Date: c. 1887
Technique: Charcoal and graphite with stumping on ivory wove paper, laid down on wood pulp board, 40 x 21 cm
Showing posts with label Fernand Khnopff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fernand Khnopff. Show all posts
6/26/14
Fernand Khnopff, The Veil
Date: c. 1887
Technique: Charcoal and graphite with stumping on ivory wove paper, laid down on wood pulp board, 40 x 21 cm
6/24/11
1/11/11
Fernand Khnopff, L’Offrande (The Offering)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Date: 1891
Technique: Pastel, graphite, and chalk on paper, 34.9 x 74.9 cm
Source
12/17/10
Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset, under the firs (A Fosset. Sous les sapins)
Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Date: 1894
Technique: Oil on canvas, 66,5 x 45,2 cm
12/15/10
Fernand Khnopff, An Abandoned City (Une ville abandonnée)
Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Date: 1904
Technique: Pastel and pencil on paper, 76 x 69 cm
12/5/10
Fernand Khnopff, Head of a Woman (Tête de femme)
Private collection
Date: c. 1899
Technique: Coloured pencil on paper, 29.5 x 29.5 cm
12/1/10
Fernand Khnopff, An Angel (Un ange)
Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
Date: c. 1889
Technique: Enhanced photograph (picture platinum accented with colored pencils) , 29,5 x 18,4 cm
The invention of photography enabled the Symbolist artists to develop a new working instrument and performing, but above all it offered to art a new sense of complicity vision, emotion and creation. Through its focus on photography, practicing and following the evolution of new techniques, Khnopff joined the generation of artists whose goal was to create not threatened its integrity. Like Gustave Moreau, Alphonse Mucha, Edvard Munch and Franz von Stuck he used the photo as sketch and composition as a collection of images from living memory. However, it is one of the few artists to have recaptured the shots of his own works to recreate new originals.
For ten years, photographer Alexander made photographs of existing works of Khnopff and printed on photographic quality paper that went on cards bearing his stamp dry Alexander PHOTO '. The process of making and printing used by Alexander was described as platinogravure. It was a very expensive process which was reserved for high quality professional work such as reproduction and artistic portraits mark. In his artist's mind Khnopff considered each drawing as a new original work, cut to size, as miniaturized. (From Anne Adriaens-Pannier, in cat. Khnopff)
Source
11/28/10
Fernand Khnopff, Istar
Private collection
Date: 1888
Technique: Chalk on paper; 16.5 x 7 cm
Istar is a novel by Joséphin Péladan first published in 1888 with a frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff, depicting a woman, head thrown back in ecstasy and completely devoid of surrounding except for a phallic tentacled plant that grows toward her pubic area. Jean Delville noted in his comment on Khnopff’s work:
Khnopff has created a type of ideal woman. Are they really women? Are they not rather imaginary feminites? They partake at the same time of the Idol, of the Chimera, of the Sphinx and of the Saint. They are rather plastic androgynes, subtle symbols, conceived according to an abstract idea and rendered visible. (Howe, 48)
Source
11/24/10
Fernand Khnopff, The Sphinx or The Caresses (Kunst - Die Zärtlichkeit der Sphinx)
Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
Date: 1896
Technique: Oil on canvas, 50 × 150 cm
On one level, it seems likely that this painting was inspired by Honoré de Balzac's story "A Passion in the Desert." It recounted the strange love that developed between a soldier of Napoleon's army, lost in the Egyptian wastes, and a female panther. Balzac described the animal's sinuous body and movements, her spots and ringed tail, and the soldier's caresses.
But of course this is not a panther, not even a cheetah, though Khnopff painted a cheetah's body. This is a sphinx. Enigmatic and dangerous, it was one of the common guises for a fin-de-siècle femme fatale. Through mythology or the mysterious Orient, women could be presented as exotic and voluptuous -- that is, in ways that were subject to deeply felt anxieties but whose representation lay outside the boundaries of convention. In the popular imagination, even in the scientific literature, women were not regarded as fully rational beings, and their impulses, unchecked, posed a threat. Consider art nouveau's other femmes fatales: Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon, whose look turned men to stone, and Salomé, whose dance was rewarded with the head of John the Baptist.
The sphinx devoured all who failed to answer her riddle: "What walks on four legs, two legs, and three legs?" So it is natural to see Khnopff's youth as Oedipus, who answered her: "Man, crawling as a baby, walking an adult, and using a cane when old." Already in ancient times, the sphinx had come to represent knowledge, of good and evil, life and death. In William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes," she "lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the / moon / gazed upon all things known, all things / unknown, / In triumph of intellect / With motionless head erect."
In another way, the youth can be seen as a symbolic portrait of the artist, and the painting as alluding to art itself. At times it has been called L'Art. The pansy above the youth's ear (in French pensée means both "pansy" and "thought") was an emblem Khnopff sometimes used as his signature. The sphinx (like almost all of Khnopff's females) resembles the artist's sister Margueritte. For that matter, the youth resembles her as well, and this androgyny accounts for much of the painting's unsettling effect. Androgyny was central to the notion of art espoused by Khnopff's friend Joséphin Péladan, a novelist, spiritualist, and descendant, he claimed, of the Magi. In art alone could the union of male and female -- creation -- be complete. Khnopff has been called a "painter of the invisible," his images merely physical expressions of an idea.
Source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)