Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - страница 6

Artists began to portray movement on stairs in painting at the end of the 19^>thcentury. Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 cubist painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase” (V1, p. 183), which The New York Times christened “Explosion at the Tile Factory”, depicts a woman’s motion down five steps along a spiral staircase through the successive overlapping of individual fragments. The painting was inspired by the new technology of cinema and particularly by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs “Woman Descending Stairs”, made in 1887.

Gerhard Richter’s “Ema. Nude on a Staircase” (V1, p. 185), painted in 1966 is a comment on Duchamp’s work. Like Duchamp, Richter based his painting on a photograph. The model was the artist’s wife, descending an ordinary staircase devoid of details that would indicate a particular time. Richter’s almost ghostly image, seemingly woven of dreams and memories, renders Duchamp’s experiment to the limits of traditional portrait painting, a genre much out of favor in the art world of the 1960s. Richter’s painting later served as an inspiration for Bernhard Schlink’s 2014 novel, “The Woman on the Stairs”.

The phenomenon of movement both up and down steps is the subject of Mario Ceroli’s sculpture “La Scala” (V1, p. 186). His staircase with profile cut-outs of men and women, made of unpainted wood, captures the various phases of this movement, focusing on the contrast of static and dynamic. In her live installation “Plastic” (2015–16) by the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi explores the same dichotomy of static and dynamic, examining pauses both plastic and temporal in a museum space. Hassabi placed performers along the flight of stairs lying perfectly still, contrasting sharply with the rapid flow of visitors around them. Thus, the artist expands our idea of the obviously utilitarian significance of the stairs in the museum, slowing down the rhythm of our reaction to its meaning.

Maria Hassabi, Plasticity, performance, 2016, Museum of Modern Art, New York

A staircase represents not only movement but also stability – architecturally, staircases are pillars that unite different levels. Since ancient times, this simple formula has given rise to many plastic variations, to the point where today we can determine the architectural style and period of a structure from the staircase. To this day architects continue to experiment with stairs, often sacrificing functionality to play with forms. Perhaps this is because other means for ascending and descending have diminished the staircase’s practical function, leaving it only a romantic role in modern architecture.

Macbeth, 2015, Vienna State Opera, set design by Gary McCann

M. C. Escher was one of the first artists to depict absurd stairs, stairs that are endless and simultaneously devoid of function. In his 1953 lithograph “Relativity” (V2, p. 50) he depicted an architectural structure with several levels united by stairs, full of geometric paradoxes. Escher eventually created a series of lithographs with impossible stairs and constructions, making him a major figure in the school of “impossible reality”. They were created under the influence of Lionel Penrose and his mathematician son Roger, whose model of a “continuous staircase” in the form of a square with no exit causes the walker, if he walks clockwise, to descend, and if he walks counter-clockwise, to ascend, in both cases endlessly.