Talk:Shaped canvas

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What does "rondo" mean in this context? It doesn't mean the musical term, the only meaning you'll find at rondo, Wiktionary, or www.dictionary.com. I Googled "rondo" with "painting" and found a few places where the painting term is used, but without explanation. See Wikipedia:Explain jargon. Art LaPella 00:29, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

I was wondering about that, too. I googled "art dictionary" and found an art dictionary online, artlex.com [1]. The entry for rondo says "see tondo". So I clicked on tondo, and it says "A painting in the shape of a circle. Most often found in Italian Renaissance painting, and in paintings of Madonnas. Raphael and Sandro Botticelli painted several tondos." [2]. I also found the cluster of terms "rondel or roundel or rondelle - Any circular work of art or other object, or a circular element of a work, design or symbol." [3]. My Webster's dictionary confirms that "tondo" is "a round painting", but does not include that as a definition for "rondo". None of these definitions say whether the painting is on canvas or on something else, such as a panel of wood - crucial piece of information in the context of an article on shaped canvases.

But apparently rondo is indeed a less usual term for tondo, a round painting. Perhaps we should change 'rondo' here to 'tondo', for greater clarity? MdArtLover 06:52, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm a stock market guy who got here by clicking "Random article". But you and your reference convinced me, and I am making that change, and wikilinking to tondo (art). Art LaPella 07:53, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Invention?

Artist have been shaping their "canvases" ever since the invention of painting. This article seems to be about a "term" in painting.. maybe it would be more informative to describe the invention and use of that term? I have moved the whole section on Tobias/Clark here because it seems to be an on ruining discussion that belongs on a talk page. The footnotes are kind of shaky - the Clark notability has server problems because the sources are not very good, they are from a commercial and advocacy site and are therefore POV:

According to thehistorymakers.com, abstract painter Edward Clark (born 1926 in New Orleans) is the first painter credited with working on a shaped canvas (in the modern sense); his first shaped canvas, painted in 1956, was shown at New York's Brata Gallery in 1957. [4] [5]

The claim that Clark invented this medium is disputable, however. According to art reviewer Francis V. O'Connor, "The shaped canvas ... was invented for modernist purposes in the 1930s by Abraham Joel Tobias." [6]. He refers the reader to Jeffrey Wechsler's exhibition catalogue, Abraham Joel Tobias: Sculptural Painting of the 1930s (see References section). Mr. O'Connor would appear to be a respected authority on modern art, having written the exhibition catalogue for the 1967 Jackson Pollock exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Rutgers University's discussion of a Tobias exhibition there notes that while "the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s", Tobias indeed had already created such works in the 1930s (see external links for this, including an image). Perhaps, then, Edward Clark can be credited with reviving rather than inventing the shaped canvas in the postwar period - whether or not he was aware of earlier shaped-canvas art. Furthermore, strictly speaking, the shaped painting by Clark exhibited in 1957 was apparently not exactly a shaped canvas: the painting was extended out of its rectangular frame by means of additional wood and paper (see external links below for source of this information).

Fountains of Bryn Mawr 14:37, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] a note about "non-Shaped canvas"

Canvases are rectangular for reasons inherent to the materials and techniques of making a canvas. The fabric is woven, and therefore consisting of threads intersecting at right angles. Care is taken to align the directionality of the fabric to the four wooden supports that comprise the normal rectangular canvas. This is done to achieve evenness of tension in the fabric and to allow for ease in making later adjustments in fabric tension. The above applies only to stretched canvas painting surfaces. It would not apply to painting on wooden panels, for instance. Bus stop 16:03, 18 February 2007 (UTC)