Art History Today

A Few Things

Just a few things: interesting stuff that might interest some people.

The organiser of a forthcoming conference in Amsterdam has asked me to publicise their event, which I’m very happy to do. It’s a conference on the Nabis, or Symbolist painters, to be held on 27th-28th October. 

The conference has been booked for the Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of October 2011 and will take place in Amsterdam, ABN AMRO Bank HQ. The conference will open with a plenary lecture on Thursday and a chance to visit the exhibition with a full day of 8 speakers on Friday. There are no registration charges but please contact Craig Landt ([email protected]) to confirm your place.

Please find the conference programme here Nabis programme

 

 

Lily Ann Pop is an artist who lives in Turin; she has a sacred art project underway called “The Man of the Shroud.” this is always a fascinating subject, and Lily Ann covers it using photography.

From the Artist’s biography:

In March 2009 graduates in painting with the thesis: A mirror of the psyche: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene. An analysis of the scenographic aspects. Along with that presents the following four paintings: Square in Holstenwall, The Hallucination, Caesar the Somnambulist.The Awakening from the Grave, Caesar's death.
In May 2011 participates at the Sacred Art exhibition organized by the New Artemisia Gallery, located in Bergamo, Italy, with two photographs titled The Man of the Shroud (#1 and #2).
In October 2011 participates at the collective exhibition Art Italy in London at SW1 Gallery.
The artist is currently represented by Agora Gallery from New York.

The artist is keen to promote this project in the U.K., so if any museum people are reading this. Lily Ann’s full biography and portfolio van be found here.

 

Since I participated in a conference on Rubens last year I’ve kept an eye on all things Rubensian. This is the latest issue of the Rubens periodical, the Rubenianum Quarterly; topics include “ A Rubens University” and “Palazzo Rubens: The Master as Architect.”  You can download it here.

Landscape and Symbol: The Secret Life of Plants.

This post is adapted from a lecture I gave on Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance landscape a week or so ago. My students thought I’d really gone this time…Raphael and dandelions!

In a discussion of Giovanni Bellini’s landscape, Kenneth Clark considers John Ruskin’s categories of perception. According to Ruskin, there are three kinds of perception:. Clark chooses the Frick St Francis, a visual hymn to the delights of nature and the divine joy spreading through the landscape.

“The man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself- a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.” (Ruskin, cited in Clark, Landscape into Art, 38-9).

For Clark, Bellini belongs in the third category because he was able to describe accurately whilst infusing his picture of nature with his passion for it. He neither unfeelingly reduced his landscape to symbol  nor was so passionless to render it in a dry and academic manner.  Although 19^th century, particularly Pre-Raphaelite landscape, cannot be considered the equivalent of renaissance landscape, affinities have been seen between the two types. Writing in the catalogue to the Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth To Nature exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2005, curator Alison Smith commented on how mid nineteenth-century English landscape painting, with its microscopic fidelity to detail not only encouraged links, but actually had more in common with the renaissance than post-renaissance landscape.

“Although Pre-Raphaelite landscapes do not closely resemble those of early Italian and Flemish painters, their nom de guerre nevertheless invited such comparisons, and indeed connections can be established in the Victorian painters’ adoption of devices such as the isolation of natural details, and an equality of focus throughout, which suggests a rebuttal of the landscape conventions that predominated after the Renaissance.” (cat, 14). 

In Northern renaissance art, nature often had symbolic meaning like the beautiful still-life at the centre of Hugo van der Goes’s renowned Portinari Triptych, all the more remarkable because it was painted before the genre was invented. This arrangement of fruits, flowers and plants is discussed by Craig Harbinson in his Art of the Northern Renaissance (58-9). Everything performs a symbolic function here: violets stand for Christ’s humility, lilies and iris for the passion, columbine for the Holy Spirit, 3 carnations represent the blood of the nailed saviour to the cross, grapes on the fine jar suggest the Eucharist. Adding an interpretation of my own: the translucent glass of water probably represents the purity of the Virgin, but meanings could be multiplied further. I read it as a representation of Christ and his mother anthropomorphised by the vessels which suggest human form.

Although the PRB’s practice of rendering landscapes in minute detail was criticised, Ruskin sprang to the movement’s defence with an argument that considered the Italian Raphael’s approach to art as well as the representation of the natural world.

“We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet highly original manner: that is to say he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules…This I say is the kind of teaching which the Royal Academy lecturing, press criticisms, public enthusiasms, and not least by solid weight of gold, we give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters.” (Ruskin, quoted in Colin Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing, 64).

Yet as Alison Smith argues in her discussion of Pre-Raphaelite landscape, despite their disavowal of Raphael, some P.R.B. artists were inclined to draw on him and other renaissance master’s treatment of nature when conceiving their vision of it. This tendency seems to have been pronounced in the art of William Holman- Hunt, who in the words of Smith, “..appropriated the quattrocento use of micro-environments of precise natural detail offset by artificial space-creating devices such as window ledges and orthogonal lines of recession.”

According to this curator it was Carlo Lasinio’s engravings of Benozzo Gozzoli’s fragile frescoes at Campo Santo that helped the painter to organise the landscape in a number of early works such as the Rienzi of 1848.

“The trees disposed as if in homage to the law of linear perspective in Rienzi and the Hireling Shepherd (1852) are surely allusions to the friction that exists in fifteenth-century landscape between the primacy of empirical observation and emerging cognitive ordering systems, just as the quotation in Rienzi of the dandelion ‘clock’ in Raphael’s St Catherine of Alexandria was probably intended as a tribute to the patient observation of natural phenomena in Renaissance landscape painting.” (cat, 14).

I have no idea what the dandelion means in HH’s Rienzi, but is it an example of “observation of natural phenomena” in Raphael’s 1507 St Catherine? Why was Raphael interested in plant life? What was his attitude to the “natural phenomena” of renaissance landscape? I found myself wondering and dived into my books on the artist. In Carol Plazzota’s entry on the painting in the London Raphael: Urbino to Rome catalogue, she points out that Raphael included the humble dandelion, probably as a symbol of grief because this “bitter herb” appears in Northern and German paintings of the crucifixion.  (cat, 224). This is taking us back to Hugo’s plant life,. but I don’t think there was a dandelion in that. The crucifixion was represented by red carnations (nail flowers).

 

But Plazzota notes the dandelion’s appearance in the slightly earlier Holy Family with a Palm and the Baglione Entombment (same date as the St Catherine) which definitely  is related to the crucifixion. In this composition the dandelion is deliberately juxtaposed with Raphael’s signature on a rock.  This seems to have been first spotted by Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny in their book on the master (Raphael, 44). The authors remark on the “curious” combination of painter’s signature and dandelion, and say that the work is “signed”. Puzzling my brains I wonder if this is a kind of anthromorphization  of a natural feature and that the dandelion/ painted signature in the landscape refers to the painter himself?  It would be a witty conceit to have this kind of artistic calling card invented with the aid of nature. But I have another thought. Returning to Ruskin’s comments on art and nature, he says that 19th century young painters are taught to believe that Nature is full of faults, and that they should improve on her. For Raphael, landscape was not even faulty, just an armature for the art of painting itself. In his early career he placed his ensembles in Perugino’s Umbrian landscapes; when he got to Rome he abandoned the natural world for architectural grandeur. Could Raphael’s dandelion symbol suggest a relationship between art and nature? Not a reconciliation, but a trumping of the natural environment by the artifice of painting. Dandelion= nature, painted inscription = Raphael’s art. Dandelions occur frequently in renaissance art but next to artists’ signatures! This symbol in the landscape must mean something. Why not this?

Art Kettles

I've just completed a really enjoyable course on the London National Gallery. I've taught its history from its inception in 1824 to its fortunes in the Comprehensive Spending Review of last month. However, had I finished the course this week, I would have had to include another event in its glorious history: its occupation by a group of students and artists; its precincts protected by riot police in Trafalgar Square.

That last image is something I never expected to see, but it recorded a real event; it also brings home the link between art history and what is happening on the streets of our cities these days, something I've tried to capture on this blog over the last few months using examples from the discipline. The NG occupation was the latest in a series of sit-ins, teach-ins that have seen art schools and museums like the Slade, Goldsmiths, and Tate Britain temporarily – some still going- taken over by arts, humanities and social studies students determined to highlight the importance of the arts to our culture and civic life in a peaceful and collaborative way. Controlling some of the other outbreaks of artistic resistance inevitably took the form of "kettling", a police containment tactic that is rightly attracting its fair share of criticism. I fear there are worse things than kettles to come in 2011 though.

It is telling how students are utilizing culture to battle kettling. The first T.V. pictures I saw on Thursday lunchtime were students shielding themselves with "book-blocks", each having the name of a famous title on its shield cover. So you had the bizarre spectacle of riot police laying into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Adorno's Negative Dialectics", or whatever. It was potent in its symbolic impact, though the message was undoubtedly transmitted at the risk of serious damage to the sender. It was resourceful and brave for students to borrow a counter-measure from Italian students who seemed to have invented it in response to kettling in their country.  

Literature is literature though, and I'm an art historian who mainly deals with images. I found myself wondering what the effect would have been if images of famous paintings had been on these blocks making the situation a true art kettle? Sadly, I can't take credit for this phrase; it was coined by a colleague in the States who is observing the events with interest. I don't know the history of the kettle, but imagine my surprise when I discovered a possible example of an art kettle, although the story is likely to be apocryphal. The story is that the Russian anarchist Bakunin was helping a rebellion in Dresden in May, 1849; he suggested that Raphael's Sistine Madonna , a canonical work at the Dresden Museum, be hung on the barricades because the Germans were "too cultured" to open fire on such a precious masterpiece.

"Well, brother, no! A German is a civilized person, but the Russian is a savage, he'll start shooting not only at Raphael, but at the very Mother of God herself, if the authorities so command. Against Russian soldiers with Cossacks it would be irresponsible to use such means - you wouldn't protect the people and you'd destroy Raphael!"

I was lucky to get this information from a journal article by Irene Pearson on the perception of Raphael by Russian writers. According to her, there's a comparison to be drawn with "the native Russian tradition of carrying holy icons in front of a procession bearing a petition to the authorities." She mentions the view that because the Sistine Madonna was painted on canvas- rare for Raphael- it may have been intended as a processional banner. Checking my books on Raphael, I don't see this theory being entertained. It's true that the Sistine Madonna was an expression of Piacenza ceding voluntarily to the papacy of Julius II who seems to have commissioned the painting. Check out John Pope- Hennessey's discussion of the work in his lectures on Raphael. Julius was a warrior pope, and he surely would have ridden into battle with the papal standard- but not the Sistine Madonna! The idea of it as a processional banner seems to have originated in Russian folklore and religion, but it's a very compelling image in the context of 19^th century civil disturbance in Europe and Asia.

So, would the celebrated Sistine Madonna have been used to taunt the forces of a German kettle? Probably not. As Pearson says, Bakunin was almost certainly joking. One look at the photograph of him suggests a kind of anarchist dandy, causing violence, then melting into the multitude.  

I'm teaching in the NG next Thursday. It'll be interesting to gauge the atmosphere in the museum after the metropolitan uproar of the last few weeks. Things will have calmed down, I'm sure, but I won't be able to get that image out of my head- the riot police standing outside the NG. I don't know if they were kettling the demonstrators inside or those in Trafalgar Square. Recalling the pictures on the BBC unfolding on Thursday, it's an odd juxtaposition: a few days before, culture guarded in Trafalgar Square; a few days after, culture attacked – albeit symbolically- in Parliament Square by the same riot squad who protected it. The irony was probably lost on the kettling kops.

Sources.

John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael, 1970.

Irene Pearson, "Raphael as Seen by Russian Writers from Zhukovsky to Turgenev," The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 59, No 3 (Jul., 1981), 346-369.

Crossed Out

Why are we still arguing over the crucifixion as a subject in art without attending to the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of different renderings of the subject, not to mention technique? This is the point made by a commenter on an article about the current Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in London. I can't help echoing this individual's viewpoint, especially when we're dealing with the crucifixion as painted by modern artists like Marc Chagall, Graham Sutherland (above) and, ahem, Tracey Emin.



There exists a modern art tradition within which the subject matter of the crucifixion is not of primary importance; what counts is the way the crucifixion can be worked through aesthetically and formally in the artistic process. You won't find such luminaries as Bill Viola, who's done more than most to incorporate a religious dimension into modern art, directly referencing the crucifixion or the resurrection within a specific historical or cultural context. His video of a man swimming in water only evoked Christ because it was situated in Durham Cathedral. Although he utilizes many examples of religious art from the renaissance and early modern periods, the message of the crucifixion and other such religious happenings are meant to be absorbed subliminally, outside a recognizable iconographic framework. Viola believes that the image of the resurrection and crucifixion belong to the whole world, not specific sects or denominations.

In the case of an earlier modernist figure, Francis Bacon, whose paintings of the 1950s and 60s were called 'Crucifixion', or 'Fragment of a Crucifixion'- above-this artist used the crucifixion in order to work through themes and problems in his paintings. This is a minority view, namely that despite the absence of religious tradition of representation in modern artists like Bacon, these religious themes eventually emerge through painting itself; some would even argue that the act of painting in the modern or postmodern condition renders art atheistic rather than spiritual. Perhaps we could see Bacon's crucifixion themes in this manner, an intriguing idea put forward by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who actually met Bacon and wrote a highly original book about his art in 1981. Deleuze proposed that Bacon, and by implication those modern artists who followed his example, could be completely indifferent to the subject matter of the crucifixion.



However, Deleuze had in mind Bacon's predecessors as well as followers since he observed,  

"What is at stake here is no longer just Bacon, but undoubtedly the whole history of Western painting. If we attempted to define this western painting, we could take Christianity as our first point of reference. For Christianity subjected the form, or rather the Figure, to a fundamental deformation. Insofar as God was incarnated, crucified, descended, ascended to heaven, and so on, the form or the Figure was no longer rigorously linked to essence, but to what, in principle, is its opposite: the event, or even the changeable, the accident. Christianity contains a germ of tranquil atheism that will nurture painting; the painter can easily be indifferent to the religious subject he is asked to represent. Nothing prevents him from realizing that, because of its now-essential relation with the accident, the form can become, not a God on the cross, but more simply a "napkin or a rug on the point of unrolling, the handle of a knife ready to be detached, a little loaf of bread falling into slices as if of its own volition, an overturned cup, all sorts of vases or fruits tumbled into a heap, and overhanging plates." All of this can be put on Christ himself, or close by him: Christ is besieged, and even replaced by accidents. Modern painting begins when man no longer experiences himself as an essence, but as an accident."

Christ as the victim of the "accidents of painting?" A tragic vision in which painting is used to define humankind in relation to a fall of some kind? Maybe, but I'm more interested in what Deleuze is saying about the way the crucifixion is metamorphosed into still-life and the rendering of everyday objects- the things that the artist positions and paints in the studio. Deleuze is obviously thinking of Cézanne's apples and napkins here, but I can't help thinking of Courbet's famous visual statement, The Painter's Studio, in which a man in the pose of Christ on the Cross hangs limply at the side of the artist's easel. Courbet seems to be saying that the crucifixion is now a studio prop completely subservient to art itself. Christ has literally gone out of the picture here; he has been decentered, crossed out, painted out by the act of painting itself. Courbet's brush hovers over a passage in the painting he is working on, but Christ is absent- it's a landscape.

Isn't that the sort of debate that this so-called controversial exhibition should be provoking, the relationship between the crucifixion and the act of painting itself, played out in the evolution of modern art, not denouncements about the "unsuitability" of the cross for a Jewish museum? It's not about Jewish or Christian theology; it's about the mysterious processes of art. That's the true religious issue. Deal with it.

Artists in the exhibition: Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Duncan Grant, Eric Gill, Craigie Aitchison, Emmanuel Levy, Lee Miller, Tracey Emin, Francis Souza, Marc Chagall, Norman Adams, Betty Swanwick, John Armstrong, Samuel Bak, Robert Henderson Blyth, Gilbert Spencer, Michael Rothenstein, Sybil Andrews, Maggi Hambling, Roy de Maistre and David Jones.

Other interesting responses to the show can be found here, here and here. More posts on art and the crucifixion here and here.

Venetian Notes 1: Of Churches and Museums

   
 
I've been in Venice for most of the last week, attending and participating in the Renaissance Society of America's (RSA) annual conference. Venice is a fantastic venue for a conference, but it does present certain organizational problems. The hub of the conference was in the Dorsoduro district, and my hotel was up in Cannaregio ward which gave me plenty of opportunity to walk across Venice, which you can do in 20-30 minutes if you know the layout of the streets. Of course, you can opt for the vaporetto, but the fares are ruinous. Here are some photos of Ca' Foscari, Venice University, whose many outposts served as venues for the conference programme. Try session hopping between these!

Though the conference was a great success, I felt slightly let down on the art front. I was disappointed to find that the Accademia had not escaped the ephemeral museum effect: one of their stellar paintings, Giorgione's 'Tempest' was not on display, nor a slew of other paintings.

 

The Giorgione was being readied for a forthcoming exhibition, and the scaffolding, boards and crane near the building told their own story about refurbishment at the museum.



If rumours I heard have any substance, the Accademia is going to need this extra space. On a visit to a local church which I won't name- I learnt from the very friendly and informative guide that this church - and others- is going to be amalgamated into other parishes/dioceses, leading to financial difficulties and the possible off-loading of paintings to the Accademia. Perhaps this is an unsurprising development- the line between museums and churches is very fine in Venice. I purchased a card allowing access to 12 churches, but was told at several churches I visited that said card was invalid because the building was not a church but a museum. When I protested that sticking a poster of Leonardo da Vinci on a church door to advertise a temporary exhibition, did not make the church a museum, I was met with a stony stare and no attempt to justify this Venetian scam.  

More on Venetian churches and art in another post....

Dynamics of the Cross (A Post for Easter)

 

This post was inspired by (a) Easter (b) watching a DVD of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ ( all 2 ½ hours of it!) and (c) a meditation on what I call the "dynamics of the cross" from the Renaissance to modern art.

Not really a believer, I was nonetheless curious to see how Gibson's controversial film would handle the iconography of various scenes of Christ's final hours like the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion. It was the latter that fascinated me: has there ever been such a bloody breakdown of the execution of Christ; has it ever been rationalized into such a formula of suffering and brutality; has there ever been such a, literally, blow by blow account? I was particularly intrigued by how Gibson turned the Crucifixion into a mechanical process in which every detail was deemed greatly significant. Effort and exertion. Every tightening of the rope against the skin, every driving home of nail into flesh, every gasp of pain escaping the wracked body of the saviour. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the mechanics of suffering was the flipping of Jesus's cross through space, so that it lay with the messiah's face pointing towards the ground.

This inversion got me thinking about the dynamics of the cross in space, an idea that has seldom been considered in art history, accounts mainly concentrating on the iconography of the event. An interest in the spatial aspects of the crucifixion may be the result of institutionalizing perspective in the fifteenth-century, although in most depicted crucifixions of that time, the spatio-temporal fits a losing battle with static flat pattern. Thus in Andrea del Castagno's Crucifixion of 1450, we get the two thieves in three quarter view, but not really a sense of space within the composition, more variations in position.

Perspective is more exploited in later Renaissance art: Tintoretto's version has the cross of the bad thief being levered up, a dramatic foreshortening effect that immediately gives us a sense of the space around that particular cross although Christ's cross must remain static so that it faces the viewer.  

Moving into the seventeenth-century, we encounter an excellent example of foreshortening the cross, in this case Christ's own. Annibale Carracci's Quo Vadis Domine (1600) shows Christ carrying a very foreshortened cross, an effect clearly developed from their experiments with perspective in the Carracci Academy in Bologna, where they would have been encouraged to study the cross from every angle, much like Gibson who rotates the cross on Golgotha so that the moviegoer becomes aware of the cross moving through space.

Lest I give the impression that Gibson's dynamics of the cross can be traced back to an academic tradition in which the cross is observed from multiple viewpoints, I should also say that Gibson in his stressing of the physical nature of crucifixion owes something to an anti-academic, realist tendency best represented by Caravaggio. His Crucifixion of St Peter shows the labour of crucifying a victim, and again we see the tipping up of the cross, although the black box like space obliterates perspective completely. The cross is swallowed up in the maw of a frozen moment of suffering unlike the Carracci whose wide open landscapes suggest the unfolding of natural processes over time. So perhaps Caravaggio is the more obvious model for Gibson, especially because his dynamics of the passion are mediated through a similar aesthetic in which the action is petrified in a sequence of moments: Christ's journey to Calvary is a series of stops and starts, the cumulative effect being to indicate inertia rather than motion.

It's probably the case that in the early modern period we encounter what marks the beginning of the modern and humanistic treatment of crucifixions, where the scientific and spiritual come together in a strange constellation of ideas. Consider a drawing by the deeply devout St John of the Cross, (1542-1591). Here the cross is not foreshortened, but shown in oblique view from above, begging the question why did this mystic chose such a precipitous view.  

Gibson didn't exploit this viewpoint in his movie, but in a famous earlier film 1961, King of Kings, Nicholas Ray did: he gives us a dizzying few seconds directly at the top of the cross- we look down from the vantage point of God towards the ground before the camera restores order by pointing back towards the sky. If you hang in with this excerpt, you'll see it.

In John of the Cross's drawing we are close to that filmic viewpoint but we're seeing Jesus from an elliptical angle, a vertiginous position that inspired the surrealist genius Salvador Dali who also did a drawing of Christ from above, which he later turned into a painting, Crucifixion of St John of the Cross (1951). For Dali, the image of Christ on the cross offered a way of combing academic precepts with strictly scientific principles: he wanted to paint a saviour in cubist form, exchange metaphysics for physics. Not content with that, Dali wanted to paint an "exploding Christ"-and you thought a chocolate Christ was controversial! - as well as transcending the limitations of the form. Dali was also influenced by the treatise of a seventeenth-century architect, Juan de Herrera, on cubic form., whose ideas also underpin Dali's investigations into Velasquez Las Meninas.

Dali's earlier crucifixion is impressive because most views of the event can be accommodated: we can both look down on Christ or imagine ourselves standing on the shore of Port Lligat like the man by the boat looking up. We can have both an earthbound and celestial view. But his Hyper Cubic Crucifixion of a few years later is distinctively unsettling. Looking at it, I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's line "Like a patient etherized upon a table"- this is Christ as an object ripe for dissection by the implements of white-coated anonymous bureaucracy- Christ as Joseph K. An objectified Christ, devoid of passion, arguably a more disturbing one than that of Gibson's, who though dripping with blood and wracked with pain, remains human.

Happy Easter!