What is art? And what is reality? Especially today, why should one draw or paint, carve or model, when an image can be captured with a camera? In a nineteenth-century painting, Interior with Portraits, by the American artist Thomas LeClear, two children stand painfully still while a photographer prepares to take their picture. The paintings and sculptures that fill the studio have been shoved aside to make way for a new kind of art-the photograph. As the photographer adjusts the lens of his camera, we see his baggy pants but not his head Is LeClear suggesting that the painter's head (brain and eye) is being replaced by the lens (a kind of mechanical brain and eye) of the camera. Or even that the artist and the camera have become a single recording eye? Or is this painting a witty commentary on the nature or reality? Art history leads us to ask such questions.
Marilyn Stokstad (16).
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As I was approaching the piece, opposing reactions surged through my mind. .
"This is it?" I noted. I may have even passed it the first time looking for a piece of integrity and beauty; perhaps, something resembling Kritios Boy. The shape of the statuette of an athlete is crude and in not appealing. The workmanship is primitive and quite "archaic". Frankly, I was disappointed.
Then, however, I began to draw it. As I outlined the figure, I came to the realization that it is the ideal Kouros statue of the early Greek-Archaic period, stretching from 600 to 480 BCE. Marilyn Stokstad defines a Kouros statue, in the book ART HISTORY, as a statue of a young man. Conforming to the convention of Greek Kouros statues, the piece under examination is nude; an archaic smile and almond shaped eyes grace its face and the shapes of the body are crude and simply cut-resembling the marble Kouros statue, of 600 BCE (169). .
Unlike the marble Kouros statue, as well as most of the Kouros statues mentioned by Stokstad, the statuette was cast in bronze.
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