SCHOOL

With phrases such as ‘the School of Paris’ and ‘the New York School’, art^ historians have invented an inherently ambiguous collective identity for artistic phenomena which bears comparison with two other also rather amorphous concepts – style and movement. However, school, in another familiar usage – referring, that is, to a specific organisation or institution with teachers, students, and shared resources, following a curriculum and process of candidate entry selection, examination, and award (e.g.: medieval craft workshops and guilds, the French Acade´mie des Beaux-Arts, the Slade School of Art, the Bauhaus, and Black Mountain College) – seems a very different and tangible thing. Might the two senses have any overlapping elements? They do, because in the vast majority of cases, actual modern art

schools, for instance, have produced graduates (and faculty) whose interests and working methods, though perhaps common in very broad terms or ethos, always differed and resulted in a range of outcomes – both in terms of teaching practices and in the production of artefacts. What might be called this coherent generality is, arguably, the same sense usually intended by the phrases ‘School of Paris’ and ‘New York School’. Both terms refer, that is, to quite large numbers of artists, in many cases unknown to each other personally, who produced artworks over a number of decades within, or in relation to, a specific place. In the case of the ‘School of Paris’, this grouping – distinct from the more specified art historical terms movement and formation – is usually defined as those artists active in that city, and its related environs, starting with cubism, and continuing, as an agglomeration of producers, products, themes, and styles, between about 1910 and 1940. ‘School of Paris’ principally refers to Parisian residents Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse – two modernist artists regarded as following very different careers and at times actually antagonistic towards each other in a variety of ways during this period of about thirty years. But ‘School of Paris’ also includes all the other Paris-based artists and groups thought to have derived their styles from Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s cubism produced in the early phase, c. 1908-16. In this sense, cubism is represented as an important sub-facet or instance within ‘the School of Paris’ as a whole that denotes a range of shared but very broad thematic and

pictorial concerns explored by artists including Picasso, Matisse, Andre´ Derain, Joan Miro´, Fe´rnand Leger, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet. Though it has been claimed that a ‘School of Paris’ persisted after

the Second World War – and it is possible to assert that such a school continues even now, in that contemporary artists still work in the city and have inherited and/or claimed the artistic culture of the interwar period – art history overwhelmingly agrees that Parisian modernism was superseded, in qualitative terms, by artists based in New York (some of whom, however, were born in Europe), responsible for the style known as abstract^ expressionism, usually dated from the late 1940s. By the mid 1960s it had become common to talk about ‘the New York School’ encompassing art and artists based in the city, roughly between the late 1930s and the rise of pop art. Interestingly, though one of US pop’s chief exponents, Andy Warhol, was a New York-based artist, his thematic and formal interests in the iconography ofmass culture effectively excluded his work from clear definition as ‘New York School’, suggesting that the term had acquired by the 1950s a relatively tight conceptual sense based on principles of ‘gestural’ or ‘hard-edge’ abstraction, and pictorial expressiveness modelled on paintings by Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman

Further Reading

Like the term painting, sculpture has two linked but separable senses. First, it refers to a distinct medium of artistic^ expression in existence over an extremely long period utilising, exploring, and foregrounding three dimensions of material^ form. (In contrast, painters – until the twentieth-century modernists at any rate – focused overwhelmingly on the imagery of their artefacts rather

than their three-dimensional material ‘objecthood’.) Traditional materials used in sculpture have included stone, wood, bronze and other metals, clay, and glass. Second, the term identifies particular artefacts, and can be used, like painting, in ways that combine both these singular and plural meanings: for instance, in the sentence ‘the abstract sculpture of Constantin Brancusi’. The two meanings here are bound up together and it would be common sense to assume that a particular sculpture by Brancusi (e.g.: Bird in Space (bronze, 1927)), constitutes an example of the stable conceptual category of sculpture understood as a medium of expression. Sculptures have generally been carved, moulded, or assembled in a wide variety of manual and mechanical processes developed over thousands of years. To reiterate, sculptures differ essentially from paintings in the very

basic material sense that they are artefacts intentionally and selfconsciously produced within three dimensions of material expressiveness – sculptures are designed to be viewed from a range of viewpoints and many, such as public monuments in town squares and on pedestals, have been made in order to be seen from 360 degrees, or ‘in the round’ (e.g.: Nelson’s Column and the four lions around its base in Trafalgar Square, London (1843)). Some so-called ‘relief ’ sculptures, however, are extremely shallow in material form – for instance those designed as decorative and narrative features for church doors – and in this way resemble paintings (e.g.: Adam and Eve after the Fall, from the bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral (1015)). Distinguishing sculpture from painting is therefore not as straightforward as it may at first seem: paintings conceived as images, though always artefacts made from materials existing in three dimensions, are often considered merely two-dimensional (see Rene´ Magritte’s visual joke making this point, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929) – it’s an image of a pipe). To complicate matters further, sculptures – indeed all objects – also present a single image to the eye when seen from a particular, and often intended, viewpoint (e.g.: Gianlorenzo Bernini, The Vision of St Teresa, altar in Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1644-47)). The use of slides and photographs of paintings and sculptures in teaching and in publications also tends to emphasise their character as image over the facts of their material three-dimensionality. Conversely, though paintings in all cases present what might be called an ‘articulated surface’ of pigment, other substances, and sometimes bare canvas, this surface has not always been entirely flat, or even distinct from a functioning wall or other structure, and has also usually been visible from a comparatively quite wide variety of angles (compare: Morris Louis’s Iris (oil painting

on canvas (1954) and Raphael’s The Liberation of Saint Peter (fresco, Apostolic Palace, Stanza dell’ Incendio, Vatican (1512)). In the past fifty years some artists have sought deliberately to

examine and sometimes undermine distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architectural space. With the objects produced by the late 1960s minimalists, as well as, more recently, by, for example, Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio, it has become possible to talk of works that seem to lie between these categories, confounding normal principles of identification (e.g.: Robert Morris’s Untitled (cut tan felt, various dimensions (1967-68); Lynn and Marcaccio’s Secession Project (multi-media including nylon (1999)).