Ben Lifson
New member
Painterly: A Classic Definition
from the art historian Charles de Tolnay, from his History and Technique of Old Master Drawing, whose comments and explanations of the power of drawing are of great use to photographers, since photography was originally (and rightly) perceived to be a branch of drawing.
The text below is two dense paragraphs from his book. I've broken them up into units of thought, for easier reading.
de Tolnay actually calls the method Pictorialist but when I give examples of Heinrich Wolfllin's definitions of painterly (as soon as I can find them in my folders) you'll see that de Tolnay's Pictorialism and Wolfflin's Painterly are the same thing.
de Tolnay:
The pictorialist method...takes the surface [of the work: the paper] as a symbol of concrete space saturated with light and atmosphere.....objects are no longer isolated but seem to be enveloped by this atmosphere and to share its life. Sometimes they are so completely absorbed that they no longer seem solid but simple condensations of the atmosphere itself.
The entire drawing is a homogeneous unity differentiated only by subtle values. Contours have their significance as limits. They are dissolved into little flecks or points. The modeling often passes through the forms with no regard for their limits, thus transforming them into degrees of light and darkness. Instead of lines one sees masses.
Touch always devours line, says Baudelaire.
The untouched paper gives the impression of light and, together with the dark touches, creates a pictorial effect.
In this method the artist no longer concentrates upon the isolated forms but upon the total effect. He abandons the anthropocentric for the cosmocentric point of view. He contemplates the spectacle of nature as it actually appears to him.
As Baudelaire said,
Colorists draw like nature, their figures are naturally compromised by the harmonious battle of colored masses.
Artists who work in this method must renounce precision in their characterization of individual objects, but they gain a greater exactitude in the characterization of the whole. They renounce the truth of detail in order to seek the truth of the Infinite.
The many excellent examples of painterly (or pictorial) drawing in de Tolnay's book at once clarify and support this definition.
from the art historian Charles de Tolnay, from his History and Technique of Old Master Drawing, whose comments and explanations of the power of drawing are of great use to photographers, since photography was originally (and rightly) perceived to be a branch of drawing.
The text below is two dense paragraphs from his book. I've broken them up into units of thought, for easier reading.
de Tolnay actually calls the method Pictorialist but when I give examples of Heinrich Wolfllin's definitions of painterly (as soon as I can find them in my folders) you'll see that de Tolnay's Pictorialism and Wolfflin's Painterly are the same thing.
de Tolnay:
The pictorialist method...takes the surface [of the work: the paper] as a symbol of concrete space saturated with light and atmosphere.....objects are no longer isolated but seem to be enveloped by this atmosphere and to share its life. Sometimes they are so completely absorbed that they no longer seem solid but simple condensations of the atmosphere itself.
The entire drawing is a homogeneous unity differentiated only by subtle values. Contours have their significance as limits. They are dissolved into little flecks or points. The modeling often passes through the forms with no regard for their limits, thus transforming them into degrees of light and darkness. Instead of lines one sees masses.
Touch always devours line, says Baudelaire.
The untouched paper gives the impression of light and, together with the dark touches, creates a pictorial effect.
In this method the artist no longer concentrates upon the isolated forms but upon the total effect. He abandons the anthropocentric for the cosmocentric point of view. He contemplates the spectacle of nature as it actually appears to him.
As Baudelaire said,
Colorists draw like nature, their figures are naturally compromised by the harmonious battle of colored masses.
Artists who work in this method must renounce precision in their characterization of individual objects, but they gain a greater exactitude in the characterization of the whole. They renounce the truth of detail in order to seek the truth of the Infinite.
The many excellent examples of painterly (or pictorial) drawing in de Tolnay's book at once clarify and support this definition.
