pictures that break composition rules

[sun of sand]

Cezanne was pretty abstract but still representational
Cubism was still representational but borrowed heavily from Cezanne and I frankly don't care for cubism
abstraction as we know it around 1910/11
One of my favorite artists is frantisek kupka
His among others work was coined orphism and was the accepted first break from reality into complete abstraction

But did Cezanne steal from someone
Was Cezanne the first to be accepted as working in that style while pulling it off somewhat successfully
I would put money on it. Did Picasso invent cubism or did he see something in somones work somewhere that had that look to it but was still yet in that artist n its infancy and unacknowledgeable.
So while one artist is exploring an idea which borrowed from something else here is Picasso at first glance diving directly into that cubist language and developing it while the other guy is wrestling with where his work is taking him


I think its a disservice to art to deny the evolution of it and instead try and determine who came up with what

That's like giving the guy who first put ketchup on a hamburger credit as the man who invented the modern hamburger
He just slightly altered something that already existed
And someone else in all likely hood beat him to it by 3 years only they weren't noticed and he got the idea from a grandmother in carolina anyway who served patties in a tomato sauce and saw little kids spooning some onto slices of bread

Egg 1st
Is a hamburger a hamburger
North america was pretty well discovered before any European ship drifted ashore
What counts and what doesnt

[N Dhananjay]

Turtles all the way down?

Which also begs the question why isn't it elephants all the way down? Except I suppose elephants don't swim through space....

[Robert Langham]

Rules apply after the photograph is complete, but not before.



Barn Owl, 1987

[David Lobato]

Compositional rules generally support harmony and order. But breaking the rules results in a dissonance that can be part of one's vision.

[Alan Klein]

Compositional rules generally support harmony and order. But breaking the rules results in a dissonance that can be part of one's vision.

+1

[Drew Wiley]

There is really no doubt who first came up with abstraction. Kandinsky. We even know the exact painting, and it was not an accident by any means. There were
plenty of precedents from himself and Cezanne especially, but actually crossing the line required some boldness. There is not such thing as an abstract photograph.
Certain subjects might be abstraction-inspired; but if a lens was pointed at them, they're real things, not abstractions. Photosensitive materials might can hypothetically be used completely apart from any subject; but then it would be difficult to call them photographs at all.

[Kirk Gittings]

Drew soooooo
..... what if someone constructs something solely for the purpose of making an abstract photograph. See my friend's album "Vanishing Point" http://philipaugustin.com/

[Drew Wiley]

Then I wouldn't personally call it a photograph. Maybe someone would. Painting with light perhaps. Unfortunately, nowadays we have Fauxtoshop too, to further
blur the line, for people too lazy to actually paint. But taxonomy is never a precise science. Abstraction in its strict sense never involves a visible object, except
in the imagination. Photographers go out and see patterns in nature and so forth and label it abstract subject matter, but it isn't. Analogously, others see scatters
of lichen color or whatever and mimic what J.Pollack did with paint drips, but it's not the same mindset at all. If he hadn't done it first, they never would have noticed something like that to begin with. But they found it - he created it. Whole different game. In some ways, it's harder to find it; but sheer creativity generally
lands squarely in the painter's ball court.

[Kirk Gittings]

Ok one more time......someone builds something abstract for the purpose of photographing it, they photograph it and make a print (in Phillips case a silver print) and you wouldn't call it a photograph? Really.

[Drew Wiley]

No. Absolutely not, Kirk. They photographed it. They built a tangible, visible set or model, focused upon it. It was there, and therefore not an abstraction in sense Kandinsky first broke that threshold, as defined by the precedent of painting. The model might be an abstraction, in the sense of a collage or sculpture. But the photograph of it isn't.