Judith by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant. Kenyatta looked at this one, and Salome yesterday and said she has some idea of the sort of woman who I'd be with, if not her--a Puerto-Rican honey, with body. Not really. A Puerto-Rican honey, with body, who liked swords. Or a cross-dresser.
Anyway, above is Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage. I actually didn't know what I thought of this. I loved the portrait itself, but had mixed emotions about the chaos in the background. The more I think on it though, the more I think the chaos had a point.
The saddest thing about hanging out at Art Museums is that I really can't get into the history of this stuff right now. In fact, I don't think I'll be able to for another five years or so. It may be good to check out some docs .
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I've never liked where this painting hangs. I haven't been to the Met in over a year, but it's sort of like a hallway. The painting doesn't really fit in with what is thought to be late 19th century painting, so it gets kind of screwed for placement IMO.
I think you're right about the chaos. She's hearing voices in the painting. She's being visited by the Angel of God for the first time. I think it makes sense that it's hard to make out a lot of what's going on.
It does seem out of sorts with the rest of what's in that hall.
She has an idea of the kind of woman you'd be? Or the kind of woman you'd be WITH, if not her?
Right. Fixt.
Although that might have made a more interesting post.
I would hold off on the history until you stop having such moving reactions to the immanent/immediate presence of these images. It's like in highschool where they made you prove the meaning of a poem by breaking it down into parts that could be checked with a dictionary/encyclopedia. But when you start to lose that vitality the histories can add some new means of appreciation. Or that's been my experience of these things.
The contrasts here in this work between the hardships of the earthly life, the nobility of her fighting spirit, and almost pagan background of the promise/fertitlity of the virgin/bride of Christ, is a moving example of our being multiple.
While I generally agree with you, I think it's also important to understand that paintings like this one were made with the expectation that the audience knew the story. This is, after all, a painting of St. Joan by a Frenchman for a French audience in the late middle of the 19th century. To fully appreciate images like this one, the importance of a familiarity with the stories being depicted cannot be overstated.
I guess I don't relate to such works as a one-time thing/experience, or as something to be gotten. So for me there is no "fully".
part of what makes a work of art "great" for me is that it exceeds, and so extends/widens/deepens, my grasp/experience/expectations.
Point taken. The limits of language, I suppose. I was going to use broad, but I do believe full is better in this context. We have a habit of looking at art from a very different perspective in the 21st century than the people of the 15th-19th centuries. What I think is lost on the 21st century audience is the simple fact that most of the paintings and sculptures made prior to, say, 1850 were about something specific. They told very specific stories that were widely known. Biblical stories. Tales of Christ. Of John the Baptist. Of various Apostles and Saints. Or they were classical stories (i.e. Venus, Prometheus, Io, the Rape of Europa). Artists made these images with the assumption that their audience would know the story being depicted. The images weren’t open for interpretation. They were about what they were about, and if you don’t know the story they are depicting, then you won’t GET most of what is to be gotten.
For an example everybody can understand, the crucifixion is an act of martyrdom. Of God embodied in man. Of God living the life of a man, and then accepting the most brutal of torture from men to free all of human kind from the burden of sin and Hell. To offer eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven. I believe if you do not understand the story of Christ, or have never heard of him, then the greater meaning of a crucifixion is almost entirely lost on you. I don’t believe that means you cannot sufficiently enjoy an image of the crucifixion. Nor do I think everyone should consider a full understanding of the Bible and the Classics a prerequisite for regular trips to the great museums of the world. I think a visceral connection to the work of art is important. I think the content of a piece is important, though.
Your points about much of this art not being open to interpretation when it was created, is very true, as is the importance of the content. To expect such art to be moving or comprehensible to a person who doesn't know grasp the general meaning of the imagery, or even what it is supposed to illustrate (like in this painting of St. Joan), is I think to overestimate the relatability of art and the art museum experience.
An incredible amount of information is lost without the context - those assumptions that the art was created in mind with. For much of the art that you describe, the focus was as much on the topic/patronage/intent as it was on artistic technique and experimentation - often more so.
It's only after a certain period, too, within western art that one begins to see a growing, pointed divorce of artistic exploration from the content. Even such abstractions can be difficult to understand without some comprehension of what is being experimented with, or deconstructed. Some of it is amusing, or blunt, like Duchamp's institutionalized urinal, but the experience of seeing that urinal as an art-piece is something else.
That visceral connection is extremely complicated with a lot of art, for any person who may either be ignorant of the context, or or of the artistic techniques employed, or both. The experience of art, then, hinges on something even more difficult to qualify and relate.
I think such an experience too is complicated by the museum as an institution - a celebration of western art, but also of the underlying worldview that ritualizes and directs that moment of being struck by something. If someone cannot see a work of art with a general contextual/symbolic/interpretative understanding, it ceases to be, in my opinion, a Work of Art, and becomes something a lot more immediate, tenuous, and uncertain, and its value can no longer be approached in a traditional sense.
I think a visceral connection to a work of art is the threshold to it being considered great. Or rather, a work of art needs to invoke visceral reactions before being a candidate for greatness. It needs instill in me the desire to learn about content. Just my opinion of course.
Again, I generally agree with the sentiment. I just think it's important that people not impose an anachronistic understanding of the meaning and purpose of art onto times when art was made in a very different context. I think our personal, initial, base reaction to a work of art is greatly important. If it's a painting, it's even more important since the average time spent looking at a single painting in a museum is something like 7 seconds. In order for the image to carry through past the one minute mark, it has to move something from within.
My only real point to dmf was that these paintings were not made with us or our understanding of the function of art in mind.
BreakerBaker, I'm so glad you posted these comments, because I agree that knowing the historical context is key to understanding the works, especially the medieval and renaissance paintings, which often depict religious themes. For me, the great thing about art history is that it really opened up and deepened the experience of art. I'm not dismissing any person's visceral reaction, but I do advocate viewing a work with that understanding. When I'm in a museum, I wonder what other people are seeing. Not to make assumptions about other people, but what does a Japanese tourist get, to take one example, from seeing a Christian-themed or French-themed painting like the one above?
Although I've got to say I've learned so much since I was forced to read Ways of Seeing in Aesthetics class, in college. Especially in terms of depictions of women.
hi all, as I said I'm for whatever brings more possibilites, my only concern here was that none of these other additions are the same as T being transported/transfixed, and could likely intefere with such a "visceral" response. But such things come and go as they will and then we are fortunate to have ways of educating/cultivating ourselves into new perspectives/experiences. I love art history, art classes, and aesthetics but not as much as I love being in love with a work of art. That's just me.
Thanks for including this painting - it totally made my day. Strange coincidence - I had a postcard of it for years when I was a kid, and my now-gf had a framed small print of it as well growing up in a different state.
I've never seen this one before. It's sick. So vivid. Her eyes are going to haunt me for a while.
Maybe I can't tell because of the picture, but what is her left hand doing? My eyes keep coming back to it, and I can't focus on anything else.
I mean no disrespect in saying this, it's actually a compliment, but she looks like a homestedder. The dress, the eyes, the hair and the overall attitude. I have pictures of my Great Grandmother that bear comparison.Especially the grim determination around the eyes.
To a certain extent, that's what she was, IIRC-- living on her family farm.
It's funny how certain things are manifested in different ways that resemble each other across cultures and time periods. The piety of farmers is one of those things. I don't know whether it has to do with not being able to control the weather, or the hardship of life in an agricultural society, or what. However it does seem that those who live closer to the soild pray more.
Wow, i think I looked at this 3 or 4 times before I saw the two figures in the background.
I looked at it 3 or 4 times before I saw one figure in the background, and then had to look at it yet again after reading your comment.
Dude. Wow. Sorry, but this one freaks me the hell out! I would not be standing around staring at this one.
Ah, art, and the eye of the beholder! When will you stop making a fool of me?
ee, my guess is that if you did walk away from the original you might find yourself creepin back, but maybe not, that's the nice thing about big/diverse collections
When I first got cable in my new place, and hooked it to my new HD, there was an HD channel that blew my mind - basically a visual arts channel. They had an "Art in America" type show with a Winnebago and two hosts, just going from locale to locale, checking out the galleries, and architecture, and weird kitschy stuff. And there were docs. And the HD part was glorious - this was a great use of the higher resolution and the high-end cameras. Beautiful close-ups and cams. It was really educational. And so, of course, a few months later it was gone. I don't know if it's gone from the earth, or just gone from my lineup.
Does anybody know what the name of this station was/is?
TNC said,
"with body, who liked swords. Or a cross-dresser."
I say, "isn't that redundant"?
Sorry. The devil made me do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qAkEA-H_zE
Hah!
A bit more about the history, 'cause it does make me see this painting differently. The angel was telling Joan "Get those English out of France" (Hundred Years War and all that). But THIS Joan is no medieval maiden; she's wearing nineteenth-century peasant garb. And THIS angel, implicitly--but as any contemporary French viewer would have figured out--is saying, "Get those GERMANS out of Alsace-Lorraine" (which Prussia/Germany had grabbed from France during the Franco-Prussian war).
And actually, the figure on the left is the angel; the figure floating in the middle is the original Joan of Arc.
I've always loved this painting, and always stare at it in that hallway (not a second-rate place to hang it, as far as I'm concerned). My pleasure is heightened by knowing the historical story, not because I'm a French militarist but because it helps me understand how the painter and his contemporaries would have experienced the work. Which doesn't limit how _I_ need to see the work.
I'm curious about this part--"And actually, the figure on the left is the angel; the figure floating in the middle is the original Joan of Arc." Can you tell me how you can identify that figure? I don't know anything about this painting, I just used to stare at it for long periods myself, and I came away thinking there were three figures in the air and they were the three saints Joan said she had seen, St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. I can't tell from this reproduction whether there is a third figure or if I remembered that wrong.
TNC said: The saddest thing about hanging out at Art Museums is that I really can't get into the history of this stuff right now.
OK, so I won't tell you to cheer up, but I will tell you that there are as many ways to enjoy a giant museum like the Met as there are people walking in the front door.
Don't have time to do the whole Art History thing? It's fine: just do what you're doing: wander the halls, make a connection, explore the work that engages you with whatever tools you've got.
I go to the Met all the time with my 84 year-old mother, my 16 year-old niece and packs of sketchbook-wielding art friends. They all experience the work in different ways, lord knows, but they all leave having seen and thought and enjoyed.
I'm big on the history myself and know my way around it some... so of course I'm all for it. But if you don't have time for it right now... well, it'll keep.
In my New York years I used to go to the Met every six or seven months just to visit Joan. There's just something about her that pulls me into the painting. She's alive.