Francis Picabia (1879–1953)Idyll, 1927, Oil on canvas, [dimensions unknown]
COHERENCE REQUIRES UNITY OF EXPRESSION
Consistency of language throughout a work of art is nearly always necessary if it is to be coherent. For example, it will be hard to make a representational painting read well if half of it is in black and white and the other half in color. Tonal and color structure must be consistent to sustain an illusion. The same principle applies to handling. It is nearly impossible, for example, to develop a unified painting in which part of the picture is executed in heavy brushstrokes and the rest of it is painted in very small and delicate brushstrokes. Similarly, it is hard to combine flawless rendering with other parts of a painting executed in a broken impressionistic style. This leads us to consider the idea that we generally require some form of unity to be present throughout a work of art, a principle that goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics. More recently, the writer Somerset Maugham observed, “The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.”
In the modern world, an artist will sometimes break with the idea of consistency of language for effect. For example, Francis Picabia (1879–1953) often combined a tonal image with a linear drawing to create a kind of two-tier presentation in his works. The English artist Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) sometimes inserted a passage of painting in a photorealist style into works that were otherwise executed in a simplified cartoon style. In these cases it is the concept of the piece that becomes the unifying element, the audacity and surprise of the discontinuity.
Francis Picabia (1879–1953)
Idyll, 1927, Oil on canvas, [dimensions unknown]
