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Francisco de Goya Yard with Madmen 1794 Courtesy Meadows Museum, Dallas |
One notices, for example, the delicate modesty of the shadows in a Renaissance painting by Giovanni Bellini. These are supportive shadows, from an era when shadow was a painterly discovery, an aid to the rendering of perspective. Their subtlety lends a rounded clarity to Bellini’s religious theme without intruding on the brightness of the scene. They are shadows held in check by holy light. His dialogue between shadow and light is ongoing through the show, as if it is the function of shadow to define the nature of light. In a Rembrandt painting, poised on the edge of a new secular era, we see shadows take the form of impalpable projections from a high window that lend a febrile pulse to an interior space, an element of mystery that enhances the naturalness of the image and wraps it in a humanist touch. Nearby, a de La Tour painting shows shadow as an impenetrable darkness, an envelope of night carved into form by the light of a single candle. The darkness is as hard as stone; and yet it is a theatre of intimacy.
As a space and a substance, shadow carries a progressive presence in western art. As one moves through the show at both of its venues, it becomes clear that the movement of time and history brings an enhanced awareness of the imaginative links between shadow and darkness. In a Goya, it fills the corners of a courtyard in a madhouse. In a Menzel, the shadows of an interior staircase become apparitions, the edges of a dark unknown. The Belgian painter Léon Spillaert fashions symbolist landscapes where darkness is the norm and all human forms are blank silhouettes. As time passes, the art shows shadows that begin to be invested with an independent otherness, not the cool balance of daylight that we see in Impressionist painting, but a parallel darkworld where shadows begin to act out an overlapping drama, whether it is de Chirico’s architectures of shadow, Christian Schad’s hovering demons, or Picasso’s looming and dominating male shadow that registers as the projection of a gendered gaze.
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Giorgio de Chirico The Anguished Morning 1912 Courtesy Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto |
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