NO TRANSPARENT PAINTING

This is the last post on the Rowe and Slutsky essay that we have been following this week.

Rowe and Slutsky focus solely on oil painting in their discussion of Literal and Phenomenal transparency. They search for transparency in Cubist paintings.  They talk about the shallow space that is created in these works.  And of course all of those were oil.  Their essay does not address drawing.

Transparent Drawing would be possible, yet basically impractical with oil paints.  Could you imagine having to mix specific colors to make the planes look like they were overlapping?  Only Joseph Albers could do that with oil.  I guess that’s why this site is not called Transparent Painting.

Yet Rowe and Slutsky’s focus on transparency is fundamentally a two dimensional understanding. As I said above, they address the painter’s canvas and the depiction of transparency. They give the example of stratifying a painting of Le Corbusier into separate two dimensional layers. A two dimensional painting is divided into smaller two dimensional elements. Yet there is no volume and no enclosure.

They really never get beyond the two dimensional plane. They do not address volume nor do they address enclosure. And this is despite the fact that Kepes, in his excellent meditation on transparency which starts their essay, is speaking about three dimensional volumes in the description that we read about.

The axonometric above, on the left, was created by Bernhard Hoesli.   The painting on the right is by LeCorbusier and is titled Still Life, 1920.  A link to the Architecturality blog which provides a discussion of Rowe and Slutksy’s essay.