Warburg and Poliakoff, Movement and Style (a contribution to the contemporary study of images and paintings) (original) (raw)

2012, Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts

It is necessary, for those who dedicate themselves to the activity of painting, to possess a wider view that can gather a certain number of references which tend, collectively, to an idea of a group: a group within which the characteristics of its own references are collected, possible but solid ones, that can function as a support for a construction based on the secular exercise of painting. This foundation of painting in its sources (or, as we say in the artistic field, in its 'influences') is not just an excuse on the part of the painter with the intention of an immediate justification and integration of his creation in the cultural context of Painting in his own time, something which would make him start from the ends to justify the means (the ends being the consumption of his pictorial production by the public). Nor does it serve a facilitated autonomous creation of value, with the concern of pre-establishing a secular program that would make painting more authentic but devalues the real process of pictorial creation that accompanies, step by step, any painterly production, from the beginning to the end and that can and should, from the beginning to the end, include that very process. The foundation of painting on its sources or 'influences' serves, rather, to achieve its integration in a group of reference from which painting, any true painting that aims at the present, can and should take part. This work aims at an updating of the analysis of these influences from the means which serve as references to the pictorial analysis and creation: the images (reproductions) and the paintings themselves.