The Arcades Project - Operi

Duveyrier.
Dartois.
[
Specialty as a criterion for the fundamental differentiation of items displayed accord-
ing to the interests of buyers and collectors. Here is the historical-materialist key to genre
painting. ,.
Wiertz the painter of the arcades: The Premature Burial, The Suicide, The Burnt
Child, Woman Reading a Novel, Hunger Madness and Crime, Thoughts and Visions of
a Severed Head, The Lighthouse of Golgotha, One Second after Death, The Might
of Man Knows No Bounds, The Last Cannon (in this picture: airships and steam­
powered dirigibles as the harbingers of achieved peace I). With Wiertz, "optical
illusions." Under The Triumph of Light: "To be reproduced on an innnense scale;'
A contemporary regrets that "Wiertz was not given, say, "railway stations" to
decorate.
To render the image of those salons where the gaze was enveloped in billowing drapery,
where church doors opened within fulHength mirrors and settees were gondolas in the
eyes of those who sat there, on whom the gaslight from a vitreous globe shone down like
the moon.
Important is the twofold character of the gates in Paris: border gates and triumphal
arches.
On the rhythm of today, which determines this work. Very characteristic is the
opposition, in film, between the downright jerky rhythm of the image sequence,
which satisfies the deep-seated need of this generation to see the "flow" of "devel­
opment" disavowed, and the continuous musical accompaniment. To root out
every trace of "development" from the image of history and to represent becom­
ing-through the dialectical rupture between sensation and tradition-as a con­
stellation in being: that is no less the tendency of this project.