avant-garde anachronism in old paintings

it is so weird that you would go to so much trouble to point by point be like "hay, i dont really care about any of these reasons bc this is a message board?"

idk id check it out irl, i remember that book being only okay

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment

Vasari's preface has a fairly teleological view of things, comfortable talking about improvement and decline. Don't know much about art history, but in general Greece/Rome give Renaissance Humanism its yardsticks.

http://www.oilpainting-frame.com/upload1/file-admin/images/new17/Felix%20Vallotton-243742.jpg

this valloton cracks me up

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

gave an answer to this iirc

i think you mean that the works have "historically specific meaning" outside of our own (necessarily post-enlightenment) discourse, and that it can be reconstructed, or s.thing

i don't, and i think, basically, yes, constructing a history means seeing things as contemporaries did not see them, and im ok with that

Mmmm, romano pepper.

xpost

really like this vallotton guy

also plax <3 and yr art historicity but maybe u should ~chill~

The art history of every age is going to reflect the values of its time, obv, and it's going to privilege certain kinds of work and ignore others. When a new paradigm ensues, people find a thrill in discovering art of the past, neglected by the prior dominant mode, that better reflects the new mode of thinking about art. Sometimes in our excitement we overstate the case for some earlier artist being a "modernist" or a "surrealist" or an "impressionist" or a "postmodernist" or whatever. But I also don't agree that we have to be beholden to the context of the work, as long as we recognize the context. There's no reason not to enjoy the outright weirdness of Bosch from a contemporary sensibility even if we know that he had some kind of religious/moral understanding of his paintings. I love looking at medieval Virgin Mary w/Christ Child paintings just for the thrill of the strange and scary baby Jesuses, for example. I mean the whole reason they're in museums to begin with is already out of context, so whatever.

which is why if the thread had been called "bizarro old shit" id be totes cool w/ it

oh, i'm sure there would be some problem.

FWIW the Bosch posted at the top of the thread looks like a really fun party.

it's actually not the thread i was after but it's the thread nakhchivan started.

anyway the thread was a spin off of a discussion about Holbein's The Ambassadors.

http://umlautampersand.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/ambassadors.jpg

ok yeah that is weirdly out of time, its like that charlie chaplin movie where a woman is on her mobile

haha.

can someone explain that painting? that's wild

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

what do you want explained goole?

still tho "flying tortoises! how modern!" like really?

Also it's easy to forget that people in other eras probably enjoyed the shock of the new and strange as well. Curiosities, oddities, novelties -- not entirely contemporary concepts.

ah i could have gone to wiki i guess:

Anamorphic skull
The anamorphic skull

The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work, however, is the skewed skull which is placed in the bottom centre of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into an accurate rendering of a human skull. While the skull is evidently intended as a vanitas or memento mori, it is unclear why Holbein gave it such prominence in this painting. One possibility is that this painting represents three levels: the heavens (as portrayed by the astrolabe and other objects on the upper shelf), the living world (as evidenced by books and a musical instrument on the lower shelf), and death (signified by the skull). It has also been hypothesized that the painting is meant to hang in a stairwell, so that a person walking up the stairs from the painting's left would be startled by the appearance of the skull. A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.[5] Artists often incorporated skulls as a reminder of mortality, or at the very least, death. Holbein may have intended the skulls (one as a gray slash and the other as a medallion on Jean de Dinteville's hat) and the crucifixion in the corner to encourage contemplation of one's impending death and the resurrection.[2]

xp yes, i was going to say, maybe it's not so "wild" -- from my v limited knowledge, the renaissance audience had a thing for novelty and trickery

yah but yr v. unlikely to see something like that done by hand so they seem v. definitely to be lens based. so when you see it its like spotting the millets gleaners wearing casios tho obv it isnt really

Yeah I'm pretty sure dudes been doing drugs and making all kinds of art throughout history, just most of it disappeared. It's not like what made it into the art history museum is what everybody else at the time was doing. That kind of thinking is how people paint themselves into the "there are no new ideas in art" corner.

maybe he shopped it

xp

A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.

this. and blow people's minds.

The real untold story of that picture is the guy on the right is wearing nothing but his wife's frillies under his robe.

b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.

this isn't about weirdness. while obv a few instances (eg bosch) are archetypally weird, the stated premise of the thread and most citations are 'old times paintings that prefigure much later developments in art', which at most implies the ~uncanniness~ of something found in an unexpected context.

the premise allows that things can be the product of accidental formal parallels. the principle of overdetermination allows that this does not invalidate a work's 'coded contemporary meaning', though that phrase forgets that nothing ever had a coherent/univocal contemporary meaning.

To be like "omg he is inventing photorealism" completely misunderstands Ingres and photorealism.

rather misunderstands kevin's

I've always found Ingres disturbing and even proto-photorealist.

which merely suggests ~anticipates~ rather than omg ingres is a photorealist a century avant la lettre. (hope he isn't going to start arguing that now).

c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

ilx/the world seems basically conditional upon certain enlightenment/modernist/historicist values yeah. 'disregards' does not imply 'invalidates', but yeah ppl are going to read certain things into other things. such is the world.

srsly you actually have a background in art history right? kinda disappointed in yr fetishistic disavowal of any sort of interpretative license outside of the pass/aggress cultural studies invocation of problematics/privileges when you could actually be ~enlightening~ here.

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

― jed_, Tuesday, 30 November 2010 18:34 (26 minutes ago)

this was my own idea yeah, and a lateral move from 'the ambassadors' which probably wouldn't fit this thread cuz it doesn't prefigure future forms so much as exemplify a contemporary concern/invention.

the thread is fine, n.

also, this is fascinating on The Ambassadors:

http://markmeynell.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/holbein%E2%80%99s-the-ambassadors-unlocking-hidden-mysteries/

it is not a perfect square – it is 207 cm x 209.5 cm.... notice the angle of the gnomon facing us. If you draw a line tracing its angle back and forth, you come across something remarkable. It will intersect off-canvas to the right with the line where your eye should go in order to see the skull correctly. And if your eye is there, looking up this trajectory, your eye will ‘pass through’ a number of key objects. It will intersect perfectly with the horizon line on the astronomical globe on the upper shelf... But as your eye travels further, you intersect with the Ambassador’s left eye, and then, lo and behold… The crucifix – at Christ’s left eye, to be precise... The Crucifix... doesn’t quite fit into the square. As noted above, the whole image is not a perfect square. If you were to draw one, flush against the right side, it would include everything in the painting, except the crucifix.

I'm not an art student and pretty much clueless ftmp but the perspective in a lot of pre-Renaissance stuff is so strange — it's flattened to the point of there being almost no illusion of depth, but just geometric forms interacting on the same plane.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life (c. 1330)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1367/602342310_945e025e77.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/2u5cils.jpg
http://i356.photobucket.com/albums/oo4/NettieMuse/PompeiiWallArt.jpg

Ancient Roman painters showed a similar (mis)understanding of perspective, rendering objects stiffly in 3 dimensions without having them converge at a vanishing point. the technique didn't disappear in the Middle Ages, but artists (Western European ones, anyways) showed practically no improvement in their use of perspective until about the 1400s, mainly because they had less interest in one-upping each other in terms of realism than they had in upholding the highly stylized conventions of Christian art.

I'm not an art student either, so I'm really just stating the obvious here.

Please note that there's a world of difference between, on one hand, re-reading artworks of a paradigm past through some sort of contemporary viewpoint/apparatus/whathaveyou, and on the other, finding evidence of hypothesized avant-garde lineage within those works.

For what it's worth, I understood the thread as some sort of combination of the two: though the title might have one believe that this is about finding concrete precedents that would materialize into later avant-garde works (thereby implying some sort of teleological account - something people worry too much about for a reason). Of course there's also the "anachonism" part of the title, which which I take as a kind of "let's find instances of subsequent avant-garde practices in earlier works, which may instance just plain old coincidences, along with a potential debunking of avant-garde claims to novelty, or again, just things that seem interesting today but wouldn't have been of note back then.

prefer because the whole (who did what first in what narrative is such a tedious approach)

let's find things that flatter our own worldviews pt 1,366,981,776

not that there's anything wrong with that, and this thread is great

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

the thread starter and others have been quite chill about their remit tho so i'm finding it difficult to hold my grudge very tightly

Ah THAT'S Millais? Ok!

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/millais/millais_ophelia.jpg

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:02 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

this seems a bit too complex -- maybe the stuff we find less interesting is actually more interesting *because* it doesn't interest us?

im caricaturing an argument to be sure

i'm perfectly happy to have this be a thread about old paintings that seem to speak to contemporary sensibilities, fwiw

srsly just post w/e. post some canaletto and some net art. compare 'l'origine du monde' and some .jp roach porn. just don't type some sophomoric shit abt ~ like, values every1 ~.

please don't actually post roach porn btw.

why has everyone adopted plax's iphone-speak for this thread?

Cabanel had his own Ophelia too (there's an essay in here, art people):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Alexandre_Cabanel%2C_Ophelia.JPG

let's find things that flatter our own worldviews pt 1,366,981,776

not that there's anything wrong with that, and this thread is great

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

I'd say it has less to do with flattering ourselves and more to do with seeking comfort in the familiar. it can be tough to approach a 500-year-old painting as anything but a dead, alienating artifact, so it can be comforting to discover some strange, playful, and strikingly (albeit accidentally) modern detail that brings the artwork forward in time (so to speak) and within our emotional reach. it may be a contrived and inauthentic approach, but it's a rare way to engage with a piece as if we're contemporaries of the artist. bringing ourselves backward in time (by gathering historical facts and viewing the work through the eyes of the artist's contemporaries or some other bygone generation) doesn't tend to have the same familiarizing effect.

I'm not arguing against intellectualism. I see the "whoa, this is surprisingly modern" mindset as a complement to the usual research and context-setting, and people who can only engage with Bosch as a proto-surrealist or Sterne as a proto-post-modernist are missing the point entirely. if a work of art both forces us to learn things we don't know and unexpectedly echoes things that we're familiar with, then it's power is enormous on multiple levels.

Bridget Riley and the Old Masters

http://www.taschen.com/media/images/480/default_xl_matisse_covers_0907301203_id_279942.jpg

it's like Flash animation!

I'ma go through the rest of Crary's list here:

http://www.website.com/yourimage.jpeg
Friedrich Overbeck, The Painter Franz Pforr (yowsah!), c. 1810 (reworked 1865?), oil on canvas
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

http://experimentiv.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/self-portrait-or-desperate-man-gustave-courbet.jpg
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1844-1845, Oil on canvas, Private collection

Courbet pumped out a few paintings so naughty I can't post them here lest it turn into a NSFW work. But GIS his Origin of the World (which Lacan owned!).

http://fontdenimes.midiblogs.com/media/01/02/9e8f3ac346b6b0f2bbee5dc3482af206.jpg
Paul Delaroche: La Jeune Martyre (The Young Martyr), 1855

Man, these dudes dug their Ophelia types!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Ernest_Meissonier_-_End_of_the_Game_of_Cards_.jpg
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, The End of the Game of Cards, oil painting, n.d. (ca. 1870?)

And Whoa! Check THIS out! Here's Meissonier's portrait of Leland Stanford, the bigwig who commissioned Muybridge's photo experiments! (Head spins)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Leland_Stanford_p1070023.jpg
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Leland Stanford, 1881 Oil on canvas, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University

http://www.cnoilpainting.com/upimage/201003150827186971_s.jpg
Wilhelm von Kobell, Riders on Lake Tegernsee, 1824 (I think)

http://hereswhatsleft.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/cross_cathedral.jpg
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross and cathedral in the mountains, 1812, oil on canvas

Could image bomb this thread with just Friedrich.

http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Gerome_Pygmalion_and_Galatea_c1890.jpg

Jean-Léon Gérôme also image bomb-worthy.

http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Delacroix.skull.gif

Eugène Delacroix. Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, 1835, Oil on canvas, approximately 39 x 32 inches. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Franfurt, Germany.

Again with the Hamlet!

http://www.all-art.org/neoclasscism/overbeck01.jpg
Friedrich Overbeck, The Painter Franz Pforr (yowsah!), c. 1810 (reworked 1865?), oil on canvas
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

good stuff, dude

that cat is fukkin tiny

also

http://hereswhatsleft.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/cross_cathedral.jpg

\m/

inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory
Gaddis' last book is partly about this.

disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.
What if its contemporary meaning was "weirdness"?

I think people got this thread right away. they basically understood at least a few of the points you bring up.

I'm not well versed in art history, so can someone explain why all these realistic portraits are supposed to be examples of "avant-garde anachronism"?

http://nedavanovac.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/aubrey_beardsley.png

I don't understand it either, Tuomas. But I'm also not well-versed in art history.