I don’t know if I’m phrasing this right, but I just noticed that even royal portraits in Europe all looked very flat and un-detailed up until like the 1600s, and there was another massive improvement in the 1700s when paintings started to look infinitely more realistic than they did in the medieval era.
In: Other
Art is a form of communication. If you want to communicate something, you need a form of language. But what artists want to communicate and how they do that can vary wildly.
[Japanese ukiyo-e art looks very simplistic to a lot of people](https://www.google.com/search?q=100+views+of+edo&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi5u4v75IvtAhWKD-wKHQ3nDJ4Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=100+views+of+edo&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzICCAAyBggAEAUQHjIGCAAQBRAeMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAgQHjIECAAQGDIECAAQGDoFCAAQsQM6BAgAEENQlXFY3oYBYPOIAWgAcAB4AIABRYgB0waSAQIxNpgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=g-q0X_ntFYqfsAeNzrPwCQ&bih=948&biw=1643&rlz=1C5CHFA_enNL916NL916). But there’s a clear reason for why it looks the way it does. Ukiyo-e translates as something as floating images or fleeting images. The idea was that the world is full of transient moments of beauty that are there for a second and then they’re gone. The smile of a woman walking through the market, a cherry blossom catching the light perfectly for a moment.
Ukiyo-e art aims to capture these brief fleeting moments in an art style that is just as ephemeral and fleeting. Painted in scant moments trying to catch that fleeting moment. In some styles, the goal was to paint subjects in a single flourishing stroke without lifting the brush from paper.
Picasso’s abstractionism is another style that people often criticise along the lines of ‘my child could do this’. Picasso wasn’t just scribbling though, he could be quite competent in more conventional paint styles when he wanted to. But he used his art to explore the essence of things. How much can you strip a subject down and still have it be recognisable?
[Picasso’s bull is a great example.](https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/pablo_picasso/picasso_bulls.jpg) He starts out with a fairly detailed bull and then explores dissecting this bull into its core essence. By the end, he draws a bull with just a few lines but it’s still clearly a bull.
Art isn’t simply about who can achieve the most realism. That beautifully realistic renaissance art you’re referring to was obsessed with beauty and perfection to the point where they often significantly enhanced their subjects beyond what they really saw.
A big part in learning to appreciate art is to move beyond ‘I like what I see’ and into understanding the underlying language of an art style.
Latest Answers