Images and Ideas: The Collection in Focus at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California

As the major patron of the arts throughout the European Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church played a central role in the development of artistic tastes. Many early European paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries depicted scenes from the Bible and were intended to decorate altars or chapels, or were made for private devotional use. Scenes of the birth of Christ, of episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary, and of incidents from the lives of the saints provided popular subject matter - subjects which an illiterate public could "read" and understand.

The tradition of iconic painting - devotional images of religious subjects - has an ancient lineage and derives ultimately from Greco-Roman portraiture and art of the early Christian church. During the Renaissance, this tradition came to encompass a kind of "disguised symbolism," where any painted, drawn, or carved detail might carry a symbolic message. Icons could thus be thought of as standardized signs conveying standardized meaning. By contrast, emblematic painting held more generalized messages and was usually intended to convey moral lessons to the viewer.

Iconic art is still popularly produced for the Eastern and Orthodox Christian churches.

The Renaissance in European art is usually thought of as the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries - a period of creative rebirth when artists rediscovered an interest in depicting the human body in naturalistic ways. This interest related closed to the notions of humankind from the periphery to the center of the cosmos.

Representations of the body thus occupy center stage during this period of European art. The paintings on view here describe a trajectory from heavily stylized representation, whose origins can ultimately be traced to Byzantine art of the medieval period, through a number of works from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which High Renaissance ideals can be found. These ideals include carefully modeled, volumetric depictions of the human form, use of warm color and strong light effects, and increasingly sophisticated attempts to situate the body in three-dimensional space. The softly atmospheric three-dimensionality of the last painting in the group, Giovanni Caracciolo's Young Saint John, relate both to the distortions of form which characterized the sixteenth-century artistic style known as Mannerism and to the school of Caravaggio, a highly sensual style that looked closely at works from Greek and Roman antiquity.

The eighteenth century in Europe and North America is often called the Age of Enlightenment, a period which placed great faith in the idea of human perfectibility. Reason was seen as the basis of all knowledge and indeed of larger notions of human growth and of existence itself. Knowledge was categorized and ordered; scientific exploration boomed; and the first dictionaries, encyclopedias, and museums for organizing and displaying information were created.

In the visual arts, the Age of Enlightenment took shape in a rediscovery of the art of the ancient world. Archaeological investigations (most notably the 1748 excavation of Pompeii) provoked a revival of interest in Greek and Roman artistic techniques, styles, and subject matter - along with a renewed taste for classical philosophy. These antique sources greatly influenced Enlightenment philosophers and statesmen such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Jefferson, as well as artists throughout Europe.

The re-use of antique forms - in painting, architecture, poetry, even fashion - was thought to convey nobility of feeling along with a sense of control and order. At the same time, the eighteenth century saw an explosion of interest in genre scenes (subjects drawn from everyday life) and in comedic forms of satire.

While it is impossible to characterize a field as broad as American painting through a small selection of canvases, the works on view here document several important moments in the history of American art. The first of these is the field known as Folk or Vernacular art. This was a style practiced by self-taught artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who carried out portraits and scenes of everyday life in the early years of the American Republic. Most of this work comes from the New England states, from the hands of itinerant artists who created a market by selling their skills door to door. The Berkeley Art Museum's holdings in this area are among the richest in the western United States.

Other works on view here describe the artistic discovery of the West in the late nineteenth century. Two historically important paintings of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill speak to the ruggedly dramatic glories of the western landscape. They are by-products of the continuing belief in Manifest Destiny - the nationalistic political argument that justified the U.S.'s westward expansion and seizure of lands throughout the nineteenth century. By contrast, works by William Keith from early this century describe in gentle tones and soft atmospheric effects a more domesticated landscape, one suitable for quiet habitation and as yet unmarred by the enormous population influx of more recent decades.

Several of the most important movements in nineteenth-century French art are included here, collectively describing the advent of Modernism in European art. Naturalism, a movement concerned with the realistic depiction of the natural world, is represented by several canvases of about 1860 from the so-called Barbizon School, a group of artists working out of doors for the first time in the history of European high art, they notoriously led the way toward plein air painting, a practice that placed great value on the direct and unmediated experience and depiction of nature.

Works such as these by Rousseau, Daubigny, and Diaz enormously influenced the Impressionist generation which followed. Represented here by works by Boudin, Pissarro, and the young Ensor, these artists took plein air painting to a new stage, focusing increasingly on transient light effects and ways in which the landscape is perceived by the human eye.

The last group of works suggests ways in which the eye moved form being an instrument of perception to one of subjective expression, placing primacy on the role of the individual artist. In these pieces by artists such as Cezanne and Gauguin, along with a late work by Renoir, we find an interesting fracturing of the image, and interest in decorative patterns and textures that seems to deny the importance of Renaissance perspective. Surface textures created by the artist's materials - rather the their use in creating a realistic representation of the observable world - also come to dominate. Collectively these interests led the way to the art of the twentieth century, explored in the following galleries.

The relation between the body and the psyche has intrigued philosophers for centuries. To what degree does our psychology reflect our physical being? Does our body give clues to our psychological state? Does our psyche live on after death? Are there such things as extra-sensory perceptions? Beginning with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth-century, these kinds of questions have greatly interested artists as well. Depictions of the human form often no longer relied on straight-forward naturalistic approach, but, rather, sought to express invisible, internal psychic phenomena through the exaggeration or unusual manipulation of the human body.

These concerns continued to be important in the twentieth century. Some artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, pushed the depiction of the human body to such an extreme that the figure became virtually unrecognizable. Others, such as the photographer Diane Arbus, elicited uncanny impressions of psychological states through a direct, almost documentary approach. Some artists, especially those affiliated with the Surrealist movement, recognized the psychological potency of parts of the body in isolation. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, in particular, created works in which parts of the body stand in - in an elliptical, haiku-like fashion - for various psychological complexes. Following the lead of Surrealist artists like Rene Magritte, contemporary artists such as Nancy Grossman and Robert Gober have recently extended the parameters of the body to include clothing and costume, exploring ways in which such coverings become virtually inseparable from both our body and our psyche.

Since its invention in the early nineteenth century, one of the main uses of photography has been portraiture. Given its exceptional veracity, photography was an ideal medium for this use. Over the decades, however, many artists discovered that in addition to its ability to produce a seemingly exact and naturalistic image of the subject, photography had the capacity to express subtle shades of personality and mood, and even, to fictionalize the sitter. Some artists, such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and Julia Margaret Cameron, took this quintessential modern tool and used it to create images that appeared to have been taken in ancient times.

Other artists combined the portrayal of particular subject with a keen attention to the formal, abstract properties of composition. Ilse Bing's self-portrait emphasizes spacial and technical issues over emotional and psychological concerns, while Peter Hujar's portrait of Susan Sontag has a severe, almost sculptural formality. In addition, John Guttman's portrait of a clown balances a striking perpendicular composition with a wonderfully evocative subject. Some artists exploited the inherent properties of photography to capture a sense of motion, as in Tim Gidal's intense diptych of the Austrian writer Karl Krauss giving a public speech. Others, like Anne Brigman, incorporated non-photographic elements, such as the halo-like rays in her portrait, Saint Gustav, to accentuate the character of the photographic image.

We are grateful to Richard Lorenz, whose generous loans from his collection make this presentation possible.

The exploration of form and color for their own sake is one of the distinctive features of twentieth-century art. In the first decades of this century, artists such as Robert Delaunay, Kasimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky pioneered the creation of so-called non-objective art. Their approach turned away from the world of recognizable things and adopted a vocabulary of abstract shapes, lines, colors, and textures. For some artists, especially Kandinsky, these abstract components did not lose their representational purpose; instead of representing things in the visible world, they visualized spiritual or emotional forces that could not be seen with the naked eye.

For others, however, art gave up its representational role entirely. In works here by Alexander Calder, Ad Reinhardt, and Donald Judd, it would probably be fruitless to search for any represented "subject" visible or invisible. Instead, the purpose of the work is to express the simple material qualities of the thing itself. Thus, the interest in the Reinhardt, for example, lies largely in the extraordinary optical effect created by the subtle differences in shades of black that comprise its abstract grid. In the Judd, we are invited to sense volume, while the Calder mobile embraces the play of random motion.

This section presents a variety of works by an emerging generation of Bay Area artists.

All made within the last ten years, these works suggest the great diversity of approaches to art-making that are current today. While the Bay Area has, in the past, been identified with certain over-arching styles (e.g. Bay Area figurative painting), the works here show that artists perhaps now feel freer to choose methods and styles that respond to their particular expressive needs.

The art world has become increasingly international as people travel more and become conscious of global issues and trends. Uri Tzaig, recently the subject of a Matrix exhibition here titled Homeless, has no permanent home at all, but rather travels from city to city connecting with artists and art scenes as he goes.

Even among those artists who are relatively stationary, these recent works show that their themes are cosmopolitan and universal rather than absorbed in regional issues or aesthetic problems. Nayland Blake's Miracled Birds is based on the turn-of-the-century autobiography of a noted schizophrenic that served as an important case study for Freud, Jung, and Lacan. D-L Alvarez's Shawl is a poignantly ephemeral work suggestive of the compelling human drive for comfort. Anne Appleby's monochromatic work is from a series title "Geezis" - the Ojibway word for things that come from the light, as well as for sun and month - whose paired paintings are about light and its absence.

While ephemerality and vulnerability are certainly traits shared by a number of these works, there is an equal measure of almost baroque grandiloquence. Catherine Opie's photographic portrait captures the flamboyant irreverence of the late Jerome Caja, a painter and performance artist who inspired many Bay Area artists before his untimely death from AIDS last year.

Jay DeFeo's painting The Rose, on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art until December 1997, provides the impetus for this grouping on the theme of "Spirit and Cosmos." The Rose is a mandala-lime image/object (composed of one ton of paint) of luminous, radiating lines and planes. Its simultaneous physicality and immateriality capture a sense of great spiritual power immanent within the forms and substances of reality. The simple, star-like image echoes innumerable representations of the spirit and cosmos throughout history, from the "Rose" windows of the Gothic cathedrals to the Native American "God's-eye" weaving to the Buddhist lotus blossom.

The other works in this section suggest a variety of approaches to spirituality and cosmic vision. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's three-channel video Passages, Paysages is an evocative, open-ended exploration of physical and spiritual dislocation. Her work embraces multiple languages and media to suggest an experience that is simultaneously intensely personal and universal. Charles Ross's Sunlight Convergence/Solar Burn captures in sculptural form evidence of the daily movement of the sun over consecutive days, thereby indicating our presence in a larger cosmic order.

Other works in this section attempt a similar goal, albeit in more symbolic fashion. Terry Fox's Diagram of the Turns in the Chartres Labyrinth explores the hidden order and meaning of the labyrinth embedded in the floor of the Chartres Cathedral. Based on the spiritual formulae of Tantric mysticism, a group of drawings from the Rajasthan region of India suggest a similar appreciation of correspondences between geometry and spirituality. The Indian artist Acharya Vyakul's drawings also derive from Tantric models; however, in these contemporary works, the artist has imbued the images with personal emphasis and aesthetic sensibility. Several twentieth-century American artists, such as Bruce Conner, Mark Tobey, Paul Kos, and Louise Bourgeois have alluded to the cosmos and experiences of the spirit through abstract, personally-derived imagery.

"The Beat Generation" is a term applied to the loosely affiliated communities of artists, writers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere who rejected the social and cultural values of the status quo in favor of a more profound, often spiritual mode of existence and art-making.

This small selection of works is meant to provide an historical context for Jay DeFeo's monumental painting, The Rose, on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art through December 1997. Created between 1958 and 1965, The Rose epitomizes the commonly held Beat Generation ideal of achieving spiritual awakening without renouncing the imperfection and physicality of everyday life.

Wallace Berman's Silent Series #1 juxtaposes strangely disembodied hands with images taken from the mass media and everyday life while the caustic humor of Joan Brown's Fur Rat captures the typically Beat Generation appreciation for the lowlier aspects of existence. A somewhat more lighthearted spirit is evident in Harry Redl's photograph of Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVigne, and a friend playing in a tree in Berkeley, and in Ed Kienholz's bittersweet weathervane.

A number of more recent works indicate the continuing importance of Beat Generation artists. Two works by Bruce Conner, the photogram Angel (1975) and his Ink Blot Drawing (December 19, 1991) exemplify the artist's ongoing investigation of symbolism and the psyche. A "paste-up" collage by Jess, Robert Duncan Reading at the LeConte Auditorium (1970) is a fanciful tribute to the artist's partner, the poet Robert Duncan, and makes an interesting comparison with Jess's much earlier, yet equally whimsical, "paste-up" collage, Seventy XXth - Success Story (1953).

Between 1958 and early 1966, Jay DeFeo worked continuously on her epic painting, The Rose, which she began on the canvas of an abandoned painting. She was intent on producing an image of radiating form, an image with a center. The painting was very much a process piece, as DeFeo worked on it daily in the Fillmore Street apartment she shared with her then-husband, Wally Hedrick. For eight years, she layered on and then scraped away massive amounts of paint, carving the accretion down like a block of marble and adding wire, beads, pearls, and wooden strips. The painting also went through what DeFeo called art historical stages - Archaic geometric and then Baroque, ultimately Classical. In the end, it had grown to almost 11 feet high, 8 inches think in places, and weighed over 2,300 pounds; it was, in the words of George Herms, "the ultimate living creature."

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and art patron J. Patrick Lannan were interested in purchasing the work, but DeFeo turned them down, convinced that it was not finished. In 1965, she and the painting were forced to leave the building and The Rose was removed, an event documented by Bruce Conner in his movie, The White Rose. DeFeo continued to work on The Rose at the Pasadena Art Museum, where it was finally exhibited in 1969, with a second showing later that year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was then moved to the San Francisco Art Institute, where, in 1974, it was covered with plaster for support and protection and stored behind a wall of a conference room. Although the legend grew about The Rose, it remained sealed and unseen until 1995, when it was excavated and restored in a major conservation effort by a team of conservators, who used traditional methods as well as the newest technologies to create a backing strong enough to support the great weight of the paint. The Rose is on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art through 1997.