Ingres. The Master of Neo-classical

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 - 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history (as above) in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. In this image: The Envoys of Agamemnon, 1801, oil on canvas, École des Beaux Arts, Paris.

We can't forget his worshipful portrait of Napoleon. After all, Ingres was a child of the French Revolution and Napoleon, for a while, was their god. 

His fame, then and now, largely rests on his portraiture and his female nudes. His art was grounded on a rigorous academic training, and directed towards the classical tradition, the most elevated genre of history painting, and the precedents of the great masters of the Renaissance – notably his hero, Raphael. The awkwardness of many of his works was seen as a symptom of his excessive reverence for artistic models of the past, which he was unable to reconcile with the progressive currents of art at the time. 

Most of his neoclassical paintings, for example, now look contrived, severe and over-laboured. The exception is Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808), in which the naked hero dominates the pictorial space, the smoothness of his skin and flowing outline of his body prefiguring the sensuousness of Ingres’s female nudes.

With a daring blend of traditional technique and experimental sensuality, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres reimagined Classical and Renaissance sources for 19th century tastes. A talented draftsman known for his serpentine line and impeccably rendered, illusionistic textures, he was at the center of a revived version of the ancient debate: is line or color the most important element of painting? Yet Ingres was not always successful; his experiments with abstracting the body and introducing more exotic and emotionally complex subjects earned harsh criticism in his early career. In truth, his work is best understood as a hybrid between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. It was only as the foil to the more dramatic Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix that Ingres came to be widely accepted as the defender of traditional painting and classicism.

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  Although Ingres was a reluctant portraitist, he nevertheless accomplished some of his finest paintings in this genre. His male portraits, which were not subject to the same demands of idealisation as the female ones, invoke an imposing sense of their sitter’s presence by combining a scrupulous realism with a classical dignity. The standout example is the portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832), who is portrayed as an uncompromising bulldog of a man, but nevertheless full of character and humanity, expressed through the precise description of Bertin’s ageing features.

In common with the portraits, La Grande Odalisque is not burdened with narrative or moral content. It is an image about the pleasure of looking, an eroticism that is heightened by the nude’s unattainability: the impossibility of her beauty, the illusionary tactility of the materials that surround her, and an air of detachment created through the even tone of her skin, the economic use of shadow and the harmonised colours. Quite rightly it forms the centrepiece of the exhibition and is hailed as ‘the first great nude in the modern tradition’.

La Grande Odalisque, like all of Ingres’s most successful works, has a teasing quality of both drawing the spectator in but also demanding a distance. Previously, this tension might have been regarded as a consequence of the contradictions within Ingres’s art. But in a closer  survey of his work, we discover a more authentic artist, who developed a distinctive aesthetic that remains influential to this day. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ingres-jean-auguste-dominique/

September is the time...

September is time for threshing with a flail. #medievalcalendar Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. D. 939; Astrological and ecclesiastical calendar in six pieces; 14th century; England; section 2ar;

@BDLSS

 

Vesuvius erupted on this day (maybe) in 79 AD .

 

Pliny the Younger wrote letters to Tacitus, detailing his eye-witness account of the AD 79 eruption and it is from this that the 24th August is known. However, we only have later transcribed copies of these letters & the eruption date varies in many of the versions.

The 9th century copy of Pliny’s letter, the Codex Laurentianus Mediceus 47.36, which includes the 24th Aug date became canon in academia as it was deemed the most complete version. However, other copies carry dates such as 30th October, 1st, and 23rd November.

A charcoal inscription uncovered in #Pompeii contains the date ‘XVI K Nov’—16 days before the Kalends of Nov—equating to 17th Oct. Though no year is mentioned, the impermanence of charcoal suggests this could have been written close to the time of eruption but it’s inconclusive.

Evidence from the Vesuvian sites also suggests that the Autumn grape harvest had just taken place as the remnants of fruit from a recent wine pressing were found & some of the dolia—the large sunken terracotta storage jars—were supposedly full of wine at the time of the eruption.

From the twitter feed of Dr. Sophie Hay: https://twitter.com/pompei79

Hans Memling

 

1494, the great Hans Memling died in Bruges. He was known for painting portraits of the rich and famous. His work for St Ursula's shrine - St John's Hospital Bruges - is considered a wonder of the world.

Hans Memling was one of the most prominent and productive Netherlandish artists of the later fifteenth century. Drawing from a variety of sources including Rogier van der Weyden, Robert Campin, and Jan van Eyck, Memling formed part of the second generation of Northern Renaissance painters (also known as the Flemish Primitives), who further developed the realistic representation of human figures, architectural constructions, and landscapes. Where van der Weyden often heightened the emotional impact of his paintings and simplified and stylized his sitters’ features, Memling’s work tends to be more placid and serene, and his depiction of figures more naturalistically detailed, if still flattering. As one nineteenth century writer poetically commented, “imagine…a privileged spot, a sort of angelical retreat…where simplicity, gentleness, and supernatural mildness grow like lilies — and you will have an idea of the unique soul of Memling, and the miracle he works in his pictures.” 

Memling was one of the most prolific portraitists of the time; about one third of his output was independent portraits or diptychs, and additional likenesses appear as part of larger works. One of his most characteristic contributions was the use of a landscape background either viewed out a window or entirely outdoors. He developed this format further than his contemporaries and used it more consistently, perhaps prompted, as Paula Nuttall suggests, by his many Italian patrons, who appreciated the clarity and detail of Flemish landscape painting. In addition to portraits, the rest of his production was quite varied, ranging from devotional diptychs and standard altarpieces to extensive narrative paintings, a huge, multi-panel altar, and a carved and painted shrine.

Warhol by Danto

 

ANDY WARHOL

 

By Arthur C. Danto

 

Yale Univ. 162 pp. $24

 

 

The Genius of Andy Warhol

 

By Tony Scherman and David Dalton

 

Decades after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the biggest-selling artist of our time and probably the most famous -- the only one whose name, face and style are recognizable even by people who know nothing else about art.

 

Why is a bit of a mystery. Warhol rose to glory in the early '60s among a handful of artists rebelling against Abstract Expressionism and creating a new kind of American art that in some cases celebrated images from mass consumer culture. Among these artists -- Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist -- Warhol was the last to emerge and arguably the least talented craftsman. Yet it was Warhol who came to define the era. His breakthrough canvases -- silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell's Soup cans and grisly car crashes -- are not only museum centerpieces but modern icons.

 

How this pale, shy (but also calculating and ambitious) boy from Pittsburgh became "the artist of the second half of the 20th century" -- as critic Arthur C. Danto describes him -- is a puzzle that two new books try to solve, with uneven success.

 

Danto is the author of the slim, meditative "Andy Warhol." The art critic for the Nation and a philosophy professor at Columbia, he has been struggling with this question since 1964, when he attended Warhol's show of Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery. The boxes were made of wood, not cardboard; and the logo was silkscreened, not machine-stamped. But otherwise, they looked exactly like the shipping containers of Brillo soap pads in every American supermarket. The "challenge," Danto writes, "was to explain why Warhol's box was art while its look-alike in common life was not." He concludes that there is no explanation and that, therefore, Warhol ruptured all of art history.

He goes too far here. A half-century earlier, after all, Marcel Duchamp had displayed a urinal and an upside-down bicycle wheel as works of art. Danto notes that those "readymades," as Duchamp called them, were objects already in existence, whereas Warhol created the Brillo Boxes to look like readymades. But this doesn't necessarily make Warhol more revolutionary than Duchamp; in fact, given that Danto describes Warhol's boxes as "beautiful," they might be less defiant. In this sense, Warhol and the other Pop artists -- all influenced by Duchamp -- were reviving an artistic tradition from an earlier rebellious era.

 

Still, Danto's larger points about Warhol's impact are indisputable, and he traces its lineage to a moment in 1961 when Warhol made two paintings of Coke bottles -- one with Abstract Expressionist drippings, the other without -- and chose the latter as the template for his subsequent work. "It was a mandate and a breakthrough," Danto writes. "The mandate was: paint what we are. The breakthrough was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply." Danto calls the subsequent era "the Age of Warhol" because of this blending of high art and commercial art -- of art and life broadly.

 

Tony Scherman and David Dalton, in their Warhol biography "Pop," underscore "the Pop insight that a great part of our experience now comes to us not directly but through a photographic, mass media veil." Pop art and early '60s rock music grew out of this same aesthetic of "cleansing away all the traditional prevailing sensibilities in the arts," leaving a broad "openness to possibilities." This link explains why, even before he recruited Lou Reed and formed the Velvet Underground, Warhol was hailed as a superstar by young rock fans, though he was as old as their parents.

 

Scherman, a music writer, and Dalton, an art writer who briefly worked as an assistant to Warhol, entertainingly trace the artist's rise from a sickly, poor art student to a wealthy, prize-winning Manhattan advertising designer to the most unlikely avant-garde painter of all time. They're less clear, and sometimes contradictory, on why Warhol emerged as the decisive figure. They persuasively refute the notion that he was a "primitive," noting his deep knowledge of the art world. But on a single page, they claim both that Warhol "genuinely" admired the commercial products that he painted and that he found them "goofy and inane." They start the book with a moment in August 1960 when Warhol supposedly transformed himself from a commercial artist into a gallery artist; but they later note that he kept doing commercial work throughout his career. In fact, Warhol's conceptual novelty lay in seeing commercial and high art as seamless.

 

The authors draw a thick dividing line at June 1968, when Warhol was shot and nearly killed by the delusional Valerie Solanas. They argue that his art was rebellious and innovative before, corporate and lazy after. Certainly the attack made him more cautious, but they overstate the point. First, as they observe, Warhol's art had declined a year before the shooting, especially with his senseless movies (to which they give way too much space).

Second, many of Warhol's post-'68 works -- his Mao portraits, skull paintings and several of the commissioned portraits (which the authors unjustly dismiss as hack work) -- are adventurous and gorgeous: his familiarly plaintive style fused with painterly flourishes reminiscent of de Kooning. They're not the breakthroughs of his early-'60s works, but they fit -- and guided -- the postmodern pluralism of the '70s and '80s. He remained a trailblazer of his era.

Did Warhol grasp the profundity of his innovations, or was he as vapid as his pose made him seem? Danto writes that Warhol had "a philosophical mind" -- a dubious claim: If he ever discussed ideas seriously, the evidence has yet to be revealed. A more plausible perspective comes from an article by critic Peter Schjeldahl, from which Scherman and Dalton quote at length. Some artists at the time did mull the issues that Pop art raised. "I don't see him doing that," Schjeldahl wrote of Warhol. "That's why we reach for the word 'genius' . . . He sees clearly. He just does it."

 

Fred Kaplan is a Slate columnist and the author of "1959: The Year Everything Changed."