Posts Tagged ‘painting’
“This is, if not a lifetime process, awfully close to it”*…
Shani Zhang paints weddings (and other events). Along the way, she’s drawn some fascinating conclusions…
Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room. Seeing someone new, I always have a feeling of noticing their internal architecture. I did not realize that some people do not feel this way, at least not as intensely.
- By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.
- I hear the speed at which they metabolize information and the nature of their attention. Attention falls on the spectrum of jumping bean to steady stream. Where it falls depends on a person’s nature, and also how much they want to be in that conversation. Someone’s quality of attention is evident from the questions they ask (how much they diverge from what the speaker is saying), if their gaze is wandering elsewhere, if they are fidgeting, restless. The outlier is dissociation, when someone is noticeably vacant, their attention completely absent.
- Sometimes I see their feelings towards me when we talk, but that has the largest room for error in retrospect. Maybe the person I have the hardest time seeing clearly is still myself. I can see people more clearly when I am watching them talk to others.
- I watch the person with the loudest laugh. The most striking thing isn’t the volume—it’s the feverish pitch. As the night goes on, it begins to sound more like desperation. Their joy has a fraying quality; it is exhausting to carry because it comes with a desire to seem happy and make others happy at all times…
Read on for all “21 observations from people watching.”
* “This is, if not a lifetime process, awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, ‘Huzzah! Eureka! I’ve got it!’ and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it’s hard.” – Rod Serling (and here and here)
###
As we look, we might send observant birthday greetings to Howard Hawks; he was born on this date in 1896. A key film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Hawks explored many genres– comedies (screwball and straight), dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, war films and Westerns– in films including Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), and Rio Bravo (1959). His frequent portrayals of strong, tough-talking female characters came to define the “Hawksian woman“. Relevently to this post, Hawks directed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), which of course, ends with a double wedding.
A close observer of human behavior, Hawks transmuted what he learned into unique, powerful, and wonderfully-entertaining work. Critic Leonard Maltin called him “the greatest American director who is not a household name.” Roger Ebert called Hawks “one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material.”
“In the world of art, authenticity is often just an illusion”*…
Kelly Grovier with the simple rules to use in identifyng art forgery…
It’s everywhere: fake news, deep fakes, identity fraud. So ensnared are we in a culture of digitised deceptions, a phenomenon increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, it would be easy to think that deceit itself is a high-tech invention of the cyber age. Recent revelations however – from the discovery of an elaborate, if decidedly low-tech, art forger’s workshop in Rome to the sensational allegation that a cherished Baroque masterpiece in London’s National Gallery is a crude simulacrum of a lost original – remind us that duplicity in the world of art has a long and storied history, one written not in binary ones and zeroes, but in impossible pigments, clumsy brushstrokes and suspicious signatures. When it comes to falsification and phoniness, there is indeed no new thing under the Sun.
On 19 February, Italy’s Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage uncovered a covert forgery operation in a northern district of Rome. Authorities confiscated more than 70 fraudulent artworks falsely attributed to notable artists from Pissarro to Picasso, Rembrandt to Dora Maar, along with materials used to mimic vintage canvases, artist signatures, and the stamps of galleries no longer in operation. The suspect, who has yet to be apprehended, is thought to have used online platforms such as Catawiki and eBay to hawk their phoney wares, deceiving potential buyers with convincing certificates of authenticity that they likewise contrived.
News of the clandestine lab’s discovery was quickly followed by publicity for a new book, due for release this week, alleging that one of The National Gallery’s highlights is not at all what it seems. According to artist and historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis, author of NG6461: The Fake National Gallery Rubens, the painting Samson and Delilah – a large oil-on-wood attributed to the 17th Century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and purchased by the London museum in 1980 for £2.5m (then the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction) – is three centuries younger than the date of 1609-10 that sits beside it on the gallery wall and is incalculably less accomplished than the museum believes.
Doxiadis’s conclusion corroborates one reached in 2021 by the Swiss company, Art Recognition, which determined, through the use of AI, that there was a 91% probability that Samson and Delilah is the work of someone other than Rubens. Her assertion that the brushwork we see in the painting is crass and wholly inconsistent with the fluid flow of the Flemish master’s hand is strongly contested by The National Gallery, which stands by its attribution. “Samson and Delilah has long been accepted by leading Rubens scholars as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens”, it said in a statement given to the BBC. “Painted on wood panel in oil shortly after his return to Antwerp in 1608 and demonstrating all that the artist had learned in Italy, it is a work of the highest aesthetic quality. A technical examination of the picture was presented in an article in The National Gallery’s Technical Bulletin in 1983. The findings remain valid.”
The divergence of opinion between the museum’s experts and those who doubt the work’s authenticity opens a curious space in which to reflect on intriguing questions of artistic value and merit. Is there ever legitimacy in forgery? Can fakes be masterpieces? As more sophisticated tools of analysis are applied to paintings and drawings whose legitimacy has long been in question (including several works attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, such as the hotly disputed chalk and ink drawing La Bella Principessa), as well as those whose validity has never been in doubt, debates about the integrity of cultural icons are only likely to accelerate. What follows are a handful of handy principles to keep in mind when navigating the impending controversies – five simple rules for spotting a fake masterpiece…
When a work of art isn’t what it appears to be: “Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece,” from BBC. Eminently worth reading in full.
* B.A. Shapiro, The Art Forger
###
As we ferret out the faux, we might send carefully-secured birthday greetings to Linus Yale, Jr.; he was born on this date in 1821. After launching a promising career as a portrait painter, Yale joined his father’s lock business and became the nation’s leading expert on banklocks. He created many locks, among them, the one for which he is best remembered, the “safe door lock,” the first modern “pin tumbler lock” (AKA “the Yale lock”).
“As well as I can”*…
A reminder that your correspondent is traveling– to wit, more occasional posts. Regular service should resume on or about September 20…
Jan van Eyck (/væn ˈaɪk/ van EYEK; Dutch: [ˈjɑɱ vɑn ˈɛik]; c. before 1390 – 9 July 1441) was a Flemish painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting…
Gregory T. Clark with an appreciation of van Eyck and of the recent Louvre exhibition of his work…
Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure. I wanted my students to share in my wonderment at Jan’s seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it, right down to the most infinitesimal details, without compromising the integrity of the whole, his powers of observation complemented by an uncanny ability to capture light, texture, and atmosphere.
The earliest surviving works of Jan—who is thought to have been born around 1390 in Maaseyck, modern-day Belgium—date to the first lustrum of the 1420s. In 1425, he was appointed court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose empire then comprised almost the entirety of the Low Countries and a large wedge of northeastern France together with his home duchy of Burgundy and the contiguous Franche-Comté (Free County) to the east. Moving to Bruges in 1430, Jan produced paintings for the Burgundian court, nobility, and haute bourgeoisie right up until his death there in 1441…
… A like visual mastery characterizes the much larger Rolin Madonna itself. Measuring some twenty-six by twenty-five inches, the work shows the kneeling chancellor in prayer immediately before the enthroned Virgin and Child in a loggia that gives onto a sprawling landscape divided by a meandering river.
On Nicolas’s sinister side is a small town and beyond it a hillside with vineyards; the Rolin family drew much of its wealth from viticulture. On the holy figures’ dexter side rises a city composed almost entirely of churches, the two agglomerations linked by a single bridge across the river. Perhaps Jan is subtly warning the chancellor and all of us not to succumb to the blandishments of this mortal world, but rather to hew to the Christian faith and thereby cross the figurative River Jordan to the eternal City of God on the river’s other side.
The removal of centuries of grime and darkened varnish means that we can truly see Jan’s handiwork as he would have wished it. But what to marvel at first: Nicolas’ fur-edged brocade woven of chocolate-brown wool and silk and threads of gold? The gemstones that stud the hem of the Madonna’s red robe, the gold crown held by an angel over her head, and the cross of gold that surmounts the crystal orb in the baby Jesus’s left hand? The sprawling landscape beyond the three arches behind the chancellor and holy figures? Everywhere one looks there are details that astonish and enchant the eye but never compromise the unity of Jan’s vision.
Reproductions can only do partial justice to the paintings of Jan van Eyck; they beg to be seen face to face, and the Louvre exhibition offers the opportunity to see five of them together with fifty-nine objects that complement and widen our understanding of both his extraordinary art and his milieu…
An early master: “I like Eyck,” from @newcriterion.
* van Eyck’s motto, inscribed on the frame of the painting atop this post
###
As we look closely, we might spare a thought for Andrea Mantegna; he died on this date in 1506. An artist and printmaker, he was a key figure in Italian Renaissance painting (and the son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini).
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen”*…
Lawrence Weschler is no stranger to controversy. In 2000 he published an article in The New Yorker, recounting a theory that David Hockey had shared with him, that ignited a fire storm in the art world– and that burns (or at least smolders) to this day.
And he’s at it again…
A few months back—in the lee of the Rijksmuseum’s epic Vermeer show and Ren’s [Wechsler’s] controversial Atlantic magazine article (featured in our Issue #39) on Vermeer and Benjamin Binstock’s intriguing contention that eight of the thirty-four paintings conventionally attributed to the Delft master were in fact by his daughter Maria—the eminent curator Helen Molesworth invited Ren and Claudia Swan (the historian behind Rarities of These Lands and other classics on the Dutch Golden Age) to engage in a conversation evaluating both that show and Binstock’s thesis for an episode of her ongoing Dialogues podcast, out of the David Zwirner Gallery. And indeed, that half-hour episode dropped yesterday—and we thought you might enjoy hearing it here. Spoiler alert: Two of the top people in the field seem decidedly open to Binstock’s theory…
Fascinating: “Vermeer’s Daughter?”
* Robert Bresson
###
As we argue over attribution, we might send grateful birthday greetings to Leon Battista Alberti; he was born on this date in 1404. The archetypical Renaissance humanist polymath, Alberti was an author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cartographer, and cryptographer. Indeed, with Johannes Trithemius, he is considered the father of cryptography. And he collaborated with Toscanelli on the maps used by Columbus on his first voyage.
But he is surely best remembered as the man who “wrote the book” on perspective: he authored of the first general treatise– De Pictura (1434)– on the the laws of perspective, which built on and extended Brunelleschi’s work to describe the approach and technique that established the science of projective geometry… and fueled the progress of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Greek- and Arabic-influenced formalism of the High Middle Ages to the more naturalistic (and Latinate) styles of Renaissance.
“Everything in the physical environment—everything—either raises our spirits or dampens them”*…
The venerable Witold Rybczynski on how, starting with Adolf Loos and the Vienna Secession, ornament was “banished” from modernist architecture– and on what that’s cost us…
… The abandonment of ornament has levied a heavy toll on the practice of architecture, tantamount to misplacing a crucial instrument of one’s toolbox. With ornament, an architect could give meaning to a building not only by incorporating specific references to what went on inside… but also by simply dialing the intensity up or down. Thus the main entrance of the Philadelphia Board of Education Building is not merely larger than the service entrance, it is more elaborately decorated, topped by two winged female figures and a medallion containing what looks like a coat of arms. Without subjunctive ornament, a building risks being less nuanced, but without meaningful ornament, it risks becoming, well, meaningless.
The banishment of ornament means an end to the close collaboration between architects and artists. It is difficult to imagine an architect today saying, “I should like to do the plan and the massing of the building; then … turn the ornament over to a perfectly qualified sculptor, and the color and surface direction to an equally qualified painter.” Today, the art in public buildings tends to be divorced from the architecture. A large travertine sculpture, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, stands outside Marcel Breuer’s UNESCO Building in Paris. Inside is a Picasso mural, The Fall of Icarus. The sculpture and the mural are beautiful works of art, but they have nothing to do with the architecture. They are simply “a Henry Moore” and “a Picasso.” The days when architects and artists worked closely together are long gone, and the results are not necessarily architecture that is worse, but architecture that is more one-dimensional: a long solo unenlivened by the occasional duet.
Take away ornament, and what are you left with? When we get close to a building today, we are confronted by gaskets, caulking, nuts and bolts—the minutiae of building construction. Or worse: exit signs, ventilation grills, and fire-hose cabinets. There is an architectural consequence to this. Traditionally, buildings were built as relatively straightforward boxes, their distinctive quality provided by ornament. Lacking the latter, architects feel obliged to provide dramatic cantilevers, unusual shapes, vertiginous space, and soaring roofs. But these big moves are not balanced by the finer-grained experience of small moves—that is, by ornament…
Why ornament matters in architecture: “Give Us Something to Look At,” from @witoldr in @TheAmScho. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Christopher Alexander, in conversation with Rybczynski
###
As we make with meaning, we might spare a thought for Pier Luigi Nervi; he died on this date in 1979. An exemplar of the trend against which Rybczynski argues, Nervi was an architect who drew on his deep engineering expertise– especially in reinforced concrete– to create notable “thin shell” structures worldwide.
You must be logged in to post a comment.