Figurative art represents human and animal subjects.
Figurative art represents a recognizable subject, such as a person or animal. The meaning of figurative art depends upon the artist. For some great figurative artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Sandro Botticelli, capturing a subject's essence with craft and skill transcends realism or recognizable imagery.
Humanity's prehistoric figurative art, discovered in Germany in 2003, suggests art may have played a role in reaching for the divine.
Figurative art reflects the complete human experience.
History
Leonardo da Vinci, a figurative artist, used craft and skill to create timeless works.
In 2003, Deutsche Welle published the findings of an archeological dig in southern Germany. Three figurative art objects carved in mammoth bone dating back 30,000 to 33,000 years, "a lion-man, a water bird and a horse," demonstrate early man's desire to capture and extrapolate from natural forms.
According to archeologist Nicholas Conard, the objects may have been used by shamans for guidance in the spirit world. The water bird, able to mediate water and land, had the potential to move between worlds. To hold the bird's image transferred its power to the shaman.
Ancient Egyptian and later civilizations rendered abstract and stylized versions of themselves. Spiritual subjects portrayed, such as Ra's daily movement through the sky in a bark, mirror their natural world.
Classical Greek art prioritized mathematical and geometric ideals rather than the real "math" of the actual human form. Recognizing that the artist must use the prism of his perspective when painting, drawing, or sculpting, Nicias, according to Pliny, endowed art with some portion of himself.
Figurativism to Modern Art
Ancient Grecian artists superimposed geometric ideals to the human form.
Through the centuries, figurative art seeks to capture subjects' natural, identifiable features. Great masters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, used skill and perspective to create art reflecting the actual mathematical relationships of human physiology.
Although precursors of modern photography have existed since the "pinhole camera" was written about by Aristotle 2,500 years ago, complete images were unknown until the mid-1820s. Figurative art and portraiture remained the preferred method of making a subject's "picture."
Twentieth Century Abstract Art
Impressionists built a bridge between figurative and modern art.
As photography techniques improved, abstract art's fresh, bold approach took many forms. Impressionism arrived with the late nineteenth century. Artists like Edgar Degas, while experimenting with new ways to use materials and techniques to capture light and a sense of movement in composition, never used "impressionist" to describe his work.
Expressionism and Action Art
Elements of figurative and abstract art blurred in the twentieth century.
Diverging from photographic imagery to oscillating abstract forms, modern artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and others gravitated toward "action art" and a return to at least some of the elements of figurativism.
Return to Figurativism
Figurative artists make "pictures" of the human form.
Blurring of abstract and, by now, symbolic use figurative art's elements of shape, color, line, light, texture, and view, culminated in the late 1940s to early 1950s. For example, David Park, an expressionist painter living in California, entered a figurative art contest and won. Considered by some as "failure to summon deeper resources" required to create abstract art, a critic remarked that most "non-objective painting was becoming as ineffectual as apocalyptic wallpaper."
