As an artist I find myself increasingly unsure of what is art, what is not, and how to define or even recognise a ‘masterpiece’. Museums are full of masterpieces as chosen by an artistic elite, remnants of long expired artists and the cultures that supported them. Today, the word “master” or “masterpiece” has lost its meaning because it is not based on anything tangible. In medieval times it was technique-based. The apprentice was permitted entry to the guild on the basis of having mastered specific skills. What it means today is anyone’s guess when for instance a metal sculptor sends his work to a factory to be rendered from a maquette. I have no doubt that some work is worth preserving for a variety of reasons but technical mastery as the sole criterion isn’t one of them.
Author Joyce Cary said ‘Nothing is a masterpiece – a real masterpiece – till it’s about two hundred years old’…… if it lasts that long. Think of Pollock’s Blue Poles falling off the canvas and de Koonings in general sliding off the canvas because he used ultra, slow drying safflower oil to say nothing of artists mixing media in ways not recommended by the manufacturers and all of the installations and performances existing only as photographs. Photographs are notoriously one dimensional when it comes to capturing the physicality, let alone the experience. Does a work even have to be in physical existence to qualify?
Carey’s dictum takes us back to 1820 where Stothard, Raeburn, Van Dyke and William Blake were alive, all in some way producing art for a commercial market or in Blake’s case, lost in mysticism. They are all of their time and the world of art history is littered with the corpses of artists who were revered in their day and are now not just forgotten but forgettable – other than William Blake of course who was busily creating his own brand of inscrutability.
A second suggestion is that for a work to be declared a masterpiece it must influence generations of artists and change the way that people look at the medium — be it painting, sculpture, decorative art or whatever. It must be so startingly original that any artist who goes in that direction is accused of being in the shadow of the original. There are numbers of works that are so distinctive and so popularised that they are anathema to generation of artists who may well venerate the artist and work but does that make them masterpieces? Even the great artist Rothko suffered the indignity of the Marlborough Gallery dividing his work into two columns – masterpieces and the rest. Even the masterpieces disappeared into a warehouse as unsaleable. It’s Rothko’s fault for producing so much work apparently and he should have taken a leaf out of the books of Vermeer and da Vinci and produced barely a handful of works. Just look at da Vinci. During a lifetime of producing battlements and weapons of mass destruction for a variety of warlords, he carried the Mona Lisa around and fiddled with it for decades. An eyebrowless, jaundiced woman, endlessly copied by not just da Vinci’s students but reproduced ad nauseam by the Louvre as a photograph stands as the pinnacle. For da Vinci it was somewhere between a technical exercise in sfumato and an enigmatic portrait. He might himself be embarrassed to find that the Mona Lisa is cast in the light of masterpiece when he was still altering it decades after he started. Any one of his religious paintings may well have been his preference.
A third idea has a masterpiece crystallising a set of artistic and cultural values as well as demonstrating technical brilliance. Again, there are endless versions of landscape painting, portraiture and the rest in recent times where technical brilliance is in evidence and as for ‘values’, artistic or otherwise, encapsulating the times, the decades of the 20th century are separated by just such distinctions. Jeff Koons puppy and use of balloons may well typify a culture that values the crass, but I would be loath to add the term ‘masterpeice’ to any of his oeuvre. He is endemic to his time but just who’s culture are we talking about?
There are however, common qualities that every masterpiece shares according to experts. Some emotion must be evoked, whether it’s curiosity, awe, or disgust. There should be style, technique, balance, and harmony. We’d all be hard pressed to disagree. But still, this would not describe that elusive element essential to any work that is intangible and presumably separates the masterpiece from the doggerel.
Having noted that, I was recently reading about the four levels of being as elucidated by the philosopher Schumacher from the inanimate [sand, rock] to the plant to the animal to the human. Of the four levels, only humanity measures its existence, and we presume gives meaning to life, through a series of ‘invisibilities’ – intuition and faith being two of them. Neither are based on logic or reason or science and only those with the capacity to recognise a higher state of being need apply. The judgement of the masterpiece in art could be said to be in in the same category. However, last week, a painting that had been declared to be a worthless copy for several centuries [even though beautifully painted] has now been recognised as a ‘lost’ masterpiece. How several hundred years of experts could have been so wrong is anyone’s guess. Apparently, faith and intuition failed as guides.
Today I read two articles. In one an artist had won acclaim in foreign parts for a prize-winning watercolour and was now part of a permanent collection and in the other, the works of Francis Bacon, other than Three Studies At The Base Of A Crucifixion from the outset of his career had experienced an 80% drop in value over the last two years. While all of that can change in a trice, what was a masterpiece yesterday, could be less so today and no doubt Dear Francis would be rightfully concerned that his first major work was considered the pinnacle of his output when there were so many screaming archbishops and pictures of the men in his life that he may well have considered to be superior. As for the watercolour artist, a moment’s acclaim amounts to little. Acquisitive competitions abound and even one or two of my works have ended up in obscure collections never to be seen again. I would be embarrassed to think that any of them were categorised as ‘masterpieces’ on the basis that they had won a competition and not that I qualify for inclusion in the two hundred year criterion in the first place even if I feel at least half of that on any given day.