Serial Image in Modern Paintings: from Monet to Richter

이현애

doi:10.17057/kahoma.2009..25.004

This study is based on the groups of modern paintings in which the same motif is repeated in a similar size, material, technique and composition on at least two canvases. I will argue that this display of serial images in a space and the viewers’ experience of it are the remarkable phenomenon both of modern art and of the art market. In addition, my research is purposed to reveal the historical, philosophical and mathematical meanings of the series as well as the structure of its repetition. The creation of art works in series has a long tradition. A series has become a conventional format in modern art since Gustav Courbet and an artist’s choice to make a series of things has represented his own attitude. In my article, this will be examined chronologically through four artists. 1) My starting point will be Claude Monet’s well-known groups of canvases created in the 1890s: the Grainstacks and the Rouen Cathedral series. These are paradigmatic of the Modernist series in which the artist’s vision generates variations on the single unifying motif. Why did Monet repeat one motif over twenty times and think it important to display them altogether at the same time and space? Above all, this was because, through this simultaneous presentation of serial works, he could more easily visualize the continuity of time as well as make the viewers reach the perception of the difference in the repetition of each instantaneous moment. 2) Besides Monet, there were a lot of artists who created series as a unity and sometimes displayed them with some aesthetic and conceptual aspects of installation as an ensemble. In the 1920s and 1930s, Alexej von Jawlensky repeated “Savior’s Face” again and again and painted “Meditation” actually over thousand times. In his series of this human face, the principle of life and dead ― the greatest and the most tragic repetition of mankind ― is embodied with the language of relief and reflection. 3) Since 1965, Roman Opalka has painted the “Detail” of the amazing work. For his series <Opalka 1965/1 ― ∞>, he wrote white numbers on black canvas, read the painted numbers and recorded them on tape and then photographed a self-portrait before the painting completed each day. To quote his words, “he painted the body of time” and his 122 paintings are “Sfumato of a being”. His repetition of numbering is an activity of memory which can tide over the flow of time. 4) At the 1972 Venice Biennale, Gerhard Richter showed 48 Portraits in the German pavilion. The portraits of 48 historic figures derived from pictures in an encyclopedia were painted on the same size canvases. Richter treated the 48 faces equally in black and white when he forgot some more important scholars of the 20th century. For him, it made no sense to know who is who. He turns his attention to showing the macro structure of the display in series and the crossover image of individuals and mass ― the part and whole. In conclusion, modern art is no more temporary imitation but becomes continuous repetition, of which originality might be composed of plurality and multiplicity.

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