Fig Leaves


syrakusos

Recommended Posts

Here in Austin, the Blanton Museum of the University of Texas is a very large building filled with the kinds of works you would expect of galleries in a midrange midwest town like Indianpolis or Toledo. (Blanton does have excellent modern works and some ancient treasures that were donated about 100 years ago.) Walking into the classical hall, the "Roman" statues had fig leaves. You get that with later imperial. Then I turned around and saw a famous archaic Greek kore with a fig leaf, a 19th century copy. In fact, the second floor greets you with plaster copies from the Erechtheion and the Pergamon Museum of Berlin.

The cards explain that plaster copies were used in art schools, that these had been stored for many years and now were here for us. Of course, the white plaster mimics what we see today, bleached out by the sun and rain. In truth, the Parthenon was painted as were all public and private buildings of Athens. Recovered remains suggest that homes might look to us like they were gang-tagged in red and blue. Statues were painted, also.

The lack of color in our presentations of classical works supports the thesis that we have bleached out sexuality from art. In The Art Gallery here on OL is a topic, "500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art." As the discussion continued, this was cited as a winning recent winning work in a British competition. (The chained female is another aspect of this problem, a theme celebrated by Ayn Rand, in fact, and the counterpoise to her admonition against a woman being elected President of the United States.)

_52136113_eight.jpg

It underscores the points made above it regarding the instances offered in the original post.

I think "women as" is the operative phrase. Do we think of women as something other than "people"?

The rumor is that there are some people who think exactly that -- such as almost everyone for most of human history, and a shocking number of people even today.

Barbara

In the Gallery topic about Bryan Larsen, Stephen Boydstun touted William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Indeed, they are accomplished and uplifting. Personally, Bougeureau is my own first choice. However, Stephen missed a brush stroke:

"Alma-Tadema is another Victorian painter. What I like about him is his attention to detail.”

But one detail is always absent.

Despite Queen Victoria's command to "cover that up" art never had a problem with the male form. Even the baby Jesus, God incarnate adored by Magi, has a penis, being, indeed incarnate. Women are conspicuously asexual. We display their breasts because they are mothers. How they get that way remains a mystery.

Bouguereau and the French Academics inspired Academic schools in the UK and USA. If you scan enough online galleries, you can find a few counter-examples to the historical truth but they are so rare that I cannot cite any at this minute. I regret not having a favorites folder for them.

However, in our day, we have Petter Hegre (Wikipedia bio). Over on RoR, the Body in Mind ("female beauty is a representation of our values") website was recommended in their links gallery.

When the Greeks arrived in the Mediterranean from the north, they shed their clothes. Egyptians often went naked. Many equitorial peoples still do. Plutarch's biography of Cato the Elder honors the Roman censor for working naked in the fields alongside his slaves. In an anthropology class, I asked the professor what could possibly be a sexual cue in a society of naked people. He replied, "A lilt to the head, perhaps, or a come-hither look."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Michael,

I was quoting Mr. Larsen on his favorites and what he said about them. However, your little slide lands rightly. Bouguereau is someone I have enjoyed since college. I really should say I enjoyed his works as shown in art books those four decades ago, and they held up for me when I encountered the originals in museums through the years. I mention that because some paintings I have liked in books have not held up in person (e.g. Degas when I saw his for real in Chicago). Others were far more wonderful “in person” than in the books (e.g. Renoir in Chicago, Turner and Constable in London). (Cf.)

The artist Alma-Tadema was one I had not known until I read Larsen’s remark—or so I thought. When I visit art museums, I get any post cards available of the paintings I have liked. They end up being dispersed into my books as bookmarks, which I then rediscover whenever I return to a book. However, this morning I found a couple of cards from Boston still on the shelf, not yet “lost” in books. One is Woman and Flowers. It is by Alma-Tadema. I had simply not learned his name. So Larsen and I have Alma-Tadema as treasure in common as well. And your little slide lands rightly again.

The preceding coincidence of taste between Larsen and me is perhaps not an accidental coincidence; and that reminds me of a smiling incident in college years in Oklahoma. One day I had dropped by the art library where a friend of mine (who was knowledgeable and friendly towards Rand) was the librarian. She opened the current issue of American Artist to a certain page and said “look.” There was a pencil drawing that immediately entranced me. I slammed my fist down on the desk and said “I knew it was possible [to create art really right for me].” It was the drawing The Possessor by Joan Mitchell Blumenthal. My friend kept pointing to the name of the artist, which I had not yet noticed. That was a name we knew from Objectivist writings.

When I moved from Oklahoma to Chicago in ’72, the first Objectivist I met was Winston Duke. That was in spring of ’73. He and wife Beverly lived on the 37th floor (or so) of a new high rise. Jerry and I lived on the 22nd. Winston’s first degree was in physics. He had earned a masters in nuclear engineering and another masters in business at Harvard. While he was at Harvard, he had taken a course by Nozick, and he had arranged for Rand to speak to one of his business classes. Whenever Winston and I got together we talked physics. Early on we talked also of Nozick, whose ASU was forthcoming, and we talked about painters we liked. I mentioned one painter I liked a lot was John Martin (known to me only by a book in that art library in OK). Winston pulled out his collection of fine prints. I remember in his collection Wyeth and, yes, John Martin. On a wall of their living room, Winston and Bev had a framed fine print of The Possessor. Many years later, maybe a year before Winston died, I received a package in the mail from him. What was hanging in their living room now hangs in ours.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...
  • 2 weeks later...

74_zps7b046ee3.jpg

"The Possessor"

Joan Mitchell Blumenthal

I don't like this. I never liked it. The body is too sleight. And who wants to know this guy? She should have called it The Poser. That's all depicted. Someone posing at the direction of the artist. The basic problem is there is nothing from behind the face.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

With an over head light, it's optically correct Michael.

Tony,

I'm not so sure.

I'm studying lighting for making videos and those shadows don't look right according to the examples I have seen in the lessons.

Michael

Ah, that is The Way of the Shadow, MSK!

Light and corresponding shade has been my lifelong fascination. With so many variations of both, at times I'm still surprised by an unpredictable effect. The vertical angle of light is pertinent here, with a hand very slightly in front a vertical background we will get shadow elongation. Try it at home with a bare light bulb as source. Every minute shift of light or fingers produces something new.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Brant (#5), concerning the body being too sleight, I’m reminded of a remark of Brancusi concerning Michaelangelo’s bodies: “Beefsteaks.” Quite. This nude by JMB is indeed thin, thinner not only than Mich’s stuff, thinner than the classical Apollo Belvedere. That’s fine with me, though I like the classical piece also. This is a somewhat small-chested guy. He seems pretty tall to me, maybe six feet. (I try to put out of my mind in looking at the drawing all that I learned or saw of this model [tape] many years after first seeing this drawing. By the way, I don’t know how far the artist departed from the model for her purposes. Jerry drew nudes for which I would pose for him just for portions of the body, though I gather from that later outside information that JMB was making pretty full use of this model for her result.) His hips seem narrow, a neat male mark if you’re so lucky. The ratio of muscle size in his arms to muscle size in his legs may be greater than usual. Be all that as it may, he comes off as with muscle, having mass, presently at ease, capable of quick activation. This drawing has always struck me as, yes, classical like Apollo, yet distinctively and squarely modern.

The subject here has seemed to me self-possessed and happy in his skin in an elementary, visceral way. That he was called “The Possesor” seemed right to me, as he does seem possessing of his body and its earth. That does not happen without its head. I just now went into the other room and looked at the head closely. The eye is more securely there than in this image. The face and hair are beautiful. I have no sense of what his eye and brow and other facial muscles would do were his eye to turn towards me and catch a glance. That is simply open to a variety of possibilities, glossing by without notice being only one. But the eye is not dead and not asleep, definitely alive and seeing. (I tried to keep the pixels-by-pixels fairly small in this image to preclude anyone blowing it up very much without shoddy resolution, hoping to preclude anyone trying to sell prints from this image. I had included this image for a Facebook photo album that is a tour of our home and acreage, and it then occurred to me that it would surely be of interest at OL.)

Michael, the length of that shadow has bothered Walter and I also. However, Tony’s resolution looks right to me now. The indicated location of the light source (anyway, the principal) is pretty high up towards the zenith, making significant shadow from the brow fall over the eye and the long shadow of the hand on the vertical plane. If the light source is moved on up to the zenith, that shadow of the hand has to extend to infinity, but for the earth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stephen,

I would like to touch on an aesthetic idea with you right now.

One of Ayn Rand's main points in her theory of art is that art is not reality, but instead idealized reality. (Selective recreation, etc... ) And one of the things I have learned in film-making, storytelling, etc., is that reality can be awful for eliciting an aesthetic response.

As a good example of what I mean, try to hone in on a conversation in a public place and try to imagine that back-and-forth discussion verbatim in a movie. All those interrupted sentences, uhms and ahs, mumbles, needless repetitions, sudden changes of topic, mostly mundane small-talk, and so on.

Boring...

For dialogue to sound real in a movie, it has to be cleaned up.

Or, another example. I have had the opportunity to film (in Brazil) with a very beautiful actress (Karina Palatnik). That is until she took her makeup off. One day she showed up on the set without makeup and the crew didn't recognize her. :smile: (True story. I was one of those who didn't.) So obviously, without makeup, she would not work as the gorgeous damsel in distress character--that character would have to be reworked as the girl next door or some other similar archetype.

Here's the point. In art, you are supposed to tweak reality to make it conform to idealized visions. At least according to Rand (and I mostly agree). If those visions are widespread in the culture, better. No explanations are needed. If not, you have to somehow convey the vision in addition to the art work for it to be effective. This is why so many paintings work much better in eliciting a response/feeling once the viewer knows a story about them. Ask art dealers about the value of story in getting customers to take action--that is take out their wallets. :smile:

Now I want to go a bit deeper into perception. Maybe intelligibility. I want to go to curiosity. How does one elicit curiosity in an audience? This is a very good question for artists because if no one gets curious enough to observe their art, no one will buy it.

The main two ways I know of are:

1. Create an anomaly in the environment. Something that doesn't fit expectations. Attention immediately goes there and the observer starts wondering what that is about. For example, a derby hat hanging on a tree in the middle of the woods. Or, in music, a plain vanilla lyrical ballad and a sudden emphasized harsh dissonant note. Instant curiosity.

2. Create an information gap. This is when information is suggested or promised, but not delivered. This works best when there is an emotional load on it, too. One place that exploits this characteristic to death in headlines is Upworthy. (“We Don’t Hear Enough From Native American Voices. Here’s An Inspiring Message From One,” or "Someone Gave Some Kids Some Scissors. Here’s What Happened Next.") There is the promise of something juicy to talk about, but there is a gap between announced information and delivery. But this works visually, too.

And this leads me to the hand shadow.

At first glance, it looks awkward. From the tone of the rest of the painting, I seriously doubt that kind of awkwardness is the feel Joan Blumenthal was trying to convey. A case could be made that her stylized form is awkward, but that's different. She seems to be hinting at flight by making the arms look a bit wavy like wings, the leg perched like a bird, overly sleek torso, the gaze off in the distance and slightly upward. In other words, that is purposeful. The awkwardness of the shadow seems like a mistake. Clunky. As you said, it bothered both you and Walter. So I know you felt this.

The next point is the shadow is an anomaly. Maybe you can fit an overhead light so that the shadows will work out to the same form, but the specially directed light source is not present in the painting. And when there is no light source, it's natural on first contact to assume lighting would be normal like with the sun. Or normal room lighting. Regardless, on first contact, the attention of the viewer goes straight to the shadow. This is instinctive, not consciously chosen. The shadow, at least for a moment, becomes the subject of the painting. It catches the curiosity of the viewer because it looks out of place. Was that Blumenthal's intent? I seriously doubt it.

(If I were evil, I might even say the shadow looks like it's giving the finger, but I'm not evil. :smile: However, it's true that flipping the bird would tie into the stylized flight theme for being a bird. :smile: Just joking...)

Now to the information gap. Once viewers have their attention captured by the perceived anomaly, many will wonder what it is doing there. It seems to be on purpose because it has relatively sharp outlines. That must mean something. During the rest of their visual scan of the picture, they will have that gap in the back of their minds. They will look at the rest of the painting for clues to discover why the damn hand shadow is that way. This happens unconsciously, but I believe it seriously undermines the impact of the stylized flight theme. It causes a kind of cognitive dissonance.

So, in this case, I believe the shadow should have been stylized, also. Reality is a disaster.

If you are going to stylize some elements and not others, at least the parts that are real--especially minor details--should not look awkward (in regard to the theme), look like anomalies or contain information gaps.

That's my opinion and others may have different ones. But I believe your initial reaction was a truer aesthetic response than the later reasoning it out of existence.

And, to me, aesthetic responses--especially automatic ones--are precious. They are important. They deserve to be respected as they enrich life on the deep pre-conscious level.

Michael

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the thoughts in #11, Michael. I concur with your remark that the artist “seems to be hinting at flight by making the arms look a bit wavy like wings, the leg perched like a bird, overly sleek torso, the gaze off in the distance and slightly upward.” Yes that, and bound comfortably to earth. I mean that has always been part of the sense about it to me.

Concerning earliest impressions, however, I should explain a bit more. I don’t recall thinking about the hand shadow being too long until Walter pointed it out. And actually, he had an extra interest in it because on my print it appears that there had been an erasure. It looks as if the shadow had been even longer and JMB had shortened it. Best I can recall, I had not seen the hand shadow size as anomalous until he pointed it out to me. I think there was a somewhat different anomaly about that patch for me, which I still trace through in an instant these many years later. It first looks like drapery, part of the feeling of solemnity and serenity about the scene. Then one notices that it is not a drape, but a shadow of the hand. One could then go on wonder whether such a shadow could be produced in real space, though I don’t think I ever had that further wonder on my own.

I’d like to add that Jerry was already deceased when I was given this print. So I never had any conversations with him—who after all did some life drawing—about this drawing as reproduced in actual-size print. He had seen, and I’m sure we had discussed, the drawing from the small image that had appeared in American Artist in 1972. Oh, to have a recording of such conversations as those! But the truth is I recall nothing of it.

The article in which the drawing appeared in that magazine is titled “Robert Beverly Hale Teaches the Drawing Methods of the Great Masters.” It is coauthored by JMB and Heather Meredith-Owens. Drawings by the authors and by other students of Hale are shown. Here is a little excerpt on light:


Once the student has learned to construct the masses of the figure by means of line, he is eager to use variations of dark and light on his forms . . . .

What the student ordinarily encounters is random lighting; that is, the lighting conditions which happen to exist in a particular place at a particular moment. Usually these conditions include multiple light sources that obscure the shape, dimension, and thrust of the forms. The student may know—through sensations, associations, and knowledge not utilized in his drawing—what the shape of his subject is, but if he copies the random patterns of dark and light, he weakens or destroys the illusion of mass achieved in his linear construction.

Hale discourages students from copying the values they see by emphasizing that, in the classroom, the model is lit by several natural window sources and at least 30 scattered artificial lights! Although this should undercut the student’s desire to copy, Hale is resigned to the fact that most students tend to copy “destructive” blotches of light and dark for about six months.

In a positive effort to discourage this practice, Hale suggests that beginners use “traditional “ illumination. “Traditional” lighting consists of one major light source—above, in front, and to one side of the model; and one minor source—opposite the major source, and much weaker, to provide reflected light. This type of illumination has two advantages: it reveals the forms most clearly, and its effect is easily imagined on the subject. For the beginner, it is a means of learning to model not by observing chance effects of light, but by understanding the appearance of forms under ideal lighting conditions. Eventually, the student’s knowledge of the way light affects form will enable him to become independent of existing illumination, and free to use light expressively. (34)

Opposite that text, as it happens, is “The Possessor.” The caption reads: “The Possessor was conceived as a classical nude: serene, balanced, and idealized.”

The uses of light in painting—and this goes for drawing too—in discussed by JMB on pages 37–43, with illustration from Vermeer, Böcklin, Renoir, and Antonello, in her book The Ways and Means of Painting.

The drapery-to-shadow sort of shift happened to me recently with that image of JMB’s painting Kingdom of Earth that I linked here recently.* I had never seen it before that day. At first it looked like a city in the sky, but then I realized: No, that’s Staten Island to the left, and the water continues past the land, land left and right, on out to the horizon, and the sky is being reflected in all that water. It’s a kind of neat resolution of an appearance of the ethereal into something still idealized but physically real.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...

Here in Austin, the Blanton Museum of the University of Texas is a very large building filled with the kinds of works you would expect of galleries in a midrange midwest town like Indianpolis or Toledo. (Blanton does have excellent modern works and some ancient treasures that were donated about 100 years ago.) Walking into the classical hall, the "Roman" statues had fig leaves. You get that with later imperial. Then I turned around and saw a famous archaic Greek kore with a fig leaf, a 19th century copy. In fact, the second floor greets you with plaster copies from the Erechtheion and the Pergamon Museum of Berlin.

The cards explain that plaster copies were used in art schools, that these had been stored for many years and now were here for us. Of course, the white plaster mimics what we see today, bleached out by the sun and rain. In truth, the Parthenon was painted as were all public and private buildings of Athens. Recovered remains suggest that homes might look to us like they were gang-tagged in red and blue. Statues were painted, also.

The lack of color in our presentations of classical works supports the thesis that we have bleached out sexuality from art. In The Art Gallery here on OL is a topic, "500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art." As the discussion continued, this was cited as a winning recent winning work in a British competition. (The chained female is another aspect of this problem, a theme celebrated by Ayn Rand, in fact, and the counterpoise to her admonition against a woman being elected President of the United States.)

_52136113_eight.jpg

It underscores the points made above it regarding the instances offered in the original post.

I think "women as" is the operative phrase. Do we think of women as something other than "people"?

The rumor is that there are some people who think exactly that -- such as almost everyone for most of human history, and a shocking number of people even today.

Barbara

In the Gallery topic about Bryan Larsen, Stephen Boydstun touted William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Indeed, they are accomplished and uplifting. Personally, Bougeureau is my own first choice. However, Stephen missed a brush stroke:

"Alma-Tadema is another Victorian painter. What I like about him is his attention to detail.”

But one detail is always absent.

Despite Queen Victoria's command to "cover that up" art never had a problem with the male form. Even the baby Jesus, God incarnate adored by Magi, has a penis, being, indeed incarnate. Women are conspicuously asexual. We display their breasts because they are mothers. How they get that way remains a mystery.

Bouguereau and the French Academics inspired Academic schools in the UK and USA. If you scan enough online galleries, you can find a few counter-examples to the historical truth but they are so rare that I cannot cite any at this minute. I regret not having a favorites folder for them.

However, in our day, we have Petter Hegre (Wikipedia bio). Over on RoR, the Body in Mind ("female beauty is a representation of our values") website was recommended in their links gallery.

When the Greeks arrived in the Mediterranean from the north, they shed their clothes. Egyptians often went naked. Many equitorial peoples still do. Plutarch's biography of Cato the Elder honors the Roman censor for working naked in the fields alongside his slaves. In an anthropology class, I asked the professor what could possibly be a sexual cue in a society of naked people. He replied, "A lilt to the head, perhaps, or a come-hither look."

Wonderful piece.

The lack of color in our presentations of classical works supports the thesis that we have bleached out sexuality from art.

Love that!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are the shadows right in that painting?

They seem off to me.

The hand shadow casts long and to the right. That's at odds with the rest of the shadows.

Michael

Yep. But sometimes an artist can get away with conflicting lights, Rubens and Rembrandt sometimes introduce secondary lights, but they are Rubens and Rembrandt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

74_zps7b046ee3.jpg

"The Possessor"

Joan Mitchell Blumenthal

an ectomorph. This meets the Randian standard of bodily beauty.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now