Abstract
This chapter explores morality in relation to painting in three eras: early modern painting, painting in the twentieth-century, and painting from the end of the twentieth-century and through into this century. Two early modern painters (from the mid-1600s) are considered in comparison with two modern painters as a way of highlighting significant differences within and between early modern and modern eras. From the end of the nineteenth-century, modern painting was a closely associated with the avant-garde and its hopes for moral and social renewal led by artists. But, after two world wars, these hopes had reduced to despair and scepticism, and artists had turned to the absurd in Dada, and increasingly away from figurative or expressive work toward abstract painting, minimalism, and subsequently to Pop-art. There was little from any of these movements that engaged—with any seriousness—moral, social or political issues. There were moral issues raised by the relationship between money and art as an enterprise, but few prominent artists who expressed moral issues in their work. Nevertheless there were notable exceptions, and throughout the twentieth century some artists continued to work in figurative and expressive forms. Major artists, including Picasso and Diego Rivera, along with less prominent artists such as Ben Shahn, have painted works that expressed moral concern. Since the 1980s, figurative painting has regained its importance and this has brought attention to artists like Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas who raise—or at least allude to—subjects with moral overtones.
In summary, this chapter addresses shifts from the role of art as moral instruction in early modern painting; to the high hopes for moral renewal through modern painting that were ultimately disappointed in the twentieth-century; and on to the more enigmatic and elusive images of moral concern expressed by painters in this century.
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Notes
- 1.
Bible, New International Version, 2 Samuel 11:2–16.
- 2.
See Chap. 15 for a discussion of Berys Gaut’s moral theory ‘ethicism.’
- 3.
Impressionism was more than “merely retinal” however and was “an art grounded in working-class or populist ideology that nonetheless appeals largely to the bourgeoisie” [18, pp. 48 and 50].
- 4.
Hughes describes Rothko as “theological” and “obsessed with… religious meanings” [14, pp. 314 and 320].
- 5.
For example, in 1947 Rothko wrote of “transcendental experiences” for the artist [22, 24, p. 58]. In the 1950s, he wrote: “there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination” [24, p. 143]. Fischer, noting Rothko’s “contradictions” wrote that “in spite of his denial” he saw in Rothko’s paintings “an almost religious mysticism” [7].
- 6.
- 7.
Rothko regarded a critic’s comment that his paintings were “primarily decorations” as “the ultimate insult.” Fischer notes: “Rothko… deeply resented being forced into the role of a supplier of ‘material’ either for investment trusts or for [the critic’s] aesthetic exercises” [7, 24, pp. 130–138]. See Schjeldahl on Rothko as not decorative [25, p. 16].
- 8.
Rothko said that, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people beak down and cry when confronted by one of my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them” [24, p. 119].
- 9.
Gaut’s theory is outlined more fully in Chap. 15.
- 10.
- 11.
Although I do not accept that auction values for paintings are definitive of a painter’s standing or worth, it is nevertheless of interest that Dumas was ranked in the top 20 ‘living artists’ in 2005 on this measure [8].
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Emeritus Professor Miles Little for his thorough and helpful review of an earlier version of this chapter, for his many suggestions, and for steering me away from tangential irrelevancies. I thank my cousin Malcolm McNeill, who came to stay, read an earlier version and suggested a number of relevant artists (including Shahn and Dumas) that helped me to bring my material into the current century. Any errors and distortions in this work are, of course, mine.
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Macneill, P. (2014). Modern Painting and Morality. In: Macneill, P. (eds) Ethics and the Arts. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8816-8_4
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