The author discusses philosophical context of arts on the example of natural sign and painting, underlying the fact that today, when aesthetics is a well grounded philosophical discipline, one tends to forget that before this discipline emerged in an explicit way, intersections between visual arts and philosophy had been rare.
The article is an analysis of the essay by Michael Foucault included in 'The Order of Things'. A question is posed whether Velazquez's painting is mentiones as an illustration of well known theses which were formulated earlier on the basis of a purely linguistic discourse, or whether it rather makes a functionally indispensable fragment of a complete conceptual construction. An attempt to answer this question, undertaken in the present work, aims at determining certain general properties of condition based on a linguistic discourse and a kind of 'pictorial' cognition. The fundamental difference is that the nature of cognition which refers to the language is successive, temporal and performative (though not in the sense understood by J.L. Austin), whereas pictorial cognition is holistic, embracing a number of elements simultaneously and, as a result, is situated as if beyond time. Michael Foucault states that we see cannot be adequately expressed by what we say, yet he still takes up an effort of describing Velazquez's painting and, what is more, his description becomes the key to the whole book. Paradoxically, a linguistic analysis of a painting, previously regarded as impossible, introduces the reader into the problems of double representation. The present work proposes a thesis that, apart from the annihilation of the subject, Foucault destroys the sphere of the object as well. Paraphrasing Poper, one might say that Foucault talks about presentation without the representing subject. The disapperance of subject may be compared with implementing the Buddhist principle of non-substantiality. Foucault's epistemological considerations thus refer to a discourse which has distinct brahmanical featueres. The disappearance of the subject is accompanied by the disapperance of reality. What is left is a representation without the represented reality. Foucault uses the painting by Velazquez to illustrate its inner self-reference which reaches an absolute limit and becomes an independent reality. Foucault doesn't want to make a speech for us, but he wants to disappear in stream of the language revealing its own energy. The answer to the initial question is not unambiguous. On the one hand Foucault uses Velazquez's painting in a rather instrumental way and treats it as an illustration of some linguistic game, an illustration of an operation carried out on symbols, yet on the other hand he comes to a reflection on a double representation in whose context Velazquez's work becomes a more formal tool of analysis. The considerations upon the order of things, words and pictures presented by Foucault in 'Las Meninas' are situated in the limits of a broad conceptual horizon which marks the idea of representation. It makes the widest context and all symbolic structures, pictorial presentations or symbolic systems are closed within this horizon. Thus the opposition of words and images fades into the background and is partially blurred in the universal space of representation
Deleuze’s critical reading of Bacon foregrounds the relationships between representation and interpretation, thus making Deleuze’s concepts applicable to the philosophical reflexion of the theory of painting and its communication potential. Therefore, the chief objectives of the paper are to understand the rhizomatic thinking in the perception of the artwork and to emphasize the problem-riddled nature of the relationship between representation and interpretation in the works of Gilles Deleuze. The comparison of two actual texts should demonstrate that Deleuze’s efforts to use the rhizome concept in order to transcend representation are doomed when limited to the level of immanence. Thus a far more fundamental topic appears – that of the relationship between the level of immanence and the level of consistence.
The case of conceptus pingendi in Zwettl, which contains several differences between text and image media, calls attention to the problem of a questionable authorship of content concepts of the frescoes, respectively the question of its definitive confirmation. Exactly the "spontaneity" in the implementation of the paintings in the library of Zwettl reminds to the fact, that the possible authority, competence or responsibility for the intellectual concept of the work, is to be interpreted with respect to the concrete executive artist, in this case Paul Troger.
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The contribution focuses on the file of late Renaissance painted epitaphs from the historical territory of the so called Bohemian Silesia, though there is a range of monuments of unclear provenience. Nevertheless, they can be connected with Silesian environment being connected with specific iconography comprising mainly the motive of Allegorical Crucifixion. This unequivocally points at commemorative and representative monuments as well as peculiar 'confessional media', referring about the confession of its customers. Therefore it appears that so far used predominantly formally-analytical approach to these problems requires also examining even the complex social background of epitaph monument, which often speaks in their iconographic themes with distinct confessional language.
Painter Robert Konstantin Schwede's 200th anniversary is a good reason to present an overview of his creative career and to examine some of the problems that arise in this context. Artists with identical or similar surnames are often found in various sources of information; two painters usually appear under the name of 'Schwede' - Robert Konstantin Schwede (1806-1871) and his cousin Theodore (Fyodor Fyodorovich) Schwede (1819-?). Both are associated with the St. Petersburg Academy of Art where they obtained their artist's qualification. The same time span and links with the Academy have created a series of misunderstandings in encyclopaedic sources, publications and museum work with respect to the attribution of paintings. The situation becomes even more complicated because Theodore Schwede's brother Adelbert Schwede also took up painting. Considering the three above-mentioned artists, Robert Schwede has been most often associated with Latvia. As far as the author knows, of Robert Schwede's portraits only the 'Portrait of Maria Miln' is in Latvia (collection of the Latvian National Art Museum), but no sure facts are known about his landscapes. The majority of over 30 Robert Schwede's works are owned by the families of his progeny in Russia and Germany. These works are accessible to the author only in photographs, so any conclusions are fragmentary. Opinions on Robert Schwede start with Wilhelm Neumann's publications. Latvian art historian Janis Silins has described the artist more completely, as Karl Timoleon von Neff's contemporary and pupil but not his follower. Although Schwede adopted many techniques from Neff he did not follow him in the Raphael tradition.
The article investigats interaction between Ukrainian and Polish surrealism in 1920–1930, features of the creative contribution to development of the general surrealistic ideas. It also compares the activity of the Polish-Ukrainian literary associations of 1920–1930s with French circle and defines dynamics of development of basic principles of poetics – the automatic letter, “an objective case”, a mythological component in surrealism structure. Unlike the French surrealism which in 1920–1930s has concentrated the problematic round ideology, the Ukrainian version of this direction, since the origin, was essentially nonpolitical. The presented research puts one of the problems – comparison of ideological base of the Ukrainian and Polish versions of surrealism (in painting and literature) with understanding of the avant-garde syncretism.
On 13 October 1944 Riga once again became the capital of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR). The political re-education of artists who now had to comply with tenets of Socialist Realism was resumed with new vigour. In 1934 the classical definition of the term was voiced at the 1st All-Union Writers' Congress - 'a truthful reflection of life in its historical and revolutionary development, national in form and socialist in content'. A wide gap opened up between normative idealisation and reality, involving a xenophobic opposition to Western art and literature LSSR Art Academy denounced apolitical, meaningless works which were to be replaced by 'true events from the life of the socialist country'. In 1950 the Artists' Union attempted to introduce team-work which had been known in the USSR since the start of collectivisation and socialist production. There were already numerous examples in Soviet art. The first collective work by Latvian artists was the decoration of the LSSR pavilion at the All-Union Agriculture Exhibition. Competitions were announced in 1951 and many teams were created as there was much interest in artists' circles with intrigues and fierce passions. However, when it came to the submission of sketches the number of approved artists declined significantly. Pathetic gestures in easel painting were far removed from the dramatic effect they attempted to convey and teams were unable to merge their approaches. Even if co-operation went smoothly, the outcome was far from satisfactory. Collectively created works sometimes emerged in later periods of Soviet art but they were no longer dictated by the state but by the artists' desire for commissions and solving some artistic problems more successfully.
Atanas Botev, an artist active in the modern culture of south-eastern Europe, through references to regional and Western historical, political, and social landscapes conducts what might best be understood as a multimedia experiment: his art takes the audience into a hypnotic world where the great narratives – the history of the political and the history of the aesthetic – become immanent. This hallucinatory blow to the building of a universal academic structure acquires revolutionary features; and in the domains of the poetic, it glows with a perceptive amazement and a psychedelic shock.
In January 2009, a surprising number of artworks or, as the artist called them, 'art-makings' - drawings, paintings and objects - were found in Visvaldis Ziedins' house. 1185 items were listed in Ziedins' art collection during work on this article. Information is still being gathered on the collection and the article is just the beginning of this research process. Visvaldis Ziedins was born on 4 April 1942 and died on 11 January 2007 in Liepaja. From 1959 to 1964 he studied at the Interior Design Department of the Liepaja Secondary School of Applied Arts. After graduation he enrolled as a painter at a motor transport depot but later started to work as artist-decorator at the 'Kurzeme' department store in Liepaja. In his spare time he created surprising 'art-makings'. Apart from participation in Liepaja artists' group exhibitions, Ziedins had three solo shows during his lifetime which were held in Liepaja in 1968, 1986 and 1992.Considering Ziedins' heritage from the historical viewpoint, his most active and interesting period coincides the gloomy Soviet time. However, the historical excursus should begin with the gains during the 'thaw' when the partial relaxation of the political regime also brought changes to culture. 'Legitimate' contacts with the rest of the world are resumed in this period. Up till now Zenta Logina, Lidija Auza and Ojars Abols were credited with being the first Latvian artists to complement their works with sand, metal slivers, glass shards and everyday objects or their fragments since the mid-1960s. Now Ziedins has to be added to this list as he had already started to form spatial compositions involving cement and lime mortar and everyday items in the early 1960s. Ziedins' diaries reveal that he studied the works of both the classical modernists and Latvian masters.
The exhibition 'AND OTHERS. Movements, Explorations and Artists in Latvia 1960 - 1984' was on view at the Riga Art Space from 17 November to 30 December 2010. It examined the marginal aspects of Soviet cultural life and searches for alternative means of expression in the art of this period. Vladimir Glushenkov (1948-2009) was among the artists represented in this show; until now his name was known only among the small circle of connoisseurs. Although Glushenkov had received a typical professional education for an artist of Soviet Latvia, his entry onto the art scene was a relative failure. The diploma of stage designer allowed him to take a creative, state-paid job at Latvian Television where he worked as an artist-producer from 1976 to 1996. Alongside this state job and several stage-design projects for Latvian theatres, throughout his life he was an enthusiastic painter as well as engaging in verbal forms of expression such as writing journals and poetry. Attempts to take part in official exhibitions, submitting his compositions to the shows of thematic painting, were usually criticised and turned down by the jury; this was related to the style and theme, which was far removed from the requirements of that time and also the insufficient 'quality' of execution. The originality of Glushenkov's individual approach became especially manifest in the 1970s and 1980s when his stylistically diverse painted compositions (tempera) and graphic works (mostly ink drawings) revealed his interest in Western art history from the Renaissance to post-modernism. He had been interested in figural art but not in the traditional manner based on academic traditions or the canon of Socialist Realism. His images of the early 1970s, anthropomorphic rather than realistic, were joined in absurd combinations, works with a hardly readable spatial structure and subject, creating a painting endowed with surreal moods.
Sigurds Vizirkste's (1928-1974) exhibition 'Cybernetic Canvases' was on view at the Foreign Art Museum in Riga from 12 September to 21 October 2007. The initiator of the show, painter Daina Dagnija, singled out works from the 1960s featuring dot-like protrusions. Vidzirkste gave them this title at the Kips Bay Gallery auction in New York in 1968. Vidzirkste was born on 10 February 1928 in Daugavpils (Latvia) where his father was a clerk at the Railwaymen Sickness Insurance Fund. He attended Daugavpils 2nd Elementary School. In Riga he graduated from the State Elementary School and continued his education at the Chemistry Department of Riga State Technical Secondary School. In autumn 1944 Vidzirkste and his family fled to Germany, emigrating to the USA in Christmas 1950 where he settled in New York City and soon joined the Will Barnett's workshop at the Art Students' League. Vidzirkste was mathematically oriented. He worked as an audiovisual specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank where he learned the principles of electronic calculation devices. Vidzirkste integrates knowledge of mathematics, chemistry and music in his art. His creative career started in the late 1950s and involved giving up polychromes and reducing composition to dark-and-light, basic formal relations. He organises information expressed as a point, line, circle and plane, creating an arrangement or iteration of elements where the same application uses different sizes and the element used in the application changes with each new painting. Vidzirkste was interested in absolute rhythm, the spontaneous and calculated, regular and irregular, symmetrical and asymmetrical, changing and unchanging intervals, grades of protruding dots as the indicators of distance and gradations of timbre, multi-layered polyphony and minimalist asceticism. Peering into his canvases, the musically oriented observer perceives an intonation analogous to serial music that ignores the motif, condensing all the information into a single sound.
The presence and importance of the nymph in the late medieval and early modern art goes beyond the fashionable adaptation of a classicizing motif. None less than Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929) was the one who developed a passion for the godly girl, wandering to the bucolic springs and caves, whose name etymologically refers to a "bride". However, it isn't the iconographic afterlife of the nymph that is addresses by this study, but the question of her visual identity in the early humanism. This question opens a discourse on a movement and wind in visual media, on the effect of the nymph on the viewer and on the (self-) reflection of the visual arts, especially painting.
The authoress focuses on paintings by two contemporary artists, George Shaw and Gerhard Richter, and shows how in times, when the principle of technical reproduction predominates no longer, Benjamin's thesis on the existence, or disappearance of the aura can still be applied. Shaw's paintings, created according to the photographs, obsessively reproduce the atmosphere, which Benjamin credited to the so-called auratic art. At the same time, the contribution reveals a semantic shift in Shaw's perception of the aura, caused by a filter of technique, at which the archetypal connection of photography with memory occurs. On the other hand, G. Richter in his technique of painting according to photography proceeds conceptually since 1960s: his paintings reproduce not the atmosphere of the photography and the following feeling of nostalgia but they attempt to make reproducible that, which produces the nostalgia
On the occasion of marriage of Francis I Medici and Joanna of Austria in 1565, a mural painting representing Bratislava as one of the capitals of the Habsburg agglomeration was executed in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Compared to the original woodcut completed by the Monogramist “HM” (Hans Mayr?), the fresco shows many differences. The outlined questions and similarities clearly show that it is important to explore the chronology of origin, mutual inspirations and a possible transfer of individual elements among the leading Habsburg courts and artists.
Miervaldis Polis is perhaps best known in Latvia for his Bronze Man performances of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Less discussed are the paintings he created in the 1970s, during his student days as well as those from the 1980s, all of which may be seen as a precursor to his performances in terms of the artist's approach and the effects of the images. By using the technique of trompe l'oeil and the genre of photorealism, Polis compelled his viewers to become actively involved in looking at the image, and in the creation of meaning, much in the same way that performance art does. In the context of Soviet Latvia, this empowerment of the viewer took on a certain significance, in that Polis' paintings provided an alternative space, outside of the official political one, for viewers to look critically, distrust and dispute the trompe l'oeil appearances, and seek the truth behind them. Throughout his career Polis has used his art to engage in a dialogue not only with his viewers, but also with artists and art history itself. From his early paintings, which are pastiches of travel diaries, to his later appropriations of photographs and prints of paintings from Western art history, the artist employs his images to compel viewers to carefully consider the forms that they are presented with, and fully engage with them. His paintings are a puzzle that the viewer must unravel himself, through active looking and careful consideration of the image.
One of the oldest images of Bratislava can be found in the first courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (Cortile di Michelozzo). The mural painting titled “Possonia” (today’s Bratislava) was part of the cycle representing the views of 17 cities of Habsburg monarchy, commissioned in 1565 by Cosimo de’Medici for the wedding between his son Francesco and Giovanna d’Austria, daughter of Ferdinand I of Habsburg. The cycle was executed by Sebastiano (Bastiano) Veronese, Giovanni Lombardi Veneziano, Cesare Baglioni Bolognese, and Turino di Piamonte. The Possonia mural painting in Florence was most likely inspired by this image, signed by Monogrammist “HM” and “MG” i.e. Leipzig-based painter and graphic artist Hans Mayr (Meyer), or Martin and Donat Hubschmann.
The article deals with the painted dowry-chests of Kurzeme in Western Latvia (their forms, metalwork and painting) recorded in drawings, descriptions and photographs by the Monument Board from the 1920s to the early 1940s. There are drawings, descriptions and occasionally photographs of 213 dowry-chests, 119 of them with painted decorations. The assumption that dowry-chests are the subject of ethnographers has created a situation where their artistic qualities have not been thoroughly analysed and assessed. The origins of dowry-chests can be traced back to the cassone developed in Italy from the 14th to the late 16th century, meaning 'chest' in Italian. In Kurzeme there is a wide variety of dowry-chests (they have been spotted unevenly in Kurzeme), yet there are general regularities concerning types, tones and artistic solutions. Forms of chests: 80 % are rectangular structures joined at the corners with straight lids (chest); 18 % are rectangular structures joined at the corners with curved lids (coffer). Chest colours: 45 % are brown, 37 % are green, and 12 % are blue and 5% blue-green. Chests are painted evenly in one tone on top of which there are groups of painted decoration. Painted decoration is created as a free-had drawing to achieve a magnificent result. The richest decoration is found on the front plane or façade of the chest. There is an opinion that Jewish-painted chests are more plastic and painterly but Latvians have created more graphic-style decorations. The uniqueness of dowry-chests found in Latvia consists in the compositional fusion of metalwork and painting, with their predominant vertical symmetry.
The appearance of the Fisherman’s Gate can be seen in the 1563 historical veduta of the town by Hans Mayer and the unique mural painting POSSONIA at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The archaeological survey in 2001 revealed surprisingly well preserved remnants of the Gothic fore-gate of Fisherman’s Gate. Uncovered murals represent the most valuable part of the fore-gate, which is a unique example of 15th century Gothic fortification architecture in Slovakia. The discovery and presentation of the remains of Fisherman’s Gate based on the survey conducted by the Municipal Monument Preservation Institute in Bratislava was granted the “2001 Discovery of the Year” award and the medal Europa Nostra 2002 for the protection of cultural heritage of the European Union.
Edouard Manet began his professional career with works reflecting bohemian street life in Paris and music. The most intriguing of these feature “Gypsy” subjects. The artist drew upon prevailing discourses about Gypsies and in particular he was responding to a book by Franz Liszt Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie which was published in Paris in 1859. A number of Manet’s innovations take their cue from the Gypsy’s revolutionary approach to music-making described in that book. Through the evocation of sound, music and other non-visual experiences he was pointing the way to a redefinition of art’s referential function.
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