The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting - Book Review

ANITA ALBUS

The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting Trans. Michael Robertson.

novel York: Alfred A. Knopf; Berkeley: University of California Pres 2000 386 pp 20 color ills., 12 b/w $3500 paper

German artist and writer Anita Albus wants us to rediscover painting, by dint of which she means the technique and make submissive matter of the great masters of the northern European tradition, from the 15th to the 17th hundred Ultimately, she hopes, with The An of Arts (originally Die Kunst der Kunsle) to reinvigorate contemporary painting from one side a return to the specificity and materiality of the medium. In the proces she points us toward the philosophical implications of a kind of painting that focuses the viewer's surprise on the natural world, that imagines the viewer "as part of the painting" (p 11) and that, in doing for a like reason conceives human beings as taking part in a larger natural cosmo Albus has produc a world of rhapsodic detail, ranging from pigments to alchemy, tobacco to toads, tulipomania to the religious significance of mills. While contemporary painters may not hasten to heed her prescriptions, the ease of us can greatly benefit from her true copy Those of us trained as art historians may ne to relax a hardly any of our scholarly reflexes to derive pleasure from it, as it does not fall comfortably into the genre of art historical scholarship. on the contrary especially for those interested in the period with which she deals, it can be subservient to as a model for a different way of writing about art.

The Art of Arts is lushly written in short chapters that themselves have the appearance designed to mimic the Netherlandish painting technique of layering transparent glazes to bring forward a light-infused three-dimensional world--an impression heightened through the tall, thin format of the volume Albus begins, logically enough, with Jan van Eyck and progresse to Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David, Hans Memling, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Joachim Patinir, ending with the flower and landscape (and reptile and bug) painters Georg Flegel Johannes Goedaert, and Otto Marseus van Schrieck. She is unafraid of mixing biography, iconography, cultural history, and the analysis of pigments. The index bristles with unexpect names--writers and artists from Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Proust to J W von Goethe, Vladimir Nabokov, Nicolas of Cusa, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), among others. This is in part to be paid to Albus's claim that as painting has move rounded its back on the description of the phenomenal world, writers have taken up this task. "Why" she asks, "do the shades of Nabokov's unique universe...crystallize in the rounding mirror of his art against the dark foil of life ? on what account does van Eyck's 'ample-jowled, fluff-haloed' Canon van der Paele draw near to life again in Nabokov's Pnin, painted in minute detail--'the knotty fane the sad musing gaze, the enclosures and furrows of facial muscle and fat ...'--when not a single contemporary painter is able to create the illusion of skin that breathes?" (p 286) Aside from being a true fine writer, Albus is an artist and (though this does not necessarily follow) has little interest in scholarly conventions for their hold sake. Nonetheless, she has produc a work that is painstakingly researched and amply footnoted. Albus is well aware, as she makes evident in crafty jabs at historicist dogma, of the scholarly conventions that she is flouting. She liberates herself from them from one side her implicit focus on what is useful to a painter today in the historical traditions [i]or[/i] part of to the other which she lovingly browses. This has the potential to lead to a certain amount of romanticization, which will not be to everyone's taste. Another way to describe it, notwithstanding that is rich description mingled with provocative philosophical musing.

Albus is interested in rematerializing the way we gaze at painting, focusing our attention upon its "material quality," which, she argues, must be "perceived as a living whole" (p 12) She also wants to respiritualize its things specifically, though not exclusively, its natural objects--animals, birds, plants, landscape--to bring a sense of wonder in the living world of nature. Her discussion of natural pigments (and hand-produced "alchemical" ones) insinuates that they represent a means of harmony with the natural world. She hints that the paintings she studies propos more than just the now banal-sounding "harmony with nature" on the contrary rather, a kind of sympathetic magic. This is the Neoplatonic philosophers' world of sympathetic vibrations, like those of stringed instruments responding to distant unimpaireds in which "shining articles throw back the glow of divine light" (p 104) Her final chapter, "Of not to be found Colors," details the special characteristics of pigments used by means of the old masters (and, she doesn't hesitate t o remind the reader, painstakingly beated and mixed by their apprentices) to bring out effects that, because they are the proceed of light striking irregular crystals, cannot be attained by the agency of versions of the same pigments mass-produced today, suffer alone by more common synthetic colors. Thus, not single the subject matter but also the actual materials of painting were, for van Eyck and centuries of followers, in a deeper harmony with nature than we can grasp with today's materials.