Ingres in the details.

I was looking at reproductions of Ingres’ drawings and noticed that he was doing something similar to my white room + details idea. In this drawing, for instance, as in many of his, the face is worked out with more refinement and detail than the rest of the body. It feels a little bit odd when you start noticing this pattern in his drawings.

To a contemporary viewer, the oddness gets worse. After a century of modernism, and an unprecedented familiarity with photographic images, many of us would be inclined to appreciate the drawing of the body more than that of the face. In the loose lines that represent the fabric of the clothing, we enjoy seeing the hand of the artist. But when our eye moves to the face, we lose interest. She just looks like a woman, not unlike many depictions on Flickr.

When we move to a full painting, it probably becomes very difficult for us to appreciate the craft of the artist. Certainly, we admire the image for its content and aesthetics. But it takes quite a bit of concentration and experience to fully realize that this image was produced by a hand of a man, painstakingly applying paint to a canvas. Craft is far easier to recognize, for us, in the drawing of the clothing.

Will players of Bientôt l’été appreciate the empty space of the beach more than sparse detailed objects in it? I wonder.