avant-garde anachronism in old paintings

thread for old times paintings that prefigure much later developments in art

(via holbein)

Guess I'll be the first to mention Bosch.

http://everydayweirdness.com/m/20090103/fullscreen.jpg

huge influence on c 21st gifwave auteur 'Z S' iirc

need to see the full triptych tho

http://www.computus.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/the-garden-of-earthly-delights.jpg

upside-down tomatocrotch in pt 2 is 'a thing'

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/James_Abbot_McNeill_Whistler_012.jpg/446px-James_Abbot_McNeill_Whistler_012.jpg

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874), by James Abbott McNeill Whistler

About which the critic John Ruskin wrote:

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

haven't seen that before, awesome

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Francisco_de_Zurbar%C3%A1n_026.jpg

zurbaran another of those weirdly ~intense~ baroque bros

that is incredible.

i think that whister is in glasgow. ruskin's huff is amazing.

jmw turner an obvious candidate for this thread but i gotta see if i can find something beyond the clasixxx

Wiki says that that Whistler is in Detroit, but I'm sure it was in the Hunterian at one point?

pretty sure they have a very similar one.

El Greco is another obvious nom, also Goya:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Goya_Dog.jpg/338px-Goya_Dog.jpg

i love those long, penumbral portraits in the hunterian, where the ladies' frocks seem to vanish back into the darkness that looms behind them

that goya is amazing.

& this caravaggio is so strange.

http://blog.scuolaer.it/ImmaginiBlog/745/conversioneSanPaolo.jpg

thread subtitle: "old art that seems to affirm contemporary taste"

idk if whistler's is an anachronism/old!

dude was just out there

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Rain_Steam_and_Speed_the_Great_Western_Railway.jpg

Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844), by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Too bad I couldn't find an exemplar:

Somewhere beyond the perfomances of Chang Tsao were those of the late T'ang eccentrics, who practices techniques every bit as outlandish as thos of the New York Action Painters of the 1950's and 1960's. One man painted with his hair dipped in ink: another danced to music, like Mathieu, facing in one direction and wielding his brush in another. A T'ang text tells of Wang Mo ("Ink Wang"; fl. 785-805), who would get drunk and then, laughing and singing, spatter ink onto the silk and stamp it with his feet and smear it with his hands. Another, like Jackson Pollock, poured ink and colour onto strips of silk that covered the floor, than hand someone sit on a sheet, which he dragged round and round, making great swirls and swashes...
Of course, none of the works of Ink Wang and his like have survived. They were in any case always considered freakish and not to be imitated: moreover, it is impossible to imagine a later student actually copying them.

idg what this thread is for. is it "weird" paintings from "the past"?

"yes"

“Clearly, the discontinuity [the founding art historians] sense is not the familiar break signified by Manet and impressionism; rather, it is a question of why painters as diverse as Ingres, Overbeck, Courbet, Delaroche, Meissonier, von Kobell, Millais, Gleyre, Friedrich, Cabanel, Gerome, and Delacroix (to name only a few) together incarnated a surface of mimetic and figural representation apparently similar to but disquietingly unlike what had preceded it.”

Jonathan Crary, Modernity and the Problems of the Observer, p. 22.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/ingres/ingres.broglie.jpg
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)
Pauline Eleanore de Galard de Brassac de Bearn, Princesse de Broglie
1853 (130 Kb); Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 x 35 3/4 in; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

http://www.stellamaris-edu.net/divers/images/Ingres_Louis_Francois_Bertin.jpeg
Ingres
Louis-François Bertin, 1832
Oil on canvas; 45 5/8 x 37 3/8 in. (116 x 95 cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris (R.F. 1071)

kevin do you have a background in history of art?

interesting stuff

'apparently similar to but disquietingly unlike' just as relevant a category itt as yr bosch/turner/etc

There's a lot of stuff that would pass for surrealism, the Ernst collage novels maybe, in emblem books, allegorical frontispieces (Vico's New Science), hermetic treatises. This kind of thing:

http://longstreet.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83542d51e69e20128756fb66f970c-500wi

Bosch as per upthread and Durer in eg Melancolia the masters of this stuff I guess.

Looking at a lot of things together by some super-specialised Dutch Little Masters makes it look like they're in an abstraction-shapes-repetition theory-world: see Saenredam's church interiors.

xxpost No, cinema. But cinema folk read Crary. And he helped pinpoint why I've always found Ingres disturbing and even proto-photorealist.

http://i.imgur.com/0PoOS.jpg

melchior lorck 1526/27 – after 1583

Ah was going to post that, it is an amazing image. My boring side stopped me – told me he drew a tortoise and then drew the Veneto (or vice versa) – he just wanted to use rest of the sheet. But my boring side not thinking in the spirit of this thread.

yeah he is really interesting -- danish draughtsman in the employ of various travelling european aristos ends up briefly imprisoned in istanbul, then works for sultans

i think i have a theoretical objection to the premise of this thread but im not sure what it is yet

The art doesn't quite do it for me - the big m Warner article in the LRB got me excited to look at him but then most of what I saw was a bit disappointing - like he's a fine observer trying to grasp a strange world, and does have an interesting (bit northern, stiff) style, but I was expecting Piranesan gothic nightmare machines, or more hypertortoises.

(xp)

Turner was one of the first painters I thought of:

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/turner/i/snwstorm.jpg
http://0.tqn.com/d/arthistory/1/0/C/i/jmwt_mma_16.jpg

Oh weird -- two very different looking photos of what appear to be the same painting. Anyway:

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/turner/i/ulysses-detail.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/turner/i/deluge.jpg

I still don't even get what this is. I mean this: idg what this thread is for. is it "weird" paintings from "the past"?

Is it just like painters/ings that were "weird" before being "weird" was in vogue? Also anachronism in the title is bugging me because most of these aren't actually anachronistic.

i think i have a theoretical objection to the premise of this thread but im not sure what it is yet

― max, Tuesday, November 30, 2010 11:35 AM Bookmark

Tracer's subtitle: "old art that seems to affirm contemporary taste" makes more sense than the thread title

Yes, I guess it would.

I don't know what's hard to understand about "prefigure much later developments in art" tbh.

Piranesan gothic nightmare machines, or more hypertortoises.

― portrait of velleity (woof), Tuesday, 30 November 2010 16:41 (1 minute ago)

ha yeah, kinda

but i liked his prospect of constantinople, and various other sketches that seem strangely restrained for their time, a kind of neutrality, tempted to say a non-representational representation but i'd be going waaaay over my paygrade there

http://i.imgur.com/253IR.jpg

Oh weird -- two very different looking photos of what appear to be the same painting. Anyway:

― ball (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 30 November 2010 16:43 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's when you know JMW was going faaaar out into abstraction

Milo, I didn't read the first post tbh. Thread title was just misleading because I was looking for examples of anachronism within the "old paintings" and not in the larger sense. It's clear now and was probably just me misreading it.

xxxp

Oh, nice, that is something. Maybe I'll try to look again without the same expectations. And find a book rather using gis.

there kindof is nothing but a theoretical objection wrt this thread. The past was fn weird. Idg y modernism has some strange license on weirdness. Modernism raided plenty of styles of non-western and pre-renaissance art but its only in the context of 20th century modernism that avant garde makes sense as an ideology, that is the violent break w/ tradition as a means of progress. If you reframe these things as "avant garde anachronism" you basically fetishize the outre elements as an ahistorical prefigurement of the conclusions that art history has retrospectively drawn.

It might be interesting to note that there are discontinuities in the perspective of Ingres paintings that has led some viewers to think that either he worked from sources that used lensed based drawing styles or he used lenses or concave mirrors himself. To be like "omg he is inventing photorealism" completely misunderstands Ingres and photorealism.

also, most of this stuff is presumably pre-art-history, that is pre wolflinn and artists did not conceptualise art history in the same linear chronologies that we do now (therefor break w/ tradition made a lot less sense as a historical move)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qY6O6h8S_Ho/TEDT5sPRjGI/AAAAAAAAFT4/iFg1b49vwZs/s1600/ancient_beekeeping_bruegel.jpg

Idg y modernism has some strange license on weirdness

evidently doesn't, hence this thread

title will appear quasi challopsy to history of art bros (itself obv an anachronism in applying echt modern rhetoric to the pre-modern)

first posts gives a fairly liberal purview that ppl seem to understand, idk

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit16/OT7.jpeg

vasari was a p linear-chronological guy istr

x-posts <3 Bruegel

yah but vasari is pretty damn impt in that regard

The Fouquet has some intense saturation going on. Wiki: It also happens to be a portrait of Charles VII's mistress Agnès Sorel.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/AgnesSorel11.jpeg

wait sorry it says "paintings" in thread title

I'll save these for somewhere else.

― Stop Non-Erotic Cabaret (Abbbottt), Saturday, 4 December 2010 06:05 (12 hours ago)

nah there's loads of lithographs etc too

post what you like

have read about knorpelgroske elsewhere but cannae remember

some nice additions itt

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcaj0aiOwx1qd3bkvo1_500.jpg

Nicolas de Largilliè (1656-1746) Study of Hands

http://madamepickwickartblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/giotto7.jpg

http://photos.travellerspoint.com/165200/Gargoyle.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Ducreux1.jpg

lol u cunt

that's fantastic.

well played

this isn't a painting but

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B1KATOtCMAA7W3V.png

http://i.imgur.com/ljty4UJl.jpg

detail from "A Bacchanalian Piece. Sir Thomas Samwell and his Friends" by Philippe Mercier (c. 1733)

very Facebook.

http://i.imgur.com/ljty4UJl.jpg

Thought this thread was gonna be about that Caravaggio with a Campbell's soup can in it

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Artemisia_Gentileschi_-_Self-Portrait_as_a_Lute_Player.JPG/956px-Artemisia_Gentileschi_-_Self-Portrait_as_a_Lute_Player.JPG

It is a selfie, btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi

http://uploads8.wikiart.org/images/matthias-gr%C3%BCnewald/the-resurrection-of-christ-right-wing-of-the-isenheim-altarpiece.jpg

LOVING The Isenheim Altarpiece, check out Super Saiyan Jesus here.

http://uploads6.wikiart.org/images/matthias-gr%C3%BCnewald/st-anthony-visiting-st-paul-the-hermit-in-the-desert-left-wing-of-the-isenheim-altar-1516.jpg

Some proto Frazetta, same Altarpiece.

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l28k25qCxb1qb6k80o1_500.jpg

i'm missing the connection. fantasy gothic?

The landscape behind them mainly.

Not really but I wanted to post this somewhere.

too real pic.twitter.com/coNZZlYlN9

— Farah Rose Smith (@farahrosesmith) March 1, 2018

for real tho, some og sorcerers claimed to be able to send sound/images through the air or communicate across the globe instantly or know other's thoughts without speaking to them. these magical things have now become daily routine; we all do these to the point of mundanity.

you know those old alchemists were fucked up on opium and mercury. imo drugs + technology = the future. same thing happened in the 60s with home computers/the internet.

olmec sculpture, just on tv

https://uncoveredhistory.com/images/W0354-Villahermosa-Museo-de-Antropologia-Jaguar-On-Wheels-500x500.jpg

can't find a better picture online but the view of this from the front looks like mickey mouse as re-imagined by radionhead. dated between 300 and 900ad.

good revive and excellent thread

i saw that documentary yesterday, Janina Ramirez? yes amazing but i couldn't help thinking "what if it wasn't really a toy at all?"

Do these count?

https://live.staticflickr.com/5289/5333453778_c4c2ff2798_z.jpg

XXp toself
Apart from the offtopic dali shite that adam b posted of course!

> Janina Ramirez

Goth historian, yes. the three episodes were all excellent.

they've found dozens of other examples of wheeled toys, spread around the place - https://uncoveredhistory.com/mesoamerica/wheeled-toys/

another example of early art that is striking (i've posted this in another thread before, i think) - very early chinese sculptures found in Sanxingdui that predate and are unlike anything else that follows. also, aquaphibian.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-ancient-artefacts-sanxingdui-have-rewritten-chinese-history-001495

https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Sanxingdui-artefacts-china.jpg

https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/bronze-heads-Sanxingdui-china.jpg

more on a similar vein, this statue of a robot is from 2000bc (Valdivia it says, not sure if that's a place or a race or a person but there are others if you Google)

https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2018/CKS/2018_CKS_16217_0667_000(valdivia_stone_figure_circa_2300-2000_bc).jpg

ancient aliens assemble

btw tho i <3 nahk and miss his contribution and acknowledge the ferocious excellent of many of the images on this thread the thinking behind its title is unsatisfactory

(took me a while to find because I was looking for 'anachronistic')

tl;dr my argument = "whiggism for futurists"

whatever happened in older historical periods of painting/sculpture are not really an "anachronism" are they? like african art influences on cubism, turner's influence on impressionism to make 2 simple examples.

i mean that sculptor who did screaming heads and that 18th C portraitist who painted self portraits of himself pulling silly faces are both unusual for their day and can both seem "modern" in unexpected ways BUT the notion that there's an iron line of progress that all can recognise at a particular and some can knowingly jump ahead of is a bad notion promulgated a bit too much by art history 101 and thus unsatisfactory captions in museums and galleries

(a particular = a particular date)

plax absolutely covered this at the time

but as a thread for looking at diverse pictures speaking to each other why not

In the Turneresque "stuff that verged on abstraction before abstraction per se was rilly cool" category I like to include Thomas Wilmer Dewing

https://uploads6.wikiart.org/00114/images/thomas-dewing/the-lute-1904-1.jpg!Large.jpg

https://www.wikiart.org/en/rembrandt/the-apostle-bartholomew-1661

If you saw this in the gallery without any info, what era would you have said it was from? Me - 1914

https://www.wikiart.org/en/rembrandt/the-apostle-bartholomew-1661

plax otm throughout thread yes

in nakh's defence you maybe probably actually do need the nudge of "anachronism" to dig out what you consider "weird" in um "pre-modern" art = "things i totally didn't expect to see"?

except then you have to be all the more alert for it not to turn into "chariots of the gods"-type misconception = "if you didn't expect this maybe the ignorant fool is you von so-called daniken"

(no shade intended koogs the stone age robot is excellent)

lol @ me recapping the entire thread's beef with inadvertent precision, yes i HAVE been on ilx too long

Isn't cultural history in all areas generally the most whiggish of all historical narratives? As practiced I mean, not from necessity.

plax otm yeah, although unmoored weirdness for its own autotelic sake is a distinctly modern flex as far as I can tell. Sorry if the point has already been made, I haven't read the whole thread.

‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610.https://t.co/RuaoBc6DNR

{Photo: @sylviethecamera} pic.twitter.com/qrn9fVyDIT

— Cora Harrington (@lingerie_addict) September 24, 2019

Nice recreation! Brings to mind a few years ago a load of us including emil.y recreating Las Meninas in a Barcelona apartment.

https://www.wga.hu/art/a/arcimbol/4composi/1vertum.jpg

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/jadensadventures/images/a/a4/Vegetable_Gremlin.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160824073044

Sorry, couldn't resist. Carry on...

Rudolf Nikolaevich Baranov — From the height of the port crane (1974) pic.twitter.com/hPqfF6cnHo

— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) June 10, 2024

looks like vermeer vs millennium falcon. is neither of those things.

when in Minnesota, make sure to visit the Museum of Russian Art, which has a large collection of Socialist Realism. https://tmora.org/

pretty sure we've had this before, but i'm not turning on pictures or going through 300 broken links to find it

Portrait of a Girl and her Dog, pen and ink drawing by Jean Jacques Lequeu, ca. 1796.

Available as a print in our online shop: https://t.co/hyDj1faFg5#InternationalDogDay pic.twitter.com/mIxzXfQVUc

— The Public Domain Review (@PublicDomainRev) August 26, 2024