Modern Painting Research Articles

Editor’s Note

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NotePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue opens with an essay on the aesthetic and political potential of the modern scrapbook. Makeda Best’s argument focuses on a unique object at the Archives of American Art, one that artist William H. Johnson created through careful selection, transformation, and recombination. I must admit feeling kinship with the scrapbooker when I collect and assemble the content for each issue of the journal. Diverse research materials intersect on our pages, bringing together multiple art-historical contexts, artistic media, and interpretive methods. At its best, the resulting arrangement—in this case, a sequence of articles concerning African American modernist painting and politics, the social practice of gift-giving in the art world of the 1960s, and the economics of nineteenth-century art—exceeds the sum of its parts. Taken together, this research by Best, David McCarthy, and Diana Seave Greenwald presents new ways of reading artworks and primary sources in the field of American art history.In “Archive Matters,” two essays apply inventive methodological questions to American aestheticism, focusing on personal papers at the Archives. Elizabeth Lee revisits her research on Abbott Handerson Thayer by considering what the diary of the artist’s physician-father and period letters might say (or not say) about medical themes in Thayer’s paintings. While archives can appear to their modern users as incoherent or incomplete, Lee advocates for subjecting them to a critical, indeed clinical, gaze that reanimates their contents and thereby an artist’s oeuvre. Erica E. Hirshler brings Thayer into her own reflection on archival absences by looking to the letters he exchanged with fellow painter John Singer Sargent. Hirshler is interested in the gaps in this, like most, archived letters. How do we creatively approach these gaps, Hirshler asks, while remaining critical of the interventions into the historical record that doing so necessitates?With this issue, the journal welcomes curator of African American manuscripts Erin Jenoa Gilbert. This new position is part of the Archives’ African American Collecting Initiative (2018–21), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. We look forward to Gilbert’s expansion of the collections by and about African American artists, and to the exciting research opportunities her work will surely provide our authors and readers. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 58, Number 1Spring 2019 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703658 © 2019 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

THE IMAGO TEMPLI OF THE INVISIBLE CHURCH: IDEALISM AND ABSTRACT ART.

Two events, apparently distant one from the other and without any direct link between them, but nevertheless strictly connected by a common spiritual legacy, constitute the subject of this paper. The first one, took place in 1971, when a very special «ecumenical chapel» opened its doors to the public. It is known under the name of «Rothko Chapel», due to the general project, undertaken by the painter Mark Rothko. Since that time, it has become one of the most precious artworks that represent the contemporary religious aesthetics. The black Rothko’s paintings, the Greek-cross building designed by the architect Philip Johnson, the Broken Obelisk of the artist Barnett Newman standing right out of the Chapel and the music composed for this ambient by the composer Morton Feldman, have replaced what traditionally has been called an «imago templi»; but contrary to all Christian tradition they represent (literally) no-thing. The second event, took place in 1795, when two young friends, Hegel and Schelling, were making a kind of oath under the sign of an Invisible Church, actualizing an ambiguous concept that, even if rooted in the Holy Scriptures, it had been condemned for its consequences as heretical. The relationship between these two events is given by contemporary art historians which have established that modern abstract painting, from a formal point of view, is rooted in the Romantic tradition. With this paper I would like to contribute to the establishment of this connection, not only by formal means, but by showing a common spiritual attitude towards images. Christianity, essentially figurative in its religious aesthetics, has always had to deal with the Jewish prohibition of image-making. This difficulty has been inherited to contemporary debates in which artist with classical readings and education, often of Jewish origins but active in Christian societies, try to create a new kind of art, above all traditions and free of dogmas. According to my suggestion, Rothko Chapel should be considered as the realization of a fragile balance in which both «aniconism» and «need of images» have simultaneously sublated their one-sidedness, producing a higher spiritual stage. Thus, such a chapel would not be a simple space where all religions could only meet and undertake a dialog, but should be considered as something more surprising: a unique realization of what logically appears as a pure contradiction: the realization of an Imago Templi for an Invisible Church.

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 by Jed Perl

Reviewed by: Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 by Jed Perl Jean McGarry (bio) Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, (Knopf, 2017), 704 pp. Almost from the moment the lights went out in the Fogg Museum, several decades ago, and something marvelous lit up on the screen, I was smitten. This was a venture into a yearlong survey of art. The experience wasn't only a plunge into whatever dazzled on the screen—from Bodhisattva [End Page 610] to Jackson Pollock, Fellini to Orson Welles—it was the reading list, which exposed me to the eye-opening analyses of Heinrich Wolfflin, Edwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim, and many more. The popular course was taught by the entire History of Art department, with each specialist rolling in to talk about his favorite period and (male) artist of that period: Van Eyck, da Vinci, Poussin, Corot, Picasso. The lectures were absorbing; they pinpointed the formal qualities and methods that distinguished each era in what was assumed to be the march of pure progress in the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was the most influential course I'd ever taken, but it wasn't, strictly speaking, my first encounter. Art—in reproduction—was part of everyday life in an old-fashioned Catholic upbringing, one where the visual surrounding was enriched by "holy" cards, month's minds, mortuary remembrances that, as often as not, featured a miniature of an Italian masterpiece: Madonnas, Crucifixions, saints and martyrs. In grammar school, pupils took dictation in the form of brief visual analysis of, say Madonna of the Chair, or Light of the World. Even then, I was mystified, and somehow gratified, by the terms perspective, chiaroscuro, light source, addressed to the picture on a postcard. Part of this exercise was practice in penmanship (via the Palmer Method), so there was a link between the painter's application of eye and hand, and the child's. Although later on, on the basis of that single course, I'd write my college thesis on Hieronymus Bosch and take a trial of graduate school in art history, with the promise of rigorous study of art (never, alas, to be completed), it was the early initiation that led to a lifetime of pleasurable reading of monographs and surveys of painting and sculpture. I wasn't so much a museum-goer as a devotee of writing about art. A second important stage in the process was a dive into the work of John Ruskin, especially Modern Painters, a work composed in defense of the mystifyingly vaporous landscapes and seascapes of J. M. W. Turner. A childhood with no toys or friends, and the daily task of memorizing a passage from the Bible, left the young Ruskin with nothing to do in his idle hours but study the trees, plants, rocks, and clouds he found in the back garden. By the time he was 29, and himself a talented draughtsman, he had acquired the expertise (and pure moxie) to take on the entire history of Western landscape painting in order to make the case for what the greatest painters had gotten wrong. A born pedant, Ruskin spent half of this hefty volume defining what nature really looked like: a wave, branch, a mountainous ravine. For Ruskin, the writer and the lawyer for the defense, this was a task of the eye, mind, and lexicon, because, in addition to seeing straight, he had to find words to impress upon the reader the subtle differences separating beauty and accuracy from the laughably misshapen. Which is a very roundabout—and I hope not too egocentric—way of saying that, with a solid amateur's appreciation for the art of writing about art, I found the first volume of what is to be a two-part biography of Alexander Calder a thrilling read, remarkable as Modern Painters—not [End Page 611] just for clearing the stage for the arrival of the genius (although the author, Jed Perl, does that), but for giving the reader the keenest, most delectable sense of what artistic creation must feel like. Not a summary, not a guess, not from the horse...

Issues and development trends of modern Icon painting

The article is concerned with topical issues and problem points of modern icon painting: understanding meanings and the mission of the icon in society, position of the Church, issue of the canon in icon painting, commercialization of the icon painter’s work, etc. The main tasks of modern icon painting have been determined. For example, ability to find a harmony of artistic creation and icon painting canon; mastering the icon painting language and icon painting thinking; development of new iconography. Today, development trends of icon painting are seen in the return and preservation of the icon painting canon culture and in the interaction of the state and the Church in terms of the spiritual and professional education of modern icon painters. Today, an example of such an interaction is the joint icon painting department of the Rostov Art College named after M.B. Grekov and the Don Theological Seminary.

Jeff Wall’s Politics of Representation of the Other

This article explores the photographic work of North American artist Jeff Wall. While his photographic work has been much discussed in terms of aesthetics and composition highlighting his methodological appropriation of modernist painters such as Eduard Manet and Piet Mondrian, the political aspect of his work remains to be investigated. This article especially unpacks the complicated dialectical relationship between the formal aesthetics and the political nature of his works by visiting his photographic work in the context of contemporary debates on the contradiction and conflicts between aesthetics and politics in photographic form. Ultimately, this article argues that Wall’s photograph acquires its political meaning by problematizing the reified social representation of the other in a way in which the materiality and/or otherness of the photographic object is registered within the photographic frame and by representing the violence of the social representation and the un-representability of the object/other.

Alexander Benois and the Artistic Heritage of France of the 18th Century

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение» — научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, обобщающий результаты исследований ученых всего мира в различных областях искусства, включая музыковедение, культурологию и художественное образование.

The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky's Art Museum in Nukus as an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality

This article serves as an introduction to the publication of archival documents related to the first two decades of existence of the Nukus Museum of Art. Situated amid a desert, Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpak autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR, became home to the art collection that is said to be the second largest collection of Russian modernist art in the world today. The museum was created in 1966 on the initiative of Igor Savitsky–an artist and art collector, who moved from Moscow to Uzbekistan after World War II. The figure of Savitsky and the history of the museum that bears his name today are surrounded by myths, because of both the uniqueness of the collection of Russian avant-garde art procured by a Soviet state museum and the scarcity of information about this initiative that was hitherto available to scholars. How was it possible for a private individual to create a new state museum, why did Karakalpak applied folk art and works of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde become part of a single museum collection, and how did Moscow-based modernist paintings end up in Central Asia? These are some of the questions addressed in this article. As a first step toward the proper analysis of Savitsky's story as substantiated by historical documents, this introduction to their publication draws a map of the available sources. It also identifies additional contexts and stories in need of further research.

A Novel Method for Emotion Extraction From Paintings Based on Luscher’s Psychological Color Test: Case Study Iranian-Islamic Paintings

Paintings evoke certain emotions in the viewers. Colors, shape, texture, and many other factors affect the feeling conveyed by paintings, but colors seem to have a stronger effect due to a century-long study of color-emotion association in various fields of psychology, art, and color science. There are many color-emotion theories and most of them have been implemented, however, the Luscher Color Test is untouched amongst them. Based on several reasons, discussed in detail inside the paper, we believe this theory can cover problems in this domain of emotion extraction. The main motivation for choosing the Luscher test was that this method is designed for personality and mood analysis and it can better study abstract paintings. In this paper, a set of paintings from Iranian-Islamic cultural heritage is chosen as a dataset. We have proposed the L-EEP method based on Culture Technology (CT) concept to extract emotions from paintings with image processing techniques and psychology knowledge. This method extracts specific colors from paintings and by performing the Luscher test automatically, is able to determine eight emotions. For this matter, paintings are assessed in two moods: 1. The full extent of the painting 2. Cropped interest area of the painting that attracts more attention. Then, the color palette which is extracted colors ordered based on their coverage extent enters search engine. The search engine performs the searching process in the 3D knowledge base of Luscher color-emotion layers to extract relative values of emotions in both scenarios. For the evaluation of the results, three steps were taken. First, we compared the output results of ancient Persian painting with literature and text of their background stories. Then a viewer evaluation is done to compare the results with human viewpoint. Finally, a set of modern abstract paintings peer-rated in the IAPS standard system to further examine the proposed method. The results of the three forms of evaluation indicate the applicability of the L-EEP approach.

Visual Position and Juxtaposition: An Analytical Study of Liberty Leading the People and Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle

This paper explores the idea of romantic and modern painting with the reference of Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People” and Jackson Pollock’s painting “Moon Woman Cuts the Circle”. Both painters representing different era, portray different styles, background, color, tempo, and textures in their painting. Delacroix’s painting expresses inner emotions and realistic world. His painting is emotional, it seems to be natural and exotic. He has used arches, sculptures, and gray color dominantly. In contrast to Delacroix, Pollock’s painting is experimental. It has abstraction and two-dimensionality. It looks rational that represents the frustrated and chaotic world in abstract form. In this sense, Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People” represents the liberty, equality, and fraternity. A woman personifying the concept and the goddess of liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen men holding the flag of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Jackson Pollock’s painting “Moon Woman Cuts the Circle” reflects the modern world representing woman the symbol of peace, color tempo suggests the domination of violence and bloodshed. The weapon shows the domination of the power which is violent. Delacroix’s painting suggests the hope of change and bright future but Pollock seems to be pessimistic in his painting.

Decoding visual and acoustic signals: Epistemological uncertainty in Tom Stoppard’s 'After Magritte' and 'Artist Descending a Staircase'

The paper discusses two plays of Tom Stoppard, After Magritte and Artist Descending a Staircase, from the perspective of the uncertainty pertaining to the possibility of perceiving and adequately describing the reality. The plays employ intertextual references to two modern painters whose names are included in the titles of the dramas and who are known to have experimented in their artistic ventures. In two series of pictures, The Key of Dreams and The Use of Words, Ma-gritte dealt with the difficulties connected with representing reality in pictorial and linguistic terms, while Beauchamp tried to present not only three dimensionality but also movement on the two dimensional canvas. Apart from referring to art, Stoppard’s pieces are also a kind of who-done-it, with each of them trying to solve a mystery. After Magritte discloses the solution of the identity of the strange figure the characters saw in the street and also logically explains the strange opening and closing stage images. Being a radio play, Artist Descend-ing a Staircase, teaches the audience to decode aural signals and demonstrates that, similar to objects of visual perception, they may be decoded in different ways. The two dramas discussed thus deal with the relative quality of reality, whose perception and description depends on individual sensitivity of a concrete person.

De Chirico and the United Kingdom (c.1916–1978)

Along with Giorgio Morandi and Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico is one of the few modern Italian artists whose name is familiar to the British museum-going public. Like them, he is a figure whose importance transcends national boundaries, and whose enigmatic work is widely recognized as possessing universal significance. In fact, de Chirico was an international artist in every sense: born in Greece, he spent extended periods of time not only in Italy but also in Germany, France and the United States. Now, the artist’s less intimate – although highly significant – relationship with the United Kingdom has been exhaustively chronicled for the first time in Victoria Noel-Johnson’s lengthy study. An immense work, it reveals that de Chirico’s reputation in the UK as one of Italy’s pre-eminent modern painters is nothing new, and how this status was cemented through his representation in over eighty exhibitions in Britain during the course of his extraordinary career.

Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans (review)

Reviewed by: Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans Chad Trevitte Victoria Evans, Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. £75.00. 208 pages. In the interviews Douglas Sirk granted at the end of his career, his early experience as a painter and theatrical director in Weimar Germany allowed him to augment his new reputation as a cinematic artist as well as a progressive social critic. While later studies have challenged any consistent view of him as a subversive auteur, many of the best have continued to combine aesthetic, historical, and political approaches in order to reassess his films within a fuller context. A recent book by Victoria Evans, which largely explores how Sirk’s melodramas are informed by key trends in modernist painting and architecture, offers a valuable contribution to Sirk scholarship by establishing its own links between the visual design of his films and their broader social and political dimensions. The book is organized in three parts, each containing two chapters. The first two chapters evaluate Sirk’s cinematography with reference to painting, with the opening chapter offering an alternative to ironic, Brechtian readings of the director’s signature use of internal framing. Here Evans first reviews Michael Fried’s distinction between “absorptive” and “theatrical” modes of pictorial representation, noting how the former parallels the customary view of melodrama as fostering an unreflective, immersive sort of audience identification, whereas the latter parallels the more distanced critical reflection associated with Brecht’s “alienation effect.” Against this backdrop, Evans then argues that a third mode drawn from Austrian art historian [End Page 61] Alois Riegl—“attentiveness”—overcomes Fried’s dichotomy by allowing a more balanced, dynamic reciprocity between these impulses in the viewer. For Evans, it is this third mode that does fuller justice to the nuanced effects of Sirk’s compositions, and her sustained analysis of the homecoming scene in All I Desire offers one of the finest examples of these effects. In the second chapter Evans turns to the influence of expressionist painting in Sirk’s color design with, among other things, a rather intriguing comparison between Wassily Kandinsky’s color theories and the director’s Technicolor palette in Magnificent Obsession. While Sirk did not name Kandinsky among his artistic influences, the painter’s association of blue with spiritual transformation and white with spiritual rebirth emerges in pivotal moments of Sirk’s film, and Kandinsky’s theosophical background is shown to have its own counterpart in the numinous transcendentalism of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel. Evans explores these affinities within a broader discussion of how Sirk’s expressive color design responds to contemporaneous debates about modern art in the United States, essentially providing a syncretic combination of European high culture and American mass culture that can also be seen in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris. The next two chapters more strongly emphasize social and political themes. Chapter Three, “The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture,” draws on Ben Singer’s analysis of cultural anxieties towards technology in post-WWI melodrama, with The Tarnished Angels serving as the fullest reflection of this theme in Sirk. While Sirk initially struggled to understand the motives of Robert Stack’s self-destructive stunt pilot in the studio script, Evans argues that the director would have found a familiar analog in Ernst Jünger’s cult of the mechanized modern warrior—a proto-fascist vision of perpetually mobilized, technologically advanced masculinity that arose in reaction against the decadence of Weimar culture. Seen in this light, the film steers away from the Faulkner novel’s tragic romanticism, offering in its place a more grounded, humane rebuke of Stack’s neurotic addiction to the euphoria he once felt as a World War I fighter pilot. In the following chapter, Evans offers a comparison of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Imitation of Life with Sirk’s 1959 remake, with particular attention to how the racial divide is reflected in their settings. The key difference explored here is Sirk’s distinctive counterpoint between urban and suburban housing, which Evans situates within the social history of post-New Deal government and commercial policies...

My Understanding of Manuj Babu and his Art

Manuj Babu Mishra (1936-2018) was a modern artist who is mainly known for his paintings and his drawings. Nepali art critic Narayan Bahadur Singh as early as 1976 mentioned about his multiple skills in art. But Mishra was also one of those painters who ushered in an era of modern consciousness shared equally by painters and poets. His contemporaries some of whom are still painting though on a smaller scale, made experiments with their arts in modernist style. An era of distorting forms, breaking the fine figurality and using flatness by shunning the illusion of three dimensional shapes rather than representative forms was seen in Nepali modernist paintings too. Manuj Babu Mishra adopted a method of using figurality in paintings that used semi surrealistic and abstract paintings. Mishra was trained in Dhaka of the then East Pakistan in the late sixties of the last century. Despite his political statements occasionally, he was basically an artist. He was a peaceful man behind the hurricanes of hard times he created. He was also a portraitist who believed that the portrait of a person is also the portrait of the world outside him or her. He had said that to me when he was drawing my portrait.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ РАЗВИТИЯ ЖАНРА «ЖЭНЬ-У» В XX-XXI ВВ.

The article considers the specificity of ‘rénwù’ genre in the modern Chinese visual art. The information presented by the author supplements and broadens the existing conceptions of the Chinese figurative painting of the XX-XXI centuries. By the example of the works of modern painters well known in China but practically unknown to the Russian audience the author analyses stylistic and technical changes, which influenced the artistic-expressive language of the genre painting. The analysis indicated radical re-evaluation of human’s role, strong emphasis on individual and his/her feelings, which have been neglected in the Chinese visual art for a long period.

Abstract Expressionism Techniques in John Ashbery’s "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

John Ashbery (1927-) is one of the most prominent postmodern poets in America who is known for his innovative techniques. He continues to be the most controversial poet, as he disregards the laws of logic in picturing reality. Ashbery’s style is deeply influenced by the experimental methods of modern painting. He has been mostly associated with Abstract Expressionism that signifies the great progress in the European avant-garde visual art. The Abstract expressionists often choose to present subjects in graceful distortion, rather than attempt to record life with absolute accuracy. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is typical of ekphrastic poetry. It is inspired by a painting which has the same title by the sixteenth-century Italian painter, Francesco Mazzola. The painting is not a realistic portrait of the painter, for it is deliberately distorted as it would be in a convex reflection. Ashbery unfolds the essence of postmodern poetry which illustrates the inability of the forms of language to capture the reality beyond the mental image. Like the Abstract Expressionists, he makes of his poems a depiction of the real workings of the mind which is liberated from all the constraints. Furthermore, the poem is a verbal depiction of the painting; it assumes and transforms the inner voice of the portrait.

The Bay of Marseille, Viewed from L'Estaque, 2010

The fishing village of L'Estaque is a few kilometers northwest of Marseille. At the beginning of the 20th century, L'Estaque was the cradle of modern painting. Artists continued to be drawn there for 6 decades, between 1860 and 1920. Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism were all developed by artists who resided in L'Estaque. Paul Cezanne and Georges Braque are the best known—Cezanne for “The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque” (c. 1885) (1 …

Trzy kroki w stronę obrazów. Pierre Bonnard i percepcyjne opóźnienie.

The essay is an analysis of three interpretations of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings offered by Jean Clair, John Elderfield, and Yves-Alain Bois. Their approaches are crucial in the context of the revaluation Bonnard’s works and his place in the history of modern painting, which has been continuing since the 1980s. Today’s scholars have been interested mostly in his late works from 1920-1947. At that time the artist created a multidimensional pictorial synthesis which addressed the most advanced dilemmas which appeared in the first half of the 20th century. The critical opinions analyzed in the essay, referring to physiology and the psychology of perception, the cognitive conditions of visual perception, and specific philosophical traditions, stem from individual visual experience and demonstrate significant tensions. Taking the painting as a starting point triggers differences in interpretation not just at the level of theoretical discourse, but in respect to visualization itself. Bonnard’s works significantly program the process of visual perception – grasping the changing rhythm of relation between the center and periphery and moving toward fixations scattered in the visual field. The specific composition of paintings makes the spectator deconcentrate; it can be grasped in an act of perception which extends in time. Such “delay” of perception means that Bonnard’s paintings are a challenge to the gestalt psychology which prevails in the analytical practice of art history. The unique quality of Bonnard’s works, based on the coexistence of the rhythms of organization and disorder,shows no superior coherence of the gestalt. They establish an “inconclusive” relation between the part and the whole, which results in continuing deference and delay of the integration of motifs and elements of the pictorial field. The discussed episode in Bonnard’s art’s reception confirms a belief that “he is not a painter for those in a hurry. The phenomenon of the perceptive delay seems to be significantly connected with the delay in discovering such qualities by art historians.

Prehistoric techniques for modern painting: Asger Jorn’s archaeological picture books

Prehistoric techniques for modern painting: Asger Jorn’s archaeological picture books

Determining The Presence of Photocatalytic Titanium White Pigments via Embedded Paint Sample Staining: A Proof of Principle

ABSTRACTTwentieth century paints often contain titanium dioxide and zinc oxide based white pigments that can range from photostable to highly photocatalytic. Photocatalytic pigments can cause the degradation of paint upon UV exposure, whereas photostable pigments may be benign or can protect paintings from degradation. Hence, knowing whether or not a pigment is photocatalytic is of high importance for risk assessment and the subsequent decision making process concerning storage and exposure conditions of objects. Here we present a proof of principle, focused on titanium white paints, for an easy-to-use and low-tech application of a commercial photocatalytic activity indicator ink (PAII) on embedded paint samples or cross sections. This test determines, qualitatively, if a photocatalytic pigment is present in a white paint sample. The PAII paint sample staining application shows an obvious color change, within five minutes of UV irradiation, for paint samples containing photocatalytic pigments. A microscope with a camera and a UV source are the only necessary equipment for the application of this method. A quantitative image processing protocol is also proposed as an extension of the staining method by applying open source software analysis to measure the color change using photographs. The test was evaluated on reference paints with well-characterized pigments and applied on samples from modern paintings by Piet Mondriaan, Robert Ryman, and Lucebert, indicating the presence of harmful photocatalytic pigments in these cases. The novel application of a commercial ink on paint samples offers a simple test, not just for assessment of photocatalytic activity of titanium white pigments, but which may in future be applied for the detection of photoactive forms of zinc white and other potentially harmful semiconductor pigments in art objects.

The Early Career of Yamaguchi Katsuhiro: Vitrine Series in Historical Perspective

Abstract This article seeks to enhance our understanding of Japanese postwar art by focusing on the early career of Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, one of the major members of the famous 1950s avant garde group Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop). This article also sheds light on the unique spatial environment of the artist’s house. His father had a two-story modernist study space built as an extension that was designed by the modernist painter Tōgō Seiji in the 1930s. This ultramodern house extension was a major influence on the work of the young Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Another influence on Katsuhiro were postwar American art journals, which were full of information about new trends in the West and available to young Japanese artists through the Center of Information and Education Section established by the Americans.