“Art reveals truth. Great art reveals great truth in a great way.”
This is the concept I’m mulling over right now… is the role of art to reveal (make known, uncover, display) truth? Think about…
- Portraiture: reveals truth about who a person is
- Landscape: reveals truth about the beauty of nature
- Abstraction / abstract expressionism: reveals truth about the formal elements of painting and/or their relationships to emotion without regards to content
- Etc.
“Revealism,” if I’m allowed the conceit of giving this theory a name, is a made-up term, but consider the following as “revealist” works:
The Voyage of Life, Thomas Cole (reveals the nature of life in four stages using physical symbology)
Guernica, Pablo Picasso (reveals the horror and chaos of war through a horrifying, chaotic set of emotional images)
Jephthah’s Daughter, Kevin Rolly (reveals the emotional truth of an easily-overlooked moment in Biblical history)
The key question of revealism is, “What truth is this piece revealing?” It might be revealing…
- Self-evident truth: the way a particular landscape or person looked at a particular moment
- Conceptual truth: concepts beyond the immediate communicated through art
- Emotional truth: how something felt or seemed, rather than how it looked
- Etc.
Revealism, as an entirely made-up movement, is related to…
- Surrealism, which posited that there was another/greater reality just past the edges of our senses. “Revealism” agrees with the concept of a higher reality, but thinks it can be known and seeks to make it known, rather than relating to it through chance or dreamlike imagery.
- Realism, which seeks to report what is. “Revealism” could incorporate much realism, but would see metaphysical/metaphorical paintings as a kind of philosophical realism, revealed through art.
- Symbolism and mannerism, which used symbolic images or manipulations of reality to represent nonphysical qualities, could be used as a “revealist” technique.
- Cubism, which did not reveal what was literally seen at one time, but was concerned with the object in time and space, seeking to reveal more of the object than simply one surface at one static moment, and give a sense of the thing as a whole.
- Illustration, which is not typically regarded as high art, would be elevated by the concept of revealism, due to the way it brings a concept into physical expression.
Okay, now. If you’ve read this far, please help me… I’m still very much formulating this concept, and need any and all input. If you have any thoughts on this whatsoever, I beseech you to fork ’em over in a comment or email.
2 responses to “Re[ve]alism”
hmmm. isn’t all (most?) art inherently meant to visually express a concept…or reveal one, to put it in your language?
what would be outside of your category? What doesn’t reveal truth? I might be able to argue that all art reveals some kind of truth, even if it’s a cynicism about art (i’m thinking post-modernism).
i dunno. push back. these are my initial thoughts.
Seems like you’ve stumbled into one of the archetypes of what makes art worth anything.
the deference and the reveal. You should write a manifesto or at least a definition to explain exactly what revealism is, and once you do that, it’s not an imaginary concept anymore.