Art and Truth
Art tries to move beyond the reality of the world and show truth about something more. It is a mediated experience with the artist made stylistic choices to portray something. However, art never captures an experience as a person would actually experience it. As Picasso said, “we all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand” (Borofsk). If art was a perfect copy of the world it would lose its value. If there is a painting that truly captured a situation, and you then actually experienced it in real life, what would the point of the painting be? It would lose any meaning. The value of art is not in the ability to capture exactly what we already see in …show more content…
The attempts at showing a truth in art over the history of art has changed over time, artists often moved away from realism as the best way to represent a ‘truth’. Impressionism and symbolism were reactions against realism. The idea behind these styles was that we don’t see the whole world, only impressions and that statements about truth can only be represented with metaphors or symbols. These movements were attempts to move past just the visual sense to portray a deeper image that would better capture an experience. Michelangelo’s Pieta employs distortion from what reality would have been to show more about the relationship between Mary and Christ. This artistic choice is in a sense a ‘lie’, but evokes more pathos and gives the audience more insight into the situation which is the ‘truth’. Art often uses exaggerations or distortion to better show truth, by going beyond the realistic you can often show more of the essence of something. Picasso’s Guernica shows the atrocities of war and, although it is not painted as someone would truly see the event, it gets the emotion and ‘truth’ of the situation across. This not to say that a work like Murat at the Battle of Aboukir by Gros, which is a painting from the romantic era, is not impactful, but they focus on different aspects of what a battle is and give audiences different ‘truths’ in the ideas that they take away. Non-realistic paintings can show more than just what the world looks like, but filtered through an abstracted artistic eye show the world as a place of much more emotion and movement, which is not necessarily the absolute truth of the world, but it is what the artist saw as the
Art tries to move beyond the reality of the world and show truth about something more. It is a mediated experience with the artist made stylistic choices to portray something. However, art never captures an experience as a person would actually experience it. As Picasso said, “we all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand” (Borofsk). If art was a perfect copy of the world it would lose its value. If there is a painting that truly captured a situation, and you then actually experienced it in real life, what would the point of the painting be? It would lose any meaning. The value of art is not in the ability to capture exactly what we already see in …show more content…
The attempts at showing a truth in art over the history of art has changed over time, artists often moved away from realism as the best way to represent a ‘truth’. Impressionism and symbolism were reactions against realism. The idea behind these styles was that we don’t see the whole world, only impressions and that statements about truth can only be represented with metaphors or symbols. These movements were attempts to move past just the visual sense to portray a deeper image that would better capture an experience. Michelangelo’s Pieta employs distortion from what reality would have been to show more about the relationship between Mary and Christ. This artistic choice is in a sense a ‘lie’, but evokes more pathos and gives the audience more insight into the situation which is the ‘truth’. Art often uses exaggerations or distortion to better show truth, by going beyond the realistic you can often show more of the essence of something. Picasso’s Guernica shows the atrocities of war and, although it is not painted as someone would truly see the event, it gets the emotion and ‘truth’ of the situation across. This not to say that a work like Murat at the Battle of Aboukir by Gros, which is a painting from the romantic era, is not impactful, but they focus on different aspects of what a battle is and give audiences different ‘truths’ in the ideas that they take away. Non-realistic paintings can show more than just what the world looks like, but filtered through an abstracted artistic eye show the world as a place of much more emotion and movement, which is not necessarily the absolute truth of the world, but it is what the artist saw as the