What is a Masterpiece?
The MacArthur Fellows: Masters of Unusual Media
I’ve been so enamored with the MacArthur Fellowship1 recently that I put together a complete playlist2 of all of their videos. “What does such a diverse group of people have in common?” I wonder. I can’t help but think that each of them has mastered a particularly unusual choice of medium.
My favorite: Theater Artist and Educator, Anne Basting3, who is “revealing the power of storytelling and creative expression to engender sustained emotional connections among elders experiencing cognitive impairment.” I cried after watching her video:
According to Marshall McLuhan4, there are principles associated with media, or “extensions of man” per his definition, that can be applied to media regardless of the specific medium.
According to Kenneth Clark5, there are similar principles that can be applied to masterpieces regardless of the specific masterpiece.
I suspect that going deep into the principles underlying medium and mastery can create some awe-inspiring results — like those of Anne Basting, Peter Pronovost, or Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Below are notes and passages I took from trying to understand masterpieces better. I hope they’re helpful for creating your magnum opus.
Summary of What Is A Masterpiece? 6
1. Masterpieces exist.
2. Masterpieces are the work of great artists in moments of enlightenment.
3. Masterpieces involve a confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea.
4. Masterpieces recreate traditional forms to express the artist’s own epoch while simultaneously keeping a relationship with the past.
5. Masterpieces require deep understanding of the human element.
6. Masterpieces are an embodiment and symbol of what we find in the depths of our hearts.
7. Small details alone do not make masterpieces, but small details in delicate human situations help to produce a masterpiece.
8. Masterpieces involve both intellectual grasp and technical skill.
9. Masterpieces require the stimulus of some dramatic situation.
10. The highest masterpieces are illustrations of great themes.
11. Masterpieces suspend the criticisms of commonsense.
12. Masterpieces require us to admit defeat.
13. Masterpieces require form and subject to be one.
14. Masterpieces are a blow in the pit of the stomach.
15. Masterpieces are sustained down to the smallest detail.
16. Effective revolutions depend on convincing details.
17. Masters escape from conventional styles and have their freedom develop in all directions.
18. Happiness is of great importance in our lives and masterpieces.
19. We stand silently before masterpieces.
20. We feel an immense respect for masterpieces.
21. Masterpieces command amazement that the master has been able to dominate a mass of material.
22. Masterpieces can make us feel personal inadequacy and the inadequacy of our own times.
23. Masterpieces must use the language of the day, however degraded it may seem.
24. Anyone seeing a masterpiece must be knocked sideways.
25. Masterpieces are not merely a superb piece of technical skill, but a record of a profound and a prophetic experience.
26. Masterpieces are above all the work of an artist of genius who has been absorbed by the spirit of the time in a way that has made his individual experiences universal.
27. If the acceptable subjects of painting are serious themes, touching us at many levels, he is well on his way to making a masterpiece.
28. In the end, a masterpiece will be the creation of his own genius.
Beloved Passages from What Is A Masterpiece? by Kenneth Clark
Although we may disagree about a theory, the impact of a masterpiece is something about which there is an astonishing degree of unanimity. Changes of taste may keep the amateur amused, and we do not need to be reminded of the unexpected names that appear in the lists of great artists in the manuals of the 18th and early 19th centuries, usually headed by Giulio Romano. […] So I hope we can agree that masterpieces exist, and are the work of great artists in moments of particular enlightenment, and the question before us is why an artist has suddenly felt himself inspired. […]
And yet we know that it would not fill our imaginations simply because it is an illustration. It does so because of Donatello’s mastery of form. The composition, which looks almost obvious, turns out, on analysis, to have a long history. Donatello had, I believe seen a Greek stele, either an original of the 5th century or a Hellenistic replica. He had been immediately struck with the beautiful finality of the design, and he probably recognized someone who had died. He determined to bring it back to life, and in doing so reveals two of the characteristics of a masterpiece: a confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea, and a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of the artist’s own epoch and yet keep a relationship with the past. […] [A] masterpiece should not be ‘one man thick, but many men thick.’ […]
The human element is essential to a masterpiece. The artist must be deeply involved in the understanding of his fellow men. We can say that certain portraits are masterpieces because in them a human being is recreated and presented to us as an embodiment, almost a symbol, of all that we might ever find in the depths of our hearts. […]
Rembrandt and Titian prove that great portraits can be masterpieces. But can we say that the straightforward portrait that appealed so much to both patrons and painters in the last century is worthy of that name? Manet and his circle thought that Velazquez was the greatest painter who had ever lived. Well, we may agree that devotion to truth is an attribute of the human mind from which a masterpiece may grow, and most people who are inclined to use the word masterpiece at all would apply it to Las Maninas of Velazquez. In the simplest meaning of the word, Las Meninas shows a devotion to truth that has never been equalled. But can mere imitation be the basis of a masterpiece? Before we indignantly answer ‘no’ we should ask what scale of visual impression is in question. A small detail – what used to be called a trompe l’oeil – can hardly claim to be a masterpiece. But when the discovery of truth is extended to a group of persons situated in a large room, and involved in a delicate human situation, then the painter’s intellectual grasp and his technical skill can be combined to produce a masterpiece.
Actually it is very rare for a masterpiece to be achieved in this way, simply because the painter usually needs, in addition to these innate gifts, the stimulus of some dramatic situation. […] Let me take the Betrayal of Christ. It is a masterly design. Everything in the picture leads us to look at the heads of Christ and Judas – the staves and torches, the draperies and of course the figures. And when we concentrate on the two heads, all pictorial designs are forgotten, and we think only of this unforgettable confrontation. Judas, like some animal, half conscious of the dreadful task that has been laid on him, and Christ, sternly accepting this betrayal as part of his destiny. […]
Figure 1: Giotto, Betrayal of Christ (Arena Chapel, Padua)
The Arena Chapel convinces us, surely, that the highest masterpieces are illustrations of great themes, and it has been the good fortune of European art that during its finest period it was called upon to concentrate almost exclusively on the Christian story. […] At almost the same date, Bellini represented the dead Christ in a way at the furthest remove from that of his brother-in-law. Instead of inspired virtuosity, a deep humanity.
Two examples from the north. First, the Descent from the Cross by Roger van der Weyden. It is both concentrated and complex. The figures are effectively all in one plane, and could be rendered as sculpture. The composition could be analyzed in great detail. Every part of it works, and no passages are included simply to please the eye. I once wrote that the figures seem to have become art before they were painted. And yet all this elaborate art is subservient to the subject. We know that the descent from the Cross cannot have looked remotely like this. But Roger’s imaginative power, supported by his great technical skill, forces us to suspend the criticisms of commonsense – in fact, they do not even cross our minds. It is a triumph of art. […]
Figure 2: Roger Van Der Weyden, Descent from the Cross (Prado, Madrid)
[Other masterpieces do] not aim at art, but at truth.
Outside Venice, the second half of the 16th century is a depressing period. Form – or, as was then said, maniera – had outsted subject. But one painter, in his love of truth, painted masterpieces, Pieter Breughel. Although one can find in his backgrounds an echo of the delicate perception of nature of his Flemish predecessors, his vision of life was his own, and startlingly original. Who else would have painted the road to Calvary in which the place of crucifixion is in the distance and our attention is drawn to the thieves, who are being taken there on a cart. The extraordinary thing is that when he went to Rome in 1550 – the Rome of Giulio Romano and the Mannerists – he was greatly admired. Vasari called him ‘un piccolo e nuovo Michelangelo’. The Roman connoisseurs admired equally both Breughel and Paolo Veronese, which looks like a sign of generosity, but was perhaps an admission of defeat similar to our own. […]
The Christian story is not the only subject of masterpieces. The good life of the senses can be raised by imagination to the condition of poetry. This, no doubt, had been the source of the greatest plastic and pictorial works of antique art, known to us only from replicas, and it was recreated in the Renaissance with something still of Gothic linearism in the work of Botticelli. Ultimately the beauty of his Three Graces expresses a deeply sensuous response, but it is rendered in a style so austere as to preclude the word sensual. His works hang at a point of balance never occupied before or since. […]
Figure 3: Botticelli, Three Graces, detail from the Primavera (Uffizi, Florence)
Once more we are aware that form and subject are one. If form predominates, as in many Mannerist and Neoclassical pictures, there is a loss of vitality and of that humanity which should underlie even the most idealized construction; but if subject predominates, as in the naturalistic painting of the 19th century, the mind releases its hold. In both cases the chance of a masterpiece is diminished. […]
The immense spiritual energy that had produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian seemed to have been exhausted in the second half of the 16th century, and for masterpieces outside Venice we have to wait fifty years for Caravaggio. […] But he was a painter of masterpieces. There are no small or trivial Caravaggios. Each one is a blow in the pit of the stomach and, as we gradually recover from the shock, we see that the mastery has been sustained down to the smallest detail. Effective revolutions depend on convincing details.
Whatever he may mean to us, there is no doubt about what Caravaggio meant to his immediate successors: escape from the packaged diet of the Mannerist style and freedom to develop in every direction. No painter has had so many men of genius among his followers; because I think we may safely say that neither Rubens, nor Velazquez nor Rembrandt would have been the same without him. […] His greatest masterpieces are Christian pictures. But his evocations of the senses are masterpieces too – not only the pictures of glowing flesh, by which is popularly remembered, but his response to nature, from the smallest detail to the largest perspective. Which reminds us that happiness, which plays so little part in the speculations of philosophers or theologians, is sometimes of great importance in our lives. No one, I hope, would deny that Watteau’s Embarkation for the Island of Cythera is a masterpiece, and although critics have detected a vein of delicate melancholy in Watteau, it is surely a poem in praise of happiness. Whether the pilgrims to Cythera will ever reach it is beside the point. They are going in search of it, as the first object in life.
Figure 4: Watteau, Embarkation for the Island of Cythera (Louvre, Paris)
Rubens was a happy man of action who was also a painter of genius. Velazquez was a true professional. It is tempting to say that masterpieces are not painted by professionals. They demand a wider contact with life. This was half true of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, but not, I suppose, of Titian, and it is eminently untrue of Velazquez. And yet one must admit that his strangely impersonal portraits are masterpieces, in which Velazquez’s reticence becomes almost a moral quality.
Figure 5: Velazquez, Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count Duke of Olivares (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fletcher Fund, 1952)
There remains a sense of the word masterpiece that I have not touched on, although it may perhaps be one that is uppermost in many people’s minds when they use the word. They think of those large, elaborate works in which a painter has put in everything he knows in order to show his complete supremacy in his art. […] We stand silently before them, and try to feel some of the emotions that overwhelmed amateurs and historians of art in the last century. I do not say that we are altogether unsuccessful. We feel an immense respect, and even an amazement that the painter has been able to dominate such a mass of material, and if we do not immediately respond, that may be due to accidental distractions. Crowds, guides, haste or hunger may intervene. But beyond this is a sense of inadequacy – personal inadequacy, and the inadequacy of our own times. By these works all modern painting is condemned. […]
After 1870, and perhaps not unconnected with the change of French social structure, although such connections are always suspect, the masterpiece contracts. It does not disappear. Manet’s Olympia is a masterpiece all right. But pictures that, by their scale and pretension, might once have had a claim to be called masterpieces are dead. Even Puvis de Chavannes, thought by his serious contemporaries to be unquestionably the greatest painter of his time, does not often make one’s heart beat faster. This is the summit of virtuous official art, and the living art of the time was not virtuous.
Figure 6: Manet, Olympia (Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris)
Which leads to the conclusion, already foreshadowed, that a masterpiece must use the language of the day, however degraded it may seem. What if that language, for certain complex reasons, has become incomprehensible to the majority of men and women? Can we say that the great cubist pictures of Picasso are masterpieces? I think we can. A picture like the Woman with a Guitar, which seemed so esoteric when it was painted in 1911, now offers no difficulties to anyone with a sense of animated design. As for Guernica: surely anyone seeing it for the first time must be, to use a popular expression, knocked sideways. It is almost impossible to believe that when it was first exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 it was attacked by almost all highbrow critics. They said that it was a betrayal of those principles that they had painfully learnt to recognize in the Woman with a Guitar. The triumph of Guernica was to a large extent a popular triumph. And if we call the cubist pictures the extended sense that I have tried to use here. It is not merely a superb piece of technical skill, it is the record of a profound and a prophetic experience. No one can analyze its subject. Many of the ideas it contains go back to before the bombing of Guernica; the confused horror of its general impression looks forward to coming war. But above all it represents, or symbolizes, a society in the throes of destruction, as convincingly as Raphael’s School of Athens represents society in perfect equilibrium.
Thus I return to my original position. Although many meanings cluster round the word masterpiece, it is above all the work of an artist of genius who has been absorbed by the spirit of the time in a way that has made his individual experiences universal. If he is fortunate enough to live in a time when many moving pictorial ideas are current, his chances of creating a masterpiece are greatly increased. If, to put it crudely, the acceptable subjects of painting are serious themes, touching us at many levels, he is well on his way. But in the end a masterpiece will be the creation of his own genius.
Figure 7: Picasso, Woman with a Guitar ('Ma Jolie') (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Lillie P. Bliss Bequest)
Figure 8: Picasso, Guernica (on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, New York)
MacArthur Fellows Program Strategy - MacArthur Foundation. www.macfound.org/programs/fellows/strategy.
Schodowski, Eddie. “Complete Playlist of MacArthur Fellows.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 Mar. 2021, youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbsfYYVorWOY3zLT1pyY48Cm3dPfjOrw5.
Anne Basting - MacArthur Foundation. www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2016/anne-basting.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. 1964.
“Kenneth Clark.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Jan. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark.
Clark, Kenneth McKenzie. What Is a Masterpiece? Thames and Hudson, 1979.