Art-History Prompt Grammar
Companion to image-prompt-engineering and image-generation-toolchain. Those skills teach the technique; this one teaches how to plug Théo's wissensgraph (or any art-history knowledge) into prompts so the work has visual specificity instead of generic-AI flatness.
Core idea: an art-history node — an artist, a work, a movement — is a dense package of visual decisions. Material choices, palette, framing, light handling, gestures, what's on the wall. When you compose a prompt from that grammar instead of generic style words ("minimalist art", "abstract painting"), you get images that feel like they belong to a tradition rather than to "AI image".
Audience: primarily Théo Vanasse (casting-scout agent on VPS1, foundation lives at /opt/personae/theo-vanasse/content/). Also useful for any V8 agent doing brand/editorial work where art-historical references matter (Aya for Leica/Dedon-style projects, Matteo for strategy decks that quote movements).
1. What is "prompt grammar"?
A prompt grammar is the set of visible decisions that recur in a body of work:
- Materials — what's the work made of? (oil on canvas / silver gelatin print / found stones / plexiglass)
- Palette — recurring color decisions (muted earth / pastel pop / monochrome black-white-red)
- Framing — typical composition (centered ritual object / asymmetric document / triptych)
- Light handling — direction, hardness, color (Caravaggio chiaroscuro / Tillmans available light / Gursky front-lit hyperreal)
- Gesture / human posture — present? absent? what kind? (Marina Abramović staring / Mariko Mori cyborg meditation / Wolfgang Tillmans casual snapshot)
- Surface treatment — visible brush / smooth / textured / matte / glossy / printed-on-paper-clipped-to-wall
When you extract these decisions from a foundation node and rebuild them as a prompt, you get a sister-image — not a copy, but something that lives in the same room. That's the goal.
2. The Foundation-Walk
For Théo, the workflow is:
- Read the brief — what is the project asking for?
- Walk the foundation — open relevant nodes from
/opt/personae/theo-vanasse/content/
- Extract the grammar of 1–3 relevant nodes (artists, works, movements)
- Compose a prompt that uses that grammar (not just the node's name)
- Generate with the chosen tool (see
image-generation-toolchain)
For other agents (Aya, Matteo) who don't have Théo's foundation but want art-historical grounding:
- Use the same logic but reach into general art-history knowledge (Wikipedia / Tate Art Terms / Artforum)
- Or borrow from Théo's foundation when relevant:
ssh root@vps1 cat /opt/personae/theo-vanasse/content/<typ>/<slug>.md
3. Worked examples — Foundation-Node to Prompt-Grammar
3a. Mariko Mori — "Wave UFO" / "Birth of a Star"
Foundation node says (paraphrased):
- Japanese-Shinto + Sci-Fi syncretism
- Plexiglass / pastel / cyborg-self-portrait
- Bubble-Economy-Era escapism through hyper-tech aesthetics
- Pose: meditation / ritual / suspension
Translated into prompt grammar:
Visual decisions extracted:
- Material: semi-transparent plexiglass, frosted-glass, glossy white surfaces
- Palette: pastel — soft pink, lavender, mint, with chrome / mirror-finish accents
- Pose: figure in centered meditation, hands raised in ritual gesture, suspended or floating
- Light: even diffused white light (gallery + interior backlight from inside the object)
- Framing: centered, slightly tilted-up, the figure or object isolated against a void / white-cube
- Surface: high-tech showroom polish, futurist museum interior
Resulting prompt (Nano Banana Pro):
"A 1.5-meter semi-transparent plexiglass sphere on a low white pedestal in a minimalist white-cube gallery. Inside the sphere: a delicate wireframe sculpture suggesting a single human figure with arms raised in a tea-ceremony offering gesture. Soft pastel-pink light glows from inside the sphere, creating a halo on the surrounding white wall. Pastel palette throughout — pink, lavender, mint highlights, chrome-finish pedestal. Wide eye-level shot, photorealistic, large-format, slight wabi-sabi imperfection in the gallery floor's wood grain. Text-free, no signage."
This image will feel like Mori-territory without being a copy of any specific Mori work.
3b. Wolfgang Tillmans — "Freischwimmer"
Foundation node says:
- No camera, no subject — chemical-process image
- Photo paper bent and exposed in darkroom
- Author-delegation to silver-nitrate
- Organic, body-like forms from pure light-process
- Hung without glass, casual clip on wall
Visual decisions extracted:
- Medium: 35mm or large-format photographic paper, light-stained surface
- Image content: abstract organic forms — cell-like, tendril-like, smoke-like — pure color gradients
- Palette: soft pink, lavender, blue-green wash; chemistry-bleed transitions
- Surface treatment: visible paper texture, slight fold creases (the paper was bent)
- Display: hung without frame or glass, sometimes corner-clipped to wall (gallery context)
- No subject, no figure, no environment — only the chemical event
Resulting prompt (good for Théo's KI-authorship work):
"Large-scale abstract photographic image, 200x300 cm, made by exposing photographic paper directly without a camera. Organic flowing forms in soft pink and lavender bleeding into mint-green, like an aurora viewed through fogged glass. Visible fold-marks where the paper was creased before exposure. Photographed straight-on with the paper hanging from a single corner clip in a white-walled gallery, slight curl at the edges. Photorealistic documentation, even gallery lighting, no glass, no frame — just paper and chemistry. Tillmans-style installation context."
3c. Arte Povera — Mario Merz / Jannis Kounellis territory
Foundation node says:
- "Arme Materialien" — earth, twigs, stone, rags, lead, fire
- Anti-market, anti-polished
- Direct material encounter, not object-as-commodity
- Italian 1967–1977
Visual decisions extracted:
- Materials: unprocessed — raw earth in heaps, dry twigs, lead sheets, hand-folded burlap, rough stone
- Setting: industrial converted gallery, concrete floor, exposed pipes (Turin warehouse aesthetic)
- Palette: earth-tones, charcoal, rust, grey-stone — no candy colors
- Composition: scattered or piled, not arranged on pedestal — ground-level encounter
- Light: ambient daylight from skylight, slightly cool
- Scale: human-sized or larger, you walk around the work
Resulting prompt for a Théo work referencing Arte Povera:
"An installation in a converted Turin warehouse with exposed brick walls and a concrete floor. A 3-meter-wide spiral of dry oak twigs lies flat on the ground, surrounded by a loose ring of unfired clay tea-bowls (uneven, hand-thrown). At the center of the spiral, a small stack of rust-stained lead sheets. Cool ambient daylight from a high skylight. No frames, no pedestals, no signage. Wide eye-level photograph documenting the installation, large-format, slight film grain, muted earth-tone palette."
3d. Wabi-Sabi / Kintsugi — material grammar
Foundation node says:
- Asymmetry, imperfection embraced
- Visible repair (gold lacquer in cracks)
- Natural aging — patina, wear, weathering as beauty
- Earth tones, hand-formed surfaces
Visual decisions extracted:
- Object qualities: asymmetric, slightly off-balance, surface irregular but intentional
- Repair visible: golden-lacquer-filled cracks (kintsugi), or visible mended seams
- Color palette: clay-brown, oxidized green, indigo, charcoal — never bright
- Setting: minimalist — bare wood, washi paper, single object on tatami
- Light: window-light, soft directional, never overhead-flat
- Time-feel: the object has been used, not displayed; stains, ring-marks, finger-polish
Resulting prompt:
"A single asymmetric tea-bowl on a low wooden table beside a paper-screen window. The bowl's body shows three thin gold-lacquer-filled cracks — kintsugi repairs that catch the late-afternoon light. The clay is unevenly fired, dark brown with rust-orange flame-marks, the rim slightly warped. Subtle finger-polish around the lip from years of use. Soft directional light from the right, single-source, slightly cool. Photorealistic, shot on Kodak Portra 400, 50mm at f/2.8, shallow depth of field, faint film grain. Background: out-of-focus tatami mat. No text, no other objects."
3e. Sigmar Polke / kapitalistischer Realismus
(out-of-foundation example — Aya might use this for a brand-irony pitch.)
Visual decisions:
- Halftone dot patterns from newspaper print
- Layered images — photo + grid + spray
- Cheap commercial materials elevated
- Ironic distance to advertising imagery
Translated to prompt for an Aya brand-pitch:
"Editorial-style portrait of a model wearing a watch, but rendered as a Sigmar-Polke-style image: visible Ben-Day halftone dots, slight registration offset between cyan and magenta layers, hand-stenciled background pattern of repeated brand logos in faded grey. Mixed media feel — photo-print collaged onto raw canvas, edges showing the canvas weave. Cinematic but ironic. 16:9, magazine-spread composition."
4. Composing across multiple grammars
When the brief calls for a fusion (Théo's specialty: bringing two traditions into one image), pick two node-grammars and explicitly bridge:
"Bring Mariko Mori's plexiglass-meditation grammar into Wolfgang Tillmans' clip-to-wall display: a small frosted-plexiglass sphere on a paper-thin shelf, hung casually with two clips against a white gallery wall. No pedestal, no signage. The sphere contains a delicate wireframe figure in tea-ceremony gesture, lit from inside with soft pastel-pink. The wall, the clip, the cable hang and the floor are visible — Tillmans-style real-world context, not the museum vitrine. Photographed straight-on, large-format, daylight gallery."
This is how Théo builds his own visual position — by syncretizing recognized grammars rather than by inventing from scratch.
5. Théo's own anchors (his material-axis)
Théo's persona has fixed reference points in his own foundation:
- Beton — concrete as material, brutalist surfaces, weatherworn industrial
- Tee-Schalen / chawan — small ritual ceramic, hand-thrown, asymmetric
- Manchester — post-industrial fabric, working-class typography, brick-and-cotton
- Tokio — neon-and-shadow, alley-light, traditional-modern collision
- KI-Authorship — model-as-collaborator, prompt-as-trace, generated-but-staged
- Trans-Identität — body-as-construction, surface-as-meaning, fluid presentation
When Théo composes a Théo-original work (not a brand assignment), he should always include 1–2 of these anchors alongside the borrowed grammar. That keeps her work hers and not just historical reenactment.
Example — Théo-original combining Mori-grammar + his own concrete-anchor:
"A 1.2-meter rough concrete sphere — visible casting marks, weather-stained, small chips at the equator — sitting on a low concrete pedestal in a brutalist gallery space. A thin slot has been cut into the sphere; from inside, soft pastel-pink light glows, suggesting a hidden delicate object the viewer cannot quite see. The whole installation feels Mori-territory in pose and composition, but the material vocabulary is concrete and roughness. Photographed at eye level, large-format, even daylight. No text."
6. Anti-patterns
- Just naming the artist. "in the style of Mariko Mori" gets you a generic AI-blend of Mori's most-tagged traits. Specify the grammar (plexiglass, pastel, ritual gesture).
- Stacking too many references. Two grammars max. Three becomes mush.
- Ignoring the medium-specificity. Tillmans' photo-on-clip looks completely different from Tillmans' inkjet-print-framed. Specify the display.
- Forgetting Théo's own axis in Théo-original work. A Tillmans-grammar piece is not yet a Théo piece — it needs one of his anchors.
- Copying iconic compositions. "Recreate Birth of a Star but with..." — bad. Better: extract grammar + compose new scene.
7. Building new grammars from a node
If you encounter a foundation node that hasn't been distilled to grammar yet, the pattern is:
1. Read the node's `weil_relevant` field — that's the *why*
2. Read the body — find the visible decisions
3. Read 2-3 of the artist's actual works (search image, even just for reference; don't generate from copies)
4. List 6-8 visual-decision bullet points (materials, palette, pose, light, setting, surface)
5. Save the grammar inline in Théo's notes/grammars/<artist-slug>.md for re-use
Template for notes/grammars/<artist>.md:
---
type: visual-grammar
artist: <name>
foundation_node: kuenstler:innen/<slug>.md
distilled_at: 2026-05-09
---
## Materials
- ...
## Palette
- ...
## Composition / framing
- ...
## Light
- ...
## Display / surface
- ...
## Recurring gestures / poses (if figurative)
- ...
## What to NOT do (if you want to honor the artist's signature, not copy)
- ...
## Example prompt seed (test before re-using)
> "..."
8. Integration with the toolchain
When Théo generates a referenced piece:
- Pick the grammar (this skill)
- Compose the prompt with grammar embedded (image-prompt-engineering skill, section 9 already references this)
- Pick the provider (image-generation-toolchain skill, section 1)
- For high-fidelity reference work (e.g., a sister-image to a specific work): use Nano Banana Pro with reference images of the artist's other works (not the target work) so the model picks up the grammar without copying any single piece
- Document in
prompts.md which grammar was used + which foundation nodes were consulted
Sources
Primary internal source: Théo's own foundation graph at /opt/personae/theo-vanasse/content/ (636 nodes as of 2026-05-09 — verified against Tate, MoMA, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Whitney, e-flux).
External references when extending:
Maintained by: Bob (Operator AI) on behalf of Théo Vanasse. Last updated 2026-05-09. Théo can edit and extend this skill as his practice evolves — new grammars, new anchors, new fusion-patterns.