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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Robert Motherwell
Possessing perhaps the best and most extensive formal education of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell was well-versed in literature, philosophy, and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints, and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts, and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy, and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events, and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression, and revolution.
Motherwell’s first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen-and-ink drawings, collectively called the “Mexican Sketchbook,” show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell’s career then received a jump-start in 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.
In the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing, and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York’s Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential Documents of Modern Art series, the publication Possibilities, and The Dada Painters and Poets anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.
The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series— the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known— began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called At Five in the Afternoon, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression, and resistance.
Composed between 1953-1957, the artist’s second major group of work is called the Je t’aime series, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the Elegies paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell’s collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist’s interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.
Motherwell began his third major series, the Opens, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct— in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field— in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.
Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing, and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As arguably the most eloquent and intellectually accomplished of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell’s legacy is significant not only for the importance of his paintings, but also for the breadth and influence of his writing, editing, and teaching. Yet, it is first and foremost in the artist’s work— which both bridged and challenged the duel influences of European and American Modernism, and which, despite its interest in formal dialogues, never neglected the necessity of human empathy— that Motherwell’s legacy will continue to endure.
[via]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzcbhhzXTy1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Robert Motherwell
Possessing perhaps the best and most extensive formal education of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell was well-versed in literature, philosophy, and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints, and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts, and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy, and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events, and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression, and revolution.
Motherwell’s first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen-and-ink drawings, collectively called the “Mexican Sketchbook,” show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell’s career then received a jump-start in 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.
In the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing, and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York’s Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential Documents of Modern Art series, the publication Possibilities, and The Dada Painters and Poets anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.
The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series— the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known— began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called At Five in the Afternoon, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression, and resistance.
Composed between 1953-1957, the artist’s second major group of work is called the Je t’aime series, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the Elegies paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell’s collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist’s interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.
Motherwell began his third major series, the Opens, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct— in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field— in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.
Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing, and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As arguably the most eloquent and intellectually accomplished of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell’s legacy is significant not only for the importance of his paintings, but also for the breadth and influence of his writing, editing, and teaching. Yet, it is first and foremost in the artist’s work— which both bridged and challenged the duel influences of European and American Modernism, and which, despite its interest in formal dialogues, never neglected the necessity of human empathy— that Motherwell’s legacy will continue to endure.
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Body/Landscape: Photography and the Reconfiguration of the Sculptural Object
by Douglas Eklund, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Just as photography had introduced ideas of seriality and industrial processes into the practice of painting, the medium was similarly crucial in recasting the idea of sculpture in the 1960s and early 1970s. In place of the hard-edged geometries of Minimalism, artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Lynda Benglis began working with a wider array of malleable materials, from molten lead and neon to felt and dirt—substances that retained traces of the artist’s forming gestures and clung to or sullied the space that they occupied in opposition to Minimalism’s smooth, ordered forms. Others similarly trained in Minimalism tried to liberate sculpture from the gallery and museum altogether, making works that were inextricably bound to their site. Like Serra and Bruce Nauman, earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Michael Heizer were also fascinated by process and gesture, but installed their works in ravaged industrial sites and far-flung corners of the world, creating pieces that were largely dependent upon photography as witness to their existence; the most famous earthwork is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)—a 1,500-foot sculpture made of mud, salt crystals, and rock coiling over ten acres of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
At the same time that some sculptors turned outward toward the wider landscape, others turned in upon their own bodies as both the subject and object of sculptural activity. One work that brilliantly moved in both directions simultaneously was Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking from 1967, in which the artist repeatedly trod across a field in the English countryside to form a temporary imprint in the earth that was given longer life in the act of photographic documentation. Between 1966 and 1968, Nauman retreated to the studio to make a landmark series of films, videos, and photographs in which he performed complex series of movements or activities such as keeping two balls bouncing simultaneously over long periods of time, juxtaposing the clarity and simplicity of the conceptual directive with the body’s attempts to keep pace.
Vito Acconci moved from the practice of poetry into video, performance, and photography not simply to document an ephemeral event but within a systematic exploration of his body’s “occupancy” of public space (the street, theater proscenium) through the execution of preconceived actions or activities. Acconci created his perhaps best-known work over the course of three weeks in October 1969, during which time he followed a stranger until that person entered a private space; the artist recorded these pursuits in photographs (made by a third party) and a written log. By keying his own movements to the perambulations of randomly chosen pedestrians, Acconci attempted to reconceive the role of the artist as a keenly attentive mirror to the world; as the artist described it, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of [the] scheme.”
[via]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyzdc1CPkA1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Body/Landscape: Photography and the Reconfiguration of the Sculptural Object
by Douglas Eklund, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Just as photography had introduced ideas of seriality and industrial processes into the practice of painting, the medium was similarly crucial in recasting the idea of sculpture in the 1960s and early 1970s. In place of the hard-edged geometries of Minimalism, artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Lynda Benglis began working with a wider array of malleable materials, from molten lead and neon to felt and dirt—substances that retained traces of the artist’s forming gestures and clung to or sullied the space that they occupied in opposition to Minimalism’s smooth, ordered forms. Others similarly trained in Minimalism tried to liberate sculpture from the gallery and museum altogether, making works that were inextricably bound to their site. Like Serra and Bruce Nauman, earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Michael Heizer were also fascinated by process and gesture, but installed their works in ravaged industrial sites and far-flung corners of the world, creating pieces that were largely dependent upon photography as witness to their existence; the most famous earthwork is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)—a 1,500-foot sculpture made of mud, salt crystals, and rock coiling over ten acres of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
At the same time that some sculptors turned outward toward the wider landscape, others turned in upon their own bodies as both the subject and object of sculptural activity. One work that brilliantly moved in both directions simultaneously was Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking from 1967, in which the artist repeatedly trod across a field in the English countryside to form a temporary imprint in the earth that was given longer life in the act of photographic documentation. Between 1966 and 1968, Nauman retreated to the studio to make a landmark series of films, videos, and photographs in which he performed complex series of movements or activities such as keeping two balls bouncing simultaneously over long periods of time, juxtaposing the clarity and simplicity of the conceptual directive with the body’s attempts to keep pace.
Vito Acconci moved from the practice of poetry into video, performance, and photography not simply to document an ephemeral event but within a systematic exploration of his body’s “occupancy” of public space (the street, theater proscenium) through the execution of preconceived actions or activities. Acconci created his perhaps best-known work over the course of three weeks in October 1969, during which time he followed a stranger until that person entered a private space; the artist recorded these pursuits in photographs (made by a third party) and a written log. By keying his own movements to the perambulations of randomly chosen pedestrians, Acconci attempted to reconceive the role of the artist as a keenly attentive mirror to the world; as the artist described it, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of [the] scheme.”
[via]
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Ten-Minute Art School Course
Part Two: Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus
Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 78.1 cm
(Tate Modern, London)
Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
The ancient source of this subject is Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Book 3, lines 339-507) tells of Narcissus who upon seeing his own image reflected in a pool so falls in love that he could not look away, eventually he vanishes and in his place is a “sweet flower, gold and white, the white around the gold.”
Dalí’s poem, below, accompanied the painting when it was initially exhibited:
Narcissus,
in his immobility,
absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants,
becomes invisible.
There remains of him only the hallucinatingly white oval of his head,
his head again more tender,
his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs,
his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers,
at the tips of the fingers
of the insensate hand,
of the terrible hand,
of the mortal hand
of his own reflection.
When that head slits
when that head splits
when that head bursts,
it will be the flower,
the new Narcissus,
Gala - my Narcissus
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Ten-Minute Art School Course
Part One: Caravaggio’s Narcissus at the Source
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus at the Source, oil on canvas, 1597-99 (Palazzo Barbarini)
There stands a fountain in a darksom wood,
Nor stain’d with falling leaves nor rising mud;
Untroubled by the breath of winds it rests,
Unsully’d by the touch of men or beasts;
High bow’rs of shady trees above it grow,
And rising grass and chearful greens below.
Pleas’d with the form and coolness of the place,
And over-heated by the morning chace,
Narcissus on the grassie verdure lyes:
But whilst within the chrystal fount he tries
To quench his heat, he feels new heats arise.
For as his own bright image he survey’d,
He fell in love with the fantastick shade;
And o’er the fair resemblance hung unmov’d,
Nor knew, fond youth! it was himself he lov’d.
The well-turn’d neck and shoulders he descries,
The spacious forehead, and the sparkling eyes;
The hands that Bacchus might not scorn to show,
And hair that round Apollo’s head might flow;
With all the purple youthfulness of face,
That gently blushes in the wat’ry glass.
By his own flames consum’d the lover lyes,
And gives himself the wound by which he dies.
To the cold water oft he joins his lips,
Oft catching at the beauteous shade he dips
His arms, as often from himself he slips.
Nor knows he who it is his arms pursue
With eager clasps, but loves he knows not who.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, c. 8 C.E.
translation from Latin by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et.al.
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Sciences, Humanities, and … Design? The Case for a Third Pillar of Education
by Jon Freach
During course reviews with students at the Austin Center for Design, where I am a professor, our faculty saw a concerning pattern. Many of our students were inhibited, some even fearful, of actually making things. Luckily, they were seeking advice and direction on how to use their hands and actually experiment.
But the problematic part was that they were students at a design school. We actively recruit and accept those without deep design backgrounds because of the other skills and experience they bring to our program like business, science, engineering, education, social work, or simply their intellectual curiosity and adeptness. We do this with full confidence that we can leverage our own design training to help them along. The expectation at our school is that students won’t be creating just beautiful objects; they’ll create beautifully smart and socially impactful ones.
But, the fear of literally making these designs was a bright red flag for our faculty.
Students often traced their inhibitions back to childhood when they first grew conscious of their teacher and peers’ judgment. One student vividly recalled what it was like to have a teacher title his drawing for him to avoid inevitable confusion from grown-ups. His “making trauma” was intensified when he was in fourth grade and one of his paintings mistakenly got put into a first grade art show. He didn’t win.
This condition is even more widespread the higher you go up the corporate ladder. At frog, we often engage our clients in visually creative exercises to tap their knowledge about a domain and strengthen our partnership in the design process. But, in three different collaborative work sessions that I’ve facilitated with clients in the past year, I’ve been told outright at the beginning: “I’m not good at this, so don’t expect much.”
In a 1979 research project at the Royal College of Art, Professor Bruce Archer referred to design as the missing “third area” of education; the first two areas were considered the sciences and the humanities. Later, in a small book, Designerly Ways of Knowing, educator Nigel Cross made a formal case for the addition of design to our general education, namely the K-12 curriculum. But, he was careful to point out the tricky nature of such a proposition. Cross argued that design, as an area of study, suffered from a legacy of being a technical vocation, where one is “trained” to be a designer, often through an apprenticeship of some sort. Its aims are extrinsic, meaning a student is equipped to perform in a specific social role such as an architect capable of competently designing a building. But general education, in addition to being non-technical, consists of intrinsic goals which contribute to an individual’s self-realization and basic life skills. For instance, many of us learned the principles of math and use them to pay our taxes, but didn’t become mathematicians. And, we read Shakespeare to learn about comedies and tragedies and the use of language, but didn’t become playwrights.
In this context, theoretical understanding takes priority over “the how.” But, to be a designer you need both forms of knowledge. With this in mind, Cross called for a “fundamental change of perspective” regarding design, if it were to be a part of general education. He asserts that an education in design must have value in and of itself and not just be influenced by extrinsic motivating factors such as getting a job.
If our students (and our clients for that matter) had benefited from a general education in design, would they be so apprehensive about the act of making things? What if that student’s teacher had used a different tactic to present his work to the public, one that didn’t lead to a crippling self-consciousness about making his visualizations real?
It’s not for lack of talent that he and others don’t naturally draw or make something. In fact, they’re often really good at it when they try. Would a general education in design have relaxed his inhibitions and taught him to love what he makes no matter what? Perhaps this kind of education, with its intrinsic values, can develop “designerly” qualities and knowledge in people over the course of their formative years: help them develop an understanding and ease with the fundamentals of image and form, give them the skills to spot a wicked problem and the desire to tackle it, provide them with confidence in expressing their ideas, and instill the conviction to see their inventions to fruition. After all, we may be afraid to do our taxes, procrastinate paying our bills, or dread writing that email to a co-worker, but we do them anyway because of our lifetime of knowledge and experience with such social and cultural norms.
[via]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly7ohvkNhg1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Sciences, Humanities, and … Design? The Case for a Third Pillar of Education
by Jon Freach
During course reviews with students at the Austin Center for Design, where I am a professor, our faculty saw a concerning pattern. Many of our students were inhibited, some even fearful, of actually making things. Luckily, they were seeking advice and direction on how to use their hands and actually experiment.
But the problematic part was that they were students at a design school. We actively recruit and accept those without deep design backgrounds because of the other skills and experience they bring to our program like business, science, engineering, education, social work, or simply their intellectual curiosity and adeptness. We do this with full confidence that we can leverage our own design training to help them along. The expectation at our school is that students won’t be creating just beautiful objects; they’ll create beautifully smart and socially impactful ones.
But, the fear of literally making these designs was a bright red flag for our faculty.
Students often traced their inhibitions back to childhood when they first grew conscious of their teacher and peers’ judgment. One student vividly recalled what it was like to have a teacher title his drawing for him to avoid inevitable confusion from grown-ups. His “making trauma” was intensified when he was in fourth grade and one of his paintings mistakenly got put into a first grade art show. He didn’t win.
This condition is even more widespread the higher you go up the corporate ladder. At frog, we often engage our clients in visually creative exercises to tap their knowledge about a domain and strengthen our partnership in the design process. But, in three different collaborative work sessions that I’ve facilitated with clients in the past year, I’ve been told outright at the beginning: “I’m not good at this, so don’t expect much.”
In a 1979 research project at the Royal College of Art, Professor Bruce Archer referred to design as the missing “third area” of education; the first two areas were considered the sciences and the humanities. Later, in a small book, Designerly Ways of Knowing, educator Nigel Cross made a formal case for the addition of design to our general education, namely the K-12 curriculum. But, he was careful to point out the tricky nature of such a proposition. Cross argued that design, as an area of study, suffered from a legacy of being a technical vocation, where one is “trained” to be a designer, often through an apprenticeship of some sort. Its aims are extrinsic, meaning a student is equipped to perform in a specific social role such as an architect capable of competently designing a building. But general education, in addition to being non-technical, consists of intrinsic goals which contribute to an individual’s self-realization and basic life skills. For instance, many of us learned the principles of math and use them to pay our taxes, but didn’t become mathematicians. And, we read Shakespeare to learn about comedies and tragedies and the use of language, but didn’t become playwrights.
In this context, theoretical understanding takes priority over “the how.” But, to be a designer you need both forms of knowledge. With this in mind, Cross called for a “fundamental change of perspective” regarding design, if it were to be a part of general education. He asserts that an education in design must have value in and of itself and not just be influenced by extrinsic motivating factors such as getting a job.
If our students (and our clients for that matter) had benefited from a general education in design, would they be so apprehensive about the act of making things? What if that student’s teacher had used a different tactic to present his work to the public, one that didn’t lead to a crippling self-consciousness about making his visualizations real?
It’s not for lack of talent that he and others don’t naturally draw or make something. In fact, they’re often really good at it when they try. Would a general education in design have relaxed his inhibitions and taught him to love what he makes no matter what? Perhaps this kind of education, with its intrinsic values, can develop “designerly” qualities and knowledge in people over the course of their formative years: help them develop an understanding and ease with the fundamentals of image and form, give them the skills to spot a wicked problem and the desire to tackle it, provide them with confidence in expressing their ideas, and instill the conviction to see their inventions to fruition. After all, we may be afraid to do our taxes, procrastinate paying our bills, or dread writing that email to a co-worker, but we do them anyway because of our lifetime of knowledge and experience with such social and cultural norms.
[via]
+
![Ten-Minute Art School Course
The American Dream: Ernie Barnes
by Andréa Fernandes
By the time Ernest “Ernie” Barnes, Jr. (1938-2009) passed away, he had truly achieved the American dream. He went from being a “fat” and “introverted” child who wasn’t allowed into art museums because he was black to a renowned artist with exhibitions in prestigious galleries. Along the way, he was also an accomplished athlete.
Some things you might not know about Ernie Barnes…
1. He was paid a football salary to spend 6 months painting.
After six seasons of professional football (including a stint in Canada), Ernie Barnes had to retire from the game at the age of 26 due to an injury. The next year, the owner of the New York Jets, Sonny Werblin, contracted Barnes “to just paint” for six months at $14,500, about $1,000 more than Barnes’ football salary the previous year. The contract culminated with Barnes’ first solo exhibition, held at the prestigious Manhattan gallery founded by John Singer Sargent, the Grand Central Art Galleries, at which all 30 of Barnes’ paintings sold.
2. Singers loved his artwork for their album covers.
Barnes’ most famous painting, “The Sugar Shack,” was used by Marvin Gaye for his album I Want You. Other cover artwork includes “Late Night DJ” for Curtis Mayfield’s Something to Believe In, an untitled painting for Donald Byrd’s Donald Byrd and 125th Street, NYC, “Head Over Heels” for The Crusaders’ The Good and Bad Times, and “In Rapture” for B.B. King’s Making Love is Good for You.
3. Even as a pro athlete, he was devoted to his art.
“Big Rembrandt,” as his teammates called him, often spent team meetings, review sessions, and his time on the bench drawing, even though he was fined $50 each time his coach caught him. Playing for the San Diego Chargers, Barnes sketched the portraits of his teammates that appeared in the game programs. Those portraits spiraled into an appearance on Regis Philbin’s first talk show and an assignment to write and illustrate an article for a magazine. With the Denver Broncos, Barnes was asked to show his work at a team party. Six of the 11 works he displayed sold, and Barnes’ reluctance to sell his favorite painting, “The Bench,” resulted in a Sports Illustrated article, his first real national exposure as an artist.
4. Vincent Van Gogh inspired him to call Barron Hilton from a pay phone.
At one point, Barnes was so strapped for cash he was selling his possessions. Selling his books one day, Barnes saw an article about Van Gogh that featured a letter to the artist’s brother about his hardships. The letter gave Barnes “reaffirmation” and courage, and he marched home to pick out his best drawings, write up a proposal, and phone Hilton for a meeting. Lacking money for gas, Barnes walked 6 miles to Hilton’s office, where the hotelier commissioned a painting for $1,000 (of which Barnes received a $500 advance).
5. He’s the only sport artist to be named Sport Artist of the Year twice.
In 1984, Barnes was named the first Sport Artist of the Year by the American Sports Art Museum and Archives. Twenty years later, in 2004, he received the award again. He has received numerous other accolades, including being named America’s Best Painter of Sports, Official Artist of the American Football League, and Official Artist of the 1984 Summer Olympics.
6. He believed “we are blind to each other’s humanity.”
Almost all of the people in Barnes’ paintings are depicted with their faces obscured or their eyes closed. Barnes stated, “I won’t paint people with their eyes open,” explaining “We don’t see each other, we are blind to each other’s humanity.”
[via]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxjihfh5a31qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
The American Dream: Ernie Barnes
by Andréa Fernandes
By the time Ernest “Ernie” Barnes, Jr. (1938-2009) passed away, he had truly achieved the American dream. He went from being a “fat” and “introverted” child who wasn’t allowed into art museums because he was black to a renowned artist with exhibitions in prestigious galleries. Along the way, he was also an accomplished athlete.
Some things you might not know about Ernie Barnes…
1. He was paid a football salary to spend 6 months painting.
After six seasons of professional football (including a stint in Canada), Ernie Barnes had to retire from the game at the age of 26 due to an injury. The next year, the owner of the New York Jets, Sonny Werblin, contracted Barnes “to just paint” for six months at $14,500, about $1,000 more than Barnes’ football salary the previous year. The contract culminated with Barnes’ first solo exhibition, held at the prestigious Manhattan gallery founded by John Singer Sargent, the Grand Central Art Galleries, at which all 30 of Barnes’ paintings sold.
2. Singers loved his artwork for their album covers.
Barnes’ most famous painting, “The Sugar Shack,” was used by Marvin Gaye for his album I Want You. Other cover artwork includes “Late Night DJ” for Curtis Mayfield’s Something to Believe In, an untitled painting for Donald Byrd’s Donald Byrd and 125th Street, NYC, “Head Over Heels” for The Crusaders’ The Good and Bad Times, and “In Rapture” for B.B. King’s Making Love is Good for You.
3. Even as a pro athlete, he was devoted to his art.
“Big Rembrandt,” as his teammates called him, often spent team meetings, review sessions, and his time on the bench drawing, even though he was fined $50 each time his coach caught him. Playing for the San Diego Chargers, Barnes sketched the portraits of his teammates that appeared in the game programs. Those portraits spiraled into an appearance on Regis Philbin’s first talk show and an assignment to write and illustrate an article for a magazine. With the Denver Broncos, Barnes was asked to show his work at a team party. Six of the 11 works he displayed sold, and Barnes’ reluctance to sell his favorite painting, “The Bench,” resulted in a Sports Illustrated article, his first real national exposure as an artist.
4. Vincent Van Gogh inspired him to call Barron Hilton from a pay phone.
At one point, Barnes was so strapped for cash he was selling his possessions. Selling his books one day, Barnes saw an article about Van Gogh that featured a letter to the artist’s brother about his hardships. The letter gave Barnes “reaffirmation” and courage, and he marched home to pick out his best drawings, write up a proposal, and phone Hilton for a meeting. Lacking money for gas, Barnes walked 6 miles to Hilton’s office, where the hotelier commissioned a painting for $1,000 (of which Barnes received a $500 advance).
5. He’s the only sport artist to be named Sport Artist of the Year twice.
In 1984, Barnes was named the first Sport Artist of the Year by the American Sports Art Museum and Archives. Twenty years later, in 2004, he received the award again. He has received numerous other accolades, including being named America’s Best Painter of Sports, Official Artist of the American Football League, and Official Artist of the 1984 Summer Olympics.
6. He believed “we are blind to each other’s humanity.”
Almost all of the people in Barnes’ paintings are depicted with their faces obscured or their eyes closed. Barnes stated, “I won’t paint people with their eyes open,” explaining “We don’t see each other, we are blind to each other’s humanity.”
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Renaissance Drawings: Material and Function
by Carmen Bambach, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
During the late fourteenth century, artists began to use paper more and more to explore their ideas for the design of paintings and sculptures, rather than simply to copy or record finished works of art. This exploratory type of drawing offers a vivid and intimate glimpse of the artist creatively thinking on paper. In preparing a composition, artists first drew quick sketches, usually in pen and ink, in which they formulated general ideas rather than focused on details. An example is Leonardo da Vinci’s fascinating double-sided sheet that includes an exquisite small sketch for an allegory on the fidelity of the lizard, and the stage design for a musical comedy (17.142.2). Another of Leonardo’s double-sided sheets combines an exciting array of ideas for different projects: a figure of Hercules probably intended for a sculpture, some scientific illustrations of the flow of water around obstacles, and a tiny figure of a man sheathing or unsheathing a sword (2000.328a,b).
In the next steps of the creative process, artists investigated the poses of the figures from life models. The earliest such extant studies date from the first years of the fifteenth century. Using the medium of silverpoint on pink prepared paper to obtain delicate tonal effects, Filippino Lippi posed a male studio assistant to stand in for the figure of a bound Christ or Saint Sebastian, in order to observe the figure’s chiseled nude musculature (36.101.1). In contrast, Raphael’s sheet of studies of an infant (1997.75) attempts to capture his energy and delightful gestures, and the red chalk medium serves to imitate the soft tonal effects of his dimpled flesh. Artists then integrated the results of studying the figures from life models into a summary design of the composition, in order to pull together the figural arrangements with the lighting effects and setting. Raphael’s Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (64.47) offers a fairly rough summary study of their pyramidal grouping, while Titian’s poetic study of two satyrs in a landscape (1999.28) concentrates especially on the transforming effects of light and atmosphere. As a final step, artists drew cartoons (full-scale drawings). These were especially necessary in painting frescoes on moist plaster, for the enormously difficult medium of fresco demanded that artists paint quickly, one plaster patch per day, before the moist plaster and the water-based colors set in a chemical process. The monumental cartoon by Francesco Salviati (2001.409) is boldly rendered with black chalk and white highlights in the final size of the figure in the fresco painting, and the main outlines around the figure are incised with a stylus for the transfer of the full-scale design onto the moist plaster. During the late fourteenth century, artists also began to work out the details of their commissions for paintings, sculptures, and buildings with their prospective patrons by drafting legally binding contracts. These contracts often included a drawing as an attachment in order to explain the details of the design that was expected and that would be agreed upon by the two parties. A number of drawings were also more generally produced as demonstration pieces (modelli) for the patron’s approval and for the workshop’s use, and these were often carefully modeled with pen and ink and were fairly complete regarding the iconography. These types of demonstration drawings for sculptural projects usually illustrate the architectural framework of the monument, as is seen in the designs by Jacopo della Quercia for the Fonte Gaia that was orignally meant for the Piazza del Campo in Siena (49.141), and by Michelangelo for the tomb of Pope Julius II, intended originally for Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (62.93.1).
[via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx6d2mzT9p1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Renaissance Drawings: Material and Function
by Carmen Bambach, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
During the late fourteenth century, artists began to use paper more and more to explore their ideas for the design of paintings and sculptures, rather than simply to copy or record finished works of art. This exploratory type of drawing offers a vivid and intimate glimpse of the artist creatively thinking on paper.
In preparing a composition, artists first drew quick sketches, usually in pen and ink, in which they formulated general ideas rather than focused on details. An example is Leonardo da Vinci’s fascinating double-sided sheet that includes an exquisite small sketch for an allegory on the fidelity of the lizard, and the stage design for a musical comedy (17.142.2). Another of Leonardo’s double-sided sheets combines an exciting array of ideas for different projects: a figure of Hercules probably intended for a sculpture, some scientific illustrations of the flow of water around obstacles, and a tiny figure of a man sheathing or unsheathing a sword (2000.328a,b).
In the next steps of the creative process, artists investigated the poses of the figures from life models. The earliest such extant studies date from the first years of the fifteenth century. Using the medium of silverpoint on pink prepared paper to obtain delicate tonal effects, Filippino Lippi posed a male studio assistant to stand in for the figure of a bound Christ or Saint Sebastian, in order to observe the figure’s chiseled nude musculature (36.101.1). In contrast, Raphael’s sheet of studies of an infant (1997.75) attempts to capture his energy and delightful gestures, and the red chalk medium serves to imitate the soft tonal effects of his dimpled flesh. Artists then integrated the results of studying the figures from life models into a summary design of the composition, in order to pull together the figural arrangements with the lighting effects and setting. Raphael’s Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (64.47) offers a fairly rough summary study of their pyramidal grouping, while Titian’s poetic study of two satyrs in a landscape (1999.28) concentrates especially on the transforming effects of light and atmosphere.
As a final step, artists drew cartoons (full-scale drawings). These were especially necessary in painting frescoes on moist plaster, for the enormously difficult medium of fresco demanded that artists paint quickly, one plaster patch per day, before the moist plaster and the water-based colors set in a chemical process. The monumental cartoon by Francesco Salviati (2001.409) is boldly rendered with black chalk and white highlights in the final size of the figure in the fresco painting, and the main outlines around the figure are incised with a stylus for the transfer of the full-scale design onto the moist plaster.
During the late fourteenth century, artists also began to work out the details of their commissions for paintings, sculptures, and buildings with their prospective patrons by drafting legally binding contracts. These contracts often included a drawing as an attachment in order to explain the details of the design that was expected and that would be agreed upon by the two parties. A number of drawings were also more generally produced as demonstration pieces (modelli) for the patron’s approval and for the workshop’s use, and these were often carefully modeled with pen and ink and were fairly complete regarding the iconography. These types of demonstration drawings for sculptural projects usually illustrate the architectural framework of the monument, as is seen in the designs by Jacopo della Quercia for the Fonte Gaia that was orignally meant for the Piazza del Campo in Siena (49.141), and by Michelangelo for the tomb of Pope Julius II, intended originally for Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (62.93.1).
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
The Origins of Saturnalia and Christmas
by Tom Schmidt
I was inspired to look at an English translation of Macrobius’s Saturnalia after reading Roger Pearse’s post that mentioned that Macrobius claimed that an infant was presented on the winter solstice as a representation of the Sun. Saturnalia was a Roman feast which occurred in middle or late December, and many have tried to draw ties between this feast and the institution of the date of Christmas.
The Saturnalia by Macrobius (wrote early 5th century) is really a dinner conversation by several interlocutors that is set during the festival Saturnalia. The lengthy dialogue covers all manner of Roman culture and the festival of Saturnalia is only one of the many, many topics. The translation I used is the one by Percival Vaughn Davies published in 1969 by Columbia University press. Loeb just came out with the only other translation; it uses a superior text and I assume has better editors. The Davies translation does not even include quotation marks!
In this work there are some very good, but lengthy quotes about the origins of Saturnalia and its customs and dates. We begin in Saturnalia 1.7.18 which discusses the origins of the festival:
[18]…The laws of religion, he said, allow me to disclose the origin of the festival of the Saturnalia so far as the account of its origin is a matter of mythology or is made known to all by the physicists…
In the omitted section Macrobius discusses, through an interlocutor, how Saturn and Janus coreigned in Italy.
[24] It was during their reign that Saturn suddenly disappeared, and Janus then devised means to add to his honors. First he gave the name Saturnia to all the land which acknowledged his rule; and then he built an altar, instituting rites as to a god and calling these rites the Saturnalia—a fact which goes to show how very much older the festival is than the city of Rome. And it was because Saturn had improved the conditions of life that, by order of Janus, religious honors were paid to him, as his effigy indicates, which received the additional attribute of a sickle, the symbol of harvest. [25] Saturn is credited with the invention of the art of grafting, with the cultivation of fruit trees, and with instructing men in everything that belongs to the fertilizing of the fields. Furthermore, at Cyrene his worshipers, when they offer sacrifice to him, crown themselves with fresh figs and present each other with cakes, for they hold that he discovered honey and fruits. Moreover, at Rome men call him “Sterculius,” as having been the first to fertilize the fields with dung (stercus). [26] His reign is said to have been a time of great happiness, both on account of the universal plenty that then prevailed and because as yet there was no division into bond and free—as one may gather from the complete license enjoyed by slaves at the Saturnalia.
Then Macrobius adds a second tradition about the origins of the festival:
[27] Another tradition accounts for the Saturnalia as follows. Hercules is said to have left men behind him in Italy, either (as certain authorities hold) because he was angry with them for neglecting to watch over his herds or (as some suppose), deliberately, to protect his altar and temple from attacks. Harassed by brigands, these men occupied a high hill and called themselves Saturnians, from the name which the hill too used previously to bear, and, conscious of the protection afforded to them by the name of Saturn and by the awe which the god inspired, they are said to have instituted the Saturnalia, to the end that the very observance of the festival thus proclaimed might bring the uncouth minds of their neighbors to show a greater respect for the worship of the god.
Macrobius then adds a third account:
[28] I am aware too of the account given by Varro of the origin of the Saturnalia. The Pelasgians, he says, when they were driven from their homes, made for various lands, but most of them flocked to Dodona and, doubtful where to settle, consulted the oracle. They received this reply: “Go ye in search of the land of the Sicels and the Aborigines, a land, sacred to Saturn, even Cotyle, where floateth an island. Mingle with these people and then send a tenth to Phoebus and offer heads to Hades and a man to the Father.” Such was the response which they received, and after many wanderings they came to Latium, where in the lake of Cutilia they found a floating island, [29] for there was a large expanse of turf—perhaps solidified mud or perhaps an accumulation of marsh land with brushwood and trees forming a luxuriant wood—and it was drifting through the water by the movement of the waves in such a way as to win credence even for the tale of Delos, the island which, for all its lofty hills and wide plains, used to journey through the seas from place to place. [30] The discovery of this marvel showed the Pelasgians that here was the home foretold for them. And, after having driven out the Sicilian inhabitants, they took possession of the land, dedicating a tenth of the spoil to Apollo, in accordance with the response given by the oracle, and raising a little shrine to Dis and an altar to Saturn, whose festival they named the Saturnalia. [31] For many years they thought to propitiate Dis with human heads and Saturn with the sacrifice of men, since the oracle had bidden them: “Offer heads to Hades and a man to the Father.” But later, the story goes, Hercules, returning through Italy with the herds of Geryon, persuaded their descendants to replace these unholy sacrifices with others of good omen, by offering to Dis little masks cleverly fashioned to represent the human face, instead of human heads, and by honoring the altars of Saturn with lighted candles instead of with the blood of a man; for the word (porta means “lights” as well as “a man.” [32] This is the origin of the custom of sending round wax tapers during the Saturnalia, although others think that the practice is derived simply from the fact that it was in the reign of Saturn that we made our way, as though to the light, from a rude and gloomy existence to a knowledge of the liberal arts. [33] I should add, however, that I have found it written that, since many through greed made the Saturnalia an excuse to solicit and demand gifts from their clients, a practice which bore heavily on those of more slender means, one Publicius, a tribune, proposed to the people that no one should send anything but wax tapers to one richer than himself.
Here another interlocutor interrupts and talks about different traditions that were added at a later time:
[34] I find, Praetextatus, interposed Albinus Caecina, a substituted sacrifice, such as that which you have just mentioned, made in later times at the rites of the Compitalia, when games used to be held at crossroads throughout the city, that is to say, on the restoration of these games by Tarquinius Superbus, in honor of the Lares and of Mania, in accordance with an oracle of Apollo. For that oracle ordained that offering should be made “for heads with heads,” [35] and for some time the ritual required the sacrifice of boys to the goddess Mania, the mother of the Lares, to insure the safety of the family. But after the expulsion of Tarquinius, Junius Brutus, as consul, determined to change the nature of the sacrificial rite. By his order heads of garlic arid poppies were used at the rite, so that the oracle was obeyed, in so far as it had prescribed “heads,” and a criminal and unholy sacrifice was discarded. It also became the practice to avert any peril that threatened a particular family by hanging up woolen images before the door of the house. As for the games themselves, they were customarily called “Compitalia” from the crossroads (compita) at which they were held. But I interrupted you. Pray go on.
Then Macrobius’s main interlocutor for this section continues with his conclusion:
[36] You have referred, said Praetextatus, to a parallel instance of a change for the better in the ritual of a sacrifice. The point is well taken and well timed. But from the reasons adduced touching the origin of the Saturnalia it appears that the festival is of greater antiquity than the city of Rome, for in fact Lucius Accius” in his Annals says that its regular observance began in Greece before the foundation of Rome. [37] Here are the lines: In most of Greece, and above all at Athens, men celebrate in honor of Saturn a festival which they always call the festival of Cronos. The day is kept a holiday, and in country and in town all usually hold joyful feasts, at which each man waits on his own slaves. And so it is with us. Thus from Greece that custom has been handed down, and slaves dine with their masters at that time.
So, lots of traditions about the origin of the festival of Saturnalia, but none of them seem to have to do with the birth of anyone.
(continued HERE)
[via]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwglm2Bc5v1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
The Origins of Saturnalia and Christmas
by Tom Schmidt
I was inspired to look at an English translation of Macrobius’s Saturnalia after reading Roger Pearse’s post that mentioned that Macrobius claimed that an infant was presented on the winter solstice as a representation of the Sun. Saturnalia was a Roman feast which occurred in middle or late December, and many have tried to draw ties between this feast and the institution of the date of Christmas.
The Saturnalia by Macrobius (wrote early 5th century) is really a dinner conversation by several interlocutors that is set during the festival Saturnalia. The lengthy dialogue covers all manner of Roman culture and the festival of Saturnalia is only one of the many, many topics. The translation I used is the one by Percival Vaughn Davies published in 1969 by Columbia University press. Loeb just came out with the only other translation; it uses a superior text and I assume has better editors. The Davies translation does not even include quotation marks!
In this work there are some very good, but lengthy quotes about the origins of Saturnalia and its customs and dates. We begin in Saturnalia 1.7.18 which discusses the origins of the festival:
[18]…The laws of religion, he said, allow me to disclose the origin of the festival of the Saturnalia so far as the account of its origin is a matter of mythology or is made known to all by the physicists…
In the omitted section Macrobius discusses, through an interlocutor, how Saturn and Janus coreigned in Italy.
[24] It was during their reign that Saturn suddenly disappeared, and Janus then devised means to add to his honors. First he gave the name Saturnia to all the land which acknowledged his rule; and then he built an altar, instituting rites as to a god and calling these rites the Saturnalia—a fact which goes to show how very much older the festival is than the city of Rome. And it was because Saturn had improved the conditions of life that, by order of Janus, religious honors were paid to him, as his effigy indicates, which received the additional attribute of a sickle, the symbol of harvest.
[25] Saturn is credited with the invention of the art of grafting, with the cultivation of fruit trees, and with instructing men in everything that belongs to the fertilizing of the fields. Furthermore, at Cyrene his worshipers, when they offer sacrifice to him, crown themselves with fresh figs and present each other with cakes, for they hold that he discovered honey and fruits. Moreover, at Rome men call him “Sterculius,” as having been the first to fertilize the fields with dung (stercus). [26] His reign is said to have been a time of great happiness, both on account of the universal plenty that then prevailed and because as yet there was no division into bond and free—as one may gather from the complete license enjoyed by slaves at the Saturnalia.
Then Macrobius adds a second tradition about the origins of the festival:
[27] Another tradition accounts for the Saturnalia as follows. Hercules is said to have left men behind him in Italy, either (as certain authorities hold) because he was angry with them for neglecting to watch over his herds or (as some suppose), deliberately, to protect his altar and temple from attacks. Harassed by brigands, these men occupied a high hill and called themselves Saturnians, from the name which the hill too used previously to bear, and, conscious of the protection afforded to them by the name of Saturn and by the awe which the god inspired, they are said to have instituted the Saturnalia, to the end that the very observance of the festival thus proclaimed might bring the uncouth minds of their neighbors to show a greater respect for the worship of the god.
Macrobius then adds a third account:
[28] I am aware too of the account given by Varro of the origin of the Saturnalia. The Pelasgians, he says, when they were driven from their homes, made for various lands, but most of them flocked to Dodona and, doubtful where to settle, consulted the oracle. They received this reply: “Go ye in search of the land of the Sicels and the Aborigines, a land, sacred to Saturn, even Cotyle, where floateth an island. Mingle with these people and then send a tenth to Phoebus and offer heads to Hades and a man to the Father.” Such was the response which they received, and after many wanderings they came to Latium, where in the lake of Cutilia they found a floating island, [29] for there was a large expanse of turf—perhaps solidified mud or perhaps an accumulation of marsh land with brushwood and trees forming a luxuriant wood—and it was drifting through the water by the movement of the waves in such a way as to win credence even for the tale of Delos, the island which, for all its lofty hills and wide plains, used to journey through the seas from place to place. [30] The discovery of this marvel showed the Pelasgians that here was the home foretold for them. And, after having driven out the Sicilian inhabitants, they took possession of the land, dedicating a tenth of the spoil to Apollo, in accordance with the response given by the oracle, and raising a little shrine to Dis and an altar to Saturn, whose festival they named the Saturnalia.
[31] For many years they thought to propitiate Dis with human heads and Saturn with the sacrifice of men, since the oracle had bidden them: “Offer heads to Hades and a man to the Father.” But later, the story goes, Hercules, returning through Italy with the herds of Geryon, persuaded their descendants to replace these unholy sacrifices with others of good omen, by offering to Dis little masks cleverly fashioned to represent the human face, instead of human heads, and by honoring the altars of Saturn with lighted candles instead of with the blood of a man; for the word (porta means “lights” as well as “a man.” [32] This is the origin of the custom of sending round wax tapers during the Saturnalia, although others think that the practice is derived simply from the fact that it was in the reign of Saturn that we made our way, as though to the light, from a rude and gloomy existence to a knowledge of the liberal arts. [33] I should add, however, that I have found it written that, since many through greed made the Saturnalia an excuse to solicit and demand gifts from their clients, a practice which bore heavily on those of more slender means, one Publicius, a tribune, proposed to the people that no one should send anything but wax tapers to one richer than himself.
Here another interlocutor interrupts and talks about different traditions that were added at a later time:
[34] I find, Praetextatus, interposed Albinus Caecina, a substituted sacrifice, such as that which you have just mentioned, made in later times at the rites of the Compitalia, when games used to be held at crossroads throughout the city, that is to say, on the restoration of these games by Tarquinius Superbus, in honor of the Lares and of Mania, in accordance with an oracle of Apollo. For that oracle ordained that offering should be made “for heads with heads,” [35] and for some time the ritual required the sacrifice of boys to the goddess Mania, the mother of the Lares, to insure the safety of the family. But after the expulsion of Tarquinius, Junius Brutus, as consul, determined to change the nature of the sacrificial rite. By his order heads of garlic arid poppies were used at the rite, so that the oracle was obeyed, in so far as it had prescribed “heads,” and a criminal and unholy sacrifice was discarded. It also became the practice to avert any peril that threatened a particular family by hanging up woolen images before the door of the house. As for the games themselves, they were customarily called “Compitalia” from the crossroads (compita) at which they were held. But I interrupted you. Pray go on.
Then Macrobius’s main interlocutor for this section continues with his conclusion:
[36] You have referred, said Praetextatus, to a parallel instance of a change for the better in the ritual of a sacrifice. The point is well taken and well timed. But from the reasons adduced touching the origin of the Saturnalia it appears that the festival is of greater antiquity than the city of Rome, for in fact Lucius Accius” in his Annals says that its regular observance began in Greece before the foundation of Rome. [37] Here are the lines:
In most of Greece, and above all at Athens, men celebrate in honor of Saturn a festival which they always call the festival of Cronos. The day is kept a holiday, and in country and in town all usually hold joyful feasts, at which each man waits on his own slaves. And so it is with us. Thus from Greece that custom has been handed down, and slaves dine with their masters at that time.
So, lots of traditions about the origin of the festival of Saturnalia, but none of them seem to have to do with the birth of anyone.
(continued HERE)
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Early Documentary Photography
from the Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By the beginning of the twentieth century, photography was well on its way to becoming the visual language it is today, the pervasive agent of democratic communication. Photographers used its growing influence to expose society’s evils, which the prosperous, self-indulgent Belle Époque chose to ignore: the degrading conditions of workers in big-city slums, the barbarism of child labor, the terrorism of lynching, the devastation of war. Despite Alfred Stieglitz’s early interest in candid or snapshot-style street photography seen in The Terminal of 1892 (58.577.11) and The Steerage of 1907 (33.43.419), he attempted to turn the page on the natural development of the documentary tradition in photography with his successful 1910 retrospective of Pictorialism at the Albright Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. If the age of electricity, the automobile, and the telephone would, by caveat, be ignored by the Pictorialists, modern realities in the 1890s to 1910s would nonetheless appear in images produced by tens of thousands of artists and amateurs who found the world intoxicatingly attractive, if at times disorderly and brutal. Alongside selected examples of the work of Stieglitz and members of his circle (Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Steichen), the photographs of Jacob Riis, Arnold Genthe, Lewis Hine, and E. J. Bellocq, among others, provide a sampling of early documentary practice in America.
Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a police reporter for the New York Tribune newspaper. In the early 1880s, he supplemented his investigative reporting of the city’s notorious Lower East Side slums with his own photographs (MCNY) and soon became known as one of the city’s most important social reformers. An immigrant from Denmark to the United States in 1870, Riis, who originally trained to be a carpenter, published his first and most important book, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890. The catalyst for citywide reform of building codes and slumlord-tenant relations, the book continues to serve as a model for all photographers and urban historians dedicated to social change within the city. Born in Berlin, Arnold Genthe (1869–1942) received a doctorate in philosophy in 1894 and moved to California the following year to tutor the son of a wealthy German baron and San Francisco heiress. He died a naturalized citizen in New York City in 1942 after fifty years of camera work, primarily in portraiture, published in nine photography books. His first publication, Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908), reveals the artist’s decade-long obsession with the exotic flavor of San Francisco’s eight square blocks that comprise its Chinatown. With no prior experience in photography, Genthe would acquire one of the newly invented small handheld cameras and proceed to photograph the foreign inhabitants (53.680.6), their brocades and embroideries, their bronzes and porcelains, as well as the district’s dark alleys and opium dens. In so doing, he mastered the nascent art of what much later came to be known as “street photography.” In 1908, Lewis Hine (1874–1940) left his teaching position at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New York City to become a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization dedicated to improving the working and living conditions of children. Over the next thirteen years, Hine made thousands of negatives—often undercover—of children working across the country in mills, sweatshops, factories, and various street trades, such as newspaper delivery (1970.727.1). Through a steady accumulation of specific, idiosyncratic facts, the photographer hoped to reveal the larger, hidden patterns of child exploitation upon which the American city was rapidly expanding. More important, his reports and slide lectures were not meant solely as tools for labor reform but as ways of triggering a more profound, empathetic response in the viewer, one that would cause him to reconsider his relationship to society. Ernest J. Bellocq (1873–1949) was born into an aristocratic Creole family in New Orleans. A prominent member of the New Orleans Camera Club, he worked as a professional photographer specializing in shipbuilding. Bellocq’s international renown, however, was established by a series of intimate, mildly erotic portraits of prostitutes working around 1912 in Storyville, the city’s infamous tenderloin district (2005.100.130). When discovered by the photographer Lee Friedlander in the 1960s and published in 1970, Bellocq was immediately recognized as a master of the modern, psychological portrait—an instant ancestor for a whole generation of contemporary artists including Diane Arbus. In 1915, Stieglitz’s flagging interest in American Pictorialist photography was revived by the work of three young photographers: Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), Morton Schamberg (1881–1918), and Paul Strand (1890–1976). Sheeler and Schamberg were both academically trained painters from Philadelphia who had studied modern art in Europe and New York. Although each believed painting was their true vocation, they took up photography to earn a living; Sheeler specialized in architecture, Schamberg in portraiture. When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in 1910–11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter. He began to photograph domestic architecture in the Philadelphia area, and within three years had a successful sideline documenting fine private and public American collections of Chinese bronzes, Meso-American pots, and modern painting and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp. The rigorous demands of detailed record photography soon influenced his painting as the direct, generally frontal assessment of both an object’s form and structure retrained and refined his eye. By 1917, Sheeler had begun to turn his camera from commercial work to subjects of personal significance, such as the eighteenth-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, that he and Schamberg used as a studio. Sheeler saw in its spare construction a formal purity as clear as the practical intention of the carpenter. In a black stove (33.43.259), he found a material abstraction undivorced from actuality and unembellished by decoration. For him, the farmhouse was a structure of elementary geometries, a series of Cubist compositions unadorned by painterly camouflage. Paul Strand first visited Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1907 as a student in a class taught by Lewis Hine. Hine’s photography was absolutely straightforward documentary, but at that time Stieglitz was promoting the gauzy Pictorialism of his Secessionist fellows. Strand dutifully followed suit, but eventually Stieglitz encouraged his young protégé to abandon the soft-focus technique and to explore movement in the city and the geometric shapes of urban structures. Stieglitz gave Strand a show in March 1916 and published a selection of his pictures in Camera Work, the journal which had appeared regularly since 1914. Following his exhibition, Strand’s advances accelerated and his pictures became startlingly bold (33.43.334; 49.55.318). The outbreak of World War I essentially ended the Pictorialist movement as a viable aesthetic program. The inherent violence of the war soon engendered a new commitment by the world’s photographers to document every aspect of the fighting, from life in the trenches to views of fighter planes cruising the skies. Nothing was left hidden from the camera’s burrowing eye. The American commercial photographic firm of Mole & Thomas made many composite scenes of soldiers (1987.1100.478)—studies of seeming unity, strength, and organized patriotism far from the frontlines. Edward Steichen, flying high above the soldiers in a reconnaissance plane, generated its antipode: a view of brutal destruction and death on a field in France (1987.1100.109).
[via]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw3mhwQZ621qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Early Documentary Photography
from the Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By the beginning of the twentieth century, photography was well on its way to becoming the visual language it is today, the pervasive agent of democratic communication. Photographers used its growing influence to expose society’s evils, which the prosperous, self-indulgent Belle Époque chose to ignore: the degrading conditions of workers in big-city slums, the barbarism of child labor, the terrorism of lynching, the devastation of war.
Despite Alfred Stieglitz’s early interest in candid or snapshot-style street photography seen in The Terminal of 1892 (58.577.11) and The Steerage of 1907 (33.43.419), he attempted to turn the page on the natural development of the documentary tradition in photography with his successful 1910 retrospective of Pictorialism at the Albright Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. If the age of electricity, the automobile, and the telephone would, by caveat, be ignored by the Pictorialists, modern realities in the 1890s to 1910s would nonetheless appear in images produced by tens of thousands of artists and amateurs who found the world intoxicatingly attractive, if at times disorderly and brutal. Alongside selected examples of the work of Stieglitz and members of his circle (Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Steichen), the photographs of Jacob Riis, Arnold Genthe, Lewis Hine, and E. J. Bellocq, among others, provide a sampling of early documentary practice in America.
Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a police reporter for the New York Tribune newspaper. In the early 1880s, he supplemented his investigative reporting of the city’s notorious Lower East Side slums with his own photographs (MCNY) and soon became known as one of the city’s most important social reformers. An immigrant from Denmark to the United States in 1870, Riis, who originally trained to be a carpenter, published his first and most important book, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890. The catalyst for citywide reform of building codes and slumlord-tenant relations, the book continues to serve as a model for all photographers and urban historians dedicated to social change within the city.
Born in Berlin, Arnold Genthe (1869–1942) received a doctorate in philosophy in 1894 and moved to California the following year to tutor the son of a wealthy German baron and San Francisco heiress. He died a naturalized citizen in New York City in 1942 after fifty years of camera work, primarily in portraiture, published in nine photography books. His first publication, Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908), reveals the artist’s decade-long obsession with the exotic flavor of San Francisco’s eight square blocks that comprise its Chinatown. With no prior experience in photography, Genthe would acquire one of the newly invented small handheld cameras and proceed to photograph the foreign inhabitants (53.680.6), their brocades and embroideries, their bronzes and porcelains, as well as the district’s dark alleys and opium dens. In so doing, he mastered the nascent art of what much later came to be known as “street photography.”
In 1908, Lewis Hine (1874–1940) left his teaching position at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New York City to become a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization dedicated to improving the working and living conditions of children. Over the next thirteen years, Hine made thousands of negatives—often undercover—of children working across the country in mills, sweatshops, factories, and various street trades, such as newspaper delivery (1970.727.1). Through a steady accumulation of specific, idiosyncratic facts, the photographer hoped to reveal the larger, hidden patterns of child exploitation upon which the American city was rapidly expanding. More important, his reports and slide lectures were not meant solely as tools for labor reform but as ways of triggering a more profound, empathetic response in the viewer, one that would cause him to reconsider his relationship to society.
Ernest J. Bellocq (1873–1949) was born into an aristocratic Creole family in New Orleans. A prominent member of the New Orleans Camera Club, he worked as a professional photographer specializing in shipbuilding. Bellocq’s international renown, however, was established by a series of intimate, mildly erotic portraits of prostitutes working around 1912 in Storyville, the city’s infamous tenderloin district (2005.100.130). When discovered by the photographer Lee Friedlander in the 1960s and published in 1970, Bellocq was immediately recognized as a master of the modern, psychological portrait—an instant ancestor for a whole generation of contemporary artists including Diane Arbus.
In 1915, Stieglitz’s flagging interest in American Pictorialist photography was revived by the work of three young photographers: Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), Morton Schamberg (1881–1918), and Paul Strand (1890–1976). Sheeler and Schamberg were both academically trained painters from Philadelphia who had studied modern art in Europe and New York. Although each believed painting was their true vocation, they took up photography to earn a living; Sheeler specialized in architecture, Schamberg in portraiture.
When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in 1910–11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter. He began to photograph domestic architecture in the Philadelphia area, and within three years had a successful sideline documenting fine private and public American collections of Chinese bronzes, Meso-American pots, and modern painting and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp. The rigorous demands of detailed record photography soon influenced his painting as the direct, generally frontal assessment of both an object’s form and structure retrained and refined his eye. By 1917, Sheeler had begun to turn his camera from commercial work to subjects of personal significance, such as the eighteenth-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, that he and Schamberg used as a studio. Sheeler saw in its spare construction a formal purity as clear as the practical intention of the carpenter. In a black stove (33.43.259), he found a material abstraction undivorced from actuality and unembellished by decoration. For him, the farmhouse was a structure of elementary geometries, a series of Cubist compositions unadorned by painterly camouflage.
Paul Strand first visited Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1907 as a student in a class taught by Lewis Hine. Hine’s photography was absolutely straightforward documentary, but at that time Stieglitz was promoting the gauzy Pictorialism of his Secessionist fellows. Strand dutifully followed suit, but eventually Stieglitz encouraged his young protégé to abandon the soft-focus technique and to explore movement in the city and the geometric shapes of urban structures. Stieglitz gave Strand a show in March 1916 and published a selection of his pictures in Camera Work, the journal which had appeared regularly since 1914. Following his exhibition, Strand’s advances accelerated and his pictures became startlingly bold (33.43.334; 49.55.318).
The outbreak of World War I essentially ended the Pictorialist movement as a viable aesthetic program. The inherent violence of the war soon engendered a new commitment by the world’s photographers to document every aspect of the fighting, from life in the trenches to views of fighter planes cruising the skies. Nothing was left hidden from the camera’s burrowing eye. The American commercial photographic firm of Mole & Thomas made many composite scenes of soldiers (1987.1100.478)—studies of seeming unity, strength, and organized patriotism far from the frontlines. Edward Steichen, flying high above the soldiers in a reconnaissance plane, generated its antipode: a view of brutal destruction and death on a field in France (1987.1100.109).
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Venus of Willendorf
Also known as the Woman of Willendorf, the Venus is an 11.1 cm high statuette of a plump female figure. It was discovered in 1908 by archaeologist Josef Szombathy at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from a limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. Since the discovery and naming, several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered. They are collectively referred to as Venus figurines.
In 1990 a new analysis estimated it to have been carved between 24,000 and 22,000 BC. Very little is known about its origin, method of creation or cultural significance, but there is plenty of theories.
The Venus is not a realistic portrait but rather a crude version of the female figure. Her vulva, breasts, and swollen belly are very pronounced, suggesting a strong connection to fertility or pregnancy. Her tiny arms are folded over her breasts, and she has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of plaited hair or a kind of headdress. The lack of a face has prompted some archaeologists and philosophers to view the Venus as an Mother Goddess.
“The ironic identification of these figurines as ‘Venus’ pleasantly satisfied certain assumptions at the time about the primitive, about women, and about taste.” - Christopher Witcombe.
The statue’s feet don’t allow it to stand on its own. Due to this it has been speculated that it was meant to be held, rather than simply looked at. The purpose of the carving is subject to much speculation.
Theories include: A doll; a holy fertility symbol; a portrait; a teaching tool; and erotica.
[via]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvqsllYh691qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Venus of Willendorf
Also known as the Woman of Willendorf, the Venus is an 11.1 cm high statuette of a plump female figure. It was discovered in 1908 by archaeologist Josef Szombathy at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from a limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. Since the discovery and naming, several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered. They are collectively referred to as Venus figurines.
In 1990 a new analysis estimated it to have been carved between 24,000 and 22,000 BC. Very little is known about its origin, method of creation or cultural significance, but there is plenty of theories.
The Venus is not a realistic portrait but rather a crude version of the female figure. Her vulva, breasts, and swollen belly are very pronounced, suggesting a strong connection to fertility or pregnancy. Her tiny arms are folded over her breasts, and she has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of plaited hair or a kind of headdress. The lack of a face has prompted some archaeologists and philosophers to view the Venus as an Mother Goddess.
“The ironic identification of these figurines as ‘Venus’ pleasantly satisfied certain assumptions at the time about the primitive, about women, and about taste.” - Christopher Witcombe.
The statue’s feet don’t allow it to stand on its own. Due to this it has been speculated that it was meant to be held, rather than simply looked at. The purpose of the carving is subject to much speculation.
Theories include: A doll; a holy fertility symbol; a portrait; a teaching tool; and erotica.
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Luxury Arts of Rome
by Christopher Lightfoot, Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
During the late Republic, wealth poured into Rome on an unprecedented scale in the form of tribute, taxes, and profits from commerce and banking. Not all of the riches were honestly or legitimately acquired, for some came in the form of booty and spoils, including defeated enemies of Rome that were enslaved. It did mean, however, that a few leading men, such the general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 115–53 B.C.), became enormously rich. Such wealth was used principally to secure success in the intense political rivalry that afflicted Rome at that time, but it also stimulated patronage of the arts, the formation of libraries and art collections, and the construction of palaces and gardens.
Although Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, attempted to curb these extravagances and excessive displays of personal wealth, well-to-do Romans increasingly indulged their taste for luxury during the Julio-Claudian period (27 B.C.–68 A.D.). In addition to spending fortunes on sumptuous villas, lavish entertainment, fashionable clothes, and entourages of slaves and hangers-on, men and women in high Roman society furnished themselves with a range of expensive personal items. Alon with gold jewelry such as earrings, necklaces, and finger rings, the Romans loved expensive silver mirrors, ivory combs and hairpins, and an assortment of boxes and containers for perfumes and cosmetics. These precious items give an indication of the variety and quality of the craftsmanship that was required to provide for the needs of wealthy Roman clients. Other accessories, known only from literary sources, were in more perishable materials, such as costly silks imported from China or flamboyant wigs made from the hair of German or British slaves. Ivory was also imported to Rome mainly from Africa via the Nile.
Roman ladies also developed a taste for elaborate jewelry decorated with colorful, exotic stones. Amber and pearl were two of the most popular and sought after materials; the former was brought from the Baltic Sea, and the finest pearls were imported from the Persian Gulf, although one reason given to justify the conquest of Britain during the reign of emperor Claudius (41–54 A.D.) was that it was a rich source of pearls. Other rare and expensive gems included amethysts, sapphires, and uncut diamonds, all from various parts of southern Asia. These were prized for their brilliancy and transparency. Emeralds from the eastern desert of Upper Egypt were also very popular; they were usually left in their natural form as prisms, which were drilled and strung on gold necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Many funerary portraits of women—particularly the painted mummy portraits from Roman Egypt (examples of which are on display in the Egyptian galleries) and the sculpted stone portraits from the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria (examples are exhibited in the Ancient Near East galleries)—show the deceased wearing such jewelry as a lasting indication of their social status and personal wealth.
Some luxury materials were so rare or costly that they gave rise to cheaper, manmade imitations in both pottery and glass, but even in these we can recognize a technical and artistic skill of the highest caliber. Such is the case with mosaic glass and marbled ceramic tablewares, made to reproduce the striking patterns of banded agate. Cameo glass, the most difficult and costly of all Roman glass, was also inspired by layered semiprecious stones. There are, for example, many Roman gems in cameo glass that were made as less expensive alternatives to real cameos in banded agate or sardonyx. In addition, it must be remembered that much has been irretrievably lost, especially objects in gold and silver, which could easily be melted down and reused. Others became heirlooms and relics that were later incorporated into medieval and Renaissance works, such as some of the semiprecious stone vessels in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice.
In the third century A.D., the Roman empire was beset by barbarian invasions in Europe, a renascent Sasanian Persian empire in the East, internal disorder, and rampant inflation. Nevertheless, the empire’s accumulated resources meant that the privileged elite in Roman society continued to enjoy a life of untold wealth and luxury. One result of the increased dangers was that people buried their precious possessions and failed more often to return to collect them. Hoards of silver and jewelry have consequently been found in considerable numbers throughout the Roman world. There was certainly no diminution of skill and inventiveness of the craftsmen who produced these luxuries, but new styles in design and fashion developed. In particular, jewelry and ornaments became more colorful and garish, and they included the use of gold coins (an attractive but practical way to beat inflation). Such tastes led ultimately to the adoption by the emperors of ceremonial silk robes and regal-looking gold crowns, decorated with pearls and precious stones. It was to be a fashion that greatly influenced later Byzantine art, and even in the West the rulers of the successor kingdoms never completely forgot the wealth and splendor of ancient Rome.
[via]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvdlbjfdrW1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Luxury Arts of Rome
by Christopher Lightfoot, Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
During the late Republic, wealth poured into Rome on an unprecedented scale in the form of tribute, taxes, and profits from commerce and banking. Not all of the riches were honestly or legitimately acquired, for some came in the form of booty and spoils, including defeated enemies of Rome that were enslaved. It did mean, however, that a few leading men, such the general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 115–53 B.C.), became enormously rich. Such wealth was used principally to secure success in the intense political rivalry that afflicted Rome at that time, but it also stimulated patronage of the arts, the formation of libraries and art collections, and the construction of palaces and gardens.
Although Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, attempted to curb these extravagances and excessive displays of personal wealth, well-to-do Romans increasingly indulged their taste for luxury during the Julio-Claudian period (27 B.C.–68 A.D.). In addition to spending fortunes on sumptuous villas, lavish entertainment, fashionable clothes, and entourages of slaves and hangers-on, men and women in high Roman society furnished themselves with a range of expensive personal items. Alon with gold jewelry such as earrings, necklaces, and finger rings, the Romans loved expensive silver mirrors, ivory combs and hairpins, and an assortment of boxes and containers for perfumes and cosmetics. These precious items give an indication of the variety and quality of the craftsmanship that was required to provide for the needs of wealthy Roman clients. Other accessories, known only from literary sources, were in more perishable materials, such as costly silks imported from China or flamboyant wigs made from the hair of German or British slaves. Ivory was also imported to Rome mainly from Africa via the Nile.
Roman ladies also developed a taste for elaborate jewelry decorated with colorful, exotic stones. Amber and pearl were two of the most popular and sought after materials; the former was brought from the Baltic Sea, and the finest pearls were imported from the Persian Gulf, although one reason given to justify the conquest of Britain during the reign of emperor Claudius (41–54 A.D.) was that it was a rich source of pearls. Other rare and expensive gems included amethysts, sapphires, and uncut diamonds, all from various parts of southern Asia. These were prized for their brilliancy and transparency. Emeralds from the eastern desert of Upper Egypt were also very popular; they were usually left in their natural form as prisms, which were drilled and strung on gold necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Many funerary portraits of women—particularly the painted mummy portraits from Roman Egypt (examples of which are on display in the Egyptian galleries) and the sculpted stone portraits from the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria (examples are exhibited in the Ancient Near East galleries)—show the deceased wearing such jewelry as a lasting indication of their social status and personal wealth.
Some luxury materials were so rare or costly that they gave rise to cheaper, manmade imitations in both pottery and glass, but even in these we can recognize a technical and artistic skill of the highest caliber. Such is the case with mosaic glass and marbled ceramic tablewares, made to reproduce the striking patterns of banded agate. Cameo glass, the most difficult and costly of all Roman glass, was also inspired by layered semiprecious stones. There are, for example, many Roman gems in cameo glass that were made as less expensive alternatives to real cameos in banded agate or sardonyx. In addition, it must be remembered that much has been irretrievably lost, especially objects in gold and silver, which could easily be melted down and reused. Others became heirlooms and relics that were later incorporated into medieval and Renaissance works, such as some of the semiprecious stone vessels in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice.
In the third century A.D., the Roman empire was beset by barbarian invasions in Europe, a renascent Sasanian Persian empire in the East, internal disorder, and rampant inflation. Nevertheless, the empire’s accumulated resources meant that the privileged elite in Roman society continued to enjoy a life of untold wealth and luxury. One result of the increased dangers was that people buried their precious possessions and failed more often to return to collect them. Hoards of silver and jewelry have consequently been found in considerable numbers throughout the Roman world. There was certainly no diminution of skill and inventiveness of the craftsmen who produced these luxuries, but new styles in design and fashion developed. In particular, jewelry and ornaments became more colorful and garish, and they included the use of gold coins (an attractive but practical way to beat inflation). Such tastes led ultimately to the adoption by the emperors of ceremonial silk robes and regal-looking gold crowns, decorated with pearls and precious stones. It was to be a fashion that greatly influenced later Byzantine art, and even in the West the rulers of the successor kingdoms never completely forgot the wealth and splendor of ancient Rome.
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
excerpt from The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe
by Sarah Lowengard
Charts and tables were useful tools for natural philosophers; as classification devices their forms were reinvented and refined throughout the eighteenth century. The three-sided color graph developed by the astronomer and mapmaker Tobias Mayer, for example, drew several themes in mathematics and optics into a descriptive aid for color. Mayer first presented his ideas about a color system at a lecture in Göttingen in 1758. Several German periodicals described the content of the lecture in detail and its information spread quickly, as those articles were republished. Mayer’s triangle became, after Newton’s color circle, perhaps the most recognizable color classification form in the eighteenth-century West. Painters (and amateurs of painting) adopted and adapted Mayer’s conceptualization of a color triangle to regularize their own practices. Natural historians used it to identify objects and to situate relationships between the sciences and the arts. When examined together, Mayer’s triangle and its later variations offer an excellent example of the eighteenth-century effort to create a unified, mathematized description of colors and to extend the value of this description into artisan worlds. As an episode within the centuries-long effort to systematize color as a way to understand and control it, the development of Mayer’s color triangle highlights the constraints produced by materials, the limits of mathematized descriptions, and the relationship of those limitations to representation and understanding of color.
Mayer based his triangle on clearly stated precepts that addressed some recognized problems of color display systems. First was the definition of pure and simple colors. In eighteenth-century scientific descriptions, these were often linked to the prismatic spectrum. Seven simple colors, usually the seven Newton identified, were often cited. Pure colors were those made from a single coloring source and not the combination of any others: Orange was a simple color and certain coloring materials provided orange shades, but because the combination of red and yellow pigments could yield orange, it was not a pure color. Following contemporary painters’ practices, Mayer showed that only red, yellow, and blue met his criterion for pure and simple colors. His choices for the best sources for these pure colors, for the liveliest and most beautiful red, blue, and yellow were, respectively, cinnabar, mountain blue (azurite), and gamboge.
Mayer’s system also demonstrated the common assumption that, combined in the correct proportions, this small number of basic colors could create all others. This was a more intuitive idea, artisan-based and not always evident in other visual classification systems. Waller’s grid incorporated graded colors in a way that suggested that colors were made from varying combinations of darkness and lightness. Schäffer’s and Werner’s systems relied on the alternative concept of principal colors. Principal colors might be pure in the sense that they were unmixed mechanically, but not all were: For those two systems, principal subsumed the definition of pure.
If there are three basic colors, then the triangle becomes an obvious choice to display them succinctly. A different pure color is placed at each angle or corner of the triangle, and the balance may be filled with their mixtures. Appropriately sized, the triangular form could contain all combinations within one system.
Mayer’s Color Triangle
Mayer also conducted a study to guide the size of the triangle. His tests of visual perception determined that the eye can distinguish only about twelve gradations between any two colors. Accordingly, his triangle has thirteen compartments on each side. At each extreme, the angular color is a perfect or pure color. Each is separated from the two other pure colors by eleven proportional mixtures of them. The two chambers on either side of the angular blue (designated b12 in Mayer’s notation system) would have, respectively, eleven parts blue to one part red and eleven parts blue to one part yellow, and so on. The fifty-two compartments at the interior of the triangle are filled with mixtures of the three colors, each combination calculated according to its position within the triangle. The center block would have equal parts each of red, yellow, and blue (r4y4b4); the compartments surrounding it would have combinations of three, four and five parts of each color, depending on location.
Mayer’s complete color system included other triangles made up of the pure pigments mixed with progressively larger quantities of white or black. These triangles had progressively fewer compartments as the colors approached white (lightness) or black (darkness). The first set of pale and dark triangles each had twelve compartments per side rather than the thirteen of the main form. In each, the angular colors were eleven parts pure color to one part black or white. The second set of triangles had eleven compartments per side; the angular colors were ten parts pure color to two parts black or white. Calculated from perfect colors to full white and full black, the total number of colors in each category, pale and dark, was 364. Added to 91, the number of colors of the main triangle, the total number of perfect and dark and pale colors was 819. That, by Mayer’s definition, was the number of colors in the world, although his color algebra indicated that more colors might exist.
Mayer described how these triangles determined and defined colors. His graphs were bi-directional, equally useful to describe a color at hand or to determine the formula to make any color the eye could see. One could compare a color found on an object to the colors in the triangle and, because location on the graph was determined by the proportions of the preparation, know its composition. Alternatively, one could choose a color from the schematic and know immediately the combination of red, yellow, blue, black, and white needed to recreate it.
Still, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg found, to construct Mayer’s triangle was no simple task. Lichtenberg noted, for example, that the most effective way to make the pale colors of the supplemental triangles was a simple dilution of the pure colors, allowing the paper support to transmit the required proportion of white. The complement, concentrating pure colors, was less successful for the creation of the dark triangles however, and the addition of a black tincture made of an equal combination of red yellow and blue pigments was never dark enough. Furthermore, Lichtenberg admitted, it was difficult to obtain all colors from mixtures of only two or three. Even Mayer did not use his angular pigments to mix pinks and violets but instead based them on pure colors available to him.
Whether Mayer ever constructed a complete triangle or a set of complete triangles is unclear. Lichtenberg’s effort and discussion of his own version of Mayer’s triangle further demonstrate assumptions about the nature of art and the problems of its use to express scientific ideas. Lichtenberg’s published version of Mayer’s triangle truncated the form to seven chambers per side because of some practical problems. Using Mayer’s methodology of proportional mixtures, for example, resulted in midpoint colors that were dirty-looking, not the clear greens and violets of the imagination. Lichtenberg attributed this to different physical properties of each pigment including differences in their ability to absorb water, the medium. As Waller had used weights, Lichtenberg used specific gravities to compare colors, and he reconfigured his pigment choices so that the initial ratios of yellow to blue was one to six; of blue to red was two to one, and of yellow to red one to three. He also employed different pure pigments from those recommended by Mayer, choosing amber, Prussian blue, and natural cinnabar as the angular pigments.
Mayer’s color system was graph-like and number-based. It seemed to achieve the scientific goals common to classification projects: overall simplification, recognition of order, and a clear articulation of the advantages that those two qualities might offer practices via the use of theories. Visually elegant, Lichtenberg’s recalculation of Mayer’s triangle, like Mayer’s triangle itself, was nevertheless a difficult tool to create and to use. One problem related to the angular colors, as Lichtenberg encountered. Although Mayer’s description called for cinnabar as his pure red, the color used in his sample formulas is the more yellow-toned red lead (Mayer’s formula for red lead is r8y4. Although azurite is Mayer’s pure blue pigment (b12), his examples of color mixing and identification relied on Prussian blue (b11r1). Mayer did not explain these discrepancies, and there may be several reasons for them. Cost and availability may have restricted access to the materials that Mayer initially chose. If minium and Prussian blue were less expensive and less difficult to obtain outside of large cities, it would be more practical, as well as more practice-based, to use them. It is also possible that the change from Mayer’s pure colors to other, imperfect or mixed colors resulted from the properties of Mayer’s choices. Neither vermilion nor gamboge is reliably permanent. The practical value of the triangles would be limited if the materials used to construct it were incompatible or otherwise unstable. Finally, although it is unlikely that this was deliberate, Mayer’s use of nonperfect colors in mixtures has the effect of emphasizing his point that nearly any coloring material could be adapted to his techniques of color composition and identification.
Mayer’s color classification system illustrates the difficulties of adapting art practices to the sciences. In the imagination or as a hypothesis, the combination was almost effortless. Mixing pigments to achieve specific colors, even when guided by the certainties of mathematics, was considerably more difficult.
[taken from the chapter Number, Order, Form]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lunpntsWaa1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
excerpt from The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe
by Sarah Lowengard
Charts and tables were useful tools for natural philosophers; as classification devices their forms were reinvented and refined throughout the eighteenth century. The three-sided color graph developed by the astronomer and mapmaker Tobias Mayer, for example, drew several themes in mathematics and optics into a descriptive aid for color. Mayer first presented his ideas about a color system at a lecture in Göttingen in 1758. Several German periodicals described the content of the lecture in detail and its information spread quickly, as those articles were republished. Mayer’s triangle became, after Newton’s color circle, perhaps the most recognizable color classification form in the eighteenth-century West. Painters (and amateurs of painting) adopted and adapted Mayer’s conceptualization of a color triangle to regularize their own practices. Natural historians used it to identify objects and to situate relationships between the sciences and the arts. When examined together, Mayer’s triangle and its later variations offer an excellent example of the eighteenth-century effort to create a unified, mathematized description of colors and to extend the value of this description into artisan worlds. As an episode within the centuries-long effort to systematize color as a way to understand and control it, the development of Mayer’s color triangle highlights the constraints produced by materials, the limits of mathematized descriptions, and the relationship of those limitations to representation and understanding of color.
Mayer based his triangle on clearly stated precepts that addressed some recognized problems of color display systems. First was the definition of pure and simple colors. In eighteenth-century scientific descriptions, these were often linked to the prismatic spectrum. Seven simple colors, usually the seven Newton identified, were often cited. Pure colors were those made from a single coloring source and not the combination of any others: Orange was a simple color and certain coloring materials provided orange shades, but because the combination of red and yellow pigments could yield orange, it was not a pure color. Following contemporary painters’ practices, Mayer showed that only red, yellow, and blue met his criterion for pure and simple colors. His choices for the best sources for these pure colors, for the liveliest and most beautiful red, blue, and yellow were, respectively, cinnabar, mountain blue (azurite), and gamboge.
Mayer’s system also demonstrated the common assumption that, combined in the correct proportions, this small number of basic colors could create all others. This was a more intuitive idea, artisan-based and not always evident in other visual classification systems. Waller’s grid incorporated graded colors in a way that suggested that colors were made from varying combinations of darkness and lightness. Schäffer’s and Werner’s systems relied on the alternative concept of principal colors. Principal colors might be pure in the sense that they were unmixed mechanically, but not all were: For those two systems, principal subsumed the definition of pure.
If there are three basic colors, then the triangle becomes an obvious choice to display them succinctly. A different pure color is placed at each angle or corner of the triangle, and the balance may be filled with their mixtures. Appropriately sized, the triangular form could contain all combinations within one system.
Mayer’s Color Triangle
Mayer also conducted a study to guide the size of the triangle. His tests of visual perception determined that the eye can distinguish only about twelve gradations between any two colors. Accordingly, his triangle has thirteen compartments on each side. At each extreme, the angular color is a perfect or pure color. Each is separated from the two other pure colors by eleven proportional mixtures of them. The two chambers on either side of the angular blue (designated b12 in Mayer’s notation system) would have, respectively, eleven parts blue to one part red and eleven parts blue to one part yellow, and so on. The fifty-two compartments at the interior of the triangle are filled with mixtures of the three colors, each combination calculated according to its position within the triangle. The center block would have equal parts each of red, yellow, and blue (r4y4b4); the compartments surrounding it would have combinations of three, four and five parts of each color, depending on location.
Mayer’s complete color system included other triangles made up of the pure pigments mixed with progressively larger quantities of white or black. These triangles had progressively fewer compartments as the colors approached white (lightness) or black (darkness). The first set of pale and dark triangles each had twelve compartments per side rather than the thirteen of the main form. In each, the angular colors were eleven parts pure color to one part black or white. The second set of triangles had eleven compartments per side; the angular colors were ten parts pure color to two parts black or white. Calculated from perfect colors to full white and full black, the total number of colors in each category, pale and dark, was 364. Added to 91, the number of colors of the main triangle, the total number of perfect and dark and pale colors was 819. That, by Mayer’s definition, was the number of colors in the world, although his color algebra indicated that more colors might exist.
Mayer described how these triangles determined and defined colors. His graphs were bi-directional, equally useful to describe a color at hand or to determine the formula to make any color the eye could see. One could compare a color found on an object to the colors in the triangle and, because location on the graph was determined by the proportions of the preparation, know its composition. Alternatively, one could choose a color from the schematic and know immediately the combination of red, yellow, blue, black, and white needed to recreate it.
Still, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg found, to construct Mayer’s triangle was no simple task. Lichtenberg noted, for example, that the most effective way to make the pale colors of the supplemental triangles was a simple dilution of the pure colors, allowing the paper support to transmit the required proportion of white. The complement, concentrating pure colors, was less successful for the creation of the dark triangles however, and the addition of a black tincture made of an equal combination of red yellow and blue pigments was never dark enough. Furthermore, Lichtenberg admitted, it was difficult to obtain all colors from mixtures of only two or three. Even Mayer did not use his angular pigments to mix pinks and violets but instead based them on pure colors available to him.
Whether Mayer ever constructed a complete triangle or a set of complete triangles is unclear. Lichtenberg’s effort and discussion of his own version of Mayer’s triangle further demonstrate assumptions about the nature of art and the problems of its use to express scientific ideas. Lichtenberg’s published version of Mayer’s triangle truncated the form to seven chambers per side because of some practical problems. Using Mayer’s methodology of proportional mixtures, for example, resulted in midpoint colors that were dirty-looking, not the clear greens and violets of the imagination. Lichtenberg attributed this to different physical properties of each pigment including differences in their ability to absorb water, the medium. As Waller had used weights, Lichtenberg used specific gravities to compare colors, and he reconfigured his pigment choices so that the initial ratios of yellow to blue was one to six; of blue to red was two to one, and of yellow to red one to three. He also employed different pure pigments from those recommended by Mayer, choosing amber, Prussian blue, and natural cinnabar as the angular pigments.
Mayer’s color system was graph-like and number-based. It seemed to achieve the scientific goals common to classification projects: overall simplification, recognition of order, and a clear articulation of the advantages that those two qualities might offer practices via the use of theories. Visually elegant, Lichtenberg’s recalculation of Mayer’s triangle, like Mayer’s triangle itself, was nevertheless a difficult tool to create and to use. One problem related to the angular colors, as Lichtenberg encountered. Although Mayer’s description called for cinnabar as his pure red, the color used in his sample formulas is the more yellow-toned red lead (Mayer’s formula for red lead is r8y4. Although azurite is Mayer’s pure blue pigment (b12), his examples of color mixing and identification relied on Prussian blue (b11r1). Mayer did not explain these discrepancies, and there may be several reasons for them. Cost and availability may have restricted access to the materials that Mayer initially chose. If minium and Prussian blue were less expensive and less difficult to obtain outside of large cities, it would be more practical, as well as more practice-based, to use them. It is also possible that the change from Mayer’s pure colors to other, imperfect or mixed colors resulted from the properties of Mayer’s choices. Neither vermilion nor gamboge is reliably permanent. The practical value of the triangles would be limited if the materials used to construct it were incompatible or otherwise unstable. Finally, although it is unlikely that this was deliberate, Mayer’s use of nonperfect colors in mixtures has the effect of emphasizing his point that nearly any coloring material could be adapted to his techniques of color composition and identification.
Mayer’s color classification system illustrates the difficulties of adapting art practices to the sciences. In the imagination or as a hypothesis, the combination was almost effortless. Mixing pigments to achieve specific colors, even when guided by the certainties of mathematics, was considerably more difficult.
[taken from the chapter Number, Order, Form]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
The Arts and Crafts Movement in America
by Monica Obniski
The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.
The British movement derived its philosophical underpinnings from two important sources: first, the designer A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), whose early writings promoting the Gothic Revival presaged English apprehension about industrialization, and second, theorist and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who advocated medieval architecture as a model for honest craftsmanship and quality materials. Ruskin’s persuasive rhetoric influenced the movement’s figurehead (and ardent socialist) William Morris (1834–1896), who believed that industrialization alienated labor and created a dehumanizing distance between the designer and manufacturer. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form.
The American Arts and Crafts movement was inextricably linked to the British movement and closely aligned with the work of William Morris and the second generation of architect-designers, including Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), who toured the United States, and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941), whose work was known through important publications such as The Studio. British ideals were disseminated in America through journal and newspaper writing, as well as through societies that sponsored lectures and programs. The U.S. movement was multicentered, with societies forming nationwide. Boston, historically linked to English culture, was the first city to feature a Society of Arts and Crafts, founded in June 1897. Chicago’s Arts and Crafts Society began at Hull House, one of the first American settlement houses for social reform, in October 1897. Numerous societies followed in cities such as Minneapolis and New York, as well as rural towns, including Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Unlike in England, the undercurrent of socialism of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States did not spread much beyond the formation of a few Utopian communities. Rose Valley was one of these artistic and social experiments. William Lightfoot Price (1861–1916), a Philadelphia architect, founded Rose Valley in 1901 near Moylan, Pennsylvania. The Rose Valley shops, like other Arts and Crafts communities, were committed to producing artistic handicraft, which included furnishings (1991.145), pottery, metalwork, and bookbinding. The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony was another Utopian Arts and Crafts community. Outside of Woodstock, New York, Englishman Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (1854–1929) and his wife Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead (1861–1955) founded Byrdcliffe, which was completed and operating by 1903. There craftspeople worked in various media, including woodwork, pottery, textiles, and metalwork. In harmony with the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, Byrdcliffe furniture (1991.311.1) is a study in rectilinearity, simply treated materials, and minimal decoration.
In urban centers, socialist experiments were undertaken on a community level, frequently in the form of educating young women. Ideas of craftwork and simplicity manifested themselves in decorative work, including the metalwork and pottery of the Arts and Crafts movement. Schools and training programs taught quality design, a cornerstone of the Arts and Crafts movement. In Boston, the Saturday Evening Girls Club, established in 1899 as a reading group for immigrant girls, founded the Paul Revere Pottery, which began producing pottery (2000.31) in 1908 and offered the girls the ability to earn good wages within the community. Newcomb Pottery was formed in New Orleans in the winter of 1894–95 under the auspices of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, an educational institution for women. Using local Southern flora and fauna as inspiration, the female designers at Newcomb made pottery (1983.26) and later also produced metalwork and textiles (2004.334).
In addition to pottery, women fashioned jewelry in the Arts and Crafts mode. Stones were chosen for their inherent artistic qualities, resulting in jewelry that promoted truth to materials. Florence Koehler (1861–1944), a charter member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, taught china painting, jewelry, and metalsmithing. After studying jewelry and enamelwork in London, she referenced historic design, especially Renaissance sources (52.43.1-.3). Marie Zimmermann (1879–1972) began her artistic career as a jewelry designer and later expanded her metalsmithing to include ornamental garden and home objects. An idiosyncratic designer, Zimmermann studied foreign cultures for inspiration, including Egypt (2005.464), Greece, and China.
Without a singular philosophy, diversity persevered within the Arts and Crafts movement as a mixture of individuals worked in diverse locations. There were regional differences due to the geographical distribution from the East Coast, to the Midwest, to California. Craftsmen used a wide range of source material to produce handwrought objects. Arthur J. Stone (1847–1938), a dedicated member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, produced silver objects that were conservative in design. An Englishman who emigrated to the United States, Stone opened his silver shop in Gardner, Massachusetts, where he initially executed all pieces himself. When the business expanded, he hired additional craftsmen to make individual works (1990.49). There were also creative designers with unique vision, such as Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936), who worked in Buffalo, New York. Rohlfs eschewed industrial production methods, preferring to craft individual pieces of furniture (1985.261) utilizing a myriad of foreign sources, including Moorish, Chinese, and Scandinavian design. Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), founder of The United Crafts (later known as the Craftsman Workshops), was a proselytizer of the craftsman ideal. Emulating William Morris’s production through guild manufacture of his furniture, Stickley believed that mass-produced furniture was poorly constructed and overly complicated in design. Stickley set out to improve American taste through “craftsman” or “mission” furniture with designs governed by honest construction, simple lines, and quality material (1976.389.1). He also published the highly influential The Craftsman (1901–16), a beacon for the American Arts and Crafts movement.
Publications, including The Craftsman, House Beautiful, and Ladies Home Journal, disseminated ideas about design and interiors. The ideal home that emerged had an open-planned interior shaped by a color palette that reflected the natural environment. Articles and illustrations presented decorating suggestions, including the use of colors, type of furniture, and decorative accessories, such as rugs and pottery. Period sources embraced Grueby Pottery for its innovative interpretation of nature and craftsmanship. Founded by William Grueby (1867–1925), the pottery was known for naturally shaped vessels with matte green glaze (69.91.2). In addition to pottery, lighting was also an important element that contributed to the ideal Arts and Crafts interior. The copper electric table lamp (1989.129) was the archetypal object crafted by the Dirk Van Erp Studio. Additionally, a Native American undercurrent developed during the Arts and Crafts movement, as evidenced by fashionable Indian-style baskets and textiles featured in Arts and Crafts exhibitions and publications. Many collected baskets to display in their Indian corners, which may have inspired Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) to design a hanging shade in an Indian basket motif (69.150).
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) shaped a new way of living through his completely designed environments, encompassing architecture and all elements of interiors. He ushered in a style of architecture that became known as the Prairie School, characterized by low-pitched roofs, open interiors, and horizontal lines that reflected the prairie landscape. This architecture, which utilized natural materials such as wood, clay, and stone, sparked a revolutionary shift in the American interior (1972.60.1). Wright’s “organic” architecture was indebted to nature. However, plain surfaces with minimal decorative embellishments were suited to incorporating the machine, resulting in furniture with intense rectilinearity and natural surfaces. In addition to Wright, popular Prairie School architects William Gray Purcell (1880–1965) and George Grant Elmslie (1871–1952) directed offices in Minneapolis and Chicago. Purcell, Feick and Elmslie (as the firm was known between 1910 and 1913 with the addition of George Feick Jr. [1881–1945]) remodeled the J. G. Cross House in Minneapolis in 1911 (1972.20.2). The firm specialized in residences with artistic interiors (especially for a middle-class clientele, although they certainly worked for wealthy patrons as well) using organic decorative elements. Like Wright and Purcell, Feick and Elmslie, Charles Sumner Greene (1868–1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954), California architect-designers of the period, were interested in domestic architecture incorporating the interior as a total work of art. The brothers Greene initially worked in all the popular revival styles, but after examining English and American design periodicals and Charles Greene’s formative trip abroad, their style shifted by the early 1900s. They fashioned a distinctive style, heavily influenced by Asian design, that reached its zenith with the bungalow, the quintessential Arts and Crafts architectural form, characterized by broad overhanging eaves, articulated woodwork, and an open plan. For the Blacker House (1907) in Pasadena, Greene and Greene used Japanese design to meticulously craft elements in their comprehensive schemes, inside and out (1986.445; 1992.127).
The rise of urban centers and the inevitability of technology presaged the end of the Arts and Crafts movement. The search for nature and an idealist medieval era was no longer a valid approach to living. By the 1920s, machine-age modernity and the pursuit of a national identity had captured the attention of designers and consumers, bringing an end to the handcrafted nature of the Arts and Crafts movement in America.
[via]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luanydwYVQ1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
The Arts and Crafts Movement in America
by Monica Obniski
The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.
The British movement derived its philosophical underpinnings from two important sources: first, the designer A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), whose early writings promoting the Gothic Revival presaged English apprehension about industrialization, and second, theorist and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who advocated medieval architecture as a model for honest craftsmanship and quality materials. Ruskin’s persuasive rhetoric influenced the movement’s figurehead (and ardent socialist) William Morris (1834–1896), who believed that industrialization alienated labor and created a dehumanizing distance between the designer and manufacturer. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form.
The American Arts and Crafts movement was inextricably linked to the British movement and closely aligned with the work of William Morris and the second generation of architect-designers, including Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), who toured the United States, and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941), whose work was known through important publications such as The Studio. British ideals were disseminated in America through journal and newspaper writing, as well as through societies that sponsored lectures and programs. The U.S. movement was multicentered, with societies forming nationwide. Boston, historically linked to English culture, was the first city to feature a Society of Arts and Crafts, founded in June 1897. Chicago’s Arts and Crafts Society began at Hull House, one of the first American settlement houses for social reform, in October 1897. Numerous societies followed in cities such as Minneapolis and New York, as well as rural towns, including Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Unlike in England, the undercurrent of socialism of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States did not spread much beyond the formation of a few Utopian communities. Rose Valley was one of these artistic and social experiments. William Lightfoot Price (1861–1916), a Philadelphia architect, founded Rose Valley in 1901 near Moylan, Pennsylvania. The Rose Valley shops, like other Arts and Crafts communities, were committed to producing artistic handicraft, which included furnishings (1991.145), pottery, metalwork, and bookbinding. The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony was another Utopian Arts and Crafts community. Outside of Woodstock, New York, Englishman Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (1854–1929) and his wife Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead (1861–1955) founded Byrdcliffe, which was completed and operating by 1903. There craftspeople worked in various media, including woodwork, pottery, textiles, and metalwork. In harmony with the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, Byrdcliffe furniture (1991.311.1) is a study in rectilinearity, simply treated materials, and minimal decoration.
In urban centers, socialist experiments were undertaken on a community level, frequently in the form of educating young women. Ideas of craftwork and simplicity manifested themselves in decorative work, including the metalwork and pottery of the Arts and Crafts movement. Schools and training programs taught quality design, a cornerstone of the Arts and Crafts movement. In Boston, the Saturday Evening Girls Club, established in 1899 as a reading group for immigrant girls, founded the Paul Revere Pottery, which began producing pottery (2000.31) in 1908 and offered the girls the ability to earn good wages within the community. Newcomb Pottery was formed in New Orleans in the winter of 1894–95 under the auspices of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, an educational institution for women. Using local Southern flora and fauna as inspiration, the female designers at Newcomb made pottery (1983.26) and later also produced metalwork and textiles (2004.334).
In addition to pottery, women fashioned jewelry in the Arts and Crafts mode. Stones were chosen for their inherent artistic qualities, resulting in jewelry that promoted truth to materials. Florence Koehler (1861–1944), a charter member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, taught china painting, jewelry, and metalsmithing. After studying jewelry and enamelwork in London, she referenced historic design, especially Renaissance sources (52.43.1-.3). Marie Zimmermann (1879–1972) began her artistic career as a jewelry designer and later expanded her metalsmithing to include ornamental garden and home objects. An idiosyncratic designer, Zimmermann studied foreign cultures for inspiration, including Egypt (2005.464), Greece, and China.
Without a singular philosophy, diversity persevered within the Arts and Crafts movement as a mixture of individuals worked in diverse locations. There were regional differences due to the geographical distribution from the East Coast, to the Midwest, to California. Craftsmen used a wide range of source material to produce handwrought objects. Arthur J. Stone (1847–1938), a dedicated member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, produced silver objects that were conservative in design. An Englishman who emigrated to the United States, Stone opened his silver shop in Gardner, Massachusetts, where he initially executed all pieces himself. When the business expanded, he hired additional craftsmen to make individual works (1990.49). There were also creative designers with unique vision, such as Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936), who worked in Buffalo, New York. Rohlfs eschewed industrial production methods, preferring to craft individual pieces of furniture (1985.261) utilizing a myriad of foreign sources, including Moorish, Chinese, and Scandinavian design. Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), founder of The United Crafts (later known as the Craftsman Workshops), was a proselytizer of the craftsman ideal. Emulating William Morris’s production through guild manufacture of his furniture, Stickley believed that mass-produced furniture was poorly constructed and overly complicated in design. Stickley set out to improve American taste through “craftsman” or “mission” furniture with designs governed by honest construction, simple lines, and quality material (1976.389.1). He also published the highly influential The Craftsman (1901–16), a beacon for the American Arts and Crafts movement.
Publications, including The Craftsman, House Beautiful, and Ladies Home Journal, disseminated ideas about design and interiors. The ideal home that emerged had an open-planned interior shaped by a color palette that reflected the natural environment. Articles and illustrations presented decorating suggestions, including the use of colors, type of furniture, and decorative accessories, such as rugs and pottery. Period sources embraced Grueby Pottery for its innovative interpretation of nature and craftsmanship. Founded by William Grueby (1867–1925), the pottery was known for naturally shaped vessels with matte green glaze (69.91.2). In addition to pottery, lighting was also an important element that contributed to the ideal Arts and Crafts interior. The copper electric table lamp (1989.129) was the archetypal object crafted by the Dirk Van Erp Studio. Additionally, a Native American undercurrent developed during the Arts and Crafts movement, as evidenced by fashionable Indian-style baskets and textiles featured in Arts and Crafts exhibitions and publications. Many collected baskets to display in their Indian corners, which may have inspired Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) to design a hanging shade in an Indian basket motif (69.150).
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) shaped a new way of living through his completely designed environments, encompassing architecture and all elements of interiors. He ushered in a style of architecture that became known as the Prairie School, characterized by low-pitched roofs, open interiors, and horizontal lines that reflected the prairie landscape. This architecture, which utilized natural materials such as wood, clay, and stone, sparked a revolutionary shift in the American interior (1972.60.1). Wright’s “organic” architecture was indebted to nature. However, plain surfaces with minimal decorative embellishments were suited to incorporating the machine, resulting in furniture with intense rectilinearity and natural surfaces. In addition to Wright, popular Prairie School architects William Gray Purcell (1880–1965) and George Grant Elmslie (1871–1952) directed offices in Minneapolis and Chicago. Purcell, Feick and Elmslie (as the firm was known between 1910 and 1913 with the addition of George Feick Jr. [1881–1945]) remodeled the J. G. Cross House in Minneapolis in 1911 (1972.20.2). The firm specialized in residences with artistic interiors (especially for a middle-class clientele, although they certainly worked for wealthy patrons as well) using organic decorative elements. Like Wright and Purcell, Feick and Elmslie, Charles Sumner Greene (1868–1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954), California architect-designers of the period, were interested in domestic architecture incorporating the interior as a total work of art. The brothers Greene initially worked in all the popular revival styles, but after examining English and American design periodicals and Charles Greene’s formative trip abroad, their style shifted by the early 1900s. They fashioned a distinctive style, heavily influenced by Asian design, that reached its zenith with the bungalow, the quintessential Arts and Crafts architectural form, characterized by broad overhanging eaves, articulated woodwork, and an open plan. For the Blacker House (1907) in Pasadena, Greene and Greene used Japanese design to meticulously craft elements in their comprehensive schemes, inside and out (1986.445; 1992.127).
The rise of urban centers and the inevitability of technology presaged the end of the Arts and Crafts movement. The search for nature and an idealist medieval era was no longer a valid approach to living. By the 1920s, machine-age modernity and the pursuit of a national identity had captured the attention of designers and consumers, bringing an end to the handcrafted nature of the Arts and Crafts movement in America.
[via]
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![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Hieronymus Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus (or Jeroen) van Aken (meaning “from Aachen”). He signed a number of his paintings as Bosch (pronounced Boss in Dutch). The name derives from his birthplace, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which is commonly called “Den Bosch”.
Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at c. 1450 on the basis of a hand drawn portrait (which may be a self-portrait) made shortly before his death in 1516. The drawing shows the artist at an advanced age, probably in his late sixties.
Art
Bosch produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel. When the exterior panels are closed the viewer can see, painted in grisaille, God creating the Earth. These paintings have a rough surface from the application of paint; this contrasts with the traditional Flemish style of paintings, where the smooth surface attempts to hide the fact that the painting is man-made.
Bosch never dated his paintings and may have signed only some of them (other signatures are certainly not his). Fewer than 25 paintings remain today that can be attributed to him. Philip II of Spain acquired many of Bosch’s paintings after the painter’s death; as a result, the Prado Museum in Madrid now owns several of his works, including The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Interpretation
In earlier centuries it was often believed that Bosch’s art was inspired by medieval heresies and obscure hermetic practices. Others thought that his work was created merely to titillate and amuse, much like the “grotteschi” of the Italian Renaissance. While the art of the older masters was based in the physical world of everyday experience, Bosch confronts his viewer with, in the words of the art historian Walter Gibson, “a world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes.” In the first known account of Bosch’s paintings, in 1560 the Spaniard Felipe de Guevara wrote that Bosch was regarded merely as “the inventor of monsters and chimeras”. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander described Bosch’s work as comprising “wondrous and strange fantasies”; however, he concluded that the paintings are “often less pleasant than gruesome to look at.”
In the twenty-first century, scholars have come to view Bosch’s vision as less fantastic, and accepted that his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age. His depictions of sinful humanity, his conceptions of Heaven and Hell are now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and sermons. Most writers attach a more profound significance to his paintings than had previously been supposed, and attempt to interpret it in terms of a late medieval morality. It is generally accepted that Bosch’s art was created to teach specific moral and spiritual truths, and that the images rendered have precise and premeditated significance. According to Dirk Bax, Bosch’s paintings often represent visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns drawn from both biblical and folkloric sources.
However, some writers see Bosch as a proto-type medieval surrealist, and parallels are often made with the twentieth century Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Other writers attempt to interpret his imagery using the language of Freudian psychology. However such theses are commonly rejected; according to Gibson, “what we choose to call the libido was denounced by the medieval church as original sin; what we see as the expression of the subconscious mind was for the Middle Ages the promptings of God or the Devil.”
Debates on attribution
The exact number of Bosch’s surviving works has been a subject of considerable debate. He signed only seven of his paintings, and there is uncertainty whether all the paintings once ascribed to him were actually from his hand. It is known that from the early sixteenth century onwards numerous copies and variations of his paintings began to circulate. In addition, his style was highly influential, and was widely imitated by his numerous followers.
Over the years, scholars have attributed to him fewer and fewer of the works once thought to be his, and today only 25 are definitively ascribed to him.
[via]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltxrwmBaiN1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Hieronymus Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus (or Jeroen) van Aken (meaning “from Aachen”). He signed a number of his paintings as Bosch (pronounced Boss in Dutch). The name derives from his birthplace, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which is commonly called “Den Bosch”.
Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at c. 1450 on the basis of a hand drawn portrait (which may be a self-portrait) made shortly before his death in 1516. The drawing shows the artist at an advanced age, probably in his late sixties.
Art
Bosch produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel. When the exterior panels are closed the viewer can see, painted in grisaille, God creating the Earth. These paintings have a rough surface from the application of paint; this contrasts with the traditional Flemish style of paintings, where the smooth surface attempts to hide the fact that the painting is man-made.
Bosch never dated his paintings and may have signed only some of them (other signatures are certainly not his). Fewer than 25 paintings remain today that can be attributed to him. Philip II of Spain acquired many of Bosch’s paintings after the painter’s death; as a result, the Prado Museum in Madrid now owns several of his works, including The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Interpretation
In earlier centuries it was often believed that Bosch’s art was inspired by medieval heresies and obscure hermetic practices. Others thought that his work was created merely to titillate and amuse, much like the “grotteschi” of the Italian Renaissance. While the art of the older masters was based in the physical world of everyday experience, Bosch confronts his viewer with, in the words of the art historian Walter Gibson, “a world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes.” In the first known account of Bosch’s paintings, in 1560 the Spaniard Felipe de Guevara wrote that Bosch was regarded merely as “the inventor of monsters and chimeras”. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander described Bosch’s work as comprising “wondrous and strange fantasies”; however, he concluded that the paintings are “often less pleasant than gruesome to look at.”
In the twenty-first century, scholars have come to view Bosch’s vision as less fantastic, and accepted that his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age. His depictions of sinful humanity, his conceptions of Heaven and Hell are now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and sermons. Most writers attach a more profound significance to his paintings than had previously been supposed, and attempt to interpret it in terms of a late medieval morality. It is generally accepted that Bosch’s art was created to teach specific moral and spiritual truths, and that the images rendered have precise and premeditated significance. According to Dirk Bax, Bosch’s paintings often represent visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns drawn from both biblical and folkloric sources.
However, some writers see Bosch as a proto-type medieval surrealist, and parallels are often made with the twentieth century Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Other writers attempt to interpret his imagery using the language of Freudian psychology. However such theses are commonly rejected; according to Gibson, “what we choose to call the libido was denounced by the medieval church as original sin; what we see as the expression of the subconscious mind was for the Middle Ages the promptings of God or the Devil.”
Debates on attribution
The exact number of Bosch’s surviving works has been a subject of considerable debate. He signed only seven of his paintings, and there is uncertainty whether all the paintings once ascribed to him were actually from his hand. It is known that from the early sixteenth century onwards numerous copies and variations of his paintings began to circulate. In addition, his style was highly influential, and was widely imitated by his numerous followers.
Over the years, scholars have attributed to him fewer and fewer of the works once thought to be his, and today only 25 are definitively ascribed to him.
[via]
+
![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Chinese Painting
by Maxwell Hearn, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Chinese way of appreciating a painting is often expressed by the words du hua, “to read a painting.” How does one do that?
Consider Night-Shining White by Han Gan (1977.78), an image of a horse. Originally little more than a foot square, it is now mounted as a handscroll that is twenty feet long as a result of the myriad inscriptions and seals (marks of ownership) that have been added over the centuries, some directly on the painted surface, so that the horse is all but overwhelmed by this enthusiastic display of appreciation. Miraculously, the animal’s energy shines through. It does so because the artist has managed to distill his observations of both living horses and earlier depictions to create an image that embodies the vitality and form of an iconic “dragon steed.” He has achieved this with the most economical of means: brush and ink on paper.
This is the aim of the traditional Chinese painter: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but its inner essence as well—its energy, life force, spirit. To accomplish his goal, the Chinese painter more often than not rejected the use of color. Like the photographer who prefers to work in black and white, the Chinese artist regarded color as distraction. He also rejected the changeable qualities of light and shadow as a means of modeling, along with opaque pigments to conceal mistakes. Instead, he relied on line—the indelible mark of the inked brush.
The discipline that this kind of mastery requires derives from the practice of calligraphy. Traditionally, every literate person in China learned as a child to write by copying the standard forms of Chinese ideographs. The student was gradually exposed to different stylistic interpretations of these characters. He copied the great calligraphers’ manuscripts, which were often preserved on carved stones so that rubbings could be made. He was also exposed to the way in which the forms of the ideographs had evolved: their earliest appearance on bronzes, stones, and bones about 1300 B.C. (known today as “seal” script, after its use on the red seals of ownership); their gradual regularization, culminating with the bureaucratic proliferation of documents by government clerks during the second century A.D. (“clerical” script); their artful simplification into abbreviated forms (“running” and “cursive” scripts); and the fusion of these form-types into “standard” script, in which the individually articulated brushstrokes that make up each character are integrated into a dynamically balanced whole. Over time, the practitioner evolved his own personal style, one that was a distillation and reinterpretation of earlier models.
The practice of calligraphy became high art with the innovations of Wang Xizhi in the fourth century. By the eleventh century, a good hand was one criterion—together with a command of history and literary style—that determined who was recruited into the government through civil service examinations. Those who succeeded came to regard themselves as a new kind of elite, a meritocracy of “scholar-officials” responsible for maintaining the moral and aesthetic standards established by the political and cultural paragons of the past. It was their command of history and its precedents that enabled them to influence current events. It was their interpretations of the past that established the strictures by which an emperor might be constrained. And it was their poetry, diaries, and commentaries that constituted the accounts by which a ruler would one day be judged.
These were the men who covered Night-Shining White with inscriptions and seals. Their knowledge of art enabled them to determine that the image was a portrait of an imperial stallion by a master of the eighth century. They recognized that the horse was meant as an emblem of China’s military strength and, by extension, as a symbol of China itself. And they understood the poignancy of the image. Night-Shining White was the favorite steed of an emperor who led his dynasty to the height of its glory but who, tethered by his infatuation with a concubine, neglected his charge and eventually lost his throne.
The emperor’s failure to put his stallion to good use may be understood as a metaphor for a ruler’s failure to properly value his officials. This is undoubtedly how the retired scholar-official Zhao Mengfu intended his image of a stallion, painted 600 years later (1988.135), to be interpreted. Expertise in judging fine horses had long been a metaphor for the ability to recognize men of talent. Zhao’s portrait of the horse and groom may be read as an admonition to those in power to heed the abilities of those in their command and to conscientiously employ their talents in the governance of their people.
When an emperor neglected the advice of his officials, was unjust or immoral, scholar-officials not infrequently resigned from government and chose to live in retirement. Such an action had long been understood as a withdrawal of support, a kind of silent protest in circumstances deemed intolerable. Times of dynastic change were especially fraught, and loyalists of a fallen dynasty usually refused service under a new regime (1973.120.6; L.1997.30). Scholar-officials were at times also forced out of office, banished as a result of factionalism among those in power. In such cases, the alienated individual might turn to art to express his beliefs. But even when concealed in symbolic language, beliefs could incite reprisals: the eleventh-century official Su Shi, for example, was nearly put to death for writing poems that were deemed seditious. As a result, these men honed their skills in the art of indirection. In their hands, the transcription of a historical text could be transformed into a strident protest against factional politics (1988.363.4), illustrations to a Confucian classic became a stinging indictment of sanctimonious or irresponsible behavior (1996.479). Because of their highly personal nature, such works were almost always dedicated to a close friend or kindred spirit and would have been viewed only by a select circle of likeminded individuals. But since these men acted as both policy makers and the moral conscience of society, their art was highly influential.
Scholar-official painters most often worked in ink on paper and chose subjects—bamboo, old trees, rocks—that could be drawn using the same kind of disciplined brush skills required for calligraphy. This immediately distinguished their art from the colorful, illusionistic style of painting preferred by court artists and professionals. Proud of their status as amateurs, they created a new, distinctly personal form of painting in which expressive calligraphic brush lines were the chief means employed to animate their subjects. Another distinguishing feature of what came to be known as scholar-amateur painting is its learned references to the past. The choice of a particular antique style immediately linked a work to the personality and ideals of an earlier painter or calligrapher. Style became a language by which to convey one’s beliefs.
Zhao Mengfu epitomized the new artistic paradigm of the scholar-amateur. A scholar-official by training, he was also a brilliant calligrapher (1989.363.30) who applied his skill with a brush to painting. Intent on distinguishing his kind of scholar-painting from the work of professional craftsmen, Zhao defined his art by using the verb “to write” rather than “to paint.” In so doing, he underscored not only its basis in calligraphy but also the fact that painting was not merely about representation—a point he emphasized in his Twin Pines, Level Distance (1973.120.5) by adding his inscription directly over the landscape. Zhao was a consummate scholar, and his choice of subject and painting style was carefully considered. Because the pine tree remains green through the winter, it is a symbol of survival. Because its outstretched boughs offer protection to the lesser trees of the forest, it is an emblem of the princely gentleman. For recluse artists of the tenth century, the pine had signified the moral character of the virtuous man. Zhao, having recently withdrawn from government service under the Mongols, must have chosen to “write” pines in a tenth-century style as a way to express his innermost feelings to a friend. His painting may be read as a double portrait—a depiction of himself and also of the person to whom it was dedicated.
Since scholar-artists employed symbolism, style, and calligraphic brushwork to express their beliefs and feelings, they left the craft of formal portraiture to professional artisans. Such craftsmen might be skilled in capturing an individual’s likeness (59.49.1), but they could never hope to convey the deeper aspects of a man’s character.
Integrating calligraphy, poetry, and painting, scholar-artists for the first time combined the “three perfections” in a single work (1989.363.33). In such paintings, poetic and pictorial imagery and energized calligraphic lines work in tandem to express the mind and emotions of the artist (1989.363.39; 1973.120.8). Once poetic inscriptions had become an integral part of a composition, the recipient of the painting or a later appreciator would often add an inscription as his own “response.” Thus, a painting was not finalized when an artist set down his brush, but it would continue to evolve as later owners and admirers appended their own inscriptions or seals. Most such inscriptions take the form of colophons placed on the borders of a painting or on the endpapers of a handscroll or album; others might be added directly on to the painting. In this way, Night-Shining White (1977.78) was embellished with a record of its transmission that spans more than a thousand years.
As the arbiters of history and aesthetic values, scholars had an immense impact on taste. Even emperors came to embrace scholarly ideals. Although some became talented calligraphers and painters (1981.278), more often they recruited artists whose images magnified the virtues of their rule. Both the court professional and the scholar-amateur made use of symbolism, but often to very different ends. While Zhao Mengfu’s pines may reflect the artist’s determination to preserve his political integrity (1973.120.5), a landscape painting by a court painter might be read as the celebration of a well-ordered empire (1973.120.1). A scholar-painting of narcissus reflects the artist’s identification with the pure fragrance of the flower, a symbol of loyalty (1973.120.4), while a court painter’s lush depiction of orchids was probably intended to evoke the sensuous pleasures of the harem (1973.120.10). The key distinction between scholar-amateur and professional painting is in the realization of the image: through calligraphically abbreviated monochrome drawing on paper or through the highly illusionistic use of mineral pigments on silk.
Amateur and professional alike shared a reverence for the past. Artists would manipulate antique styles (1973.120.6) and reinterpret ancient subjects (1988.135) to lend historical resonance to their work. But the weight of past precedents was also a heavy burden that could make painters acutely self-conscious. Sometimes their solutions were eccentric and challenged the viewer’s ability to judge them by what had preceded them (1986.266.4). At other times, a knowledge of past models made them keenly aware of the illusionistic power of art, the capacity to mimic reality (2005.112a–l) as well as to distort it (1989.363.14).
To “read” a Chinese painting is to enter into a dialogue with the past; the act of unrolling a scroll or leafing through an album provides a further, physical connection to the work. An intimate experience, it is one that has been shared and repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings, enjoyed alone or in the company of friends, that meaning is gradually revealed.
[via]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltkvvmTf2C1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Chinese Painting
by Maxwell Hearn, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Chinese way of appreciating a painting is often expressed by the words du hua, “to read a painting.” How does one do that?
Consider Night-Shining White by Han Gan (1977.78), an image of a horse. Originally little more than a foot square, it is now mounted as a handscroll that is twenty feet long as a result of the myriad inscriptions and seals (marks of ownership) that have been added over the centuries, some directly on the painted surface, so that the horse is all but overwhelmed by this enthusiastic display of appreciation. Miraculously, the animal’s energy shines through. It does so because the artist has managed to distill his observations of both living horses and earlier depictions to create an image that embodies the vitality and form of an iconic “dragon steed.” He has achieved this with the most economical of means: brush and ink on paper.
This is the aim of the traditional Chinese painter: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but its inner essence as well—its energy, life force, spirit. To accomplish his goal, the Chinese painter more often than not rejected the use of color. Like the photographer who prefers to work in black and white, the Chinese artist regarded color as distraction. He also rejected the changeable qualities of light and shadow as a means of modeling, along with opaque pigments to conceal mistakes. Instead, he relied on line—the indelible mark of the inked brush.
The discipline that this kind of mastery requires derives from the practice of calligraphy. Traditionally, every literate person in China learned as a child to write by copying the standard forms of Chinese ideographs. The student was gradually exposed to different stylistic interpretations of these characters. He copied the great calligraphers’ manuscripts, which were often preserved on carved stones so that rubbings could be made. He was also exposed to the way in which the forms of the ideographs had evolved: their earliest appearance on bronzes, stones, and bones about 1300 B.C. (known today as “seal” script, after its use on the red seals of ownership); their gradual regularization, culminating with the bureaucratic proliferation of documents by government clerks during the second century A.D. (“clerical” script); their artful simplification into abbreviated forms (“running” and “cursive” scripts); and the fusion of these form-types into “standard” script, in which the individually articulated brushstrokes that make up each character are integrated into a dynamically balanced whole. Over time, the practitioner evolved his own personal style, one that was a distillation and reinterpretation of earlier models.
The practice of calligraphy became high art with the innovations of Wang Xizhi in the fourth century. By the eleventh century, a good hand was one criterion—together with a command of history and literary style—that determined who was recruited into the government through civil service examinations. Those who succeeded came to regard themselves as a new kind of elite, a meritocracy of “scholar-officials” responsible for maintaining the moral and aesthetic standards established by the political and cultural paragons of the past. It was their command of history and its precedents that enabled them to influence current events. It was their interpretations of the past that established the strictures by which an emperor might be constrained. And it was their poetry, diaries, and commentaries that constituted the accounts by which a ruler would one day be judged.
These were the men who covered Night-Shining White with inscriptions and seals. Their knowledge of art enabled them to determine that the image was a portrait of an imperial stallion by a master of the eighth century. They recognized that the horse was meant as an emblem of China’s military strength and, by extension, as a symbol of China itself. And they understood the poignancy of the image. Night-Shining White was the favorite steed of an emperor who led his dynasty to the height of its glory but who, tethered by his infatuation with a concubine, neglected his charge and eventually lost his throne.
The emperor’s failure to put his stallion to good use may be understood as a metaphor for a ruler’s failure to properly value his officials. This is undoubtedly how the retired scholar-official Zhao Mengfu intended his image of a stallion, painted 600 years later (1988.135), to be interpreted. Expertise in judging fine horses had long been a metaphor for the ability to recognize men of talent. Zhao’s portrait of the horse and groom may be read as an admonition to those in power to heed the abilities of those in their command and to conscientiously employ their talents in the governance of their people.
When an emperor neglected the advice of his officials, was unjust or immoral, scholar-officials not infrequently resigned from government and chose to live in retirement. Such an action had long been understood as a withdrawal of support, a kind of silent protest in circumstances deemed intolerable. Times of dynastic change were especially fraught, and loyalists of a fallen dynasty usually refused service under a new regime (1973.120.6; L.1997.30). Scholar-officials were at times also forced out of office, banished as a result of factionalism among those in power. In such cases, the alienated individual might turn to art to express his beliefs. But even when concealed in symbolic language, beliefs could incite reprisals: the eleventh-century official Su Shi, for example, was nearly put to death for writing poems that were deemed seditious. As a result, these men honed their skills in the art of indirection. In their hands, the transcription of a historical text could be transformed into a strident protest against factional politics (1988.363.4), illustrations to a Confucian classic became a stinging indictment of sanctimonious or irresponsible behavior (1996.479). Because of their highly personal nature, such works were almost always dedicated to a close friend or kindred spirit and would have been viewed only by a select circle of likeminded individuals. But since these men acted as both policy makers and the moral conscience of society, their art was highly influential.
Scholar-official painters most often worked in ink on paper and chose subjects—bamboo, old trees, rocks—that could be drawn using the same kind of disciplined brush skills required for calligraphy. This immediately distinguished their art from the colorful, illusionistic style of painting preferred by court artists and professionals. Proud of their status as amateurs, they created a new, distinctly personal form of painting in which expressive calligraphic brush lines were the chief means employed to animate their subjects. Another distinguishing feature of what came to be known as scholar-amateur painting is its learned references to the past. The choice of a particular antique style immediately linked a work to the personality and ideals of an earlier painter or calligrapher. Style became a language by which to convey one’s beliefs.
Zhao Mengfu epitomized the new artistic paradigm of the scholar-amateur. A scholar-official by training, he was also a brilliant calligrapher (1989.363.30) who applied his skill with a brush to painting. Intent on distinguishing his kind of scholar-painting from the work of professional craftsmen, Zhao defined his art by using the verb “to write” rather than “to paint.” In so doing, he underscored not only its basis in calligraphy but also the fact that painting was not merely about representation—a point he emphasized in his Twin Pines, Level Distance (1973.120.5) by adding his inscription directly over the landscape. Zhao was a consummate scholar, and his choice of subject and painting style was carefully considered. Because the pine tree remains green through the winter, it is a symbol of survival. Because its outstretched boughs offer protection to the lesser trees of the forest, it is an emblem of the princely gentleman. For recluse artists of the tenth century, the pine had signified the moral character of the virtuous man. Zhao, having recently withdrawn from government service under the Mongols, must have chosen to “write” pines in a tenth-century style as a way to express his innermost feelings to a friend. His painting may be read as a double portrait—a depiction of himself and also of the person to whom it was dedicated.
Since scholar-artists employed symbolism, style, and calligraphic brushwork to express their beliefs and feelings, they left the craft of formal portraiture to professional artisans. Such craftsmen might be skilled in capturing an individual’s likeness (59.49.1), but they could never hope to convey the deeper aspects of a man’s character.
Integrating calligraphy, poetry, and painting, scholar-artists for the first time combined the “three perfections” in a single work (1989.363.33). In such paintings, poetic and pictorial imagery and energized calligraphic lines work in tandem to express the mind and emotions of the artist (1989.363.39; 1973.120.8). Once poetic inscriptions had become an integral part of a composition, the recipient of the painting or a later appreciator would often add an inscription as his own “response.” Thus, a painting was not finalized when an artist set down his brush, but it would continue to evolve as later owners and admirers appended their own inscriptions or seals. Most such inscriptions take the form of colophons placed on the borders of a painting or on the endpapers of a handscroll or album; others might be added directly on to the painting. In this way, Night-Shining White (1977.78) was embellished with a record of its transmission that spans more than a thousand years.
As the arbiters of history and aesthetic values, scholars had an immense impact on taste. Even emperors came to embrace scholarly ideals. Although some became talented calligraphers and painters (1981.278), more often they recruited artists whose images magnified the virtues of their rule. Both the court professional and the scholar-amateur made use of symbolism, but often to very different ends. While Zhao Mengfu’s pines may reflect the artist’s determination to preserve his political integrity (1973.120.5), a landscape painting by a court painter might be read as the celebration of a well-ordered empire (1973.120.1). A scholar-painting of narcissus reflects the artist’s identification with the pure fragrance of the flower, a symbol of loyalty (1973.120.4), while a court painter’s lush depiction of orchids was probably intended to evoke the sensuous pleasures of the harem (1973.120.10). The key distinction between scholar-amateur and professional painting is in the realization of the image: through calligraphically abbreviated monochrome drawing on paper or through the highly illusionistic use of mineral pigments on silk.
Amateur and professional alike shared a reverence for the past. Artists would manipulate antique styles (1973.120.6) and reinterpret ancient subjects (1988.135) to lend historical resonance to their work. But the weight of past precedents was also a heavy burden that could make painters acutely self-conscious. Sometimes their solutions were eccentric and challenged the viewer’s ability to judge them by what had preceded them (1986.266.4). At other times, a knowledge of past models made them keenly aware of the illusionistic power of art, the capacity to mimic reality (2005.112a–l) as well as to distort it (1989.363.14).
To “read” a Chinese painting is to enter into a dialogue with the past; the act of unrolling a scroll or leafing through an album provides a further, physical connection to the work. An intimate experience, it is one that has been shared and repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings, enjoyed alone or in the company of friends, that meaning is gradually revealed.
[via]
