The History of the Easel
Easel-Painting
Despite their apparent status as specialized lecterns, art easels in history actually play a significant role in the development of a new form of visual presentation. The development of oil-based paint, storable in tubes, and the accompanying portable painting easel once changed the face of art: "The rise of oil painting in the fifteenth century stands as one of the epochal breakthroughs of Western art. …Oil-based paint, it has been argued, fueled a great leap forward in pictorial verisimilitude, at once facilitating the ascendancy of portable easel painting and casting a naturalist spell over Western representation lasting nearly five centuries."
18 Artists were suddenly able to ramble through hill and vale and see the world around them in completely new ways. This newfound freedom was considered to be so discrete from past perspectives that a new form came into being, termed "easel-painting." This naming reflects that despite its role of supporting actor, the power of the easel to alter the very medium is undeniable.
Ralph Mayer's Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, the all-time painter's bible, defines easel painting in the following way: "Creative painting executed in one of the standard techniques, such as oils, watercolors, tempera, gouache, or pastel; most frequently intended to be framed and hung on a wall." To contemporary thinkers it's a clearly distinct form of art, but it wasn't always, and wouldn't have become so without the portable easel. Mayer goes on to say, "The term [easel painting] distinguishes this major fine-arts form from other fields of painting such as mural painting, illustration, and decorative or applied arts. It also implies an adherence to professional and technical standards of permanence, or the ability to survive indefinitely when preserved indoors under the conditions normally afforded works of art."
19 Unlike some art forms, which by their impermanent nature aren't made to last, easel art intends to stick around.
This distinction between easel art and mural art has actually cost lives in history. The socialist realism which was imposed on Russian artists and writers in the early 1930s raised not only the question of what was allowable content but also what was allowable form. A Society of Easel Painters collided ideologically with the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia as to what visual language was suitable for the masses, and traditionalists "rejected easel painting for murals. …By the mid-1930s, artists who continued to embrace modernist principles were officially criticized, castigated as 'formalists,' and some of them were eliminated."
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