Robert Bechtle, Fosters Freeze, 1975, oil on linen
Telling Stories: Narrative Art from the Permanent Collection
From the earliest cave paintings to the allegorical religious paintings of the Renaissance and history paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, telling stories in visual form has long been an impulse in art. In the nascent developments of American art, narrative compositions were particularly popular because they told the story of the birth of a country. Artists such as John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, John Trumble, and Charles Wilson Peale were among the many artists in the United States who embraced narrative art and challenged European dominance of the genre.
Entertaining, educational, and at times moralistic, narrative works of art focus on a single image that is captured in time in the midst of an action or implies that some kind of activity has recently taken place. While many modern artists sought to remove narrative content from their abstract paintings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the mid-1960s, as realism became redefined through Pop art and photo realism, the tendency to depict figurative works within an implied story line resurged. Contemporary narrative art is for the most part a kind of fiction that addresses relationships, mythic and historic situations, and everyday life. Such stories derive from personal biography, literature, television, the Internet, and the pure imagination of the artist. Whether highly subjective or socio-political in nature, narrative art provides a challenge to the viewer—not simply to unlock the plot of a fixed story, but to follow numerous paths of interpretation based on one’s own association with people, places, and things.
