Folding screens and screen doors originated in China and Japan, probably during the 12th century (or possibly earlier), and screen painting continued as a traditional form into the 20th. They are in ink or gouache on plain or gilded paper and silk. Their vivid rendering of animals, birds, and flowers and their atmospheric landscapes brought nature indoors. In some screens each panel was designed as an individual painting, while in others a continuous pattern flowed freely across the divisions. Japanese screens were often painted in complementary yin and yang pairs. Large 12-panel Chinese coromandel lacquer screens were imported into Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. French Rococo boudoir screens depicting fêtes champêtres (townspeople enjoying rural surroundings) and toile de Jouy (landscape or floral) pastoral themes were painted on silk or on wood panels in a flamboyantly scrolled, gilded framework. The designs of Art Nouveau screens were inspired by the Japanese tradition. Sidney Nolan’s screens on Greek themes and the pastiches of Victorian paper-scrap screens by Pop art painters are recent Western revivals. Traditional to the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches is the iconostasis screen, which stands between the nave and sanctuary and displays icon panel paintings representing the Virgin, the saints, and narrative subjects.
Genji monogatari: Miotsukushi, centre detail of left screen of a pair of sixfold screens by Sōtatsu, colour on gold-leafed paper; in the Seikado Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo.The Seikado Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo
Rigid fans are depicted in the paintings and reliefs of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, but the oldest surviving specimens are the round and folding fans from East Asia. These were painted in India ink and colour on paper, card, and silk, the ground often sprinkled with gold dust or laid with gold or silver leaf. Spread freely across the mount, a calligraphic design depicted seasonal landscapes, genre scenes, and bird, flower, and animal motifs, with accompanying poems and commentaries. Leading Asian painters produced much of their finest work in this form. In Europe, however, where fan painting had been rarely practiced until the 17th century, it was considered a minor art, and designs were often based on frescoes and easel paintings. The richest and most elegant of these were painted in France and Italy during the 18th century. Watercolour and gouache paintings and hand-coloured engraved designs were made on paper, card, kid, and gauze. Allegories and romantic pastoral landscapes were frequently designed as separate vignettes, linked by floral swags and border scrolls. Both sides of the mount might be painted. The guards and sticks of the spoke framework were in delicately carved wood or ivory, inlaid with gold leaf or mother-of-pearl. Round hand-screens of parchment, mounted on handles like lollipops, were popular in early 19th-century English society. Charles Conder was a notable fin de siècle (“end of the century,” characterized by effete sophistication) fan painter, and, in the early 20th century, Oskar Kokoschka decorated a lively set of fans on an autobiographical narrative theme.
Vernis Martin fan with mother-of-pearl guards, French, early 18th century; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonCourtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
Panoramas
Panoramas were intended to simulate the sensation of scanning an extensive urban or country view or seascape. This form of painting was popular at the end of the 18th century. Notable examples are The Battle of Agincourt (1805), by R.K. Porter, and the Mesdag Panorama (1881), by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Panoramas might be compared to Cinerama films and enjoyed as a stimulating optical entertainment, along with cyclorama drums (large pictorial representations encircling the spectator), trompe l’oeil diorama peep shows, and the show box, for which Thomas Gainsborough painted glass transparencies. More serious forms of panoramic painting are exemplified in Chinese Buddhist sanctuary frescoes, Asian hand scrolls, Dürer’s watercolour townscapes, Andrey Rublyov’s 14th-century mural of Moscow, and Uccello’s original sequence of three panels depicting the Battle of San Romano. Modern forms
The concept of painting as a medium for creating illusions of space, volume, texture, light, and movement on a flat, stationary support was challenged by many modern artists. Some late 20th-century forms, for example, blurred the conventional distinctions between the mediums of sculpture and painting. Sculptors such as David Smith, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Philip Sutton made multicoloured constructions; painters such as Jean Arp and Ben Nicholson created abstract designs in painted wood relief, and Richard Smith painted on three-dimensional canvas structures the surfaces of which curl and thrust toward the spectator. And, rather than deny the essential flatness of the painting support by using traditional methods of representing volume and texture, Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine attached real objects and textures to the painted surface, and Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland designed their irregularly shaped canvases to be seen as explicitly flat art objects. Rejecting earlier painting methods of reproducing effects of light with tonal contrasts and broken pigment colour, some artists made use of neon tubes and mirrors. Instead of simulating sensations of movement by optical illusion, others designed kinetic panels and boxes in which coloured shapes revolved under electric power. The traditional definition of painting as a visual, concrete art form was questioned by Conceptual art, in which the painter’s idea might be expressed only in the form of documented proposals for unrealized and often unrealizable projects. In performance art and happenings, which employed techniques akin to those used in theatre, the artists themselves became a kind of medium.
“Monogram,” combine painting (mixed media) by Robert Rauschenberg, 1959; in the Moderna Museet, StockholmModerna Museet, Stockholm/Photograph: Statens Konstmuseer
Imagery and subject matter
The imagery and subject matter of paintings in early cultures were generally prescribed by tribal, religious, or dynastic authorities. In some Eastern countries, traditional models survived into the 18th century and even later. With the Renaissance, however, images and themes in Western painting, reflecting the new spirit of humanistic, objective curiosity and scientific research, came to be decided by the artist and his patron and, in later periods, by the artist alone. Kinds of imagery
Within the various cultures the art of representing things by painted images has rarely shown a continuously developing pattern toward greater realism. More often, religious and philosophical precepts have determined the degree of naturalism permitted. Rules governing portrayals of the human figure have been particularly stringent in certain traditions of representational painting, reflecting different attitudes to the cosmic significance of humans. For example, a belief in human inferiority in relation to an almighty deity is expressed in the faceless figures of early Jewish painting and in the stylizations of Byzantine imagery; and human insignificance against the dynamic forces of nature is symbolized in Chinese landscape paintings by man’s puny scale within a monumental setting. An earlier view, which instead sought to glorify the spiritual, intellectual, and physical attributes of humankind, is typified in the noble figures of Greco-Roman art and in the renewed celebration of human physical beauty in the Renaissance and subsequent Neoclassical styles. The uniqueness of humans among living things and the expression of individual physical and emotional characteristics are exemplified in Japanese and northern European narrative and genre painting. Concomitant with the antipathy toward figurative representation in some cultures was a general distaste for the portrayal of all things of the exterior world, animals, landscape features, and other natural forms rarely appearing except as stylized images signifying spiritual forces of good and evil. The representational imagery of modern painting borrows freely from ancient and contemporary sources such as untrained and child art, Classical mythology, commercial advertising, press photography, and the allegories and fantasies of the motion picture and the comic strip. Nonrepresentational imagery is not restricted to modern painting but appears also in earlier forms such as Aurignacian (Paleolithic) decorative meanders, the scrollwork of Celtic illuminations, and the patterns of Islamic Kūfic calligraphy (an angular variety of the Arabic alphabet). And the abstraction of natural forms into rudimentary symbols, characteristic of modern painting, is echoed in the “pin-men” conventions of Magdalenian caves, in Aztec pictograms, and Indian and Tibetan cosmic-diagram paintings. Kinds of subject matter Devotional