Moving from a small but intriguing exhibition held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main in 2002, in which three works of the Dutch painter Pieter Janssens Elinga were juxtaposed to just as many works by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, the paper suggests what is actually nothing more than a play. Namely, to let one of Wall’s work – Morning Cleaning – reflect in Elinga’s Interior with painter, a woman reading and a servant sweeping the floor or, more precisely, in Elinga’s work in light of Hegel’s interpretation of Dutch painting. In fact, many of Hegel’s observations on Dutch painting can also be used as comments on Elinga’s Interior and, given the kind of family resemblance that connects this work to that of Wall, they also shed some light on the latter. In particular they help to highlight how both works have the same effect of an aesthetic elevation of the everyday and the ordinary. Like the Dutch painters, Wall discovers that the everyday can be a domain of the aesthetic, a space in which meanings accumulate. Hegel helps us to appreciate how the pictorial realization carries the meanings into the realm of the aesthetically pleasurable, and in the same time to acknowledge that this realm and the domain of art, in which we experience, to use one of his expression, a kind of «Sonntag des Lebens», is nothing more than a kingdom of semblances.
La bellezza dell’ordinario. Su Hegel, la pittura olandese del Seicento e Jeff Wall
TOMASI, GABRIELE
2016
Abstract
Moving from a small but intriguing exhibition held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main in 2002, in which three works of the Dutch painter Pieter Janssens Elinga were juxtaposed to just as many works by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, the paper suggests what is actually nothing more than a play. Namely, to let one of Wall’s work – Morning Cleaning – reflect in Elinga’s Interior with painter, a woman reading and a servant sweeping the floor or, more precisely, in Elinga’s work in light of Hegel’s interpretation of Dutch painting. In fact, many of Hegel’s observations on Dutch painting can also be used as comments on Elinga’s Interior and, given the kind of family resemblance that connects this work to that of Wall, they also shed some light on the latter. In particular they help to highlight how both works have the same effect of an aesthetic elevation of the everyday and the ordinary. Like the Dutch painters, Wall discovers that the everyday can be a domain of the aesthetic, a space in which meanings accumulate. Hegel helps us to appreciate how the pictorial realization carries the meanings into the realm of the aesthetically pleasurable, and in the same time to acknowledge that this realm and the domain of art, in which we experience, to use one of his expression, a kind of «Sonntag des Lebens», is nothing more than a kingdom of semblances.
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