Therefore, oil painting is not so much a “window open on to the world” but a window open on to the lives of a very small part of the population throughout history.Chapter 5 focuses on a specific tradition of oil painting, which reached its fullest embodiment roughly between 15. In the same manner visual history (aka art) was commissioned by the wealthy and titled the minute percentage of the population that was luck enough to be born into such luxury.
The genre or “slice of life” paintings where considered tacky.īerger’s summary of his views on oil painting brings to mind the quote “history is written by the victors”. Genre painting served to reinforce the idea that the well-off where well-off because they worked and the poor had nothing because they were lazy. (and one that the lower classes had no access to.) This is why paintings of mythical Greek stories was so popular.
#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING CHAPTER 5 PDF CODE#
It allowed them to have a “higher” more revered code of life to live by. The classics and an understanding of them was a way for the higher classes to live distinctly separate from the majority of their lesser of peers. Thus the depiction of livestock, property, and lifestyle became popular. The purpose of art became to display wealth through subject matter. The physical details of the sitters face (for a portrait) became less important in comparison to the importance of showing the sitter’s prestige or status according to his or her title. Tenets like colonization, the superiority of the white man to both woman and black people, and classism were all time and time again positively related through contemporary art. Oil painting reinforced values and trends of the time whole-heartedly. But as the symbol of status became most significantly tied to having money, no matter how one got it, oil painting/art changed to reflect this. Before, being high class or “rich” was a fixed state that was neither, left or entered. The “masters” greatness was revolutionary and unique but then eventually enveloped into the tradition by mimics into the general field of oil painting. And from there- what constitutes “the exceptional”? The obvious answer is: skill, imagination, and morale. Within the world of oil painting comes the comparison of “the average” versus “the exceptional” artists. Artists where considered agents and laborers at one point- expendable and paid to paint exactly and solely what their patrons mandated. Painting or art as a commodity has been held higher than all other possessions and finery like clothes, plates, cutlery, furniture…etc because of its ability “to speak to the soul”. Art, rather than music or literature, is also expected to be on display. You can display them and reap the praise and accolades that come from having such good taste as to own such finery. You can own paintings in a different way than you can own poems and music. The textures and objects that the spectator can associate with touch are superior and more meaningful than symbols like a skull, for example. The vivid and highly realistic textures that are often on display in oil painting also promote this obsession with “owning”. Until then, oil painting was the most superior medium in which to create visual images. It used to be the principle source of visual imagery until photography (specifically color photography) replaced it. Oil painting as a popular art form lasted from about 1500 to 1900. This ties in with Berger’s earlier analysis on rarity and what exact variable gives art and paintings their “value”. With the advent of oil painting “art” itself became more of an object and something you were able to own. As life got better people learned to value material objects more and more which was paralleled in popular and contemporary art.
This development in art mirrored what was going on socially, agriculturally, and technologically in Europe at the time. The move away from religious art to humanist celebrations of the triumphs of mankind also gave way to the glorification of the “possession”. The concept of reinforcing the importance of objects and materialism through oil painting is explored in Chapter five of Ways of Seeing.