How does the canvas 'hang' today? Part 2 - Shaped canvas

Shaped canvas

2 Art de l'Antiga Grѐcia (430-530 BC)

3 Michelangelo Buanoretti, 

Taddei Tondo, (1505)

4 Tondo mit Septimus 

Severus und seiner Familie,

 (~ 199 – 201) BC, 

Tempera heightened with gold leaf

 on mahogany panel

5 Raphael, Madonna and Child, (1502-3), tempera on canvas

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.

6 Tom Wesselmann, 

Still Life #28, (1963).

 48 x 60 x 11 inches,  

 acrylic and collage on board

 with live TV.

Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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

7 Tom Wesselmann, Smoker #1, (1967).

 108 1/2 x 82 1/2 inches. 

Oil on shaped canvas.

 Collection : The Museum of Modern Art.

Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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

3 Wikimedia Commons  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taddei_Tondo.JPG#filelinks

4 Author: Unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

5 Author: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. Current Location: Hermitage, St. Petersburg. [Public Domain] Wikimedia Commons http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raffael_024.jpg#filelinks