Sculpture and painting as modes of anatomical illustration / by Fielding H. Garrison and Edward C. Streeter.

  • Fielding Hudson Garrison
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sculpture and painting as modes of anatomical illustration / by Fielding H. Garrison and Edward C. Streeter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or storehouse of energy, not specially intended for violent motor activity, the musculature is usually flabby and little developed, except in athletics or strenuous occupations. Artistic representation of its suave contours is usually effected by accounting for the depositions of subcutaneous fat, which set in at puberty and usually go on increasing up to the change of life. Countless variations have been played upon this theme, the recital of which is part of the story of modern painting. The history of modern painting, one of the greater glories of modern France, is briefly as follows: In the early part of the nineteenth century, a definite and determined reaction against the erotic pictures of Boucher, Fragonard, and Greuze was ushered in by Vien and apotheosized by David. Austere, prudish, insipid themes from Greek and Roman his¬ tory became the fashion. The class^l tradition of the methode David was continued by Ingres, a superlative draughtsman, whose pencil sketches make him, in Huneker’s phrase, ‘Ahe greatest master of pure line who ever lived.” With the advent of Gericault and Delacroix, French art broke away from the stiff formal tradition, with its historical or literary subject-matter. Gericault was almost the only artist in the nirmteenth century who dissected, and he dissected even the viscera. With Gericault and Delacroix came two of the fundamental postulates of modern painting, viz., unrestricted freedom in the choice of subjects and the feeling that color rather than line is its true means of expressing form, volume, depth, light, air, and motion. Emancipation from formal or literary subject-matter was largely due to the Spanish artist Goya, who boldly took his themes from the varied life about him, painting almost every conceivable subject, and, in his diabolical etchings, revived the intensely dark backgrounds of Rembrandt and Hals. From Goya stemmed Gustave Courbet, who was reviled all his life for his daring choice of unconventional subjects and who was one of the earliest of the great landscape painters of France. From the Spanish tendency came also the caricaturist Honore Daumier, whose gloomy backgrounds again suggest Rembrandt and Goya, and whose nude studies of bathing and wrestling scenes introduced a tendency of colossal importance in recent painting, namely, the rendering of mass in motion, of the sensa¬ tions of tactile volume, contour, weight, and muscular exertion by the sheer and rugged blocking out of dark tones against the light. It is the physiological anatomy of Michelangelo rendered in a new medium. Another product of the Goya tradition was Edouard Manet, who exhausted all the possibilities of unconventional subject-matter After Manet, there was nothing new to paint”), who eliminated nonessentials
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