Titian was silently painting the portrait of the Emperor Charles V when he accidentally dropped his brush. The Emperor, then the most powerful man in the Western world, is reputed to have bowed down to the floor, picked up the paintbrush, and, with reverence, handed it back to Titian. Assuming the event actually took place, the Emperor’s solemn gesture acknowledges the proffered paintbrush as a sacred instrument of high office; Titian, like himself, a Head of State, the Emperor of Painters.
In terms of technique, Titian stood unmatched, an outlier from the prevailing Florentine-informed canon dictating tight drawing and accurate linear perspective. For Titian those matters were entirely secondary to the energetic possibilities of the brush; his strokes looser, bolder, gestural and expressive with the sheer liquid lusciousness of the oil medium itself. Titian’s contemporary Vasari was entranced:
‘these last works are executed with bold strokes and dashed off with a broad and even coarse sweep of the brush, insomuch that from near little can be seen, but from a distance they appear perfect.’
Nearly a hundred years later, inspired by Titian’s sensual freedom in the very action of painting itself, and continuing his flight in the face of classical academic tradition, Rubens and Van Dyck in Flanders, and Velazquez and then Murillo in Spain, followed Titian’s example; like gently cascading dominoes, other painters followed suit: Frans Hals and Rembrandt in Holland, then Tiepolo and Guardi in Venice and Gainsborough and Kauffmann in England a hundred years after that, Delacroix in France fifty years later, and so on and on, to the dismayed admiration of the classicists who realised that this brushwork was unteachable. Reynolds remarked of Gainsborough’s work, after his great rival’s death in 1788:
‘this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places’.
The liberated brushstroke led to the freedoms of Corot and Boudin in mid 19c France. In the later 19c Monet and Cezanne found they could construct painting anew, whether of water or rock, by using the new flat ferrule brushes which had almost replaced rounded brushes in the 1840s. American artists like Henri and Bellows saw this new broad brush as ideal for capturing the vigour of American urban life. By the mid 20c in France and America only the huge board-like strokes of Pierre Soulages and Franz Kline could hold down the tensions and anxieties of the Post-War Age. Later abstractionists of the sixties and beyond such as De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and Gillian Ayres seem to have softened those concerns with a return to the ecstatic sweeping movements of the Titian school. To give the brushstroke still more depth and texture, materials such as sawdust or sand were added to the brushstroke by Antoni Tapies, Sandra Blow and Anselm Kiefer. Thus the expressive brushstroke captured the quivering of life itself, with all its ecstasies and anxieties, just as the 19c critic Baudelaire had prophesied.
But the paintbrush alone does not create the expressive brushstroke. The brush and the painter’s stroke must be one. The medium becomes the message, and the brushstroke becomes a leading instrument of the new painting of the 20c.
Do join us on a journey through the cultural story of the brushstroke, from 16c Venice to 20c Germany, following the excitement of the artist’s emboldened hand!
NB:
The course, in two parts, will be held on Wednesdays at 11 am, and repeated on Thursdays at 4 pm.
Part I begins on Wednesday 8 February at 11 am and ends on Thursday 16 March at 4 pm.
Part II will follow beginning on Wednesday 10 May and ending on Thursday 22 June.
Booking Information:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This online course via Zoom has been developed by Louise Friend and Nicholas Friend. It will be presented by Nicholas Friend, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Inscape. It is held on Wednesdays and repeated on Thursdays, beginning on Wednesday 8 February 2023 at 11 am and ending on Thursday 16 March 2023 at 4 pm.
You may choose to attend individual sessions or all six. If you would like to attend but cannot manage a particular date, then be assured we will be sending recordings of sessions to all participants. Each session meets from 20 minutes before the advertised time of the lecture, and each lecture lasts roughly one hour, with around 15 minutes discussion.
Cost: £270 members or £330 non-members for the course of 6 sessions or £45 members or £55 non-members per individual session. All sessions are limited to 21 participants to permit an after-lecture discussion session.
Due to the coronavirus cheques are not a viable option at this time. Instead, please make your payment to Friend&Friend Ltd by bank transfer to our account with Metrobank, bank sort code 23-05-80, account number 13291721 or via PayPal to nicholas@inscapetours.co.uk, or credit/debit card by phone to Henrietta on 07940 719397. She is available Tuesdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm or Thursdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm. Do get in touch if you would like extra support learning how to use Zoom.
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How to Connect your Bank Account to your PayPal account:::::::::::::::::::::::
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How to Send Money::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
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