Aiming to provide a sense of the range of works that a philosophy of the visual arts should consider, I continue with my fourth initial piece, Rembrandt’s famous ink drawing ‘Hendrikje Asleep’ from around 1655. I choose this particular work, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, as an instance of a work that, unlike my previous examples, is produced for suitably attuned viewers outside of any decorative, ritual, mythological, or ceremonial context, and is offered solely for visual inspection. Such works are likely what come to most people’s minds as paradigmatic instances of visual art. As with my other choices, I consider this work along with an outstandingly penetrating analysis of it, that given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. Maynard also there gives what seems to me the single most illuminating demonstration of the ways in which artistic meaning is built, and so provides a partial justification for the conception I previously referred to as the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning in Zafimanary carvings. The Rembrandt drawing is at the other end of the spectrum of artistic meaning as the presentation of artistic meaningfulness at what Maynard calls ‘full stretch’.
As I draw heavily from Maynard, so Maynard in his account drew heavily from the art historian Philip Rawson’s magisterial book Drawing. A basic, negative stylistic feature of Rembrandt’s drawing was his avoidance of a continuous outline around a figure (“like a black wire around the form” as Rembrandt reportedly said). Instead, he would build up a depicted figure most typically with a series of rounded, convex strokes in order to “create rhythmical figures by means of continuous series of linked contour-unites, giving them fresh starts, breaks, and calculated overlaps so that the lines seem to end and begin again” (Rawson, quoted in Maynard (p. 209)). Another central negative aspect of Rembrandt’s style, one that he shares with Goya, is its ‘antianatomical’ quality (p. 172), where the size and placement of the torso and limbs are left indeterminate, as in Goya’s ‘Three Soldiers Carrying a Wounded Man’ (1812-23):
A third central, and this one positive, feature of Rembrandt’s, Goya’s, and also Titian’s drawing is the use of ‘autonomous’ shadows, partially unlinked from the light-occluding bodies that cast them and linked instead with other shadows to form structuring blocks as if orthogonal to the drawing’s depicted figures (p. 168) , as in Titian’s ‘St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) in a Landscape’ (c.1520),
or in Goya’s ‘Two Prisoners in Irons’ (1820-23):
The rhythmic aspect is particularly salient in the clockwise drawn curved lines that form Hendrikje’s back and buttocks. The marks are varied yet readily grouped together as a distinctive bit of the drawing’s lexicon. The quasi-temporal aspect of these grouped marks is two-fold: First, as noted, they strongly exhibit the temporal ordering of their own making, as each stroke exhibits a passage from wet to dry where the loaded brush first touches the paper and then drains as the mark progresses. Second, and more ambiguously, the marks taken together form a larger temporal patterning from left-to-right, but with a suggestion of a counter-patterning of intensification, with the two darkest, centrally placed marks expressing a kind of climax.
In Maynard’s book the analysis of the Rembrandt drawing is part of a much longer argument and set of analyses aiming to show that in artistic pictorial depictions the artist has evoked various kinds of ordering (depth, outline, field, etc.) that evoke both those that the visual perception of pictures shares with non-pictorial environmental perception, as well as those that are distinctive of pictures and their making. He calls the various sub-kinds of the latter ‘drawing’s own devices’. His central point with regard to the Rembrandt drawing is that one sees here an exemplary instance of how these two kinds are interwoven in any artistic depiction. Maynard’s point seems to me fundamental, and shall become the starting point (in my next post) of my initial attempt at stating what is meant by the term ‘artistic meaning’.
References:
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression (2005)
Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)