Arch. Rania Obead

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No doubt, every person setting out to name the most important themes in art would produce a different list.

This lecture proposes eight themes, from the sacred realm to art about art.

Each one allows us to range widely over the world’s artistic heritage, setting works drawn

from different times and places in dialogue by showing how their meanings begin in a

shared theme.

Who made the universe? How did life begin, and what is its purpose? What happens to us after we die?

For answers to those and other fundamental

questions, people throughout history have turned to a world we cannot see except through faith, the sacred realm of the spirit.

Interior, upper chapel,Sainte-Chapelle, Paris

Prayer hall of Abd al-Rahman I, Great Mosque,

Córdoba, Spain

The sacred realm cannot be seen with human eyes, yet artists throughout the ages have been asked to create images of gods, goddesses, angels,demons, and all manner of spirit beings.

Cimabue. MadonnaEnthroned.Rathnasambhava, the

Transcendent Buddha of the South.

We should not conclude from the remarkable formal similarity of these works that any

communication or influence took place between Italy and Central Asia. A safer assumption is that two artists of

different faiths independently found a format that satisfied their pictorial needs.

Both the Buddha and the Virgin are important, serene holy figures.

Bodhisattvas and angels, who are always more active, attend them. Therefore, the artists, from their separate points of view, devised similar compositions.

Of the many things we create as human beings, the most basic and important may be societies.

How can a stable, just, and productive society best be organized?

Who will rule, and how? What freedoms will rulers have? What freedoms will citizens have?

How is wealth to be distributed? How is authority

to be maintained?

Many answers to those questions have been posed throughout history, and throughout history the resulting order has been reflected

in art.

In ancient Egypt, where the pharaoh (king) was

viewed as a link between the divine and the

earthly realms.

When a pharaoh died, it was believed that he rejoined the gods and became fully divine.so they constructed Pyramids.

Equestrian statue of Marcus

Aurelius, Rome

Eugène Delacroix. Liberty

Leading the People

On April 28, 1937, the Germans bombed thetown of Guernica, the old Basque capital in northern Spain.

There was no real military reason for the raid; it was simply an experiment to see whether aerial bombing could wipe out a whole city.

Being totally defenseless, Guernica was devastated and its civilian population massacred.

Pablo Picasso. Guernica.

Deeds of heroes, lives of saints, folktales passed down through generations.

Episodes of television shows that everyone knows by heart—shared stories are one of

the ways we create a sense of community.

Artists have often turned to stories for

for subject matter, especially stories whose roots reach deep into their culture’s collective

memory.

Sahibdin and workshopRama and Lakshmana Bound byArrow-snakes, from the Ramayana.

The social order, the world of the sacred, history and the great stories of the past—all these are very grand and

important themes.

But art does not always have to reach so high.

Sometimes it is enough just to look around ourselves

and notice what our life is like here, now, in this place, at

this time.

Another model from Meketre’s tomb depicts women at work spinning and weaving cloth.

They would probably have been producing linen, which Egyptians excelled at.

In China, the favored material since ancient times has been silk. Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk.

We find a solitary man tending to the gasoline pumps at his small

roadside service

station.

Hopper had a gift for depicting empty places and lonely moments.

Edward Hopper. Gas.1940. Oil on canvasThe Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Yet they also would have shared certain experiences, just by virtue of being

human.

We are all of us born, we pass through childhood, we mature into sexual beings, we

search for love, we grow old, we die.

We experience doubt and wonder, happiness

And sorrow, loneliness and despair.

Kahlo began to paint while recovering from a streetcar accident that left her body shattered and

unable to bear children.

She would know periods

of crippling pain for the rest of her life and undergo dozens of operations.

Her first work was a self-portrait, as though to affirm that she still existed.

Frida Kahlo. Self-Portraitwith Monkeys. 1943. Oil

on canvas, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Birth, death, the decisions we must weigh on our journey through life,

The temptations of vanity, the problem of self-knowledge, the question of life after

death—all these issues are gently touched on in this most understated of paintings.

Renaissance theorists likened painting to poetry.

With words, a poet could conjure an imaginary world and fill it with people and events.

Painting was even better, for it could bring an imaginary world to life before your eyes.

In Empty Dream, Japanese artist Mariko Mori inserts herself into this tradition even as she pokes fun at it.

She sets her fantasy scene on a beach, where bodies are routinely on display , and casts herself as a mermaid—

three mermaids, actually, all in rather hokey bathing beauty poses. “That’s right,” Mori’s mermaid seems to say, “I’m a

goddess.” ordinary mortals stare and point their video cameras.

Mori pieced the image together on a computer from digitized photographic fragments, a process we canthink of as similar to the way our brain draws on fragments of memory to create dreams.

Mariko Mori. EmptyDream. 1995.

As humans, we make our own environment.

From the first tools of the earliest hominids

to today’s towering skyscrapers, we have

shaped the world around us to our needs.

This manufactured environment, though, has its setting in quite a different environment, that of the natural world.

Nature and our relationship to it are themes that have often been addressed through art.

During the 19th century, many American painters set themselves the American landscape as a subject.

One of the first of these was Thomas Cole , who as a young man had emigrated to America from England.

Cole s most famous painting is The Oxbow, which depicts the great looping bend (oxbow) of the

Connecticut River as seen from the

heights of nearby Mount Holyoke,

in Massachusetts.

To the left, a violent thunderstorm darkens the sky as it passes over

the mountain wilderness.

To the right, emerging into the sunlight after the storm, a broad settled valley extends as far as the eye can see. Fields have been cleared for grazing and crops.

Nature has been more than a subject for art; it has also served as a material for art.

The desire to portray landscapes has been matched by the desire to create them for the pleasure of our eyes.

A work such as the famed stone and gravel garden of the Buddhist temple of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, Japan, seems to occupy a position halfway between sculpture and landscape gardening created toward the end of the 15th century and maintained continuously.

When asked why he made art, the American painter Barnett Newman is said to have replied,

“To have something to look at.’’

There is more than a little truth in his comment.

Art is an activity we have come to pursue for its own sake.

As such, art can be its own theme, with no other purpose than to give visual pleasure or to pose

another answer to the ongoing question “What

is art?’’

Pat Steir. Summer Moon.2005. Oil on canvas, 9'11⁄2"

11'5".Courtesy Cheim and Read Gallery,

New York.