Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief

Thursday 25 October 2007

Laden with significance

One of the greast lessons of the work of R. B. Kitaj, as his Times obituary says, "was that the accumulated layers of association embedded in a specific image could themselves convey meaning." It is easy to dismiss what he did as "cut-and-paste" postmodernism but, as the range and resonance of his references and allusions demonstrate, he painted in a contemporary tradition that, by bringing micro-images and narratives together, revealed connections which then suggest wider macro-images and narratives.

Jacques Maritain suggested, in The Philosophy of Art, that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as “the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”. The work of Kitaj is an example of just this contention.

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Chagall Guevara - Violent Blue.

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