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Monday, November 26
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 11:22 AM PST
 Tissot loved the Thames and its waterfronts -- which offered him endless opportunities for the sort of spatial drama that he reveled in. The example above is especially dynamic, with its small boat moving forward into a space in front of the picture plane as the taller ships lead our eye backward into the space of the painting, reinforcing the sense of movement. The result is a highly cinematic image. Saturday, November 17
AN IMAGE FROM THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 Nov 2007 12:33 AM PST
 Ken Burns says this photograph is his favorite among all the still images used in his documentary The War. It really is beautiful -- the composition, emphasizing the deep space, reminds one of Victorian academic paintings. Tissot and Alma-Tadema reveled in compositions like this:  Thursday, November 15
A ZORN FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 Nov 2007 12:21 PM PST
 Like Renoir, Anders Zorn seemed to be intoxicated by female flesh -- the sensual surface of his canvases seems to be a sexual response to the female nude, whose aura radiates outward to affect her surroundings, which take on her sensual properties, as in the painting above. The whole world seems made of flesh. Renoir said, "I paint with my penis," and the same can almost be said of Zorn.  Renoir's world sometimes seems about to melt in the sexual delirium but Zorn kept a stricter control over his draftsmanship and his sense of modeling, of space -- he was more academic in that sense. The tension between the sensual surface and the precise rendering of forms makes Zorn's work more interesting to me than the late Renoir nudes, which always seem to threaten to dissolve into goo (see above.) They become more and more about Renoir's mood and process, less and less about real women. Wednesday, November 14
WINSOR MCCAY AND THE CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 Nov 2007 11:05 AM PST
 The influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail. Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation. Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies, comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to make room in the galleries for the junk creations of "modern art". With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)  New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the slideshow suggests.] If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my passing observations in the essays collected here. |
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