avant-garde anachronism in old paintings

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

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...