Posts tagged painting

Artistic echoes of a primordial cultural project gone awry, but to this day remembered, resonant, and perhaps—in the beauty both of our varied tongues and non-disastrous buildings—redeemed.

re: architecture, art, babel, europe, museums, painting, primordial stories

Nate:

The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum’s exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there’s even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk’s, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was “really” like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting—one of a series that riff on Brueghel—the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper.

I've seen this article cited in a number of blogs this past week; generally the take-away seems to be what Gladwell starts with, that some artists (or writers, or whatever) do their best work seemingly right out of the blocks, while others are comparably late bloomers. What's perhaps most interesting in terms of culture-making, though, is the article's later sections, which deal with just what sort of necessary conditions allow for the emergence of a late bloomer. Such success is, indeed, "highly contingent," which I think you can take two ways: on the one hand, to despair a bit about the difficulty of any artistic or cultural greatness to ever get off the ground; but on the other, to rejoice that for every Cezanne who we know about, there must be scores we never will, going about their business in our midst.

re: 3 12 120, community, europe, france, horizons of the possible, painting, patronage, visual arts

Nate:

But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.

Judith Thurman's remarkable article on the 32,000-year-old art of southern France is unfortunately not available on line. It gives us a glimpse into both the culture making of our earliest ancestors, and the ongoing effort to interpret what they made. But for my money this paragraph is the most intriguing . . .

re: art, europe, history, horizons of the possible, painting

Andy:

[The cave at] Chauvet was a bombshell. . . . Its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, [author George] Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying"—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.