The rise of oil painting as defining genre for Western art history would have been impossible without the materials generated from the flax plant. Its stalks consist of cellulose fibres that can be woven into linen canvases, while flax seeds are pressed into linseed-oil, that mixed with pigments, gives oil paint its characteristic and unique slow-drying, viscous, and durable properties. Flax thus provides two of the least visible yet all the more indispensable elements of the art of oil painting: its ground and its medium. During the 19th century, the cultivation of flax, its processing and manufacture into linen and oil not only changed through the industrialisation of cultivation and treatments; the plant also became subject of scientific investigation with a view to optimising the perceived quality of its products. The results—brighter and more regular linen fabrics, woven on industrial looms, or the standardization of oil for paint manufacturing—influenced the ways in which painters worked and how their paintings would look and keep. Yet while the impact of these changes has been acknowledged for individual works and oeuvre’s, they have rarely been studied in relation to the ecological dimensions of a changing flax industry. My talk tries to bring these elements together and insert the flax plant into the material history of oil painting.

Biography

Ann-Sophie Lehmann studied art history, philosophy and history in Vienna and Utrecht. After finishing her PhD, she worked as assistant and associate professor in the Department of Media & Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Since 2015 she is professor of Art History and Material Culture at the University of Groningen, where her research and teaching develop a materials-based approach to art history. Lehmann has published widely on the theory and history of artistic materials and practices, material literacy, and object-based learning. She is on the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and the advisory board of Art History and was a fellow at a.o. the Getty Research Center (Los Angeles) and the Max-Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin). Between 2020-2026, she leads the research group Curious Hands: Moving Making to the Core of Education.