Arts 101: Museum Lingo -- Paintings

Posted at 11:38 AM on February 15, 2011 by Luke Taylor (1 Comments)
Filed under: Arts 101, Museums, Painting

Here's a quick quiz: When a curator at an art museum talks about a scumble, is he or she describing:
A) a museum patron who's behaving boorishly?
B) bits of debris that flake off when a painting is dropped?
C) a brawl in the gallery?
D) the use of light paint over darker paint?

Today we continue our series explaining unusual words and phrases in the arts by looking at the language used by those who curate paintings at museums. Read on to find out the true answer to the question above.

Erika Holmquist-Wall is a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). Incidentally, she says the word "curator" comes from a Latin term meaning "to care for," which accurately describes what she and her colleagues do for the MIA's collection of paintings. "You see our work when you go through the galleries in how works are installed, how they're described and how they're arranged," she says. "We're also responsible for the conservation of the paintings."

Holmquist-Wall recently explained some of the lesser-known words she and her colleagues use in their work.

Scumble
A scumble is a thin, lighter-color paint that's applied over darker underpaint. "If you look at the clouds in the sky in a painting and see the way the brush dances across to make the clouds or tinges of white, that would be a good example of a scumble," Holmquist-Wall says.

The sky in Paul Huet's Caretaker's Cottage in the Forest of Compiegne (1826) provides a good example of scumbles.

Impasto
The term that describes the texture created by an artist's brushwork is impasto. Vincent Van Gogh, for example, daubed thick, rich impasto. Compare that to Georges-Pierre Seurat, who created crisp, delicate impasto.

Pentimento
Taken from Italian where it means "change of mind," a pentimento is an artist's alteration to a painting. A famous example in the MIA's collection is Rembrandt's Lucretia. "If you stand back and look at it in the right light," Holmquist-Wall suggests, 'you're able to see where Rembrandt had originally drawn her shoulder slightly higher."

Rembrandt's Lucretia contains a pentimento.

Craquelure
As a painting ages, a craquelure -- or pattern of cracks -- develops on its surface. Craquelure doesn't diminish the value of the work. "It offers clues to environmental conditions, if it was rolled up, if it was struck by an object, what kind of support was used on it," Holmquist-Wall says. "The craquelure in the paint tells us basically what's happened over the years to the work."

You can see the craquelure in this close-up of Silenus by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Fugitive
This isn't an art thief. Fugitive is a term that's used when describing pigment. Over time, the pigments used in certain oil paints tend to fade. An example Holmquist-Wall gives involves a pigment called yellow lake; Dutch painters of the 17th century mixed yellow lake with blue paint to make green. In the course of a few centuries, however, yellow lake has faded, so certain features, such as leaves in trees, have lost their yellow tint and now appear bluish. The yellow is therefore deemed "fugitive" because it flees the light.

Recto-verso
The recto is the front of a painting, the verso is the back. The verso is particularly important in determining ...

Provenance
... which is the history of an artwork's ownership. The verso of a painting can give clues to the work's provenance, as it often bears collector's stamps. The stamps can be anything from the seal of a royal family to what's called an atelier stamp, the mark of a particular artist's workshop. Holmquist-Wall says a large part of her work as a curator is tracing the provenance of new works that enter the museum's collection.

These three images are assembled from Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Penitent Magdelene , shown in its entirety at left. The middle and right images are details from the lower corners of the painting where visible markings provide hints to the painting's provenance. Before coming to the MIA, this piece was once item #629 in the collection of Queen Isabella Farnese of Spain (1692 - 1766).

Didactic
Finally, a didactic is the placard next to a work of art that contains information about it. The word "didactic" is an adjective that means "intending to explain or instruct." As such, the didactics in a museum can tell us about: what's depicted in a painting, who the artist was and what he or she was like, what social or political factors may have been influences, where the painting has "lived" during its lifetime--i.e., its provenance and any other details that help give context to a work.

This didactic tells us that the painting next to it once belonged to Minnesota's most famous railway businessman.

Next Tuesday, visit State of the Arts for some slang used by classical music performers.