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| Albrecht Durer, Adoration of the Magi, 1504 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy) |
Contrary to many precedent and following artists who depicted the Magi presenting their gifts in the dark surroundings of the stables, Durer imagined the scene en plein air and in daylight.
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| Pablo Picasso, A Girl with a Book |
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
I cannot complain about the number of lovely presents I have received, but to have an app dedicated by Tate Britain on Twitter is very different, so many thanks for such a wonderful surprise. Admittedly, I am not the only recipient: I am in the company of great Twitter folk who enthusiastically took part in discussing The Guardian‘s article back in September. You have read my contribution in this post: The Masters We Choose: Turner vs. Old Masters.
I am not going to tell you who won when I attempted the quiz, although I state that I was not cheating. I was as honest a critic as I could be. Turner goes against Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto, and Titian, among others, and the pop-up windows give you a chance to have a close look at the paintings.
To take a quiz, go to Turner & The Masters. And at the end of it you may like to fill in a form for a chance to win a special Turner goodie bag. What’s in it? Hmmm, you’ll have to do the quiz to find out!
The Guardian and Tate have today initiated a discussion – half based on Twitter – about Turner vs. the Old Masters. David Solkin, the curator at Tate, walked a Guardian journalist through the exhibition that pitches Turner’s paintings against those that inspired them. Turner’s works are shown next to Willem Van de Velde the Younger’s, Rembrandt’s, and Poussin’s.
According to Solkin, it’s 2:1 to Turner. Suppose this is so. But would one really organise such exhibition to let Turner lose? Especially at the gallery that boasts an impressive Turner collection? I don’t think so.
Copying and/or remaking the masters’ works is an exercise that arguably every artist out there undertakes at some point in their lives. Consider Francis Bacon’s study after the Portait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez (left). Or the copies of the work by Jean François Millet made by Vincent van Gogh: van Gogh’s own understanding was that he was more repainting Millet’s works rather than simply copying them. Or Duchamp’s well-known mockery of Mona Lisa (right).
Speaking of Turner, here are three Deluges: one by Leonardo, another by Poussin, the third by Turner. Who should, and why?
The problem I always have with this kind of juxtapositions in art is the point of reference. Poussin’s Deluge is likely to delude the viewer (I couldn’t resist the pun), so sober it is. Poussin deftly pushes the tragedy into the background of the painting. By comparison, Turner makes the viewer confront the tragic subject. Based on this, one may think that Poussin is more mature an artist because of the way he chooses the draw our attention to the subject. Another may say that Turner is braver and more ambitious, throwing us straight into the deluge. If Turner’s Deluge should be compared, it is best compared to Leonardo’s: not only the force of techniques, but the very intents are more similar.
Another statement that I would disagree with concerns Turner’s Pilate Washing His Hands, that it is “the bravest picture of the 19th c.“. I won’t question why it is compared to Rembrandt’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery: to me, the subjects are infinitely different, and so are the approaches to depicting them.
But let’s ignore this. Turner chose a grand subject, no doubt about it. In the larger context (that is, outside the Art world), this painting potentially preannounced the entire 20th c. with all its great wars with thousands, if not millions, of losses, off which many a Pilate washed their hands. But is that the context in which Solkin sees it? The Guardian doesn’t tell us.
What if the context is limited by the artistic pondering on themes of the New Testament? If this is the case, then Pilate Washing His Hands is no more ground-breaking than Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (right) that provoked outrage and was harshly criticised by Dickens.
And if the context is defined by the act of depicting a sensitive subject, then Eugene Delacroix’s Massacre of Chios (left) was considered both ground-breaking and outrageous and could possibly be seen as preempting the now familiar media reports from the “conflict regions”. But in the early 19th c. the Parisian society was not ready to spoil their day out at the gallery with the sight of exhausted Greek bodies. A century later Henry Miller noted the similar kind of displeasure of the cinema visitors who didn’t want to see the atrocities in the French Indochina. However brave Turner or Delacroix were, it doesn’t look like their works have had much impact either on contemporaries, or on posterity.
“Who wins” still stands, of course. And maybe it’s best not to try to give an answer, as the query is a rather fanciful one. Can we imagine Turner without the Titans of Renaissance? Or the Titans of Renaissance without Giotto or Duccio? Or the 20th c. art without the centuries that preceded it? We have the advantage that the contemporaries of Giotto, Leonardo or Turner didn’t have: we can see them in the context of their predecessors, contemporaries and followers – something they could never afford, at least as far as followers are concerned. But we should not use this advantage too much. In another 50 years, we will be seen in context, too.
As for me, when it comes to “winning artists”, I look at Picasso’s Guernica.
Image credits: Wikipedia, The Guardian, Aiwaz, Olga’s Gallery, and Matt Kirkland.
Special thanks to @Tate and @asiantees for discussing Turner and the Old Masters (especially Rembrandt).
P.S. I couldn’t resist re-sharing the photo I took in Waterstone’s in Manchester. As we can see, the good old Turner certainly ignites people’s creativity.
My photo of one of the musical angels in Manchester Cathedral has just been invited to the group Anges Musiciens (‘musical angels’ in French). I thought I’d point to it those who love art, especially Medieval. Someone was asking if Devil was a musical angel, and if angels could sing. Clearly, if there is an expression ‘angelic voice’, it originated for a reason. Here is the post, if you want to read for yourself. Incidentally, the decor of the altar screen in Manchester Cathedral portraits the singing angels. And on the right is how Edward Burne-Jones depicted a musical angel in 1878-1880 (credit to ArtMagick).
I noted that someone was looking for “picture on The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
“. There are various editions of the book, so the covers differ accordingly. The novel itself is woven around the work of Egon Schiele, the Austrian painter, and some of his works are used to illustrate the 1999 Faber&Faber edition.
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| Henri Gervex, Rolla, 1878 |
The cover of this edition, however, features a different work: it is Rolla (1878), by the French painter Henri Gervex (left). It is an illustration of a scene from the long poem under the same name by the enfant terrible of the French literature, Alfred de Musset (1810-1857). Rolla is the story of a bourgeois, Jacques Rolla, whose self-ruin and bankruptcy come as the consequence of his ennui with his social status. Unlike what may be deduced from Gervex’s painting, de Musset’s Rolla ended his life in a romantic but noble way: he came to visit Marion to tell her of his state of affairs, drank poison, and died in her arms.
The painting went public 20 years after de Musset’s death and 45 years after Rolla was composed. It was rejected by the Salon, and Gervex went on to display the painting in the shop window, attracting the crowds of onlookers and producing the furore. The public was not altogether unfamiliar with the portraits of courtesans or the depiction of the “gallant scenes“; the latter were particularly popular throughout the 18th c. On the left is Venus and Mars by Botticelli that dates back to 1483; and on the right is Manet’s Olympia (1863), a hommage to Giorgione (Sleeping Venus) and Titian (Venus of Urbino), as far as the pose of the model is concerned. All those paintings, Manet’s included, preceded the work of Gervex. His other contemporaries, including Ingres and Degas, were producing numerous studies of the nude, so the naked form, however ‘indecent’, wasn’t necessarily the reason for a public outcry.
The entire “problem” the public would have with Gervex’s painting is literally dumped in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The protruding walking stick is, of course, a phallic symbol, but it is buried almost entirely under female clothes. The top hat rests on this heap of fabric, overturned. The walking stick and the top hat were both the symbols of a bourgeois. Rolla the painting was scandalous not because of nudity, the relaxed pose of the sleeping courtesan, or as the illustration to the work of a no less scandalous author. The outrage was provoked by the depiction of the corrupt state of the gentilshommes who in the heat of passion were bringing the entire social class into submission to a prostitute. Compared to Gervex’s work, the engraving from the edition of de Musset’s collected work looks almost impossibly demure, giving us a Shakespearean-style scene (right).
As to why this painting was chosen for Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto‘s cover, my guess is that Gervex’s Rolla would bode well for the novel’s focus on sexual fantasy and desire, often forbidden.
Painting is the art of reaching out to the soul through eyes. If the effect didn’t go beyond the eyes, the painter only walked one half of his way.
Denis Diderot, Salon de 1769.
The 1818 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Death of Leonardo, was inspired by an extract from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.
Recently I’ve been doing some research for my other projects and I came across this painting by the French master Ingres, The Death of Leonardo. I knew that the Renaissance Italian connoisseur Giorgio Vasari would surely have something on the subject, see below:
At last, having become old, he lay ill for many months, and seeing himself near death, he set himself to study the holy Christian religion, and though he could not stand, desired to leave his bed with the help of his friends and servants to receive the Holy Sacrament. Then the king, who used often and lovingly to visit him, came in, and he, raising himself respectfully to sit up in bed, spoke of his sickness, and how he had offended God and man by not working at his art as he ought. Then there came a paroxysm, a forerunner of death, and the king raised him and lifted his head to help him and lessen the pain, whereupon his spirit, knowing it could have no greater honour, passed away in the king’s arms in the seventyfifth year of his age.
This passage from Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists inspired Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (J.-A.-D. Ingres (French painter)) to paint his 1818 work, titled The Death of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo is depicted wearing a long beard, as in the Uffizi portrait.
Following Leonardo’s death, Francesco Melzi wrote to the painter’s brothers:
I understand that you have been informed of the death of Master Leonardo, your brother, who was like an excellent father to me. It is impossible to express the grief that I feel at his death, and as long as my bodily parts sustain me I will feel perpetual unhappiness, which is justified by the consuming and passionate love he bore daily towards me. Everyone is grieved by the loss of such a man whose like nature no longer has it in her power to produce…
View the excellent cover of 1568 edition of Vasari’s work; and read extracts at Fordham University’s website.
Although I didn’t get the chance last year to attend any events during Liverpool’s residency as a European capital of culture of 2008, I travelled to Liverpool just a week before Christmas for a meeting. And there I finally got to visit Walker Art Gallery, just in time to catch a retrospective exhibition dedicated to John Moores Prize winners of the past years, as well as the John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize.
Before then, in September-October 2008 I was researching into Art and Poverty when I had to deeply delve once again into the 19th c. European painting, and particularly, the works of Pre-Raphaelites. Earlier in December 2008 I visited the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery that had the stunning Holy Grail Tapestries on display, as well as an exhibition of work of Ford Madox Brown. And between November 2008 and January 2009 I went to the exhibition of work of William Holman Hunt at Manchester Art Gallery. Not exactly because I loved it too much, but because twice I went with friends.
(I didn’t have to fill any photography permission forms at the Walker, but this was a requirement in Birmingham. On my Flickr, you can view the Walker set and the BMAG set).
I am posting this photo from one of the Victorian halls at the Walker also with the view to introduce a great blog about Pre-Raphaelites that I found recently: Pre Raphaelite Art. The blog is updated very, very often (something I’d love to do here and elsewhere) and is a wonderful treat to all who love Pre-Raphaelite painting. If you haven’t found it yet, I hope you do now. As for me, I’m grateful to the blog’s author for using a LinkWithin widget; I didn’t know about it.
And to round it off, a cast of William Holman Hunt’s hand from the Walker:
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It is always interesting to observe how the media presents the “news”. When independent artists, especially not well-known, turn to Social Media and mobile technologies, journalists and pundits use them for case-studies. They profile the use of social networks, various online or mobile tools that enable artists to make, publish and broadcast their art to a wide audience, at a potentially low cost. At certain point this even stops being “unthinkable” and becomes something that we almost expect an artist to do: to have a website and some online “profiles”.
Then David Hockney takes to draw a painting on his iPhone and emails it to friends – and this instantly becomes the case of one of the celebrated British artists still being “at the cutting edge of art“.
To think about it, Hockney is not the only “old master” who explores the new media. Already three years ago I briefly mentioned that both Peter Greenaway and David Lynch proclaimed the decline of “traditional” cinema and turned to the new technology. In this regard Hockney isn’t doing anything remotely novel – but it is the conclusion he draws that counts:
One morning recently, I made a drawing on my iPhone while I was still in bed, of flowers through the window, and the sunrise, which I could then [email] to 12 people, without it ever having been photographed or printed, and that’s very new.
We are very aware of the instantaneous quality of online publishing, yet what seems hard to register with us is that it’s still very new in comparison to centuries of traditions based first on handwriting and then on printing press. And yet it is new, and what this means for the artist like Hockney is that his work could be projected straight on the gallery screen or posted to the website immediately as it was finished. For a writer who posts straight to the blog online publishing also creates the precedent of making the work available for a larger or smaller circle of readers immediately as it was composed. Musicians, actors, dancers, even sculptors can use live streaming to show their work in process and in progress. Arguably, the more this is done in the way that Wollheim and Hockney appeared to do it, the better we understand “how art is made”.
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The article in The Daily Telegraph introducing Bruno Wollheim’s documentary about David Hockney is thought-provoking. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson earlier, Hockney turns away from photography to painting. But he does this with a twist, the reaction to which I find amusing:
He’s still obsessed by Secret Knowledge, to which he devoted two years of his life in the aftermath of his mother’s death in 1999. The book and film were controversial, arguing that, for the past 500 years, artists in the West had used lenses and mirrors to aid their work, so presenting the world in photographic terms. Most art historians poured scorn on his researches, but fellow artists tended to agree with him.
I’ve just written about how oblivious the historians can be to their own faults, and it seems that art historians follow in their footsteps. I never studied painting, and I cannot draw, but I will argue in Hockney’s favour, which will certainly prove that he is more right than wrong. This is the story of Filippo Brunelleschi introducing the perspective as early as 1425:
…Brunelleschi secretly painted a small, highly realistic image of the Baptistery of San Giovanni as it would have appeared in a mirror-reversed perspective when seen from a single point of view located just inside the portal of Santa Maria del Fiore. […] For purposes of his demonstration, Brunelleschi also drilled a small hole in the painting of the Baptistery at the point that would have been exactly opposite the point within the portal of the Duomo from which the perspective of the Baptistery had been constructed. […] Brunelleschi then set up his painting between the Baptistery and the entry to Santa Maria del Fiore, and called for volunteers to look through the peephole from behind the surface of the painting with one eye, while holding a mirror at a mathematically correct distance in front of the painting. […] The effect of the mirror was to minimize the viewer’s awareness of the presence of the painted surface and to intensify the sense of depth of the painting. […] By thus demonstrating to the public the breathtaking realism of his newly discovered system of linear geometric perspective, it seemed to Brunelleschi’s contemporaries that he had discovered how to re-create the world through the power of an art that precisely reflected physical reality as it is seen by the detached observer.
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| William Scrots, Anamorphic Portrait of Edward VI Tudor |
To carry on, why not remember the Renaissance admiration for anamorphic images? Their popularity had to do with the advances in the optical research, apart from the sheer amusement they provided. This famous portrait of King Edward VI Tudor even has a special slot on one side for a narrow tube through which the painting could be seen “properly”. Hans Holbein the Younger didn’t resist the call of fashion in the famous Ambassadors. Anamorphosis made its way into Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement; and in the whimsical arrangements of Arcimboldo’s works it probably played a moralistic, as well as entertaining, role.
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| Hans Holbein, Ambassadors |
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| Michelangelo, The Last Judgement(detail) |
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| Ludovico Archimboldo, The Cook |
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| Parmigianino, A Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror |
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| Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Family |
There are many examples of mirrors appearing in paintings. The more “traditional” approach would ascribe their presence to some ethical argument on the part of the artist, but what if in truth those artists who included mirrors in compositions simply gave away their “trade secret”, while also indicating that artists and people and objects in their paintings inhabited a three-dimensional, rather than two-dimensional, space? Here is Parmigianino’s self-portrait that he made while looking at himself in a convex mirror. But what if mirrors were introduced to revert, or elucidate, but either way to “personalise” the story in the painting? We may start with the famous Arnolfini portrait where the mirror in the background reveals the “other side” of the story we are watching. And then, to skip through several generations of painters, we could cite Velazquez’s Las Meninas, or better what Kenneth Clark wrote about this painting:
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| Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas |
With these speculations in mind I return to the Meninas and it occurs to me what an extraordinarily personal selection of the facts Velasquez has made. That he has chosen to present this selection as a normal optical impression may have misled his contemporaries, but should not mislead us. […] It is true that the Infanta dominates the scene, both by her dignity_for she has already the air of one who is habitually obeyed_and by the exquisite beauty of her pale gold hair. But after looking at her, one’s eye passes immediately to the square, sullen countenance of her dwarf, Maribarbola, and to her dog, brooding and detached, like some saturnine philosopher. These are in the first plane of reality. And who are in the last? The King and Queen, reduced to reflections in a shadowy mirror. To his royal master this may have seemed no more than the record of a scene which had taken his fancy. But must we suppose that Velasquez was unconscious of what he was doing when he so drastically reversed the accepted scale of values?
Here the celebrated photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo – who took much of his inspiration from paintings – would most likely remind us that “this phenomenon of instantaneous choosing is exactly the same thing that happens when I am taking photographs”. Isn’t Las Meninas a potent enough example of making a selection for a painting, akin to capturing the Bressonian “decisive moment” on camera?
Lastly, there will be the artwork by Philip Scott Johnson that stunned millions of viewers around the globe with a precocious arrangement of female portraits from the last 500 years. But I noted specifically that the video (which is a morphic art, as a matter of fact) somehow revealed that artists were painting their models from the more or less same angles for 500 years. Not only did this quality of female portraiture made Johnson’s own work possible – it also potently questioned the originality of form in Western art.
I am not aware of examples Hockney cited; neither do I know exactly why art historians found it hard to agree with the idea that the world was indeed presented in photographic terms throughout the last 500 years. It is quite clear even from the given examples that lenses and mirrors not only were an important part of a creative process (i.e. in the case of a self-portrait) but also affected the techniques, compositions, and “stories”. This may explain perhaps why already Turner’s contemporaries found it hard to “understand” his paintings: because they represented the world as a mixture of elements, untouched by an optical, geometrical arrangement. And the same elementary chaos is what apparently attracts Hockney today:
He is radically re-working his methods, going for speed and directness, using Rembrandt drawings and Van Gogh as his guides. This is his way to make painting escape the stranglehold of the camera.
While his painting may be escaping the stranglehold of the camera, his life in art has finally been caught with the very medium Hockney has abandoned. Whether this is paradoxical or ironic, time will tell; and in the meantime David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is to be broadcast on BBC1 on 30 June.
Illustrations:
William Scrots, The Anamorphic Portrait of Edward VI, 1546
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533
Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1534-1541
Guiseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook, 1570
Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
Parmigianino, A Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656
I am very grateful to a reader in Australia who introduced me to the figure of Adi Da Samraj in 2008 and shared several articles, one of which, by Gary J. Coates, I used in this post.
