“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent pairing his fingernails.”
– James Joyce in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
Art and Life
The connection between art and life has been a long-debated topic since ancient times. An artist imitates his surroundings, people, culture, nature, etc, to produce great specimens of art. On the other hand, people imitate art for their aesthetic, religious and social well-being. The reciprocal relationship between art and life has remained an issue of discussion since the ancient period when Plato accused the artists of being imitators, and Aristotle defended the process of imitation. Beginning from ancient literature, and painting, through the Renaissance and till the postmodern period, the connection between art and life has been debated, defended and celebrated.
Art in the Renaissance Period
Renaissance art was dedicated to promoting truth and knowledge beyond religious and social orthodoxy, superstition and authority. The period ranged between the 14th to late 17th century in Europe, whereas it was in the 19th and 20th centuries in India. Renaissance artists prioritised life-like details in their art and literature. Humanism plays an important role in Renaissance art and literature. One of the most popular Renaissance artists who portrayed lives through art was Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci, whose works include Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Michelangelo and Raphael are two more popular artists of this period who revived ancient themes, focussed on individual potential and celebrated human being’s quests for truth through their arts.
Art in the Romantic Period
The romantic period in the early 18th century is marked by the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley, as well as the novels of Jane Austine, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, and so many talented writers. The writing of this period is popular for its lucid style, conversational tone, subjectivity and application of strong imagination. The writers and the artists of the Romantic Period valued human beings’ scope for imagination rather than their practical lives. Imagination, fantasy and free-thinking dominated over hard realities. Painters like William Blake, Eugène Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich and others created artistic masterpieces that celebrates the creative faculty, passion, human emotion and imagination as major componants of art. Hence the arts of the Romantic Period had an appeal to human mind and imagination rather than the practical lives of them.
Art in the Victorian Period
The art produced in the Victorian period reflects the harsh reality of society. The literature of the era was dominated by writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Robert Browning, who through their art and poetry portrayed issues like industrialism, urbanisation, people’s fascination for logic and reality etc.
In India, it was the period of the Bengal Renaissance. Writers and thinkers like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Michael Madhusudan Dutta wrote about Indian cultural heritage, people, aesthetic sensibilities and a rising sense of Indian nationalism in their prose.
In India, the Victorian Period arts reflect India’s sense of nationalism, Indian culture, and the rise of Western influence and taste. Indian art in this period carries both the colonial legacy and the reaction against it. Bengal became the hub of the promotion of art and culture. As Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) was the capital of British India and one of the most important cities of the whole world, the city saw the flourishing of modern thought reflected through art and literature. One of the pioneering institutions of this age was The Bengal School of Art. Nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E.B. Havell, this institution promoted arts not only as a medium of life, but also as a way of promoting nationalistic thoughts against British Raj.
Postmodern Approach to Art
Postmodern art, which roughly began flourishing after 1950, promotes pluralism, irony, anti-essentialism and sceptic thoughts. The art produced in the postmodern period rejects the notion of absolute truth and historical grand narrative. Rather, art in this period is contextual, and it blurs the genre between high culture and popular culture. of this period. Popular culture in the forms of mini-narratives, oral tradition, advertisements, web series, etc, represents life and many bitter aspects of the world which remain invisible and unexplained in the high culture and historical grand narratives. Technology plays an important role in promoting postmodern arts and culture; hence, the art of this period does not only have physical existance, the virtual existance is more prominant.
