Date: Unknown
Technique: Oil on canvas
Showing posts with label Antoine Wiertz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antoine Wiertz. Show all posts
7/4/14
Antoine Wiertz, Human Insatiability (Insatiabilité humaine)
Date: Unknown
Technique: Oil on canvas
9/28/12
9/7/12
5/25/11
Antoine Wiertz, Last Thoughts and The Visions of a Guillotined Head
Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Date: 1853
Technique: Oil on canvas
Wiertz depicts an execution by guillotine in three panels. The first suggests a low-angle view of the headless body, our gaze guided upwards by the pointing finger of a spectator in the foreground; the second presents a high-angle view as our now downward gaze is divided between the falling body and the decapitated head which, resting in the bottom right corner of the frame, leads us into the third panel. At this point, Wiertz 'jump cuts' dramatically from a spectator's view of events to a 'subjective shot' of the "last thoughts and visions of a decapitated head", presenting us with an extraordinary, expressionistic sensory whorl where objects and people become indistinct. And so the staccato movement across the three panels operates likes a sequence of filmic montage, bursting with the sort of rhythmic and psychological energy that film directors like Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein would unleash upon the audiences of their experimental silent epics of the 1920s.
Source 1
Source 2
12/14/10
12/11/10
Antoine Wiertz, Guillotined Head (Une tête coupée)
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Source
Date: 1855
Technique: Oil on canvas, 43 x 57 cm
11/27/10
Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial (L'inhumation précipitée)
Musée Wiertz, Brussels
Date: 1854
Technique: Oil on canvas, 160 x 235 cm
Art commentator, Jeffery Howe, suggests that Wiertz was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, in whose fiction premature burial is a recurring theme (e.g. the short story entitled The Premature Burial, Madeleine in The Fall Of The House Of Usher, and Fortunato in The Cask Of Amontillado). Poe had been dead five years by the time this painting appeared, though doubtless would have approved of its memorable evocation of a fervid, nightmarish scene. In fact, the work of Wiertz, Poe and Lautréamont (Maldoror and Poems) - all three working around the same time - displays a common obsession with extreme states of consciousness, manifest in romanticised imagery of menacing, grotesque, violent, erotic and tragic proportions.
Source
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