MANILA, Philippines - Eighth, holistic. This paradigm synthesizes all the pictorial and tactile units including all the above paradigms save feminism into an organized and significant whoIe.
Central in this paradigm is the artwork, the artistic alpha and omega in art criticism. The artist who created the art-piece sourced the content/substance of his art from reality either concrete or abstract, within a particular time-calendar, historical, cultural, socio-political. The percipient-sentient, otherwise known as audience composed of UNI (You and I), will get to know about a particular reality at a given time, and beyond through the artwork.
The following portions of critiques are some examples:
Linda Murray in Michelangelo, noted: "David represented the essence of civic virtue-courage, fortitude, faith... Stylistically, it is... a new statement of an old theme, given a new monumentality."
Murray, however, said nothing about the leftward gaze of David: that this is a recognition that Goliath personified evil. In Mt. 25: 32-33, it says: "All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left." Put simply, right is for righteousness, as left is for lefteousness.
Goya's 'The Execution, May 3, 1808' is a clear indictment on any State inebriated by its power. Craven in A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, declared: "In the spring of 1808, (Goya) was living in Madrid in the Puerta del Sol when Napoleon's namelukes (in Muslim countries, male slaves-pbz), under Murat, marched into the city. It was the second of May; the nobility stayed within doors and covered their heads, but the loyalists, the people, practically unarmed, resisted the invaders. The next day the bloody reprisals began and the populace was slaughtered at the city gate. Goya painted the massacre-with a spoon, it is said-and bequeathed to mankind, not the most tragic or the most touching commentary, but the most frightening curse ever uttered against the universal evil: a night scene with a ragged group frozen with the fears of sudden death; men with their hands sticking up; men hiding their faces; men clenching their fists; dead bodies in pools of blood-impotent civilians before a firing squad".
The critic-editor ended his incisive critique with this challenge: "A reproduction of this picture, in color, should be hung in the council chambers of the war lords of all nations".
In 'Guernica', Picasso sourced his subject from a concrete and historical, if brutal reality, namely the bombing of a Basque town, Guernica, during the Spanish civil war in 1937. Curiously, in this civil war, Germany and Italy supported Franco's rebel forces against the Loyalists who were aided by Russia. Who knows, these foreign countries might have contributed to the carnage that ensued. The pictorial units-men, women, children, ghosts, bull, horse, bird, tongues of fire, sword, ceiling bulb, gas lamp, swing door-are cut up into sharp-edged geometric shapes, with generally pointed corners.
The woman at the left writhes in extreme pain, the parts of her body brutally dismembered, but still nurses her baby. Message: Let not war deny a baby 'of life's nourishment. A soldier lies near the left bottom corner, but his right arm, detached from his body, still clutches his broken sword firmly: the symbol of his power and authority. The bull, symbol of aggression, snorts its last, just as the horse, measure of power and speed, neighs its last.
Picasso used off-white, gray and black-all deathly colors. End-message: War is brutal. The end is final-death.
Another work by Picasso, 'Les Demoiselles d' Avignon' (The Ladies of Avignon), shows five women, au naturel in progressive cubism from the lady at the left to the right. Two oval shapes "are formed, with the cleaved arms of the central lady and the tip of the table at the bottom, center, as a shared linear property. Two diagonal lines are created by the blurred shapes, sharp and pointed contours and juxtaposed colors. And where the two criss-crossing diagonals meet-which is that part of the central lady's anatomy-that is the focal point.
Avignon at the onset of the 14th century, was a "Papal seat" (1309-77). However, in the early 20th century, this city on the SE France on the Rhone, became a sin city. The five ladies of Avignon are thus exposed as sex workers, to use today's euphemism.
But Picasso did not ridicule, despise, dehumanize them. He gave them the dignity they deserve as human beings. He called them "ladies."
Madonna and Child, a ubiquitous religious theme in European art regardless of period, gives primacy to the Madonna, Virgin Mary, as clearly written in the billing. Pictorially, the Madonna is almost always centrally located in the composition, and is visually and spatially engaging.
All this relegates the Child, Jesus Christ, to the periphery. Paintings with this pictorial presentation run counter to the Lord's word in Mt. 18:20: "When two or more are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." So how come such tangential paintings are kept in the air and heat-conditioned museums, with millions of reasons attached to them? And are called "masterpieces" even?
The painting of Charito Bitanga, 'Composition in Green,' challenges the eye, intellect and awareness of the viewer on universal constructs. Exploding and imploding shapes, in light-dark alternations, follow either a tunnelized path inward or outward, in the process submitting to linear diminution for a continuous action. No need to look for outside referents. The universal constructs of unity, tension and action, are the overriding reasons for this abstract's work's reason for being.
In sculpture, Michelangelo did an incisive reading and depiction of 'Pieta.' Jesus Christ, in a lambent horizontal, serves as the counterpoint to the generally upright torso of Virgin Mary-strong in controlled grief. An icon is formed: cross.
Two small tactile details, always overlooked but not now, are the forefinger and middle finger of Christ's right hand, fiddling a fold of the Virgin's long garment. This major theological truth is revealed: Jesus Christ is dead, but he is spiritually alive!
Murray's critique is worth quoting in part: "... (T)he Virgin and her dead Son become in (Michelangelo's) hands the supreme expression of sacrifice, resignation and aesthetic beauty. He was inspired by Quercia's bulky and timeless draperies, and by Leonardo's concentration on the meaningful relationship of figures, to enlarge the mass of draperies over the Virgin's knees into a pedestal for the limp body of the dead Christ, so that she who gave Him birth becomes the altar on which His sacrifice is offered-God's surrender of Himself to be martyred by man... (A)nd the criticism that she looked too young to be the mother of a man of 33 was countered by Michelangelo's own argument that her purity and virginity prolonged her youth and arrested the normal process of decay..."
Extro
Paintings and sculptures are significant visual and tactile objects because they depict the image of man and society. They are universal. Timeless.
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