Theory of painting

This chapter examines Aristotle’s references to visual arts and argues that the revolutionary theory presented in his Poetics may have been influenced by prior discussions of painting. Aristotle uses the paradigm of painting in three kinds of contexts: i. explicit analogies between poetry and painting that support theoretical principles of poetics; ii. implicit comparisons between their psychological and educational effects on their audience and their practitioners; iii. claims about their intrinsic value as mimetic arts. The explicit analogies between poetry and painting suggest that many puzzling features of Aristotle’s theorization of the former can be explained with reference to the model provided by the latter. The similarity between his assessment of the cognitive and moral value of painting and poetry also shows that painting was a constructive paradigm for his conception of mimetic crafts.

En el mundo cultural del Siglo de Oro tiene lugar una fuerte resurrección de la hermandad entre pictura y poesis, que alcanza una gran difusión en un amplio abanico de alcances, formas y funciones. Por ello, la pintura —todavía más que otras artes— constituye una clave fundamental para acercarse a la poesía de Quevedo, una perspectiva de lectura que permite tanto perfilar asuntos ya trillados como descubrir algunas dimensiones novedosas. Entre otras cuestiones muy variopintas, una mirada a la luz de la pintura permite acercarse a cuatro aspectos de la poesía quevediana: con el aval inicial de las relaciones de Quevedo con el arte pictórico, se examina una galería de poemas artísticos imbricados en la política del momento para pasar seguidamente al canon pictórico preferido por el poeta en relación con su propia práctica poética y, finalmente, se ofrece una revisión de la participación de Quevedo en las polémicas pictóricas de la época a partir de la silva «El pincel» y una empresa editorial como botones de muestra. Al final del recorrido, Quevedo se delinea como un poeta muy cercano —tanto en ideas como imágenes— al universo de la pintura de su tiempo y especialmente amigo del arte ita - liano, que aprovecha con gran partido en su obra.

ITALIAN ABSTRACT: Nel De pictura, paragonando la pittura prima a una finestra e poi a uno specchio, Leon Battista Alberti sottolinea l’importanza del punto di vista per la rappresentazione artistica. Nelle Intercenales, che costituiscono il contraltare giocoso del trattato, il cambiamento di punto di vista determina una diversa visione del mondo. Attraverso riferimenti testuali ad entrambe le opere, il saggio dimostra che, sia come teorico dell’arte sia come letterato, Alberti ha esaltato la «forza del vedere», il rifiuto di una visione monodirezionale e l’importanza di discernere e valutare differenti prospettive, lasciando ai posteri un insegnamento coerente di natura sia etica sia estetica.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In his work De Pictura, Leon Battista Alberti underlines the importance of viewpoint for artistic representations by comparing painting first to a window and then to a mirror. In the Intercenales, which make the playful couteract of the treaty, the shift in the point of view leads to a different view of the world. By making text references to both works, the essay shows that Alberti, as an Art theorist and a scholar, hightlights the «power of viewing», the refusal of a one-direction vision and the importance of recognizing and evaluating different perspectives, by leaving the posterity with coherent ethical and aesthetical teaching.

Ce domaine de réflexion immense, complexe et délicat est revisité dans la communication à la lumière de lectures, de conversations et de perplexités partagées avec René Taveneaux, un maître qui enseignait à aimer « l’âge héroïque de M. de Saint-Cyran », le moment de haute harmonie incarné par les Solitaires et même le symbole de « la liberté de conscience opprimée » que représente encore le vallon de Port-Royal, après trois siècles. Dans un ouvrage didactique d’histoire moderne, il écrivait pour expliquer le faible accueil du « baroque » en France : « La rencontre de la bourgeoisie avec le jansénisme eut, dans le domaine de l’art, des conséquences déterminantes : le jansénisme impliquait une large culture, une vie intellectuelle sans compromission ; il enseignait les voies austères pour accéder à Dieu. » Au-delà de cette formule qui exprime une apparente réduction sociologique s'esquissent un postulat et des questions philosophiques que j'essaie d'ébaucher ici.
Si la doctrine des premiers jansénisants met a priori en congé les principes mêmes d’une « esthétique janséniste » et des usages apologétiques de l’art, elle semble s’être confrontée avec clairvoyance à presque tout l’ensemble des paradigmes qui fondent la pensée sur la création dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle : clarté et obscurité, Beauté et admiration, figure et inspiration. Ainsi, la communication tâche de dessiner la présence de la création littéraire et artistique à Port-Royal non dans des attitudes et des réalisations, mais à travers l’intelligence que l’on y avait de ces questions.

Youtube video of lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rodf1rphxn0

While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay “Painting as Model,” it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium—the subject of Bois’ review—has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology, and structuralism.

This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of “Painting as Model” suggests a sea-change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped it revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.

Conference abstract
21 Jun 2018
9.30am to 5pm


Yve-Alain Bois’ seminal text Painting as Model, published in 1990, is still cited as being an extremely important collection of essays that looks at painting as being both a conceptual and a material enquiry. Bois believes that one must concentrate on both the formal elements of a work of art and its physical qualities to fully understand its totality.

Schedule:
9.30 - 10.00 Registration
10.00 - 10.15 Daniel Sturgis: Welcome
10.15 - 11.15 Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne: Unframing painting, ‘pushing back the walls’
11.15 - 12.00 Moyra Derby: Models of Attention
12.00 - 12.15 Break
12.15 - 1.15 Dr Matthew Bowman: The Intertwining: Damisch, Bois, and October’s Rethinking of Painting
1.15 - 2.15 Lunch
2.15 - 3.15 Lisa Florman: Description and Resistance
3.15 - 4.00 Daniel Neofetou: A World for Us: On the Prefiguration of Reconciliation in Barnett Newman's Painting
4.00 - 4.45 Roundtable: Yve-Alain Bois and Eric Alliez. Chaired by Philip Armstrong

The symposium is free and open to all. Booking is essential.
Please use the booking form below to reserve your place.

Yve-Alain Bois will deliver an opening lecture to introduce this event on 20 June 2018.
Tickets for the keynote must be purchased separately: http://bit.ly/yve-alain-bois.

Painting as ReModel is convened by Daniel Sturgis, Reader in Painting and Programme Director of BA Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts. It is presented by the Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School Public Programme.

Nakanishi is known as a member of the legendary performance group in Japan, Hi-Red Center, whose activities in the early 1960s have been heavily documented. But precisely because of this, Nakanishi's work as a painter has not been paid proper attention it deserves, especially outside Japan. This monographic analysis is an attempt to interpret Nakanishi's work as a painter in light of its profound philosophic-aesthetic implications.

This book reconsiders the role of painting during the 1960s and 1970s. The assembled essays examine how “painting” was present and practiced during this defining period of post- modernism: as an embattled parameter in the evolving anti- formalist discourse of the 1970s, as a parallel activity within an artist’s oeuvre, or by being conceptually integrated into another medium. Besides a reconsideration of artists such as Donald Judd, John Baldessari, and Robert Morris, this book provides in-depth analyses of lesser-known artistic positions, for example, those of David Novros, Roy Colmer, Mary Heilmann, and Jo Baer, and of positions whose relation to painting has remained largely unexamined up to now, such as Bruce Conner’s, Walter De Maria’s, and Fred Sandback’s. By treating the activity, the material foundations, and the concept of painting as symptomatic of the post-medium condition, this book reframes the history of postmodernism and provides historical and theoretical approaches for the current discourse on contemporary painting.

The answer to the question, »which is the foremost human activity, which activity is most worthy of a man«, was for the Ancients simple enough: that can only be the activity of politics, with its concommitant skill of rhetoric. Consequently, the arts of politics and rhetoric were thoroughly theorised, they were profoundly thought over and written about in a systematical and analytical manner by the most important philosophers of the period. With the Italian Renaissance, in the context of humanism and the emerging modern state, the position of the most excellent human skill began to be taken over by the arts of building, of painting and of sculpting. The key step in that direction, as is well known, was made by Leon Battista Alberti. He was the first to truly theorise those visual arts-hitherto lowly, manual skills, unworthy of philosophical enquiry-and thus to provide the foundation on which the modern conception of art could be developed. Himself a humanist, writing in Latin for the cultivated governing elite, he grounded his project in the importance of the visual representation within the political situation of the day. Whereas Alberti's borrowings from the rhetoric have been profusely commented upon and much has been established about the political uses of visual arts in the Renaissance times, nonetheless the final consequence of his particular association of rhetoric and politics and visual arts has not yet been sufficiently emphasized and explicated.

The answer to the question, »which is the foremost human activity, which activity is most worthy of a man«, was for the Ancients simple enough: that can only be the activity of politics, with its concommitant skill of rhetoric. Consequently, the arts of politics and rhetoric were thoroughly theorised, they were profoundly thought over and written about in a systematical and analytical manner by the most important philosophers of the day.
With the Italian Renaissance, in the context of humanism and the emerging modern state, the position of the most excellent human skill began to be taken over by the arts of building, of painting and of sculpting. The key step in that direction, as is well known, was made by Leon Battista Alberti. He was the first to truly theorise those visual arts – hitherto lowly, manual skills, unworthy of philosophical enquiry – and thus to provide the foundation on which the modern conception of art could be developed. Himself a humanist, writing in Latin for the cultivated governing elite, he grounded his project in the importance of the visual representation within the political situation of the day. Whereas Alberti's borrowings from the rhetoric have been profusely commented upon and much has been established about the political uses of visual arts in the Renaissance times, the final consequence of his particular association of rhetoric and politics and visual arts has not yet been sufficiently emphasized and explicated.

"Painting in the Gravitational Field" was published in the book Studio Talks: Thinking Through Painting (2014) http://www.arvinius.se/. The book is the result of an artistic research project funded by, among others, The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In his text Jan Rydén discusses how to find a useful way of talking about painting's medium specificity without being normative or limiting, and how that medium specificity explains painting's remarkable perseverence in contemporary art. He puts forward the idea that painting should be regarded as a field, or a nebulous entity with a strong nucleus and very diffuse boundaries. However, to pinpoint an essence might be impossible. The exact centre of gravity, the core of the matter, could well hover in the empty space between the different central parts. There are resemblances to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Family resemblance theory. These are discussed in the text, as well as the theories of embodied cognition (George Lakoff) , prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch ) and affordances (James J. Gibson) in conjunction to painting.

Il paper si propone di indagare forme di pittura caratterizzate da una gamma cromatica ridotta della tavolozza. La negazione della policromia può condurci sulle tracce della costruzione di senso inscritto nell’opera e indicarci qualcosa di intimamente legato alla dimensione ideativa e processuale del dipinto?
Una selezione di casi studio, incentrati sulla dialettica tra forme di riduzione cromatica e forme del potere, tenterà di evidenziarne caratteristiche e peculiarità, secondo una lettura che procede dal contesto per giungere alle strategie enunciative messe in atto dalle rappresentazioni. La rinuncia a una resa policroma della realtà, nell’ambito della pittura Occidentale, è documentata fin dall’Antichità e attraversa l’intera storia della pittura. Ciò spinge a interrogarsi sulle valenze semantiche di tale tipo di pittura, sulle modalità di costruzione dell’osservatore, sullo statuto ontologico della pittura stessa.