2012年10月24日 星期三

Fifteen Greatest


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This article is translated from the Taiwan blog “Elsewhere of Elsewhere”. 
http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/ailleurs-art/article?mid=1352&prev=1362&next=1323
It is poorly translated.  I would like to invite all guests who master both English and Chinese to provide your suggestions to perfect the translation, thank you in advance.
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This is a list of the fifteen greatest artists in my mind.  This list only refers to oil paintings, sculpture, and multimedia and does not refer to calligraphy and Chinese ink paintings.  This list is sorted by the year of birth of each artist.  There are three major issues we need to discuss first:

1. Criteria?

The work of art must touch “essential sentiment”.  This is the first criterion.  Only “sentiment” counts in an art work.  A work of art without “sentiment” is meaningless.  The “sentiment”, in its broadest sense, refers to human sensation interacting with everything or every life in the universe.

The second criterion is the creativity should be independently a sect itself.  The third criterion is the profoundity of thoughts.  This is in fact another side of the first criterion because a work of art touching “essential sentiment” would possess the profoundity of thoughts by nature.  The most mysterious part of art lies in the nexus between human rationality and sensibility.  Human rationality is sensibility while human sensibility is rationality.  As Mark Rothko puts it: “Intuition is the highest of rationality, not opposed.”

Among these fifteen greatest artists, Constantin Brancusi and Mark Rothko stay on the top of sculpture and paintings.

2. Why are they all artists born after 1853?

Oil paintings and sculpture are media which exist for more than one thousand years.  Until recent one hundred years, oil paintings and sculpture go mature due to the development of all kinds of sciences, philosophy and the research toward human’s mind.  Thus, contemporary great masters are standing on the shoulders of giants.  Geniuses before Vincent van Gogh were limited by their era.  It is of the same reason that the best regulated verse and quatrains poets appeared around Fu Du’s era in Tang Dynasty.  Regulated verse and quatrains in Tang Dynasty are aesthetically higher than in Song Dynasty.  Regulated verse and quatrains went mature and reached their summits in Tang Dynasty.  I predict that it will be hard to find an oil painting or sculpture artist better than the fifteen greatest in the future because so many new media (other than oil painting and sculpture) attracted the attention of newborn creativity.

3. Who is better?  Yu SAN or Picasso?

Before, I commented that “Picasso’s aesthetic achievement is higher than Yu SAN, but I love Yu SAN more than Picasso.”  After writing this blog for one year, I realized that there can be no aesthetic achievement without “essential sentiment”.  I placed Picasso in rank 16 now because although Picasso possessed excellent creativity and explored various domains of art, Picasso did not put enough sentiments in his works of art.  Many pieces of Picasso’s works lack inner human sentiments.  The overall intuitional impact of Picasso’s works is slightly inferior than the fifteen greatest artists’.

Fifteen greatest artists in the order of the year of birth:
















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