Part I: Does Art Get Better – or Just Different?
“Back then, at least they still knew how to paint.”
You hear this sentence surprisingly often. It usually appears in front of a work of modern or contemporary art, preferably when a figure does not quite meet anatomical expectations, a canvas contains suspiciously few objects, or the artist has had the audacity to let a line end where a respectable person would at least expect a face. This is often followed by: “And today? A few splashes, a bit of scribbling – and that is supposed to be art.”
It would be too easy to dismiss this objection as mere philistinism. There is, in fact, a serious art-theoretical claim hidden inside it: that art can develop qualitatively – and perhaps also regress. In the past, certain skills were mastered that have subsequently been lost. Anyone looking at the anatomical precision of Ingres, the rendering of fabrics by Velázquez or the astonishing spatial illusionism of many Renaissance and Baroque painters can at least understand where this impression comes from. An academically trained painter of the nineteenth century had to master technical skills that are simply no longer prerequisites for some forms of contemporary art.
The mistake begins when “This artist could paint extraordinarily naturalistically” automatically becomes “Therefore his art is better.” Technical skill is undoubtedly one component of artistic quality, but it is not its complete measure. Otherwise, a technically impeccable academic Salon painter would automatically have to be more important than van Gogh, whose anatomy and perspective occasionally show remarkably little respect for academic etiquette. Or a meticulous photorealist would have to be superior to Goya simply because his rendering is more precise. That is clearly not how we judge art. We also take into account composition, expression, invention, attitude, effect, intellectual depth, historical significance and, above all, the question of what an artist was actually trying to achieve with the means available to him.
The same problem becomes obvious in my own photography when historical craftsmanship is equated with artistic quality. I certainly know where photographic terms such as dodging and burning come from and what they were used for in the darkroom. But put me today under an enlarger with a sheet of photographic paper and ask me to dodge individual areas cleanly, and you would probably get to watch an adult photographer slowly lose the will to live. I could no longer develop film with any real confidence either, and I would probably struggle badly with a purely analogue camera if I had to set light and exposure without being able to see the result immediately and correct it. A daguerreotype is another matter entirely. A photographer of the nineteenth or early twentieth century therefore mastered certain photographic procedures far better than I do. That does not, however, mean that he necessarily made better pictures.
The same is true of writing. In several of my photographic works I use historical scripts and actually apply them to the bodies of my models. I engage with their history, their form and their cultural context, but that certainly does not make me a great calligrapher. More of a moderately competent one who has enough respect for good calligraphers to know the difference. Here too, my interest is not in reproducing a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century hand so perfectly that a palaeographer starts anxiously searching for the original manuscript. I use historical letterforms as part of a contemporary visual language. Their age, their form, their cultural associations and, in particular, the contrast between an old script and a contemporary body all become part of the image.
The crucial distinction, then, is between mastering a historical technique and consciously using a historical language. I do not have to be a virtuoso darkroom printer in order to engage photographically with an aesthetic that is a hundred years old, and I do not have to be a master calligrapher in order to use a historical script meaningfully in contemporary work. Of course, the result still has to be technically competent enough for the intended effect to function. Sloppiness does not suddenly become quality merely because it has an art-historical concept attached to it. But neither does a work become important simply because its maker has mastered a difficult process with virtuosity. Technical skill is tied to the tools and demands of its time. Artistic quality begins with the question of what someone does with those possibilities.
The phrase “Back then, at least they still knew how to paint” becomes even more interesting once we ask which past we are actually looking at. We do not see the past in its entirety. We see a past that has already been sifted, judged, collected, discarded and repeatedly reassessed over centuries. From seventeenth-century Dutch painting, we encounter Rembrandt, Vermeer or Frans Hals. We do not compare contemporary art with the average painter who was also producing portraits, landscapes and still lifes at the time. We tend to compare it with the very few whose work survived several centuries of art-historical selection.
And it is not only mediocrity that disappears. Fame is astonishingly fragile as well. I experience a particularly good example of this regularly in the Cathedral of Spoleto. In the apse there is a magnificent fresco cycle by Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the major and highly sought-after Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. Lippi was not an obscure specialist’s favourite, nor some pleasant provincial painter whom a few art historians pulled out of a dusty footnote five hundred years later. He belonged to the prominent artists of his age. His frescoes in Spoleto were created towards the end of his life; he died there in 1469 while working on this major commission.
During my seminars in Umbria, I regularly stand with participants in front of these frescoes and tell them about Lippi, his life, his status and just how famous he was in his time. They look at these remarkable paintings, listen to the story – and sooner or later the reaction comes with striking reliability: “Never heard of him.” I like that moment. Not because I can then smugly award myself an art-history point, but because it reveals something much more fundamental: fame and art-historical memory are not the same thing. An artist can be a star during his lifetime, receive major commissions, be sought after by princes, churches and patrons, leave behind works that still make people stop and stare five hundred years later – and nevertheless largely disappear from the general cultural consciousness outside art-historical circles.
That raises an uncomfortable question. If even Filippo Lippi is no longer a familiar name to many people today, in front of which works from our own time will people be standing in the year 2526, astonished to discover that their creators were once famous? And which artists whom hardly anyone notices today will then appear as self-evident figures in every survey of our period? In retrospect, the canon likes to present itself as a neatly sorted ranking of the best. While it is being formed, it probably resembles a very large table covered with unsorted pieces of paper rather more closely.
This adds another distortion to any comparison between past and present. In the past we see a selection that has been sorted again and again over centuries. In the present we get almost everything: excellent work, mediocrity, fashions, dead ends, the overrated, the underrated and occasionally works before which even an unusually generous theory of art eventually asks for a coffee and somewhere quiet to sit down. The historical filter simply has not yet had two hundred or five hundred years to tidy up.
So when we compare a Rembrandt with some arbitrary contemporary work and conclude that art used to be better, we are comparing the summit of an already filtered past with an unfiltered present. And even within that filtered past, we do not know whether the hierarchy that seems obvious to us today would have seemed equally obvious to the people who lived at the time. None of this, however, answers the question of whether art actually develops. Techniques change, materials change, social functions change, ideas of beauty change, and artists change the questions they ask of images. But does change mean progress? Is Michelangelo an improvement on Giotto? Is Rembrandt an improvement on Michelangelo? Is Picasso an improvement on Rembrandt? Or are we trying to apply a concept of progress that simply does not work in art?
Several rather important gentlemen have given very different answers to that question.
Giorgio Vasari: Yes. Art Gets Better. And by Pure Coincidence, It Ends with Michelangelo.
Let us begin in the sixteenth century with Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), painter, architect, writer and one of the founding fathers of what would later become art history. His famous Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori was first published in 1550 and appeared in an expanded edition in 1568. In it, Vasari tells the history of Italian art as a development – and for him, development quite clearly means progress.
According to Vasari, after what he regarded as the decline of art following antiquity, a revival begins with artists such as Cimabue and especially Giotto. Later generations improve representation, perspective, anatomy and naturalism. Finally, in the High Renaissance, art reaches an extraordinary degree of perfection. And at the very top, for Vasari, stands Michelangelo.
This is remarkably convenient. The whole history of art struggles upwards for centuries and reaches its summit in an artist whom Vasari happened to know personally and admire without restraint. History occasionally displays an admirable sense of courtesy towards its authors. Even so, it would be wrong simply to mock Vasari. His model reflects a large part of the Renaissance understanding of itself. Artists and scholars saw themselves as rediscoverers of antiquity. Perspective, anatomy, observation of nature, mathematical proportion and renewed engagement with ancient art genuinely opened up new – or rediscovered – possibilities of representation.
The word Renaissance, after all, means rebirth. And here our problem already begins: one of the periods that we still describe as a tremendous advance in European art developed to a considerable extent because people looked backwards. Brunelleschi studied ancient architecture, sculptors studied ancient statues, humanists searched libraries for old texts. One went backwards, so to speak, in order to move forwards. Looking back and progressing are therefore clearly not opposites.
Vasari’s model has another problem. If art keeps getting better, what happens after Michelangelo? Is the next generation supposed to improve Michelangelo just a little more? An extra percentage of anatomy? Slightly more terribilità? David with an updated operating system? This already reveals the difficulty of treating art history like technological development. We can measure engine performance, computing speed, camera resolution, dynamic range and noise behaviour. But what unit do we use for Michelangelo and Rembrandt? Mega-art?
Hegel: It Is Not Only Art That Changes. Human Beings Change Their Relationship to the World.
Around two hundred and fifty years later, the whole matter becomes considerably larger. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) belongs to German Idealism, that philosophical tradition to which we owe some of the most important ideas in European philosophy – and probably a significant proportion of the historical coffee consumption of German universities.
For Hegel, art history cannot simply be understood as the improvement of technical skills. Art forms part of humanity’s intellectual and spiritual development. It reveals how a culture understands itself, its religion, its world and the relationship between mind and reality. Hegel distinguishes three major art forms: the symbolic, the classical and the romantic. Put very simply, in symbolic art the spiritual idea still struggles with a form that does not fully correspond to it. In classical art – above all Greek antiquity for Hegel – the relationship between spiritual content and sensuous form reaches a particular harmony. In romantic art, the emphasis increasingly shifts inward, towards subjectivity and inwardness.
This is, of course, no longer accepted as a universally valid timetable of world art. Hegel writes from a European perspective of the early nineteenth century, and his grand system is impressively elegant partly because considerable parts of the world are granted rather limited speaking rights within it. But his central idea remains fascinating: Perhaps art develops because human beings understand their world differently.
A medieval altarpiece would then not be “less developed” than a Renaissance painting simply because its maker had not sufficiently mastered central perspective. It serves a different function within a different worldview. A medieval image does not have to look like a window onto an optically reconstructed world if its actual concern lies with a spiritual reality whose meaning does not depend on physical plausibility.
At that point, the familiar remark “Back then, at least they still knew how to paint” becomes considerably more complicated. Perhaps Picasso, Kandinsky or Egon Schiele were perfectly capable of painting differently. The interesting question is no longer why they could not, but why they did not want to. If an artist distorts anatomy, dissolves perspective or separates colour from visible reality, that need not indicate a loss of skill. It may indicate a change in what art is supposed to do in the first place.
Hegel therefore turns the history of forms into a history of changing relationships to the world. And he goes further. In his lectures on aesthetics we encounter the famous idea that art in the modern world has lost its former highest vocation. Hegel does not mean that no art will be produced after him. Rather, art can no longer represent the highest form of truth for the modern intellectual world in the same way that it could in certain earlier cultures. This already begins a discussion that we will encounter again later with Arthur Danto.
But we are not there yet. First comes a man who is rather less interested in the World Spirit and would prefer to look at pictures.
Heinrich Wölfflin: Perhaps Art Does Not Get Better. Perhaps We See Differently.
Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) was a Swiss art historian and one of the major representatives of art-historical formalism. He became particularly famous for his Principles of Art History, published in 1915. His question is crucial to our discussion: Wölfflin is less interested in whether Baroque painters were better than Renaissance artists. He is interested in how modes of seeing change.
To compare Renaissance and Baroque art, he developed five famous pairs of concepts: linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, absolute and relative clarity. At first glance, this sounds like precisely the kind of vocabulary list with which art history has successfully prevented too many people from studying art history voluntarily. In fact, however, the idea is quite concrete. In Wölfflin’s model, Renaissance art tends towards clearly separated forms, legible spatial planes and closed compositions. In the Baroque, contours loosen, movement extends beyond the edges of the image, space becomes deeper and more dynamic, and individual forms merge more strongly into an overall effect.
The important point is that Wölfflin does not simply say one is better than the other. They are different ways of seeing.
Suddenly, one can place Picasso next to Velázquez without having to answer the rather absurd question of which of them “could paint better”. Perhaps they simply pursue different ideas about what an image is supposed to do and how reality can be organised visually. The same thought applies at least as strongly to photography. A Pictorialist around 1900 sees differently from a photographer of the New Objectivity. A fashion photographer of the 1950s organises a body differently from a contemporary photographer. And František Drtikol constructs a nude differently from a photographer working today. Not necessarily worse. Not necessarily better. Different.
Wölfflin should not, of course, be turned into an infallible prophet either. His oppositions are enormously useful but also simplifications. Art history is rarely polite enough to fit neatly into five drawers. Even within individual periods, there are artists who display a certain unhelpful resistance to his system. Nevertheless, his major contribution to our question remains: Perhaps seeing itself has a history.
And if seeing changes, art inevitably changes with it.
Ernst Gombrich: Nobody Starts from Zero
Then comes Ernst H. Gombrich (1909–2001). Born in Vienna and later active for decades at the Warburg Institute in London, Gombrich combined art history with perceptual psychology and epistemology. Particularly important for our question is his 1960 book Art and Illusion.
Gombrich challenges the romantic idea that artists simply look at the world and then reproduce it as directly as possible. Artists do not begin from zero. They begin with existing schemata. A schema is a learned pictorial solution: a particular way of representing a body, a tree, a space, a face or light. Artists inherit such solutions from their tradition, compare them with what they want to represent or express, modify them, correct them and develop new solutions from them.
Gombrich describes this process as an interplay of schema and correction, closely connected with his idea of making and matching: making, comparing, adjusting. Art development now takes on a very different form. It is neither Vasari’s steady ascent towards perfection nor Hegel’s march of the World Spirit. It resembles a vast cultural conversation in which every artist responds to something that already exists.
And this is exactly where the question becomes relevant to my own photographic work. Some of my aesthetic roots lie roughly a hundred years in the past. I deliberately engage with historical visual languages – with Drtikol, Art Deco, Expressionist dance and older forms of photographic staging. One could therefore argue that I am taking a step backwards.
But that is not quite true.
I cannot go backwards. I am not photographing in 1926. Even if I used the same focal length, the same lighting, the same pose and the same background, the result would still be an image of the twenty-first century. I know a hundred years of photography that Drtikol could not have known. My model knows a hundred years of body imagery, advertising, cinema and photography that did not yet exist then. And today’s viewer recognises a historical reference where a viewer in 1926 would simply have seen the present.
A historical quotation changes its meaning precisely because it has become a quotation.
For me, that is the crucial difference between repetition and engagement. When I draw on a visual language that is around a hundred years old, I am not trying to reconstruct 1926. That would, incidentally, be a rather elaborate method of avoiding the present. I take elements of a historical language and use them from my contemporary perspective. In doing so, I naturally use modern technology, digital preview and digital image processing. I do not need to develop film or coat glass plates in order to engage seriously with a historical visual language. Scholars of the Renaissance do not write their books by candlelight on parchment either, merely to prove their academic credibility.
The same applies to my use of historical scripts. I do not quote Kurrent, Bastarda or other old letterforms because I want to claim that I am a master calligrapher from a past century. I am not. What interests me is what happens when an historical script appears on a contemporary body, when signs from another period meet a present-day photographic language. Meaning arises precisely from this temporal displacement. The historical form is not preserved like an artefact in a glass case; it is used again in a new context.
And that brings us back to Gombrich: schema, adoption, alteration, correction. Artistic development does not have to consist of throwing away every existing form and desperately inventing something that no human being has ever seen before. It can equally consist of placing existing forms into new relationships. The Renaissance did this with antiquity. Picasso did it, among other things, with African and Iberian visual traditions. Modernism repeatedly drew on archaic and non-European forms – although the nature and circumstances of such appropriations are now, for good reason, subject to critical examination. Art constantly looks backwards, adopts, changes, rejects and rediscovers. And sometimes something new emerges precisely from that process.
So: Does Art Get Better?
According to Vasari, one might say yes. Artists improve skills, solve problems and perfect methods of representation. In certain areas, that can indeed be observed. According to Hegel, the question would have to be posed differently: art changes because people and societies change their relationship to the world. According to Wölfflin, modes of seeing change. Renaissance and Baroque are not simply different levels of quality, but different visual orders. And according to Gombrich, development emerges from ongoing engagement with already existing pictorial solutions.
Perhaps the original question is therefore already wrong. Art does not simply get better, but neither does it simply become arbitrarily different. It reacts to what came before. It adopts, rejects, corrects, quotes, contradicts, forgets and rediscovers. Sometimes something that seemed obsolete yesterday becomes the starting point for a new language tomorrow. That is precisely why a deliberate return to historical forms is not automatically a regression. Anyone working today with a visual language whose roots are a hundred years old is still working today. The past cannot be repeated. It can only be reread from the present.
This also gives the sentence “Back then, at least they still knew how to paint” a certain unintended comedy. Yes, some people in the past could paint extraordinarily well. Some people today can too. Photographers in the past could develop film, prepare glass plates, dodge under an enlarger and handle processes for which I would now rather quickly ask someone more competent for help. Photographers today can work with tools completely unknown to their predecessors. Neither fact alone determines whether the result is art – or whether it is good art.
Perhaps at the next museum visit, instead of saying “My child could have done that”, we should ask a slightly more difficult question: Why did an adult artist want it to look exactly like this?
The answer may still be: because nothing better occurred to him.
That happens too.
Art theory is not, after all, an organised obligation to admire every work of art.
But at least then we are asking the right question.
And one more remains: if art does not simply keep getting better, why do we insist so stubbornly that contemporary artists must make something new? Why has “That has already been done” become almost a death sentence?
That will be the next story.
Literature and Further Reading
Giorgio Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, first published in 1550, expanded in 1568. Vasari’s biographies of artists are among the foundational texts of European art historiography and played a major role in establishing the idea of a development from Giotto to the High Renaissance.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on Aesthetics. Published posthumously from Hegel’s lectures, these texts treat art as part of the historical development of spirit and distinguish symbolic, classical and romantic forms of art.
Heinrich Wölfflin: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 1915. A central work of art-historical formalism and of the idea that different historical periods possess different modes of seeing.
Ernst H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960. Particularly important are Gombrich’s ideas of schema and correction and the role of inherited conventions of representation in the development of pictorial forms.