A Study on Still-life Painting of New Objectivity in Germany : Focusing on Cacti and Semaphore by Georg Scholz

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Yeon Jeong Go ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 496-505
Author(s):  
Olga Yu. Kulakova

Over three and a half centuries, the genre of flower still life created by Dutch artists experienced ups of interest and oblivion. There were the maximum assessment of society in the form of high fees of the 17th century artists; the criticism of connoisseurs and art theorists; the neglect in the 19th century and the rise of auction prices and close attention of art critics, manifested from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In the middle of the 17th century, there was already a hierarchy of genres, based on both the subject and the size of the paintings, which was reflected in the price. Still lifes and landscapes were cheaper than allegorical and historical scenes, but there were exceptions, for example, in the works of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Art theorists Willem van Hoogstraten and Arnold Houbraken, resting upon academic tastes, downplayed the importance of still-life painting. Meanwhile, the artists themselves, determining the worth of their paintings, sought for maximum naturalism, and such paintings were sold well.In the 20th century, this genre attracted the attention of collectors in Europe and the United States. A revival of interest in Dutch still lifes in general, and in flower ones in particular, began in the 20th century, the paintings rose in price at auctions, and collecting them became almost a fashion. Art societies and art dealers of the Netherlands and Belgium organized several small exhibitions of still lifes. The course for studying symbolic messages in still lifes, presented by Ingvar Bergström, is continued by Eddie de Jong, who emphasizes the diverse nature of symbolism in Dutch painting of the 17th century. Svetlana Alpers, on the contrary, criticizes the iconological method and presents the Dutch painting of that period as an example of visual culture. Norman Bryson’s view of Dutch still lifes is formed against the background of the development of a consumer society, economic prosperity and abundance. Finally, there has been an increasing interest in the natural science aspects of flower still-life painting in the researches of the last twenty years. Curiosity, skill, and admiration for nature are the impulses that can still be felt in the images of bouquets and fruits.


Author(s):  
Michael Mackenzie

Neue Sachlichkeit, which can be translated as "New Objectivity," was the name given to a tendency in painting which, from about 1921 on, returned to something like traditional compositional and representational codes, eschewed vehemence of any kind, "Primitivism," and even painterliness, while emphasizing unbroken contour lines and unbroken local color. Painters depicted conventional subject matter such as still life, landscapes, and portraits with the pictorial means of sculptural volume, perspectival space, natural proportions, and unbroken, evenly modulated tonal values which had dominated painting since the Renaissance but which had been systematically dismantled by Modernism. The tendency received its name with an exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1925, organized by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, although art critics had sought to name and define it since 1920, and explicitly in opposition to an Expressionism widely perceived as moribund. Hartlaub described what he saw as a split in the overall tendency, with an inclination toward traditionalism and classicism on the "right" wing, and toward aggressively critical social commentary and a propensity to exaggeration and caricature on the "left" (although Hartlaub denied that there was any political significance to his terminology of "left" and "right," the artists assigned to the "left" wing were either active in or openly sympathetic to the left wing of German politics).


1974 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 460
Author(s):  
Norman A. Geske ◽  
William H. Gerdts ◽  
Russell Burke

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Donald D. Keyes ◽  
William H. Gerdts ◽  
Russell Burke

Nuncius ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-639
Author(s):  
Joris van Gastel

Neapolitan still life painting, even though Italy’s most prolific “school” of the genre, has attracted little theoretical analysis. Where scholars have considered the genre almost exclusively in terms of stylistic developments and questions of attribution, this paper, alternatively, draws inspiration from insights formulated largely outside the field of art history: Umberto Eco’s characterization of still life paintings as “visual lists” and Michele Rak’s characterization of seventeenth-century literature in the Neapolitan dialect as “literary still lifes.” Building on these insights, this paper aims to explore the ways in which Neapolitan still life painting was anchored in local literary traditions and how, moreover, these literary traditions help us to understand the way in which these paintings resonate with the specific social and political situation that characterized Spanish Naples.


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