It's been some time since I wrote on puzzles. It began with the Monet puzzle I purchased years ago on a whim, that serendipitous little choice that turned out to be so incredibly rewarding. I've since kept it up as a minor habit; I'll never be an artist myself, and so not have an artist's eye for works, but as I alluded to in the original post the idea that I could learn from hours spent staring at puzzles has indeed paid off.
Take for instance two pieces that would seem at first quite disparate: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and Bouguereau's Childhood Idyll (1900):
_-_A_Childhood_Idyll_(1900).jpg)
The latter is a small favorite of mine from the Denver art museum; a bit standard and saccharine, but I like it nonetheless for the real sweetness it also contains. Bouguereau was known for such works, an exemplar of the academic establishment at the time (Manet, on getting corrective lenses, was said to have taken them off and thrown them down, exclaiming with disgust, "Now I see the world like Bouguereau!"). Now, I knew that academic painting had its roots in the Renaissance tradition, but it was more trivia than working knowledge. However, coming to the feet I made a bit of a connection: oh, this is what statuesque flesh in painting is:
Despite their relative tenderness, they have the same firmness of line, the same roundness of form, the same solidity, as Michelangelo's more muscle-bound creations. Modern European painting started with the sculpture, ironically, and it didn't lose that sensibility until now. The inherent sense that what I am seeing could just as effectively be created in the round is what defines this academic tradition, and why the first thing modernists did was dismantle the ability for their paintings to ever be viewed as anything real. Which segues nicely into Hiroshige:
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Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, |
I stumbled on the puzzle up top in the Columbus art museum. It wasn't even in the museum itself (apparently it's in Brooklyn), but caught my eye because I hadn't assembled a puzzle in years due to graduate school and teaching. It seemed like a good one to start with. It also ended up being the easiest puzzle I had ever assembled.
When you read about the wave of Japonisme that swept Europe in the 1800s one of the things that is frequently mentioned in painting is the Japanese use of space. More particularly, that the Japanese are prone to using large, flat areas of color, such that rather than model an object with light and shadow it is identified by its tone. Again, something I "knew" but this absolutely proved it to me. After spending time with it I can confidently state that every single object in the print has its own unique color. The wood is one hue of orange, completely separate from the reddish-orange of the text regions or the burnt red of the sunset horizon. The sky is white, blue, and deep navy, none of which can be confused for each other, let alone the white of the cat or the blue of the towel. There is a green field and green flooring but I never once mistook them. In short, every time I picked up a piece I knew immediately where in the puzzle it belonged.
More subtly, each color-object had its own "region". That is, you could imagine a style in which each type of object has its own color - there could be multiple patches of sky or earth, for instance, occupying different regions of the work but united by their shared hue... but there aren't. The closest are the paper walls on either side, but everything else not only has its own color it also occupies its own particular spot; the middle-distance yellow cottages are in one place, the brown roof of the closest hut in another, and you won't find any of them dotted in the distance signified by a shared color. The result is a steady color advancement as you move across the print, like one of the many modern experiments with pure color bands. A Rothko given form. Not only did I know where pieces were found, but after the outline I assembled this puzzle sequentially from the bottom up, something I have never done before. It was simply natural to do so.
And finally, underneath it all, it gives a hint as to the roots of the art. The Europeans started with sculpture but the Asians started with calligraphy. This image is as flat as paper. Sure it has some perspectival elements thrown in, recently imported from the West at the time, but the writing on the side, contained in its flat blocks of color, is not at all out of place. If this were a European painting those squares would have a sense of "floating" above the painting, and as such would clash with the intent of producing a window into another world. Here, however, they are integrated into the design as much as any other element; the label is part of the painting. The same is true of the black, decorated border on the left - this is not an attempt to recreate reality but an artistically-complete postcard.
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A strange aside that I wish to remark on. As I have alluded to, I have been fond of many anime over the years, and of these none more than Gunslinger Girl. I originally pirated the series and in that version the top and bottom had decorative bars:
I have always wondered about these. I assumed they were part of the fansubs, because that's where they put their translation notes, but I have never seen any other fansub add space in this way. The later official Funimation release removes them, so I thought perhaps that they were an artifact of aspect ratio or some such thing.
But the more I compare them to the Hiroshige above, the more I wonder if they were actually part of the original. It is hard to explain, but whenever I watch my newer release I miss them. Like how Funimation rebalanced the sound so that the subtle background noise, as well as some of the finer touches of voice acting, are removed, perhaps they in their dullard way also thought the series would benefit from stripping it of its original "frame" as well. It's hard to describe the effect they have, but despite the profound realism of the series it also ends with a sense that it is a story, a piece of something that is contained within something greater than that story. As such, the artistic inheritance of borders was more than appropriate. However, without access to the original airing, this remains devoted speculation.
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However, if there is no pretense at being reality, there is sure a pretense at being calligraphy. Look at box of writing in the upper right:
There is a conceit here: drips of ink in the red and blues. This is a woodblock. It was carved then pressed, not painted with a brush. And yet included is the unmistakable pattern of seeping water, as though it had in fact been painted onto the final paper all along. It is a masterful recreation of a slightly-botched original form. How delightful!
The writing, too, echoes itself in the cat:
Of all the segments, these were the only two I confused: when I first picked up the piece that outlined the top of the hind leg with its curling line I thought for sure it belonged with the "no" in the text. This sense of similarity overrode my later realization that there was clearly no region of white large enough between the drips. The cat is composed of calligraphy. It isn't a character, per se, but it could be the origins of one. It makes one wonder how much the history of ideograms in Asia has influenced their art, if the impulse toward using as few strokes as possible to delineate an object comes not just from their philosophy but from the visceral sense that just as objects in the world have become distilled into simplified forms, visually inaccurate but richly meaningful, such is their essential nature when the writing reverts to representation.
Which brings me to a somewhat-paradoxical observation I have heard before, and that is that the Japanese adore Botticelli. This was always a bit of a puzzle to me. Why him and not other Europeans who also use the "wiry line of rectitude" (to quote William Blake) to outline their solid forms? Thinking on this more I realize that this is because in Botticelli they do not actually do so.
At the museum was also a puzzle of the Birth of Venus. I had considered purchasing it since I want to understand Botticelli better as well, but decided that I would rather work on Primavera instead for that project. But while I was staring at the front of the box I noticed something: Botticelli's water is medieval. It is flat. The background does not have perspective but is instead simply behind her, a field of symbols. The shell, too; its slightly awkward perspective always bothered me, but I can see now that, in part, this is due to the fundamentally symbolic feeling of Botticelli. He isn't quite like the other Renaissance painters trying to reproduce reality. He's trying to bring the solid visual reality of the Greco-Roman world into line with the ethereal, symbolic one of the Christian era. As such the painting contains aspects of both, the result being that Venus is less an object than an icon. One could imagine a world where in time a simplified ideogram of a woman standing on a shell became the "word" for creation springing forth, begetting more creation. All it's missing are the bars on the side to indicate that it is a manuscript rather than a portrait:
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| Herman, Paul, and Jean de Limbourg The Annunciation in The Belles Heures of Jean de France (1405–1408/1409) |
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