|
|
|
Eugène Fromentin's brilliantly accurate discourse on Dutch art includes a fragment which never ceases to amaze me. In this fragment, the author points to the precision with which objects are observed, for example, in those simple still lifes displaying a few things. Without wasting words, Fromentin connects this precision with a certain slowness, "a patient will" - thus, with the patience necessary to study each individual object before, possibly, becoming immersed in the much more lively scenography which is the whole painting. When you observe something patiently, and for a long time, it will eventually lie still by itself - just as the single leaf, under the botanist's magnifying glass, has nothing left to recall the tree swaying wildly in the storm. For this silent leaf, and equally for a few curious shells in a still life, or for a butterfly among the fancifully blooming tulips in another seventeenth-century painting - to depict such details in their full simplicity, we need the drawing. "Every object, thanks to the interest it offers" (wrote Fromentin) "ought to be examined in its form and drawn before it is painted. In this way nothing is secondary. A landscape with its distances, a cloud with its movements, a piece of architecture with its laws of perspective, a face with its physiognomy, its distinctive traits, its passing expressions, a hand with its gesture, a garment in its natural folds, an animal with its carriage, its frame, the inmost characteristics of its kind..." Around 1875, such an observant and humble attitude towards reality struck a French author as being typical, true, and characteristic of art from the Northern Netherlands, which, in general, faithfully represented what could be seen. Other schools more often favoured eloquent and dramatic compositions, in which delicate details disappeared into effectful clair-obscure and a compelling jumble of colours. Of course, I am speaking very generally about the situation, but the patient attention to a highly detailed reality is indisputably a characteristic of Dutch art, from Jan van Eyck right up to Mondriaan's so precisely executed abstractions. More than a hundred years after Fromentin, Svetlana Alpers published The Art of Describing (1983), in which, with a wealth of added information from such areas as cartography and optics (in which Dutch scientists also excelled), she simply echoes the Frenchman. In his book, Les Matres d'Autrefois (1876), Fromentin described the works of art he encountered on his journey through the Netherlands, viewed through the discerning eye of the writer who was also a painter. Another aspect we should not forget is that this was the time when photography had just been invented - that is to say, the time when perception became linked to the idea of a moment in time, or rather, of the moment that, in the photograph, will for ever stand still. Through early photography, a whole new world was gradually discovered - a kind of documentary world, encompassing all manner of things for which the noble art of painting had no time, because such things were too insignificant and too unimportant to be paid much attention. Photography led to a new aesthetics of realism, often not without sentimentality - or rather, it allowed this aesthetics to develop further, because of course, in essence, it already existed. This is why photography could emerge as the answer to this desire for realism and documentation of which Fromentin was one of the protagonists; he could project this desire onto Dutch art. For what it is worth, with all this I only want to say that an exhibition such as The Second, which also shows this curious realism, with its slowness and patience, is also part of this special Dutch tradition. If Dutch artists - not only painters, but, in this century, also documentary film makers - have a unique talent for astute observation, the artists of the 'New Media' certainly have that talent, too: "the patient will", as Fromentin put it. Rudi Fuchs |
|
|
Kessels & Bajazzo
Please direct any comments and questions to: webmaster@bajazzo.com