Swiping Among the Masters

Don't Draw What You Can Trace...18th Century Edition

Explaining my sudden reappearance after months of inactivity will be dealt with in a future post. At the moment I'm much more interested in an oddity from the days of real painting.

I follow a fascinating blog titled "Where is Ariadne?" Each posting takes a venerable art theme (e.g. Birth of Venus, Apollo and Daphne, Mermaids, Cain and Abel) and presents a gallery of interpretations of that theme by painters down through history. It's interesting to see how each artist staged a time-worn story: his (almost always his) choice of which portion of the tale to present, its setting, which details he featured, and so on.

This week's theme is "Joseph and Potiphar's Wife," one of those great tales in which artists could present a salacious story ennobled by Biblical trappings. You may recall the plot: the wife of Potiphar, a rich bigwig, attempts unsuccessfully to seduce Joseph. The woman scorned grabs Joseph's coat as he beats a retreat.  Later she uses the coat as evidence when she accuses Joseph of rape.

As I examined the paintings, two of them caught my eye. The first was this 1703 canvas attributed to Lazzaro Baldi.

 

The second was a 1711 painting by Jean-Baptiste Nattier.

Do you see what I see? Curious, I took the images to Photoshop. First I flopped the Baldi.

Then I laid the Baldi over the Nattier, making it transparent so we can compare the images. Here's the result. Baldi is on top, reduced to 33% opacity. I moved it around a bit, but I didn't rotate, scale or otherwise alter the image.

There's no question. The Nattier is a flopped tracing of the Baldi. The fringing on Joseph might come from his figure having been moved by Nattier, but it could just be differences in the photos of the paintings. This isn't someone's careful re-drawing of the earlier painting. It's a direct trace. Considering that the image is flopped, I wonder if it was copied with one of those prism / half-silvered mirror contraptions. Or was the 18th century version of tracing paper laid over the Baldi and the resulting tracing transferred to the new canvas?

I'd love to hear from readers who know more than I do about classic painters. What was going on here?

Chinese Revolutionary Painters

The Paint is Red

Years ago a friend gave me a monograph about one of the State painters of Mao Tse Tung's China. Over time the poorly-produced booklet fell apart. All I have left are the color pages from the center. It's just as well, because (regrettably) I don't read Chinese. It goes without saying that I have no idea of this guy's identity or biography.

His work is typical of the "social realist" painting which flourished under China's Communist government. Intended as propaganda vehicles, these works celebrated good-looking men and women involved in labor and national service. The paintings appeared in books or as inspirational posters in factories and schools.

There seem to have been three broad styles of Chinese revolutionary art: a flat-colored approach which seems to owe much to classical Chinese art and block printing; dynamic black-and-white pictures which resemble mid-20th century Western magazine illustrations; and full-dress oil paintings stylistically rooted in conservative European art of the late 19th century.

It's interesting to see a work-in-progress demo of one of the artist's oils. The approach is solidly academic: a fairly complete charcoal drawing, a wash-in using sepia tones, then opaque color worked over the underpainting.(The finished painting is the image at the top of this post)

Also interesting is the way that the subject's face changes from drawing to finish. In the drawing he's a typical good-looking Chinese man. During his transformation into a hero the model's face loses most of its ethnic traits. I've been puzzled by this before. Many Chinese revolutionary painters seemed to employ an idealized "revolutionary hero" face which didn't look very Chinese.

In the following landscapes the artist treats a factory scene, a traditional landscape, and a river view with a pleasant Impressionistic style.

Here are a lively head study and a sketch of a plaster cast (nice reflected light):These two heads may be details from larger works:Finally come three propaganda works. The picture of the miners caught my eye. In the handful of books I've seen reproducing Chinese revolutionary art appear dozens of paintings glorifying noble (and unusually clean) coal miners. It's kind of creepy in light of the many Chinese mine disasters over the years.Thus does another anonymous illustrator enter the blogosphere. If someone out there knows his name, or can translate the captions, I'd love to hear from you!