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11Painting

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Fig. 280 Giorgio Vasari, The Art of Painting, 1542.Fresco of the vault of the Main Room, Arezzo, Casa Vasari.Canali Photobank, Capriolo, Italy.

Early in the fifteenth century, a figure knownas La Pittura—literally, “the picture”—beganto appear in Italian art (Fig. 280). As art his-torian Mary D. Garrard has noted, the emer-

gence of the figure of La Pittura, the personification ofpainting, could be said to announce the cultural arrivalof painting as an art. In the Middle Ages, painting wasnever included among the liberal arts—those areas ofknowledge that were thought to develop general intel-lectual capacity—which included rhetoric, arithmetic,

geometry, astrology, and music. While the liberal artswere understood to involve inspiration and creativeinvention, painting was considered merely a mechani-cal skill, involving, at most, the ability to copy. Theemergence of La Pittura announced that painting wasfinally something more than mere copywork, that itwas an intellectual pursuit equal to the other liberalarts, all of which had been given similar personifica-tion early in the Middle Ages.

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A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter 11 Painting 221

In her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting(Fig. 281), Artemisia Gentileschi presents herself asboth a real person and as the personification of LaPittura. Iconographically speaking, Gentileschi may berecognized as La Pittura by virtue of the pendantaround her neck that symbolizes imitation. AndGentileschi can imitate the appearance of things verywell—she presents us with a portrait of herself as shereally looks. Still, in Renaissance terms, imitationmeans more than simply copying appearances: It is therepresentation of nature as seen by and through theartist’s imagination. On the one hand, Gentileschi’smulticolored garment alludes to her craft and skill as acopyist—she can imitate the effects of color—but onthe other hand, her unruly hair stands for the imagina-tive frenzy of the artist’s temperament. Thus, in thispainting, she portrays herself both as a real womanand as an idealized personification of artistic genius,

possessing all the intellectual authorityand dignity of a Leonardo or aMichelangelo. Though in her time itwas commonplace to think of womenas intellectually inferior to men—“women have long dresses and shortintellects” was a popular saying—hereGentileschi transforms painting frommere copywork, and, in the process,transforms her own possibilities as acreative person.

Nevertheless, from the earliesttimes, one of the major concerns ofWestern painting has been representingthe appearance of things in the naturalworld. There is a famous story told bythe historian Pliny about a contestbetween the Greek painters Parrhasiusand Zeuxis as to who could make themost realistic image:

Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes sodexterously represented that birds began tofly down to eat from the painted vine.Whereupon Parrhasius designed so lifelikea picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud ofthe verdict of the birds, requested that the

curtain should now be drawn back and the picture dis-played. When he realized his mistake, with a modestythat did him honor, he yielded up the palm, saying thatwhereas he had managed to deceive only birds,Parrhasius had deceived an artist.

This tradition, which views the painter’s task asrivaling the truth of nature, has survived to thepresent day.

In this chapter, we will consider the art of paint-ing, paying particular attention to how its variousmedia developed in response to artists’ desires to imi-tate reality and express themselves more fluently. Butbefore we begin our discussion of these various paint-ing media, we should be familiar with a number ofterms that all the media share and that are crucial tounderstanding how paintings are made.

From prehistoric times to the present day, thepainting process has remained basically the same. As

Fig. 281 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait asthe Allegory of Painting, 1630.Oil on canvas, 351/4 � 29 in. The Royal Collection.© 2007 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Photo: C. Cooper Ltd.

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222 Part 3 The Fine Arts Media

in drawing, artists use pigments, or powdered colors,suspended in a medium or binder that holds the par-ticles of pigment together. The binder protects thepigment from changes and serves as an adhesive toanchor the pigment to the support, or the surface onwhich the artist paints—a wall, a panel of wood, asheet of paper, or a canvas. Different binders have dif-ferent characteristics. Some dry more quickly thanothers. Some create an almost transparent paint, whileothers are opaque—that is, they cannot be seenthrough. The same pigment used in different binderswill look different because of the varying degrees ofeach binder’s transparency.

Since most supports are too absorbent toallow the easy application of paint, artistsoften prime (pre-treat) a support with a paint-like material called a ground. Grounds alsomake the support surface smoother or moreuniform in texture. Many grounds, especiallywhite grounds, increase the brightness of thefinal picture.

Finally, artists use a solvent or vehicle, athinner that enables the paint to flow morereadily and that also cleans brushes. All water-based paints use water for a vehicle. Other typesof paints require a different thinner—in the caseof oil-based paint, turpentine.

Each painting medium has unique character-istics and has flourished at particular historicalmoments. Though many media have been largelyabandoned as new media have been discovered—media that allow the artist to create a more believ-able image or that are simply easier to use—almostall media continue to be used to some extent, andolder media, such as encaustic and fresco, sometimesfind fresh uses in the hands of contemporary artists.

ENCAUSTIC

Encaustic, made by combining pigment with a binderof hot wax, is one of the oldest painting media. It waswidely used in classical Greece, most famously byPolygnotus, but his work, as well as all other Greekpainting except that on vases, has entirely perished.(The contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius was prob-ably conducted in encaustic.)

Most of the surviving encaustic paintings from theancient world come from Faiyum in Egypt, which, inthe second century CE, was a thriving Roman provinceabout 60 miles south of present-day Cairo. The Faiyumpaintings are funeral portraits, which were attached tothe mummy cases of the deceased, and they are theonly indication we have of the painting techniques

used by the Greeks. A transplanted Greek artist may,in fact, have been responsible for Mummy Portrait of aMan (Fig. 282), though we cannot be sure.

What is clear, though, is the artist’s remarkableskill with the brush. The encaustic medium is ademanding one, requiring the painter to work quicklyso that the wax will stay liquid. Looking at MummyPortrait of a Man, we notice that while the neck andshoulders have been rendered with simplified forms,

which gives them asense of

Fig. 282 Mummy Portrait of a Man, Faiyum, Egypt, c. 160–170 CE.Encaustic on wood, 14 � 18 in.Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Charles Clifton Fund, 1938.

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Fig. 283 Still Life with Eggs and Thrushes, Villa of Julia Felix, Pompeii, before 79 CE.Fresco, 35 � 48 in. National Museum, Naples.Scala / Art Resource, NY.

strength that is almost tangible, the face has beenpainted in a very naturalistic and sensitive way. Thewide, expressive eyes and the delicate modeling of thecheeks make us feel that we are looking at a “real” per-son, which was clearly the artist’s intention.

The extraordinary luminosity of the encausticmedium has led to its revival in recent years. Of allcontemporary artists working in the medium, no onehas perfected its use more than Jasper Johns, whoseencaustic Three Flags (see Fig. 19) we saw in Chapter 1.

FRESCO

Wall painting was practiced by the ancient Egyptians,Greeks, and Romans, as well as by Italian painters ofthe Renaissance. Numerous examples survive fromAegean civilizations of the Cyclades and Crete (seeFig. 568), to which later Greek culture traced its roots.In the eighteenth century, a great many frescoes were

discovered at Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum,where they had been buried under volcanic ash sincethe eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. A series of still-life paintings was unearthed in 1755–57 that provedso popular in France that they led to the renewed pop-ularity of the still-life genre. This Still Life with Eggsand Thrushes (Fig. 283), from the Villa of Julia Felix,is particularly notable, especially the realism of thedish of eggs, which seems to hang over the edge of thepainting and push forward into our space. The factthat all the objects in the still life have been paintedlife-size adds to the work’s sense of realism.

The preferred medium for wall painting for cen-turies was fresco, in which pigment is mixed withlimewater (a solution containing calcium hydroxide,or slaked lime) and then applied to a lime plaster wallthat is either still wet or hardened and dry. If the paintis applied to a wet wall, the process is called buon

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fresco (Italian for “good” or “true fresco”), and if it isapplied to a dry wall, it is called fresco secco, or “dryfresco.” In buon fresco, the wet plaster absorbs the wetpigment, and the painting literally becomes part of thewall. The artist must work quickly, plastering only asmuch wall as can be painted before the plaster dries,but the advantage of the process is that it is extremelydurable. In fresco secco, on the other hand, the pig-ment is combined with binders such as egg yolk, oil, orwax and applied separately, at virtually any pace theartist desires. As a result, the artist can render anobject with extraordinary care and meticulousness.The disadvantage of the fresco secco technique is thatmoisture can creep in between the plaster and thepaint, causing the paint to flake off the wall. This is

Fig. 284 Bodhisattva, detail of a frescowall painting in Cave I, Ajanta,Maharashtra, India, c. 475 CE.Photo: Lars Gôhler, India Project.

what happened to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper inMilan (see Fig. 99), which has peeled away to such atragic degree that the image almost disappeared.Today it is being carefully restored.

Nevertheless, in extremely dry environments,such as the Buddhist caves at Ajanta, India, frescosecco has proven extremely durable (Fig. 284).Painting in the fifth century CE, the artists at Ajantacovered the walls of the caves with a mixture of mudand cow dung, bound together with straw or animalhair. Once dry, this mud mixture was smoothed over alayer of gypsum or lime plaster, which served as theground for the painting. The artists’ technique is fullydescribed in the Samarangana Sutra Dhara, an encyclo-pedic work on Indian architecture written in the early

eleventh century CE. The artist firstoutlined his subject in iron ore, thenfilled in the outline with color, buildingup the figure’s features from darker tolighter tones to create the subtle grada-tions of modeling required to achieve asense of a three-dimensional body.Protruding features, such as shoulders,nose, brow, and, on this figure espe-cially, the right hand, thus resonateagainst the dark background of thepainting, as if reaching out of the dark-ness of the cave into the light.

This figure is a bodhisattva, anenlightened being who, in order tohelp others achieve enlightenment,postpone joining Buddha in nirvana—not exactly heaven, but the state ofbeing freed from suffering and thecycle of rebirth. It is one of two largebodhisattvas that flank the entrance toa large hall in Cave I at Ajanta builtinto the caves around the sides ofwhich are monks’ cells with a Buddhashrine at the back. Lavishly adornedwith jewelry, including long strands ofpearls and an ornate crown, the deli-cate gesture of the right hand formingthe teaching mudra (see Chapter 2), thefigure seems intended to suggest to theviewer the joys of following the pathof Buddha.

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In Europe, the goal of creating the illusion ofreality dominates fresco painting from the earlyRenaissance in the fourteenth century through theBaroque period of the late seventeenth century. It isas if painting at the scale of the wall invites, even

demands, the creation of “real” space. In oneof the great sets of frescoes of the earlyRenaissance, painted by Giotto in the Arena

Chapel in Padua, Italy, this realist impulse is espe-cially apparent.

The Arena Chapel was specially designed, possi-bly by Giotto himself, to house frescoes, and itcontains 38 individual scenes that tell the stories ofthe lives of the Virgin and Christ. In the Lamentation(Fig. 285), the two crouching figures with theirbacks to us extend into our space in a manner similarto the bowl of eggs in the Roman fresco. Here, theresult is to involve us in the sorrow of the scene. Asthe hand of the left-most figure cradles Christ’s head,it is almost as if the hand were our own. One of themore remarkable aspects of this fresco, however, is

the placement of its focal point—Christ’s face—inthe lower-left-hand corner of the composition, at thebase of the diagonal formed by the stone ledge. Justas the angels in the sky seem to be plummetingtoward the fallen Christ, the tall figure on the rightleans forward in a sweeping gesture of grief thatmimics the angels’ descending flight.

Lines dividing various sections of Giotto’s frescoare clearly apparent, especially in the sky. In thelower half of the painting these divisions tend tofollow the contours of the various figures. These sec-tions, known as giornata, literally a “day’s work” inItalian, are the areas that Giotto was able to com-plete in a single sitting. Since in buon fresco the painthad to be applied on a wet wall, Giotto could onlypaint an area that he could complete before the plas-ter coat set. If the area to be painted was complex—aface, for instance—the giornata might be no larger.Extremely detailed work would be added later, as infresco secco.

Fig. 285 Giotto, Lamentation, c. 1305.Fresco, approximately 70 � 78 in. Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 286 Fra Andrea Pozzo, The Glorification of Saint Ignatius, 1691–94.Ceiling fresco. Nave of Sant’ Ignazio, Rome.Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 287 Giotto, Madonna and Child Enthroned,c. 1310. Tempera on panel, 10 ft. 8 in. � 6 ft. 81/4in. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The fresco artists’ interest in illusionism culmi-nated in Michelangelo’s frescoes for the SistineChapel (see Works in Progress, pp. 228–229) and inthe Baroque ceiling designs of the late seventeenthcentury. Among the most remarkable of these is TheGlorification of Saint Ignatius (Fig. 286), which FraAndrea Pozzo painted for the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome. Standing in the nave, or centralportion of the church, and looking upward, the con-gregation had the illusion that the roof of thechurch had been removed, revealing the glories ofHeaven. A master of perspective, about which hewrote an influential treatise, Pozzo realized hiseffects by extending the architecture in paint onestory above the actual windows in the vault. SaintIgnatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, is shownbeing transported on a cloud toward the waitingChrist. The foreshortening of the many figures,becoming ever smaller in size as they rise toward thecenter of the ceiling, greatly adds to the realistic, yetawe-inspiring, effect.

TEMPERA

Most artists in the early Renaissancewho painted frescoes also worked intempera, a medium made by combiningwater, pigment, and some gummy mater-ial, usually egg yolk. The paint wasmeticulously applied with the point of afine red sable brush. Colors could notreadily be blended, and, as a result,effects of chiaroscuro were accomplishedby means of careful and gradual hatch-ing. In order to use tempera, the paintingsurface, often a wood panel, had to beprepared with a very smooth ground, notunlike the smooth plaster wall preparedfor buon fresco. Gesso, made from glueand plaster of Paris or chalk, is the mostcommon ground, and, like wet plaster, itis fully absorbent, combining with thetempera paint to create an extremelydurable and softly glowing surfaceunmatched by any other medium.

To early Renaissance eyes, Giotto’s Madonna andChild (Fig. 287) represented, like his frescoes in theArena chapel, a significant “advance” in the era’sincreasingly insistent desire to create increasinglyrealistic work. It is possible, for instance, to feel thevolume of the Madonna’s knee in Giotto’s altar-piece, to sense actual bodies beneath the draperiesthat clothe his models. The neck of Giotto’sMadonna is modeled and curves round beneath hercape. Her face is sculptural, as if real bones liebeneath her skin.

What motivated this drive toward realism?Painting, it should be remembered, can suggest atleast as much, and probably more, than it portrays.Another way to say this is that painting can be

understood in terms of itsconnotation as well as

its denotation. What apainting denotes

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On May 10, 1506, Michelangelo received anadvance payment from Pope Julius II to under-take the task of frescoing the ceiling of theSistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome. By the

end of July, a scaffolding had been erected. BySeptember 1508, Michelangelo was painting, and forthe next four and a half years, he worked almost with-out interruption on the project.

According to Michelangelo’s later recounting ofevents, Julius had originally envisioned a design inwhich the central part of the ceiling would be filledwith “ornaments according to custom” (apparently afield of geometric ornaments) surrounded by the 12apostles in the 12 spandrels. Michelangelo protested,assuring Julius that it would be “a poor design” sincethe apostles were themselves “poor too.” Apparentlyconvinced, the pope then freed Michelangelo topaint anything he liked. Instead of the apostles,Michelangelo created a scheme of 12 Old Testamentprophets alternating with 12 sibyls, or women of clas-sical antiquity said to possess prophetic powers. Thecenter of the ceiling would be filled with nine scenesfrom Genesis.

As the scaffolding was erected, specially designedby the artist so that he could walk around and paintfrom a standing position, Michelangelo set to workpreparing hundreds of drawings for the ceiling. Thesedrawings were then transferred to full-size cartoons,which would be laid up against the moist surface of thefresco as it was prepared, their outlines traced throughwith a stylus. None of these cartoons, and surprisinglyfew of Michelangelo’s drawings, have survived.

One of the greatest, and most revealing, of thesurviving drawings is a Study for The Libyan Sibyl(Fig. 288). Each of the sibyls holds a book ofprophecy—though not Christian figures, they prophesythe revelation of the New Testament in the events ofthe Old Testament that they surround. The Libyan Sibyl(Fig. 289) is the last sibyl that Michelangelo wouldpaint. She is positioned next to the Separation of Lightfrom Darkness, the last of the central panels, which isdirectly over the altarpiece. The Libyan Sibyl herselfturns to close her book and place it on the desk behindher. Even as she does so, she steps down from herthrone, creating a stunning opposition of directionalforces, an exaggerated, almost spiral contrapposto.She abandons her book of prophecy as she turns to

participate in the celebration of the Eucharist on thealtar below.

The severity of this downward twisting motionobviously came late in Michelangelo’s work on thefigure. In the drawing, the sibyl’s hands are balancedevenly, across an almost horizontal plane. But theidea of dropping the left hand, in order to emphasizemore emphatically the sibyl’s downward movement,came almost immediately, for just below her left armis a second variation, in which the upper arm dropsperceptively downward and the left hand is parallelto the face instead of the forehead, matching thepositions of the final painting. In the drawing, thesibyl is nude, and apparently Michelangelo’s modelis male, his musculature more closely defined thanin the final painting. Furthermore, in the drawing,


Fig. 288 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Libyan Sibyl, c. 1510.Red chalk on paper, 113/8 � 87/16 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NewYork. Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924 (24.197.2).Photo © 1995 Metropolitan Museum of Art

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the model’s face is redone to the lower left, her lipsmade fuller and feminized, the severity of the origi-nal model’s brow and cheek softened. The magnifi-cently foreshortened left hand is redone in largerscale, as if in preparation for the cartoon, and so isthe lower-left foot. There are, in fact, workingupward from the bottom of the drawing, threeversions of the big toe, and, again, the second and

third are closer to the final painted version than thefirst, more fully realized foot, the second toe splayingmore radically backward, again to emphasize down-ward pressure and movement. It is upon this footthat, in the final painting, Michelangelo directs ourattention, illuminating it like no other portion ofthe figure, the fulcrum upon which the sibyl turnsfrom her pagan past to the Christian present.

Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl


Fig. 289 MichelangeloBuonarroti, The Libyan Sibyl,1511–12.Fresco, detail of the SistineCeiling, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.Canali Photobank, Capriolo, Italy.

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is clearly before us: Giotto has painted a Madonnaand Child surrounded by angels. But what thispainting connotes is something else. To a thir-teenth- or fourteenth-century Italian audience, thealtarpiece would have been understood as depictingthe ideal of love that lies between mother andchild—and, by extension, the greater love of Godfor humanity. Although the relative realism ofGiotto’s painting is what secures its place in art his-tory, its didacticism—that is, its ability to teach, toelevate the mind, in this case, to the contemplationof salvation—was at least as important to its originalaudience. Its truth to nature was, in fact, probablyinspired by Giotto’s desire to make an image withwhich its audience could readily identify. It seemedincreasingly important to capture not the spiritual-ity of religious figures, but their humanity.

Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (Fig. 290), paintedfor a chamber next to the bedroom of his patronLorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici, is one of thegreatest tempera paintings ever made. As a result of

its restoration in 1978, we know a good deal abouthow it was painted. The support consists of eightpoplar panels, arranged vertically and fastened bytwo horizontal strips of spruce. This support was cov-ered with a gesso ground that hid the seams betweenthe panels. Botticelli next outlined the trees and hishuman figures on the gesso and then painted the sky,laying blue tempera directly on the ground. The fig-ures and trees were painted on an undercoat—whitefor the figures, black for the trees. The transparencyof the drapery was achieved by layering thin yellowwashes of transparent medium over the white under-coat. As many as 30 coats of color, transparent oropaque depending on the relative light or shadow ofthe area being painted, were required to create eachfigure.

The kind of detail the artist is able to achieveusing egg tempera is readily apparent in Braids(Fig. 291) by Andrew Wyeth, one of the few contem-porary artists to work almost exclusively in themedium. Wyeth’s brushwork is so fine that each strand

Fig. 290 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482.Tempera on a gesso ground on poplar panel, 80 � 1231/4 in. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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paint layers

oil varnish

blue oil

glaze #3

blue oil

glaze #2

blue oil

glaze #1

underpainted

tempera blue

light

white plaster

ground

cloth

wood


of hair escaping from his model’s braids seemscaught individually in the light. In fact, themost obvious effect that Wyeth achieves withthe medium is that of light. Wyeth’s figuresoften seem posed in the most intense late-afternoon sun. The intensity is achieved byWyeth’s setting his palette of warm colorsagainst a deep black background. Thus, theinherently glowing surface of the temperamedium seems to glow even more acutely.

OIL PAINTING

Even as Botticelli was creating stunningeffects by layering transparent washes of tem-pera on his canvases, painters in northernEurope were coming to the realization thatsimilar effects could be both more readily andmore effectively achieved in oil paint. Oilpaint is a far more versatile medium thantempera. It can be blended on the painting surface tocreate a continuous scale of tones and hues, many ofwhich, especially darker shades, were not possiblebefore oil paint’s invention. As a result, the painterwho uses oils can render the most subtle changes inlight and achieve the most realistic three-dimensionaleffects, rivaling sculpture in this regard. Thinned withturpentine, oil paint can become almost transparent.Used directly from the tube, with no thinner at all, it

can be molded and shaped to create three-dimensional surfaces, a technique referred toas impasto. Perhaps most important, because

its binder is linseed oil, oil painting is slow to dry.Whereas with other painting media artists had to workquickly, with oil they could rework their images almostendlessly.

The ability to create such a sense of reality is avirtue of oil painting that makes the medium particu-larly suitable to the celebration of material things. Byglazing the surface of the painting with thin films oftransparent color, the artist creates a sense of luminousmateriality. Light penetrates this glaze, bounces off theopaque underpainting beneath, and is reflected backup through the glaze (Fig. 292). Painted objects thusseem to reflect light as if they were real, and the playof light through the painted surfaces gives them asense of tangible presence.

Fig. 292 Diagram of a sectionof a fifteenth-century oilpainting demonstrating theluminosity of the medium.

Fig. 291 Andrew Wyeth, Braids, 1979.Egg tempera on canvas, 161/2 � 201/2 in. Private collection.© AM Art, Inc. Photo courtesy of Ann Kendall Richards, Inc., New York.

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Although the ancient Romans had used oil paintto decorate furniture, the medium was first used inpainting in the early fifteenth century in Flanders. Theso-called Master of Flémalle, probably the artist RobertCampin, was among the first to recognize the realisticeffects that could be achieved with the new medium.In The Mérode Altarpiece (Fig. 292), the Christianstory of the Annunciation of the Virgin, the revela-tion to Mary that she will conceive a child to be born the Son of God, takes place in a fully realizedFlemish domestic interior. The archangel Gabrielapproaches Mary from the left, almost blocking theview of the two altarpiece’s donors, the couple whocommissioned it, dressed in fashionable fifteenth-century clothing and standing outside the door at theleft. Seven rays of sunlight illuminate the room andfall directly on Mary’s abdomen. On one of the rays, a

miniature Christ, carrying a cross, flies into thescene (Fig. 293). Campin is telling the view-ers that the entire life of Christ, including

the Passion itself, enters Mary’s body at the momentof conception. The scene is not idealized. In the right-hand panel, Joseph the carpenter works as a realfifteenth-century carpenter might have. In front of himis a recently completed mousetrap. Another mousetrapsits outside on the window ledge, apparently for sale.

Fig. 293a The Master of Flémalle (probably Robert Campin), The Annunciation (The Mérode Altarpiece), c. 1425–30.Oil on wood, triptych, central panel: 251/4 � 247/8 in.; each wing: 253/8 � 103/4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70).Photo © 1996 Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig. 293b The Master of Flémalle (probably Robert Campin), TheAnnunciation (The Mérode Altarpiece), detail, c. 1425–30.Oil on wood, triptych, central panel: 251/4 � 247/8 in.; each wing: 253/8 � 103/4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The CloistersCollection, 1956 (56.70).Photo © 1996 Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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These are real people with real daily concerns. Theobjects in the room—from the vase and flowers to thebook and candle—seem to possess a material realitythat lends a sense of reality to the story of theAnnunciation itself. In fact, the archangel Gabrielappears no less (and no more) “real” than the brass potabove his head.

Another noteworthy aspect of Campin’s altar-piece is its astonishingly small size. If its two side pan-els are closed over the central panel, as they aredesigned to work, the altarpiece is just over two feetsquare—making it entirely portable. This little altar-piece is itself a material object, so intimate anddetailed that it functions more like the book that liesopen on the table than a painting. It is very differentfrom the altarpieces being made in Italy during thesame period. Most of those were monumental in scaleand painted in fresco, permanently embedded in thewall, and therefore not portable. Campin’s altarpiece

is made to be held up close, in the hands, not surveyedfrom afar, suggesting its function as a private, ratherthan public, devotional object.

By 1608, the Netherlands freed itself from Spanishrule and became, by virtue of its almost total domi-nance of world trade, the wealthiest nation in theworld. By that time, artists had become extremelyskillful at using the medium of oil paint to representthese material riches. One critic has called the Dutchpreoccupation with still life “a dialogue between thenewly affluent society and its material possessions.” Ina painting such as Jan de Heem’s Still Life with Lobster(Fig. 294), we are witness to the remains of a mostextravagant meal, most of which has been leftuneaten. This luxuriant and conspicuous display ofwealth is deliberate. Southern fruit in a cold climate isa luxury, and the peeled lemon, otherwise untouched,is a sign of almost wanton consumption. For de Heem,the painting was at least in part a celebration, an

Fig. 294 Jan de Heem, Still Life with Lobster, late 1640s.Oil on canvas, 251/8 � 331/4 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment.Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

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invitation to share, at least visually and thus imagina-tively, in its world. The feast on the table was a feastfor the eyes.

But de Heem’s painting was also a warning, anexample of vanitas painting. The vanitas tradition ofstill-life painting is specifically designed to induce thespectator to a higher order of thought. Vanitas is theLatin term for “vanity,” and vanitas paintings, espe-cially popular in northern Europe in the seventeenthcentury, remind us of the vanity, or frivolous quality, ofhuman existence. If one ordinarily associates the con-templation of the normal subjects of still-life paintingswith the enjoyment of the pleasurable things in life,here they take on another connotation as well. The

overturned goblet, the half-peeled lemon, the oysteron the half-shell (which spoils quickly), the timepiecebeside it, all remind the viewer that the material worldcelebrated in the painting is not as long-lasting as thespiritual, and that spiritual well-being may be ofgreater importance than material wealth.

Contemporary Spanish artist Antonio LópezGarciá has revisited the vanitas tradition in many ofhis highly realistic still lifes and interiors. NewRefrigerator (Fig. 295) is a modern still life, the objectsof traditional still life removed from the tabletop intothe refrigerator. Of particular note in López Garciá’spainting is the contrast between the extreme atten-tion he pays to capturing the light in the room—note

Fig. 295 Antonio López Garciá,New Refrigerator, 1991–94.Oil on canvas, 941/2 � 7413/16 in.Collection of the artist.Photograph courtesy of the Museum of FineArts, Boston.

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the light reflecting off the white tiled floor and thetiled wall behind the refrigerator—and the way he hasrendered the objects in the open refrigerator, whichare simply abstract blotches of local color. In fact, theabstraction of the still-life objects is echoed in thewhite blotch on the upper wall, which appears to be ahighly realistic rendering of a plaster patch. In thispainting, the complex interchange between realityand spirituality that vanitas still-life painting embodiesis transformed into an interchange between the objec-tive and the subjective, between the material worldand the artist’s mental or emotional conception ofthat world.

Virtually since its inception, oil painting’sexpressive potential has been recognized as fundamen-tal to its power. Much more than in fresco, where theartist’s gesture was lost in the plaster, and much morethan in tempera, where the artist was forced to usebrushes so small that gestural freedom was absorbed bythe scale of the image, oil paint could record and tracethe artist’s presence before the canvas.

Pat Passlof begins with abstraction. Her paintingDancing Shoes (Fig. 296), like many of her largerpaintings, began with leftover paint from a smallerwork, which she distributed in odd amounts over the

surface of the 11-foot canvas. The painting developedas a predominantly yellow field that threatened, evenwith its syncopation of darker, loosely rectangularmedium-yellow shapes, to flatten out. In response tothese yellow shapes, Passlof added sap green blocks of color, so dark that they read as black. These imme-diately animated the surface, creating an unevenchoreography of short leaps and intervals across thepainting’s surface that at first glance seems to fit into agrid but reveals itself to be much freer, the spacebetween elements lengthening itself out across thecanvas with a greater and greater sense of abandon.

From her husband, the painter Milton Resnick,Passlof learned to appreciate a sense of discontinu-ity or displacement between elements in a composi-tion that creates surprise, excitement, and even adegree of existential trembling, a sense of beingfrightened before the work (see Works in Progress,pp. 236–237). It is, perhaps, this leap that DancingShoes so successfully exploits, as each “step” orblock in the composition stands in surprising rela-tion to the next, not as an impossible “next move,”but not in the rhythm of a natural pace either. It isas if, in looking at the painting, we can hear thesyncopation of its jazz beat.

Fig. 296 Pat Passlof, Dancing Shoes, 1998.Oil on linen, 80 � 132 in.Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York.

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On July 25, 1995, Abstract Expressionist painterMilton Resnick began five new large paint-ings. They would sum up, he hoped, what hehad learned over the years as a painter. He had

left home in his late teens to become an artist andlived through the heyday of Abstract Expressionistpainting in New York, where, as one of the leaders ofwhat would come to be known as the New YorkSchool, he had worked with Willem de Kooning,Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. He had continuedto work up to the present, longer than any of his con-temporaries. These new paintings would take Resnickfull circle, back to his beginnings and forward againinto the present. And it was, in fact, beginnings thatwould lend the new paintings their theme—Genesis,the first book of the Bible, Adam and Eve, the Gardenof Eden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,and the serpent, Satan. Pat Passlof, Resnick’s wife andfellow painter, suggested that the figures in the newwork had a more general significance as well, that theywere “you and me.” The name stuck, though modifiedto U � Me, because, Resnick says, “it’s easier to write.”

On July 25, Resnick painted on all five canvasesin his Eldridge Street studio in Chinatown, a two-story brick-walled space with large windows that hadbeen, in the first decades of the twentieth century, aJewish synagogue. It is Resnick’s practice to begin

painting without a plan and without preliminarydrawings—with nothing but a brushmark and a feelingabout where he’s going. “This feeling doesn’t have tobe physical,” he says, “but it has to be as if I come atyou and you’re frightened. That’s the feeling. It’s like ifyou have a glass and there’s something in it and it’s akind of funny color. And someone says, ‘Drink it.’And you say, ‘What’s in it?’ And they say, ‘Drink it orelse!’ And so you have to drink it. So that’s the feel-ing. I’m going to drink something, and I don’t knowwhat’s going to happen to me.”

Pictured on these pages is one of the U � Mepaintings at three different stages in its development—two studio photographs taken on each of the first twodays, July 25 and July 26 (Fig. 297), and the finishedpainting as it appeared in February 1996 in an exhibi-tion of the new U � Me paintings at the Robert MillerGallery in New York (Fig. 298).

In the first stages of the painting there are twofigures, the one on the right kicking forward to meetthe other, who seems to be striding forward in greeting.The major difference in the work from day one to daytwo is color. The exuberant red and yellow of the firstbrushstrokes is suppressed in an overall brownish-greenover-painting. The figures are smaller and darker, thegestural marks appear denser, and the surface begins tohave a much more layered feel.


Fig. 297 Milton Resnick’s U � Me in progress.Left: July 25, 1995; right: July 26, 1995.

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The final painting, in fact, is a culmination of layerupon layer of paint being added to the work over thecourse of several months, each revealing itself at differ-ent points across the canvas. For instance, the secondday’s brownish-green layer can be seen in the finalwork above the top of the tree, and rich dapples of dif-ferently colored layers appear throughout the darklayer of paint of the ground behind the figures and tree.

If the final work seems dramatically different fromits beginnings, that is not least of all because Resnickhas added a tree. “I put it in the middle,” he says,

“because that’s the most difficult place”—difficultbecause the tree makes the painting so symmetrical andbalanced that it risks losing any sense of tension orenergy. But Resnick’s tree also has symbolic resonance,prefiguring the cross. By looking forward to the crucifix-ion from the Garden of Eden, Resnick changes theimage. The figures have changed as well, giving up theirsense of physical motion. “The figures have to have avitality but not be in motion,” Resnick says. “They haveto be animated with some force . . . with some energy.That’s what the paint is doing. Paint has the energy.”

Milton Resnick’s U � Me


Fig. 298 Milton Resnick, U + Me, 1995. Oil on canvas, 931/4 � 1041/2 in.© Milton Resnick. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Watch the late Milton Resnick work, alongside his wife, the painter Pat Passlof, on the series of U � Me paintings over the course of sevenmonths in the Works in Progress video series.

WATCH VIDEO

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WATERCOLOR

Of all the painting media, watercolor is potentiallyone of the most expressive. The ancient Egyptiansused it to illustrate papyrus scrolls, and it wasemployed intermittently by other artists downthrough the centuries, notably by Albrecht Dürer andPeter Paul Rubens. The medium, it quickly becameevident, was especially suitable for artists who wishedto explore the expressive potential of painting, ratherthan pursue purely representational ends.

Watercolor paintings are made by applying pig-ments suspended in a solution of water and gum arabicto dampened paper. Historically, it has often been usedas a sketching tool. Certainly, as a medium, watercolorcan possess all of the spontaneity of a high-qualitysketch. Working quickly, it is possible to achieve ges-tural effects that are very close to those possible withbrush and ink, and, in fact, the roots of Chinese water-color techniques can be traced back to the sixteenth-century ink paintings of Xu Wei. Xu Wei led a troubledlife. Suffering from severe depression and paranoia, heattempted suicide on several occasions, and then mur-dered his wife, an act for which he was imprisoned atage 46 in 1567. Upon his release seven years later, hesupported himself, as best he could, by selling paint-ings. Grapes (Fig. 299) is testament to both his failureas an artist and his genius.

Until Xu Wei, Chinese watercolor had been dom-inated by meticulous, finely detailed rendering thatemployed carefully controlled line. Xu Wei introduceda more free-form and expressive style, known as xie yi,meaning “sketching idea.” Grapes is painted with inkmixed with gelatin and alum, a water-soluble, transparent mineral. The vines and grapes arecomposed of areas of wash, some more transparentthan others, depending upon the amount of ink in thegelatin and alum binder. The aim is to capture thespirit or essence of nature, not copy it in precise detail.

Despite the inventiveness of his style, in the poemat the top of the painting Xu Wei expresses his frustra-tion as an artist. In essence, it reads:

Being frustrated in the first half of my life,Now I have become an old man.Standing lonely in my studio, I cry loudly in the

evening wind,There’s nowhere to sell the bright pearls from my

brush,I have to cast them, now and then, into the wild vine.

Xu Wei’s work was, in fact, never appreciated in hislifetime, but after his death, his style would come toabsolutely dominate Chinese painting.


Fig. 299 Xu Wei, Grapes, Ming dynasty, c. 1580–93.Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 651/4 � 253/8 in. Palace Museum, Beijing.

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Depending on the absorbency of the paper andthe amount of watercolor on the brush, like Xu Wei’sink, watercolor spreads along the fibers of the paperwhen it is applied. Thin solutions of pigment andbinder have the appearance of soft, transparentwashes, while dense solutions can become almostopaque. The play between the transparent and theopaque qualities of the medium is central to WinslowHomer’s A Wall, Nassau (Fig. 300). Both the wall andthe sky behind it are transparent washes, and the tex-tural ribbons and spots of white on the coral limestonewall are actually unpainted paper. Between these twolight bands of color lies the densely painted foliage ofthe garden and, to the right, the sea, which becomes adeeper and deeper blue as it stretches toward the hori-zon. A white sailboat heads out to sea on the right.

Almost everything of visual interest in this paintingtakes place between the sky above and the wall below.Even the red leaves of the giant poinsettia plant that isthe painting’s focal point turn down toward this mid-dle ground. Pointing up from the top of the wall, fram-ing this middle area from below, is something far moreominous—dark, almost black shards of broken glass.Suddenly, the painting is transformed. No longer just apretty view of a garden, it begins to speak of privacyand intrusion, and of the divided social world of theBahamas at the turn of the century, the islands givenover to tourism and its associated wealth at theexpense of the local black population. The wall holdsback those outside it from the beauty and luxurywithin, separating them from the freedom offered, forinstance, by the boat as it sails away.


Fig. 300 Winslow Homer, A Wall, Nassau, 1898.Watercolor and pencil on paper, 143/4 � 211/2 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Amelia B. Lazarus Fund, 1910 (10.228.90).Photo © 1995 Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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It is worth comparing Homer’s watercolor stylewith that of a more contemporary watercolorist, LaurieReid. Reid began her career working in a traditionalvein, painting representational watercolor still lifes.But over the years she became increasingly inter-ested in the ways in which watercolor reacts withpaper. She was interested, she says, in “how the fruit,when it bruises, was similar to the way pigment set-tles in on paper. . . . I started investigating the waythe paper acts. Eventually the imagery just droppedaway.” Ruby Dew (Pink Melon Joy) (Fig. 301) con-sists of a single curve, or necklace, of watercolordroplets that extends across four giant pieces ofpaper that hang vertically. Unanchored at the bot-tom, the fall of the paper echoes the curved fall ofthe watercolor necklace—a visual manifestation ofgravity that echoes the fall of the watercolor droplet

from brush to ground, even as it evokes, in deliber-ate understatement, the drips of a Jackson Pollockoil painting (see Figs. 172–174). The subtitle ofReid’s work, Pink Melon Joy, is the name of a shortwork by modernist writer Gertrude Stein, one of hermore metaphorically erotic pieces. It suggests thatthese “dew”-like droplets are meant to possess a cer-tain sensuality, like water dripping from someone’smouth as he or she eats a honeydew melon, as wellas the sensuality of watercolor as a medium in itsown right.

GOUACHE

Derived from the Italian word guazzo, meaning“puddle,” gouache is essentially watercolor mixed withChinese white chalk. The medium is opaque, and,


Fig. 301 Laurie Reid, Ruby Dew (Pink Melon Joy), left, anddetail, above, 1998.Watercolor on paper, 192 � 240 in.Courtesy Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, and the artist.

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while gouache colors display a light-reflecting bril-liance, it is difficult to blend brushstrokes of gouachetogether. Thus, the medium lends itself to the creationof large, flat, colored forms. It is this abstract qualitythat attracted Jacob Lawrence to it. Everything in thepainting You can buy bootleg whiskey for twenty-fivecents a quart (Fig. 302) tips forward. This not only cre-ates a sense of disorienting and drunken imbalance,but also emphasizes the flat two-dimensional quality ofthe painting’s space. Lawrence’s dramatically intensecomplementary colors blare like the jazz we can almosthear coming from the radio.

SYNTHETIC MEDIA

Because of its slow-drying characteristics and thepreparation necessary to ready the painting surface, oilpainting lacks the sense of immediacy so readily appar-ent in more direct media like drawing or watercolor.For the same reasons, the medium is not particularly

suitable for painting out-of-doors, where one is con-tinually exposed to the elements.

The first artists to experiment with syntheticmedia were a group of Mexican painters, led by DavidAlfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, whose goal was tocreate large-scale revolutionary mural art (see Fig. 698,Chapter 21). Painting outdoors, where their celebra-tions of the struggles of the working class could easilybe seen, Siqueiros, Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco—Los Tres Grandes, as they are known—worked first infresco and then in oil paint, but the sun, rain, andhumidity of Mexico quickly ruined their efforts. In1937, Siqueiros organized a workshop in New York,closer to the chemical industry, expressly to developand experiment with new synthetic paints. One of thefirst media used at the workshop was pyroxylin, com-monly known as Duco, a lacquer developed as anautomobile paint.

In the early 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler gave upthe gestural qualities of the brush loaded with oil paint


Fig. 302 Jacob Lawrence, You can buy bootleg whiskey for twenty-five cents a quart, from the Harlem Series, 1942–43.Gouache on paper, 151/2 � 221/2 in. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. Helen Thurston Ayer Fund.Artwork © 2003 Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, courtesy of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation. © 2007 Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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and began to stain raw, unprimed canvas with greatlythinned oil pigments, soaking color into the surfacein what has been called an art of “stain-gesture” bymoving the unprimed, unstretched canvas around toallow the paint to flow over it. Her technique soonattracted a number of painters who were themselvesexperimenting with Magna, a paint made from acrylicresins—materials used to make plastic—mixed withturpentine. Staining canvas with oil created a messy,brownish “halo” around each stain or puddle of paint,but the painters realized that the “halo” disappearedwhen they stained the canvas with Magna, the paintand canvas really becoming one.

At almost exactly this time, researchers in bothMexico and the United States discovered a way to mixacrylic resins with water, and by 1956, water-basedacrylic paints were on the market. These media wereinorganic and, as a result, much better suited to stain-ing raw canvas than turpentine or oil-based media,since no chemical interaction could take place thatmight threaten the life of the painting.

Inevitably, Frankenthaler gave up staining hercanvases with oil and moved to acrylic in 1963. Withthis medium, she was able to create such intenselyatmospheric paintings as Flood (Fig. 303). Workingon the floor and pouring paint directly on the canvas,


Fig. 303 Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967.Synthetic polymer on canvas, 124 � 140 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.Purchased with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 68.12.

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the artist was able to make the painting seem sponta-neous, even though it is quite large. “A really goodpicture,” Frankenthaler says, “looks as if it’s happenedat once. . . . It looks as if it were born in a minute.”

The usefulness of acrylic for outdoor muralpainting was immediately apparent. Once dried, theacrylic surface was relatively immune to the vicissi-tudes of weather. Judith F. Baca, whose mural for theUniversity of Southern California student center weconsidered in Chapter 8, put the medium to use in1976 for The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural thatwould be more than a mile long. It is located in theTujunga Wash of the Los Angeles River, which hadbeen entirely concreted over by developers as LosAngeles grew. The river, as a result, seemed to Baca“a giant scar across the land which served to furtherdivide an already divided city.” She thought of hermural, which depicts the history of the indigenouspeoples, immigrant minorities, and women of thearea from prehistory to the present, as a healing ges-ture: “Just as young Chicanos tattoo battle scars ontheir bodies, Great Wall of Los Angeles is a tattoo ona scar where the river once ran.” Illustrated here(Fig. 304) is a 13-foot-high section depicting theintersection of four major freeways in the middle ofEast Los Angeles, the traditional center of Chicanolife in the city, freeways that divided the community

and weakened it. To the right, for instance, aMexican woman protests the building of DodgerStadium, which displaced the traditional Mexicancommunity in Chavez Ravine, a theme Baca alsoexplores in the mural at USC.

Baca worked on the Great Wall project more as adirector and facilitator than as a painter. Nearly 400inner-city youth, many of them recruited through thejuvenile justice system from rival gangs, did the actualpainting and design. They represented, in real terms,the divided city itself. “The thing about muralism,”Baca says, “is that collaboration is a requirement. . . .[The] focus is cooperation.”

MIXED MEDIA

All of the painting media we have so far consideredcan be combined with other media, from drawing tofiber and wood, as well as found objects, to make newworks of art. In the twentieth century in particular,artists purposefully and increasingly combined variousmedia. The result is mixed media work. The motivesfor working with mixed media are many, but the pri-mary formal one is that mixed media violate theintegrity of painting as a medium. They do this byintroducing into the space of painting materials fromthe everyday world.


Fig. 304 Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, detail, Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine, 1976–continuing.Mural, height 13 ft. (whole mural more than 1 mile long). Tujunga Wash, Los Angeles.Photo © SPARC, Venice, California.

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CollageThe two-dimensional space of the canvas was first chal-lenged by Pablo Picasso and his close associate GeorgesBraque when they began to utilize collage in their work.Collage is the process of pasting or gluing fragments ofprinted matter, fabric, natural material—anything thatis relatively flat—onto the two-dimensional surface of acanvas or panel. Collage creates, in essence, a low-reliefassemblage.

A good example of collage is one created soonafter Picasso and Braque began using the new tech-nique by their colleague Juan Gris. Although noone would mistake The Table (Fig. 305) paintingfor an accurate rendering of reality, it is designed to

raise the question of just what, in art, is “real” andwhat is “false” by bringing elements from the realworld into the space of the painting. The wood-grain of the tabletop is both woodgrain-printedwallpaper and paper with the woodgrain drawn onit by hand. Thus it is both “false” wood and “real”wallpaper, as well as “real” drawing. The fragmentof the newspaper headline—it’s a “real” piece ofnewspaper, incidentally—reads “Le Vrai et le Faux”(“The True and the False”). A novel lies open atthe base of the table. Is it any less “real” as a noveljust because it is a work of fiction? The key in thetable drawer offers us a witty insight into the com-plexity of the work, for in French the word for

“key,” clé, also means “problem.” Inthis painting, the problematic inter-change between art and reality thatpainting embodies is fully high-lighted. If painting is, after all, a men-tal construction, an artificial realityand not reality itself, are not mentalconstructions as real as anything else?

Because it brings “reality” into thespace of painting, collage offers artistsa direct means of commenting on thesocial or political environment inwhich they work (for an example of aNazi-era political collage, see Works inProgress, pp. 246–247). The African-American artist Romare Bearden wasinspired particularly by the African-American writer Ralph Ellison’s 1952novel Invisible Man. One of Ellison’snarrator’s most vital realizations is thathe must assert, above all else, hisblackness, not hide from it. He mustnot allow himself to be absorbed intowhite society. “Must I strive towardcolorlessness?” he asks.

But seriously, and without snobbery,think of what the world would lose if thatshould happen. America is woven ofmany strands; I would recognize themand let it so remain. . . . Our fate is tobecome one, and yet many—this is notprophecy, but description.


Fig. 305 Juan Gris, The Table, 1914.Colored papers, printed matter, charcoal on paper mounted in canvas, 231/2 � 171/2 in.© Philadelphia Museum of Art. A. E. Gallatin Collection.Photo: Lynn Rosenthal, 1993. © 2007 Juan Gris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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There could be no better description ofBearden’s collages. Bearden had worked for twodecades in an almost entirely abstract vein, but,inspired by Ellison, in the early 1960s, he began totear images out of Ebony, Look, and Life magazinesand assemble them into depictions of the blackexperience. The Dove (Fig. 306)—so named for thewhite dove that is perched over the central door, asymbol of peace and harmony—combines forms ofshifting scale and different orders of fragmentation,so that, for instance, a giant cigarette extends fromthe hand of the dandy, sporting a cap, at the right,or the giant fingers of a woman’s hand reach overthe windowsill at the top left. The resulting effect isalmost kaleidoscopic, an urban panorama of a con-servatively dressed older generation and hipper,

younger people gathered into a scene nearly burst-ing with energy—the “one, and yet many.” AsEllison wrote of Bearden’s art in 1968:

Bearden’s meaning is identical with his method. Hiscombination of technique is in itself eloquent of thesharp breaks, leaps of consciousness, distortions,paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surrealblending of styles, values, hopes, and dreams whichcharacterize much of American history.

Mixed media, in other words, provide Bearden with themeans to bring the diverse elements of urban African-American life into a formally unified, yet still distinctlyfragmented, whole.


Fig. 306 Romare Bearden, The Dove, 1964.Cut-and-pasted paper, gouache, pencil, and colored pencil on cardboard, 133/8 � 183/4 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York.Blanchette Rockefeller Fund.© Romare Bearden Foundation / VAGA, New York.

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Given collage’s inclusiveness, it is hardly surpris-ing that it is among the most political of media.In Germany, after World War I, as the forcesthat would lead to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party

began to assert themselves, a number of artists in Berlin,among them Hannah Höch, began to protest the grow-ing nationalism of the country in their art. Reacting tothe dehumanizing speed, technology, industrialization,and consumerism of the modern age, they saw in collage, and in its more representational cousin, pho-tomontage—collage constructed of photographic frag-ments—the possibility of reflecting the kaleidoscopicpace, complexity, and fragmentation of everyday life.Höch was particularly friendly with Raoul Hausmann,whose colleague Richard Hulsenbeck had met a groupof so-called Dada artists in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916.The anarchic behavior of these “anti-artists” hadimpressed both men, and with Höch and others theyinaugurated a series of Dada evenings in Berlin, the firstsuch event occurring on April 12, 1918. Hulsenbeckread a manifesto, others read sound or noise poetry, andall were accompanied by drums, instruments, and audi-ence noise. On June 20, 1920, they opened a Dada Fairin a three-room apartment covered from floor to ceilingwith a chaotic display of photomontages, Dada periodi-cals, drawings, and assemblages, one of which has beendescribed as looking like “the aftermath of an accidentbetween a trolley car and a newspaper kiosk.” On onewall was Hannah Höch’s photomontage Cut with theKitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer BellyCultural Epoch of Germany (Fig. 308).

We are able to identify many of the figures inHöch’s work with the help of a preparatory drawing(Fig. 307). The top right-hand corner is occupied bythe forces of repression. The recently deposed emperorWilhelm II, with two wrestlers forming his mustache,gazes out below the words “Die anti-dadistischeBewegung,” or “the anti-Dada movement,” the leaderof what Höch calls in her title “the Weimar beerbelly.” On Wilhelm’s shoulder rests an exotic dancerwith the head of General Field Marshal Friedrich vonHindenburg. Below them are other generals and,behind Wilhelm, a photograph of people waiting inline at a Berlin employment office.

The upper left focuses on Albert Einstein, out ofwhose brain Dada slogans seem to burst, as if thetheory of relativity, overturning traditional physics as

it did, was a proto-Dada event. In the very center ofthe collage is a headless dancer, and above her floatsthe head of printmaker Kathë Kollwitz. To the right ofher are the words “Die grosse Welt dada,” and then,further down, “Dadaisten,” “the great dada World,”and “Dadaists.” Directly above these words are Lenin,whose head tops a figure dressed in hearts, and KarlMarx, whose head seems to emanate from a machine.Raoul Hausmann stands just below in a diver’s suit. Atiny picture of Höch herself is situated at the bottomright, partially on the map of Europe that depicts theprogress of women’s enfranchisement. To the left afigure stands above the crowd shouting “Tretet Dadabei”—“Join Dada.”


Fig. 307 Hannah Höch, Study for Collage “Cut with the Kitchen KnifeDada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany,”1919.Ballpoint pen sketch on white board, 105/8 � 85/8 in. Staatliche Museen zuBerlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz Nationalgalerie/NG 57/61.Photo: Jorg P. Anders, Berlin. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY. © 2007Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife


Fig. 308 Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919.Collage, 447/8 � 357/16 in. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz Nationalgalerie/NG57/61.Photo: Jorg P. Anders, Berlin. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Painting toward SculptureOne of the most important results of mixed media hasbeen to extend what might be called “the space of art.”If this space was once defined by the picture frame—ifart was once understood as something that was con-tained within that boundary and hung on a wall—thatdefinition of space was extended in the hands ofmixed-media artists, out of the two-dimensional andinto the three-dimensional space.

Although it begins hanging squarely on [?] the wall,in the manner of a traditional, two-dimensional paint-ing, Marcia Gygli King’s Springs Upstate (Fig. 309)travels off the wall into three-dimensional space. Halfpainting, half sculpture, it is as if King’s deeply impas-toed painting style has gone wild. In fact, King’s work-ing method is unique. Her impasto brushwork is builtup on a surface that is created by what she calls “once-removed painting.” She begins, that is, by painting her

image on a sheet ofPlexiglas, which shethen presses wetonto her preparedcanvas, allowing thepaint to spread outin every direction.This highly tactile,even sensual surfacecreates the “ground”for her landscape.But the “ground” isjust the beginning.It is as if her paintseeks to flow outinto the world, tosquirt out over theedge, beyond theframe. The streamand boulders on thefloor and the frame


Fig. 309 Marcia Gygli King, Springs Upstate, 1990–92.Oil on canvas, mixed media sculptural projection and frame: 6 ft. � 9 ft. � 10 ft. 6 in.; painting: 9 ft. � 5 ft. � 7 in.© 2006 Marcia Gygli King. Photo: Allan Finkelman.

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of the painting itself are created with carved styrofoamthat is covered with epoxy and fiberglass. When origi-nally shown at the Hal Katzen Gallery in New York in1992, this styrofoam river of paint spilled out thegallery door and onto the street until rain and passersbycarried it away. King’s intention, in fact, was to engagethe viewer more fully in the work—in 1992, New Yorkwas suffering through a severe water shortage—andthis insistence on moving painting into the space ofthe audience is the primary motivation for movingpainting out of two dimensions into three.

Patricia Patterson’s The Kitchen (Fig. 310) is a cel-ebration of family life on the island of Inishmore, thelargest of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay on the westcoast of Ireland. On the gallery wall to the right hangsPatterson’s painting Cóilin and Patricia, in which CóilinHernon, head of the Inishmore Hernon family, gives

the artist a jovial hug. The human warmth of the sceneextends beyond the frame into a replication of theHernon family kitchen itself, with its table and hearth.On the mantel is a watercolor of Nan Hernon and adrawing of the Hernon family dog, along with aceramic rooster and chicken, an alarm clock, and otherobjects—like the table and chairs, all duplicates ofobjects in the actual Hernon home. The colorsPatterson employs in the tile and walls are the same asthose found on the doors, windows, and furniture ofInishmore itself. In fact, Patterson, who was born inNew Jersey to Irish-American parents, began visitingInishmore regularly beginning in 1960 and was movednot only by the warmth of its people but by their stead-fast loyalty to Irish culture and the Irish language. In itsquiet orderliness, The Kitchen brings something of thatworld out of the painting’s frame and into the museum.


Fig. 310 Patricia Patterson, The Kitchen, 1985.Table, chairs, mantel, objects, floor tiles, and casein on canvas painting; painting: 60 � 107 in; overall dimensions vary with each installation (as illustrated: 80 � 144 � 180 in.). Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Museum Purchase, 90:11.1–43.

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This movement is nowhere more forcefullystated than in the work of Robert Rauschenberg.Rauschenberg’s painting Monogram (Fig. 311) liter-ally moves “off the wall”—the title of CalvinTomkins’s biography of the artist—onto the floor. Acombine-painting, or high-relief collage, Rauschenbergworked on the canvas over a five-year period from1955 to 1959.

The composer John Cage once definedRauschenberg’s combine-paintings as “a situationinvolving multiplicity.” They are a kind of collage, butmore lenient than other collages about what they willadmit into their space. They will, in fact, admit any-thing, because unity is not something they are particu-larly interested in. They bring together objects ofdiverse and various kinds and simply allow them to

coexist beside one another in the same space. InRauschenberg’s words, “A pair of socks is no less suit-able to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpen-tine, oil, and fabric.” Nor, apparently, is a stuffedAngora goat.

Rauschenberg discovered the goat in a second-hand office-furniture store in Manhattan. The prob-lem it presented, as Tomkins has explained, was how“to make the animal look as if it belonged in a paint-ing.” In its earliest recorded state (Fig. 312) the goatis mounted on a ledge in profile in the top half of a6-foot painting. It peers over the edge of the paintingand casts a shadow on the wall. Compared to laterstates of the work, the goat is integrated into the two-dimensional surface, or as integrated as an object of itssize could be.


Fig. 311 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955–59.Freestanding combine: oil, fabric, wood, on canvas and wood, rubber heel, tennis ball, metal plaque, hardware, stuffed Angora goat, rubber tire, mounted on four wheels, 42 � 631/4 � 641/2 in.© Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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In the second state (Fig. 313),Rauschenberg brings the goat off its perchand sets it on a platform in front ofanother combine-painting, this onenearly 10 feet high. Now it seems about towalk forward into our space, dragging thepainting behind it. Rauschenberg has alsoplaced an automobile tire around thegoat’s midsection. This tire underscoresits volume, its three-dimensionality.

But Rauschenberg was not happy withthis design, either. Finally, he put thecombine-painting flat on the floor, creatingwhat he called a “pasture” for the goat.Here, Rauschenberg manages to accomplishwhat seems logically impossible: The goat isat once fully contained within the bound-aries of the picture frame and totally liber-ated from the wall. Painting has becomesculpture.


Fig. 312 Robert Rauschenberg,Monogram, First State.© Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA,New York. Photo: Harry Shunk.

Fig. 313 Robert Rauschenberg,Monogram, Second State.© Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, NewYork. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt.

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Fig. 314 Fred Tomaselli, Airborne Event, 2003.Mixed media, acrylic, and resin on wood, 84 � 60 � 11/2 in.Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York.

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THE CRITICAL PROCESS Thinking about Painting

In this chapter, we have considered all of the paint-ing media—encaustic, fresco, tempera, oil paint,watercolor, gouache, acrylic paints, and mixedmedia—and we have discussed not only how these

media are used but also why artists have favored them.One of the most important factors in the developmentof new painting media has always been the desire ofartists to represent the world more and more faithfully.But representation is not the only goal of painting. Ifwe recall Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait at thebeginning of this chapter (see Fig. 281), she is not sim-ply representing the way she looks but also the way shefeels. In her hands, paint becomes an expressive tool.Some painting media—oil paint, watercolor, andacrylics—are better suited to expressive ends thanothers because they are more fluid or can be manipu-lated more easily. But the possibilities of painting areas vast as the human imagination itself. In painting,anything is possible.

And, as we have seen in the last section of thischapter, the possibilities of painting media can beextended even further when they are combined withother media. The art of Fred Tomaselli is a case in

point. In the late 1980s, Tomaselli began producingmixed-media works that combine pills (over-the-counter medicines, prescription pharmaceuticals,and street drugs), leaves (including marijuanaleaves), insects, butterflies, and various cutout ele-ments, including floral designs, representations ofanimals, and body parts. The resulting images consti-tute for Tomaselli a kind of cartography—he seesthem as “maps” describing his place in the world.Airborne Event (Fig. 314) might well be consideredan image of a psychedelic high. But Tomaselli, bornin the late 1950s, is well aware of the high price firsthippie and then punk cultures have paid for theirhallucinogenic indulgences. Another way to readthis painting is as a critique of what has been called“the jewel-like nature of a pill.” That is, Tomaselli’swork might also be considered an essay on the toxicnature of beauty or “airborne events” such as diseaseor disaster. How does it suggest that the world itdepicts is as artificial as it is visionary? In order toanswer this question, it might be useful to compareTomaselli’s mixed-media work to Fra Andrea Pozzo’sGlorification of Saint Ignatius (see Fig. 286).

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