Hi-tech imaging reveals the artist tinkered with Herri met de Bles’s painting to improve the composition of figures

One benefit of being among history’s greatest artists is that if you don’t much like a painting done by someone else, you can just improve it. The Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens certainly knew how to paint people; Rubenesque is still used to describe a curvaceous, ample body. So when he noticed the inferior quality of the religious figures depicted on an otherwise accomplished landscape hanging on his wall, it turns out he simply picked up his paint palette.

A newly rediscovered Herri met de Bles painting, titled The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in an Extensive Landscape with Travellers, set a puzzle for art historians because the style of the landscape background did not match the group of people. Hi-tech imaging of the canvas carried out by a London auction house has since “completed the jigsaw”, revealing the way Rubens had tinkered with a painting now thought to have belonged to his own collection.

Royal Academy, London
Pampered pets, polite portraits and enough wan landscapes to fill a field – this show mirrors the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Tory misrule

This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is best enjoyed as a mirror of the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Conservative government. It is a gasping death-rattle of mediocrity, a miserable garden party of vapid good taste. There are no laughs and precious few glimpses of good art. Nothing points to the future. All you will learn from it is that the small “c” conservatism of British middle-class culture has reached the end of its rope.

“Art Is in All of Us”, affirms a typically profound placard by Bob and Roberta Smith RA. If only. That radical-sounding statement might seem to promise a show that’s a wild, democratic, free-for-all romp. After all there are more than 1,700 works of art here, apparently chosen pretty much by flipping a coin. But it is almost all the same, all tepid, polite and pointless. In the same room as Smith’s platitude is a sculpture of two model ships with the leaden one-note wordplay title Worship-Warship and a pair of ugly, kitsch ceramic deer. For a moment I thought these were examples of outsider art. Bless. They are actually by Richard Wilson RA and Cathie Pilkington RA. Either these eminent artists have totally run out of ideas or they have submitted any old random items lying around their studios.

Enlarge / Light painting reveals a cloud of particulates on Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PM2.5 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter). (credit: Robin Price)

Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Air pollution is the leading global environmental risk factor," said co-author Francis Pope, an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who spearheaded the Air of the Anthropocene project with artist Robin Price. "[The project] creates spaces and places for discussions about air pollution, using art as a proxy to communicate and create dialogues about the issues associated with air pollution. By painting with light to create impactful images, we provide people with an easy-to-understand way of comparing air pollution in different contexts—making something that was largely invisible visible."

Light painting has been around since 1889, when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny, who were investigating the use of photography as a scientific tool to study biological motion, created the first known light painting called Pathological Walk From in Front. In 1914, Frank and Lillian Mollier Gilbreth tracked the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers using light painting techniques, and in 1935, Man Ray "signed" his Space Writing series with a penlight—a private joke that wasn't discovered until 74 years later by photographer/historian Ellen Carey in 2009.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments