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

http://www.principiosdeconomia.org/EHELP/index_archivos/prehistory/Images/venus-Willendorf.jpghttp://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/lucien-freud.jpg

http://www.abcgallery.com/I/ingres/ingres44.JPG
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Portrait of Madame Moitessier Sitting. 1856. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK.

“The History Painter renders space in general, whereas the Portrait Painter only represents the individual in particular, by consequence, a model often ordinary or full of faults.” (31)

“And while the seated portrait of Madame Moitessier operates at a great remove from ‘history’ – as conceived of as that which takes as its subject the public and the ‘ideal,’ and which is figured compositionally through the deployment of multiple figures – what it helps to illuminate is the degree to which Ingres’s own distinction between history painter and portraitist [quoted above] must be understood as surpassing the question of subject matter.” (51)

Sarah Betzer, “Ingres’s Second Madame Moitessier: ‘Le Brevet du Peintre d’Histoire,” in Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin, eds. Fingering Ingres (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 31-51.

http://static.artbible.info/large/cranach_adameva_1526.jpghttp://www.page291.com/blog/images/tree.jpg

lol

lol am0n

lol - whose is the pic on the right? mcginley?

I literally lold at willendorf/frued

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.

i KNEW i had a theoretical objection, thx

lol sometimes i just want a fight

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.

i KNEW i had a theoretical objection, thx

― max, Tuesday, November 30, 2010 5:05 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark

that's not an objection, per se, you've just used the word 'fetishize' without discrimination is all

art/literary history isn't like real history, in that it always involves some scale of values

people worry too much about being teleological

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcpjbpbOZl1qdu6dfo1_400.jpg
http://madinkbeard.com/blog/wp-content/images/vallotton1.jpg
http://madinkbeard.com/blog/wp-content/images/vallotton2.jpg

"real" history, mayne?

real history doesnt involve a scale of values!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

xxpost OMG! Who is this FV?

F. Volloin?

Ah! Félix Vallotton! Never heard of dude!

people worry too much about being teleological

― rip whiney g weingarten 03/11 never forget (history mayne), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 12:07 PM (2 minutes ago)

except that what you're doing is
a) inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory
b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.
c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.
d) i'm kindof uncomfortable w/ the *need* for finding "historical precedents," somebody recently pointed out how much fun ppl have looking for anal sex refs in chaucer like its a way of being like "hay guy, its ok, ppl have always been doing this" like its a way of excusing yourself. Im a bit sketchy about it as a strategy is what im saying.

Wtf? How have I not heard of this guy?? New favorite painter ever = Félix Vallotton! Prolly outside the purview of this thread but mon dieu:

http://www.canvasreplicas.com/images/Child%20Playing%20Ball%20in%20the%20Park%20Felix%20Vallotton.jpg

xp would you object if the thread title/premise was changed to "surreal pre-20th C. paintings"?

thread should b renamed 'paintings we like'

except that what you're doing is
a) inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory

im not doing it, but also im sure this is what's being done -- ppl are saying look at the cool outlying stuff that maybe influenced later artists

b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.

this is absolutely legitimate behaviour, i think. context-dependent. on an internet thread i think it's ok. and artists don't have to give a fuck about the contemporary meaning of what moves them. and in a way we're all artists.

c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

was gonna go with YOU'RE an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history", but again only in specific contexts do we need to respect the historically specific meaning, and anyway what's wrong with the enlightenment?

d) i'm kindof uncomfortable w/ the *need* for finding "historical precedents," somebody recently pointed out how much fun ppl have looking for anal sex refs in chaucer like its a way of being like "hay guy, its ok, ppl have always been doing this" like its a way of excusing yourself. Im a bit sketchy about it as a strategy is what im saying.

it's an image thread on ilxor.com

vallotin is hella hip right now

not surreal but Pieter Jansz Saenredam did some interesting minimalistic stuff with church interiors in the 1600s

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Pieter_Jansz._Saenredam_006.jpg

I'm not an art student and pretty much clueless ftmp but the perspective in a lot of pre-Renaissance stuff is so strange — it's flattened to the point of there being almost no illusion of depth, but just geometric forms interacting on the same plane.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life (c. 1330)

http://img372.imageshack.us/img372/3892/effects20of20good20govepk0.jpg

i take image threads seriously

Thread has inspired me to Xmas list this book:

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso

it is so weird that you would go to so much trouble to point by point be like "hay, i dont really care about any of these reasons bc this is a message board?"

idk id check it out irl, i remember that book being only okay

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment

Vasari's preface has a fairly teleological view of things, comfortable talking about improvement and decline. Don't know much about art history, but in general Greece/Rome give Renaissance Humanism its yardsticks.

http://www.oilpainting-frame.com/upload1/file-admin/images/new17/Felix%20Vallotton-243742.jpg

this valloton cracks me up

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

gave an answer to this iirc

i think you mean that the works have "historically specific meaning" outside of our own (necessarily post-enlightenment) discourse, and that it can be reconstructed, or s.thing

i don't, and i think, basically, yes, constructing a history means seeing things as contemporaries did not see them, and im ok with that

Mmmm, romano pepper.

xpost

really like this vallotton guy

also plax <3 and yr art historicity but maybe u should ~chill~

The art history of every age is going to reflect the values of its time, obv, and it's going to privilege certain kinds of work and ignore others. When a new paradigm ensues, people find a thrill in discovering art of the past, neglected by the prior dominant mode, that better reflects the new mode of thinking about art. Sometimes in our excitement we overstate the case for some earlier artist being a "modernist" or a "surrealist" or an "impressionist" or a "postmodernist" or whatever. But I also don't agree that we have to be beholden to the context of the work, as long as we recognize the context. There's no reason not to enjoy the outright weirdness of Bosch from a contemporary sensibility even if we know that he had some kind of religious/moral understanding of his paintings. I love looking at medieval Virgin Mary w/Christ Child paintings just for the thrill of the strange and scary baby Jesuses, for example. I mean the whole reason they're in museums to begin with is already out of context, so whatever.

which is why if the thread had been called "bizarro old shit" id be totes cool w/ it

oh, i'm sure there would be some problem.

FWIW the Bosch posted at the top of the thread looks like a really fun party.

it's actually not the thread i was after but it's the thread nakhchivan started.

anyway the thread was a spin off of a discussion about Holbein's The Ambassadors.

http://umlautampersand.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/ambassadors.jpg

ok yeah that is weirdly out of time, its like that charlie chaplin movie where a woman is on her mobile

haha.

can someone explain that painting? that's wild

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

what do you want explained goole?

still tho "flying tortoises! how modern!" like really?

Also it's easy to forget that people in other eras probably enjoyed the shock of the new and strange as well. Curiosities, oddities, novelties -- not entirely contemporary concepts.

ah i could have gone to wiki i guess:

Anamorphic skull
The anamorphic skull

The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work, however, is the skewed skull which is placed in the bottom centre of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into an accurate rendering of a human skull. While the skull is evidently intended as a vanitas or memento mori, it is unclear why Holbein gave it such prominence in this painting. One possibility is that this painting represents three levels: the heavens (as portrayed by the astrolabe and other objects on the upper shelf), the living world (as evidenced by books and a musical instrument on the lower shelf), and death (signified by the skull). It has also been hypothesized that the painting is meant to hang in a stairwell, so that a person walking up the stairs from the painting's left would be startled by the appearance of the skull. A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.[5] Artists often incorporated skulls as a reminder of mortality, or at the very least, death. Holbein may have intended the skulls (one as a gray slash and the other as a medallion on Jean de Dinteville's hat) and the crucifixion in the corner to encourage contemplation of one's impending death and the resurrection.[2]

xp yes, i was going to say, maybe it's not so "wild" -- from my v limited knowledge, the renaissance audience had a thing for novelty and trickery

yah but yr v. unlikely to see something like that done by hand so they seem v. definitely to be lens based. so when you see it its like spotting the millets gleaners wearing casios tho obv it isnt really

Yeah I'm pretty sure dudes been doing drugs and making all kinds of art throughout history, just most of it disappeared. It's not like what made it into the art history museum is what everybody else at the time was doing. That kind of thinking is how people paint themselves into the "there are no new ideas in art" corner.

maybe he shopped it

xp

A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.

this. and blow people's minds.

The real untold story of that picture is the guy on the right is wearing nothing but his wife's frillies under his robe.

b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.

this isn't about weirdness. while obv a few instances (eg bosch) are archetypally weird, the stated premise of the thread and most citations are 'old times paintings that prefigure much later developments in art', which at most implies the ~uncanniness~ of something found in an unexpected context.

the premise allows that things can be the product of accidental formal parallels. the principle of overdetermination allows that this does not invalidate a work's 'coded contemporary meaning', though that phrase forgets that nothing ever had a coherent/univocal contemporary meaning.

To be like "omg he is inventing photorealism" completely misunderstands Ingres and photorealism.

rather misunderstands kevin's

I've always found Ingres disturbing and even proto-photorealist.

which merely suggests ~anticipates~ rather than omg ingres is a photorealist a century avant la lettre. (hope he isn't going to start arguing that now).

c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

ilx/the world seems basically conditional upon certain enlightenment/modernist/historicist values yeah. 'disregards' does not imply 'invalidates', but yeah ppl are going to read certain things into other things. such is the world.

srsly you actually have a background in art history right? kinda disappointed in yr fetishistic disavowal of any sort of interpretative license outside of the pass/aggress cultural studies invocation of problematics/privileges when you could actually be ~enlightening~ here.

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

― jed_, Tuesday, 30 November 2010 18:34 (26 minutes ago)

this was my own idea yeah, and a lateral move from 'the ambassadors' which probably wouldn't fit this thread cuz it doesn't prefigure future forms so much as exemplify a contemporary concern/invention.

the thread is fine, n.

also, this is fascinating on The Ambassadors:

http://markmeynell.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/holbein%E2%80%99s-the-ambassadors-unlocking-hidden-mysteries/

it is not a perfect square – it is 207 cm x 209.5 cm.... notice the angle of the gnomon facing us. If you draw a line tracing its angle back and forth, you come across something remarkable. It will intersect off-canvas to the right with the line where your eye should go in order to see the skull correctly. And if your eye is there, looking up this trajectory, your eye will ‘pass through’ a number of key objects. It will intersect perfectly with the horizon line on the astronomical globe on the upper shelf... But as your eye travels further, you intersect with the Ambassador’s left eye, and then, lo and behold… The crucifix – at Christ’s left eye, to be precise... The Crucifix... doesn’t quite fit into the square. As noted above, the whole image is not a perfect square. If you were to draw one, flush against the right side, it would include everything in the painting, except the crucifix.

I'm not an art student and pretty much clueless ftmp but the perspective in a lot of pre-Renaissance stuff is so strange — it's flattened to the point of there being almost no illusion of depth, but just geometric forms interacting on the same plane.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life (c. 1330)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1367/602342310_945e025e77.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/2u5cils.jpg
http://i356.photobucket.com/albums/oo4/NettieMuse/PompeiiWallArt.jpg

Ancient Roman painters showed a similar (mis)understanding of perspective, rendering objects stiffly in 3 dimensions without having them converge at a vanishing point. the technique didn't disappear in the Middle Ages, but artists (Western European ones, anyways) showed practically no improvement in their use of perspective until about the 1400s, mainly because they had less interest in one-upping each other in terms of realism than they had in upholding the highly stylized conventions of Christian art.

I'm not an art student either, so I'm really just stating the obvious here.

Please note that there's a world of difference between, on one hand, re-reading artworks of a paradigm past through some sort of contemporary viewpoint/apparatus/whathaveyou, and on the other, finding evidence of hypothesized avant-garde lineage within those works.

For what it's worth, I understood the thread as some sort of combination of the two: though the title might have one believe that this is about finding concrete precedents that would materialize into later avant-garde works (thereby implying some sort of teleological account - something people worry too much about for a reason). Of course there's also the "anachonism" part of the title, which which I take as a kind of "let's find instances of subsequent avant-garde practices in earlier works, which may instance just plain old coincidences, along with a potential debunking of avant-garde claims to novelty, or again, just things that seem interesting today but wouldn't have been of note back then.

prefer because the whole (who did what first in what narrative is such a tedious approach)

let's find things that flatter our own worldviews pt 1,366,981,776

not that there's anything wrong with that, and this thread is great

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

the thread starter and others have been quite chill about their remit tho so i'm finding it difficult to hold my grudge very tightly

Ah THAT'S Millais? Ok!

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/millais/millais_ophelia.jpg

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:02 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

this seems a bit too complex -- maybe the stuff we find less interesting is actually more interesting *because* it doesn't interest us?

im caricaturing an argument to be sure

i'm perfectly happy to have this be a thread about old paintings that seem to speak to contemporary sensibilities, fwiw

srsly just post w/e. post some canaletto and some net art. compare 'l'origine du monde' and some .jp roach porn. just don't type some sophomoric shit abt ~ like, values every1 ~.

please don't actually post roach porn btw.

why has everyone adopted plax's iphone-speak for this thread?

Cabanel had his own Ophelia too (there's an essay in here, art people):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Alexandre_Cabanel%2C_Ophelia.JPG

let's find things that flatter our own worldviews pt 1,366,981,776

not that there's anything wrong with that, and this thread is great

but what about all the odd, outlier stuff in old paintings that DOESN'T jive with ourselves today? the stuff that might have rhymed with, say, the 1940s instead of the 2010s? the stuff that hasn't rhymed with anything else that we know of? is that of less interest somehow? i'd have thought it would be moreso actually, since it forces us to learn things we don't know, to try on a different mask

I'd say it has less to do with flattering ourselves and more to do with seeking comfort in the familiar. it can be tough to approach a 500-year-old painting as anything but a dead, alienating artifact, so it can be comforting to discover some strange, playful, and strikingly (albeit accidentally) modern detail that brings the artwork forward in time (so to speak) and within our emotional reach. it may be a contrived and inauthentic approach, but it's a rare way to engage with a piece as if we're contemporaries of the artist. bringing ourselves backward in time (by gathering historical facts and viewing the work through the eyes of the artist's contemporaries or some other bygone generation) doesn't tend to have the same familiarizing effect.

I'm not arguing against intellectualism. I see the "whoa, this is surprisingly modern" mindset as a complement to the usual research and context-setting, and people who can only engage with Bosch as a proto-surrealist or Sterne as a proto-post-modernist are missing the point entirely. if a work of art both forces us to learn things we don't know and unexpectedly echoes things that we're familiar with, then it's power is enormous on multiple levels.

Bridget Riley and the Old Masters

http://www.taschen.com/media/images/480/default_xl_matisse_covers_0907301203_id_279942.jpg

it's like Flash animation!

I'ma go through the rest of Crary's list here:

http://www.website.com/yourimage.jpeg
Friedrich Overbeck, The Painter Franz Pforr (yowsah!), c. 1810 (reworked 1865?), oil on canvas
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

http://experimentiv.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/self-portrait-or-desperate-man-gustave-courbet.jpg
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1844-1845, Oil on canvas, Private collection

Courbet pumped out a few paintings so naughty I can't post them here lest it turn into a NSFW work. But GIS his Origin of the World (which Lacan owned!).

http://fontdenimes.midiblogs.com/media/01/02/9e8f3ac346b6b0f2bbee5dc3482af206.jpg
Paul Delaroche: La Jeune Martyre (The Young Martyr), 1855

Man, these dudes dug their Ophelia types!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Ernest_Meissonier_-_End_of_the_Game_of_Cards_.jpg
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, The End of the Game of Cards, oil painting, n.d. (ca. 1870?)

And Whoa! Check THIS out! Here's Meissonier's portrait of Leland Stanford, the bigwig who commissioned Muybridge's photo experiments! (Head spins)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Leland_Stanford_p1070023.jpg
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Leland Stanford, 1881 Oil on canvas, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University

http://www.cnoilpainting.com/upimage/201003150827186971_s.jpg
Wilhelm von Kobell, Riders on Lake Tegernsee, 1824 (I think)

http://hereswhatsleft.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/cross_cathedral.jpg
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross and cathedral in the mountains, 1812, oil on canvas

Could image bomb this thread with just Friedrich.

http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Gerome_Pygmalion_and_Galatea_c1890.jpg

Jean-Léon Gérôme also image bomb-worthy.

http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Delacroix.skull.gif

Eugène Delacroix. Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, 1835, Oil on canvas, approximately 39 x 32 inches. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Franfurt, Germany.

Again with the Hamlet!

http://www.all-art.org/neoclasscism/overbeck01.jpg
Friedrich Overbeck, The Painter Franz Pforr (yowsah!), c. 1810 (reworked 1865?), oil on canvas
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

good stuff, dude

that cat is fukkin tiny

also

http://hereswhatsleft.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/cross_cathedral.jpg

\m/

inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory
Gaddis' last book is partly about this.

disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.
What if its contemporary meaning was "weirdness"?

I think people got this thread right away. they basically understood at least a few of the points you bring up.

I'm not well versed in art history, so can someone explain why all these realistic portraits are supposed to be examples of "avant-garde anachronism"?

http://nedavanovac.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/aubrey_beardsley.png

I don't understand it either, Tuomas. But I'm also not well-versed in art history.

neat thread. totally got what thread-starter was looking for even if the title was ripe for tearing into.

titles just get ppl thru the door

pretty retarded to cavil about it when ppl obv 'got it'

ilx thread and not curated exhibition etc

friedrich is interesting....sometimes seems excessively lurid, sometimes justifiably so

wow this thread is the best, more please!!

more satisfied customers

http://artinvestment.ru/content/download/news/20081219_aubrey_beardsley_the_platonic_lament.jpg

damn, never heard of aubrey beardsley before

thought cozen's post was some manga ish he posted for lols initially but no, ab died of consumption in 1898 at the age 25 ;_;

I really like this thread and do see that people 'get it' as much as they need to get it, but I wouldn't mind those who are posting adding a bit of explanation for each picture, even if it's as facile as "surrealism before surrealism". For instance, I'm not sure how the Ophelias are avant-garde anachronism even in the looser sense - is it just that they come before the pre-Raphaelites or something? Also, there are a few that I get but can't think of the name of the school they influenced, as I'm not an art history buff, so would appreciate those who are more educated in the field to point me towards the answer.

Also, nakh, WAHT? Are you joking about not having heard of Aubrey?

Beardsley drew some quality porn iirc, friend of Wilde and other party guys

yeah well obv it doesn't ~have to~ have anything to do with yr core 20th century avant-garde movements tho obv they predominate in the popular conception of things, i mean if you find a 200 y/o lithograph with a proto-lolcat then even better

i'm not sure what milais' ophelia suggests either....it's an early pre-raphaelite work and obviously influential within that movement....

Also, nakh, WAHT? Are you joking about not having heard of Aubrey?

― emil.y, Thursday, 2 December 2010 12:44 (5 minutes ago)

the name is familiar but nothing beyond that!

I thought of posting Lowry's seascapes here but obviously they're après la lettre. Fascinating exercises in minimalism tho if you've not seen them.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bFFjCDvr2EY/Sw_jD0DrsxI/AAAAAAAAOg4/1qS6EO2huhI/s400/seascape+lowry.jpg

Not what you'd expect from the guy if you only have a passing knowledge. The one I've seen in real life was much more monotone than this, even.

Some outsider stuff might fit, eg Louis Wain (1860-1939), starts as Edwardian jolly Cat artist (so in fact an important ancestor of the poker-playing dogs school of art), goes mad, gets locked up, the cats become v 60s psych. These pics show the development (tho' there are lots of args abt whether the pictures & his mental state run parallel, I dunno, I'm not up on it).

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lblgadUUt61qae9wfo1_400.jpg

http://i41.tinypic.com/ims5f9.jpg

XP yes, also lolcat ancestor

catowl? owlcat?

http://storage.canalblog.com/68/96/119589/36314457.jpg

^ Theodore Gericault ca. 1818. This feels quite modern to me in the whole weird intense blankness of their doll-like faces. That one chunky arm makes me think of Fernand Leger too, and the tubular kind of way that he painted body parts (cubism I guess?).

also the lad on the right appears to be holding a gat

on the left i meant. ow my head.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/AlexGraffito.svg/450px-AlexGraffito.svg.png

world's first MSPaint art

kinda cavilling at "it's just the internet, eh, don't get so wound up" tbh - you should know by now that this board will seriousify any attempt at silliness, and the other way round

"lighten up" is just such a disappointing comeback for so many reasons

how about "get a grip"?

there has been a misidentification of the cohort that "gets" what is being discussed on this thread

Robert Lazzarini's sculpture of the anamorphic skull

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/42/124783383_1049751f2d.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/41/124783486_3f4bcb29a1.jpg

<3

whoa

my brain hates teh way that looks

he's been mentioned already, but: piranesi's carceri - cf. escher, ico:

http://im-possible.info/images/art/classic/piranesi/carceri-xiv.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Piranesi9c.jpg

(of course piranesi was an admitted influence on ico)

I forgot Gleyre from the Crary list.

http://artmight.com/albums/2010-09-11/1001-Orientalist-Art-Paintings/Charles-Gleyre/Charles-Gleyre-Egyptian-Temple.jpg

Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, Egyptian Temple, 1840, Oil on canvas, 14.17 x 19.29 inches [36 x 49 cm],Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DtsajQefh2s/Rlme93QcrlI/AAAAAAAAEq8/e7G_WRFE4ag/s1600-h/Gleyre_Danse_Bacchantes.jpg
La danse des bacchantes, 1849, Huile sur toile - 147 x 243 cm, Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts

And yo check this:

"Despite the sensuality of such works as La Danse des Bacchantes (above, from 1849), Gleyre was reportedly celibate his entire life. For him, the flesh painted on the canvas in mythological scenes always remained a myth, an unfelt abstraction. Gleyre earned a reputation for perfectionism that many of his students took away from his atelier. The way that Gleyre returned again and again to the same works can be seen, for example, in Monet’s obsessive series of water lilies, haystacks, cathedrals, etc., etc. Gleyre and Monet differ widely in style, but their commitment to depicting a personal vision is exactly the same."

Also: "Renoir loved Gleyre specifically for the free hand he gave to his students—allowing the young Impressionists to paint outdoors while he preferred working in the studio from memory."

From here

Grrrr.

http://www.latribunedelart.com/IMG/jpg/Gleyre_Danse_Bacchantes.jpg
Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, La danse des bacchantes, 1849, Huile sur toile - 147 x 243 cm, Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts

Again, like with the realistic portraits, I don't see what's the "avant-garde anachronism" in that one? Looks pretty much of its time to me.

http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2008/06/10/FriedrichCDmonkbythesea%2Cjpg.jpg
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the sea, 1809/10, oil on canvas

Tuomas I'm with you on that in regards to several of the things that have been posted ITT without explanation.

Wonder what Crary would make of Bouguereau (since we already know what Berger made of him):

http://www.sexualfables.com/images/Bouguereau-The-Nymphaeum.jpg

So much gorgeouness in this thread! Couldn't give a whole fig tree what the concept is, keep em coming.

i included those specific felix vallotton examples (the woodcuts now behind pagebreak) with latter-half 20th c. graphic novels & comics in mind.
i found it uncanny that by inherent stringencies in their production that they should take on that weird, relaxed 'fluid realist' style of inking beyond the 1950's mode of production in comix draughtmanship. something about seeing their monochrome rendered on a monitor makes them look totally natural being seen for the first time on like, a computer.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rC2EkOOmAX8/RsdrkfQBuII/AAAAAAAAAns/Q4GpmTdz3DY/s320/vallotton_le_violon.jpg
http://giam.typepad.com/100_years_of_illustration/images/vef_edgar.gif

that last friedrich is wonderful

does matthias grunewald fit this thread?
http://commandopera.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Temptation-of-St-Anthony-Matthias-Grunewald.jpg

ha, that's rather less sober than the grunewald i can remember

disappointed that he ended up illustrating mid 20th c english children's books ;_;

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSt-MlNExO1rWIP5p-gZ_qoMvzXCTOdk4stxZUqpGAhMBubpd9KhQ

for so many reasons, not least the friedrich & the font, this is my most treasured paperback.

well yeah, lol, most of the grunewald i've seen weren't all beastly orgies of violence, but the isenheim alter, for example, has always struck me as very surreal and out of scale and just strange to look at, and there are some drawings of his which i'm struggling to find that i think fit this thread quite well, too.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pieter_Bruegel_I-Fall_of_rebel_Angels_IMG_1444.JPG

big version

not saying it ~prefigures~ but i instantanteously thought of kandinsky

i've had breughel in mind today w/ all the snow

flying puffer fish is a bit outré

Robert Lazzarini's sculpture of the anamorphic skull

If you think that's whoa, you need to see his payphone:

http://www.dcist.com/attachments/dcist_charles/2007_0216_payphone.jpg

way more impressive in person, btw

That Breughel looks like a Bosch painting giving an Archimbolo a good kicking.

Arcimboldo rather.

omg those sculptures are making me nauseated

so nauseous that you said nauseated by mistake

it's true tho

what is the effect irl?

i made no mistake, sir.

http://darcyarts.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/crazyjanesmall.jpg

^ this Richard Dadd from 1885 looks a lot more modern than that yeah?

was he the psychotic dude

fucking bastard dns servers not resolving so i cannae see it

/smashes router w/ whisky bottle

now i c

it's very '~edgy~ observer magazine fashion editor reads up on henry darger'

Yeah, he was the guy who took his dad apart with a potato peeler or something. The style of that picture there ('Crazy Jane') looks like it belongs on the cover of some 80s paperback, but the subject has basically invented Adam Ant 100 years beforehand.

so nauseous that you said nauseated by mistake

― Ectothiorhodospira shaposhnikovii (nakhchivan), Thursday, December 2, 2010 7:06 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

*shakes head*

the crakhs are showing, first DJP now max

I'm actually in my second ever art history class right now (hooray for working at a university) and I love this thread.

I realize how little i know about the history of art but i love when something jumps out for me and feels very different and more appealing to my modern sensibilities and biases, instead of feeling like yet another portrait or religious work. Not that there's anything wrong with those, and I love hearing the weird secrets and references and history surrounding them. But on a strictly visual and composition basis they don't excite me as much.

Friedrich's Monk By The Sea really felt different for me, as did his Abbey in the Oakwood which is also pretty \m/:
http://towerweb.net/alt-lib/art/friedrich/oakwoodabbey2.jpg

I also really love Degas' At the Races in the Countryside:
http://www.topofart.com/images/artists/Hilaire_Germain_Edgar_Degas/paintings/degas022.jpg

Yeah, he was the guy who took his dad apart with a potato peeler or something. The style of that picture there ('Crazy Jane') looks like it belongs on the cover of some 80s paperback, but the subject has basically invented Adam Ant 100 years beforehand.

Incidentally, that painting inspired Grant Morrison to create the superhero called Crazy Jane in Doom Patrol in 1989.

*shakes head*

― max, Friday, 3 December 2010 03:16 (6 hours ago)

imo u gotta use nauseous in that instance cuz (although ~literally~ correct) nauseated usually nows means something else

maybe in nakhchivan but this is an english speaking board

those sculptures (or pics thereof...i dunno how it works irl) do kinda induce nausea.....whereas ppl usually say 'nauseated' to describe non-physical sensations that they wanna amplify by invoking physical nausea....but my thoughts only, pls let's not ruin the ~crazy weird old pictures~ w/ further cavilling

so would you say nausea makes you feel nauseous or nauseates you

'pls let's not ruin the ~crazy weird old pictures~ w/ further cavilling' is to cavilling as 'don't think about eggs' is to thinking about eggs

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/D%C3%BCrer_Melancholia_I.jpg

durer

nakhchivan how am I meant 2 adulate yr harried new posting persona, fuck it I'm going back 2 bed

pls not to adulate me

in general adulation does u no good

it's no adulteration

dude that was self-checking deprecation, yr truths they are already manifest

zz

i'll consider incorporating 'going to bed at 10am' into noel's post-traumatic persona (my first fiction since key stage 3 english iirc)

http://www.lib-art.com/imgpainting/2/6/11362-atropos-the-fates-francisco-de-goya-y-lucientes.jpg

anyway that last aside (apols to gbx) got me thinking baout early (say pre nineteenth century) depictions of.......nausea, melancholy etc.....archetypal modern(ist) tropes

http://redtreetimes.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/henri_rousseau_-_a_carnival_evening.jpg

http://www.mailartworld.com/wp-content/uploads/Toulouse%20Lautrec_2.jpg
i always thought this felt like a contemporary painting, although maybe it's a painting that will fit in more 50-100 years from now because of how objective it is toward matters of sex.

that rousseau looks like a modern painting trying to seem old

http://arttattler.com/Images/NorthAmerica/NewYork/Morgan%20Library/William%20Blake/17_Blake.jpg

http://www.lookpdf.com/images/thumbnail/102-islamic-art-and-geometric-design.gif

this thread makes me feel like Tuomas

those sculptures (or pics thereof...i dunno how it works irl) do kinda induce nausea.....whereas ppl usually say 'nauseated' to describe non-physical sensations that they wanna amplify by invoking physical nausea....but my thoughts only, pls let's not ruin the ~crazy weird old pictures~ w/ further cavilling

― Ectothiorhodospira shaposhnikovii (nakhchivan), Friday, December 3, 2010 4:52 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

*shakes head*

brb scanning bosch pieces for a figure jumping a shark.

omg @ the blake

OK: let's settle the nauseous/nauseated matter:

nauseous
Causing nausea; sickening

nauseated
To be feeling, or having been caused to feel nausea.
http://phrogz.net/nauseous

Purists will argue that "nauseous" should not be used to mean "feeling nausea," but I don't see how you can argue against gbx' use of "nauseated."

the thing that produces nausea is NAUSEOUS
when you have a sensation of nausea you are NAUSEATED

you're welcome

i remember seeing that phonebooth years ago.. it is aweseous

http://www.backtoclassics.com/images/pics/franciscogoya/franciscogoya_the_sleep_of_reason_produces_monsters.jpg

Cover connection with the Blake.

http://pixhost.info/avaxhome/83/3a/00103a83_medium.jpeg

idk, can we do knorpelgroteske?

http://img.blogster.com/view/akermariano/post-uploads/keller.jpg

Shortlived but kinda fascinating.

Can I quote myself from something which I haven't actually finished yet?

...together forming a sort of musical knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fear, of man, peering into the darkened forest.

Can I can I? clearly i can, entitled m'f'er.

idk, can we do knorpelgroteske?

Shortlived but kinda fascinating.

Can I quote myself from something which I haven't actually finished yet?

...together forming a sort of musical knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fear, of man, peering into the darkened forest.
― Herr Kapitan Pugvosh (GamalielRatsey), Friday, December 3, 2010 2:06 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

That's crazy... hadn't heard of this before

Uhh, this, I guess.

http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/artists/special/ringkxj.jpg

that is an utterly bizarre painting!

I am more up on my cartoons. In that vein, I think my 18th century bro James Gillray deserves some kind of nod. I always thought of him as like some 18th c proto-Basil Woolverton. Obv he has his own thing going on too.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/images/works/unpetitsouper_large.jpg
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/images/works/politicaldreaming_large.jpg
http://cdn.wn.com/pd/c4/c6/4d1ae73cb21bcbd1db99444538ea_grande.jpg
^"The Gout"

I like this Richard Newton drawing too, also late 18th c

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/images/works/layingghost_large.jpg

it reminds me kind of the Katzenjammer Kids

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_S2X__U-SA4w/SQcXaV77oEI/AAAAAAAAAhU/B-NJ069rRd8/s400/Katzenjammer1901.jpg

wait sorry it says "paintings" in thread title

I'll save these for somewhere else.

On the madonna and breast tip (he he).

http://www.fisheaters.com/images/marialactans-miraculouslactationofstbernard.jpg

I saw this in Spain and was actually shocked/amused. It still seems weird.

http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/artists/special/ringkxj.jpg

Who is this by? It's pretty bizarre.

Looks like the girl from die antwoord tbh

Xpost: Jean Fouquet, and that Painting is apparently C. 1450

I don't know anything beyond that.

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...