The Substance of Painting - Yale Center for British Art

ya le c e nte r fo r b r iti s h a r t
The
Substance
of Painting
Graduate Student
Symposium
Saturday,
February 26, 2011
9 am–6:30 pm
Thomas Lawrence, George James Welbore Agar-Ellis,
later 1st Lord Dover (detail), 1823–24, oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
The Substance of Painting
1:30 pm
“Frampton’s Photographs and the Stella Myth”
Rebecca Dubay, Bryn Mawr College
Yale Center for British Art Graduate Student Symposium
Saturday, February 26, 2011
“Between Canvas and Celluloid: Painted Films and Filmed Paintings”
Gregory Zinman, New York University
“Die Brücke on Vacation: Glue-Bound Distemper
and the Island Temperament”
Jacob Stewart-Halevy, Yale University
schedule
8:30 am
Registration
9 am
Welcome and Introduction
Amy Meyers, Director, Yale Center for British Art
Imogen Hart, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Publications,
Yale Center for British Art
9:15 am
Panel 1
Chair: Laurel Peterson, Yale University
3:30 pm
4–5 pm
“The Eye, Perceived: Joseph Wright of Derby’s Bladder Series”
Stephanie O’Rourke, Columbia University
10:45 am
Coffee
11:05 am
Panel 2
Chair: Chloe Portugeis, Yale University
“Annie Louisa Swynnerton: Sculpting Paint”
Katie Tyreman, University of York
“The Dimensions of Trompe L’Oeil Painting
in Nineteenth-Century America”
Katie Pfohl, Harvard University
Break for lunch
Tea
Breakout sessions
“Border Walking: A conversation in the exhibition
‘into the light of things’: Rebecca Salter, works 1981–2010”
Rebecca Salter, artist
Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings,
Yale Center for British Art
“Painting or Drawing: A conversation in the exhibition
Rebecca Salter and Japan”
Sadako Ohki, the Japan Foundation Associate Curator of
Japanese Art, Yale University Art Gallery
“Secrets, Codes, and Mr. Berger’s Bedroom:
Protecting Paint Recipes in Georgian and Victorian London”
Sally Woodcock, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge
12:35 pm
Panel 3
Chair: Sarah Hetherington, Yale University
“Beyond Black and White: Gray as Color”
Eleanor Hughes, Associate Curator and Head of Exhibitions
and Publications, Yale Center for British Art
“Dead Coloring: A workshop in the Paintings Conservation Studio”
Mark Aronson, Chief Paintings Conservator
Jessica David, Postgraduate Research Associate,
Yale Center for British Art
5:30 pm
6:30 pm
Keynote Lecture
“The Madness of Art: Georgia O’Keeffe and Virginia Woolf ”
Alexander Nemerov, Vincent J. Scully Professor of the History
of Art, Yale University
Reception
abstr ac t s
Rebecca Dubay, Bryn Mawr College
“Frampton’s Photographs and the Stella Myth”
Hollis Frampton’s photographs of Frank Stella in the studio making his black painting
Getty Tomb (1959) have become as ubiquitous as Hans Namuth’s 1950 photographs of
Jackson Pollock and, I argue, as misleading. Taking on the oft-reprinted but seldom
interrogated photographs of Stella painting Getty Tomb, this paper examines how
Frampton’s visual “evidence” impacted the art historical scholarship on Stella. Frampton’s
photographs of Stella painting Getty Tomb, stripe after stripe, moving from top to bottom
and left to right, dramatize a sense of workmanlike repetitiveness and monotonous labor.
These photographs shaped the reception and misperception of not only Getty Tomb but
also, by association, Stella’s other stripe paintings by visually reinforcing their making as
mechanical. I insist that Stella’s process of painting should be understood as methodical,
not mechanical; the distinction is subtle but crucial, especially pertaining to Stella’s first
shaped canvases, his aluminum paintings that directly succeeded his black paintings. My
research confirms that Stella’s work, even when lean, has always been about and invested
in the painterly gesture. If archived, unpublished transcripts of early interviews with
Stella reveal his painterly preoccupations, so too, of course, do the paintings themselves.
Shaped and lean though they may be, their surfaces are documents of a painterly process
and project. In the end, the aluminum paintings of 1960 are important to Stella’s oeuvre
but not for the reasons we have been led to believe, namely, their objecthood and nihilistic
sparseness. Instead, they are significant, even momentous, for what they propose for the
medium of painting, reimagining and reinvigorating abstraction as an expressive and vital
form for the 1960s, and indeed also for the future.
Stephanie O’Rourke, Columbia University
“The Eye, Perceived: Joseph Wright of Derby’s Bladder Series”
Over the course of his career, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) painted numerous
images of children playing with, marveling at, and fighting over bladders. These bladder
paintings, which are rarely discussed in the critical literature on Wright of Derby, were
among the artist’s most popular and frequently reproduced works during his lifetime.
The paintings are particularly noteworthy for the uncanny prominence of a luminous
orb that occupies the center of each image, forcing narrative content to its margins. This
inflated bladder, at once a luminous void and a material presence, seems to speak to the
conditions of and possibilities for painting itself. Wright of Derby, who often interrogates
the relationship between knowledge and visual perception in his work, calls upon this
dramatic arrangement at several junctures over the course of his career. Examining his
bladder paintings and contemporaneous attempts to reproduce them, this paper considers
the extent to which Wright of Derby articulates and challenges thresholds of visibility in
the Age of Reason.
Katie Pfohl, Harvard University
“The Dimensions of Trompe L’Oeil Painting in Nineteenth-Century America”
This paper examines the relationship between the practice of trompe-l’oeil painting and
the products and processes of factory production in 19th century America. In the 19th
century, new forms of industrial manufacture reduced the intricate decorative designs
commonly found on handmade objects into flat, one-dimensional patterns produced
by machine stamping, quite literally changing the dimensions of everyday things. This
paper argues that trompe-l’oeil painting provided a powerful means of exposing the
dimensional poverty of machine production because its illusionistic effects relied on a
rich interplay between surface and depth. Focusing on American artist William Michael
Harnett’s trompe-l’oeil still-life paintings of ornate decorative objects, this paper contends
that Harnett manipulated the formal properties of ornamental form in order to highlight
the dimensional complexity of trompe-l’oeil as a genre. The extensive knowledge about
ornament Harnett gained while working as a silver engraver allowed him to craft his
trompe-l’oeil paintings as dimensionally complex objects that could function both as
images of fully formed decorative objects containing an array of ornament and as surfaces
composed of complex systems of ornamental forms. As a result, these works were able to
reference and expose but ultimately bypass the flattening effects of machine production,
permitting Harnett to mount an incisive critique of the dimensional effects of the
transition from handmade to machine made objects in an era of rising factory production.
Jacob Stewart-Halevy, Yale University
“Die Brücke on Vacation: Glue-Bound Distemper and the Island Temperament”
This essay investigates the uses of Leimfarbe or glue-bound distemper in the field of
Modernist painting. The peculiar qualities of Leimfarbe—its matte finish when dry and
buttery texture when wet, its capacity to look prematurely aged given its propensity for
cracking and caking, and most significantly, the way in which it functions simultaneously
as a binder and a pigment enabling painters to work directly on unprimed canvas made
it a particularly attractive medium for the Die Brücke artist Otto Mueller. Responding
to the evermore-flattened painting of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, he
came to establish his own German Expressionist variant of primitivism via the material.
Leimfarbe—­­raw, brittle, and water soluble—enabled Mueller to construct a brand of
lyrical and projective Polynesian beachscapes as he vacationed with the other Die Brücke
members on the Moritzburg Lakes and the Island of Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea. This
essay first attempts to explain why he might have sought recourse to glue-bound
distemper instead of oil paint or aquarelle and then considers the way in which the
Neo-Expressionist painter Siegfried Anzinger, the replacement to Gerhard Richter at the
Painting Academy in Düsseldorf, took up the tradition of Leimfarbe painting in the 1980’s
as a kind of historical meditation. It seems as though the manner in which Anzinger casts
the German Expressionist movements of the 1910’s and 1920’s in terms of avant-gardist
negation, allowed him to criticize the Neo-Expressionist movement in which he himself
participated as one of escapism and withdrawal.
Katie Tyreman, University of York
“Annie Louisa Swynnerton: Sculpting Paint”
In late nineteenth-century Britain, painting and sculpture came into increasing dialogue.
However, while extant scholarship has examined how the ‘New Sculpture’ drew
productively on painterly traditions, few studies have investigated this intermedial
relationship as articulated in painting of the same period. Through highly theorised,
unprecedentedly close, sustained readings, this paper explores a number of allegorical
paintings produced in the 1880s and 1890s by neglected British painter, Annie Louisa
Swynnerton, ARA. First examining Swynnerton’s Oleander, 1883, within the context of
her travels in Italy, interest in cameos and relationship with her sculptor husband, Joseph,
I argue that Swynnerton’s handling articulated an intermediality self-conscious of the
relationship’s gains and losses. Then, through firsthand analysis Swynnerton’s facture
in paintings from the 1890s, I demonstrate that her work in this period challenged the
flatness of painting and emphasised its substantial materiality, registering a productive
intersection and tension between painting and sculpture that was understood in
nineteenth-century reviews. For example, in Mater Triumphalis, rough multi-layered paint
corresponding to the figure’s flesh is modelled in relief so that the figure projects from the
contrastingly two-dimensional painterly space. Within the same canvases, fine detail and
indicative non-representational marks are also juxtaposed, providing new purchase on
the intersection of Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. By contextualising Swynnerton’s
work alongside contemporary painters and sculptors, including Burne-Jones, Watts,
Sargent, Rodin, Gilbert and Ford, I establish Swynnerton’s intermedial and diverse
facture as particular and useful to our understanding of late nineteenth-century British
art. But I also suggest that Swynnerton’s confluence of intermediality and painterly self
depiction has a significant gendered dimension, demonstrating that her position between
and beyond established movements and generic categories was a strategy particularly
characteristic of nineteenth-century women painters, whose gender has to date seen them
characterised as belated variants on extant artistic practices, rather than independent
sophisticated, critical, avant-garde players.
Sally Woodcock, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge
“Secrets, Codes, and Mr. Berger’s Bedroom:
Protecting Paint Recipes in Georgian and Victorian London”
The booming art market that allowed nineteenth-century painters to accumulate great
fortunes also made the firms that supplied them with their painting materials rich. Artists’
colourmen such as Winsor & Newton, Reeves, Rowney and Roberson had incomes,
reputations and, in some cases, technical innovations to safeguard, and their preferred
method of protection was the trade secret.
The measures they employed may seem unorthodox and unsophisticated in an age of
intellectual property rights, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries colourmen had
a limited arsenal with which to protect their paint recipes from competitors. The most
common method was to deploy simple codes, and the paper will examine the possibility
that this may have derived from apothecaries’ practices.
The use of codes, ciphers, mirror-writing, sealed envelopes and disguised handwriting
will be discussed, as well as formal patents and commercial agreements. The paper will
explore the manufacturers’ perception of the threats to their business interests from
both competitors and their own workforce. It will document their eventual capitulation
to disclosure, in part stimulated by a desire to counter the criticism and suspicion that
secrecy had encouraged.
Finally, an attempt will be made to evaluate the extent to which the secrets the colourmen
guarded so carefully merited such protection. Was such caution and protection really
justified or, as was suggested by contemporaries, did artists’ colourmen exaggerate the
need for secrecy to increase the prestige of their paint?
Gregory Zinman, New York University
“Between Canvas and Celluloid: Painted Films and Filmed Paintings”
This paper seeks to simultaneously examine the moving image’s capacity to document and
to provide a material support for the act of painting.
To this end, the paper will focus on a number of works that reside between celluloid and
canvas, works that both document the act of painting and yet are artworks that can only
exist as moving images. Weimar painter Walther Ruttmann’s desire to make “paintings
in time” led to the first abstract film screened for the public. Basque artist José Antonio
Sistiaga’s monumental hand-painted feature film challenges our perceptive faculties
and calls into question the nature of the painted object. Animator Oskar Fischinger’s
frame-by-frame capture of his own “motion painting” investigates relationships across
and between artistic mediums. California conceptual artist John Baldessari’s film of his
students at work playfully interrogates the very meaning of “artistic” painting.
Taken together, the final works of art here are not single still images, but rather, to
use Ruttmann’s term, paintings in time—ephemeral and liquid, paintings that are
continuously en route to becoming something else, all while remaining, at all times, only
themselves. These are works that grant the viewer access to new understandings of paint
and its applications that are most often denied to us in a museum or gallery space. They
are not merely representations of paintings, but rather are new kinds of painting that
expand the parameters of field, providing us with new ways to think about, present, and
experience painting. In so doing, they push us to redefine our conceptions of artistic
practice, both in terms of painting and cinema.