Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
S U P E R F I C T I O N S
Alice Black
Alice Black the originator of The Theory of Emerging Art
is one of the most remarkable names in 20th century art.
The exhibition which takes its title from the above theory illustrates Black's
revolutionary theories about art history, classification and criticism.
Alice Black was born in London in 1908. Following in the footsteps of her famous
father, the cultural anthropologist Sir John Black, she became an ardent student
of the new science of Sociology and accompanied her father on many of his journeys
throughout the world during the 1930s.
In her travels, Black acquired a passion for art and was the author of
several popular books which examined the connection between art and societies.
In 1946, she visited North America for the first time. It was then, in New York City,
that she made the discovery which was to give rise to her radical and outstanding theory.
Black found a painting that she knew she had seen some years before in a different
part of the world.
Subsequent enquiries revealed that it wasn't the same painting, but, rather, an
'identical painting' to one that she had seen ten years before in the studio of
an Australian artist in Adelaide.
This gave rise to the idea that art can be reclassified. Not according to the
traditional methods of time or place of origin, or even the motivation of the
artist, but according to the final form of the work.
Black realised that all works of art can and are replicated unintentionally. The
more complex a work may be, the further one may have to search, but ultimately,
to coin Black's own phrase: 'there is no new art.' see Rodney Glick and David Solomon
