Search

[Display omitted] Over the last few decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to developing new cleaning systems aimed at preserving cultural heritage. One of the main objectives is to selectively remove aged or undesirable coatings from painted surfaces while preventing the cleaning solvent from permeating and engaging with the pictorial layers. In this work, we propose the use of electrospun polyamide 6,6 nonwovens in conjunction with a green solvent (dimethyl carbonate). By adjusting the electrospinning parameters, we produced three distinct nonwovens with varying average fiber diameters, ranging from 0.4 μm to 2 μm. These samples were characterized and tested for their efficacy in removing dammar varnish from painted surfaces. In particular, the cleaning process was monitored using macroscale PL (photoluminescence) imaging in real-time, while post-application examination of the mats was performed through scanning electron microscopy. The solvent evaporation rate from the different nonwovens was evaluated using gravimetric analysis and Proton Transfer Reaction- Time-of-Flight. It was observed that the application of the nonwovens with small or intermediate pore sizes for the removal of the terpenic varnish resulted in the swollen resin being absorbed into the mats, showcasing a peel-off effect. Thus, this protocol eliminates the need for further potentially detrimental removal procedures involving cotton swabs. The experimental data suggests that the peel-off effect relates to the microporosity of the mats, which enhances the capillary rise of the swollen varnish. Furthermore, the application of these systems to historical paintings underwent preliminary validation using a real painting from the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-expressionism was a pioneering movement with the diverse stylistic approaches on figurative painting in the 20th century. Neo-expressionism acted in Germany and in the USA mostly. Neo-expressionism was the result of wars, political and economical depressions experienced in that period. Neo-expressionist artists aimed to capture an understanding in which people evaluated as human beings, individuality valued and return into social value judgments. The artists returned to oil on-canvas painting in order to express those social impacts. After the World War II, the political, economical and social issues came along with the division of Germany. On the other hand, students' protests which began in France in 1968 and applied to Germany also influenced in the point of views of German artists. Anselm Kiefer, the pioneer artist of Neo-expressionism art movement, passed his first childhood years with wreckage views of the World War II. Kiefer returned to his childhood memories by using these images on his paintings. The artist's paintings evaluated as a witness of those years. The artist who used the dark colours in his paintings reflected the gloomy darkness of the war, in this way. He took as a subject of the division of Germany into east and west and Germany which was destroyed throughout the war. He settled a score by revealing the negativeness experienced throughout the World War II. The artist also used some script in his paintings. In particular, he referred to those people, using the words of those who were instrumental in bringing Germany back to its old days. The aim of the study is to reveal the reflectiveness by an artist of the negativeness experienced throughout the World War II which had a significant position in the history of Germany in Anselm Kiefer's paintings in the style of Neo-expressionism. The limitations of the study are provided as five paintings by the artist. As a method in the research, the case study method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. In the result of the study, it was determined how the negative effects of the war were reflected in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer by painting technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So what I learned was look for where people are doing things together and you know, working together in a way that their work intersects with the work of other people and they can do more and more different things and do it better. Claudio E. Benzecry (CEB): Howie, you once said that there are only two questions in an interview: how do you get into it and then what happened? And that was the next big step for me, was to see that everything comes from people intersecting their lines of activity, intersecting so that your work produces something, some object or some idea and I say "oh, Claudio has that idea, I can use that" and then very often it ends up being kind of solidified into an organization or a named kind of work. [Extracted from the article]

I take Mark Rothko at his word when he claims that an encounter with his paintings involves 'companionship' and argue that this insight reflects the artist's recognition that an observer and his work are in a relationship in which, as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa puts it, 'both sides speak with their own voice'. To understand what this might mean, I first discuss Rosa's theory of 'resonance' and its importance for the study of art. Then, I explore 'resonance' in relation to Rothko, relating it to how he manipulated the language of painting to de-centre the normative visual perception of the observer, but also how he potentially opens this observer up to radically non-normative psychological and somatic experiences. The de-centring involves making space for an active relationship with Rothko's paintings which shifts the observer from the focused, outer-directed and controlling attention that usually dominates visual perception towards a more inwardly directed but more porous mode enacted under conditions of essential uncontrollability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces Beth Harland's approach to painting practice in light of her engagement with Michael Fried's interpretation of eighteenth and nineteenth century painting and her fascination with Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The contrast between reflection on phenomena of inner life and a painting's audience address is explored through a reading of passages from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve and Fried's writing about theatricality and absorption. Harland's practical and theoretical explorations of the situation and possibilities of contemporary painting, illuminated by her engagement with notions of theatricality and absorption, are then outlined. After considering Hans Belting's views on seriality and processes of re-working, the article concludes by suggesting that Harland sought and achieved a buoyant working relationship between formational contraries, avoiding both hypostatisation and easy compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the posthumous publication of a lecture given by the artist and academic Beth Harland (1964–2019). It was originally presented at a conference on Theatricality, at Lancaster University in 2017. This paper begins by working through the arguments of Michael Fried, to situate the key terms of theatricality and absorption, before then turning to contemporary painting practice (with notable reference to the work of Tomma Abts) to advance her reading of 'an absorptive mode of address within contemporary painting'. This article also situates Harland's own art practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the nature of perceptual and actual spaces created and occupied by painting. The focus is on two artistic projects taken up by the author that incorporate sculptural elements and site-specific explorations to create a series of work. The body of work retains characteristics unique to painting. These projects are situated against the background of a similar trend in contemporary painting that sees many painters taking their painterly gesture outside of the bounds and flat surface of the canvas. This investigation is also a search for establishing theory-practice relation as the author's own practice is analysed with the support of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of embodied perception. This theory proposes the radical notion that sensation is an active reflective process and vision works in unity with different tactile and kinaesthetic senses. Reflective analysis of author's evolving practice – from the two-dimensional flat canvas to expansive installations on the terrain of a Himalayan village – opens up a productive opportunity for exploring how contemporary paintings incorporate and respond to space. Application of pigments through gestural brushstrokes on appropriate surfaces and strategically positioning these painted surfaces following compositional rules are ways of creating paintings in an expanded space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French artist Pierre Bonnard created more than two thousand paintings, many of them now dispersed around museums across the world. He painted in a slightly eccentric manner—on unstretched canvas—and often worked on these paintings over decades. They typically depict closed spaces, interiors, that open out to vistas beyond the room. He also produced a number of self-portraits and a very large number of paintings depicting his muse, Marthe, often going about her toilette. Almost of all these paintings have very strange effects—for the most part overlooked by viewers from his own time to today. These effects, which Peter de Bolla calls "ghosts," are often depictions hiding in plain sight. In this essay, de Bolla patiently explores how such effects can be seen in one painting, La salle à manger sur le jardin (1930–31), leading the viewer into the strange world Bonnard depicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Sonia Delaunay's efforts to promote her simultaneous dresses made in 1913–14. Departing from traditional art‐historical accounts which treat Robert Delaunay's simultanism as a painterly, modernist practice, I situate Sonia Delaunay's fashions and her attendant publicity as an avant‐gardist move from art into life. Throughout, the essay traces how Delaunay strategically photographed herself wearing her dresses and promoted the circulation of such photographs within the popular and avant‐garde press as a means of generating visibility and attention for herself as a (woman) artist. Highlighting the gendered constraints that originally led her to the applied arts, the essay ultimately argues that Delaunay offers an early and alternative art‐into‐life narrative of the avant‐garde: one in which a woman artist embraces the everyday and the decorative arts only to turn that embrace into a highly visible, public, and sellable production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the South Asian artist Francis Newton Souza (1924–2000), the color black—redolent with achromatic intensity, controverted in color theory, resonant with political potentiality—mattered. Preoccupied with the color from 1954, Souza completed a series of over fifty monochromatic black paintings in 1965. What meaning did the color have for the then London-based artist? In postwar art, the color black remained associated with infinity, spirituality, and transcendence. In contrast, situating blackness at the intersections of decolonization, Négritude, and civil rights movements tracks a contrapuntal politics and poetics of the color through Souza's black paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spaces represented in Edward Hopper's paintings are taken as a model by an academic project about light behavior in architecture, the goal of which is to develop a quantitative approach contrastable with the perception of natural light in such paintings. With the support of a physical model and a smartphone as measurement and verification instruments, the author tests the idea that it is possible to establish links between sensory registers and the performance of light in a certain precinct, using as a starting point the question posed by Hopper about the feasibility of light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Historic recipes show 19th-20th c. house paint manufacturers in the USA used fish oil. • Fish oil was cheaper than linseed oil and its presence in paints was not advertised. • GC–MS or HPLC-MS identify the unique fatty acid or TAGs profile of fish oil in paints. • Fish oil mixtures in some historic artists' paints suggest adulteration. • Fish oil containing paints have been found in paintings by well-known artists. Vegetable oils such as linseed oil are commonly used in retail trade and artists' oil and alkyd paints, but examination of historic trade literature from the 19th and 20th centuries suggests that paint manufacturers in the USA also used fish oils, especially from menhaden (Brevoortia sp.). Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and high-performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry of menhaden oil samples provided by Werner G Smith Inc., a modern company that supplies menhaden oil to the coatings industry, reveal a fatty acid profile distinct from that of vegetable oils. Menhaden oil has high levels of myristic acid, low levels of lauric acid and a high palmitic to stearic acid ratio and so is readily distinguished from vegetable oils by either of these methods. Historic paint recipes indicate that menhaden oils were often mixed with vegetable oils, so to establish detection limits we analyzed combinations of menhaden oil and either linseed, safflower or sunflower oils by GC–MS; the high levels of myristic acid remain characteristic in mixtures containing only 20% menhaden oil. A selection of historic artists' paints pre-dating 1970 and paint samples taken from paintings dating from the 1950s and 1960s were analyzed to determine if fish oils could be detected. Fish oils may be present in historic artists' paints, including those made by the Bocour Company, and in paintings by American artists Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, David Smith, and Andy Warhol. This is the first positive identification of fish oils in historic artists' paints and 20th century artworks. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does the work of Black and other artists of colour tend to get debated only in terms of social and political discourse? Taking as its focus Gavin Jantjes's Korabra series (1986), this essay considers what becomes possible when aesthetic considerations are given renewed emphasis. Attention shifts away from constructions of meaning in terms of broad themes, such as 'slavery' and 'oppression'. Instead, a restored critical equilibrium is sought by focusing on concerns such as technique, genre and art‐historical influence. The discussion takes place in the context of displays in the 'Art since 1900s' gallery at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines two paintings by Denis Williams, Human World (1950) and Painting in Six Related Rhythms (1954), and their accompanying critical reception, to consider the transformation that takes place from an early interest in social realism and narrative approach in representing the post‐war urban environment and the experience of migration in London, to a radically geometric abstraction that deliberately negates any narrative reference. Wyndham Lewis was a fervent supporter and mentor, but his writings on Williams employed clichéd characterizations of primitivism and colonialism that limited a fuller understanding of the artist's intentions for his work. Wilson Harris's more fully considered essays provide an interesting counterpart. Williams's contribution to British modernism of the 1950s, which was largely eclipsed following his departure for Africa and eventual return to Guyana, should, it is argued, be reconsidered as part of a fuller and more inclusive assessment of that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorothea Tanning's painting Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary female figure reaching her hand through a door. This borrows plainly from an artist renowned for rendering women as statues or storefront mannequins: the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose early corpus formed one of Surrealism's most prominent—and fraught—precedents. Yet Tanning's canvas also conjures up another of the Surrealists' elected forebears: Marcel Allain's series of detective fiction books, titled Fatala: Grand roman policier (1930–31). Co-authored with Pierre Souvestre, Allain's first series of pulp novels, Fantômas (1911–13),had proven enormously popular in Parisian avant-garde circles, first in the circle of the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and later among the Surrealists. Michel Nathan has described Allain's Fatala as "Fantômas in a walking skirt" ("Fantômas en jupe trotteuse"). This cast-off epithet offers a fitting aegis under which to consider both Tanning's use of various Surrealist modes in Fatala and their resonance in the context of the movement's late iterations and sexual politics. For with Fatala, Tanning takes on a higher mathematics of masculine precedent—both Metaphysical painting and the detective novel—as well as their adoption by a host of male Surrealist artists. It is on the male-centered ground of the Metaphysical cityscape and the roman policier that Tanning sets her femme fatale in Fatala, finding in it a readymade stage for the apparition of other identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Forensic analysis of artwork. • Pigment analysis by FTIR. • Pigment analysis by XRF. • Analysis of artworks by MA-XRF. • Scientific analysis of analytical data. This work studied suspicious and authentic artworks by Brazilian painters Ivan Serpa, Ismael Nery, and Iberê Camargo by XRF, FTIR, OM, and MA-XRF techniques. The studies made it possible to verify that all suspicious artworks are counterfeit artifacts. The analyses were conducted in situ, and different approaches were applied for data treatment. For example, principal component analysis and spectral deconvolution were performed on the XRF data. From these methods, it was possible to verify that the suspect artworks by Ivan Serpa and Iberê Camargo have different materiality than the authentic paintings. Additionally, MA-XRF images did not reveal the presence of a polychrome preparation layer in the suspicious paintings by Ivan Serpa. The suspect artworks from Ismael Nery exhibited a Ca-K/Ti-K ratio that indicates they were created on a low-quality paper support, which is not suitable for paintings. The differences in materials used in the suspicious and authentic artworks are further supported by the FTIR and OM results. In addition to the physicochemical analysis, the paintings were studies graphotechnical examinations, financial evaluations, and artistic analyses that demonstrated they were counterfeit artifacts. The results of the analysis demonstrate how physicochemical techniques can contribute to the forensic investigation of paintings. However, this work highlights the importance of applying distinct treatments to the XRF data in order to accentuate the differences between the suspect and authentic artworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1996 unnamed series of paintings by Glenn Ligon, a Black gay artist, about the Million Man March as an exploration of early civil rights demonstrations. Topics discussed include Ligon's mural-size painting 'Hands" providing a gay perspective on the march of Black men, how his series examined the prevailing heteropatriarchal signifiers of the civil rights movement and the author's use of Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) to track Ligon's artistic representations.

A quasi‐panic underlies Renato Guttuso's Boogie Woogie in Rome, his single envoi to the 1954 Venice Biennale. It depicts teenagers dancing frenetically in front of Mondrian's eponymous painting, its kinetic, neoplasticist language absorbed into their plaid clothes. This essay shows how this painting pulled into its orbit much of the geopolitics of the 1950s. Guttuso's depiction of gyrating youths drew its – mostly negative – energy from events taking place just beyond its frame. It identifies afterimages (Guttuso's painting elicited other paintings); medial crossovers as well as medial denials (namely film, a medium that Guttuso professed to abhor); anticipations thwarted by reversed scenarios (the fiasco of the Soviets and the success of Mondrian at the subsequent Biennale in 1956); and blind spots (nations with no pavilion). Its leitmotif is plaid as a multifarious sign for youthful rebellion, nonchalant bohemianism, lumberjacks and hillbilly folk, solidarity with the working class, and modish sophistication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the informal painting of the 20th century, the essay deals with the relationship between formal and informal dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the use of Olmec colossal heads as a central motif in the late work of Aubrey Williams (1926–90). Focusing on four key paintings, Chato Presence (1982), Night and the Olmec (1983), Chato III (1984) and Hymn to the Sun IV (1984), it connects the colossal heads' appearance to themes of decolonialism, diaspora and cross‐culturality, which are fundamental for understanding the artist's transnational life and practice. The works belonged to an epic cycle of forty oil on canvas paintings known as the Olmec–Maya series, which were first exhibited in London in 1985 and represented the culmination of Williams's lifelong engagement with Indigenous American aesthetics and archaeology. By locating the colossal head motif in relation to this trajectory and aspects of Guyana's colonial history, particularly slavery, emancipation and its postwar independence struggle, the essay describes how Williams transformed these iconic sculptures into avatars of postcolonial vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide-and-Seek (1940–42)—acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942—has received almost no contemporary consideration despite the interest it garnered in Tchelitchew's lifetime and his prominence within the transatlantic artistic culture of the interwar years. Beloved by the public, the work has been neglected in histories of modernism. Analysis of the artist's rich philosophical world, informed by premodern cosmologies and by histories of exile and global war, secures Tchelitchew's place in the project of modernist reenchantment, at a time of ever more bureaucratized forms of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an evidence for the presence of cadmium sulfate and sulfites as alteration products of the original cadmium sulfide (CdS)-based paint and explore the external circumstances and internal factors causing this transformation. It discusses the recrystallization of water-soluble phases of the paint are associated with the formation of cadmium sulfates.

A wide-ranging conversation between artist Amy Sillman, Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo, and October editor David Joselit on Sillman's influential Artist's Choice exhibition, The Shape of Shape, presented in the reopening of MoMA's galleries in 2019. Topics range from the re-introduction of intuition into histories of contemporary painting to strategies for expanding the modernist canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II, Georgia O'Keeffe created a series of foreboding paintings of New Mexico's Bisti Badlands, which she named the "Black Place." Produced within a wartime image ecosystem in which photographs, films, and cartography vividly communicated the power of air war to obliterate humanity and nature, O'Keeffe's "Black Place" series grappled with the war's destruction and shifts in perceptions of time, distance, and place. In its tense engagement with a new technological and visual world, the Black Place series finds kindship with the art of the bourgeoning generation of Abstract Expressionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]