According to accounts of art history, a critical component of painting, prior to the movement towards modernity, was the visual narrative and its depictive “concrete” imagery. Approaching the 20th century, the subject matter of western painting became simpler in its narrative, and therefore, required less complexity of the visual imagery to support it. The time of biblical and mythological narrative that concerned Western art was exchanged later for a time that concerned humbler subject matters of, for example, the provincial and the landscape; the importance of the narrative, and the imagery the supported it, continued to wane during the emergence of the experimentally modern and “New” trends of the art in the 20th century. The quantitative visual results and effects of the medium itself had became more important than the image that could have been created had thus brought the narrative and the concrete image largely to an end in the art history of Western Art. I agree with aesthetic theories that explain the importance of historical grounds with art, in so far it it provides the foundation necessary to preserve the importance, value, and cultural durability of the art piece, through time. The narrative and the concrete image are facilitations of the historical grounds of visual art; if the narrative and the concrete image were to be removed from the art work, then there would not be means for history to make art endurably relevant through time. Modernist aesthetics demonstrated not only how the historical had been rendered irrelevant in the support of the experimental ‘New’, but that the historical contradicts the very constitution of the New and the modern; the new would contradict its very constitution if it possessed aspects of old. The historical was necessarily rejected for the creation and survival of the new art of modernity, and therefore, frequently had no use for the image and the narrative in the contemporary visual art of the 20th century.

The trend of Pop Surrealism seems to have gained momentum in contemporary western culture, and with it, some restoration of the concrete image and the visual narrative. History therefore has become relevant again and is evident within the products of the Pop Surrealist trend as it exhibits baroque aesthetics and technique of painting, an emulation from the late 1800’s, however mimetic. Aesthetic mimicry however now may be the momentum of new trends of art that involve concrete imagery and narrative, for it seems that art has not moved far enough beyond from the standards of modern art set by the 20th century to discover what is ahead. The contemporary artist who wishes to create an image independent of of “modern art” now seem to have little else but to grasp back into history to derive from for any aesthetic that could be considered progressive, because there has yet to be a new aesthetic established beyond those set by modernism.