Wise to Art

The vast diversity that the European continent has brought to the art of pictorial expression has been remarkable throughout the ages. The present difficulties with the current European Union show that the underlying and fundamental heterogeneity of this part of the world is still very much a reality, in spite of ongoing unification and accruing globalization.

However, modern times tend to confine the adjective ‘European’ to its geographical content, at the expense of the more subtle and historical connotation of ‘cultural diversity sprung from a common ground’. The ‘ground’ in question would be the values that shaped the western world over the last millennia, the ‘diversity’ the result of the relative isolation in which the different geographical parts evolved.

The idea of a possible extinction of the latter sense of ‘European’ took form in the 1960’s and it has gained momentum ever since. We may consider that this semantic evolution has entered its terminal phase as we advance into a largely standardized 21st century. Media, flux and migrations increasingly make the world a mono-cultural society where geographical origin ceases to be a diversifying factor. In fact we are inevitably moving ahead, not only towards the end of European diversity, but towards the end of cultural diversity in general. This evolution is certain to be accomplished during the decades to come.

We can remain neutral as to the worth of this evolution and yet clamour with reason that our interest in art, as expression of human perception and sensibility, is diminishing as standardization, reproduction, simplification and streamlining take hold.

This makes pre-1960’s art all the more interesting. Not from a nostalgic viewpoint but simply for its variety. In these works we are facing a familiar yet puzzling manner of viewing the world whose diversity is still astonishing and above all stimulating. From that point onwards, the art world seems for a large part to have fallen into repetition, make-believe and navel-staring.

For European painting, the subtleness of viewpoint, coming from a geographically small but still highly dismembered whole, created optimal conditions for innovation and creativity. Encounters with differently formed sensibilities brought dynamism to individual work, akin to the beneficial ‘melting pot effect’ that New York City enjoyed in the last decades of the 20th century thanks to a highly multicultural population.

An international style has emerged, supplanting the old concepts of regional schools and national manners. As everything went global, so did inevitably painting. In the recent revival of painting as art form this evolution is especially striking. Nothing in contemporary painting will make a particular cultural reference evident. For some time already, the adjective ‘European’ as a cultural precision has become meaningless.