Barbara Hepworth 和现代艺术的级别

[Jun]

今天的 Google Doodle 是英国女雕塑家 Barbara Hepworth，一点上去就跳出很多相关她的条目，我随便看到一篇卫报上的文章就点进去看了一眼。好有意思啊：

The stone-cold truth: Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore are not in the premier league

Yet Moore and Hepworth really are idiosyncratic British artists of mostly local interest, and the campaign to turn them into art gods tells a big lie about their true place in 20th-century art. Hepworth is hard to hate (her cavernous sculpted lyres sing like the sea), but easy to get bored by. She and Moore quaintly and cosily soften the discoveries of modern art – in her case abstraction, in his case surrealism – by merging them with a deeply British romanticism.

Hepworth 的雕塑：





Henry Moore 大家应该都很熟悉，我就不贴了。

卫报文章的作者是这样分级别的：

But to claim they are among the really great modern artists is daft. Picasso dwarfs his imitator Moore. But it’s not just Picasso who makes these modernist Brits look minor. In Hepworth’s case the most significant comparisons are with the truly great abstract artists: you cannot seriously set her works alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra. She is not in the same class.

让我觉得亲切的是这些人名里我只有一个不认识 ... At least he is not being too high brow ...

[Jun]

昨天在城里的 Renwick Gallery 看了一圈，很小，迅速能看完。展品很有趣，专门收集那些介乎工艺和艺术之间的作品，实用性和观赏性模糊起来。另外就是 curator 很喜欢 mixed media 作品，看着象金属实际是烧土，看着象布实际是木，看着象织布实际是胶片；本来是木头被替换成玻璃，本来是陶瓷被替换成玻璃，等等搞法，playing with materials and texture，蛮炫的。其中最神奇的是一座木雕，真的跟布一样，我凑上去盯着看了半天，可惜不能手摸，简直神乎奇技！



总之让我感慨了一下艺术与实用之间的界限。我觉得自古以来艺术的本质是有实用性的，虽然是家用（例如最早发掘的陶罐上的花纹），但做得美观，摆在家里让人心情愉快。画像和雕塑啥的也有其实用价值，例如祭祀崇拜神灵，纪念祖先鬼魂，或者戴在身上头上的首饰，增加自身的美，等等。然后就演变成了艺术。所以艺术家和匠人之间没有清晰的分界。

但不知何时艺术和匠之间的差距忽然变成了概念性的，就很那啥 ... 也许是因为文艺复兴和之前的时代，艺术家都被天主教会包养了，教廷斥巨资把“艺术”和实用性的手艺割裂开了。

[Knowing]

太像布了。。。
我在康沃的小镇st ives 看到过Barbara Hepworth的作品。当时还奇怪那么个小镇有个Tate 分馆不够还有个专门的Barbara Hepworth 雕塑花园。在Tate 分馆看了就没去雕塑花园。原来她这么有名.
Mary Beard 说艺术还有一个重要的作用，帝皇和宗教用来炫耀权力。平民一进来看见就吓趴下了以为是神授。