Lectures of the Cátedra del Prado.
Time – The Invisible Force Visual
Concepts Through History

Time has neither colour nor form, though we credit it with scale and direction. This allows it to be visualized, for example as a circle or line. Both are ancient metaphors in historical-political thought. The ideologically founded, conceptual poles, between which our secular notions of time are situated, are the eternal return immanent in the cycle and the irreversible sequence of events rendered as a unidirectional line of travel. Despite their crude simplification of complex historical phenomena, these elementary models of circle and line capture and confirm the experiences underlying them: the cyclical recurrence of day and night as well as the inherently directional nature of life. This lecture will examine these contrary concepts of time, this polarity between regularity and the unrecoverable singularity of the moment, as they are reflected in art.

The history of artistic pace has yet to be written. Meanwhile, time has always served as a gauge by which to measure the quality of art: specifically the hours invested in it as the measurable timespan within which a given work was produced. Slow painters and fast painters may constitute the extremes, but both types of artist are undoubtedly as old as art itself. The diverse, even contradictory, criteria for judging the speed at which an artist works have always been dictated by variables such as the prevailing taste, the latest theories, technical inventions, and economics. Artistic pace itself remains an immaterial factor, even when it can be timed by a clock or quantified by a calendar. This wide-ranging history of creative time will take in some fine examples of overpainted masterpieces, paintings that began ageing even as they were being painted, and photographs whose subjects had to hold still for what seemed like an eternity.

All art materials are perishable to a greater or lesser degree, and hence in thrall to time. To put it another way, they represent materialized time. Whether they are tough or pliable, whether rare or available in abundance, whether natural or a product of technical expertise, they objectify time long before artists begin working with them. Here, our probing of temporality will focus on three materials: marble, paper, and snow. The notions of temporality associated with this revealing trio of substances could scarcely be more different. While the one promises monument-like durability and the other extreme ephemerality, paper can offer both. It can withstand wear and tear for a remarkably long time, yet is also quick to disintegrate.

For Spain, the year 1808 began with turmoil, it having been invaded by French troops under the command of General Murat in late 1807. In 1814, by which time the war was over, Goya visualized what had happened in two monumental history paintings. Taking El 2 de Mayo and El 3 de Mayo as examples, I shall conclude this lecture series by tracing an arc to historiographical concepts. The discussion here will turn on the following questions: How long does the present last? How does art translate abstract time into visible history? How can the creator of a work structure time, even stretch it or compress it, and to what end might an artist do this? Surprisingly, it is portraiture that provides some of the most illuminating answers to these questions.