The missing links of automatism & the quest for systems (1)

In my visit to the "Turner-Hugo-Moreau: the Discovery of Abstraction" at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt last month, my interest was immediately drawn to the genealogy of automatism, the drive to allow chance to direct art-making in many different forms. Another aspect that caught my attention was attempts by art educators in the past 3 centuries to draw general principles in picture-making by abstracting famous painters' works into rational principles (or systems of rules). My intuition told me that there's a strong connection between chance-based automatist art-making and the notion of machine. Perhaps the affinity lies in the appeal to rationality, which Hector Rodiriguez describes as "random machines," a kind of machine that provokes randomness of the rule of its operation.

Here's a quick list of artists and works I spotted:

"Klecksografien"
= axially symmetric prints made by folding
The name comes from German "Klecks" which means blots.
18th-C techniques: had been used for ornamental purposes
19th-C: practised by artists and writers independently
Example: Justinus KERNER (1786-1862), Swabian writer and doctor

Alexander COZENS (1717-1786)
*English landscape painter and art teacher
*Systematically combined teaching composition with an aesthetic interest in "chance"
*Adopted the concept of the "blot" to describe the composition of a painting...
*He painted random, abstract-looking blots as a source of inspiration when preparing drafts for landscape painting.
*He treated that as new method of assisting the invention in drawing original compositions of landscape.

Gustave MOREAU
*A few of his sketches on one page were exhibited, something he developed for teaching...
*"Composition of Various Masters"...summarizes a few masters' principle style and approach of composition in line sketches

Frank HOWARD
*Three extracts are on display from his book COLOUR AS A MEANS OF ART: BEING AN ADAPTION OF THE EXPERIENCE OF PROFESSORS TO THE PRACTICE OF AMATEURS (London, 1838; private collection): "Turner's Principles," Ruben's Principles" and "Another of Titian's Principles"

Herman RORSCHACH (1884-1922), psychiatrist
*He published his EXPERIMENT IN INTERPRETING CHANCE FORMS in 1921. He used "klecksografien" for tests in personality and pathology studies.

Coffee stain images from the Coffee Stain Album [kafeeklecks album]
*The images were produced in Berlin around 1847-50 by Wilheim von Kauerbach and his assistants, Michael Echter and Julius Muhr...; published in 1880 as collotypes. Some doubted whether the stains were actually from coffee, but so far no one has taken theworks for a chemical test...

George SAND (1804-1876)
*She developed her own methods for producing chance iamges in color. They formed prints (1st layer, 2nd layer...) as end products.
*Images in her prints look like fossilized stone formations, which geologists called "dendrites" (streaks)

Mary MAGDALENE
*She is an example of painters in early 17th century working on "ruin marble"...
*The marbles used were usually quarried in Tuscany, which carried marks and were cut into slabs... The patterns found on the slabs resembled some kind of landscape. All artists needed to do was to add figures to these "pictorial stones." The "ruin marbles" were themselves the basis for painting.

Victor HUGO
*One leitmotif of his abstract drawings is "the chance shape."
*1830s...He would draw with any formal instruction...
*1834-35... He recorded his impressions of travels with lines and then cross-hatching.
*He then turned to imaginary landscape and the play with non-traditional drawing material (many of them everyday objects)...

Image 1: Justinus Kern's self portrait: Klecksografie (Selbstbildnis), 1857 (klecksografie and pen in brown)[owned by Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach]

Image 2: an example of "ruin marble" turned into landscape


For official article on the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle-Frankfurt:
http://www.schirn-kunsthalle.de/data/news/1189519756_presse_turnerhugomoreau_engl_1.pdf