Electric Contrasts Study Evening

About

Electric Contrasts: The Art of the Detail brings together photobooks and magazines to show how the revolution of photography in the late 19th and early 20th century changed the history of art. Electric Contrasts takes Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1938 book One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery as a starting point to illuminate the impact black and white photographic details of Old Master paintings had on new ways of seeing in the early 20th century. The Bowes Art and Architecture Library exhibition reveals the anachronistic and provocative juxtapositions of artworks in avant-garde magazines and books which created a radically new vision that would go on to influence television and the internet.

This Study Evening brings together Geraldine Johnson and Alexander Nemerov to discuss the role of the detail in art history, moderated by the exhibition’s curator, Altair Brandon-Salmon.

6:00pm: Tour of the Electric Contrasts exhibition in Bowes Art and Architecture Library with Altair Brandon-Salmon6:30pm: Introduction to the Study Evening with Altair Brandon-Salmon, Oshman Hall6:40pm: Geraldine Johnson on Medardo Rosso7:00pm: Alexander Nemerov on André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence7:20pm: Audience Q&AGeraldine Johnson is Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. She will discuss the Italian sculptor-photographer Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) and his deployment of details from installation shots taken at the 1904 Salon d'Automne in Paris in his own photographs and collages. He used these details to produce new works of aesthetic interest in their own right, as well as in a campaign waged through the art press to prove that he was the true inventor of 'Impressionist' sculpture. By cropping photographs of work by Modern 'masters' such as Rodin and Cézanne, whom he saw as rivals, and Old masters such as Michelangelo, Rosso created an entirely new form of photographic assemblage that undermined established notions of sculptural materiality and conventions for photographing sculpture. The result was, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, a form of art-making that "gesture[s] toward the unseeable side of objects."

Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. In his talk, he will focus on the book The Voices of Silence (1951), where André Malraux reproduces a detail from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642), bestowing extraordinary importance on a figure who might otherwise seem sheerly of background interest. The detail, bringing out the strangeness, even eeriness of the figure—in effect, creating that strangeness (for the black-and-white detail is even odder than the figure in the painting)—Malraux creates a time-bound human: a figure bonded to Rembrandt’s time, and to the mid-20th century, and to some other time, not known to human beings, whose coordinates are outer space.