Andrew Wyeth Master Bedroom Analysis

Humanity has faced the challenge of placing a definition on the ever so abstract concept of art since the beginning of the Renaissance. The ongoing dispute between art critics and aesthetic philosophers has generated the creation of numerous textual and pictorial compositions in regards to varying views on the idea of art. To translate a scene of a room and a bed onto a large canvas should not be considered true art. Early art philosophers struggled between perceiving art as an inspiration or a true knowledge. Andrew Wyeth’s watercolor, Master Bedroom, seems to just be an imitation of a real master bedroom instead of a true work of art. The piece deserves the least amount of appreciation because of its lack of originality, creativity, and

Maybe his sole purpose of the painting relied on the use of colors that were not so lurid. The sepia tone of the overall painting renders the same old feeling of walking into an old vintage room. Coming in contact with feelings and emotions is a checkpoint when experiencing art and this general experience is what art critic, Clive Bell, addressed and deemed an aesthetic experience in his book, Art. The absence of being able to feel a new or “peculiar emotion” when observing the painting, makes it just any old painting with little to no significance (Bell 187). Experiencing the aesthetic experience in which Bell speaks of means that the audience actually is actually provoked into interacting with the work of art because of its significance and a certain quality in which Bell calls “significant form” (Bell 8). In observing the piece, one can relate to the forms in the painting, but those forms are not expressive of any type of message. Wyeth may have had a specific experience with the scene, but the audience’s interpretation of the piece does not connect, disqualifying the piece from being a work of art, according to philosopher, Leo Tolstoy. He argues that art is only art when “the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt” (Tolstoy 179) in his book, What is Art?. There is no sense of “unity” between “the artist and the audience” where the audience “feels as if the work were his own and not someone else's—as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express” (Tolstoy 180). John Berger also addresses the issue of audience and art interaction in his book, Ways of Seeing. Within the text, he explains the relationship between the audience’s beliefs and how it affects their reception of a certain piece of art. He says that the audience’s “knowledge” and “explanation” of a scene “never quite fits the sight”