{"id":123,"date":"2022-04-23T16:05:42","date_gmt":"2022-04-23T16:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/?page_id=123"},"modified":"2023-10-30T19:35:34","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T19:35:34","slug":"craig-staff","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/craig-staff\/","title":{"rendered":"Craig Staff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from Sites of Time: Painting, History and Meaning<\/em>, published by Intellect, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Between 1995 and 2004, Lali\u0107 made a total of fifty-three works that collectively were entitled the History Paintings. The catalyst for this body of work was a chart that the artist discovered in 1994, printed by Winsor and Newton, which categorised the historical development of pigments into six periods or eras, namely \u2018Cave,\u2019 \u2018Egyptian,\u2019 \u2018Greek,\u2019 \u2018Italian,\u2019 \u2018C18\/19th<\/sup>\u2019 and \u2018C20th.\u2019[1]<\/a> Painted on medium-weight cotton canvas with a ground of between 12-20 layers of acrylic gesso, each work was made using a specific Winsor and Newton pigment which had been mixed with five parts turpentine, one part damar varnish and one part refined linseed oil. Working uni-directionally from left to right, several layers of paint were then applied.<\/p>\n

The title of each work incorporates the generic title of the whole series, namely History Painting, the period that denotes the relative historical position within the timeline of the series and the pigments that are derived from and the names of the paints that have been used in the order in which they were applied.[2]<\/a> So for example, the full title of History Painting 42 C20th. Winsor Yellow<\/em>, 1995 is as follows:<\/p>\n

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History Painting 42<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>
\nC20th. Winsor Yellow<\/em>
\nTitanium White
\nIvory Black
\nLamp Black
\nMars Black
\nManganese Blue
\nQuinacridone Permanent Rose
\nAlizarin Crimson
\nQuinacridone Permanent Magenta
\nDioxazine Violet
\nPhthalocyanine Blue
\nPhthalocyanine Green<\/em>[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2014, Lali\u0107 began work on a second series of these paintings. Unlike the original series that entailed the artist applying a series of semi-transparent layers of paint that pertained to a particular historical period, the more recent group of History Paintings were made using a series of oil glazes that incorporated a single colour group. (The eight colours that originally were included within the Winsor and Newton chart were red, blue, yellow, green, purple, black, white and brown). In keeping with the first series, each layer of the same colour is applied in accordance with the period in time it derived from, that is, the first layer of paint to be applied was chronologically the earliest. As with the first series, the full title of the work lists all of the colours that were used. For example:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018History Painting. Blue\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Egyptian Azurite<\/em><\/p>\n

Egyptian Blue Frit<\/em><\/p>\n

Egyptian Indigo<\/em><\/p>\n

Italian Genuine Ultramarine<\/em><\/p>\n

C18\/19th<\/sup> Prussian Blue<\/em><\/p>\n

C18\/19th<\/sup> Cobalt Blue<\/em><\/p>\n

C18\/19th<\/sup> French Ultramarine<\/em><\/p>\n

C20th Cerulean Blue <\/em><\/p>\n

C20th Phthalocyanine Blue<\/em><\/p>\n

C20th Manganese Blue<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the first instance, and before we go on to consider how the paintings are bound up with specific aspects drawn from the annals of art history, the two bodies of paintings as a whole more straightforwardly have as their basis particular chronologies that structure both the painting\u2019s formal organisation and more broadly the technical development of painting as a medium. Indeed, even a brief consideration of any particular work from either series will reveal a rich and complex history, a history that encompasses not only painting and its production, but how this production was contingent upon, amongst other things, the cultural habits and social and religious customs of the time. So for example, even a cursory glance at two of the colours that are listed as part of the title for History Painting 17 <\/em>brings into focus, inter alia<\/em>, a very particular set of contexts and practices that marked the historical development of the pigments. To this end, Sienna derives its name from the Tuscan city in Italy where it can still be found. Raw Sienna and its calcinated equivalent Burnt Sienna were traditionally used as glazes due to their transparency.[4]<\/a>Terra Verte, also known as Green Earth was used as, amongst other things, a pigment on Roman wall paintings at Pompeii and at Dura-Europos. In addition, according to Rutherford J. Gettens and George L. Stout, it \u201cwas widely used by Italian painters as a foundation for flesh tones, and is the pigment that gives the greenish tone to so many of the abraded Italian panel paintings.\u201d[5]<\/a> Although the pigments deriving from the period Winsor and Newton labelled \u201cItalian\u201d fall loosely within the context of the Italian Renaissance, in an interview with Rebecca Fortnum, the artist acknowledged the History Paintings\u2019 relationship to modernism through their relationship with the monochrome:<\/p>\n

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If you look at the edge of the History Paintings <\/em>or through the surface, you can track a little bit of how the painting was made, but essentially you are looking at a monochrome. That really seemed to me to get the balance right; it\u2019s first and foremost a visual experience of a single colour and then the other things are there, if you want to interrogate it further.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Seeking, in one sense, to take Maurice Denis\u2019s dictum that \u201cbefore being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story [a picture] is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular pattern\u2026\u201d at face value, within the context of the twentieth century, the monochrome was representative of modernist abstraction\u2019s ne plus ultra.[7]<\/a> Rather than seek to dismantle the appearance of things so that a novel semblance of the world could be engendered, as was arguably the case with earlier, more schematic approaches to abstraction such as Cubism, the monochrome sought to entirely eradicate all <\/em>form so as, on one level, to purge painting of its representational basis. As it was, the monochrome functioned as a sort of (non)visual ground zero whereby artists could claim either that the project of painting had reached its necessary conclusion or, conversely, that it had arrived at a point from which it could begin.<\/p>\n

Although the monochrome stands squarely within the context of artistic modernism as it came to be played out internationally and over the course of the twentieth century, there were instances prior to this period within art\u2019s history. According to Arthur Danto:<\/p>\n

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Monochromy had been available for literary exploitation since at least 1760, when Laurence Sterne displayed a black square as an emblem of death in Chapter 12 of Tristram Shandy. But it could not represent a serious option for the visual arts at that time. In a 1912 parody of the austere philosophical journal Mind<\/em> a blank page was titled \u201cThe Absolute,\u201d doubtless in reference to the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. But even at this late date, art history had not quite evolved to a point where monochrome painting could actually be made without it being a joke.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

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In real terms, the first point at which the monochrome was perceived as a legitimate form of artistic expression was during the first two decades of the twentieth century and was arguably, at that historical moment at least, most readily associated with the work of Kasmir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. Indeed, Thomas McEvilley has noted that their respective responses to the monochrome as a sub-genre of abstraction heralded its \u201ctwo great threads\u2026 the metaphysical and the materialist…\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

For his part, Malevich conceived the monochrome as being somewhat akin to a portal or threshold that facilitated the viewer\u2019s journey towards a separate ontological realm. Indeed, as well as manifesting this realm, the ostensibly spiritual dimensions extended towards the artwork\u2019s viewing conditions. The ostensibly spiritual dimension of Malevich\u2019s monochrome paintings extended to the conditions of their display. Within the 0.10 exhibition that was staged in St Petersburg in 1915, the artist hung one of his black squares in a somewhat elevated position overlapping at a ninety degree angle the point where two of the gallery\u2019s walls met. As Alison Hilton has noted:<\/p>\n

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The spiritual focus of the home was the icon corner, located diagonally opposite the oven. Called the krasny ugol <\/em>(\u201cred\u201d or \u201cbeautiful corner\u201d), it had at least one icon, sometimes an icon case (bozhnitsa <\/em>or kiot<\/em>), and usually a small table holding candles and family mementoes beneath. Anyone entering the izbe <\/em>[peasant house] would bow to the icons before greeting the hosts or speaking. Guests of honor were seated in the icon corner, and matchmaking rituals and parts of the marriage rites were conducted there. When a member of the family died, the body would be laid out so that the head lay closest to the icon corner, and the feet near the door. [10]<\/a><\/p>\n

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However, militating against the spiritual potential of pure abstraction were the three three monochrome paintings, Pure Red Colour, Pure Blue Colour and Pure Yellow Colour <\/em>that Rodchenko, together with his fellow Constructivist artists exhibited in Moscow in 1921. Conceived as ushering in painting\u2019s logical end point, the monochrome became a cipher for either painting\u2019s apotheosis or its inevitable demise. As McEvilley observes:<\/p>\n

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The monochrome painting is the most mysterious icon of Modern art. A rectangle of a single more or less unmodulated color is erected on the wall at eye level and gazed at by humans standing before it in a reverential silence. What is happening? The painting is not impressing the viewer through a display of skill. In it skill is negated. Color manipulation and relationship are negated. Subject matter, drama, narrative, painterly presence, touch are absent. The color may have been applied with a roller or spray gun; it may even be the natural color of the unpainted fabric. One might as well be looking at the wall the picture is mounted on. Yet here, in this ritual-pictorial moment, the deepest meanings of Western Modernist art are embedded \u2013 its highest spiritual aspirations, its dream of a utopian future, its madness, its folly.[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

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In one respect, David Batchelor\u2019s relatively more recent comments about the monochrome echo those of McEvilley:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is what I want to argue: that the monochrome has been many things to many people; and that it has resulted and can still result in work which is either adventurous or academic, absurdist or serious, amateur or professional, hilarious or humourless, critical or conventional, beautiful or banal, innocent or implicated, light or heavy, literalist or illusionistic, mystical or materialist, quick or dead. And this: that these and other possibilities continue to make up a practice which has in different instances signified either the end of painting, or the renewal of painting, or the breakdown of the distinction between painting and sculpture, or the transformation of painting into something else entirely.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Beyond the paintings\u2019 surface incident that speaks of, or rather indexes the history of their making, the \u201ctemporal differentiation\u201d of these works is such that not only do they have a very particular bearing on the technical histories (in the broadest sense), of painting, but they also become imbricated with a particular genre that painting was accorded with. To this end, whilst it is the monochrome that Lali\u0107\u2019s paintings bear both a technical resemblance to and a conceptual affinity with, as \u201cHistory Paintings\u201d they invariably bring to mind History Painting, a genre that was sanctioned by the Acad\u00e9mie Royale in Paris during the seventeenth century. Although it had first emerged during the Renaissance, its galvanisation occurred during the latter half of the 1600s as part of the Acad\u00e9mie Royale\u2019s hierarchisation of style, approach and perhaps most importantly, subject matter. As David Green and Peter Seddon note, \u201cAlthough certain aspects of history painting are traceable to the early Renaissance \u2013 the description of the \u2018istoria\u2019 to be found in Alberti\u2019s treatise On Painting <\/em>(1436) is often cited \u2013 the formulation of a coherent genre, fully codified in a given set of aesthetic and iconographic conventions only occurs much later.\u201d[13]<\/a><\/p>\n

During this period in painting\u2019s history, the academy in Paris had set out five categories of subject matter that were accorded with varying levels of status. To this end, the lowliest of the categories was still life, whereas the subject matter that was deemed most worthy and noble was history painting.[14]<\/a> Often conceived on a grand scale (unlike, the somewhat more diminutively scaled category of still life), as well as depicting historical events, history painting also represented scenes derived from mythological, allegorical and religious subjects. So, for example, Jacques-Louis David\u2019s Andromache Mourning Over the Body of Hector<\/em>, painted in 1783 is loosely based on a scene in book 24 of Homer\u2019s Iliad.<\/em> According to Jack Johnson, the painting is in fact an imagined and more intimate response to the scene from which it derives from. Accordingly, in lines 725-28 of Book 24, what is described is \u201cthe funeral of Hector and particularly, Andromache\u2019s grief. Homer describes a scene of pubic mourning in which Andromache participates, and this was the image that other eighteenth-century painters, such as Gavin Hamilton, had portrayed. But David imagined a later moment, a very private moment after the public lamentations, in which Andromache sits alone with the body of her husband and foresees the dire fate that awaits her and her innocent son.\u201d[15]<\/a> In David\u2019s painting, the artist depicts Adromache in a state of mourning over the death of her husband Hector who had been killed by Achilles during the Trojan War.<\/p>\n

Executed on a scale befitting of the genre (9\u2019 10 \u00bd\u201d x 6\u2019 8\u201d), David render\u2019s the grief-stricken Adromache in muted beige and white, gazing up to the ceiling as her right-hand gestures towards her husband\u2019s lifeless, recumbent body. Nestled in her lap and wearing a red shawl is Astyanax who, now fatherless, attempts to console his mother. According to Andr\u00e9 Feliben des Avaux, an architect who assumed the role of amateur honoraire <\/em>at the academy, to achieve<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the greatest perfection of art\u2026it is necessary to move on from the representation of a single figure to that of a group; to deal with historical and legendary subjects and to represent the great actions recounted by historians or the pleasing subjects treated by poets. And, in order to scale even greater heights, an artist must know how to conceal the virtues of great men and the most elevated mysteries beneath the veil of legendary tales and allegorical compositions.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n

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As this statement by Feliben suggests, in addition to an emphasis accorded the genre\u2019s iconography, underscoring history painting was a moral imperative. According to David Green and Peter Seddon: \u201cHistory painting displayed not only narrativity <\/em>but a second characteristic as part of its ambition, that of didactic intent. <\/em>History painting, in other words, had an ethical and moral dimension in which viewers would in some sense perceive virtue, a virtue both relevant to their own time and one of a universal timeless kind.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

During the seventeenth century at least, history painting occupied a privileged position from which it could confer upon the medium a status that was in accordance with the academy\u2019s values. However, artists increasingly directed their attention away from mythological, religious and historical scenes of the past, and towards actual events that had occurred more recently. Although this shift in history painting\u2019s import meant that it would have to relinquish some of the iconographies that the genre had become, to a certain extent synonymous with, what it was initially replaced by was an approach to subject matter that served \u201cthe glorification of the state and its illustrious men and women.\u201d[18]<\/a> Moreover, rather than glorification, within the context of the nineteenth-century History Painting sought to provide a reliable account, unembellished by artistic flourishes, of the political events of the day. As a result, and as Robert Storr notes, \u201cTh\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault and \u00c9douard Manet[\u2018s] contributions to the genre upset most of the assumptions and most of the conventions that had previously caused it to flourish under official patronage.\u201d[19]<\/a><\/p>\n

The evolution of History Painting as it moved into the nineteenth century was arguably indicative of a broader shift that informed the development of painting as a visual medium. Not only was a marked level of scepticism directed towards those in authority characteristic of this volte-face. A growing impatience with the so-called academic approach and an increasing commitment towards rendering significant events of the day as unvarnished and at times unpalatable truths were also aspects that when combined, contributed towards the recasting of history painting\u2019s scope and import. From that point, and as Storr has noted, \u201cmodern historically minded art hasn\u2019t been painted at all [whilst] recent examples of ambitious history painting are few and far between.\u201d [20]<\/a><\/p>\n

Emblematic of the shift that took place towards the latter half of the nineteenth century and that was coincident with the development of artistic modernism is Manet\u2019s three versions of The Execution of Maximilian<\/em>.[21]<\/a> Each version sought to represent the disastrous outcome of Napoleon II\u2019s ill-fated attempt to gain influence, if not control within the Americas, what is notable with the paintings that were made in response to the execution of Archduke Maximilian is their relationship to art historical precedent. As Storr recounts:<\/p>\n

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Eager to expand his influence into the Americas, Napoleon III, who rose from president to emperor after a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in 1851, dispatched Archduke Maximilian of Austria and a small expeditionary force to Mexico where the archduke was installed as emperor under French protection. That protection evaporated when revolutionary followers of the nationalist Benito Juarez stormed Mexico City and drove Maximilian out. Still refusing to abdicate, the emperor without an empire soon fell into the hands of Mexican forces who put him before a firing squad with two of his legal generals. Together they died in vain but with valor. Pointing an accusatory finger at Napoleon III by ennobling the man he had betrayed through inaction, Manet implicitly attacked the self-appointed personification of France\u2026[22]<\/a><\/p>\n

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It was perhaps Michael Fried who first brought to people\u2019s attention the intertextuality of the paintings that Manet made during the first half of the 1860s. According to Fried, writing in \u201cManet\u2019s Sources,\u201d a text first published in Artforum <\/em>in 1969 \u201cmost of the important pictures of the 1860s depend either wholly or in part on works by Vel\u00e1squez, Goya, Rubens, Van Dyck, Raphael, Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Le Nain, Watteau, Chardin, Courbet\u2026\u201d[23]<\/a> With respect to Manet\u2019s paintings of the execution of Maximilian, Fried writes that it \u201cmobilized several sources in something like the spirit of the pre-Madrid paintings. The most obvious one, the picture that has always been recognized as largely determining the composition of the London and Mannheim versions, is Goya\u2019s The Third of May <\/em>[1814].\u201d[24]<\/a> Drawing the reader\u2019s attention towards the formal similarities between the London and Mannheim canvases and Jacques-Louis David\u2019s The Oath of the Horatii<\/em> (1785) primarily through a shared iconography of bodily comportment, Fried observes \u201ca doubling of allusions to French and Spanish painting which recalls the strategic use of sources in Manet\u2019s paintings of the first half of the 1860s.\u201d[25]<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Manet completed his own series of paintings based on the execution of the archduke a century and a half ago, the artist Johannes Phokela has more recently made a series of paintings based on Manet\u2019s original series. Through the medium within which they were originally made, Johannes Phokela\u2019s practice has sought to reimagine particular paintings that in one sense, are firmly rooted within the canonical tradition of western art. To this end, in addition to the paintings of Manet, the artist\u2019s critical gaze has been directed to, Narcissus<\/em>, c. <\/em>1597-99 by Caravaggio <\/em>and Nicolaes Berchem\u2019s A Moor Presenting a Parrot to a Lady<\/em>, c. <\/em>1660s. Regardless of what the historical source for Phokela\u2019s paintings is, the artist\u2019s practice, as Colin Richards has pointed out, is notable for its \u201ccuriosity about bravura artistic illusionism [its] critique by means of what is criticised\u2026strong ideas about aesthetic structure \u2013 often manifest as a sort of grid \u2013 and, finally, a sense of laughter.\u201d[26]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Ides of March <\/em>(2015) is the tenth painting Phokela has produced that is based on Manet\u2019s painting of the execution of Emperor Maximilian in 1867. Within this iteration, Phokela introduces a visual reference to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, a nephew of Maximilian. As a result, the assassination Franz Ferdinand becomes superimposed onto the execution of Maximilian.<\/p>\n

The tradition of artists working from their forebears\u2019 achievements reaches back at least as far as the Renaissance. Indeed, in Cennino Cennini\u2019s Il Libro dell\u2019 Arte <\/em>(The Craftsman\u2019s Handbook<\/em>), originally published in the late 1390s, the artist lays great emphasis upon taking \u201cpains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters.\u201d[27]<\/a> Moreover, in the same section of the handbook which is entitled \u2018How you should endeavor to copy and draw after as few masters as possible,\u2019 Cennini is keen to underline the importance of working only from the best artist \u201cwho has the greatest reputation.\u201d Ibid. This is because if one \u201cunderstand[s] to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind.\u201d[28]<\/a> However, this practice wasn\u2019t only in the pursuit of acquiring technical knowledge. It was also undertaken as a means of ensuring that despite, amongst other things, the vicissitudes of historical distance, a credible link could be maintained between the work and its referent. According to Nagel and Wood, when the connection between a divine personage and its likeness became tenuous, it was \u201cthe model of mutual substitutability\u201d that worked to safeguard the potential collapse between (a) known reality and its subsequent inscription.[29]<\/a>\u00a0 As such, and as the copies of a particular deity multiplied, \u201cthe artefact thus functioned by aligning itself with a diachronic chain of replications.\u201d[30]<\/a> It perhaps should be noted that this historically received approach is not one that Phokela shares; certainly, one would be mistaken if his paintings were taken as some faithful transcription or, to borrow Nagel and Wood\u2019s phraseology, as \u201carchaizing copies,\u201d something which \u201cabandons contemporary conventions and instead attempts to adhere to the model.\u201d [31]<\/a> Neither are they, for that matter, some form of artistic homage with the ostensible lack of criticality that this implies. With regard to the latter understanding, this is negated by the fact that the artist chooses to work not only from reproductions found in art history books, but also from his memory of individual paintings.[32]<\/a><\/p>\n

On one level, the artist\u2019s ambivalence towards his source material reflects a broader degree of scepticism that postmodernism directed towards history as a discipline. In order to understand the development of this idea, we would first have to acknowledge the paucity of recent examples of history paintings as being bound up with the obsolescence of painting\u2019s historically received function as an essentially representational medium. As Benjamin Buchloh notes: \u201cBut the history of history painting is itself a history of the withdrawal of a subject from painting\u2019s ability to represent, a withdrawal that ultimately generated the modernist notion of aesthetic autonomy.\u201d[33]<\/a> We could perhaps argue that the problematisation of representation that history painting inadvertently highlighted, if not brought about had occurred during the previous century with what had become an ersatz version of the genre. According to Green and Seddon:<\/p>\n

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Unlike its predecessor which was intended to function as exemplum virtutis<\/em>, nineteenth-century historical genre painting has generally been regarded as little more than costume drama offering anecdotal and bowdlerised versions of history and worse still to be artistically retrograde\u2026[its] devotion to the imitation of the appearance of things was pursued at the expense of the true purpose of art which was to stir in the viewer \u2018aesthetic emotions\u2019 and this could only be achieved by attending to the formal properties of the work of art. Representation \u2013 understood in terms of producing a recognisable likeness \u2013 was at best irrelevant, at worse positively harmful, to those ambitions.[34]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Whilst this is arguably true, and certainly what Green and Seddon describe as history painting\u2019s \u201cterminal decline\u201d is symptomatic of modernism\u2019s wholesale repudiation of what the genre embodied, what also contributed to this decline was a set of critiques that during the latter half of the twentieth century had been directed towards the academic discipline of history itself.[35]<\/a> Accordingly:<\/p>\n

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It is not therefore surprising that coincidental with the types of critique wrought by post-structuralism on the prevailing assumptions of conventional historiography we have also witnessed the proliferation of diverse and competing claims to speak of the past. Once the totalising and universalising ambitions that once underpinned the academic discipline of history had been exposed as being in fact partial and partisan, it was no longer possible to hold on to the idea of history (in the singular), only of different histories (in the plural).[36]<\/a><\/p>\n

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On one level, this comment by Green and Seddon echoes Keith Jenkins\u2019s own contention, given in his text Re-thinking History<\/em>, that \u201cwhilst the past is singular, history is necessarily plural.\u201d[37]<\/a> Representative of a shift from a determination of history as Res gestae<\/em>, wherein a particular series of events are fixed and knowable as such and towards an understanding wherein it is historia rerum gestarum<\/em>, that is, more readily bound up with the telling (or perhaps retelling) of a particular event, (a move which in one sense is away from history and is towards historiography), perhaps Jenkins\u2019s most significant admission, at least for our purposes is \u201cthe world\/the past comes to us always already as stories and what we cannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if they correspond to the real world\/past, because these \u2018always already\u2019 narratives constitute \u2018reality\u2019.\u2019[38]<\/a><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Maria Lali\u0107, \u2018Statement for \u201cHelder en Verzadigd\u201d, Amiticae, Amsterdam, 13 March\u201312 April 1998\u2019, c.1998, unpaginated, Tate Artist Catalogue File, Maria Lali\u0107, PC4.2.2,\u00a0A26661,\u00a0T07287\u2013T07292, accessed January 20 2019 http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/art\/artworks\/lalic-history-painting-14-greek-massicot-t07289<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> In an interview with Rebecca Fortnum, the artist explained how a particular colour was indubitably bound up with the historical moment and social and cultural context within which it emerged from and was, in the first instance, directly associated with: \u2018If we look at the colours that were available to someone in the cave era, say …There are four coloured pigments from that period and they\u2019re so resonant with what that life was situated around \u2013 fire and earth, carbon black from fire, and from the earth yellow, red and chalk. It says so much about a particular culture and civilisation … I think I\u2019m simply excited by recognising a time and place through colour.\u201d Maria Lali\u0107,\u2019 in Rebecca Fortnum, Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words<\/em> (London; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 34.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> The full title of these works are set out in this way so as to be analogous to each individual layer of the actual painting. Email correspondence with the artist, 29th<\/sup> July, 2018.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Rutherford J. Gettens and George L. Stout, Painting Materials: A Short Encyclopedia<\/em> (New York: Dover, 1966), 156.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 117.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> \u2018Maria Lali\u0107,\u2019 in Fortnum, Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words<\/em>, 35.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Maurice Denis, \u201cDefinition of Neo-Traditionism,\u201d first published as \u2018D\u00e9finition du N\u00e9o-traditionisme\u2019 in Art et Critique<\/em>, Paris, 23 and 30 August 1890, reproduced in Art in Theory 1915-1900 An Anthology of Changing Ideas<\/em>, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 863.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Arthur C. Danto, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic World<\/em> (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, University of California Press, 2001), 307.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Thomas McEvilley, \u201cSeeking the Primal Through Paint: The Monochrome Icon,\u201d in G. Roger Denson and Thomas McEvilley, Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism<\/em> (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1996), 53-54.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Alison Hilton, Russian Folk Art<\/em> (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 25.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> McEvilley, \u201cSeeking the Primal Through Paint: The Monochrome Icon\u201d 45.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> David Batchelor, \u201cIn bed with the monochrome,\u201d in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses<\/em>, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Serpent\u2019s Tail, 2000), 156.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> David Green and Peter Seddon (editors), History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art<\/em> (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 6.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> The five categories in the hierarchy of genres, as instituted by the French Royal Academy were history painting, portraiture, genre painting, landscape and still life.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Jack Johnson, \u201cDavid and Literature,\u201d in Jacques-Louis David New Perspectives<\/em>, ed. Dorothy Johnson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 82.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Andr\u00e9 F\u00e9libien deas Avaux, from the Preface to Conf\u00e9rence de l\u2019Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture <\/em>(1669), reproduced in Art and its Histories: A Reader<\/em>, ed. Steve Edwards (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1998), 35.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Green and Seddon History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art<\/em>, 7.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a>\u00a0 Storr, Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977<\/em>, 121.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Ibid., 123.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Ibid., 121.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Ibid., 125.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Ibid., 125.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> Michael Fried, \u201cManet\u2019s Sources.\u201d Artforum <\/em>VII, no 7 (March 1969): 23.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> Michael Fried, Manet\u2019s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 351.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> Ibid., 352.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> Colin Richards, \u201cJohannes Phokela,\u201d in 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa<\/em>, ed.\u00a0 Sophie Perryer (South Africa: Bel Roberts Publishing, 2004), 291.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman\u2019s Handbook \u201cIl Libro dell\u2019 Arte<\/em>,\u201d trans. David V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), 15.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance<\/em>, 16.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> Ibid., 29-30.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> Ibid., 114.<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> Bruce Haines, \u201cJohannes Phokela,\u201d NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art<\/em> (May 01 2002): 49.<\/p>\n

[33]<\/a> Benjamin H. D Buchloh, \u201cA Note on Gerhard Richter\u2019s October 18, 1977<\/em>,\u201d October <\/em>48 (spring 1989): 93 reproduced in Storr, Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977<\/em>, 131.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/a> Green and Seddon, History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art<\/em>, 10.<\/p>\n

[35]<\/a> Ibid., 11.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/a> Ibid., p. 3. Along with the admission that history was both equivocal and plural, as Green and Seddon point out, the critique of history as an academic discipline extended to encompass the postmodern idea that history itself had ended. Ibid.<\/p>\n

[37]<\/a> Jenkins, Re-thinking History<\/em>, 13.<\/p>\n

[38]<\/a> Ibid., 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from Sites of Time: Painting, History and Meaning, published by Intellect, 2021   Between 1995 and 2004, Lali\u0107 made a total of fifty-three works that collectively were entitled the History Paintings. The catalyst for this body of work was a chart that the artist discovered in 1994, printed by Winsor and Newton, which categorised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1463,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-123","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/temporalities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}