acoolsha
Painting
Der Zauber des Alltäglichen (Senses and Sins) 13 March 05
Section: painting
Categories: Exhibition / museum
Title: Der Zauber des Alltäglichen (Senses and Sins: Dutch Painters of Daily Life in the Seventeenth Century)
Museum: Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
Brouwer and Godard
Along with the half dozen or so Vermeer paintings in the exhibition, I loved the paintings by Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6 – 1638). One painting, Two peasants in a fist fight, reminded me of a fist fight in Godard’s Band à part which I saw the night before. It was almost as if Godard had based his scene on the painting: he choreographed it self-consciously — I think of the torture scenes in, I believe, Le Petit Soldat. Brouwer was trying to express the feelings of daily events: one painting, well enough known, is called The Bitter Drink. Brouwer’s fist fight seems not only staged but a bit awkward: done well before he had the benefit of stop-motion photography to better understand the dynamics of the human body in action, he isolated the various body parts and a tipping barrel and assembled them into his conception of a bar fight.
Letters
According to something I read once on the subject, in the 17th century, the provinces we now call The Netherlands and dominated at that time by Holland had the highest rate of literacy in Europe. Writing and reading letters as a theme play a dominant role in the genre painting of the time and in this exhibition as well.
Genre Painting and slavery
The Protestant Reformation had paved the way for breaking with a subordination to religious iconography as a dominant subject in painting. I am an artist, not an art historian, but I would imagine that one underlying force in the rise of genre painting in that area was a booming capitalism (the Golden Age), the growth of a thriving international trade, including the trade in slaves. Genre painting represents a development from painting as a window to our world — a world that can be possessed, owned — to depictions of daily life, divided between the upper and lower classes, images which reinforce outlooks and perceptions of the respective classes, paintings which can be marketed, perhaps to a broader market in the relatively wealthy society of Holland at that time.
Vermeer and the Camera Obscura
I have the impression that there is still some defensiveness among the ranks of art historians, and in the public, about the issue of whether painters such as Vermeer used a Camera Obscura to aid them in their painting. As if that would diminish their accomplishment — in the 19th century the development of photography had a tremendous influence on painting, and in the 20th century prominent painters, such as Picasso, sometimes worked directly from photographs and of course later painters worked from slides projected on their canvas.
In one historical reference to Vermeer (I don’t remember where I read it right now) it was even claimed that Vermeer couldn’t have used the technology of the Camera Obscura because he didn’t have access to it — the reference mentioned specifically that Vermeer “didn’t even know” Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a draper (note the extensive use of drapery in Vermeer’s work) who was a brilliant inventor of lenses and who discovered bacteria in 1683. Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek were contemporaries: born in the same year and both residents of Delft. According to Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything (page 454):
Leeuwenhoek was close friends with another Delft notable, the artist Jan Vermeer. In the mid-1600s Vermeer, who previously had been a competent but not outstanding artist, suddenly developed the mastery of light and perspective for which he has been celebrated ever since. Though it has never been proved, it has long been suspected that he used a camera obscura [...]. No such device was listed among Vermeer’s personal effects after his death, but it happens that the executor of Vermeer’s estate was none other than Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the most secretive lens-maker of his day.
- Title: Der Zauber des Alltäglichen (Senses and Sins)