"I have lived for long happy years in a lovely land of art and literature where men strove earnestly, and I think nobly, to create and perpetuate beauty. Now that land has been invaded and overrun by a rabble rout, who have profaned its innermost sanctuaries and polluted them with ugliness and obscenity."................Gilbert Robertson

Views on Art

The quotation above, from the nineteen-forties accords with my attitude to modern art. The present art scene is dominated by people who are promoted to public prominence as part of a cynical manipulation of the system to transfer public money into private hands. They are artists in name only. Few, if any, can draw or paint. Their only quality is a juvenile ability to shock the public. The Tate gallery apparently paid £22,400 for a tin of human excrement and this not even an original but one of a limited edition of ninety. This is where art has arrived in one hundred and fifty years of "progress".

The present state of the art world is one of complete degeneration as anyone with a shred of common sense will recognise. Many art critics, who have followed slavishly every art movement of the past one hundred years, are now beginning to realise that art has reached rock bottom and has nowhere to go. It is quite amusing to see to what point they would like to return in this artistic "progression". More and more people are now turning to 19th century art to try to recover some of the skills which have been lost. I believe that we should try to get some common sense back into art, ignore pickled sheep, dirty knickers, piles of bricks and other such rubbish and return to the old established principles of good drawing, composition, colour harmony, etc., which were the foundation stones of traditional art.

Ever since the Impressionists rebelled against the academic straitjacket of the mid 19th century, we have seen one gimmick after another; the critics apparently considering that anything different must be better. There is nothing wrong with progress but most of the "innovations" of the modernists have been simplistic, trivial, and juvenile. In fact it is quite evident that most of the artistic "styles" which have appeared in recent times would have been tried and found wanting thousands of years ago, when people first began to scrawl on cave walls and pieces of rock with whatever materials were to hand. The only thing new about performance art and other such gimmicks is that the art establishment is stupid enough (or corrupt enough) to throw public money at people with little or no artistic talent. Visual art media generally are vulnerable because of their cheapness and accessibility. Anyone can produce some work in a matter of minutes and claim it to be art. It is notable that other art forms such as literature and music have not degenerated to the same extent, presumably because they require skill and effort. In order to write a novel a person must apply some skill in language and grammar or be laughed out of court. Do we expect a concert pianist to perform without having learned the basic skills? Apparently in painting this is now superfluous. I find it encouraging that every class which I have attended has been full of individuals trying to improve their basic artistic skills despite the constant barrage of noise from the art establishment that such skills are unnecessary.

Ultimately anyone who has any aspiration to be an artist must ask himself "What is art and what is its purpose?". I am sure that art is not merely what any individual considers it to be. If this were the case it would be a pointless term, meaning everything and consequently nothing. A definition that I was brought up with was that art consisted of works that the most skilled exponents of art could agree upon as being the best examples in their field of expertise. I suppose this definition would allow for the best picklers of sheep to establish between themselves which were the best examples of the type and whose were the best dirty knickers! The view of art which I am happiest with is that art is synonymous with beauty. This does not have to mean beautiful subject matter although it is easier to produce an attractive picture with a pretty subject than with an ugly one. I have little sympathy with those 20th century artists who take a subject and deliberately uglify it. What is the point? Do we want to cover our walls with ugly images? What sort of mentality finds this attractive?

A great many people nowadays take what they are told about modern art as being the truth. They believe, in the absence of a contrary opinion, that this represents some new aesthetic experience and that if they cannot see it they must have some sort of intellectual or aesthetic deficiency. I think that they should stop following what is fashionable in the art scene and apply a little common sense to the subject. They should remember that, when they hear many people speaking out in support of modernism, few employed in the field can afford to swim against the tide and express a contrary opinion; the degree of censorship now rivalling that of the nineteenth century academicians. They should stop trying to read meaning into the pretentious drivel with which the art critics of the world describe modernist art. In fact, I think that the main art form of the 20th century has been the convoluted and obscure language expended by the critics in attempting to justify more and more ludicrous attempts at originality.

My favourite artists are the Pre-Raphaelites, the Neo-classicists and others of the late 19th century such as Lord Frederick Leighton, Laurens Alma Tadema, John William Waterhouse, Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore and John Godward. I consider that the beauty and skill evident in the works of the late Victorians represents the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment and that little has been produced in the last century to measure up to it. Victorian art has been denigrated by the modernists - so called - of the 20th century for a variety of reasons none of which bears close examination. For many years books deliberately ignored them and most art students had only a hazy idea of Victorian art. My belief is that the reason for this is that such beautiful well constructed images would not have sat well with the meaningless scribble and daub of the modernists which the writers were trying to promote.

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"Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity."................Oscar Wilde