| Eugène Fromentin's
brilliantly accurate discourse on Dutch art includes a fragment which
never ceases to amaze me. In this fragment, the author points to the
precision with which objects are observed, for example, in those simple
still lifes displaying a few things. Without wasting words, Fromentin
connects this precision with a certain slowness, "a patient will"
- thus, with the patience necessary to study each individual object
before, possibly, becoming immersed in the much more lively scenography
which is the whole painting. When you observe something patiently,
and for a long time, it will eventually lie still by itself - just
as the single leaf, under the botanist's magnifying glass, has nothing
left to recall the tree swaying wildly in the storm. For this silent
leaf, and equally for a few curious shells in a still life, or for
a butterfly among the fancifully blooming tulips in another seventeenth-century
painting - to depict such details in their full simplicity, we need
the drawing. "Every object, thanks to the interest it offers" (wrote
Fromentin) "ought to be examined in its form and drawn before it is
painted. In this way nothing is secondary. A landscape with its distances,
a cloud with its movements, a piece of architecture with its laws
of perspective, a face with its physiognomy, its distinctive traits,
its passing expressions, a hand with its gesture, a garment in its
natural folds, an animal with its carriage, its frame, the inmost
characteristics of its kind..." Around 1875, such an observant and
humble attitude towards reality struck a French author as being typical,
true, and characteristic of art from the Northern Netherlands, which,
in general, faithfully represented what could be seen. Other schools
more often favoured eloquent and dramatic compositions, in which delicate
details disappeared into effectful clair-obscure and a compelling
jumble of colours. Of course, I am speaking very generally about the
situation, but the patient attention to a highly detailed reality
is indisputably a characteristic of Dutch art, from Jan van Eyck right
up to Mondriaan's so precisely executed abstractions. More than a
hundred years after Fromentin, Svetlana Alpers published The Art of
Describing (1983), in which, with a wealth of added information from
such areas as cartography and optics (in which Dutch scientists also
excelled), she simply echoes the Frenchman. In his book, Les Matres
d'Autrefois (1876), Fromentin described the works of art he encountered
on his journey through the Netherlands, viewed through the discerning
eye of the writer who was also a painter. Another aspect we should
not forget is that this was the time when photography had just been
invented - that is to say, the time when perception became linked
to the idea of a moment in time, or rather, of the moment that, in
the photograph, will for ever stand still. Through early photography,
a whole new world was gradually discovered - a kind of documentary
world, encompassing all manner of things for which the noble art of
painting had no time, because such things were too insignificant and
too unimportant to be paid much attention. Photography led to a new
aesthetics of realism, often not without sentimentality - or rather,
it allowed this aesthetics to develop further, because of course,
in essence, it already existed. This is why photography could emerge
as the answer to this desire for realism and documentation of which
Fromentin was one of the protagonists; he could project this desire
onto Dutch art.
For what it is worth, with all this I only want to
say that an exhibition such as The Second, which also shows this
curious realism, with its slowness and patience, is also part of
this special Dutch tradition. If Dutch artists - not only painters,
but, in this century, also documentary film makers - have a unique
talent for astute observation, the artists of the 'New Media' certainly
have that talent, too: "the patient will", as Fromentin put it.
Rudi Fuchs
|
November 13 (Fri.) - December 27 (Sun.),1998 [Finished]