Late Painting Research Articles

Zidne slike u južnoj apsidi crkve Sv. Krševana - prijedlog za Ivana Petrova iz Milana

Ostatci kasnogotičkih zidnih slika u južnoj bočnoj apsidi crkve Sv. Krševana u Zadru odavno su poznati, ali su, prvenstveno zbog lošeg stanja u kojem se nalaze, tek uvrštavani u šire preglede, bez ozbiljnijih pokušaja da im se nađe jasnije mjesto u okvirima zadarskog i dalmatinskog slikarstva 15. stoljeća. Ipak, u sklopu napredovanja spoznaja o ključnim ličnostima zadarskog gotičkog slikarstva moguće je ukazati na određene paralele i podudarnosti, pa i pokušati se konkretnije odrediti o mogućem autorstvu. Naime, navedene je slike moguće kronološki vezati uz djelatnost opata Petra Krešave (1420-47.) ili onu opata Deodata Veniera (1459-85.). U vrijeme Petra Krešave u Zadru su djelovali Menegelo Ivanov de Canali, Blaž Jurjev Trogiranin, Ivan Petrov iz Milana, Dujam Marinov Vučković i Donat Bragadin sa svojim sinovima, a u vrijeme Deodata Veniera Carlo Crivelli, Vittore Crivelli i Petar Jordanić. Ako navedene slikare prihvatimo kao moguće kandidate za autorstvo, već je na prvi pogled jasno da to ne mogu biti ni braća Crivelli ni Petar Jordanić, pa kao vjerojatnija opcija ostaju slikari iz prve grupe i datiranje slika u vrijeme između 1420. i 1447. godine, vjerojatno ipak bliže kraju tog razdoblja nego njegovu početku. S obzirom na likovne odlike koje je ipak moguće očitati na slikama u crkvi Sv. Krševana, kao najozbiljniji kandidat za njihovo autorstvo ističe se Ivan Petrov iz Milana, a kao temelj za usporedbu pojedinih karaktirističnih elemenata mogu poslužiti tri njegova djela: "Ugljanski poliptih" u samostanu Sv. Frane u Zadru, freske u kapeli Sv. Duje u splitskoj katedrali i poliptih u muzeju Ermitaž u Petrogradu. Pritom je najizrazitija zajednička odlika naglašena preciznost crteža i specifičan tretman draperija, a uočljive su i neke specifične podudarnosti u skraćivanju podlaktica stojećih likova, ali i u vrlo specifičnom tipu oklopa lika Sv. Krševana, koji se pojavljuje i na slikama u crkvi Sv. Krševana i na "Ugljanskkom poliptihu". Riječ je o vrsti konjaničkog oklopa kakav ne nalazimo na drugim djelima dalmatinskog gotičkog slikarstva, ali niti na djelima mletačkih gotičkih slikara, pa je njegovu pojavu na dva slikarska djela u Zadru možda moguće dovesti u vezu s podrijetlom slikara koji je došao iz Milana, gdje je mogao upoznati tada još rijedak i inovativan tip modernog konjaničkog oklopa kakav su proizvodile radionice porodice Missaglia.

문진형의 장물지 중 ‘현화월령’과 명대 말기의 회화감상

문진형의 장물지 중 ‘현화월령’과 명대 말기의 회화감상

Memory's Cut: Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid of 1608

Caravaggio's late painting, Sleeping Cupid, had long been recognized as a mimetic engagement, as well as a reversal, of the antique sculptural tradition of sleeping cupids that commonly decorated ancient funerary monuments. Destined for a Florentine patron, the work has been understood as intencionally troubling the art-historical legacy of Michelangelo's famous lost sculpture of this subject. Caravaggio described himself as a painter without recourse to artistic imitation. Yet much of his oeuvre, as in this instance, works at the boundaries of art-historical citations that are then vexed, as if to undo the work they seek simultaneously to emulate. If the classical mortuary figure of the sleeping cupid was at once a memorial of life's tenderness and maker of its passing, Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid is instead like a fractured or ruptured memory, a shifting and unstable dream-like recollection of the past within the present.

Artificial orpiment, a new pigment in Rembrandt\u2019s palette

This paper reports on how the application of macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) imaging, in combination with the re-examination of existing paint cross-sections, has led to the discovery of a new pigment in Rembrandt’s palette: artificial orpiment. In the NWO Science4Arts ‘ReVisRembrandt’ project, novel chemical imaging techniques are being developed and applied to the study of Rembrandt’s late paintings in order to help resolve outstanding questions and to gain a better understanding of his late enigmatic painting technique. One of the selected case studies is the Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca, known as ‘The Jewish Bride’, dated c. 1665 and on view in the Rijksmuseum. During the re-installation of the Rijksmuseum in 2013, the picture was scanned using the Bruker M6 Jetstream MA-XRF scanner. The resulting elemental distribution maps made it possible to distinguish many features in the painting, such as bone black remains of the original hat (P, Ca maps), and the now discolored smalt-rich background (Co, Ni, As, K maps). The arsenic (As) map also revealed areas of high-intensity in Isaac’s sleeve and Rebecca’s dress where it could be established that it was not related with the pigment smalt that also contains arsenic. This pointed to the presence of a yellow or orange arsenic-containing pigment, such as realgar or orpiment that is not associated with the artist’s palette. Subsequent examination of existing paint cross-sections from these locations taken by Karin Groen in the 1990s identified isolated, almost perfectly round particles of arsenic sulfide. The round shape corresponds with published findings on a purified form of artificial orpiment glass obtained by dry processing, a sublimation reaction. In bright field, the particles characteristically exhibit a dark cross in the middle caused by internal light reflections. The results of additional non-invasive techniques (portable XRD and portable Raman) are discussed, as well as the implications of this finding and how it fits with Rembrandt’s late experimental painting technique.

Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Fingerprinting for Identification of Acacia Gum in Microsamples from Works of Art.

This paper reports an improved method for the identification of Acacia gum in cultural heritage samples using matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) after enzymatic digestion of the polysaccharide component. The analytical strategy was optimized using a reference Acacia gum (gum arabic, sp. A. senegal) and provided an unambiguous MS profile of the gum, characterized by specific and recognized oligosaccharides, from as little as 0.1 μg of material. The enhanced experimental approach with reduced detection limit was successfully applied to the analysis of naturally aged (∼80 year) gum arabic samples, pure and mixed with lead white pigment, and allowed the detection of gum arabic in samples from a late painting (1949/1954) by Georges Braque in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. This first application of the technique to characterize microsamples from a painting, in conjunction with analyses by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), provided important insights into Braque's unusual mixed paint media that are also helpful to inform appropriate conservation treatments for his works. The robustness of the analytical strategy due to the reproducibility of the gum MS profile, even in the presence of other organic and inorganic components, together with the minimal sample size required, demonstrate the value of this new MALDI-TOF MS method as an analytical tool for the identification of gum arabic in microsamples from museum artifacts.

Portrait of an artist as an ex-war surgeon

Purpose To examine how art is shaped by war, outside of the official commemorative projects of the First World War. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experience of a surgeon/artist who knew first-hand the horror of industrial scale of destruction. It speculates on how his medical education and surgical knowledge in the treatment of the casualties informed his art and considers how such scientific discourses may have contributed to a new modernist language. Design/methodology/approach The double career of J.W. Power – a surgeon then an artist – provides a case study to probe such questions. The paper speculates about the connections between these different careers, and considers the implications of becoming an artist for someone who had pre-war university-training, medical expertise and experience as a war surgeon. In particular, consideration is given to how surgical knowledge and contemporary medical debates may have informed a group of later paintings. Findings A group of J.W. Power’s late paintings stand apart from his other subjects as they suggest states of physical or psychological damage. Indeed by the 1930s shell shock was recognised as a war-related psychological injury. These paintings then may not only be an act of remembrance, but also potentially a reflection on that new discourse. Research limitations/implications It remains a compelling idea that by the 1930s Power had found a modern abstract language capable of revisiting the traumatic subject of his hospital sketches. The implications of the war-time surgery on his art was delayed and remains highly ambiguous, however it invites, indeed encourages, such speculation. Originality/value The paper is the first to examine the cultural impact of the medical career of the artist J.W. Power. His medical training and experience as a war-time surgeon is shown to have been significant to his later painting, for he knew the regenerative powers of modern surgery, of how such knowledge had the power to repair and to heal.

조선 후기 남종화풍 문인산수화의 모방과 창작 : 화보의 분류 체계와 그 수용

In late Joseon period Southern school-style literati landscape paintings a group of standardized pattern-like images become omnipresent. These images, which can be any objects, are repeatedly imitated in various paintings. Another unique characteristic of these images is the fact that they denote separate themes or contexts in various paintings even though they share nearly identical figurative features. The purpose of this study is to reveal the inner meaning system that enabled the repetition and polysemy of these pattern-like images. One hypothesis is that this phenomenon was influenced by the act of imitating Painting manuals,Huapu, imported from China. By proving this, the study attempts to understand how imitating painting manuals burgeoned creation, and also what kind of art form Southern school literati painting has. In Joseon, painting manuals were perceived as a canon, containing the artistic spirit of the late masters, which should be followed in order to practice theories of Southern school-style literary painting. By categorizing images according to individual properties, painting manuals provided a range of options to choose when an artist needed a certain image, enabling identical images to be used in various paintings. Moreover, this method of approach is similar to the way people categorize and systematize knowledge and information. This implies Southern school literati painting’s art form is close to method of learning in general. In brief, mastering the images (and also the categorizing system) of painting manuals and arranging them in a new original way could be understood as how creation was formed in Southern school-style literati landscape paintings.

Gloss paints in late paintings by Francis Picabia: a multi-analytical study

In this paper, a multi-analytical approach for the study of the materials used by Francis Picabia in two paintings dating from 1949 and 1950 is reported, with a particular reference to the possible use of enamel paints. The study is complemented by analysis of paints that had the appearance of glossy enamel sampled from the artist’s easel in the collection of the Comite Francis Picabia. Analysis with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry with thermally assisted hydrolysis and methylation (THM-Py-GCMS) and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy revealed that only few paints match the composition of historical reference samples of Ripolin enamels, while the majority of the glossy paints sampled likely consist of mixtures of binders and varnishes made by the artist. This study confirms the importance of scientific testing and comparison with reference materials, when determining artists’ use of enamel paints. Results should be interpreted in the context of documentary/historical evidence, for a more informed characterization of oleoresinous paint media.

Cy Twombly: late paintings, 2003-2011

Beginning in 2003, when Twombly was seventy-five years old, a fresh surge of creativity brought new energy into his art, expanding upon themes and modes of expression from throughout his career. Characterized by monumentality and flamboyant colour, these works often use large formats to accommodate broad and sweeping motions. Sometimes their surfaces are dense and heavily worked; sometimes they are expressively fluid, incorporating chance elements such as extravagant drips of paint. Favoured motifs such as ships, flowers and mythological references are revisited in new contexts and allowed to interact in unusual ways. Like his earlier output, however, these images continue to engage viewers in an active dialogue, resisting easy interpretation and offering up multiple layers of potential meaning. Concluding with the series known as The Last Paintings, completed only a few months before his death in 2011, these are memorable works in which the gestural intensity of this great artist is vividly preserved.

Decadence Disrupted: Arguing Against a Decadence Model in Late Ming Painting History

This essay offers an intervention to the field of Chinese art history, arguing that a decadence model has been tacitly operating in studies of late Ming painting, and that this model has clouded our understanding of this art. A possible source of the decadence model is explained, and a few of the terms resulting from its application are contemplated. A number of historical fallacies that have combined with the decadence model are identified, and are brought to bear in a cautionary note to beware of confusing cause for correlation.

Jack Bush: Coping and Coming of Age in the 1960s

This essay re-evaluates the disavowed relationship between the advertising career and colour field paintings of the Canadian artist Jack Bush (1909-77). Bush’s belated transition out of the world of graphic design uniquely equipped him to fulfill the efforts of the American formalist critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) to buttress the remnants of the historical avant-garde through a strategic rationalization of pop cultural forms and commercial techniques. The resulting co-optation reflected transformations in the Canadian advertising industry during the 1960s, which mirrored developments in the United States in accommodating the symbols of popular protest movements to re-entrench establishment interests. The resemblance between certain late paintings by Bush and the conventions of psycho-medical modelling and other graphic instruments deployed by Madison Avenue researchers troubles uncritical readings of the formalist agenda usually said to have informed these artworks.

“Mountains Being a Language with Me” Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, and Modernist Revision

“Mountains Being a Language with Me” Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, and Modernist Revision Emily Setina (bio) Marsden Hartley made a career—though not always a very successful one—painting mountains. He painted mountains in France, Germany, Mexico, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. When he did not have mountains to paint, he improvised them. In Dogtown, Massachusetts, he entitled a painting of boulders Mountains in Stone, and critics have commented repeatedly on the mountain-like contours and masses that characterize his portraits of human subjects.1 Hartley was painting mountains the year before he died, in 1942, and he was painting mountains in 1909 when Alfred Stieglitz first showed his work. Marianne Moore met Hartley through his mountain paintings, at another show at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in 1915. She accorded Hartley’s mountains special notice in a letter home, reporting that she had seen “paintings of mountains by a man named Hartley, also some Picabias and Picassos and so on.”2 Even in a career’s worth of mountain painting, Hartley’s late paintings of Maine’s Mount Katahdin are unique. Previously, in painting the Alps and Mont Sainte-Victoire, Hartley had painted a small number of views repeatedly, but never had he painted so doggedly a single mountain, not to mention a single view of a mountain, as he did Mount Katahdin. Over the four-year period before his death in 1943, he painted Katahdin almost twenty times. The paintings vary only slightly in composition. In Mt. Katahdin, Autumn, No. 2, painted the winter after his 1939 expedition to the mountain, all the elements of succeeding paintings are in place: mountain, foothill, tree, lake (fig. 1). The point of view would not change. A photograph of Hartley [End Page 153] outfitted in plaid shirt and vest and standing next to this canvas appeared in the Bangor Daily News in February 1940 with the accompanying caption: “Katahdin as seen by Bangor Painter” (fig. 2).3 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Marsden Hartley, Mt. Katahdin, Maine, Number 2. 1939-40. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 40 1/4 in. (76.8 x 102.2 cm). Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991 (1992.24.3). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Im age copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Hartley’s critics have accounted for the Katahdin series in two seemingly contradictory ways. Some, such as Jeanne Hokin and Townsend Ludington, see the repeated depictions as transcendental, as a pilgrimage toward a spiritual peak.4 Others, including Donna M. Cassidy, are more skeptical.5 After all, Hartley’s return to his home state following years abroad in Paris and Berlin coincided with an art market demand for regionalist painting. At the start of a new European war, his move to Maine was also a bid for repatriation in the public eye. Further, in choosing Katahdin as pilgrimage site, Hartley located the spiritual heart of the state right at its tourist center. Katahdin was Maine’s most popular, most recognizable sight, featured at the time on postcards, parks brochures, and advertisements for Vacationland’s newly founded Baxter State Park (Cassidy, “On the Subject of Nativeness,” 240). Hartley’s series may be read as a commercial serialization of the site, and his desire to be the mountain’s “official portrait painter” may be seen as a bid for copyright (Cassidy, “Localized Glory,” 185). His letters offer testimony for both hypotheses: Hartley as pilgrim and Hartley as profiteer. In a letter from September 1939, just before the Katahdin expedition, he writes unabashedly [End Page 154] of needing to “get that Mt. for future reason of fame and success” (quoted in Cassidy, “Localized Glory,” 185). In another letter from that year, though, he would remember the experience as intensely spiritual, one that left him “helpless with words,” akin to having “seen God for the first time” (quoted in Hokin, Pinnacles and Pyramids, 111). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. “Katahdin As Seen By Bangor Painter.” Bangor Daily News, February 8, 1940. Marsden Hartley Scrap-book, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare...

Emil Nolde: retrospective

Known as a master of colour, Emil Nolde used many different types of media besides painting, including watercolor, drawing, and prints, to create works such as his numerous flower paintings and coastal landscapes. The book explores Nolde's expressionist painting technique and reexamines Nolde's motives as an artist, by looking at how his works were received and how this was shaped by the artist's image of himself. As well as featuring Nolde's lesser studied early and late paintings and previously unpublished works this volume also presents the latest research on Nolde's work and his relationship to National Socialism. The book accompanies an extensive retrospective exhibition on Nolde's work.

The work analysis study of the Late Choseon Dynasty real landscape painting - focusing on the perspective and narrative of creative subject

The work analysis study of the Late Choseon Dynasty real landscape painting - focusing on the perspective and narrative of creative subject

Domina Paupertas: the praise of voluntary poverty by St. Francis of Assisi and its reflection in late medieval Spanish painting

As is well known, St. Francis of Assisi heroically embraced evangelical poverty, renouncing material goods and living in abject poverty, in imitation of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, through his writings and oral testimonies collected by his disciples, the saint fervently urged Christians to live to some degree voluntary poverty , of which Christ was the perfect model. By basing this reading on some Poverello’s quotations, this paper intends to show the potential impact that these exhortations from San Francisco to poverty may have had in the late medieval Spanish painting, in some iconographic themes so significantly Franciscan as the Nativity and the Passion of the Redeemer. Through the analysis of a large set of paintings representing both issues, we will attempt to put into light if the teachings of St. Francis on evangelical poverty are reflected somehow in Spanish painting of the late Middle Ages.

Fragmented Images: The Last Tomb Paintings of Tarquinia

SummaryCultural decline as a result of the Roman conquest is usually invoked to explain the gradual disappearance of Tarquinian tomb paintings during the third century BC. By contrast, this paper argues that, first, the late tomb paintings of Tarquinia markedly differed from their predecessors by decorating individual burials (fragmentation), as opposed to entire chamber tombs, which should be seen as a culturally meaningful development in the iconographic approach towards representing the deceased; and that, second, the disappearance of this time‐honoured type of monument be seen as part of wider changes in the ways in which Tarquinian and other Etruscan elites chose to materialize their ideologies during the cultural and political realignments of the period of the Roman conquest.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

William Holman Hunt’s Holy War in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

Abstract This essay is concerned to interpret the background, meaning, and reception of a late painting by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt entitled The Miracle of the Sacred Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1899). The painting illustrates and critiques an annual Easter Saturday miracle reported to have been experienced by believers and nonbelievers since the third century CE. During this miracle, fire descends from the oculus of the dome in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem onto the site believed to be the tomb of Christ, and impassioned pilgrims by the hundreds seek to light their candles with its flame. The painting, not well received when first exhibited at the New Gallery in London, remained in Hunt’s studio until his death in 1910. The history of the church in Jerusalem, the conflicts between the different Christian sects who guarded it, the attitude of one Victorian ecumenical Protestant traveler to Jerusalem toward these conflicts, and their resolution in his painting are the subjects used to explore this strangely overwrought and little known image.

Maulbertsch és a tragikus festészet. A pápai plébániatemplom Szent István vértanú történetét ábrázoló mennyezetképei

Abstract Special literature ascribes a distinguished role to the Papa cycle in both the late phase of Franz Anton Maulbertsch's oeuvre and in the history of late baroque ceiling painting. Its specific features are interpreted by the authors as manifestations of unfolding neo-classicism and the Enlightenment. The St Stephen cycle is, however, a series of history pictures set into the medium of fresco painting, and accordingly, the mode of rendering adapts to the classic, centuries-old tradition of history painting and is not necessarily the outcome of a period style. The utterances of the client, bishop of Eger Karoly Eszterhazy and Maulbertsch are to be interpreted as reflections upon the rules of this genre. The demand for dramatic unity is already discernible in the formulation of the scheme and recurs repeatedly in their correspondence. The narrative unfolding in the ceiling paintings in Papa can be taken for a painted tragedy of a complex plot based on Aristotle's notions of change of fate (peripeteia...

Verging on Modernity: A Late Nineteenth-Century Burmese Painting on Cloth Depicting the Vessantara Jataka

Verging on Modernity: A Late Nineteenth-Century Burmese Painting on Cloth Depicting the Vessantara Jataka