Space
Artistic Elements
SPACE
Space is the empty area surrounding real or implied objects. Humans categorize space: there is outer space, that limitless void we enter beyond our sky; inner space, which resides in people’s minds and imaginations, and personal space, the important but intangible area that surrounds each individual and which is violated if someone else gets too close. Pictorial space is flat, and the digital realm resides in cyberspace. Art responds to all of these kinds of space.
Clearly artists are as concerned with space in their works as they are with, say, color or form. There are many ways for the artist to present ideas of space. Remember that many cultures traditionally use pictorial space as a window to view realistic subject matter through, and through the subject matter they present ideas, narratives, and symbolic content.
The innovation of linear perspective, an implied geometric pictorial construct dating from 15th century Europe, establishes the accurate illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface, objects appears to recede into the distance through the use of a horizon line and vanishing points. See how perspective is set up in the schematic examples below:
One Point Perspective, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
One-point perspective occurs when the receding lines appear to converge at a single point on the horizon and used when the flat front of an object is facing the viewer. Note: Perspective can be used to show the relative size and recession into space of any object, but is most effective with hard-edged three-dimensional objects such as buildings.
A classic Renaissance artwork using one point perspective is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ from 1498. Da Vinci composes the work by locating the vanishing point directly behind the head of the Christ figure in the middle, thus drawing the viewer’s attention to the center. His arms mirror the receding wall lines, and, if we follow them as lines, would converge at the same vanishing point.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1498. Fresco, Santa Maria della Grazie.
Two-point perspective occurs when the vertical edge of a cube is facing the viewer, exposing two sides that recede into the distance, one to each vanishing point.
Two Point Perspective, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
The painting by Gustave Caillebotte’s, Paris Street, Rainy Weather from 1877 (below), shows how two-point perspective is used to give an accurate view to an urban scene.
The artist’s composition, however, is more complex than just his use of perspective on the buildings and cobblestones. The figures are deliberately placed to direct the viewer’s eye from the front right of the picture to the building’s front edge on the left, which, like a ship’s bow, acts as a cleaver to plunge both sides toward the horizon. In the midst of this visual recession a lamp post stands firmly in the middle to arrest our gaze from going right out the back of the painting. Caillebotte includes the little metal arm at the top right of the post to direct us again along a horizontal path, now keeping us from traveling off the top of the canvas. As relatively spare as the left side of the work is, the artist crams the right side with hard-edged and organic shapes and forms in a complex play of positive and negative space.
Three-point perspective is used when an artist wants to project a “bird’s eye view” or a "worm's eye view", that is, when the projection lines recede to two points on the horizon and a third point is either far below or above the horizon line. In this case the parallel lines that make up the sides of an object are not parallel to the edge of the ground the artist is working on (paper, canvas, etc). Rather the lines are tilted, pointing to that 3rd point.
Three-point perspective (with vanishing points above and below the horizon line shown at the same time).
Design by Shazz, licensed under Creative Commons
Three point perspective adds a sense of drama to imagery and moves the viewer perspective into fantastic positions.
Artist: M.C. Escher, Tower of Babel, woodcut, 1928
Sculptors use the principles of three point perspective, to create what is called forced perspective. Ultimately a sculptor will enlarge or diminish the parts of a form to make it look closer or further away when viewed from the correct vantage point. The most famous example of this is by the Italian sculptor, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known best as Michelangelo. The 17' foot tall sculpture of David was meant to be displayed high above the viewer, originally on a rooftop, but then when it was realized the sculpture was too heavy to move that high, it was placed on a pedestal. Michelangelo sculpted the upper body and head too big for the body, and his right hand is bigger than his left so that it looked more correct when viewed from below.
Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble
The concept of forced perspective is also used in theatre. It is a way to create perceived depth in the relatively short distance of the stage. After reading the above about perspective, you can imagine how that works. My favorite is when artists know the rules and bend them to create something new! One of my favorite set designs is in the 1920's, black / white, silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Get some popcorn or your favorite snack and take a break! Notice how perspective is used to create space, emotion, and move the story forward.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Links to an external site.
The perspective system is a cultural convention well suited to a traditional western European idea of the ‘truth’, that is an accurate, clear rendition of observed reality. Even after the invention of linear perspective, many cultures traditionally use a flatter pictorial space, relying on overlapped shapes or size differences in forms to indicate this same truth of observation. For example, often the most important individual was shown to be much larger scale than the people around them, telling a clear story without using linear perspective.
Examine the miniature painting of the ‘Third Court of the Topkapi Palace’ from 14th century Turkey to contrast its pictorial space with that of linear perspective. It’s composed from a number of different vantage points (as opposed to vanishing points), all very flat to the picture plane. While the overall image is seen from above, the figures and trees appear as cutouts or silhouettes. Notice the towers on the far left and right are sideways to the picture plane. As ‘incorrect’ as it looks, the painting gives a detailed description of the landscape and structures on the palace grounds.
Third Court of the Topkapi Palace, from the Hunername, 1548
Ottoman miniature paintingTopkapi Museum, Instanbul.
Used under Creative Commons license
After nearly hundreds years using linear perspective, western ideas about how space is depicted accurately in two dimensions were challenged in Paul Cezanne's later paintings. Cezanne lived from 1839-1906, as he worked he became more interested in the structure of space and ignored the laws of perspective allowing each individual object to be independent within the space of a picture while the relationship of one object to another takes precedence over traditional single-point perspective. Cezanne's Links to an external site. study of space paved the way for the art movement called cubism, an even more radical exploration of space that would emerge 40 years later.
Below is a still life painting by Cezanne, Still Life with Fruit and Basket, c. 1888-1890. To start with, look at the very front edge of the table. Notice that the side on the right of the cloth and the side on the left of the cloth do not line up. Once you see that, you start to notice Cezanne is breaking the convention of perspective all over the painting! Use your understanding of perspective and see how each object is depicted in it's own space:
Cubism
A young Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, Links to an external site. moved to Paris, then western culture’s capital of art, and largely reinvented pictorial space with his explorations and development of Cubism Links to an external site., this art movement was ushered in dramatically by his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Links to an external site. in 1907. He was influenced in part by the chiseled forms, angular surfaces and disproportion of African sculpture (refer back to the ‘Male Figure’ from Cameroon) and mask-like faces of early Iberian artworks. For more information about this important painting, listen to the following question and answer session.
session
Links to an external site.
Picasso, his friend Georges Braque and a handful of other artists struggled to develop a new space that relied on, ironically, the flatness of the picture plane to carry and animate traditional subject matter including figures, still life and landscape.
Cubist pictures, and eventually sculptures, became amalgams of different points of view, light sources and planar constructs. It was as if they were presenting their subject matter in many ways at once, all the while shifting foreground, middle ground and background so the viewer is not sure where one starts and the other ends.
Public and critical reaction to cubism was understandably negative, but the artists’ experiments with spatial relationships reverberated with others and became – along with new ways of using color – a driving force in the development of a modern art movement that based itself on the flatness of the picture plane. Instead of a window to look into, the flat surface becomes a ground on which to construct formal arrangements of shapes, colors and compositions. For another viewpoint on this idea, refer back to module one’s discussion of ‘abstraction’.
You can see the radical changes cubism made in George Braque’s landscape ‘La Roche Guyon’ from 1909. The trees, houses, castle and surrounding rocks comprise almost a single complex form, stair-stepping up the canvas to mimic the distant hill at the top, all of it struggling upwards and leaning to the right within a shallow pictorial space.
George Braque ‘Castle at La Roche Guyon’ 1909 Oil on canvas
Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Licensed through GNU and Creative Common
Deconstructing and combining multiple views at once, Picasso's, Girl with a Mandolin, gives the viewer a sense of space and movement:
Pablo Picasso, 1910, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York
It’s not so difficult to understand the importance of this new idea of space when placed in the context of comparable advances in science surrounding the turn of the 19th century. The Wright Brothers took to the air with powered flight in 1903, the same year Marie Curie won the first of two Nobel prizes for her pioneering work in radiation. Sigmund Freud’s new ideas on the inner spaces of the mind and its effect on behavior were published in 1902, and Albert Einstein’s calculations on relativity, the idea that space and time are intertwined, first appeared in 1905. Each of these discoveries added to human understanding and realigned the way we look at ourselves and our world. Indeed, Picasso, speaking of his struggle to define cubism, said “Even Einstein did not know it either! The condition of discovery is outside ourselves; but the terrifying thing is that despite all this, we can only find what we know.” (from Picasso on Art, A Selection of Views by Dore Ashton, (Souchere, 1960, page 15).
In three-dimensional forms, such as sculpture and architecture, space remains a visual tug between positive and negative spaces. Sculptors dedicated to exploring cubism continue to investigate sculpting multiple views of the same form, presented at one time.
Ukrainian artist Alexander Archipenko, 1912, La Vie Familiale (Family Life)
Raymond Duchamp-Villon , Le cheval (The Horse), c 1914 cast in bronze in 1930
Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian sculptor living in Paris, became a leading artist to champion the new forms of modern art. His sculpture ‘Bird in Space Links to an external site.’ is an elegant example of how abstraction and formal arrangement combine to symbolize the new movement. The photograph of Brancusi’s studio below gives further evidence of sculpture’s debt to cubism and the struggle to go around the object.
Edward Steichen, Brancusi’s studio, 1920. Metropolitan Museum, New York
This photograph is in the public domain.
Now that we’ve established line, shape, spatial relationships and mass, we can turn our attention to surface qualities and their importance in works of art. Value (or tone), color and texture are the elements used to do this.