Shaped canvas
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2 Art de l'Antiga Grѐcia (430-530 BC)
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3 Michelangelo Buanoretti,
Taddei Tondo, (1505)
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4 Tondo mit
Septimus
Severus und seiner Familie,
(~ 199 – 201) BC,
Tempera heightened with gold leaf
on mahogany panel
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5 Raphael, Madonna
and Child, (1502-3), tempera on canvas
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The Ancient Greeks produced round paintings
of everyday living and myths on the inside of vases and shallow wine cups known
as Tondi. Later within the
Renaissance Tondo were round
sculptures/reliefs, frescos/panel/canvases painted by for example Botticelli, Michelangelo
and Raphael, particularly for Madonna focused works. Bringing it up-to-date
Takashi Murakami did a series of tondo flower pieces expressing his super flat
aesthetic style. Matti Kujasalo paints small almost cross shapes in black
interspersed with white matter to create illusionist ephemeral feeling tondos which float out into the viewer. Damien Hirst’s Beautiful, pop, spinning ice creamy, whirling, expanding painting,
(1995) could represent a twist on the tondo of the past in which the circular
canvas becomes dynamically personified through the physical ‘spinning’
involved in the production of it’s own work.Obviously diminished somewhat
however as Hirst is in control of paint application and the spinning machine
but still countable. His work, To the Sea
– Heaven, (2006) combines the stained glass style of medieval artists using
real dead butterflies and gloss with a Renaissance shaped tondo. All sorts of
interpretations inspired here involving life, death, idealised nature in art
and real nature in art, combination of art styles to develop new styles and
break convention together with religion and nature.
The work of the Suprematists was very avant-garde
for it’s time. They believed in a work based wholly on feeling and rejection of
the visual outside world. They worked with creating their own visual language
via interacting, under and overlapped geometric shapes that were reduced to
essential colours and forms. Kazimir Malevich believed total non-objectivity
was best for the future of our world. In his famous Black Square on a White Ground, (1915) negation of the use of
mathematical perspective for depth in terms of colour theory takes place, adding
a mysticism that diffuses the flat materiality of the white canvas into a
vision of infinite black space, like the universe: never-ending, limitless. It
rejected the state and religion and the art of Constructivism focused on
materiality and social utilitarian function for art in favour of an art
existing for itself without the need for ‘things’.
Ben Nicholson and Mondrian took a similar
approach in developing their own geometric/linear/colour visual language for
art. Nicholson worked on wood and synthetic board however but painted such
compositions on canvas also, initiating geometric shaped works, that overlapped
and developed more of a three-dimensional sculptural quality to what was known
as the ‘canvas’. He’s been credited by many as introducing Constructivism to
England. Mondrian was part of the De Stijl movement or Neo-Plasticism which
worked with rejection of natural forms for straight lines and a focus on
dichotomy:
positive and negative
reactions, black and white, primary and non-primary. They avoided symmetry
instead developing aesthetic from opposing elements. Influenced by Cubism but
also mysticism, Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society and was influenced by
the ideas of the neoplatonic philosophy of
mathematician
M.H.J Schoenmaekers and ‘optimum’ geometric shape
formations. Schoenmaekers believed you could interpret the spiritual universe
(Man, society and nature) via Mathematics. A similarity with the Renaissance
working with science to create an artificial reality... rooted in reality.
Between 1934 and
1935 Abraham Joel Tobias’ began to experiment with irregular canvas
shapes set in diverse unique frames that echoe them sinuously. Moving away from
the control of institutions in art led to interaction and intermixing of
different genres of art. In the 1940s Martin Blazko and Rhod Rothfuss
representative of the Madi movement and Concrete art also played around with
the boundaries of the standard rectangular canvas. Non-representational geometric
art was presented again on compatible irregular geometric canvases or hardwood
attacking the stamped standard of the ‘rectangular’ canvas. As seen so far, as
time progressed there became a disintegration of the importance of canvas
frame. Greenberg states Modernist art developed from an urge for
pictorial art to separate itself from all others genres such as sculpture,
naturalistic art, etc... ‘Flatness alone
was unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The enclosing shape of the picture
was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater;
color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with
sculpture. Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no
other art, Modernist painting orientated itself to flatness as it did to
nothing else.’ 1b It also obviously rejects the Old Masters necessity to
negate the flatness of canvas with three-dimensional illusion. However as he
points out the history of art has a way of rejecting one movement to help
recreate a new one, not realising that there’s not one movement in history that
doesn’t relate to another in the past.
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6 Tom Wesselmann,
Still Life #28, (1963).
48 x 60 x 11
inches,
acrylic
and collage on board
with live TV.
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It developed on a much
grander scale and into more of a movement within New York from the 1960s plus.
New
York artists such as Richard Tuttle, Frank Stella and Kenneth Nolan developed
shaped canvases with a minimalist edge, then you had others more organic such
as Jane Frank who emulated the approaches of Fontana in
Winter Window, (1967) with layered canvases on top of each other pierced with ‘apertures’ revealing painted images beneath. Tom Wesselmann
incorporated canvases with the aesthetic use of everyday objects as collage and
assemblage. In
Still Life #28, mixed media, (1963) he included a television set that was turned on,
experimenting with the interaction of the commercial everyday images with the
canvas. He liked to combine different realities and juxtapose opposing objects
to try and create new
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7 Tom Wesselmann, Smoker #1, (1967).
108 1/2 x 82 1/2
inches.
Oil on shaped canvas.
Collection : The Museum of Modern Art.
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dimensions or realities, similar to the Surrealists. Crossovers
with the work and collage of Jasper Johns takes place. Renaissance masters did
everything possible to hide the texture of the raw canvas, whereas artists in this
era added glass to the canvas and different materials to increase it’s
sculptural quality and even bring out the texture of the canvas. There were
artists who linked to the art of the past in piety via crucifix shaped
paintings.
1b Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, (2003), Art in Theory
1900-2000, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford OX4 1JF, 2003. ‘Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) ‘Modernist Painting’ , pg. 775
2 By Art de
l'Antiga Grècia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
4 Author:
Unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
