Back!

I wanted to check back in briefly; I'm still alive, thankfully, and here's a new post. I want to tell you about Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Čiurlionis. The man was also a composer, and titled many of his paintings in rather music-flavored fashions (he's painted some Preludes, some Sonatas, some Fugues, for example). His intent was also precisely to make his art rather musical.

Anyway, one of his best-known works is Calm (or Tranquility), depending on who you ask, which is pictured above. It's inspired in large part by Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss Symbolist painter, one of the versions of which follows. ("The time of Böcklin" is also referenced in Dramatic Symphony, a rather trippy work by Andrei Biely, which I'm currently reading. Clearly, Russians of this period had very consistent tastes, and one of those tastes was Symbolism.) (Another parenthetical: for the uninitiated, Symbolism is probably best approached through one of the French Symbolists, like Verlaine. The Russian Symbolist poets borrowed a lot from the French.)

Isn't that a glorious work? I really like how it treats light, and particularly how the interior of the isle rejects all of that light. I love objects that seem to radiate shadow as others might emit light.

That's it for a day or two, unfortunately, this is a busy week between work, fellowship applications, and quizbowl. I'm definitely going to make a point of updating frequently in the future (oh, how often that is said!) but I don't think I can maintain a daily schedule anymore.

Théodore Géricault

Many apologies that I've missed several days worth of updates; I've been moving back to Harvard and spending time at Brandeis and, on the whole, being too busy to blog. But I promise not to abandon you!

Théodore Géricault was a really important early French Romantic painter. He's best known for a painting called The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts a real-life event: a bunch of shipwreck survivors, who had been abandoned by their captain, drift on the title raft. Around the bottom left, many weakened survivors lie piled on top of each other; at the upper right, men twirl red and white cloth, trying to attract ships.

To the left is an earlier work, The Charging Chasseur, showing a Napoleonic cavalry officer. Compare the diagonal features of both works; it's a motif that shows up often in Gericault's work.

Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic painter who did mostly landscapes. He was serious about doing landscapes. Gerhard von Kügelgen decided to be a mensch and give us a portrait of our man CDF to show us just how serious about landscapes he is. Yow.

One of CDF's most important contributions (besides his work on the concept of the sublime) was the idea of an inherently emotional (in the sense of emotion-containing or emotion-inducing) landscape, which he called die romantische Stimmungslandschaft because he was German.

Anyway, CDF's work shares with Turner's several aspects that work for me: a really good sense of the play of light and air and fog. The overall effect is frequently exaggerated; the man is, after all, a Romantic. But even so, the image is more believable for it: even if it wouldn't fit in with the mundane world, it carves out its own space, its own world, all the more definitively.

Some of his paintings include Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I could be tempted to discuss later, and The Cross in the Mountains, his first major painting, which is a panel for the Tetschen Altar, by which name it's better known. It's notably the first depiction of the crucifixion on an altar to depict it as a landscape.

CDF managed to execute some paintings after having suffered a stroke. Give the man an award, ladies and gentlemen. Those paintings were of course very dark (one: Seashore by Moonlight, and I'll leave it to you to decide if it's gloom or trepidation that that painting makes me feel; in either case, wow), and Wikipedia reports with stunning analytic insight that "symbols of death" appeared in his work from this period. Yeah, well, I can't say I blame him.

Let me show you what I mean about his use of light and air with The Abbey in the Oakwood. Some monks are carrying a coffin towards the gate left behind in the ruins of an old Gothic church. And holy god, look at the effect.

The way the dull brown glow lifts up from the ground, reaching toward the horizon, the way it's met by the remains of the daylight: it's a sunset without a sun, without the bright colors playing. It's a dying sunset, a sunset to remind anyone of autumn. (Also, I like how the color in the sky is slanted to match the motion of the monks. It's a small touch, but a neat one.)

J. M. W. Turner

I never really "got" painting when I was a kid. In no small part this was probably because my art teacher for the first six years of my life was Mrs. Bedian. My only enduring memory of Mrs. Bedian (besides the enormous relief I felt whenever we had substitutes) was her raw, primal anger whenever anything went wrong. In third grade, when someone spilled some paint, she made us all write letters to her about how sorry we were. I wasn't sorry and I was a snarky little bastard, so I wrote a three page treatise about all the ways things hadn't gone wrong (both generally in class that year and specifically in that incident; I remember only the line "It's not like it was India ink," which a recent issue of Uncle Scrooge Adventures had convinced me was just about the most indelible thing in the world, though I don't know if that's actually true). I was sent to the office; the office wasn't Mrs. Bedian's room, so I was happy. Awesome.

Anyway, I hated her and what I associated with her, including painting. (I might actually have had something against the arts before that; when I was in preschool I rejected the nickname "Drew" because it implied that I had just drawn something, which was, of course, ludicrous. I was a weird kid.) My eyes were opened not by the Impressionists, or by the Mannerists, or by the Surrealists: I realized that there was a point to painting because of J. M. W. Turner.

The above work is titled The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, generally given as the first three words. I think this is the Turner work that specifically made me realize what was up with art, nine years ago or so. The sky, the play of warm and cold colors, the way he gave texture to the air... Turner might not be revered as the greatest painter around; I know a lot of people who find him trite, actually. But I still think he's pretty amazing, and nine years ago, his work was the world to me: it opened up an entire world to me.