inually test the rules that define their limits. In some sense, this is precisely because rules themselves are antithetical to the process of creating art: if artistry were simply a matter of following rules, anyone could be an artist. To the contrary, artistic talent requires an instinctive originality, rules filtered through the human imagination to create work that is unique to the particular artist.
Nevertheless, great art, like great science and mathematics, builds on a knowledge of what has come before. Picasso was able to produce sketches, such as his Head of a Young Boy, that demonstrated his mastery of conventional perspective, representational drawing, and the ways in which the movement of muscles governs the expression of a face. Without this understanding, works such as his Head collage would seem to be merely childish, uneducated scrawls instead of purposeful attempts to push the limits of the way in which a human face could be recorded on a two-dimensional canvas.
Even some of the most primitive and isolated examples of art demonstrate historical antecedents. Australian aboriginal art uses the X-ray technique of showing both the outside of an animal and a cross-section of its interior. This technique can be traced back several millennia throughout Asia, in rock paintings by nomadic tribes; its much more recent appearance on the Australian continent can be directly attributed to late l9th century contact with the mainland.1 Artists among the Australian aborigines have been as likely to be influenced by history as artists of any other culture.
Nevertheless, artists have also always continued to try to break away from historical precedent. The impressionist movement of the late l9th century represents the most dramatic visual testing of established rules of art, yet artists have always experimented with ways of visually recording reality, and each age has its own peculiar look. What made the impressionists such a dra...