In my last blog, I touched
upon Picasso’s choice of not pursuing further and total abstraction back in
1911. Instead, he took a different path and
retained some figural representation in his works that shaped cubism and influenced
development of modern arts. Still, many
of these paintings are not easy to comprehend.
One reason and an important
technique found in cubism and modern arts is the use of multiple perspectives. That is,
a painting can be composed of multiple views of one or more objects on the same canvas. As a result, an object could be broken up
with each fragment being represented in different perspectives and placed once
or multiple times on the canvas.
Equipped with the
ability to recognize figurative representation of familiar objects, be it ultra
realistic, or partially abstract, we can still identify some of these scattered
fragments without too much difficulty. However,
at first sight, the resulting paintings look odd since they defy our visual
experience of the straightforward single perspective or snapshot view. There are many such examples including
Picasso’s 1918 Harlequin, his later
Surrealism works including the 1937 Weeping
Woman and the 1952 Girl in Chair
(see photos below, from left o right).
Note each part of
the human figure subject appeared only once in these paintings, regardless how out-of-place
it may be. It is then not a huge leap to
having multiple views of the same
part of a figure that appear on the same canvas simultaneously as shown in his work
1938 Head (see photo to the right)
Similarly, Marcel
Duchamp’s 1912 work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (see photo to the right) is also not difficult to decode. It brought even more directly the fourth-dimension,
namely, time into painting using
multiple perspectives (over time, in this case). The canvas can obviously be thought of as an
overlay of successive frames of a motion picture from a fixed vintage point in
which the subject walks down a staircase.
A little digression
is in order. One obvious motivation for
drawing and painting in human history has been to record and to represent what
one has seen through their eyes. To that
end, the first value judgment of such a record would naturally be the accuracy
of it, or how “realistic” is the painting compared to our experience. No wonder Leonardo Da Vinci had famously said
“The most praiseworthy form of painting
is the one that most resembles what it imitates.” That is exactly what the artists in
Renaissance were striving for 600 years ago – they wanted to make the painted
scenes look as natural and real to the viewers
as possible.
Renaissance artists’
solution to this challenge was Linear Perspective. It
was developed in Florence, Italy in early 1400’s whereby artists paint
the objects as they appear on an “imaginary window” in between the viewer and the
field of objects. More precisely, if one
draws a straight line between a point of the actual object and his/her eyes,
the intersection of this line and the imaginary window should be the location
of the corresponding representative point of the object on the canvas. Below is a popular example - the painting Ideal City by Piero della Francesca.
A consequence of
this viewer-centric projection method
is that objects further away from the viewer would appear smaller and parallel
tracks appear to converge into a point at infinity, the so called vanishing
point. However as the viewing angle
becomes wider and exceeds more than say 60 degrees such as in some landscape
paintings, it becomes difficult to represent accurately what our eyes see in a
two dimensional flat surface. Camera
fisheye lenses are photographer’s solution to this problem with a nonlinear
projection that carries a significant distortion.
Technically and
strictly speaking, there is no single or completely accurate representation that
works universally. For one, we are talking
about placing faithfully the details and relationships of all objects in a
three- or four-dimensional space (or space-time) onto a finite 2-dimensional
canvas. Further, viewer’s eyes are known
to wonder around the picture, consciously or unconsciously, and their brains do
produce varying responses depending on the order of and how the stimuli are presented.
Artists can express and communicate more
effectively if they can influence how viewers view and respond to their works. That is why perspective matters.
The implication of
the viewer-centric perspectives such
as the linear perspective is that the viewer naturally responds to and
interacts with the painting from outside
the painting. An alternate choice of the
representation is the parallel system
by which projection rays are parallel to each other. Such a system in fact has been used earlier
in Western and in many cultures/civilizations.
In fact it was used extensively in Chinese paintings for thousands of
years. Below are two examples from a
recent paper by Christopher W. Tyler and Chien-Chung Chen. The photo on the
left is Gu
Hong-zhong’s 顧閎中classic painting Han Xi-zai
Gives a Banquet (韓熙載夜宴圖) during Five
Dynasties 五代 (907~ 950 AD). On
the right is a wall painting of a Roman bakery from the 1st century found
in Pompei. For more detailed
discussions, one can refer to the paper Chinese perspective as a rational system: Relationship to Panofsky’s
symbolic form which was
published on Chinese Journal of
Psychology, Volume 53, Issue 4, Pages 371-470, December 2011.
The significance of
what parallel system offers, in contrast to that of linear (or non-linear, for
the matter) perspective, is the object-centricity
and viewer-independence. One no
longer relates to the painting through an invisible viewing window external to
it. Instead, one can be inside the painting and does not have a
fixed physical view. The beauty is that once
removed from the viewer-centricity constraint, artists can express freely their
own feelings, experiences, and imaginations, be it real or unreal. They don’t have to maintain consistent views of
all objects simultaneously from a fixed external viewer’s point of view! One result of it is the scene may appear odd
and obscure, and may not conform to our daily experiences. But who is to say one must be realistic and
adhere to the linear perspective of the Renaissance’s? On the right, you can see the photo of one of
the most revered classical Chinese landscape paintings. It is entitled Travellers among Mountains
and Streams (谿山行旅) and was painted with ink and slight color
on a 6¾ ft x 2½ ft silk scroll by Fan Kuan 范寬 It
is not realistic by the measure of linear perspective but nevertheless a
beautiful painting!
I would submit to
you that for this reason, parallel and mixed representational system with
multiple perspectives are often found in Cubism and other 20th
century modern arts. The brilliant contemporary
British artist David Hockney has made in-depth expositions on the topics
of perspective. In his 2012 interview with Martin Gayford first published on The Daily Telegraph, Hockney was quoted to have said: “Cubism
was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It
was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, ‘Things don’t
look like that!’ Actually cubism was concerned to claim: yes they do in a way.” He then went on and added that “In Picasso’s
pictures you can see the front and back of a person simultaneously. That means
you’ve walked round them. It’s a sort of memory picture; we make pictures like
that in our heads.”
David Hockey’s photo
collages and composite Polaroid pictures as he first re-examined Cubism back in
1980s are excellent examples of the importance and endless possibilities of distinct
perspective. Below are two of these collages on http://www.hockneypictures.com are
included here for your convenience. The one on the left is his 1983 work Walking in the Zen Garden, Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. The one on the right is his 1982 composite Polaroid photos Don & Christopher.
With it, you would
not be surprised then to hear that Hockey has been quite intrigued by the
classical Chinese scroll paintings as they addressed some of the very issue of
perspective in its own unique approach.
In scroll painting, in addition to using stationary single or multiple
perspectives, the representation of four-dimension time-space relations on a
two dimension space is accomplished by continuously shifting the perspective with
changing vintage point from right to left.
As one views only a small and a few feet wide portion of a seemingly
endless scroll at a time, the viewer is no longer bounded by a fixed and
bounded window – one of the very constraints that Dave Hockney was trying to remove in conventional western painting and photography.
Below is a brief
segment of the 47 minutes long 1988 documentary film entitled " A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of
China" by David Hockney and Philip Haas that discusses aspects of Perspective
in Chinese Scroll Painting. The subject is the late 17th century scroll painting The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern
Inspection Tour 康熙南巡图by Wang Hui王翚 and his team. It is a
series of twelve massive hand scrolls, each one measuring from forty to eighty
feet in length! The techniques of multiple
simultaneous perspectives and parallel system combined with shifting perspective can clearly be seen throughout. The first 10 minutes of the documentary is available on Youtube. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmMasnL5VZg). Enjoy them by just wondering around in the scenes and don't worry about the realism and don't try to view it from your imaginary external window!
Hope you find the subject of perspective fascinating which is found in many fields beyond arts including computer graphics. It definitely
helped me understand better the history and techniques in both Western and
Chinese Arts. Talk to you soon!
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