In the Eye of the Beholder

Hahaha....I never noticed before - but there's a 'transliterate' button in blogger now, very interesting.....

"I have just been to" <--> "И хаве юст бен to" ....хехехе....

Anyway, indeed, I have just been to the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I remember seeing his painting "Musicians in the Orchestra" which for an instant made me think I was looking through a window at real people. It is a beautiful exhibition, and makes you realise that not that long ago, we had no idea what people looked like in motion - the way our muscles flexed, or the lines our knees/arms/thighs traced as we walked or swam. Amazing to think that this knowledge was absent from the collective consciousness! (...made me consider how trivial my research is in the larger scheme of things... in a decade or so, everything that I have done will be worthless, not to say it's not important, but that it will be assimilated into public knowledge, and hence become unnoticeable, because it will become obvious.)

I left with one distinct impression though...as though the exhibition, it's arrangement... had an idea to express: the idea of our (i.e. humanities) visual maturity. What I mean by this is, as you begin your walk through the exhibition, you see the first early paintings/sketches by Degas of dancers/people. And you realise how awkward and sometimes out of proportion the limbs are, and how sometimes the faces, heads, necks of his subjects are almost brutal in their coarseness. The plaques in the exhibit make mention of the fact that at this time, people in motion were rarely drawn because it was so difficult to hold a pose, and sometimes ropes or other props would be used to fix a dancer's figure in a certain position.

Then, as you walk on, you get introduced into the idea of photography, the efforts to capture motion. And Degas' paintings improve - the dancers now posses a delicacy, fragility and grace that was absent in his early drawings. Now, I do not want to say that Degas drew these later paintings from photographs, but that rather, the existence of photographs, and his exposure to them, allowed him to fix in his memory (for longer than was otherwise possible) the still figure of a dancer 'in motion'. Consequently, when drawing from memory, he was able to recall this image with greater accuracy than he was previously able to do.

Now, is it possible, that before photographs to compare to, people seeing Degas' first paintings of dancers in motion, really considered that this is what they looked like? Not having the capacity to 'feel' that the proportions where wrong, because they of course had even less exposure to dancers than Degas? (i.e. this sense of proportion, and motion, had not entered the collective consciousness?)

Could this in any way be justifiably related by analogy to the infantile early (early! i.e. BC) paintings? or those of small children? Photography/movies has allowed the specific fluidity of human form to enter our minds. Before this, we looked upon these forms, and in our 'minds eye' saw the stick figures of our early childhood?