Visit to Manchester art galleries

Pre-Raphaelite

Founded in London in 1848, a secret society of young artists (and one writer) who stood against the Royal Academy’s promotion of the ideal as exemplified in the work of Raphael.

The name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood referred to the groups’ opposition to the Royal Academy’s promotion of the Renaissance master Raphael. Raphael reached the highest art attainment, however after that painters instead of following their flight of imagination started painting more with reference to academic rules. Pre-Raphaelites aim was to bring back "real" art, that possessed a spiritual and creative integrity.

Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, who urged artists to ‘go to nature’, they believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Their principal themes were initially religious, but they also used subjects from literature and poetry, particularly those dealing with love and death. They also explored modern social problems.

Pictures and paintings from Manchester art gallery:

Flat Landscape with a View to Distant Hills 1648

Philips Koninck 1619-88

Oil on panel

Koninck's panoramic views were among the most

innovative developments in Dutch landscape painting. He

was inspired by the broad plains of his native Gelderland,

and this subject dominated much of his work.

This early example may show the influence of Rembrandt

in its contrasts of light and shade. Koninck suggests the

expansiveness of the land through horizontal bands of

mossy greens and browns. The minute figures and the

dog chasing birds provide a sense of scale.

Koninck was also a painter of domestic scenes.

Gas Mask 2008

Sophie Jodoin b.1965

Con~e on Mylar

During the First World War, gas was a frontline weapon

but civilians also feared chemical attacks. The gas mask

was a protective and yet also anxiety-inducing

technology, a tension that artists and writers explored.

Canadian artist, Sophie Jodoin explores this symbolism

in her series of disturbingly beautiful conte drawings,

Helmets and Gasmasks. She morphs faces and masks

so that the dehumanizing effect is not from the feared

chemicals, but from the supposed apparatus. Distorted

and anguished faces of men, women and children put

terror into our hearts. Jodoin explains that the imagined

gas mask becomes a skull, representing human beings

who are 'trapped physically and mentally', and whose

facial expressions and 'suffering eyes' evoke 'tender pain'.

Otto Dix, Der Krieg (The War) – 1924

Tomer Ganihar, Hospital Party -Venice, Arsenale. Blood

Richard Serra, Abu Ghraib, 2004

Simon Norfolk, Forensic Traces of War

Reaction to article on art engagement

Camera phones at the National Gallery stoke fears that technology is leaving us incapable of deep engagement with anything

James Elkins in a 2010 essay on the Huffington Post stated that on the universal fruit-attention scale nowadays the time it takes to look at the picture is the time it takes to eat a grape. It means that people are no longer interested to really look at the painting, they rather take pictures of it. Over the past decade the rise of social networks and the smartphone have changed the quality of attention we spent on looking at exhibits, paintings at galleries. What I noticed while visiting art galleries was that most of our students spent more time taking picture of a painting than actually looking at it.