{"id":10430,"date":"2017-11-11T08:45:50","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T16:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/11\/11\/news-4203\/"},"modified":"2017-11-11T08:45:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T16:45:50","slug":"news-4203","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/11\/11\/news-4203\/","title":{"rendered":"Do We All See the Woman Holding an iPhone in This 1860 Painting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Brian Anderson| Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2017 16:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter Russell and his partner were strolling through the Neue Pinakothek, the museum of 18th and 19th century art in Munich, when they saw her. <\/p>\n

She\u2019s walking down a path, seemingly unfocused on what\u2019s coming around a slight bend: a rosy-cheeked boy on one knee with a pink flower at the ready for wooing her. Her gaze is, for the moment, frozen downward at a slight angle, focused on a small object she cradles with both hands in the way so many of us walk around nowadays absorbed in our smartphones.<\/p>\n

This is \u201cThe Expected One,\u201d a painting by Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldm\u00fcller from 1860. <\/p>\n

Russell, a retired local Glasgow government officer, told me he recalled the artwork this past summer at a translators\u2019 conference. It was about a year after he and his partner came face to face with the painting on that fateful Bavarian holiday. Now Russell and a female colleague, he explained, had found themselves talking about \u201cthe importance of context.\u201d That\u2019s when he whipped out his phone to show her an image of \u201cThe Expected One.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context,\u201d said Russell, who now occasionally blogs<\/a> about culture and writes poetry.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/picture>\n
Image: Hajotthu\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The painting has since left enough of an impression on Russell that he\u2019d even share it<\/a> in response to a tweet last month from the @VICE Twitter account, after it posted a story<\/a> I wrote over the summer about a certain painting from 1937 that depicts, among other things, a man holding a certain something that so resembles an iPhone as to be uncanny. <\/p>\n

Russell\u2019s reply tweet, noting a similar sort of striking resemblance going on in \u201cThe Expected One,\u201d is how I first caught wind of the Waldm\u00fcller painting. And so what if Russell had the date off by a decade or so in his tweet? The point remains. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s dimmer to trace back is whether he\u2019s the first observer to publicly call it out. Russell told me he wasn\u2019t aware of anyone else having shared the painting \u201cin this way\u201d (\u201cusually,\u201d he added, \u201cif your idea is that <\/i>good, someone else has already had it\u201d). There is at least one remixed version of \u201cThe Expected One\u201d floating around Pinterest and forwarded to me. The image has been doctored to include a cone of light thrown off the woman\u2019s \u201cphone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/picture>\n
More like \u201cThe Expected Meme.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Which is all to say, of course the woman in the painting isn\u2019t holding a smartphone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe girl in this Waldm\u00fcller painting is not playing with her new iPhone X, but is off to church holding a little prayer book in her hands,\u201d Gerald Weinpolter, CEO of the art agency austrian-paintings.at, told me.<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be the first time the essence of an inanimate object\u2014its compositional weight, the way it captivates, its aura\u2014in an artistic depiction of a time pre-dating even electricity has transmogrified through the filters of our modern hyper-connectivity. <\/p>\n

Previously: <\/i><\/b> Do We All See the Man Holding an iPhone in This 1937 Painting?<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Expected One,\u201d the woman\u2019s body language certainly makes it appear as if she\u2019s looking at a phone, to the degree you can imagine her being labelled just another \u201cdistracted walker\u201d<\/a> exhibiting signs of so-called \u201ctext neck\u201d<\/a> if she were walking down the street in 2017. And as a particularly time travel-obsessed acquaintance of mine recently pointed out to me after I showed them the original (undoctored) version of the painting, the woman\u2019s face seems lit up from below as if washed in screen glow. The shadowing all seems cast forward save her chin, lips, and cheeks, which almost appear brighter than one might think they would considering Waldm\u00fcller\u2019s brushstrokes otherwise have her backlit. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe big change is that in 1850 or 1860, every single viewer would have identified the item that the girl is absorbed in as a hymnal or prayer book,\u201d Russell said. \u201cToday, no one could fail to see the resemblance to the scene of a teenage girl absorbed in social media on their smartphone.\u201d <\/p>\n

Back at the translator\u2019s conference, Russell\u2019s colleague offered another take: “She’ll be on a dating app,\u201d she cracked, imagining the bonneted young woman cooly rejecting her would-be suitor in the way she might if only she were swiping through Tinder today on an iPhone. \u201cTough luck, pal.”<\/p>\n

See something in an old painting that looks out of place? Tip me: brian.anderson@vice.com.<\/i><\/p>\n

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day <\/i><\/b> by signing up for our newsletter<\/i><\/b><\/a>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Credit to Author: Brian Anderson| Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2017 16:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

A closer look at \u201cThe Expected One,\u201d a panting by 19th century Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldm\u00fcller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,13328,10378],"tags":[1818,16562,11520,16561,14023],"class_list":["post-10430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-motherboard","category-security","tag-art","tag-context","tag-gadgets","tag-iphones","tag-painting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}