The modern Western tradition has bequeathed to our time a very specific image of the artist. This is a creative and gifted person who expresses not only themselves through their art but also the entirety of humanity. However, the price of genius is heavy. The artist-Prometheus is eccentric, melancholic, and self-destructive.
From Michelangelo to Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock, such a stereotype has been consistently reproduced throughout art history. But is this really the case? Is eccentricity and boundary-less behavior a prerequisite for artistic creativity, or is it a characteristic of a historical archetype that has emerged in modern times? And if the latter is true, what environment gave birth to, nourished, and ultimately rejected this Promethean artistic model?
In this book, Nikos Daskalothanasis examines the historical trajectory of the artist from Romanticism to the present day in three chapters (titled 'The Lonely Artist', 'The Pioneer Artist', and 'The Loss of the Artist'), analyzing the artistic developments of the modern and contemporary era. At the same time, he highlights the institutional shifts through which the artist redefines their activity and constructs their identity.
The romantic and modern artist, the culmination and also the swan song of the academic artistic system, yields their place to the avant-garde artist. This new art cultivates the utopian vision of a new society while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a new market that continues to support the artistic myth. Only in the late post-war period will the artist be called to confront for the first time in their long history a new reality: their own death.
Does this fact indicate a liberating perspective, or is it merely a rephrasing of the terms for the constitution of bourgeois subjectivity itself? The answer to this question concerns not only the contemporary artist but also, equally, the contemporary viewer.
This rich book presents both historical elements and theoretical questions that have been posed and answered by art theorists and artists themselves, illustrated with 56 black-and-white images of representative works from the modern Western tradition (paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations). The publication is complemented by a sufficient bibliography as well as an index of key names.
