Naiara - Film's time and space influence on painting

How do the works April and Album represent time and space? 

The composition of both paintings’ composition relies on serpentine paths and repetition of human figures to create a continuum sense of movement that represents continuum time and regularity/irregularity throughout space.

April, a painting created for a child’s bedroom by Maurice Denis, shows six women figures placed along a serpentine path. They are very similar with slight differences in height, garments and accessories. The repetition along with the diagonal line created in the canvas by the path and its flowy serpentine movement, and the small elements dropped in the corners of the painting are key elements that create movement in time and space.

Image: April, by Maurice Denis/ WikiArt - Public Domain

The Album, a painting by Edouard Vuillard, has a similar narrative. Here, seven women are placed throughout a continuous parlor that occupies the 2 meters-long rectangular paint. However, the printings in their clothes and the cloudiness of the vegetation that surrounds them make it hard for the viewer to distinguish forms and seem to erase boards between the characters and the environment. In this case, it is the fusion between the characters and the surroundings that create a sense of continuity in the image and the arabesque patterns keep eyes moving edge to edge.

Image: The Album, Edouard Vuillard / MetMuseum

Question

The examples in this chapter show how film and dance intervened in Modern art, influencing painters to abandon an optically fixed perspective that was dominant in the then mainstream tradition of Abstractionism. Does the same logic applies to DH and Humanities in general? Is the advent of this new field of studies bringing a new look that is creating not only the new methodologies but worldviews and ways to approach even the most traditional research topics?