Sanitaryware Promotions India

COURSE 1: INTRODUCTION
Jacques rouveyrol

1. Overall objective of the course: become familiar with contemporary art .

1.a. The paradox :

We have a great familiarity with contemporary technologies. The aircraft, automobiles but also become digital television, mobile phone multifunction computer, the Internet, the most sophisticated software does not surprise us more. We can marvel at such ingenuity, the rapid evolution of these technologies, but we are familiar .

In contrast, contemporary art available to us under the auspices of the e strangeness. It seems too often incomprehensible. There is a paradox. We our time for technical another time for artistic production.

1.b. The average familiarize ourselves:

We must go to an art that we be as alien that contemporary art. This is true of the Middle Ages.

There is a false familiarity of medieval art. He remains with us. Not a village in France who has his church of the twelfth or thirteenth century. Medieval castles in the countryside also populate their steep sides.

Yet he exudes a genuine " strangeness."

2. The prejudices.

2.a. The Middle Ages as a dark age .

a. Antiquity is familiar through the Renaissance. This gave the honor as well as sculpture Greek or Roman architecture. The mythology is coming if not replaced at least compete with Bible as a source of artistic achievements

b. Our basic design is the art of the Renaissance. This is the perspective learned during "drawing" (before the plastic arts do not come to replace the school). It's a thousand works that adorn our major museums. It is advertising that borrows from the paint (like music) models. Our eyes are fully "informed" by the aesthetics born in this period and maintained until the late nineteenth century. Our look is the fifteenth century.

c. Therefore, the Middle Ages is seen as a cultural chaos, a "parenthesis" between antiquity and Renaissance.

2.b. The Middle Ages, real basis of our culture .

Yet, and this is a new paradox, antiquity is actually a world that is foreign . Renaissance is a development of the medieval world.

The "French Landscape" is more medieval than Renaissance. Our culture is Christian calendar of feasts and saints, and our moral values are Christian. The school comes from the Middle Ages (Charlemagne and Alcuin, his "minister" of education). The layout of some areas of our cities date from the Middle Ages. Many villages in the countryside, seen from a distance, have a look not much different from the one they had in the Middle Ages.

2.c. Prejudice romantic.

This appearance Dark Age made in our minds by the Middle Age also comes from the romanticism of the nineteenth century. It feeds on "dark forces" is genius in the romantic Gothic novel. Monk Lewis is a good example. But both the Faust of Goethe.

's fascination with ruins that characterizes the romance is more oriented to the ruins of the Gothic to those of Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Roman Forum or the Athenian Acropolis.

2.d. Prejudice "modern"

There is still, to go abroad in the Middle Ages, a prejudice about modern architecture. This, from Le Corbusier is functionalist. The function of a building or part thereof must be read in its form immediately. This is not the case in medieval churches (which is a mistake since on the contrary, at the height of the Gothic classic the cathedral gives a real treaty embodied in architecture).

2.e. The prejudice of beauty.

can enter a church and find the vault beautiful, beautiful capitals or the tympanum of the portal. This assessment was anachronistic. Romanesque sculpture is not "beautiful." Do not try to be. The judge such, is to see with eyes Renaissance. And this prejudice is one more obstacle to understanding the art of this era. Because we will also say that This beautiful sculpture is not since the body is distorted, unbalanced (not according to the Canon Greek). But, again, this was not the aim of the artist as beauty.

3. The effort required to understand .

must therefore make a effort to understand the Middle Ages. Just as we must make a effort to understand contemporary art. It is the similarity of these efforts that justifies this course instead of starting with antiquity begins with the Middle Ages . The same work is done to get to one as to another.

In both efforts, we will use throughout this course will attempt to characterize the periods and artistic movements more by what distinguishes them as by what unites them, a necessary step during initiation.

JR