados have moved into tougher territory of nasty art. It is flagrantly anti-aesthetic and shuns the slightest hint of talent. Philip Guston and graffiti art are good examples. Most people do not find this art easy and often react with anger or apathy.
The myth of the artist as rebel really got going in the 19th century. Late 18th century revolutionary ideals captured the imagination of an intellectual elite, particularly in France where they were proud of throwing out the bath water and the baby. The 'Salon des Refuses' became legendary as did the fact that Van Gogh never sold anything except to his brother - and now look at the millions his pictures fetch! Is it, therefore, the logical conclusion that everyone who does something which he and a small circle of friends call art and nobody else likes it or buys, it will one day be recognized as a masterpiece and sell for millions? The Van Gogh phenomenon was a little piece of history and not a permanent condition.
The early 20th century saw the canonization of this myth. It was a great time of ferment. People were sick of the old self-satisfied empires of the 19th century - the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the decayed Ottoman. The clarion call of the intellectuals was "Let us take a new broom and sweep clean!". People were actually running around in black coats with bombs and blowing things up for the sake of destruction. All intellectuals had their favourite "isms" - anarchism, nihilism, Marxism, Leninism, communism, socialism, fascism and modernism. They would pound their red-checkered tablecloths, knock over their wine bottles and say "I have in my hand a manifesto! If everyone follows my manifesto, the world will be a perfect place!" Some art intellectuals called for the burning down of all art museums, for the good of future art.
The first two decades were very exciting. Great modernist breakthroughs happened...Kandinsky did his Pollack precursor in 1910-11, Picasso painted 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' in 1907, Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929 and Stravinsky wrote the Sacre du Printemps in 1913. Modernism was a magnificent creative flowering in a very short time and was pretty well spent by World War II. The driving force was the myth of the artist as a rebel and the rallying cry was "If it has been done before, it's not worth doing again!" Comfortable and bourgeois were to be avoided at all cost. Dealers and millionaire collectors, however, dutifully trotted along just one step behind, hoping for a repeat of the Van Gogh phenomenon. And what was the cutting edge one month became banal the next. The beleaguered avant-garde was forced to retreat further and further up the steps of the ivory tower and on to the precarious parapets where very few would dare to follow. And here we are today. Andy Warhol's famous predication has come true. The avant-garde artists are dying every fifteen minutes and the only thing that is not "in" any more is to say that something is "in".
There was a great hey-day of critics and curators and collectors in the 50's, 60's and early 70's. They had a symbiotic if not incestuous relationship. It was epitomized by the reign of Czar Clement Greenburg. I well remember the day he dropped into Toronto and deigned to put Jack Bush on the map. It was wonderful while it lasted and luckily corresponded with the North American post war boom. The critics and curators were able to show how brave they were in leading the way around the difficult and treacherous parapets. And the status-seeking entrepreneurs obediently provided the cash, plenty of it. Some very exciting work was produced by the big name abstract expressionists, op and pop artists and great collections found permanent homes. But it, like all good things, has come to an end.
The so-called post modern phase has been a desperate attempt to maintain a cutting edge. Installation art and happenings were designed to be impermanent and in most cases intellectually impenetrable. They depended on a grant system which flourished in the 70s and 80s. The influence of political correctness became apparent and talent became undesirable. I was told by a contemporary art curator that "talent had had its turn for centuries, now it is the turn of various minority groups to have a place in our art museums". Since most other fields such as dance, music, sports, etc. still recognize talent, the public seems uncomfortable with post modernism. Because grants are now drying up, this direction is most likely doomed.
It is futile to march behind a banner saying "If it's been done before, it's not worth doing again!". The result was inevitable; art produced just to be different in the vain hope of catching the eye of a big name critic. Thus we had the Venice biennial mid-70's show exhibiting an actual retarded adult on a chair (until humanitarian protesters forced the withdrawal of the "piece").
It would be as silly as shooting fish in a barrel for me to list the hopeless one day wonders exhibited in contemporary art museums and galleries in the 70's and 80's. Many of them might have made decent student projects, but in spite of their efforts to shock they seem quite futile and sadly unmemorable compared to the giants of the 60's and earlier decades. And there is no sign that given time the "cutting edge" of the 70's and 80's will magically grow in stature as in the Van Gogh model. In the early 1980's I read an article by the art critic of the New York Times. He wrote that he was sick and tired of people pestering him with this question on commuter trains, the subway and at cocktail parties - everywhere! The question was: "Who's new?". In this full length article on the front page and continued on the inside he finally answered: "Don't ask me, I am only the art critic of the New York Times. How would I know?".
It might be a salutary exercise to dip back into old issues of elite art magazines from the 40's and 50's right through to the 80's and read the criticism and reviews of the up and coming artists. Then ask the question "Where Are They Today?"...both the artists and the critics. It might help to put current theories and criticism into perspective. Please do not get the impression that I feel that art and criticism are now fleeting and futile. Styles are fleeting but art is not futile. There are more artists out there doing art for the love of it than ever, and the public is more appreciative than ever.
My view of all this is that an artist is an artist, be he/she high, low or decorative. Artists are artists because they can't help it - they just are and they do art for the love of it or because they can't stop themselves. Their prime motives are not the market or what will the critics think or whether they are "High" or "Decorative" or "Tough" or "Easy". This is their piece and they do not need to defend it. The buck stops with them. Take it or leave it!
In my own case, from the age of twelve I was a serious artist. I never doubted I would always be an artist, but never expected to make my living at it. That is why I went into teaching as a meal-ticket so I could paint to please myself and not the market. I evolved through various phases in my 20's and 30's from Group of Seven to abstract expressionism, always depicting, even in the abstracts, nature and wilderness. In the mid-60's (in my mid-30's) I moved into my present style because of my reverence for the particularity of every square inch of the biosphere. I couldn't show biological specificity in general globs of paint. I didn't sell anything until I was 35 and I was a full-time high school teacher until I was 46.
When the books and articles started to come out and I began to become 'famous', I also began to get slings and arrows from certain Canadian quarters. Canadians are famous for doing this to other Canadians in similar circumstances. I guess that it goes with the turf. Sometimes the attacks were snide and personal..."Bateman's studied casualness, with his jean shirt, tweed jacket and Order of Canada in the lapel..." and sometimes they were directed at the publication of the reproduction prints of my work. There is a small coterie of original printmakers who are very angry and feel that if only reproduction prints would vanish, their sales would soar. I would love their sales to soar and, in fact, I make original prints myself and do everything I can to cultivate public taste in that direction. Unfortunately, I doubt that there would be the slightest difference in their sales. Their lamentations have nothing to do with artistic merit and everything to do with market. I have very little interest in the market. I don't paint for prints and I have never painted for the market, but only to please myself. There are hundreds of wildlife artists out there who do paint for the market but in my view that is the sure road to becoming a non-entity. Luckily, other people sell my stuff. I couldn't sell apples as a boy scout.
Oddly enough, the only two critical reviews of any merit came from the American press. They were by the art critics of the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. They were both pans, but handled with balance and intelligence. The Post critic said that my show at the Smithsonian was too grand and glorious and my paintings were also too glorious (Tough Art vs. Easy Art). He said: "Where is the dark underbelly of nature? The death, the dirt, the rotten weather?". He made a very good point! I do, however, sometimes paint death (Vulture and Wildebeest, Polar Bear Skull, Fall - Ovenbird), dirt (Penguins and Whale Bones) and rotten weather (Osprey in the Rain) but the curator, who was a botanist, curated all of my "tough" pieces out of the show despite my protests. The Chronicle critic also praised my style, technique and concepts but at the end said "...however, this is not real art. Bateman's work is mere illustration." He went on to say that real art was about itself, whereas illustration is about something else. To me, illustration has a clear meaning. It is when the idea comes from outside the artist, as an assignment. For example, a book publisher asks N. C. Wyeth to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" or Pope Julius II asks Michaelangelo to depict the story of creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Pure, non-objective painting, I presume, would be "real" art because it is about itself. And so a furniture store abstract that matches your drapes is real art and Da Vinci's "Last Supper" is a mere illustration. It is the word "mere" that I find troubling.
When one thinks of the real problems facing the planet and, indeed, civilization, at the end of the 20th century, the problem of whether art critics appreciate this form of art or that form of art or me seems so minuscule as to be virtually invisible. Being rebuffed by one's peers in the art world is, of course, hurtful, but that has always happened and always will and it really doesn't matter. It is still fun to discuss and dismember... I do it myself, as you may have noticed.
Robert Bateman
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Robert Bateman, OC, OBC (born 24 May 1930) is a Canadian naturalist and painter, born in Toronto, Ontario.[1]
Bateman was always interested in art, but he never intended on making a living from it. He was fascinated by the natural world in his childhood; he recorded the sightings of all of the birds in the area of his house in Toronto.[2] He found inspiration from the Group of Seven; he was also interested in making abstract paintings of nature.[3] It wasn’t until the mid 1960’s that he changed to his present style, realism.[2] In 1954, he graduated with a degree in geography from Victoria College in the University of Toronto. Afterwards, he attended Ontario College of Education. Although the stage was set for an expert wildlife artist, Bateman moved on to be a high school art/geography teacher.[1] However, he still painted in his free time. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that his work started to receive major recognition. Robert Bateman's show in 1987, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, drew a large crowd for a living artist.[citation needed]
Bateman also has approximately six books devoted solely to his paintings.[1] Bateman's decision in 1977 to produce reproductions of his paintings through Mill Pond Press has been criticized by some who feel that the reproductions are "overpriced posters that cheapen the legitimate art market".[2] The reproductions are popular items, being sold in print galleries across Canada and more internationally.
Today, Robert Bateman lives in Saltspring Island in British Columbia with his second wife [4] Birgit Freybe Bateman.[2] Robert Bateman Secondary School in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Robert Bateman High School in Burlington, Ontario, and Robert Bateman Elementary School, Ottawa, Ontario are named after him.
In 2000, Bateman began the Get to Know program in British Columbia to educate young people about nature and to inspire youth to connect to the natural world.[5][6]
In 2005 Bateman volunteered for an assessment of chemicals present in his body that had a proven negative health effect. The assessment was sponsored by the organization Environmental Defence.[7]
In 2007, Robert Bateman and Birgit Freybe Bateman gifted Royal Roads University[1] with original art, gicl
