E46: "The Arts speak not only to us but about us". Discuss.

The instinct to produce an art-form is just one of a series of factors which differentiate us from the animal world. It dates back at least as far as the cave-dwellers of pre-history who produced wall drawings which possess both artistic ability and emotional power. Hunting is the main theme of these, but the situations depicted between man and beast are those of stress and danger. Were these drawings meant to exert a cathartic effect on man's natural fear by giving him a constant reminder of the worst he would have to face?

Throughout recorded history, painting has fulfilled this dual role. Subject-matter, depicted in tempera, fresco, oil and color wash, has reflected every facet of human life and activity and of the natural world. In most periods, there seems to have been cultural freedom, but not in all. Fashion, convention and religious pressures have dictated both subject-matter and treatment in certain periods. The various European schools of the Middle Ages, with the exception of the Dutch and Flemish, largely confined themselves to religious and mythological subjects. These paintings were gifted but stylized. Following the Reformation, these constraints disappeared, and subject-matter broadened, though favorable portraiture of the aristocracy, who patronized prominent painters, has continued until modern times. Turner was the catalyst in shifting from the constraints of objectivity to the freedom of subjectivity. His work inspired the Impressionists, who painted according to their own often subconscious reactions to the subject-matter. This freedom allowed as much to be read into the character and outlook of the painter as into what appeared on the canvas.


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