Some observations on a rainy day

In 1857, Hiroshige, one of the most important Japanese engravers of the XIX century printed a small image with the title “The Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake”, an integrating piece of the series of one hundred views of the Edo Era. This etching that would later be used by other artists as an example of compositive mastership and landscaping intensity, presents a bridge over a river and a group of five figures passing through the bridge during a shower of heavy rain. This spell of rain is, as the title of the piece refers, erratically, the most important element of the image, turned out to be an element of great consequence for the Ukiyo-e genre of Oriental painting, of which Hiroshige built the character of commercial painting to become what is known today as manga.

In 1880, Édouard Manet painted a small bunch of asparagus. This painting was sold to a collector for the sum of 800 francs and this gent, for mistake or philanthropy, sent 1000 francs to the artist, who later devolved the change in the form of a small picture of a single asparagus. This situation made a small stylistic exercise become one of the most striking political artworks ever, just because of the effectiveness of the statement that such a transaction allowed the artist to enact. Art and artistic practices are constantly invaded by the specter of money and often the arts dialogue with the broader socio economic reality in terms more or less agreeable and insinuating. Sometimes it demonstrates that artistic practices and money coexist as the exemplar Trojan horse of each other.

In 1904, Max Weber publishes his justifications on the origins of modern capitalism and explains us its social, ideological and religious provenance. Still today, in countries where the Protestant tradition lives on, but also in countries of Catholic legacy, we can find stone walls, of those we find in the countryside dividing eternally the territorial domains. Some of these walls split the space in a minuscule and scrupulous way, some merely mark the indistinct and irrelevant ends of a great property, both describe social models that may help us to know some aspects of the world of today.

In the 10th of June 1811, captain James Tillard perceives the formation of an island taking shape from the remains of the volcanic activity existing in the Azores archipelago. Some days after spotting this formation and getting acquainted with its development, precisely in the 4th of July, Tillard aided by the consul William Read approached the site of the isle with the intent of setting a flagpole for the British Empire. The island, despite its rapid growth, finally disappeared and frustrated the expectations of the prospective pioneers. Without territory one cannot have any territorial dispute.

In 1948 Barnett Newman painted “Onement, I”, a piece that would later become championed by himself as one of his early major pieces. In this work the artist slices a medium sized red monochrome painting with a vertical whitish line that separates the homogeneous plan of the painting. Two years later in 1950 he painted “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”, a piece of great magnitude in which he would inscribe five vertical lines cutting the plane territory of the monochrome and affirming the need to recognize the limits of a field in order to meet its extension.

In 1949, the historian Arthur Schlesinger publishes the book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, an important outlook on the importance of setting up a certain social order under the influence of state regulated economy and the utility of liberal democracy as the foremost agent of democratic utopia. In the first edition of this book, for the Boston based publishing house Houghton Mifflin Company, Schlesinger used an image that bear a resemblance to those of Barnett Newman and his fellow artists, in a straight allusion to a certain state of visual recognition of his ideological pursuit. This image is a profanation of Newman’s vertical lines with an intersecting horizontal line drawing our attention to an imagined center.

All these mentions are merely indicative and do not propose a demonstration of any kind of preconceived connections between people, events or their activities.

João Seguro
April 2013