From the end of the 18th century, profiles and full-length group portraits were cut in black paper, mounted on white card, and often highlighted in gold or white. A silhouette (“shade”) might be first outlined from the sitter’s cast shadow with the aid of a physionotrace. American artist Kara Walker revived the silhouette technique with a series of controversial works that commented on race, gender, and class.
Silhouette portrait by Charles Willson Peale; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Collage
Collage was the Dada and Synthetic Cubist technique of combining labels, tickets, newspaper cuttings, wallpaper scraps, and other “found” surfaces with painted textures. Among the most lyrical and inventive works in this magpie medium are the so-called Merz collages by Kurt Schwitters. Frottage was Max Ernst’s method of taking paper rubbings from surfaces, unrelated to one another in real life, and combining them to create fantasy landscapes. Cut paper shapes, hand coloured in gouache, were used by Matisse for his monumental last paintings; Piet Mondrian composed his famous Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–43) in coloured-paper cutouts. Mechanical mediums
The use of mechanical mediums in painting has run parallel to similar developments in modern music and drama. In the field of cybernetics, painters have programmed computers to permutate drawings, photographs, diagrams, and symbols through sequences of progressive distortion; and light patterns are produced on television screens by deliberate magnetic interference and by sound-wave oscillations. Artists have also explored the expressive and aesthetic possibilities of linear holograms, in which all sides of an object can be shown by superimposed light images. Painters are among those who have extended the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. Examples include the Surrealist film fantasies created by Berthold Bartosch, Jean Cocteau, Hans Richter, and Salvador Dalí, by Schlemmer’s filmed ballets and Norman McLaren’s hand-painted abstract animations.
For some Conceptual artists, language was the medium. Words themselves—spelled out in neon or LED lights or projected on gallery or public walls—served as art for artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Jenny Holzer. Mixed mediums
Some pictures are first painted in one medium and corrected or enriched with colour and texture in another. Examples of this kind of mixed mediums are the Renaissance tempera-oil technique, William Blake’s relief etchings colour-printed in glue tempera and hand-finished in watercolour, and Degas’s overpainted monotypes and his combinations of pastel, gouache, and oil. More recent examples are Richard Hamilton’s photographs overpainted in oil colour, Dubuffet’s patchwork assemblages of painted canvas and paper, and Klee’s alchemy in mixing ingredients such as oil and distemper on chalk over jute and watercolour and wax on muslin stuck on wood.
Klee, Pauclass="underline" Ventriloquist and Crier in the MoorVentriloquist and Crier in the Moor, watercolour and transferred printing ink on paper by Paul Klee, 1923; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984, 1984.315.35, www.metmuseum.org
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Forms of painting
Mural painting
Mural painting has its roots in the primeval instincts of people to decorate their surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a form for expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In their universal manifestation in graffiti and in ancient murals, such as cave paintings and protodynastic Egyptian frescoes, symbols and representational images have been spread freely and indiscriminately across walls, ceilings, and floors. But, in more disciplined attempts to symbolize the importance and function of particular buildings through their interior decoration, murals have been designed for the restricted framework of specific surface areas. They therefore have to be painted in close relationship to the scale, style, and mood of the interior and with regard to such siting considerations as light sources, eye levels, the spectators’ lines of sight and means of approach, and the emotive scale relationship between spectators and the painted images.
Murals in the Tomb of SennedjemMurals depicting scenes from the afterlife, in the Tomb of Sennedjem, Thebes, Egypt. Sylvain Grandadam/age fotostock
Early mural decorations for tombs, temples, sanctuaries, and catacombs were generally designed in horizontal divisions and vertical axes. These grid patterns were in harmony with the austere character of the interiors, and their geometrical plan enabled the artist to depict clearly the various episodes and symbols of a narrative subject. In these early traditions of mural design, in China, India, Mexico, Egypt, Crete, and Byzantium, no illusionary devices were used to deny the true flatness of the wall surface; images were silhouetted against a flatly painted ground framed by decorative dadoes (the decoration adorning the lower part of an interior wall) of stylized motifs in repeat patterns. By the early Renaissance, however, innovators such as Giotto, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico were placing figures within architectural and landscape settings, painted as if extensions to the real dimensions of the interior. The peak of technical skill and artistic expression was reached in the 15th and 16th centuries with the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The irregular shapes of wall areas and the distortions produced by convex surfaces were inventively exploited in the design. Intruding doors and windows, for example, were skillfully circumvented by sweeping pattern rhythms or were incorporated as features in the painting, and figures were foreshortened so as to appear to float across or to rise into cupolas (rounded vaults that form ceilings), lunettes (rounded spaces over doors or windows), and apses (domed projections of a church, usually at the east end or altar), the curving surfaces of which might be painted to simulate celestial skies. Existing structural wall features provided the divisions between narrative episodes. These were often supplemented by trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) columns, pilasters, arcading, balustrading, steps, and other architectural forms that also served to fuse the painted setting with the real interior.
The Annunciation, fresco by Fra Angelico, 1438–45; in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
With the increasing dependence upon tapestry hangings and stained glass as primary forms of interior decoration, mural painting suffered a decline in the Western world. Except for those given to Rubens, Tiepolo, Delacroix, and Puvis de Chavannes, there were relatively few important mural commissions in the period following the High Renaissance. In the 20th century, however, enlightened patronage occasionally enabled leading modern artists to execute paintings for specific sites: Monet’s Water-Lilies series for the Paris Orangerie, for example, and other murals in France by Vuillard, Matisse, Léger, Chagall, and Picasso; in Mexico and the United States by Orozco, Rivera, Tamayo, and David Siqueiros, and also in the United States by Matisse, Shahn, Keith Haring, and Willem de Kooning; in Britain by Sir Stanley Spencer and Bawden; in Norway by Edvard Munch; in the Netherlands by Karel Appel; and in Italy by Afro Basaldella. Easel and panel painting