Biedermeier Style

The Church of Our Dear Lady in Esslingen by Michael Neher (1798-1876)

"Biedermeier" is a term for a style of art in Germany, Scandinavia, and northern Italy between 1815 and 1835.

Photo by Jan Fidler

The term is also used to describe interior furnishings of the period. As Neoclassicism gave way to Romanticism, the strict, cool simplicity of classicism was overlaid with ornament and made cozy and familiar.

The term was used in a derogatory way, deriving from the comic figure known as "Papa Biedermeier."

Woman Embroidering, Georg Friedrich, 1814

As the middle class was emerging, many people found contentment at home, reading, playing piano, or doing needlework. 

Waldmuller Corpus Christi Morn Belvedere 

Later critics argued that the Biedermeier art wasn't challenging enough, and that it just served to reassure comfortable people that their values were OK. 

Carl Spitzweg

As often happens when art movements are branded with a disparaging title, later adherents proudly carry that title as their badge of honor.

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Brittanica.com: Biedermeier Style 

Visual Arts Cork Art/Biedermeier

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Biedermeier 1815-1835: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, Fashion (Art & Design)

Painting Tip: Background First, Foreground Last

I've got only 45 minutes to paint the view from an airport parking lot. Direct link to YouTube

The blue sky gradation was painted in advance in casein. I start by painting the clouds over it. Then I paint the control tower, the trees, and the fences, proceeding from background to foreground.

When you’re using any opaque paint, such as oil, casein, or gouache (the paint in this case), this classic background-to-foreground technique allows natural overlapping and a sense of depth.

New Tools for Text-to-Image Generation

Generating an image from a line of text entirely by means computer algorithms has been possible for the last few years. Newly invented tools are yielding results that keep getting more interesting.

The images can be hauntingly surrealistic, such as this one, which was generated by the phrase “when the wind blows.” 

Image courtesy The Big Sleep (source: @advadnoun on Twitter)

It's a little blurry and out of focus, with tendrils of downy fluff waving in dim light. It seems more like a photograph than a painting, but really it's a new category of image, made by computer software drawing from big data sets. 

Lately people's imaginations have been captured by tools such as VQ-GAN and CLIP.

Prompt: “a face like an M.C. Escher drawing” from The Big Sleep (source: @advadnoun on Twitter)

Some of the results are compelling and intriguing, seemingly intelligent in a weird non-human way, as if you're looking into an alien's mind. Is that a face on its side, an eye, a nose, a mouth? Are those textures fingerprints? 

Prompt: “The Yellow Smoke That Rubs Its Muzzle On The Window-Panes” 

from VQ-GAN+CLIP (source: @RiversHaveWings on Twitter)

Each solution has a visual logic of theme and variation that's carried throughout the image. It's certainly not random. 

Prompt: “A Series Of Tubes” from VQ-GAN+CLIP (source: @RiversHaveWings on Twitter)

Many of the images from this system have a surrealistic patchwork appearance resembling Cubism, where extracted fragments are juxtaposed across the picture plane, but the 3D space doesn't make sense as a real scene.

(source: @ak92501 on Twitter)

Some of the creativity of this enterprise derives from the odd juxtapositions of the words in the prompts. The results are often effective with long prompts. The phrase for the image above is “a small hut in a blizzard near the top of a mountain with one light turn on at dusk trending on artstation | unreal engine”

In recent weeks, people writing prompts realized you can get the system to yield a more detailed style if you say "trending on artstation."  

Prompt: "matte painting of someone reading papers and burning the midnight oil | trending on artstation" 

by Twitter user @ak92501

I expect that with time the results will be accepted alongside human efforts, beginning perhaps with categories like motel art, Twitter avatars, and corporate clip art. They will take their place on Instagram alongside painters and photographers. Many of the innovators in this field write their own code and come up with remarkably creative prompts, so it makes sense to think of them as artists.

As a viewer, I'm not quite sure how to respond emotionally to something that looks like art, but which didn't pass through a human consciousness.

As an artist, I'm not worried about my job. Maybe it's a vain hope, but I feel like people will always want to see images made by a human hand and filtered through a human brain rather than one made by an unfeeling machine. The question is whether eventually we'll be able to tell the difference.

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Thanks, Chris!

Resources to learn more:

• UC Berkeley blog post, which is a good overview of techniques: Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene

• Scientific paper (Free PDF) "Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis"

• Twitter account "Images.AI"  which plays with these natural language prompts and some of the same tools.

Diner Cartoon

 

Yup, it's that kind of morning.

I doodled this character in a diner, where I wrote down the dialog that I heard. The character was inspired by the work of the cartoonist Charles Saxon. 

Here's one of Saxon's New Yorker cartoons. I love the way he simplifies the shapes and lines. 

Here's a book of Charles Saxon's cartoons.

Two Russian Realists and Their Choices

If you compare the handling of a similar subject by two different realist painters, it becomes clear how each makes consistent choices, lending a recognizable style to each.

Ivan Shishkin

Backlighting adds contrast, and there are strong value shifts throughout. For Shishkin, emphasizing the local contrasts reduces the effect of large color fields.

Isaac Levitan

Indirect light allows Levitan to focus on three large value groups: the fern tops, the ground moss and the far forest. I would guess he consciously grouped those values to simplify what could otherwise be a very complex scene.

Ivan Shishkin

Here again, Shishkin uses relatively neutral colors and pursues local contrasts rather than large color fields.

Isaac Levitan

Levitan uses the backlighting to set up the strong colors of birch leaves. He handles the far leaves as an almost flat region of color.

If there's a lesson here, it's that the reality that we see and capture in paint is a direct consequence of the quality of attention we give it. There's no objective reality out there. It only comes into being in terms of the encounter with our unique brains based on what we're looking for. 

Facial Identity and Expression

Scientists studying the human visual cortex believe that separate systems in the brain process facial identity and expression.

Researchers say that as your brain begins to process a given face along the face-perception neural pathways, the recognition of the person's identity and the understanding their expression appear to happen largely independently.

The neuronal structures that process facial identity recognition seem separate and remote from those that process expression. And some patients with brain impairments often have deficits in one of those abilities without the other being affected.

But the jury is still out on this question. Even though the two kinds of processing are mostly independent, there may well be a certain amount of overlap between them.

From "Face Recognition by Humans" by Pawan Sinha, Benjamin Balas, Yuri Ostrovsky, and Richard Russell

Drawing by Mort Drucker

The Postcards of Rachael Robinson Elmer

In a previous post we looked at the self-education journey of an art student named Rachael Robinson Elmer (1878-1919).

She had a lively career as an illustrator, doing advertisements and children's book illustrations until her untimely death from the 1918 flu pandemic.

She is best known for creating a line of popular postcards depicting New York City.

Her illustration work is currently being featured in an exhibition at the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont called A Modern Artist: The Commercial Art of Rachael Robinson Elmer.

According to the museum's website:

"Exhibiting artistic talent at an early age, she was at first trained by her parents and then, as a teenager, enrolled in a correspondence course to further her skills." 

"She later studied at Goddard College and the Art Students League of New York."

"During that time she began her career as an illustrator, producing drawings for her father’s books and works for periodicals such as Forest and Stream and The Youth Companion."

"From the turn of the twentieth century until her death in 1919, Rachael built a career producing commercial art for major publishers across the United States."

"From children’s books and advertisements to her popular postcard series, Rachael Robinson Elmer was a modern artist navigating the expanding profession of commercial art."

The exhibition A Modern Artist: The Commercial Art of Rachael Robinson Elmer will be on view through October 24th.

Thanks, Courtney Clinton and John A. Gallucci

Sfumato in Interior Paintings

The The Siesta by Jehan Georges Vibert shows a rustic inn in Spain.

Jehan Georges Vibert The siesta (La Sieste), 1862

 The level of finish and the soft lighting seem inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting.

Painted when he was just 22 years old, this was Jehan Georges Vibert's first painting exhibited at the Paris Salon, and it was later exhibited in England, where it led to his popularity there.

Julius Olsson

Moonlit Shore by Julius Olsson 1911

Julius Olsson (1864-1942) was a seascape painter specializing in moonlit scenes. He was also an enthusiastic yachtsman, which explains why he was so interested in capturing the many moods of the sea.

Examples of his work in Art UK

Olsson on the Tate Museum website

Georgy Nissky and the Severe Style

Georgy Nissky (Russian, 1903 - 1987) painted the industrial landscape of Russia in what became known as the severe style. 

He did illustrations for newspapers, posters and billboards, always attracted to industrial subjects and the human landscape.

In the 1930s, many of his paintings develop angular rhythms, flat textures, and exaggerated shapes, often featuring railroads or other transport. 

More about Georgy Nissky on Wikipedia.