Last year one of my main activities as programme director of fine art at Canterbury Christ Church University was designing an Illustration degree and getting it adopted. Art and design is very important in determining how we define ‘art’. People who study art and design go on to be involved in art through their employment, and the ideas they carry get filtered into wider society. Fine art is what most people who want to be an artist study, although the situation is more complex than that.
In the mid-20th century, studying fine art meant drawing and painting from the nude, painting landscapes and portraits, still life and interiors. You would learn perspective and the use of colour, tonal values and rendering form, and spend time in the printmaking department.
As time went on, fine art had to face questions. If the latest thing was Abstract Expressionism, why should artists learn to draw from the nude? Were there other ways of learning and teaching fine art that didn’t involve sharpening a pencil and staring at a naked person all day? Maurice De Saumarez’s excellent book Basic Design (1964) tried to answer that question; in the introduction he makes it clear that his exercises in developing abstract compositions and visual ideas should be taught in conjunction with, rather than instead of, observational drawing. Most fine art lecturers who read the book seem to have ignored the introduction, as art colleges were soon sharply divided between figurative and abstract, some more so than others. It was a drawn-out war that began to reach a compromise in the 1980s with New British Figuration, but then along came the Young British Art movement, which in turn created more interest in Conceptual Art, and the struggle between abstract and figurative became irrelevant.