© Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
© Lindsey Wasson/Associated Press
In the first article of these two considering voyeurism in paintings, I examined classical examples from myth and the popular Biblical stories of King David and Bathsheba, and Susanna and the Elders.
According to legend, King Candaules of Lydia boasted of the beauty of his wife, Nyssia, to the chief of his personal guard, Gyges. To support his boast, the king showed his wife to Gyges by stealth, naked as she was preparing for bed. When she discovered Gyges’ voyeurism, Nyssia gave him the choice of being executed or of murdering the king. Opting for the latter, Gyges stabbed the king to death when he was in bed, then married Nyssia and succeeded Candaules on the throne.
Jean-Léon Gérôme in his early King Candaules from 1859 chose to show the moment that Nyssia removed the last item of her clothing, prior to the moment of peripeteia. The king is in his bed, awaiting his wife, who has just removed the last of her clothing as she spots the dark and hooded figure of Gyges watching her from the open door. Gérôme’s love of detail in the decor saves this from the accusation that this was just another excuse for a full-length nude.
Two years later, Gérôme looked again at this theme.
Phryne was a highly successful and rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.
Phryne is to the left of centre, in the midst of the semicircular court, completely naked apart from some jewellery on her neck and wrists, and her sandals. She is turned away from the gaze of the judges, her eyes hidden in the crook of her right elbow, as if in shame and modesty. Behind her (to the left), her defence has just removed her blue robes with a flourish, his hands holding them high. At Phryne’s feet is a gold belt of a kind worn to designate courtesans in France from the thirteenth century, with the Greek word ΚΑΛΗ (kale), meaning beautiful.
The judges, all men with bare chests and wearing uniform scarlet robes, are taken aback. Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses from pure fright, to anguish, grief, or disbelief, with each of those men looking straight at Phryne.
Superficially, it’s easy to suggest that Gérôme was using Phryne’s nakedness to appeal to the lowest desires, which remained one of the popular attractions of the annual Salon. However it’s more likely that this is a statement about attitudes to the nude female form, the judgement of the Salon, voyeurism and looking.
In his Musidora And Her Two Companions, Sacharissa And Amoret from 1795, Benjamin West turns to a now-forgotten cycle of poems by James Thomson, The Seasons, published between 1726-30. In this scene from Summer, Damon, who is peeping from behind a tree at the far left, voyeuristically watches the three young women bathing in a stream. He’s in love with Musidora, and towards dusk on a summer’s day is sat in a hazel copse, lost in thought. She, with her two friends, then comes to bathe in the nearby stream, and he watches them undress, forming a “soul-distracting view”. He finally can’t stand the sight any more, writes Musidora a note revealing that he had been watching her, then rushes away. She discovers his note, recognises his writing, and responds with mixed emotions.
Eugène Delacroix’s painting of Louis d’Orléans Showing his Mistress from 1825-26 tells a sordid story of misogyny from French history. Set in about 1400, it shows Louis I, Duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, at the right, displaying the legs and lower body of his mistress, Mariette d’Enghien, to his chamberlain. Her face is obscured because the mistress also happens to be the chamberlain’s wife.
Marià Fortuny pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in art in his portrait of Carmen Bastián (1871-72). His model here is a young gypsy woman whom he ‘discovered’ in the Barranco de la Zorra, then a desolate area towards Granada’s main cemetery, in Spain. When posing for the painter on his ancient sofa, she provocatively lifted her skirt to taunt him, and make the artist and viewers voyeurs.
Nude on the Beach at Portici (1874) is an excellent example of the balance that Fortuny struck between its vigorously scrubbed-in background, giving a textural feel to the beach, and the virtuoso brushwork he used to render the woman’s body. Its high angle of view and her pose makes this decidedly voyeuristic.
The most prolonged, even exhaustive, period of voyeurism must be in the intimate domestic scenes Pierre Bonnard painted of his longstanding partner Marthe, from 1898 to her death in 1942. Of the thousands of paintings and photographs that he made of her, I have selected just two.
In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior (1898), a motif known better from his later version of 1900. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. Its post-coital implications are clear. The image has also been cropped unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeuristic appearance.
Bonnard’s best-known nudes of 1925 are those in which his model is still in the bath, most notably Nude in the Bath. The bath is cropped to show just the lower torso and legs of the woman in its water. A second, clothed, person is striding across from the left, its figure cropped extremely to show just the front of the body and legs.
It is thought that the figure on the left is that of the artist, but I cannot make sense of that. He or she appears to be wearing light patterned clothing consisting of a jacket and long skirt, with soft slippers resembling ballet shoes!
I hope that you’re now feeling thoroughly uncomfortable in looking at all these paintings.
© Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
© Kenny Holston/The New York Times
© Phil Mccarten/Invision, via Associated Press
© Jarod Lew for The New York Times
Camels have continued to feature in paintings showing more recent times, from events at the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon was in Egypt.
Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867. The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire.
Dromedaries were introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century to carry people and loads through its arid regions. They came to prominence in the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition of 1860 to cross the continent of Australia from south (Melbourne) to north in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Nicholas Chevalier painted this Memorandum of the Start of the Exploring Expedition to mark the occasion in 1860. The team left Royal Park, Melbourne on the afternoon of 20 August 1860 with nineteen men and about twenty tonnes of equipment and stores. Included were more than twenty-four camels, horses and wagons. Only one of the team survived to complete the crossing, and seven died, including both Burke and Wills.
David Roberts’ painting of the Isle of Graia, Gulf of Akabah (1839), shown here as a lithograph, is unusual for showing camels on the beach. We’re used to seeing dogs, horses, donkeys, even cows and sheep, but the ‘ship of the desert’ isn’t a common sight on the beach. The coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba (or Gulf of Eilat) is on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, and before urbanisation, development, and the advent of tourists, had a wild desert beauty, as shown here.
As artists visited North Africa more during the latter half of the nineteenth century, paintings of camels in their natural habitat became more common.
Marià Fortuny’s Camels Reposing, Tangiers (1865) is a watercolour sketch made over a heavily-worked and now visible graphite drawing, showing a group of camels resting near the city of Tangier, not far from Tétouan, in northern Morocco.
Alberto Pasini’s painting of The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is a superbly wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain, including a couple of elephants at the right.
When Ivan Aivazovsky visited Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia in 1868, his superb painting of this cosmopolitan city shows camels on its bustling streets.
Even in 1900-18, when Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani painted this Tatar Camel Driver, they would still have been a common sight in parts of Tbilisi visited by traders from the south, and the artist was clearly familiar with the animal. Tatar traders moved their goods on Bactrian camels as far as Crimea and other parts of southern Ukraine.
Eugen Bracht’s paintings of the Middle East avoid the crowded and bustling towns, preferring the barren desert where just a handful of people travel with their camels In the Arabian Desert (1882).
Bracht’s slightly later view From the Sinai Desert (1884) shows more groups on the move in the relentless heat. The ship of the desert indeed, but never argue with a half-ton camel, even if it’s an entry in a beauty pageant.
As we near the end of this alphabet of landscape painting, this week we reach the letter y, standing for yellow, one of the most important and versatile colours in the artist’s palette. It’s most strongly associated with late summer, when much of the countryside has become dry and turned from the green of Spring to the yellows of ripened grain, ready for harvest.
Perhaps the earliest complete visual reference to the grain harvest is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565. This shows each step in the traditional and labour-intensive processes of cutting the ripe crop, gathering it into stooks, transporting it by cart for threshing, and onward transfer of grain to the waiting ships in the far distance.
In 1826, the young British painter Samuel Palmer moved to the rural village of Shoreham in Kent, in the valley of the River Darent to the north of Sevenoaks, where he spent much of the next decade producing some of his most distinctive work. For Palmer, the village and its environs became his ‘land of milk and honey’, in a Biblical vision of Beulah. His finely-detailed Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park was painted two years later, in 1828. This shows ancient oaks in the deer park of Lullingstone Castle, in the Darent Valley of Kent, between Eynsford and Shoreham, with their leaves turned yellow in the early autumn.
Towards the end of his time in Shoreham, Palmer’s views started to open out into more conventional landscapes, such as The Golden Valley (c 1833-34), caught here at the end of the harvest.
Painted three centuries after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s encyclopaedic account, Charles-François Daubigny’s Harvest from 1851 is remarkably similar, although its yellows are more muted.
Further afield, in the vast cereal-growing lands of Ukraine, Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine (1880) shows laborious hand-cutting of grain on the steppe, and demonstrates the origin of the Ukrainian flag of blue and yellow.
Mykola Pymonenko’s classic view of Harvest in Ukraine from 1896 follows a compositional formula developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage for Naturalist paintings. Its horizon is high, about three-quarters of the way up the canvas. The women in the foreground and the child’s cradle are painted in fine detail, and their edges are so crisp that they pop out. As the figures and fields recede into the background, they rapidly lose detail and their edges blur. The effect is of a vivid reality at the focus of the image, with deep recession to the distant horizon.
Camille Pissarro started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the Divisionist technique hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which he did later the following year.
British painter Adrian Stokes travelled to Romania in eastern Europe for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings he and his wife Marianne made of their protracted visits.
Grant Wood’s Fall Plowing from 1931 is set in the prairie of Iowa, where it shows ripe and harvested cereals, and a recently developed walking plough with a steel ploughshare, an important advance in cultivating the prairie.
Henry Herbert La Thangue painted In the Orchard in 1893, presumably in Sussex, England, using a profusion of fine marks more typical of Impressionism. Although the figures and baskets of fruit are quite tightly detailed, much of the rest of his canvas is more painterly and atmospheric.
Yellow has also been used in combination with blues and greens to create colours closer to those in nature. In some cases, even into the twentieth century, the yellow used hasn’t proved lightfast, and has faded to leave foliage appearing blue.
This is all too sadly evident in Adriaen van de Velde’s otherwise superb Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670.
Carl Blechen used lightfast chrome yellow extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted in 1832-35. By this time, the mixture of chrome yellow with Prussian blue had become known as green cinnabar or chrome green, although the chromium salt used was yellow in colour, not green.
Chrome yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). Most if not all of the greens seen here most probably rely on chrome yellow mixed with blue.
This series of articles looks at the German Romantic painters, their influences, paintings, and those that they influenced. This article provides a brief overview with links to each of the individual articles in this series.
Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), senior member of a family of French painters, a prolific landscape and marine artist who spent much of his career in Rome.
Caspar Wolf (1735–1783), a pioneering Swiss landscape artist who specialised in painting views of the Alps.
Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) initially specialised in dramatic landscapes and marines, before moving from France to London.
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), another Swiss artist who settled in London, where he served as the Royal Academy’s Professor of Painting from 1799.
Influences on Caspar David Friedrich and Romantics
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)
Born near the Baltic coast of modern Germany when it was part of Swedish Pomerania, and lived for most of his adult life in the city of Dresden.
He studied at the Copenhagen Academy, then moved to Dresden in 1798, from where he travelled to sketch on the Baltic Coast, on Rügen, in the Harz Mountains, and Bohemia. He met Philipp Otto Runge, then in 1815 was elected to the Dresden Academy. Two years later, he met Carl Gustav Carus, and JC Dahl, both of whom become his pupils and lifelong friends. In 1824, he was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy. Leader of the German Romantic painters.
Caspar David Friedrich to 1820
Caspar David Friedrich 1820-30
Caspar David Friedrich 1830-40
Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869)
Pupil of Caspar David Friedrich, a brilliant progeny and polymath. He was appointed professor of obstetrics in Dresden at the age of 25. Initially an amateur artist, he became friends with Friedrich, who taught him to paint in oils between 1814-17. Carus went on to research in botany, zoology and psychology. He was also a friend of and influence on Goethe.
Carl Gustav Carus 1816-25
Carl Gustav Carus 1826-50
Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)
Known as JC Dahl, from Bergen, Norway, he studied at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, where he established himself as a prolific and capable realist landscape painter, which brought him to Friedrich in Dresden in 1818. He visited Italy in 1820, then in 1823 he and his family moved in with Friedrich and his family, when they both taught in Dresden. His pupils included the Norwegian landscape artists Peder Balke and Thomas Fearnley.
JC Dahl 1818-1827
JC Dahl 1829-1856
Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810)
A promising painter who was also born in Swedish Pomerania. He studied at the Copenhagen Academy, then moved to Dresden in 1801, where he later became involved in the Romantic Movement and became friends with Friedrich. He developed a colour model based on a sphere, but died of tuberculosis in 1810, when he was only 33.
Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880)
Born in what is now Wrocław in Poland, he trained at the Academy of Art in Berlin, then moved to the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts in 1826, where he became a member of the Düsseldorf ‘School’ of Painting.
Carl Friedrich Lessing 1828-36
Carl Friedrich Lessing 1837-78
A characteristic if not distinctive theme in German Romantic paintings are figures that are looking away from the viewer into the landscape, so showing their back, hence in German Rückenfigur, ‘back-figure’. These feature in the paintings of most of these artists.
Rückenfigur
Nocturnes
Ships
Barren trees
Other common themes
Peder Balke (1804–1887)
A Norwegian and a pupil of JC Dahl in Dresden, he trained at the art academy in Stockholm, Sweden. When still a student in the summer of 1830, he walked through the mountains in Telemark to Bergen, then back to Hallingdal, sketching for later paintings. In 1832 he toured Finnmark in much the same way, which inspired him to paint the remote coast of northern Norway, including North Cape.
Thomas Fearnley (1802–1842)
Born in south-east Norway, he trained at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft, the Art Academy in Copenhagen, then in its sister academy in Stockholm. In 1828 he went to Germany, and the following year became a student of JC Dahl in Dresden. When in Munich early in 1842, he died of typhoid when he was only 39.
Thomas Fearnley 1
Thomas Fearnley 2
Knud Andreassen Baade (1808–1879)
Born on the coast of south-west Norway, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. He went to Dresden in 1836 to be taught by JC Dahl, and became influenced by Friedrich.
Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901)
Born in Basel, Switzerland, he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, then became a major Swiss painter.
Arnold Böcklin 1
Arnold Böcklin 2
Arkhyp Kuindzhi (1841-1910)
A Pontic Greek painter from Mariupol in the far south-east of Ukraine, he initially studied in the Crimean studio of the great marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky. Later studied at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, where he joined the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki). He enjoyed early success in selling paintings to Pavel Tretyakov, and returned to Ukraine throughout his career to paint its landscapes.
Hans Gude (1825–1903)
Born and initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), he studied at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany. On completion he returned to Norway where he became one of the founding fathers of Norwegian landscape painting.
点击封面播放视频，可以优惠价购买这本书是什么，在炎炎夏日的晚上，让人获得一丝丝清凉与放松的呢？或许，是一段与友人的闲谈，或许是一罐啤酒？可是，你是否想过，为什么，装酒的易拉罐会设计成这样子呢？
点击播放视频你可能没有意识到，易拉罐的历史，距今只有短短 61 年。
六十年前，由于消费者需要随身携带开罐器才能打开铝罐，这极大阻碍了初代罐装饮品的推广。自开罐的必要性是显而易见的，但在当时，该领域到处都是失败的原型先例。在一次野餐中，印第安纳州的工具生产商 厄尼 · 弗雷兹 不得不靠着汽车金属杠才打开罐头。经此困扰，他开始着手开发带耳片、可拉开的罐子。他创造了一个跷跷板机制，利用小杠杆，沿着预先半切划线的开口，撬开罐盖。他将小杠杆通过冷焊法固定在罐子的铆钉上，铆钉也使用罐子本身的材料。
他把这个创意，卖给了美国铝业公司。1962年，匹兹堡啤酒公司下了第一笔订单，订购了10万只拉耳罐。许多爱钻研的个人以及公司，继续改进他的发明。1965年，拉耳式开口被拉环取代。1975年，丹尼尔 · 丘德齐克 开发了不必拆卸的拉环装置。打开拉环即可畅饮的易拉罐，撕开了罐装饮料行业的巨大市场，也成为了美国饮品行业的圣杯。
点击播放视频方便的工具，总是更受人们的欢迎。尤其是，成瘾性饮料。比起可乐和啤酒，人类更早开始了，对现制咖啡器具的工业化探索。
1933年，意大利人 阿方索·比乐蒂 设计出了摩卡快速咖啡壶。这款炉顶咖啡壶，自1933年首次亮相至今，仍然保持着它的经典设计。
这款壶由3个金属部分组成：用于煮水的底部胆舱，放置咖啡粉的过滤器，以及带有一体式壶嘴的咖啡液收集隔间。煮沸的水穿过咖啡粉，从中间管道顶部如涌泉般流出，一杯富含油脂的咖啡就做好了。
据说，比乐蒂在设计这款咖啡壶的时候，参考了当时的洗衣机。那会儿的洗衣机，由一个锅炉式的底座和顶部的洗涤盆组成。因为铝的导热性能，和多空隙的表面特性，既能快速把水煮开，又能维持住水温，还可以吸收咖啡风味，于是成为了摩卡壶的首选材料。
点击播放视频如果说饮料的工业化平权，给人们带去了身体上的享受，那么，随身听播放器则是伴随着流行音乐的黄金年代，给人类带来了空前的精神滋养！
索尼的董事长盛田昭夫认为，人们在任何情况下都需要音乐。这款 1979 年诞生的 TPS-L2，它的外形尺寸仅仅比磁带略大一些，这种便携性，使它超越了不同的市场界限和地域文化影响，大获成功。
德国博朗的设计工作室与日本的极简主义，在索尼身上充分融合。小巧的体型与干净利落的造型，至今仍被津津乐道。
它最初的产品定位是青少年市场，因此在设计上，采用了类似蓝色牛仔布拼接金属色的涂装，并设置了双耳机插孔，以供两人同时靠近彼此。这使得它成为了当时乃至今天许多人心目中，一代经典的流行文化符号。
点击播放视频考点众多的设计史，是我读书时期的噩梦。那么多陌生又拗口的人名，我从来都记不住。但是，工作多年以后，我渐渐意识到：
那些经典的设计，都是那个时代下的一次又一次范式革新。
设计史不是设计师史，也不是经典产品史。
当我关注一个设计时，我所关注的是人们如何使用它。人名和产品不是设计史，它们所对应的社会形态、人文环境以及生产技术水平，才是。
设计史是最简便、最低成本的索引目录。
对某个著名设计师的关注，其实远远达不到了解设计。站在宏观的角度去观察，一条已经梳理好的时间轴，就很有帮助。这条时间轴未必符合每个人对历史的认知，但由此发散出来，而关注到的无数分叉，会在日后形成自己的视野有着不可避免的重要性。
任何历史最终都是汇集在一处的。
人类史谈论人类如何进化、如何实用工具、如何创造了古往今来的生活。然而这些生活当中，却也并行着器物进化的历史。这些历史其实是同一部历史，关心设计的历史，就是在关心自己生活在什么样的世界里。
历史是人类的镜子，也是器物的根。
上万年来，人类无数次地重复着同样的错误，然而器物，却一直按照自己的节奏在进化着，从最粗糙的原型里诞生，伴随着人类不断地尝试，衍生出了丰富的世界。
这样的过程，怎么能不迷人呢？
设计史不是人名、地名，不是产品和公司的名字，它是人类和器物之间，相互扶持，纠缠不清的故事，是古往今来的人们，用对生活的热爱，所写下的诗。
在我看来，每一位设计爱好者、在职设计师，我们的案头上都应该至少有一本这样子的书。
做为一本观察世界的魔法目录，它是我们随手可得的一条又一条线索，每一次翻开，都能对我们所处的世界多一份联系和了解。
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The last of these artists who were influenced by the German Romantic painters, notably Caspar David Friedrich and J C Dahl, is the Norwegian Hans Gude (1825–1903).
Born and initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), Gude started his studies at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1842. There he joined a recently formed landscape class taught by Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Gude rejected the conventional teaching that landscape paintings should be composed according to classical or aesthetic principles, preferring instead to paint thoroughly realistically, and true to nature. On completion of his studies, probably in about 1846, he returned to Norway.
Landscape Study from Vågå (1846) is an excellent example of one of his early oil studies, and was probably completed in front of the motif, in Norway’s mountainous Oppland county north of the Jotunheimen Mountains. Although its background is loose and vague, foreground detail is meticulous for a work that appears to have been painted en plein air.
Winter Afternoon from 1847 is a studio painting that wouldn’t look out of place on a greetings card, and a stark contrast.
Tessefossen in Vågå at Midday (1848) is a relatively large studio painting that seems more typical of an American landscape painter of the day.
Early in his career, Gude struggled to paint realistic figures, and in several works he enlisted the help of Adolph Tidemand to paint those in for him.
Among the results of this collaboration are some of his most spectacular works, such as Bridal Journey in Hardanger from 1848. Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.
Although not a particularly large canvas, it’s as meticulously detailed as might have been expected from a Pre-Raphaelite or German Romantic artist, although its colours aren’t as brash. Gude became particularly interested in reflections on water later in his career.
By the Mill Pond (1850) seems to have been another plein air study, but is so detailed that it would be hard to class it as a sketch. When looked at more carefully, though, many of its apparently precise passages turn out to consist of highly gestural marks, as in the lichens on the boulders in the foreground, and the small waterfall at the back. It’s also interesting in containing a figure, who may be Betsy Anker, whom Gude married in the summer of that year.
This later collaboration with Tidemand, Fishing with a Harpoon (1851), is a wonderful nocturne showing night fishing in sheltered waters, another masterpiece of detailed realism and influenced by German Romanticism.
In 1854, Gude was appointed professor in succession to his former teacher Schirmer, which was remarkable recognition for the Norwegian who was not yet thirty years old. He tendered his resignation three years later, but didn’t leave Düsseldorf for a further five years.
Although painted in the studio, his Norwegian Highlands from 1857 appears based on studies made in front of the motif, and retains traditional earth-based colours typical of Friedrich or Dahl.
During the 1850s his paintings had aroused some interest in the UK, so in 1862 Gude travelled to Wales to try to develop his British market.
This painting of what he called ‘Eføybroen’, which might be an ‘Efoy’ Bridge, in North Wales was completed in 1863 from studies made in the previous autumn.
He also painted some grander landscapes of The Lledr Valley in Wales (1864), where he stayed during this campaign.
Gude continued to work by painting studies en plein air, which he took back to the studio and worked up into finished paintings. In contrast, local British painters at the time tended to complete their finished works in front of the motif, and seldom painted landscapes in the studio. When his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863 and 1864, they achieved little recognition, and failed to sell.
At the end of 1863, Gude was offered the post of professor at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe, which he accepted, as there was still no academy of fine art in Norway. During his tenure there, many Norwegians were students, including Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Christian Krohg, and Frits Thaulow.
While he was teaching in Karlsruhe, Gude continued to promote the practice of painting en plein air, and his figures steadily improved. Fjord Landscape with People (1875) shows a typical period scene, with figures, cattle, horses, sailing vessels, and another of his wide open views.
Gude also worked in watercolours, and during his later career visited Scotland on several occasions, where he painted this almost monochrome view of an Estuary at Brodick, Arran, Scotland in 1877.
Gude’s watercolour Landscape with Tarbert Castle, Scotland (1877) shows one of the most famous ruined castles on the west coast of Scotland, on the shore of East Loch Tarbert, at the north end of the Kintyre peninsula.
Sandvik Fjord (1879) is a startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.
In 1880, Gude moved to teach at the Academy of Art in Berlin.
He painted Oban Bay in 1889 following another visit to Scotland, showing the small bay beside the town of Oban on the west coast of northern Scotland. This bay opens out to the Sound of Kerrera, and is now a busy ferry port serving the Western Isles; at this time it seems to have been but a small fishing port. The prominent building in the distance just to the left of the centre of the painting is Saint Columba’s Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop for the Western Isles. The distant mountains are those of the Morvern Peninsula, on the opposite shore of Loch Linnhe.
The Jetty at Feste near Moss (1898) shows another marine view in the far south-east of Norway, on the eastern side of the broad fjord that leads north to Oslo.
Gude retired to Berlin in 1901, and died there in 1903, one of the founding fathers of Norwegian and Nordic landscape painting.
Reference
In this alphabet of landscape painting, we’ve covered two of the four ancient elements, in earth and various bodies of water, but not yet touched on air. Therefore the letter w is for wind, a real challenge to paint.
The most florid paintings of wind are in seascapes, where its effects are most immediate.
JMW Turner was one of the great masters of the shipwreck/storm maritime scene. My favourite example is this Snow Storm, Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). This was the work for which it was claimed that Turner had himself lashed to the mast so that he could observe the storm properly, almost certainly false and quite unnecessary anyway: as a seasoned Channel traveller, Turner would have had ample previous experience. This also shows one of Turner’s most distinctive features in painting storms, the vortex, with his subject seen in its central eye. Although not exactly natural, it has proved atmospheric.
Peder Balke takes advantage of the rich clues provided in The Harbor at Skjervøy (c 1844-46). In this small fishing port in Troms, in the far north of Norway, the wind fills the sky with wheeling seabirds, heels the yachts, turns the sea white from breaking waves, and drives distant smoke almost horizontally.
Clarkson Frederick Stanfield made his reputation from marine paintings showing the effects of wind and waves. In the summer of 1843, he toured the Netherlands, finding fresh motifs for his oil paintings, including Oude Scheld – Texel Island, Looking towards Nieuwe Diep and the Zuider Zee, completed in his studio the following year. Its fragmented clouds are paralleled by the frequent small waves, together building the effect of a brisk offshore breeze. The critics loved it.
Late in his career, Gustave Courbet’s coastal paintings came to concentrate on waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867, where two sailing boats are the only forms to punctuate its horizon. They are heeling in the wind, which is also starting to blow the tops off the waves, as those dirty clouds scud rapidly across the sky.
On land, though, the painter has to work harder to convince the viewer, enlisting the help of trees and their foliage, and even washing hung out to dry.
Thomas Gainsborough’s sketchy Landscape with Cottage and Church (1771-72) is one of the first works to use angled highlights over the foliage of trees to make them appear as if they’re moving in the wind, and its style was far ahead of its time.
Although trees are a help when depicting wind, Daubigny’s undated October manages very well with the tell-tale smoke rising from burning stubble.
Gustave Courbet shows how a ‘leaning’ sky can amplify the windswept branches, in The Gust of Wind from about 1865.
Although it depicts more extreme conditions, Jean-François Millet’s Gust of Wind from 1871-73 must be the canonical painting of a storm. Its lone and distant figure is being blown almost double, as he’s nearly struck by a large branch torn from the tree to the left. Indeed, that tree is being uprooted, and its leaves pepper the storm sky at dawn.
Antônio Parreiras’ wonderful Ventania (The Windstorm) (1888) is not as extreme, but just as eloquent, again using a leaning sky to accentuate the arcs formed by the trees.
With the Impressionist emphasis on transient effects of light rather than weather, their paintings tend to be more subtle again, as shown in Claude Monet’s Poplars (Wind Effect) from 1891.
Some of the most effective aids for the depiction of wind are flags and drying washing. While Sisley used the former, Gustave Caillebotte painted two views in which a washing line gives the strongest clue as to the wind. This is his Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers (1892), the windier of the two.
Following his time at Cullercoats in England painting fisherfolk there, Winslow Homer’s simple and effective watercolour of Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) should come as no surprise.
Although not famous as a landscape painter, Franz von Stuck’s Storm Landscape (c 1920) leaves the viewer in no doubt.
The influence of German Romanticism, as expressed in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and JC Dahl, extended well beyond the confines of modern Germany. Among those thought to have been influenced is a Pontic Greek painter from Mariupol in the far south-east of Ukraine, Arkhyp Kuindzhi (1841-1910).
After spending some of his youth in the nearby Russian city of Taganrog, when he was fourteen he travelled to Feodosiia in the east of Crimea, to work and study in the studio of the great marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky. Although Kuindzhi received little teaching from the master himself, he was influenced by him, and taught mostly by Adolf Fessler, another of Aivazovsky’s pupils.
In 1860, Kuindzhi moved back to Taganrog to work until he travelled to Saint Petersburg, where he became a student at the Imperial Academy in 1868. There he joined the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) in 1870, leaving the Academy two years later. He met with early success, selling one of his early paintings to the merchant banker Pavel Tretyakov for his collection in Moscow, and in 1874 was awarded a bronze medal in London. Throughout his career he returned to Ukraine to paint its landscapes.
Kuindzhi’s Chumak Road in Mariupol from 1875 shows one of the major activities in this part of the Ukraine at the time, trading using wagons hauled by a pair of oxen. Chumaks had flourished in the seventeenth century, selling and transporting commodities including salt, fish and grain. By the end of the century, competition from the developing railways had put them into decline.
Following his influence by Aivazovsky, Kuindzhi soon specialised in painting in spectacular light. After a Thunderstorm (1879) is an oil sketch capturing the brilliant colour and light following heavy rain on the steppe.
He also fell in love with the great River Dnipro, and painted it in a series of views, among them The Dnipro in the Morning from 1881, showing his fine control of detail and aerial perspective.
It’s this nocturne, Moonlit Night on the Dnipro, here seen in one of his copies from 1882, that Kuindzhi is most famous for, and the strongest evidence for his Romantic influence. Silhouetted against the moonlight reflected from the river is a solitary windmill, and in the foreground are a few cottages.
In 1892, Kuindzhi was appointed a professor at the Imperial Academy, where he taught until being dismissed in 1897 for supporting the protests of students.
Between 1890-95, he painted Midday. Herd on the Steppe, one of his many views with a low horizon and heaped cumulus clouds so typical of summer in this area.
Kuindzhi’s Darial Pass. Moonlit Night, painted following a visit in 1890-95, shows a section of this 13 kilometre (8 miles) long Military Road connecting Russia and Georgia in the tranquil conditions of summer. This gorge runs north-south through the Caucasus Mountains, and has seen extensive use by armies and traders.
Landscape in Crimea (1896) is a wonderfully loose view of the rocky cliffs beside a rough Black Sea.
Red Sunset on the Dnipro (1905) is one of few Ukrainian paintings to have made their way beyond Ukraine and Russia: this is in the Met in New York, and is a fine example of Kuindzhi’s paintings of altered light.
His Night from 1905-08 shows horses grazing on the bank of a broad river, quite probably the Dnipro, under the light of a crescent moon, again very Romantic.
Another of his favourite themes is the Birch Grove, here in one of his many undated oil sketches.
In 1909, Kuindzhi founded the Society of Artists, which was later named in his honour. He died the following year, 1910, in Saint Petersburg.
References
Wikipedia
Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.
If you find geese daunting, then what about swans? Although usually seen as graceful if not regal, fully grown adults can weight over 15 kg (33 pounds), and can put up a real fight. They feature in one well-known myth that must have seemed incredible even to the ancients, that of Leda and the swan.
Leda, wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta, was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan, at about the same time that she was also impregnated by her husband. Her twin pregnancies thus resulted in two eggs: one hatched into Castor, who was human because his father was Tyndareus; the other hatched into Polydeuces (Latin Pollux), who was divine as his father was Zeus, and the twins were known as the Dioskuroi.
This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises a later account involving Helen’s unique birth, with two eggs and a fourth baby, Clytemnestra. Later paintings, perhaps wisely, concentrated on Leda and Zeus, and skipped the incredible egg phase altogether.
Tintoretto and his workshop painted Leda and the Swan in about 1578-83, and wittily include two caged birds, a duck and what appears to be a parrot, with a cat taunting the duck.
Gustave Moreau started his early Leda in 1865 but abandoned it incomplete in 1875.
Moreau’s later watercolour of Leda and the Swan (c 1882) revisits this myth as another static display of female beauty, with the added twist of a large, dark aquiline bird by Leda’s feet. Although this could be an eagle, the bright red at its base suggests the flames of a phoenix just starting to self-combust. This is a curious combination of symbols of self-renewal through cyclical combustion, and a woman who laid eggs.
Joseph Stella’s Leda and the Swan (1922) follows a more modern tradition.
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leda and the Swan is drawn not from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but direct from older Greek mythology. He shows over twenty young children, some of them winged amorini, bringing the swan to Leda as she wades into a river.
Swans appear in the supporting cast of some other myths.
After the scorched remains of Phaëthon were buried by Naiads in a distant tomb, his mother Clymene was left to mourn his death. Phaëthon’s lamenting sisters were then transformed into poplar trees, and their tears into amber (electrum). Phaëthon’s beloved friend Cycnus was transformed into a swan who shuns the heat by taking to the water that extinguishes fire. His name lives on in the genus to which swans belong, Cygnus.
Santi di Tito’s fresco of The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars, from about 1570, shows the four young women with leaves sprouting from their hands and heads, as they lament the death of their brother. A swan makes a cameo appearance in the foreground, referring to the transformation of Cycnus.
The chariot of Venus is sometimes described as being drawn by white swans, as shown in Antoine Coypel’s painting of The Alliance of Bacchus and Cupid from about 1702, below.
Swans have also made the occasional transfer into modern legend, including that of King Arthur.
N. C. Wyeth’s illustration from 1922 accompanies the text “And when they came to the sword that the hand held, King Arthur took it up.” As three swans fly low behind them, Arthur and Merlin approach the hand in the lake that is presenting Arthur with his sword.
Other mythical themes have been attended by swans.
The association between Pegasus and the Muses was revived in one of Gustave Moreau’s ‘new’ history paintings, of Hesiod and the Muses in 1860. This is the first of a series of works showing Hesiod, generally considered to be the first written poet in the Western tradition to exist as a real person. He is shown to the left of centre, as a young man holding a laurel staff in his right hand. The Muses are squeezed in together, and one is on her knee to present Hesiod with a laurel wreath. There are four swans on the ground, and one in flight above Hesiod, a winged Cupid sat on the left wing of Pegasus, and a brilliant white star directly above the winged horse.
In 1896, Mikhail Vrubel met the operatic soprano Nadezhda Zabela, and they married shortly afterwards. His patron invited her to perform in his theatre, and in 1900 she sang in the role of Tsarevna Swan-Bird, or The Swan Princess (1900), in the world première of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, based on the poem of the same name by Pushkin.
Unfortunately, swans have also been consumed by royalty and nobles, in the infamous dish Swan Pie.
Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Taste (or Allegory of Taste) (1618), with figures painted by Rubens, is an extensive catalogue of what was then considered to be edible, including a well-prepared swan.
Frans Wouters’ Allegory of Taste was painted in 1635–59, and clearly inspired by Brueghel’s painting. Instead of the lavish jam-packed collation in that earlier work, Wouters seems to have had a smaller budget, or perhaps wished to avoid the sin of gluttony. There is still the infamous Swan Pie on the table.
There are even a few paintings where swans are just swans, including this wonderfully painterly watercolour by Marià Fortuny.
His Masquerade (1868) shows an open-air masked ball, presumably held in Italy in the autumn, which is arousing the interest or bemusement of two swans. Dress is liberal to say the least, with the woman in the centre baring her breasts while holding a parasol, but she has none of the grace of those swans.
The Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) had already demonstrated his influence by Caspar David Friedrich and other German Romantic painters by the early 1870s, when he was working in Munich again. He then spent almost a decade settled in Florence, until 1885.
Spring in a Narrow Gorge (1881) seems to be a straightforward landscape painting, of a few birch trees in fresh Spring foliage (although the reference in the title isn’t to the season), in a narrow gorge. The water source of the title quite probably runs among the rocks at the base of the gorge, but isn’t readily visible.
Böcklin’s Summer Day (1881) shows a small river meandering through meadows, with summer flowers out on the grass, and white blossom on the strange-looking trees. In the background is a town, and half a dozen children are playing in or near the water, in the foreground. It has an air of calm and timelessness, otherwise it doesn’t seem to invite any deeper reading.
Ruin by the Sea (1881) makes its intent clear in returning to a more Romantic theme. The ruins of an old building are just above the waves. Growing within the broken walls are three cypress trees which lean away from the prevailing wind. Above them the sun’s rays break through banks of cloud in a dramatic light, and a large flock of crows are arriving to perch on the top of the walls. The ruin represents decay, perhaps that of later life, and the crows are harbingers of death. Cypress trees also have a strong association with cemeteries.
Many artists associated with German Romantic and Symbolist movements painted groups of worshippers within ancient trees, often under similar titles to Böcklin’s Sacred Grove, from 1882. The nine figures here are shrouded in white habits indicating their religious association. On top of a stone altar is a bright flame, at which three of them are bent low and kneeling in obeisance. Behind the grove, in the distance, is what appears to be a large stone building like a temple or monastery. In the foreground is a large pond in which white flowers are starting to open. However, the foliage of the trees indicates that it is autumn/fall.
Between 1880 and 1886, Böcklin painted a total of five different versions of his most famous work, Island (or Isle) of the Dead. Each shows a similar island, probably based in part on the English Cemetery in Florence, where his own baby daughter had been buried. Each shows the deceased being rowed across to the island, which calls on the classical myth of Charon, who rows the dead over the rivers Styx or Acheron to the underworld.
Böcklin painted the first version in 1880 for his patron Alexander Günther. This shows the boat just outside the harbour of a small rocky island which appears to be lined with mausoleums. The light is remarkable, seemingly a bright twilight, against dark water and sky. However the direction of travel of the boat is ambiguous, as it may actually be moving away from the island and towards the viewer.
While he was working on that version, the widow of a financier, Marie Berna, visited his studio in Florence, and commissioned a smaller version in memory of her first husband, who had died of diphtheria in 1865. For this, the artist added the standing figure and coffin, which he also added to the first version. At that time, Böcklin had titled the painting Tomb Island.
The third version of Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for Böcklin’s dealer. The first two versions had encountered criticism. He accordingly changed the lighting and closed in on his motif, making this version much clearer that the boat was entering the island’s tiny harbour. Although less dramatically lit, this adds clarity to the most important part of the painting, as shown in the detail below.
He painted a fourth version in 1884, which was sadly destroyed during the Second World War.
The fifth version was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, and was painted in 1886.
In 1888, Böcklin painted a complement, with the title Island of Life, and in the year of his death, a sixth version was in progress, which was completed by his son Carlo.
A great deal has been written and speculated about this remarkable series of paintings. Böcklin evokes mood, of a poignant calm, of death and loss. During the 1880s, its reputation grew. It was reproduced as a print by Max Klinger that sold strongly. Reproductions were bought by the Swedish artist Prince Eugen, and Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France. By the early twentieth century, several artists had painted their own interpretations of the image. It has influenced countless painters, poets, writers, and other artists since.
Böcklin’s Attack by Pirates (1886) is perhaps a more direct German Romantic work, showing a group of pirates attacking some Italianate buildings atop the sheer cliffs of a tiny island connected by a viaduct. The attackers have already set light to the buildings, casting an eerie red light against the black clouds. Perhaps the artist felt that he was coming under similar attack by his critics.
That year, Böcklin moved from Florence to Zürich in Switzerland, where he turned more to narrative and mythological works. Then in 1892, he moved for the last time, to San Domenico near Florence, where he remained until he died in early 1901.
The Chapel, from 1898, is one of Böcklin’s last Romantic landscapes, and returns to similar sea-swept ruins as those in Ruin by the Sea above, but with some important changes. Here there is no doubt that the waves are destroying the remains of this chapel, as they crash against its walls. The cypresses are still curved with the wind, but instead of black crows there are white doves of peace. On the remains of the steps at the right are red flowers, which could have several associations, including love.
The influence of Caspar David Friedrich, JC Dahl and the German Romantics can be seen in the works of several artists from later in the nineteenth century, among them Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), a major Swiss painter who was extremely well known at the time.
Böcklin was born in Basel, Switzerland, and studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he became a friend of Anselm Feuerbach. During his training, he visited Antwerp and Brussels, then in 1848 went to Paris to copy in the Louvre.
His early landscapes were technically accomplished, mainly upland views such as Mountain Lake from 1846, typical of Swiss landscape painting at the time.
Böcklin soon showed interest in motifs derived more from the paintings of Friedrich and his friend and pupil Carl Gustav Carus. Landscape with Castle Ruins from 1847 is an example of this ‘Gothic’ Romantic style, its serene half-light full of foreboding.
Megalithic Tomb (1847) introduces anonymous figures who appear to be engaged in a mystical ceremony at this isolated location just below the snowline in the mountains. In the foreground is a boggy lake with a heron-like bird stepping out from cover.
Even his relatively plain landscapes acquire a feeling of something else. In his Mountain Landscape with Waterfall from about 1849, the foreground is in shadow, and the distant peaks are well-lit. Visible at the right of the waterfall is a wild animal, and there’s a shadowy figure perhaps in the lower right corner. Or maybe it’s just the light playing tricks.
In 1850, Böcklin moved to Rome, where he started to paint in the Campagna.
In the Alban Hills from 1851 is a fine depiction of these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. Unlike many artists working in the Campagna at the time, Böcklin must have painted this work in the studio from extensive sketches and studies made in front of the motif. Look closely, though, and there’s a dark figure standing beside a small smoking fire, to the left of the central mass of trees, and further to the left might be the entrance to a dark cavern.
Böcklin uses more dramatic lighting in his Roman Landscape from 1852. Its dark wood is very dark indeed, not the sort of place to enter alone. At the foot of the prominent tree at the right is what appears to be a woman undressing, as if going to bathe in the stygian gloom.
In 1853, when he was in Rome, Böcklin married, and started to raise his family there. Six years later, though, he nearly died of typhoid. By that time, his mythological paintings were achieving critical recognition, and he was appointed professor at the Weimar Academy in Germany. He stayed there for two years before moving back to Rome in 1862, where started work on his first major landscape painting: Villa by the Sea.
Böcklin painted his first version of Villa by the Sea in 1864, using a mixture of encaustic (wax) paints and resins. Those have sadly not aged well, but this shows a romanesque villa at the water’s edge. Beside it is a small bay, where a woman stands looking at the sea in front of her.
Böcklin painted a second version the following year, using more conventional oil paints. The villa now appears overgrown and partly in ruins, its cypress and other trees leaning away from the prevailing wind. The woman, dressed in black, is now cradling her head with one hand as she looks at the sea.
In another version painted between 1871-74, now in the Städel in Frankfurt, it’s last light, with a band of cloud on fire with the last rays of the setting sun. Although the garden of the villa is well-grown, it appears in better condition, and the woman still stands staring at the sea.
Modern reading of these paintings has been influenced by an account published by William Ritter in 1895, stating that they tell the story of Iphigenia in Tauris. Although Ritter appears to have consulted with the artist, Böcklin himself isn’t known to have confirmed this, and there are no specific clues in any of their versions.
Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who was to be sacrificed to give the Greek fleet favourable winds so that they could attack Troy. There is no coherent account of her fate, but in one version her life was spared, and she was rescued to become priestess of Artemis on Tauris. There, she watched for the arrival of sailors, who would be captured to be offered in sacrifice to Artemis. The painting could thus be centred on waiting, death, and the passage of time, which are at least consistent with what Böcklin depicted.
Böcklin continued to move between Germany, Switzerland and Italy. In 1866, he went back to Basel, then on to Munich in 1871, where he painted the work below.
In his Mountain Castle with a Train of Warriors from 1871, a small band of warriors clad in scarlet are making their way up a track towards an ancient castle overlooking a valley. Down below them, amid a stand of cypress trees, is a villa. There are no other clues as to any underlying narrative.
昨天发现 AAAny 更新了发图的功能，于是就顺势发起了一个讨论 AIGC 的话题。
轶轩在话题下问我为什么对外发表的图都是一些细节比较丰富的类型，是否有基于 AIGC 的生成方式而做的一些突破方向的尝试。我觉得，针对这个问题，我可以在对他的回复上，再做一期视频来谈一谈我的观点。
但与此同时，我也想做一些「简练」或「抽象」的图来辅助说明我的看法。于是，今天在工作之余，用一些碎片时间，做了一些图出来。
对此，我尝试比较随意地做了一些「东西」。它们都没有什么明确的「表达」，仅仅只是我随手写的一些 prompt，或者就是在 Midjourney 的社区里复制修改的 prompt，最终出来的东西都是一眼看上去有一些「意境」或者没那么精致细节的但表现比较能唬住人的图像。
你会发现，在这些人类认为偏「抽象」的表达上，AI 反而是比较容易做「好」的。
但是，这种好不是真的好，只是这些风格上，并不需要对细节有很认真的考据，在表现层面上是非常容易「糊弄」的。
这也是现当代艺术作品常常被人诟病的原因之一，因为那些作品浓缩了大量的思考和抽象提炼，但表现形式上，其实并没有比传统艺术更复杂，或更需要技艺和体力上的付出。也就是说，作为当代艺术最核心的「观念」，在完全不需要理解的情况下，一个外行的人或者一个数据量管够的 AI 就可以模仿出「看上去像那么回事」的东西。这种模棱两可的状态，恰恰是江湖神棍和 AIGC 擅长处理的对象。
这里说的「糊弄」「神棍」并非贬义，而是借着世俗的话语体系来表达，这样的「生成作品」并不需要 AI 具备「意识」和「创意」也可以轻松地实现。
那么，什么东西是更难的呢？
细节，是令人信服的细节。
这些是我用 AI 生成的男士剃须刀的设计方案。
你会发现，这些方案咋一看是那么回事，但只要你多看两秒，立刻就会意识到它不对。它们的空间关系、形态的处理、物理交互的关系、电子器件的布局，通通都有很大的问题。这些就是不可信的细节。
因为 AI 实际上并不理解它学习的那些图像。
这些令人信服的关键点，是无法糊弄的。因为它们当中包含了大量精确的思考和训练，也包含了海量的脑力和体力劳动，如果一个「智能体」不理解一个图像背后的复杂逻辑，那么它就没有办法真正地创作出这个对象。它只能模仿，只要模仿得足够像，就可以唬住外行。但是对于以此为生的从业者，这样的智能工具，还不足以成为生产力。设计师可以用这样的工具拓展自己的思维，但这些过程并不能替代设计行为。
从创意到落地，中间还有漫长的路需要人类设计师去走完。
现阶段，更适合工业设计使用 AIGC 的方式是这样：
我的意思并不是让 AI 画手绘图，这仅仅是一种表现方式。但是，这是一种不需要追求精确的表达方式，很适合 AI 用「抽卡」的方式来快速堆想法。除了这种，当然也可以让它生成上面剃须刀那样的图，但同样的，目的不在于出方案，而是借助 AI 的海量数据库，快速地堆出一批发散性思维的「胡编乱造」的混杂图像来。
人类的视野有限，但 AI 看得一定比人类个体的平均值多。
工业设计不是天马行空地想象，它是一种「劳作」。
从初期的构思，从草图推延到模型和效果图，再从设计方案导入结构设计和工艺、制程，这意味着工业设计不是一项纯脑力劳动，不是一种只运行在计算机里的行为。它包含的体力劳作同样是设计的一部份，甚至可以说，是更关键的那部份。这种体力劳作，不仅仅是肌肉和工具的配合，更是人脑对环境、事件、社会群体、物质的反应和处理，设计师的动作意味着这个人对世界的认知。这种程度的认知，对于只运行在计算机内，仍然缺少复杂的传感器和理解过程的 AI 而言，暂时还是无法实现的。
我当然相信它未来会具备这样的能力，但是在目前的技术条件下，依然需要大量的人类来完成这些真正代表了「智能」的「体力劳作」。
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Some forthcoming talks are helping me think through a new book, which I want to start writing in 2023 once Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out in September 2023 (more on that in a post coming soon).
One of the talks is at the Asia Society on March 1 and has to do with concepts of hell and the afterlife in China–especially how this played out after the Communist Party tried to destroy most values. Details here.
The second, and more relevant talk to my new book is on the idea of Civil Religion in China. I took a stab at this in early 2023 at a talk at Fordham University and will do so in a more systematic way in March at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, aka Germany’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
I’ll be on a podium with Franciscus Verellen, a distinguished historian of religious life in middle-period China (and along with Kristofer Schipper the editor of one of the great recent works of sinological study, The Taoist Canon, which is a magically written and illustrated two-volume companion to the canon, which is essentially an encyclopedia of Taoist thought).
Prof. Verellen will talk about state and religion in classical China and I’ll talk about the concept in the country today, especially as the Communist Party uses it to cement legitimacy.
You can see details of both talks on this site’s “Talks and Media Appearances” page. The German talk will be in German. Both will be posted to YouTube, and I think the German talk will have subtitles.
If you get a chance to hear these and have feedback, please do send me an email at ij@ian-johnson.com I’d appreciate any feedback.
Thanks!
The post Hell, Politics, and Religion appeared first on Ian Johnson.
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这个叫做 AAAny 的新问答社区是汉洋他们团队，从 redit 等社区平台的使用中，萌生的对于「Ask Anyone Anything」的重新思考，所做出的产品。我其实几个月前，就在一次和他俩吃饭之后就注册好了。但是一直因为忙，我担心不能及时回复别人的提问，就一直没好意思发起一场主题活动。中途有看到可达和 JT 发起的问答，很感兴趣，也想试试看，但也因为对时间的担心就止住了念头。正好借着这次 Wenbo 的邮件，跟汉洋他俩聊了一会儿后，我就趁着夜色正浓，冲动还在，就立马编辑了两段自我介绍，发起了分别以「工业设计师」和「设计类视频创作者」为主题的两场活动。
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当天也是高效，一连开了三个会。中途用各种碎片时间，一一回答了 AAAny 上的提问。晚上赶回家陪筱烨过生日的路上，我一看已经回复过的内容，好家伙，累计的输出量都赶上我平时写两三篇文章了。
碎片化地高密度输出，也是可以产生一些好内容的。
在使用了一天后，当晚，我和汉洋、轶轩聊了聊感受。汉洋问我感觉 AAAny 和知乎之间有什么区别？我打了一个比方：
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