Mary Cassatt-- prints

1890, Tea, drypoint



1890-1, The Letter, drypoint and aquatint





Mary Cassatt was born in the American state of Pennsylvania in 1844, and moved to Paris in 1866, where she then spent most of her adult life. In 1877 she began showing her work with the impressionists. She became friends with these artists, especially Edgar Degas, who taught her the process of etching, a printmaking technique. She continued to work in largely an impressionist manner until 1914. Her health had been going downhill until that point, but in that year she became almost completely blind. She still exhibited her work and supported the womens' suffrage movement thereafter, and she died in 1926. Today's works on the show are prints that she made in the first years of the 1890's.


“Tea” was part of a series of drypoint prints that Mary Cassatt made in 1890. The drypoint technique was simpler for the artist working at home than traditional etching. In the various kinds of etching, lines in black in the final print are produced on a metal plate by creating lines in the metal that are etched away, or otherwise lower than the main portion of the surface. In etching, this is accomplished first, by coating the metal in an acid resistant material, scratching away the parts of this material in areas that are to be printed black, and then soaking the entire metal in acid. The longer this is done, the deeper the lines will be, and the darker they will be printed. Drypoint, on the other hand, does not require acid. The lines to be printed are scratched directly into the metal. There is no way to alter mistakes—every scratch is permanent. But the medium was more convenient than etching for Cassatt, and she made a series of drypoints from 1890 to 1891, two of which are included in the show today.

“Tea” shows a young woman seated at a table, in front of a black wall. She is facing off to the right, with that arm thrown up on to the top of the chair, and her elbow bent down, holding an Asian paper fan. Her arms are bare; it is somewhat unclear, but it appears that her dress has sleeves that only cover the shoulders. The surface of the table extends to the middle of the image, with its corner cutting in front of the woman's stomach. The dark teacup is set on the table, but the woman does on touch it. She looks bored, or upset.

What is unusual about this image, yet typical to this series of prints that Cassatt made, is the combination of finished and unfinished qualities. The drawing of the woman looks most finished, especially around her face. There is a delicate, lifelike use of faint gray tones, which are actually derived from shallow hatch marks, a series of thin, pale, diagonal lines. Her skin is full of subtle tonal variation, that make a realistic representation of shadows, curves, and bones. Her facial expression stands out quite a lot. She is frowning, and she appears to have been sitting there motionless for quite a while. She frowns, and looks away from the viewer. Her eye at the left seems to droop a little, as though she is not focusing on looking at anything, because of a subtle, but visible, line above indicating an eyelid's wrinkle. She looks distressed, possibly tired, perhaps waiting for something, although there is not a definite narrative that emerges from her expression. Though this print was made in 1890, placing it in the post-impressionist period, this snapshot quality is one that is characteristic of impressionist works. The focus is not on getting a definitive narrative, telling exactly what is going on, but on capturing the feeling, the particular ephemeral moment in life.

If anything else in this print can be said to have been drawn almost as realistically as the woman's skin, it is her teacup. But in this, even, the lights and darks are quite exaggerated, and there isn't a huge amount of variation. This teacup is where the title of the piece comes from, yet, compared to the figure, it seems a rather unimportant object. It's unimportant artistically, and this corresponds to its role in what is being depicted—the woman does not seem to care about her tea. Her focus is on her feelings, or on whatever is distressing her. If anything, the tea is something added as a distractive mechanism, and it fails even at that.

Everything else in the work looks quite unfinished. There's a vase of flowers, which is drawn as a blur of light spaces upon the black wall. The lines on the wall and on the flowers are still hatched, all parallel like the lines making the values of gray on the woman's skin, but they are rendered in a looser manner. The wall is a dark mass of vertical lines, and the flowers are vaguely arranged spaces of diagonal lines.

The lines that make up the table are even more loose. They are certainly not always going in the same direction; they are in fact rather a lot like quick scribbles added to get an appropriate tone quickly. The table's edges themselves show a use of distorted perspective, that can be seen in other prints by this artist from about the same time, and for some time later. The table seems to be tilted in some odd fashion, as though it's not completely flat. But we can infer that it is flat, since the teacup and flowerpot appear stable and vertical. The table is simply distorted for effect, made to look more like a simple, pure, geometric shape than it even already is. It does not seem to have thickness, as much as a series of extra decorative lines around the edges. The scribbled hatch marks that cover most of the space on the table simply serve to add to this distorted quality of the table. The table's surface even appears to be floating, since it is drawn without legs. Again, this has a purpose given the subject. It is disoriented and flattened and quickly rendered, just as the woman's surroundings, from her point of view, might be flattened. It's just this surface that's there, in front of her. Since she's focusing probably on her feelings, we can infer, she is not regarding her surroundings very much.

Everything else in the image, the area below the table, the woman's skirts, the visible parts of the back of her chair, and the fan she is holding to the right of the image, are left almost entirely blank. There are only the fewest possible lines drawn, and these are quite pale in character. They look like gestural lines, drawn very quickly, en plen air, as one would draw as this event was happening. It is most certainly an incomplete look.

This idea of a work of art that looks incomplete can be traced back to the first impressionists, who were criticised, among many other things, for seemingly leaving their canvases unfinished. There isn't an attempt at getting every detail perfectly rendered, or smoothing out the texture of the paint—what is more important is that original feeling of the scene. And this, the act of capturing something most immediate, was considered by some artists a more realistic representation of the scene, less distorted by the changes in mind set over the course of numerous hours of work.

“Tea,” and Cassatt's other prints from this series, basically extend this. Drypoint is a more quick, direct process than acid based etching, making it ideal for this kind of work. The difference in medium naturally produces a different result. Scratching into metal is something more like a very permanent kind of drawing, than painting with oil based pigments of various colors. So, the natural incomplete state is a messy collection of lines, just sufficient to get an idea of what is there, while leaving much of the rest of the space white. It is quite a lot more incomplete than many of the original impressionist landscapes and figures, yet it still shares the essential goals of impressionist work. The most important parts of the print are emphasised—the woman and her expression—and what is unnecessary, or just incidental, is left unfinished. So in viewing this work, one perceives something closer to what one would perceive is one found this woman sitting in a cafe, or if one were this woman, experiencing what she is experiencing.

“The Letter” is another print, from 1890 to 1891, shortly after “Tea.” “The Letter” shows a woman seated in front of a small desk, facing to the right, bringing the tip of an envelope to her mouth to seal a letter. It uses both drypoint and aquatint techniques, using a black drypoint layer primarily for thin outlines of the image, but also for the entirety of the woman's black hair and some gray details of lace on her dress; and this is combined with several layers of aquatint, to produce colors, in a manner that looks somewhat like watercolors, though being a printmaking method, multiple copies of each image can be produced.

Cassatt's aquatints of this period show the influence of Japanese wood block prints; this is visible in “The Letter,” stylistically, with the use of large blocks of solid color, which were common in Japanese prints of the time produced from multiple wood block prints, and with the use of floral patterns covering the wallpaper of the interior space and the woman's dress. Indeed, even the subject of this particular print can be traced to Japanese influence, in particular images of geishas shown flirtatiously kissing their handkerchieves, a gesture somewhat similar to the sealing of the letter, which Cassatt depicts.

Cassatt's image, though, is not pure mimicry of an exotic culture; it is full of qualities all its own. It has its own odd, rather disorienting effect that emerges after a long look at the print. This is largely the result of the distorted space depicted, and the use of a repeated floral pattern. There's a table to the desk shown at the lower right side of the print, yet most of the right side is pressed in by the desk's large shelf, which extends higher even than the woman's head. It is seen as a flat brown rectangle, like a Greek column in visual function and proportions, topped with a dim yellow stripe, which is decorated with a subtle series of white dots in a line. The table itself is quite similar to the table in “Tea”-- it appears thin and membrane-like, though less than the table in “Tea,” as this table shows the use of the multiple colors, a deep blue surface and an edge of the same brown as the shelves, to create a slight three dimensional impression, although this impression is certainly a weak one, and it remains quite unrealistic. In addition its perspective is rather distorted, as though the upper line that forms its far side has too strong a diagonal, and should be more horizontal; this creates the impression that the table itself is being twisted and bent, like it's a cut fragment of a helical ribbon. The brown outline's thickness varies around the table, though everywhere it is composed from tight, thin, extremely straight outlines. The lowest edge of the table, which is nearest to the viewer, has these lines set diagonally so that it becomes wider nearer to the right side, cut off from sight by the attached shelving unit. This just accents the distortion of the table's perspective; its edges seem overly tight and straight, and its helical perspective makes it seem, visually, as though it is in motion.

The space shown is kept tight by the use of the shelving unit on the desk, and the somewhat symmetrical element of the back of the woman's chair. It does not extend as high, and its lines are less tightly, perfectly straight, but it makes use of the same brown color. It is also rather flat, like the shelf. The use of flat, solid blocks of color with the aquatint technique creates spaces that are separated visually by color, and by an imperfect edge, which sometimes leaves little pieces of lines of the uncoloured paper visible. The space is tightly compressed into the narrow picture plane, the table is distorted into a helical form that seems to be in motion, and the large majority of the rest of the space is covered in a messy floral pattern. It is not rendered in an exactly detailed fashion, but in a more impressionistic way, because of the nature of the aquatint medium. This is especially true of the wallpaper, which is composed of multiple colors on an uncoloured background, and is for the most part lacking in any outlining from the drypoint. Thin lines form stems, but the leaves and flower buds are simple daubs of colour. The flowers look like a dull pink—really though, they are simply a thinner layer of the brown pigment of the chair and desk shelves. This is combined with yellow and blue, variously mixed, to create tones of green. The flowers swirl, and float around; their stems make indefinite shapes, sprawling in all directions. The pattern of the dress is more definite, composed of a particular shape repeated over the surface of the fabric—two yellow arcs, like palm fronds, that bend together and form a circle, set upon a deep blue surface. It is repeated regularly over the dress's fabric, but is still rather irregular due to the folds within the dress. The pattern itself shows a use of stronger contrast, so it is more immediately seen. Though even with this difference taken into account, there is still a good sense of visual continuity between the dress and the wallpaper, because of the commonality in the use of a swirling floral pattern.

While there is an unusual sense of continuity between these elements, the use of solid blocks of tone make for an unusual sense of disconnect between other spaces. The most evident example is that between the blue that makes up most of the woman's dress, and the pale pink that makes up a layer of a lacy, button-down shirt over most of the front of the woman's chest, through the dress's neckline. Its paler color makes it look nearer than the blue of the dress, though it is actually a layer of fabric under the dress. The blue, being darker, recedes visually. The hands that hold the envelope have a similar effect, but less pronounced, especially because of the complete lack of shading over the skin. Outlines of fingers, skin folds in the palm, and fingernails are denoted by the use of lines in the drypoint layer, but this is all. The space is a flat, thin, pale brown or ochre. This kind of detachment is also visible between the back of the woman's chair and the back of her dress, which are both made from thin, incomplete layers of their respective colours. The woman seems to be floating upon the chair consequently.

There are all of these effects that combine into rather a disorienting image—the detachment between spaces of colors that should be connected, the continuity in pattern between the dress and the wallpaper, the continuous flowering swirls, and the helical, seemingly bent, moving table, compressed into a narrow space by two tall brown columns. All of this occurs around a seemingly entirely mundane, domestic task—the sealing of a letter, preparing it to be sent. There is only this gesture shown, none of the context of the event is depicted. We know nothing of the nature of the letter, whether it is something useless or important, something related to dry matters of business, or a more emotional, personal correspondence. As is characteristic of impressionist art, we only get an ephemeral, momentary glance at the scene, a scene that itself shows only a restrained gesture of an action, without context.

Alexander Calder

1943, Constellation



1934, A Universe



UNESCO Spiral



Alexander Calder was a sculptor, who lived from 1898 to 1976. He produced art from the 1920's and continuously after. His sculptures from the twenties often produce the illusion of mass using thin wires. Later, he made mobile sculptures, for which he is most well known. These began in the early thirties, and after this he continuously elaborated on the idea.

The first sculpture here is an immobile structure, one of the constellation pieces, built in 1943. This is considerably later than the mobile sculptures began, showing that he was still working in a variety of styles contemporaneously. In the constellations, of which there are quite many, abstract, three dimensional shapes are scattered about, separated and suspended in air by a stiff wire. These are organic forms, composed of hard, curved lines, and sharp edges. Even though technically these are termed “organic” forms, as they are composed of curved lines, they are most definitively nonliving—their edges are still strong, and they often do not look like something that is naturally occurring. Instead, they look like pieces of wood that have been shaped by conscious human effort. They are spread apart by the wires, which make the constellation-like shape. What is unusual about this, is that the structures so openly contradict the basic understanding of a constellation. Constellations are human contrivances. The constellations that we are now familiar with are Roman in origin; the various Native American tribes and other cultures created entirely different constellations, independently. This variety of forms identified is the result of the basic human tendency to see patterns in random signals. It is an evolved psychological characteristic—it is better to see a pattern that does not exist, than to fail to see a something that is present, like a hiding predator, or potential food. The pattern of stars seen in the sky is the result of massive objects, casting off a huge amount of energy in light and heat, scattered around our galaxy, over thousands of light years. It is an extremely vast amount of space, yet with everything so distant, it becomes flattened into a particular arrangement of light dots from the vantage point of the Earth. Constellations are built from this flat image, not from the three dimensional arrangement that actually exists. Lines are added between two or more stars that appear close to each other, even though, in the third dimension in the distant space which we cannot see, these two stars might actually be hundreds or thousands of light years away. Calder's sculptures add the third dimension back to the form. Calder's works do not seem to make pictures of soldiers or animals as constellations in the sky do. Their whole form is a geometric abstraction, and it doesn't purport to be anything other than a scattering of forms. The focus is placed on the objects, and the thin, flimsy lines that connect them. This is radically different from the understanding of constellations in the sky, in which the stars and their lines are almost incidental, and the main focus is the total form which is perceived and imposed onto the stars, and the space between them, a form which is usually something living—an animal, a human, or a mythological creature. Calder doesn't offer any such representative idea with his sculptures; the only title is “constellation,” but there is no sense of any particular constellation. There are only the lines, the massive shapes, and the open space between them.

Also shown is “A Universe,” of 1934. It's set on a wooden base, with a thicker curved bar, with something like a bent helical form, rising up, and holding the main circular form, made of wire. From both of these elements, two small spheres are suspended from wire. So, the motion of the sculpture is guided by the circular form, orbiting. Ultimately, Calder found this style of mobile sculpture excessively predictable. According to one anecdote, Albert Einstein saw this structure in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, and gazed at it for forty minutes, carefully watching it rotate, before declaring that he wished that he had created it. After this, Calder was persuaded to continue these structures for a while, but ultimately still found even the best of them, in his words, “apt to be mechanically repetitious.” This particular sculpture, though, derives an additional humorous quality from its title, “A Universe,” and the disconnect between that and the apparent simplicity of the structure itself. There are possibly two or three small spheres which may be considered planets, orbiting along one sphere of wire, to which they are connected. In both A Universe and Constellation, there is an allusion to these grand, expansive, astrophysical spaces. However Calder was also quite vigorously opposed to the attachment of symbolism to his work. Regarding a large outdoor mobile, the UNESCO spiral, the art dealer George Staempfli once asked about symbolic meaning in his work. Calder responded, “Well, it goes up, something like a flame. But there's no history attached.” His wife apologised for him, “Sorry,.. Sandy is probably as unsymbolic a person as I know.” This little anecdote was recounted in an article by this art dealer, and it is quite illustrative of Calder's opposition to symbolism in his own work in particular, and also of the art scene at the time. This trait is one that Calder shared with many of the abstract expressionist painters, in which allusions might be made to grand philosophical realisations, or the basic human condition, but the work itself does not make use of direct symbolism or representation of these concepts.

The rest of this show will now be spent on the sound which accompanied a short film on Calder's work. It was composed by John Cage in 1950, and the film itself was made by Herbert Matter, and called “Works of Calder”. The film runs for just over 20 minutes, and contains narration from Burgess Meredith, who brought up the idea of making a film on Calder's work. The music itself uses primarily the sounds of Cage's prepared piano technique, in which foreign objects, like bits of metal and plastic, bolts, toys, pencils and the like, are placed about on the strings of the piano, distorting the pitches and making a more percussive timbre. This is combined with recorded sounds of Calder at work, hammering at his sheets of metal.

Yves Klein

IKB 67



1961, RE 6



1961, ANT 95, Anthropometry



1960, Monotone Symphony




Yves Klein was a French painter who lived from 1928 to 1962. His best known work comes from the mid-1940's to his death. These are his monochrome paintings, which began in 1946. He is particularly known for his “blue period”, during which he patented a pigment he called International Klein Blue, and worked almost exclusively in this color. He painted panels purely in this color, using different techniques for applying the paint, first using rollers to create perfectly flat surfaces. But he experimented with this, and other ways of applying the paint, like using natural sponges, and using these to build reliefs onto his panels. This experimentation led naturally to his anthropometries, which began in 1958. In these, he used the bodies of women to apply paint to his canvases—he would instruct them to cover their skin with the paint, and then make a stamped imprint of themselves on the large, upright canvases. In other works he coated plaster replicas of famous Greek sculptures with the International Klein Blue pigment, and produced a musical equivalent of his monochrome paintings, first in 1947, then in variant forms thereafter for different performances in different galleries.
He died at the age of 34 after having a series of three heart attacks in less than a month in 1962.

So, to give a sense of the ideas behind the monochrome works, we have an excerpt from Klein's own words, from his lecture at the Sorbonne in 1959.
(from book)

That was an extract from Yves Klein's lecture at the Sorbonne, from 1959. This provides an idea about his monochrome works, two of which are shown online at newexpressionist.blogspot.com. There are visible there IKB 67, a flat, deep blue panel with some ridges of texture, and RE 6, a relief with sponges. In IKB 67 there are uneven horizontal ridges, which bend and meet with each other into points in places, and fade in and out in others, rising and descending again, and remain temporarily parallel at other points. Upon close examination the ridges look like some sort of geological formation, something that could happen in nature, perhaps by the movement of wind through sand—though in the end there is not an idea that definite about it, only a good sense of the naturalness of the textural elements. There is a similar sense about RE 6, too—when looking at a reproduction of this work, one could imagine looking at a satellite image of a foreign planet. Little fragments and particles dust the surface in an irregular fashion like rocks and pebbles dusting a planet's surface. It is unclear from simply looking how this was formed; it may be that it is the result of forming the surface by applying the paint with sponges, though there are pieces scattered about that seem too large for that, more like sticky pieces of the pigment, dropped around like dust. Of course, the most prominent element of the relief is the scattering of sea sponges. They are round, rough, and completely soaked with paint, so their texture blends quite well with that of the panel, like boulders on a planet's surface, and of course the color is completely uniform. The only variations are the shadows from the textural elements. And the color, being this very deep, very saturated blue that one would have a difficulty finding in nature, is indeed the main point of this work, as Klein articulated in his 1959 lectures.


His exploration of the aesthetics of a pure space was not confines to this use of color, though. He also explored the use of pure empty space in works such as the Void, and the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility. The Void came first, in 1958. Its full title was “The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void,” and in this, an empty space was put on exhibition at the Iris Clert gallery. The space was kept flat white, except for a blue curtain over a the entrance to the gallery, a window which was painted blue, and a cabinet—the only object not removed from the gallery. From 1959 onward, the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility occurred-- this has been termed a kind of performance piece, though that description does not seem to suit it entirely properly. In this piece, Klein would exchange areas of empty space in Paris for gold. In both works, the buyer would get a certificate of ownership of the space. In the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility though, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, half the gold would be thrown into the river, and this would restore the natural order that had been upset by the selling of the empty space. This relates to the monochrome works in the idea of experiencing objects entirely in their absence, or in the fleeting imprints made upon them. It's more like the white canvases of Robert Rauschenberg, in which the viewer's shadows and reflections made up the art work—but there is also the aspect to it that is more like Klein's own monochrome works: as those were about appreciating the aesthetic of the pure color, the Void and the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility are about the aesthetic appreciation of an empty space.

A more obvious parallel to Klein's monochrome paintings is his Monotone Symphony. The piece was first composed in 1949, three years after the beginning of his monochrome paintings. It is written to consist of 20 minutes of a single sustained tone, followed by 20 minutes of silence. Since 1949 it was realized in various different versions. The first was with an exhibit of International Klein Blue paintings at the Iris Clert Gallery in 1957, produced by tape.

In another, on March 9, 1960, at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Paris, Klein conducted a performance of the piece by a ten piece orchestra. Before going any further in talking about this performance event, here is a one minute excerpt from this performance.

This went on for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of a strict silence. At the gallery, as this was happening, the visitors had all arrived in formal wear, and simultaneous with the performance of the Monotone Symphony, an Anthropometry painting was produced. The two elements of this performance can be seen together in some of the photographs. The orchestra is arranged seated along one of the walls with an International Klein Blue painting behind them. In front of them, there is paper laid out across the floor, on which the International Klein Blue paint is spread. The panel on which the Anthropometry work is being produced is set upright along a wall at the left. There is a series of steps along the edge of this wall, which allows the models to reach different heights along the panel. In the photograph that I've shown online, one imprint is already visible, and two models are shown. One is still covering herself with paint, and another is standing on one of the steps, about ready to create the imprint of herself. Yves Klein is between these two events—the making of the anthropometry and the line of instrumentalists, so that he can conduct both of them. For the anthropometry paintings, he needs only to instruct the models on where to position themselves; he does not need to touch even a drop of the paint.

The name for the Anthropometry paintings comes from an old scientific practice of the early 20th century, used primarily in tracking criminals. A variety of bodily measurements were taken, like stature, length and width of head, and lengths of left middle and little fingers. There were 12 total measurements, selected by Alphonse Bertillon, after he took a variety of anthropometric measurements over time, and found these most consistent over the duration of a person's life. The practice of using anthropometric measurements was more efficient and effective than the use of photographs, as even one piece of information would very much reduce the number of pictures one would have to sift through. But, it ultimately fell out of favor, becoming obsolete with the rise of fingerprinting. Klein's Anthropometries are more like larger fingerprints, being imprints of the entire body. These, the selling of empty spaces, and the monochrome works were all continued until the artist's death in 1962.

Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani--two women of the Italian Baroque

1612-3 Judith Slaying Holofernes -- Artemisia Gentileschi



1620 Judith Slaying Holofernes -- Artemisia Gentileschi



1664 Portia Wounding he Thigh -- Elisabetta Sirani




Artemisia Gentileschi was born in from 1593, and died at an uncertain date, from 1652 to 1656. She was the daughter of another painter, Orazio Gentileschi, who was very much influenced by Caravaggio. She was born in Rome, introduced to art through her father's work. In the studio she showed talent much greater than that of her brothers, yet in 1612 the all male Roman art academies refused to admit her into their program. Orazio then tried to hire one of his colleagues, Agostino Tassi, as a private tutor for Artemisia. But, this did not exactly work as planned—Tassi raped Artemisia, and charges were only brought against Tassi when it was found out that Tassi did not intend to marry Artemisia. The trial then lasted seven months, bringing notoriety to the artist. The minutes from this trial still exist today, and reveal a good deal about the social conditions of women in the early baroque era. Artemisia moved out to Florence in 1614, and worked there until 1620, when she returned to Rome, and traveled to Venice. In Florence she was quite successful as a painter, and while there, she did become the first woman admitted into the Academy of Drawing. She was able to gain friendship with the Grandduke and Grandduchess, contemporary artists of the area, and other important figures of the area, like Galileo Galilei, with whom she maintained some correspondence even after leaving Florence.

In Florence she focused on a few religious stories in which women play a significant role. She painted multiple works of the repentant Mary Magdalene, the prostitute and general sinner who meets Christ, repents, and converts to a life of servitude to god. These representations tend to emphasise her desperation and agony. There are paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes, and of Susanna with the elders. Both these stories are included in Catholic versions of the bible, but excluded from the Protestant versions. The story of Judith has its own book in the Catholic bible, included as part of the Old Testament. Judith is upset at the Isrealites for failing to trust God to deliver them from their oppressors, so she takes matters to her own hands. She goes to the enemy's general, Holofernes, and slowly gains his trust. Once she gains access to his tent, she takes the opportunity to murder him, with the assistance of her maid. She brings the head of Holofernes back to the Israelites, and the Assyrians, who have been oppressing them, disperse about, departing in a disorganised manner, having then lost their general. Judith becomes celebrated as a heroic figure, and she is courted, though remains unmarried for the rest of her life.

In the modern Catholic bible the Susanna story is included as an appendage to the book of Daniel. The conflict over whether to include Susanna in the canon, which occurred in the baroque era, adds a political dimension to artistic representations of the scene. In the story of Susanna, Susanna is falsely accused of infidelity. Two elders come upon her while she is bathing in the garden, and threaten to send out false accusations against her, unless she allows them sexual gratification. Susanna refuses this blackmail, and the elders make public accusations against her of promiscuity. When Susanna is about to be put to death, Daniel arrives and convinces the judges to question the two elders separately. When they are apart, the elders' stories disagree, and it becomes obvious that they are lying, so Susanna is released. It has been speculated that Gentileschi's use of this story is related to her own rape, that she used the story partly as a way to insert an autobiographical element to her work. Her use of Judith Beheading Holofernes, as well, which she first painted around 1612 to 1613, has also been speculated to be related to these events in her own life, though rather than a direct depiction of her life, rather as a means of expressing a desire for revenge. But, these psychological hypotheses about Artemisia's work remain very much speculative; there really isn't enough of an historical record to offer any input on the matter.

In 1630 she went to Naples, and in 1638 she and her father went to England to work on a commissioned ceiling painting. Orazio died the next year, though Artemisia stayed in the country to work on her own commissions. It is not known how long she stayed there, but she left by 1642, when a civil war broke out in the country. Little is known about her whereabouts after this period, though she did return to Naples. Records are sparse from this time, though in her latest known letter, of 1650, Artemisia states that she is still actively involved in making art. Due to the sparse historical record, it is not known whether she died around 1653, as has been usually believed, or if she died later in a plague that swept the city in 1656, as per another speculation.

In general, Gentileschi's style is usually quite influenced by that of Caravaggio, though it is indirect. Her exposure to his style came from her father's use of the techniques. This included primarily the use of tenebrism and chiaroscuro. Tenebrism refers to the use of very intense shadows. It comes from the Latin term tenebre, which refers to shadows. In particular, tenebrism refers to the kind of very intense shadows in which the background is nearly a flat black, and the forms being depicted have very uncertain edges. Much of the forms themselves can be covered in the same shadows that dominate the background, and only particular lit surfaces are visible. This was a rather new technique when Caravaggio began using it in the late sixteenth century, and it would still have been considered a fairly new development in painting in Artemisia's time, though it was a few generations after Caravaggio's work. Chiaroscuro is a somewhat related concept, but it is more general than tenebrism—it simply refers to the strong contrast between light and dark spaces. Later, it came also to refer to the technique in drawing of working on a coloured paper, and drawing in both dark outlines as usual, along with a layer of white for highlighting. Artemisia Gentileschi came to master the use of both tenebrism and chiaroscuro in her paintings. This is especially evident in her earlier works, like in her two versions of Judith slaying Holofernes—one was painted in 1612 to 1613, and another version was made in 1620 using a very similar composition. Compared to Caravaggio's work, however, Gentileschi's forms are rendered more realistically rather than idealistically. Her figures tend to have heavier bodies, which in combination with the more realistic treatment and the often violent subject matter, communicate an intense kind of strength. The figures often resemble Gentileschi's self portraits, especially in their facial features and their heavier forms.

These aspects are quite evident in her two versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes. The earlier version, made around the time or soon after her rape trial, is currently located at Naples. Both the Naples version and the later painting, made around 1620, are shown online at newexpressionist.blogspot.com. Both show Judith at the right, driving a sword through Holofernes' neck. Holofernes is lying in a bed, positioned so that his head is nearest to the viewer, and the rest of his body extends back and to the left. Both Judith and her maid are also on this bed. The maid is in the centre of this cluster of figures, holding Holofernes down. Judith is at the right, extending her arms to the left, one to hold Holofernes' head in place, and one to pull the sword in. The cut begins from the outside; Judith hods the sword down, and pulls in toward her.

The painting is compositionally intense; the six arms of the three figures converge on the central point around Holofernes' neck, though in a fairly disorganised manner. It is full of diagonal lines and triangular forms, which are visually quite active. In the 1620 version of the scene this effect is increased by the addition of space to the left, which allows for the inclusion of additional diagonals for Holofernes' legs. There is pressure being exterted in all directions from this central point. Judith is clenching her fists tightly, at the handle of her sword and below that, the side of Holofernes' head. His hair is visible between her fingers, being pulled violently, and the skin on his face wrinkles from the pressure. Holofernes reaches up to the maid, tightly grabbing the collar of her dress, and the maid presses down at Holofernes. In the 1620 version a stream of blood shoots up toward Judith, adding another dynamic line, and to the overall level of violence in the scene.

Compared to one another, the main difference evident is the wider view in the 1620 version. Additional space is included above, below, and to the left in this version. The 1612 version is somewhat of a compressed image; the maid's head seems pressed in at the top of the canvas. Also, Judith's sword is smaller in the 1612 version, the lower part of it almost seeming, because of the way the light is painted falling on it, to be something printed onto the bedsheets rather than an extension of the same sword that Judith grasps. This effect is eliminated in the 1620 version, in which it is wider and lit somewhat strongly along its edges, and extends farther down. In fact, in the 1620 version the sword itself can be said to add to the dramatic pressure of the image.


From here we move on to another artist, Elisabetta Sirani. She lived from 1638 to 1665 in the north Italian city of Bologna, the capital city of the province Emilia-Romagna. Her father, Giovanni Andrea Sirani, was also a painter. Bologna was a strong centre for painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rivaling Rome and Florence. For an amount of time, Elisabetta Sirani was one of the most important and well known painters in the Bolognese school. She achieved fame for her virtuosity of technique—her ability to complete paintings at an impressively quick rate, and for her pure character and demure personality. Patrons, art aficionados, and others curious about her painting would come to her studio and watch her work. At the peak of her fame, when she was just 27 years old, she died under suspicious circumstances—at least one close friend believed that the artist had been poisoned, but this was never confirmed.

Her 1664 painting, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, from just one year before her suspicious death, shows a scene from Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus. Brutus was one of the conspirators in the murder of Julius Caesar, and Portia was his wife. In the end of the story, she commits suicide to demonstrate her loyalty to her husband, in the original version, by suffocating herself with burning coals. The scene in the painting is an earlier one, as Portia is just beginning to sense that her husband is involved in a dangerous plot of some sort. Here is the passage from Plutarch:

This Porcia, being addicted to philosophy, a great lover of her husband, and full of an understanding courage, resolved not to inquire into Brutus's secrets before she had made this trial of herself. She turned all her attendants out of her chamber, and, taking a little knife, such as they use to cut nails with, she gave herself a deep gash in the thigh; upon which followed a great flow of blood, and, soon after, violent pains and a shivering fever, occasioned by the wound. Now when Brutus was extremely anxious and afflicted for her, she, in the height of all her pain, spoke thus to him: "I, Brutus, being the daughter of Cato, was given to you in marriage, not like a concubine, to partake only in the common intercourse of bed and board, but to bear a part in all your good and all your evil fortunes; and for your part, as regards your care for me, I find no reason to complain; but from me, what evidence of my love, what satisfaction can you receive, if I may not share with you in bearing your hidden griefs, nor be admitted to any of your counsels that require secrecy and trust? I know very well that women seem to be of too weak a nature to be trusted with secrets; but certainly, Brutus, a virtuous birth and education, and the company of the good and honorable, are of some force to the forming our manners; and I can boast that I am the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus, in which two titles though before I put less confidence, yet now I have tried myself, and find that I can bid defiance to pain." Which words having spoken, she showed him her wound, and related to him the trial that she had made of her constancy; at which he being astonished, lifted up his hands to heaven, and begged the assistance of the gods in his enterprise, that he might show himself a husband worthy of such a wife as Porcia. So then he comforted his wife.

This, again, is the source text for the scene in Sirani's painting Portia wounding her Thigh, from Plutarch's Life of Brutus. Sirani chooses a rather obscure scene for this painting, probably in part because there was a demand in the baroque for images of strong women, which would have also been satisfied as well by the last paintings we saw, Gentileschi's depictions of Judith slaying Holofernes. Portia demonstrates her strength by demanding that she be treated as an equal, rather than as a pet-like creature too delicate to be allowed awareness of the brutal world of politics. From the modern standpoint, it seems odd that a demonstration of loyalty to her husband would be taken as an image of a strong female character. Certainly the two characteristics are not exclusive of one another, but increased loyalty to one's husband is still not seen as the usual route for beginning to assert one's strength as a woman—it is usually instead some sort of act of independence that is expected. The scene with Portia shows a strong female character from the existing cultural context of the baroque period, in a manner that does not subvert existing gender roles, but expresses a greater strength within them.

In terms of the technical aspects of the image, Portia is shown at the right side of the frame, sitting on a bench in front of a flat wall with a dark curtain draped over the right edge. This wall takes up approximately three quarters of the image, and at the left there is a doorway through which Brutus and his colleagues are visible conspiring and discussing the important matters in which Portia wants to be involved. They are shown in a mistier lighting situation, without heavy shadows, being that they are in the background. In the foreground Portia is wearing a bright red dress which falls loosely off of her left shoulder. She extends her leg out, so that her shin extends a bit beyond the door frame. Her skirts are pulled up to reveal her thigh being stabbed. Her foot of the leg that is revealed is cut off at the lower part of the frame, and the other is concealed under a massive pile of crumpled fabric. She is holding her right arm up, grasping her small dagger, preparing to stab. Two small wounds are already visible on her thigh, though she does not appear to be bleeding profusely yet. Her eyes look intently and unemotionally at the point she wishes to stab.

The upper right corner of the painting is filled by a dark corner, in front of which Portia's head and shoulder are positioned. This creates a kind of tenebrist or chiaroscuro effect with Portia's very light skin. Bolognese painting at the time was noted mostly for its emphasis on classicism, but this aspect of Portia Wounding her Thigh shows that Sirani was aware of modern trends in painting, and could use them to her own advantage. There can even be inferred a symbolic significance in using the more modern technique around the woman in her expression of strength. The use of violent subject matter such as this was also more characteristic of the Baroque than earlier periods. This painting shows the artist's ability to mix classical compositional elements, like the triangular arrangement of figures in the background, with a more modern sensibility. It is certainly less radically violent, and less extreme in its use of chiaroscuro, than the earlier work of Gentileschi, but both were aware of these techniques, and with them and additional influences, were able to develop their own artistic styles.

Johannes Vermeer

The Astronomer, 1668



The Geographer, 1668-9



Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, 1670



Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, 1663-4



A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, 1657


The Geographer was painted from 1668 to 1669, around the same time as a very similar painting, The Astronomer, of 1668. The paintings show the same model, wearing the same blue robes, in similar settings of scientific work.

The Astronomer is situated to the right side of the canvas, in a profile view, although facing away from the viewer. He is leaning forward actively, toward his window at the left, stretching his hand out to a globe on the desk. His other hand is set on the edge of the desk nearest the viewer, supporting him as he stretches forward, as though in a quick bout of inspiration, caught completely in his work. It is already late in the day, as one can tell from the golden light that pours in through the window.

The Geographer, in contrast, shows the scientist interrupted from his work. He is facing in a forward position, leaning forward once again, over a large sheet of paper spread roughly about over the desk, holding a compass. The same globe that the Astronomer leans toward is visible in this painting, set atop a high wardrobe. In both paintings, the scientist presses his left hand to the same corner of the desk, supporting himself while leaning forward. The geographer would have been supporting himself in the astronomer's manner a moment ago, but his attention has just been diverted. He looks up, out the window to the left, just quickly and momentarily distracted from his work. The hour is closer to the morning or afternoon; the light that pours into the room is of a more pale silver character.

In both paintings, there is a similar blue and gold ornamental carpet appears tossed over the front side of the desk. In the Astronomer's, the pattern is a European looking floral pattern. On the whole, the Astronomer has a more organised and geometric composition than the Geographer. The astronomer's body forms two equilateral triangles with a common vertex, one between the edge of his back at the right of the painting, and his left arm, and the other between his left and right arms. These form the main diagonals of the piece. The rest of the elements of the painting consist primarily of rectangular forms. The desk is set at straight horizontals and verticals. The background is full of strong verticals, from the chair on which the astronomer sits, the windows at the left, the wardrobe, a chart displayed on the front of the wardrobe's doors, and the space between this wardrobe and a dark, obscure painting on the wall to the right of it. It is very carefully organised, and the astronomer's pose tends not to seem completely spontaneous. The geometry of the composition, the astronomer's gesture of complete focus on his work, and the gold light and deep shadows of the evening hour, all work together to make a calm, yet intense mood, intimate, and almost mystical in nature, well suited for a depiction of the study of the outer cosmos—a mysterious and unfamiliar realm at any period in our history yet, but even more so in the Baroque era when this was painted, at the dawn of the scientific revolution.

The composition in The Geographer is a more disheveled one. Papers are more scattered about; the books set atop the wardrobe are set on their side with their inconsistent pages shown, rather than neatly upright, arranged by their height, as in the Astronomer. The globe is set there as well, set aside and out of use, but not neatly out of the way. In his frontally oriented position, the geographer's robe even looks more disorganised than the astronomer's, even though it is the same robe, simply because from the front, a white and a red-orange layer of fabric are visible under the blue one. This disheveled appearance is well suited for the subject, the geographer figure just interrupted from his work. This effect is accomplished most directly by subtly changing the angle from which the viewer sees the scene. In the Astronomer, the viewer sees a direct frontal view. In The Geographer, the viewer has taken a few steps to the right, and stepped back to get a wider view. The facade of the wardrobe and window sill are revealed. The chair is removed; the figure is standing at the center of the painting instead, hunched over his map in a mostly frontal view. This change in his position upsets the balance of the painting, as well. Where in the Astronomer the figure and the window created a symmetry of visual weight, in the Geographer the figure is situated more centrally, leaving the right side of the painting unoccupied but for small objects, light in terms of visual weight. The movement of the figure and the chair reveal scattered papers on the floor and diffuse areas of light and shadow about the rear wall, which has more of a cool gray tone under the daylight, than the warm brown that it takes on in The Astronomer. The space is more open in the Geographer, because a wider angle is depicted, and because the scientist is not covering the right side of the wall. The carpet on the desk, although very much arranged in nearly the same way as the Astronomer's, also suggests the worldliness of the geographer. Rather than the comparatively sparse European floral design, we see a denser pattern, with decorative borders blocking off different spaces, suggesting the carpets of the Middle East. Its patterns are unclear in places, and may well still be of a mostly European design. Though it is visually busier, while comparatively, the Astronomer's carpet seems to suggest a certain sort of calmness in mood.

The Geographer's painting suggests to me an ambiguous dual sense of worldliness. On one hand, it is the mundane practicalities of everyday life, as opposed to the intellectual pursuits of the Astronomer, which verge on the mystical, somehow simultaneously more cerebral or requiring more introspection, and centering around the wider reaches of space, the distant cosmos, the heavens, the planets, and stars. On the other hand, the Geographer's worldliness is a broadness and openness of knowledge and experience, far beyond the basic practical needs within a particular small city. Although, this is remaining withing the context of life on Earth and within human societies. An uneasy balance between these states is shown in the Geographer, seemingly expressed even through the daylight which silently pours through the window, onto fragments of the wall, to the carpet, and over the geographer's face and robes.

The Geographer's worldliness is related to a familiarity with the human affairs of a multiplicity of other lands. The Astronomer's focus rests at more distant spheres, far away from Earth, which leads him to become detached from the mundane human or Earthly matters, and so seemingly more isolated and introverted, because from the point of view of another part of the human world, there isn't much connection—the connections pursued are instead made toward parts of the universe even more distant than the distant human cultures, upon which the Geographer places his focus.

Vermeer's two scientist paintings, then, show distinctly different concepts of intellectual pursuit, in what are otherwise very similar paintings. They are compositionally very similar; they show the same model in the same space, even wearing the same robes, and his hair tied back in the same manner. These similarities make it easier for the viewer to discern the differences between the two. But it also has the effect of communicating that, for their differences, neither of the manners of scientific pursuit are better than the other; they are simply different areas of study. They are both vital and worthwhile, providing useful and fascinating knowledge. Equally, they are expressive of the human capacity to gain knowledge, of a particular human energy in an intellectual pursuit and work.


The next paintings centre around a more common topic in Vermeer's paintings. The Astronomer and the Geographer are his only paintings of scientists, although the communication by letters is a more recurring element in his paintings, appearing throughout his career. Women are shown in the various stages of the process of communication by letter, the writing of the letters, the reading of them, and receiving these letters from their maids. Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid is a later painting, from 1670, five years before the artist's death. It shows a seemingly urgent scene of a seated woman, writing a letter at a table, keeping an intent focus upon her work, and a maid looking out the window, waiting for the writer to finish. The scene is set apparently at the same window as that which is used in the scientist paintings, a particular corner that occurs often in Vermeer's paintings, presumably being the artist's studio with different props and furniture items arranged to make a different setting. The space shows the corner of a room with gray walls, with a wall at the left and windows visible, and the rear wall shown fairy close by. It has been hypothesised that this setup, having windows to the left of an image, was a common aspect of Dutch baroque paintings of interior scenes for practical reasons, which stem from the fact that most of the time, the artist is working directly from observation, especially on preliminary drawings that will later make up the completed paintings. The artist is standing, facing forward, with an easel in front of him, and an arrangement of objects or a model a greater distance away. But, the only light available, most of the time, is sunlight. And the sunlight, coming in through only one wall, will cause a shadow to be cast. If the artist is right handed, as is the majority condition, setting oneself up such that the window is at the left helps to avoid an interference from the shadow. One's right hand is up, and one needs to see the area to the left, in front of where the hand is. The light is coming from the left, and the shadow is then behind the hand.

Whatever the reason, this kind of an interior space occurs quite frequently in Vermeer's paintings, including in this one, Lady Writing a Letter to her Maid. The space is changed to denote different kinds of rooms by the use of furniture and other props. Here, there is the table where the letter writer works, with a red carpet draped over it, some dark curtains at the foreground which frame the left half of the image, a lighter, shorter, and thinner set of curtains set at the right side of the windows, near the room's rear corner. The back wall is taken up almost entirely by a large painting, an outdoor scene, apparently a more prestigious kind of religious or mythological painting, with four or five figures visible, including a seated woman holding a baby, in conversation with a man nearby. There is a chair in front of the table, and there are a few scraps of paper of the floor in the foreground.

One can very easily build a narrative from a look at the figures in the painting. It seems a rather urgent situation; both figures look impatient in their tasks. The writer is certainly focused and busy, and the maid is looking out the window, intently but quickly, as though looking for something or someone outside. Her mouth seems a bit open, as though she is saying something to herself, or preparing to say something to the writer. It seems unusual that the maid would be standing there for the writing of the letter, so this suggests that instead, the maid had brought the lady a particularly important letter, and it was necessary to write and send out a response immediately.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is another painting, a considerably earlier one, of 1663-4, showing a different kind of scene, within a the same topic of communication by letter. The woman is simply standing alone with the letter, wearing a large pale blue house coat. She is standing in a profile view at approximately the center of the image, in front of a sunlit wall with a large map over it. The lower half of the painting has other pieces of furniture visible, dark blue tables and chairs.

The narrative that one gets from this painting is a significantly simpler one—simply reading a letter. There isn't very much of a sense of when it was received, or any specific details of a narrative like that. Instead, it is a more general depiction of a domestic event. The reading of a letter had certainly been taken on by Vermeer at least once before, in a surviving painting from 1657. Both of these show a similar kind of composition, fairly geometric, with a woman at the center, in profile, facing the left window to read her letter. But, compositionally, the later painting is more successful. The earlier painting, A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, is still quite superb in terms of its brush work and its treatment of light, though the actual arrangement of objects in the picture plane comes across as haphazard or even clumsy. There is an open window with a curtain draped over it, and in front of the woman is a bed, or a low table, with a red carpet draped over it, and a sprawling bowl of fruit. There is an excess of space on the wall for almost the entire upper third of the painting, and most oddly, the right side of the painting is dominated by a completely arbitrary pale green curtain, of a thick looking fabric. Its upper bar extends across the canvas near the top, and the curtain's lower edge nearly meets the lower edge of the painting. It doesn't seem to actually logically fit in with the space that is being depicted—it looks very much like something that was added later in order to take up some extra space. It is overall very cluttered at the lower two thirds, with a haphazard arrangement of furniture that distracts from the reader, the main subject of the painting, while the top third of the painting seems to consist primarily of unnecessary space. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter shows a more refined execution of the same subject. The point of view is closer, which cuts back on unnecessary space, and places more emphasis on the reader, who then appears larger than in the earlier painting. There is not an excess of furniture, and the dark shadowy forms that are there for the chairs and tables are set to the sides of the canvas, not in the way of the figure, only what is needed to give a sense of a real space. The window is also not shown. It is implied instead by the strong sunlight on the wall. Geometrically, the painting is arranged simply into quadrants, in which the upper right and lower left are occupied by dark objects—the draped table, and a map on the wall; and the upper left and lower right are mostly the blank wall, though the upper left is certainly the lightest space. The woman in the center is also strongly lit. The arrangement of light and open space creates a strong diagonal, based around the source of light and the action of reading the letter.

In the later Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid, there is less of an obvious geometricity to the composition, though there is still an emphasis on the diagonal light from the upper left window. There are two rows of windows, and it is the upper row that casts the strongest light on to the curtains. Light moves from there, to the writer, who is wearing a dress and bonnet of pale cream tones, which keeps the emphasis on her intense focus. The pieces of furniture and walls are still viewed from somewhat of a frontal position, which suggests something of a grid, but there is not a very immediately apparent arrangement on a grid format. But, the composition remains quite balanced.

These are not the only paintings related to letter communication that Vermeer painted by any means, and they hint at a strange social aspect to this method of communication. Being a form of communication, by its very nature, it involves an association between two people, at minimum. There are numerous others involved in delivery and transport of the letters, but as for the actual reading and writing of the contents of the letter, there are in particular the sender and the recipient. It is by nature a social activity, a form of communication, yet the act of writing, and the act of reading, tend to be intensely private activities. This is the emphasis in the earlier letter reader paintings, in which only one figure is shown, with a letter, reading. It is a domestic, private, intimate activity, though other people must be involved to allow that moment to occur. There are depictions by Vermeer of letters being delivered, and these tend to show a jarring disagreement between the social aspect of the delivery, and the private activity of reading the letter. In Woman Writing a Letter With her Maid this tension is overcome for the most part by the urgency of the situation, although the maid still looks away, crosses her arms, and seems in some uncertain state of beginning, somehow, to speak. There is a nuanced relationship between social and private activity in the process of letter writing, changing at the various stages of the process, studied extensively in Vermeer's paintings throughout his career.

Woodcut Methods

1734, Torii Kiyonobu II: Two Actors, Ichikawa Danjuro II in the role of Fuwa no Banzaemon and Segawa Kikujiro I in the role of Burei no Ikkaku, hand coloured woodcut



1893-4, Paul Gauguin: Te Alua (God)



Asger Jorn: Sommerreise




This installment of Various Works of Art is a bit different from our earlier shows, which all dealt in particular with the work of a single artist. Today, the focus is instead on the medium of wood block printing and the techniques that can be involved with the process. This spans over a very large amount of time, though the particular works I will be bringing up are only from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Woodcut prints have been made in East Asia since as early as the ninth century of the common era, even well before the famous invention by Gutenberg of the movable type printing press in Germany, in which each letter is a separate stamp, so each page can be taken apart and reassembled as needed. Metal movable type developed in Korea by the early fifteenth century, independently of European technologies, though wood block printing remained in common use. It was not that one technology was really better or more advanced than the other; both had their advantages and disadvantages. Wood block printing was an altogether more economical process; it did not take a very high economic status to be able to begin work. One simply had to obtain carving tools, wood, and calligraphic texts to work from, and ink and paper, and begin producing and selling books. One did not even need to be able to read the texts that one was printing. This was made easier still by the ease of working with the papers and inks in use in China at the time, which could transfer ink so easily that only a brush was needed, not even a printing press.

Over history in East Asian societies wood block printing has been in use both for functional or practical use, and for more purely artistic images. Texts also would often be illustrated. In Europe wood block printing was used similarly, though movable type printing methods took over for the printing of text. For some time movable type and woodcuts were used along side one another, with wood blocks used to illustrate texts printed on movable type. In modern times, woodcut printing has taken on more of a purely artistic function. The medium was rather popular with the German expressionists of the early twentieth century. To this day, woodcut remains one of the simpler, or more directly intuitive printmaking processes.

The basic procedure starts with a flat, smooth block of wood. An image can be drawn on to the surface of the board. Areas that one does not want to be printed must be removed with carving tools, forming a low relief. So, if you are printing a black image on a white sheet of paper, the spaces that will be black are left alone, and the spaces on the block that will be white are carved away. To make prints with multiple colors, usually more than one block of wood must be used. Once the wood is carved, its surface is coated with ink, and the inked block is set face down on to a sheet of paper. The paper and block are flipped over, so that the paper is set face down, above the block, which is face up. To transfer the ink from the wood to the paper, pressure must be applied. This can be done manually with a tool like a spoon, or with printing presses, which essentially just apply consistent pressure down at whatever is being printed. For the most part, though, in modern working settings, it is best not to apply pressure to the print manually, because wood blocks, which often have curved or otherwise inconsistent shapes, might crack or break under the consistent pressure of the printing presses.



The first woodcut print here has rather a long title, referred to now as Two Actors, Ichikawa Danjuro II in the role of Fuwa no Banzaemon and Segawa Kikujiro I in the role of Burei no Ikkaku. This serves, simply enough, as a description of who and what is shown. The print was made by Torii Kiyonobu II, and it is dated as from 1734. There are two figures acting, as the title suggests. The one to the left is standing, and looking down to a seated, irritated figure at the right. The standing figure seems to have been walking away, turning back only briefly, interrupted by the seated man, turning back nonchalantly, or with a bit of annoyance.

This print uses a technique that had been in use for centuries earlier than the early eighteenth, when this was produced, across cultures. In this print, color is achieved by adding it in by hand. One block of wood is carved, and this becomes the base for the black outline of the image. It is made knowing that color will be added by hand afterwards, and an uncoloured print would be considered incomplete. This same sort of technique was used not only in Japanese prints like this one, but also rather commonly in medieval Europe. Religious images would often be produced in that era, mostly for travelers on pilgrimages, for keeping or display later. The woodcut method allows the pictures to be produced more quickly and in greater quantity than it would be possible if each sheet were hand drawn entirely, and additionally, the printers do not need to carve more than one block, or worry about aligning them properly. In Japan prints such as the one shown here were made from the eighteenth to the early 20th century, mostly for the merchant class, who would desire art, while being unable to afford quite the kinds of paintings that would have been made for the courtly class.

In this print, you can see four colors of ink, excluding the black, which was printed from a wood block. Red, yellow, and a pale orange are used throughout the print, and a blue-gray appears in the standing actor's robes. In order to get another four colors in a purely printed manner, another four blocks of wood would have to be carved, and the blocks would have to align perfectly, when actually printing them, and when making the drawings and the carvings. This technique did not yet exist in 1734 when this print was made; it was invented later in the century by Suzuki Harunobu, who was producing multi-block prints by the 1760's. In this print, instead, there are thin layers of color added in a thin paint, perhaps either a watercolor, or a thin kind of oil paint. Indeed, these colors do appear to have been added quite quickly. In prints of the European middle ages that used this same kind of technique, the kinds of colors used are still similar to the ones here, in that the inks seem transparent, as they would need to be if one were to paint at all over the first black lines. But in the Two Actors print, spaces of colour do not really stay inside the lines; each block seems to escape its boundary or fail to fill its own space in at least one place. The regions of color blend freely, correlating to the wood image only on a basic level. In the background, maple leaves in the woodcut all appear to have a set of five thin lobes. In the ink that goes over the woodcut, there is a single red dot where each leaf goes. This makes rather a charming effect, in which the woodcut and its colors seem almost to be in disagreement with one another. In a way, they really are in disagreement, yet at the same time are not. There are two techniques, both of which are used to keep the rate of production a quick one. The appearance of the two techniques are quite different. The colors consist of big, which strokes that make generalised blocks of colour where they are necessary. They are messy, basic, and rapidly executed. In the woodcut, the image is kept simple as well, but simply as a matter of how the image is produced, this results in clean lines and boundaries between light and dark areas. This was probably produced rather more carefully than the coloring; the quickness of the process results more from the ability to repeat the same image multiple times once it is produced once, than a quicker execution on each image, as is done for the painted section. Though the goal of each part of the process is a similar one, towards greater quickness of process, the results are quite different for one another. It is an especially prominent disagreement in this print in particular. One could even say that on a thematic level, the discord between the two methods in the techniques echoes the annoyed conflict between the characters that are depicted, though it is quite unlikely that this was something that was made consciously when the print series was first produced.

Japanese prints like these became quite popular in Europe by the late nineteenth century. Trade between Europe and Japan became possible around the 1860's; after that Japanese prints could be imported into Europe. By that time the prints made did not often contain hand colouring; they were typically coloured by using multiple blocks. The prints that were imported to Europe tended to be contemporary products; eighteenth century prints such as the one shown were less common, owned more by particular connoisseurs. By the 1890's, Japanese prints had become quite popular among artists. In Paris, a brief trend among post-impressionist artists developed, known as Japonisme. There are prints by the various artists, as well as paintings, that directly borrow from Japanese techniques and visual conventions, as well as more subtle kinds of influence, in which styles and techniques are borrowed and incorporated into the artist's work.

Paul Gauguin's Te Alua, or God is a print of this period, made from 1893 to 1894. However, it does not fit very nicely into the category of Japonist prints. Gauguin was quite an independent and unique artist. He is most remembered today for his depictions of Tahiti and the people of the islands, and his travels there. He was born in France, and was involved with the impressionists in the 1870's. He first traveled briefly to Panama in 1887, then permanently to Tahiti in 1891, painting images of their village life. After 1897 he lived at the Marquesas islands, often taking the side of the islanders in their conflicts with the Catholic church. Over the entirety of his time at these tropical islands he returned to Paris only on one instance. The print, Te Alua, was made well into his time in Tahiti. Gauguin was influential in his use of woodcut, in popularizing the use of the print technique again.

Te Alua shows four figures in Gauguin's characteristic Tahitian style. The figures are depicted in simplified, flat forms, with rounded edges and exaggerated proportions. The image itself draws upon various religious kinds of images. At the top of the image “Te Alua” is written, a word for God. As a whole, the print is divided into a triptych form. Usually, this refers to a painting that consists of three separate panels or canvases. It originates in the west from medieval altar paintings, which would have one main central panel, and at each side, a door, which, when open, would show another, separate image. When the paintings were not being displayed for a mass or other kind of ceremony in the church, it could be closed. In Te Alua the division between the spaces is not quite as discrete as if there were actually separate panels, but there is a clear division. The entire image is continuous, but each one third of space is independent. At the left two figures in profile, one kneeling and the other sitting, are situated very closely together in conversation. They share a large halo. At the right there is a darker standing figure surrounded by shadow, facing directly forward. In the middle is a figure sitting cross-legged, also with a halo around her head. It is most interesting that her representation seems to borrow some of the iconography used in the depictions of Buddha. There is a small protrusion at the top of her head, which resembles Buddha's cranial bump, an extension of his brain that visually represents increased wisdom and enlightenment. There is a trace of a third eye also visible, an icon which also relates to wisdom, visible as a small dot in the center of the forehead. More immediately, the cross-legged sitting position and the large halo remind the viewer of Buddha. However, there are many other particular icons of Buddha that are absent, such as his monastic robes, extended earlobes, and any particular hand gesture. The figure seems more of a feminine character, and is depicted nude, with her arms at rest. The use of Christian and Buddhist iconography seems used to create more of a generalized primitive spirituality, than to depict a specific religious idea.

The print is made from two wood blocks, a lower one in orange, and an upper layer in black. The orange block fills most of the background. There are only a few places carved away in this layer: the halos of the left and central figures, and a low shrub between them. The white space of the paper in this sense is being used actively, as a particular form, rather than as a flat background or negative space. This is a technique that was used in Japanese wood block prints of the time, which Gauguin would probably have seen before having left for Tahiti. The black layer, printed over the orange, creates all of the forms—the figures, the ground, the background, and the foliage. Although it is printed in black, Gauguin uses different ways of creating gray tones. To represent a pale gray over the sky, above the central figure, rather than removing the wood in a consistent and flat manner, which would leave the space empty, he allows curved lines of wood to remain, remnants of the carving process, which would need to be removed with sandpaper to make the space an empty one. In other places, areas that would otherwise have been printed in solid black have been sanded away slightly. This makes parts of the wood grain visible, especially in the right side, and establishes a wide range of gray tones, as the same black is printed more thinly. The torso of the central figure, and the face of the kneeling figure at the left, are quite a pale gray. There is a fairly continuous range of tones between this and the solid black that is found along the lower edge of the print. In some places, the orange and black blocks do not seem to align exactly. This, in combination with the use of transparent black areas that make the gray tones, creates the sense in places that the image is vibrating. The misalignment does not seem consistent over the entire print. In the central figure the orange block seems moved to the left, and in the left panel the orange seems shifted to the right. From this, I would say that it is quite possible that it is added for an additional expressive effect.

Finally, we have a woodcut print by Asger Jorn, Sommerreise. I do not have the exact year that the print was made, though it was at least before 1970, probably from the late sixties. So, this print shows some of the more modern uses of the woodcut method. This particular print shows a heavily abstracted, expressionistic face, though the artist used a similar technique in purely abstract prints as well. In it, there are different blocks of colour, vivid tones which often seem quite unrelated to each other. They almost never overlap, and the white areas, which are the spaces that have been carved away, form an outline of the shapes. This appearance could have been accomplished in one of two ways. Each color could have been made from a separate block of wood, as is usually done for multicolor prints. There are prints by this artist in which it is obvious that this is what was done, because the grain of the wood, on the spaces of different colors, is oriented in different directions. The effect can also be achieved by carving out only one block, and printing different parts of it at different times. Certain spaces could be covered in tape when one color of ink is being used. The tape can then be removed, so that when the block is printed, only a portion of it will print. This can be done multiple times until the whole image is printed, with a different color each time. This technique might have been used in Sommerreise, since the grain of the wood is clearly oriented horizontally in every space. A combination of both techniques might also have been used. If one block was used for multiple spaces, it is even possible that more than one color could have been printed at once, if they are sufficiently far away.

In this print, we can also see an increased use of the particular qualities of the wood. This is an aspect of wood block printing that has become more prominent in the modern period. Earlier in history, wood block printing was used because it was the only, or the easiest, available method. In modern times, there is a wider variety of available printing techniques, which can be selected for their particular aesthetic qualities. This kind of a use of wood block printing can be seen in Gauguin's prints, like Te Alua, and a few decades later in the prints of the German expressionists.

In Jorn's Sommerreise, the wood grain is made a very prominent element of the image. The outlines are not left clean; there are lines everywhere that follow the grain, contradicting the represented form's outline, showing where a particular stroke made when carving extended beyond the original lines that would have been marked off. This creates a very rough look, characteristic of the wood material, which is used freely and expressively, letting the aesthetics particular to the wood show. It is a material that was once alive, and the remnants of this fact are allowed to show, and become extremely prominent.

Asger Jorn

Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist is Proven By Their Existence, 1939



Feligrams, 1942



Loss of Center, 1958



In the Beginning was the Image, 1965



Blue Horse, 1954



Monster, 1954



Stalingrad, 1957-60, 1967, 1972



The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender, 1962



Nocturne III, 1959



Choux, 1961



We will begin with the 1939 painting, Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist is Proven by Their Existence, which is characteristic of Jorn's earlier style of painting. There are four standing figures on a flat background of yellow ochre, and they appear to be standing in some sort of low puddle, which is a deep ultramarine blue colored part of a curving horizon. At the left, the first figure is a tall, thin amoeboid shape that tapers to a point at the top, painted in a flat brown with a circular black claw an a light blue, horizontally oriented oval for an eye that comes across as though it is partly closed. A frowning mouth is formed by an extension of the boundary line of a black triangle that floats behind the first figure and over the second, visually connecting them. The second creature consists of a much more complex form, the overlapping of a good multiplicity of circles and oval shapes. The head is mostly a rounded equilateral triangle, but it may also be the massive black triangle that extends between the two figures, which has at its this tip a blue oval much like the first figure's eye. This figure's form is the least definite of the four, because it consists of the most complex overlappings of simple shapes that do not themselves seem to represent certain parts, though there are definitely two thin lines for legs extending to the ground's puddle form, and the figure appears to be holding up a large white egg shape to the middle of the upper portion of the canvas. The third figure is the shortest of the four. He looks directly out at the viewer, spreading his arms out, and stepping forward. He appears to be wearing some kind of loose robe, established by multiple shapes. First, there is a rectangle over the middle of his body, with a zigzagged lower edge. The top edge of the rectangle is the figure's arms, and hands extend from each side, pointing up. This rectangle apparently represents loose fabric of the sleeves. The figure's body is a somewhat triangular shape with curved edges that starts with a thin point above the large rectangle of loose fabric, extending through the middle of it, and below, stopping at the horizon line, where it has spread out noticeably. The head is its own dark green amoeboid shape with two eyes of the same yellow ochre color as the background, eyes that tilt on a diagonal axis, creating the appearance of a head tilted to the right in a confused gaze, a gaze which points directly at the viewer. Behind the head there is a red-orange shape, rounded at the top with straight vertical lines as edges below, like a hood for the figure's cloak. One can interpret this figure as some sort of a preacher or prophet, stepping though the puddle to reach the viewer, but without much of a clear narrative going on between the figures this is hard to say as a definite intention of the artist. Yet, this third figure remains probably the one with the clearest narrative quality, and he has one of the more definite expressive qualities of the four figures. Finally, the figure at the right consists of a massive dark head shape, and another dark body shape, that are connected by a very thin neck, and with thin lines extending out for arms. The right arm has an additional loop for the hand, and smaller intersecting lines for the fingers. The head is altogether bizarre, being quite large for the size of the body, with two pseudopod-like extensions from the top. Most oddly, there are three dots in a very small inverted triangle shape, which is registered immediately as a face with an expression similar, but not identical to that of the preaching figure, yet this face is outside of the head shape, directly on the ochre background.

All of these figures are painted in a hard edged style, which is to say, their forms are mostly rendered in flat colors, and each shape has a very definite, clear boundary. Sometimes there are outlines, and some forms consist only of lines. Usually in this style of painting there isn't very much of a trace of brushwork, because the colors and their boundaries are produced so flatly. There is very little illusion of depth. In this one, the only thing that shows depth is the placement of some shapes directly on top of others, and there are some aspects with the horizon and the puddle on the ground: figures whose feet end closer to the top of the horizon are perceived as being further back, but on the whole the space shown is very shallow. Unlike a lot of hard edged painting, a style more characteristic of early 20th century abstractions, Jorn's Obtrusive Figures allows some painterly technique. Variations in the tone of the mostly flat blocks of color are visible, and some brushstrokes can be seen, though they are not very thick. Variation is especially evident in the ochre background, and the edge of the blue puddle at the bottom of the picture does have a more jagged edge, with a few lines extending off of the main shape, and some small lines left unpainted within it.

The title of the piece is also of interest: it is a humorous name, somewhat tautological in its form, or logically fallacious, like a statement that “it is wet because it is wet.” Yet this aspect of the title fits the figures perfectly well. The figures are standing there, and they are strongly asserting themselves. The two on the right are looking directly at the viewer, the cloaked one is even stepping forward; the two at the left are in profile, looking dazedly or intently or scornfully at the two right figures. They have their own sort of vitality, and they come across as strong creatures, capable of sustaining their own identities. To me, this seems to express quite well Jorn's idea of art as life form, which he articulated two years after this painting was made.


Feligrams was painted from 1942 to 1943, a little more than three years after his Obtrusive Creatures. It has a lot in common with both his earlier hard-edged style and his abstract expressionist works. There is a scattering of figures about the canvas, apparently emerging from the upper part of the canvas, where they are the smallest, to the center and the lower right area. The creatures here range from not definitively human to definitively non-human. At the top there is a fish, a red wormlike creature, a penguin holding its fins up as though in celebration of its existence, and a blocky form in purple and blue, with yellow squares upon it, that might be a whale or a large fish. Below there are three larger creatures, who are situated just below the middle of the picture, though they extend off to both sides as well. They are blockier and rather more humanoid than the fish and penguin of the upper portion, though in the end their identities do not refer to creatures that we already know about: they are just themselves. The smallest of these has an immense, joyful smile, a red crescent on a face that consists of yellow and blue shapes and wide white eyes looking off somewhat to the right. The other two figures are not smiling as much at all; the central one gazes rather blankly at the viewer and the right-most one is nearly walking off of the paper. This picture is quite different from the Obtrusive Creatures. There is a greater illusion of space: the creatures seem to be floating about in rather an unrealistic space, but there is still the difference in the scale of the figures, and the diagonal direction of their emergence, like a single-point perspective drawing, that create some sense of depth between the various characters, even though any of the characters taken individually is quite flat. The color palette used is that of Jorn's later paintings, consisting of rich greens, yellows, blues, and reds, and some oranges, purples, and browns, though these are not as frequent in this painting. The blocks of color are still cohesive, but are allowed to mix into each other more than previously, especially in the background, which is a dark red at the top, and blue and green in the lower two thirds, with dark shadows scattered about behind the figures. It shows a considerably greater freedom of brush work than the earlier paintings, and this aspect of Jorn's work continues to increase over time. It comes across as a very joyful painting, full of vitality and happiness, without coming across as having a naïve, childish kind of happiness; there is no sense that this is a kind of joy so sugary-sweet or twee as to be immediately off-putting and mostly lacking in substance. Instead the figures come across as having a strength of their own, a certain level of energy that relates again to Jorn's idea of art as life form in all its varieties: beautiful, ugly, impressive, grim, contradictory, and all. Perhaps this sense about the characters in the painting is established by the richer and darker color palette and the general indecipherable nature of some of these figures. In fact, the three figures at the front seem to be more of scattered arrangements of coloured polygons than actual figures. The faces are constructed as faces, but the rest of their bodies seem to have only occasional hints at representation of particular parts. At the back there are concentrations of shapes that are registered as having faces only after some time of examination, but when they are seen as faces they come across as extremely expressive: there is a lightened blue form near the penguin, a round shape with two semicircles at its bottom like the two drooping cheeks on a bulldog or a walrus; this face comes across as tilted 45 degrees to the right, while maintaining a tight gaze forward, as though the creature is actually held quite still, but suspended in water and floating up through it, rotating slowly and involuntarily. There are other concentrations of shapes, there are shapes that seem to meld in with the background and these figures simultaneously, and these apparently fishlike forms that are expressing themselves, their movements, and their emotions, simply by how they are extended in space, as these forms are fully lacking in facial features, but they are still perceived as animals of some sort, floating and swimming about, extending their limbs, going off into some direction. In all I would attribute the joyous, vital, and overall strong character of this painting to the variety of elements working together: the colors along with the shapes, their abstraction and scattering, the directions of the lines in the background's brushwork, the implied directionality in the arrangement of the figures, and the altogether strange sense of space which in places has an illusion of a rather deep space, and in other places no space at all, only the two dimensional shapes.


Loss of Centre is a painting from 1958, which is almost completely abstract. Its colors are not as bright as some of Jorn's other paintings: the greens seem manually muted and tinged with cyan, this color is overlayed in a part of the background on an orange colour with a similar luminosity, and they are allowed to mix and dull each other. The blues are more of cobalt tones than ultramarines, and the yellows are allowed more variation than usual, being lightened to various extents over the canvas. Over these colors there is a large amount of pure black, especially in the right half of the background, and pure white, which occurs more in the outlines of the main round forms at the left of the canvas. In this already there is a sense of imbalance: the right is dark, empty space, and most of the forms are on the left side, and consist of lighter tones. There are hints of faces in the round forms, but these are difficult to discern, and on the whole, what one perceives are shapes in motion. The title, Loss of Centre, fits quite well: there are three main round forms at the middle and the left half of the painting, which seem to be rotating, colliding, and moving away from each other. Two of them appear to have faces, but the rest are fully abstract. The left-most one appears quite distressed: it is a long, bearded face, covered in thick strokes of the fairly light, cyan-tinged green that is also present through the left side of the background. The other face is in the central yellow outlined form, and it is certainly expressive, although indefinite; it is far from blank, but its features are so incomplete and distorted that one cannot discern a particular expression. An odd pale yellow shape, something like a capital L with curves and bulges, seems to form about a third of a skull: the center of the face and a bit of a curvature around the right eye; and at the bottom of this form there is a series of white lines, which do not end defini9tely but instead blend into the black background, to represent teeth. They are large lines with a definite sense of motion, the left cluster pointing straight down, and the two lines at the right going diagonally away from the faces, more into the lower right corner. There are spots for two eyes, and the right one seems to be drooping, or having its skin pulled down, while looking off dazedly into the distance above the right half of the painting. Yet as a whole, the face's outline is moving toward the upper right corner. The outline is made in a deeper yellow color than the yellows that appear in the face, and its outline, an oblong but mostly round shape, extends to a point at its upper left corner, stretching far away from all of the facial features. Another dark bulge between the right eye and the teeth seems to extend down in the opposite direction. It is indeed a loss of center; it is being pulled apart just by a matter of the conditions of its existence. It applies for this particular face, and it applies equally for the entirety of the canvas. The various shapes are arranged so that they are all moving somehow off of the edge of the picture plane, or at least away from the center; the brush strokes are loose, and rough, and very thick, giving the sense that the image was born out of an act of intense movement, and the resulting picture is, itself, apparently in motion. It is a loss of center, but it appears that whatever center there is can only have been there momentarily, accidentally, as the objects began colliding with one another.

The 1965 painting, In the Beginning was the Image, is painted in a style fairly similar to Loss of Center, though in a color palette more similar to that of Feligrams, with deep greens and blues, and variations between strong reds and oranges. These are the main categories of colors on the canvas, which are separated into clear categories or spaces for each color, as though they have not yet had time to start acting and dashing and mixing about. The upper left corner is blue; the lower left corner is red-orange; the right side, though mostly its lower portion, is green. They mix in places, and scattered throughout there are pieces of white, and yellow, and black. And these are not the main components of the space, but they instead occupy for the most part the spaces between the main masses of color. In terms of physics, this kind of composition makes sense for something that is representing a beginning. Over time, entropy, or chaos, increases. When a glass falls from a table onto the floor, it shatters, and its condition becomes more disorganised. It will not happen in the reverse; that is to say, glasses that have been shattered do not spontaneously rise back up to adjacent tables and reassemble themselves. To use a simpler example more directly applicable to this painting, we can look at the diffusion of fluid substances, which can be either gases or liquids, as long as they are in a phase that does not hold its own shape. One can begin with two discrete containers of a red and a blue liquid. This is a very organised state; all of the reds are together and all of the blues are together. But if a wall that is dividing them is removed, they will spontaneously mix. This is because their particles are always in motion. Simply by that aspect of their nature, some of the particles will move away from those of their own color. Over time they will mix into one uniform purple mass, the simplest possible state. This is the increase in entropy, and this process occurs in any closed system. One might be able to organise something locally, but this depends on the addition of energy from outside. A person can reassemble a shattered glass, but this act will require an amount of effort, and that human effort will have required the eating of food and the deposition of wastes, so that on the whole, the total entropy in the universe has increased. So, Jorn's painting, which has rather discrete spaces of bright colours at each corner, is a perfectly logical way to represent a beginning, a time before his forms, which have a strong sense of motion, have been given a chance to mix and combine into a violent, messy chaos.

A vast multiplicity of faces appear to the viewer over time. One of the first that is seen is the figure on the white section, a man with a skinny face and glasses. His head is tilted to the right, and he looks stylishly off to the left. A face below him, on the red mass, is made from an additional layer of pale blue, which looks to have been applied with a very dry brush. He appears quite uncertain and stressed as he looks up in the general direction of the first face. At the upper right corner there is a particularly amusing figure. Her head is set is such a manner that she appears to be leaning back quite a lot. The face is wider than it is tall, and there are upward indents in the lower edge of the open mouth that give the appearance of a chin in that kind of a position. It is an extremely angry figure, with large dark eyes with diagonals pointing to the inner corners, and a mouth sprawling open widely, taking the shape of a sideways tilted bean, with three little pointed teeth. At its right is a messy hand, pointing to the centrally positioned figure, as though in absolute rage at that person. Elsewhere there are vague faces, harder to define or see, that seem distressed, astonished, sad, or hopeful, or silly, or some combination thereof. The world has apparently just begun and the interactions between the characters on stage are already extravagant and chaotic.

The title, in addition to setting up the picture as one of a beginning, is more importantly a reversal of the traditional idea of language as the originating force behind the world. Jorn grew up in a traditional Christian household, and under the Christian story, shared by the other Abrahamic traditions, the world is created from the words of god: “let there be light; let the trees grow here; let there be a moon to provide some light during the night hours,” &c., &c., and in particular, “in the beginning there was the word,” the first line of the Gospel of John. In Jorn's painting, this is reversed, and the image takes precedence. Jorn was prolific both in painting and in writing as expressive forms. The title of this painting makes the bold assertion that, even if both media are important expressive tools, visual art is the more original of them.


Blue Horse and Monster, both made in 1954, though linear sculptural works, have a lot in common with Jorn's figurative paintings, especially in terms of his use of color texture, and shape. They are colorful, fairly flat forms, made from thick curved lines. In both of these sculptures, but more so in Blue Horse, there is not very much of a definite form: the lines are abstract; the feet are indefinite and seem to exist more as a way to keep the figure propped up than to represent the legs of a horse; upper limbs are only hinted at with extended lines; and the head is more of a loose semicircle that extends out to the left of the body, intersected by a thick vertical bar glazed white (to support one of the eyes). The lower line has a somewhat upbending curve to it, and its lower edge is full of little stubs of lines pointing down; these are registered as teeth. The eyes are simple yellow circles with dark indented centers, of the same ultramarine glaze color as most of the form. The entirety of the form itself, as the title suggests, is mostly this dark blue color, though much of the head, and some of the left edge of the body, is glazed flat white. Like in his paintings the colors are allowed to mix freely where they overlap. The most striking aspect of this sculpture, in my opinion, is the way that in spite of the rather free use of abstraction, it is still registered immediately as a figure. Its head is about twice as long as its body, and its limbs are for the most part tiny stubs, and yet it still remains possible to talk about the lines as though they represent these bodily parts. It certainly is not first registered as a horse, and would not be registered as a horse at all if not for the title, but it is certainly a tetrapod of some sort. In this sense, it is very much like the figures in Jorn's paintings, which are often simply amorphous organic shapes, even in some of his paintings as early as those of the 1930's, which retain a mostly hard-edged abstract style that was more widespread at the time. I also see the use of a rougher, obviously modeled texture on the ceramic lines of both Blue Horse and Monster as a parallel to the use of thickly applied, rough brushstrokes in his paintings: both serve to show the activity behind the artistic production, and add an expressive vitality to his works. This is a characteristic that is visible in his earlier hard-edged paintings, as a product of the freely curved, vaguely figurative forms, though ultimately the very emotive, intense, vital character of his work is not fully realized until his more mature paintings of the late forties and fifties, when the texture and brushwork, in addition to the shapes, are treated completely freely, with energetic bursts of action. Blue Horse and Monster, made in 1954, demonstrate these characteristics that were coming about in his painting: Jorn did indeed also speak against an absolute separation between sculpture and painting in 1941.

All in all Blue Horse is an extremely fun sculpture. It seems to be smiling vibrantly at the viewer, and below and to the right of this smile there are two additional lines that echo the same shape of the smile, which extend a little off from the torso at the right and the left sides: these are registered as arms thrown up in excitement, or gesturing at the viewer to come and follow him somewhere, though since there are two lines that each might be pairs of forelimbs it is quite unclear which one would take this role—in fact I would say that neither of the lines represent the forelimbs; they are parts of the expression, not a representation.

Besides the pure aesthetic aspect of the sculpture the Blue Horse can also be understood as a reference to the artists' group known as Der Blaue Reiter, or, The Blue Rider. This was a German movement active from 1911 to 1914, and it included various expressionist painters, like Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Munter, though centering largely around Kandinsky and Marc. During this time both of these artists painted some canvases showing blue horses. The color was not completely arbitrary; Kandinsky believed the deeper blue colors to have a uniquely spiritually powerful quality. Both the German expressionists of Der Blaue Reiter, and Asger Jorn made expressive uses of color and form, focusing more on emotional or intuitive content than literal representation, and in fact distorting literal representation for this expressive effect. Working at the middle rather than the beginning of the twentieth century, though, Jorn's work might be called more artistically advanced, in that action painting such as that which is very much evident in Jorn's painting did not come about until long after the expressive figures and geometric abstractions that emphasized the importance of elements like form, shape, and line, precisely arranged and applied, that came about in the first half of the century. Regardless of this stylistic difference the mentality of the earlier expressionists is a similar one to the later action painters, and the Blue Horse sculpture can be seen as a recognition of this shared artistic pursuit.

Jorn's Monster, stylistically, is quite similar to his Blue Horse: both are made from freely textured ceramic rods that make a curved, freely shaped abstraction, with limbs and facial features that allow the whole sculpture to be registered as a figure. Both are glazed in a freely mixed manner that brings to mind Jorn's use of blended color in his paintings. Monster differs from Blue Horse in its particular expression, which is more of a focused, determined walk, advancing to the left, in the photograph I have. There is a greater variety of colors used. There is an olive green, a fairly dull red, and white and black, and many individual lines will have more than one of these colors. The figure comes across as less abstractly distorted than the Blue Horse: it is primarily one round, beanlike shape, extended vertically, with feet, hair, eyes, a mouth, and a tail, which although certainly quite unrealistic at least fit logically with the idea of the figurative form. On the whole it is still clearly abstracted and expressive, though I find it to be less so than the Blue Horse. For this reason I personally prefer the Blue Horse sculpture to the Monster, though this is still mostly a matter of my own aesthetic opinion.


The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender is a painting edited by Jorn, from 1962. In these kinds of paintings that Jorn made, old images are edited, of pleasantly posed figures painted in an academic style, pastoral landscapes and nocturnes of equally traditional styles. Altogether, they are generic images, familiar ones, that can be considered generally pleasant. They are painted over with apparently quick, almost momentary and rather expressive brushwork, that clashes completely with the original painting. The Avant Garde Does Not Surrender began with a girl of about ten holding a jump rope. Whatever the original background was, it has been painted over in a textured black, and mostly illegible scribbles of French text, from which the title of the text comes, are added in white, along with two scribbled creatures, a messy thing that looks like a half completed stick figure at the lower left, and a form at the upper right that might be a dinosaur missing its forearms, or a duck with an unusually large head. But the first thing the viewer notices is the mustache and goatee that have been painted on the girl, who gazes directly at the viewer, situated in the middle of the picture plane, very obviously posed for a portrait. With the addition of three brush strokes for facial hair the little girl comes across as a middle aged man, though she retains her childish body, the hands are still clutching the jump rope, and she's still wearing her fluffy white dress, which may have previously served to symbolically highlight her childish innocence and purity—now it is simply something jarring and ironic.

The painting is a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous edit of the Mona Lisa, LHOOQ, which features facial hair irreverently drawn on to the iconic portrait. Jorn's edit, in contrast to this, takes a portrait that is not at all well known in particular, but still is painted in such a traditional, familiar style that this aspect of it is recognised immediately, though its exact identity remains unknown. That is to say, while Duchamp's edit defaced a particular High Renaissance portrait, Jorn's defaced the whole generality of academic portraiture, and the concept of the great virtue of childhood purity which is expressed in this particular little girl's portrait.

Nocturne III, from 1959, is another example of this kind of painting. Here, rather than portraiture a landscape is the subject of the original painting, a night scene with trees and a large setting moon in the center of the picture. It was already dark to begin with, and Jorn's additional deep blue brush strokes over the masses that were probably trees make it quite obscure. These are loose, expressive forms reminiscent of the loose figures and amorphous bloblike faces from his other paintings of the time, thick with texture, and although mostly a deep, pure blue color there are visible variations in white, red, and light ochres. The additional forms add to the sense of deep space in the painting; they turn a mundane and fairly typical scene into something surreal, being vastly unusual in its juxtaposition of contradictory styles, yet unified by the general darkness of the scene, and the blue colors, though Jorn's additions are of a much brighter blue than those which are found anywhere else in the painting. The result is an altogether beautiful scene. The original painting may have been pleasant enough, and those who saw the painting at the time may have seen it as an expression of natural beauty, though the work seems generic to the modern viewer. Jorn's additions make a completely unique appearance, adding his large vaguely facelike forms over the trees. He saw these edits not as acts of contempt toward the academic styles of the past, (although some of his contemporaries interpreted them as such) but as ways of bringing these old works up to date with the modern period. There are particular paintings in this manner where it is hard to see how they could possibly have had motives of endearment towards the original works, merely adding on to them the way one might add on to ideas that a friend is having while brainstorming about. The Avant Garde Will Not Surrender, in fact, seems to contradict the entirety of this idea, and it is completely possible that different works are expressing fully contradictory ideas, and the artist is aware of it, perhaps even accentuating the differences between these positions for effect. There is nothing wrong with this at all, and in fact it adds to the complexity of the artist and the body of work, and avoids letting the work start coming off as propagandistic in its lack of ambiguity or nuance.


Choux, of 1961, is another painting done in this manner. It shows a woman in an elegant blue dress resting her elbow on a low dresser, which has a lock and key on one of its drawers. Loose brush work in red, orange, and yellow coats the background. The brushstrokes are long, applied with a wide brush. Each of these very long lines follows the outline of the woman's form, making a large arch at the top of the canvas. There is also a loop around the lock behind the woman's elbow. This area is a green, which is made from the same yellow, mixed with a blue that also appears at the left side. On the woman's outline the colors of the lines closer to her are more yellow, and the more distant ones are red, giving the sense that she is exuding light. This sets up a jarring contrast between the original academically styled woman, and the new brush work, a contrast made ever more jarring by the fact that the woman's face is painted over entirely; there is none of the original face or hair visible. In its place is an androgynous, chubby, round ball of flesh coloured brush strokes, and absolutely massive eyes in flat blue, and a massive, expressionless mouth of green and blue. It shows teeth, and seems, if anything, to be showing a slight, vague smile. The overall effect is to make an image that is, at first, quite shocking to us. Yet ultimately, after looking for a while, the new strokes force one to take notice of the original painting, in its traditional gilded age style of beauty in the female form and her clothing, and the rather corny, kitschy romantic symbolism of the locked door. The title of the work, Choux, is a French pun, being a word that can be translated into English as either “cabbage” or “darling.” The title, then, supports this dual sense about the image, of the simultaneous endearingly familiar and beautiful subject matter, and the light humour and mocking of the image's treatment.