Author(s): Ivan Stefanov / Language(s): Bulgarian
Issue: 3/2022
Hegel, in his Aesthetics, Volume 2, in the section on painting as a romantic art, repeatedly returns to the same idea: painting must choose and present as its subject only what can be realized through its external specific subject appearance. Painting should represent people, houses, faces, trees, bushes, rivers and lakes, etc. In this way, according to Hegel, painting can escape from sinking into abstraction, to which it is constantly driven by the growing autonomy and independence of the color principle in the construction of the overall pictorial image. But historically this has proved impossible. With the advent of modernism in the mid-19th century, painting was deprived of its external support (mythology, religion, history) and must develop as a completely autonomous and independent artistic field that can and has to rely solely on itself. This autonomy finds its ultimate expression in the emergence and development of the absolutely pointless abstract picture. It is also the concrete aesthetic response to the enormous external pressure of photography and cinema as new technical media and arts. From mimesis art, painting is radically transformed into expressive and completely pointless art. This radical transformation, its causes, nature and consequences are the subject of analysis in the proposed article. The final conclusion is that abstract art is closely related to painting theory and practice, its specific end and at the same time a new beginning.
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