Riffed ‘n Recycled

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In recent V. Notes I talked about how artists learn and get inspired by studying works by other artists. I posted transcriptions by Jonathan Harkham, and I posted Frank Auerbach’s Transcriptions after Titian.

In art, to transcribe is to copy or record information in a different form than the original. To transcribe a painting or drawing is not to copy the artwork exactly, but instead to record observations in a different form. A transcription also doesn’t need to copy everything in an original. An artist can choose to pull selected aspects of information here and there from within an artwork. An artist can choose to transcribe a color palette, size relationships, or an idea from an original. For many artists, the goal is not a perfect and complete copy of an artwork, but instead to use the artwork as a jumping off point to further their own work.

Today I have generations of images that were borrowed from one artwork to another, as they carried figures from antiquity to today. Above is a recent artwork by Ayana V. Jackson riffing off of Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, below. Ayana brings black women, often unseen in artworks, to take the place of Manet’s scandalous (at the time) portrayal of the world’s first modernist nude.  

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Female nudes are common throughout the history of art, but until The Luncheon on the Grass, nudes had always represented figures from mythology or allegory. By placing a “girl next door” (and possibly a prostitute?) in an everyday setting, and by having her look directly at the viewer while the other characters seem to act out a play, Manet brought us a disconcertingly direct nude, and he delivered her with a twist of irony.

“So, they’d prefer me to do a nude, would they? Fine I’ll do them a nude . . . Then I suppose they’ll really tear me to pieces. They’ll tell me I’m just copying the Italians now, rather than the Spanish. Ah, well, they can say what they like.” -” Manet in a letter to French journalist Antonin Proust in 1862.

Where did this disconcertingly normal nude come from? Irony does cartwheels in front of our faces, because the scene came directly from Raphael’s The Judgement of Paris, a mythological scene in which Paris is called to judge who is the fairest: Aphrodite, Hera, or Athena.

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But wait – these figures go back even further! Raphael made a drawing with this painting, and though we don’t have the drawing any longer (it was gone before Manet), we know that he took his figures directly from Marcantonio Raimondi’s etching The Judgement of Paris. The etching was part of of an ongoing collaboration between Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael. Raimondi designed the print specifically so it could be replicated, and hoped the work would be a starting point for his art to spread. Time has proven his method effective, as this composition continues to be riffed and recycled from antiquity to today.

How many