Another woman preparing after the bath and perhaps before the combing.
[LAUGH] finding the world before it's ready.
Hey, that's not a bad expression really, finding the world before it's ready.
there you get the sense of finding something fundamental, and the sense of
getting an angle on it. That before it's kind of primped up to,
to go in public, with convention and mascara.
[LAUGH] If I could put it that way. Here's a, a, a beautiful painting, The
Laundress of Degas. he was fascinated by working class women
who were still, in the midst of maternity doing the trad, traditional work here
laundresses is one quite tired. [LAUGH] Right, this is from around 1869,
this is an earlier painting. but again why capture, why capture
someone in a yawn? Think about it, why capture someone in
the yawn? You know what happens if I start talking
about yawning, or if I go maybe some of you while you're listening to this, while
you're watching, you'll yawn. Because you can't help it sometimes,
right? When that happen's to you?
Your sitting with a friend, and that person yawns and you yawn.
It's a, it's a automatic, or at least it seems like an automatic reaction.
You are disclosing something. You're opening yourself up, not because
you decide to yawn, you, you, ju, it just happens to you.
And for a painter to capture something that just happens to you, means you're
getting beneath, the artifice of bourgeois culture.
You're getting beneath that with, of course, the artifice of painting.
Degas could also do these emotionally resonant images like the absinthe
drinkers that you see here. and we could go on, I mean the paintings
are so interesting to look at and to understand both his effort to capture the
world, the changing world around him, and his tendency to fall into that world.
I, his a tendency to, to get very very close to the world a of, of play and
desire at work that he's trying to pear beneath, to pear beneath.
I want to talk next about a different kind of artist Paul Cezanne .
This is a photograph my notes tell me, from 1861, so early.
It's young Cezanne which here's a self-portrait which is undated of the
artist. Cezanne changes the game in may respects,
you know, he, he's not in Paris, really, he, he's in the south of of France.
And this is one of his many many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire .
this is from around 1904, 1904 to 1906 it's now at the Philadelphia Museum.
And Cezzane painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many times.
He was fascinated by the way the mountain changes, and doesn't change.
By the way the mountain presents you with an insurmountable victorial challenge.
How do you react to the challenges that the immovable object that seems always to
look different in different light and different wind and different air and
different moods of the artist. How do you, how do you, how do you come
back to the mountain? Well, when you come back to it, you're
always coming through different things on your way to get there.
Cezanne's trying to find solutions to this problem by changing the way you
represent space, changing the way you represent the spaces between the artist
gaze, and the object that the artist was gazing upon.
So, here a more radically abstracted or a, a, a, a more radically free perception
of the landscape, altered into a painting surface that conveys not just the object
of the mountain, but the landscape. But the the, conveys the way of seeing,
and our changing relationship to opticality or to vision.
Changing your relationship to opticality or to vision, was a key ambition of the
next group of artists or couple of paintings I will show you from Cubists.
Now I, I, I, I wouldn't, I would like to show you some work by Pablo Picasso but
copyright [LAUGH] issues make me hesitate to do so.
So let me use the word Picasso as a signal to you to, to think about Picasso.
Especially, Picasso of around the second decade of the 20th century to, to to
think with about with cubism, and how the modernism as it takes its cubist form,
remains a, a painterly movement of critique, of negation as Tim Clark calls
it. and a painterly movement that is trying
to solve pictorial problems, right? If I were to go, if I flip back here to
the Cezzane, right? The Cezzane here is trying to break the,
the, the the surface of the painting in ways that allow us to depict different
modes of seeing. So, too the Cubists are trying to
disaggregate and reaggregate the way of seeing.
I don't know if you'll remember, from way back in the beginning of class I talked,
when I talked to you about Immanuel Kant. I talked to you about how Kant thinks we
wear our space time glasses, remember that?
I put on my glasses, and now I organize the world with my glasses, or my [LAUGH]
I organize the world with my space time categories, and that's how the world I
can make sense of the world. Well, the Cubists, falling on Cezanne are
trying to paint with a disaggregated vision, and reaggregating it in pictorial
terms. but changing the way we think about, and
represent, the world around us. So this is Gris, Gris.
This is violin and guitar. and you can find as I say some some
Picasso to look at his Juan Gris again, Le Petit Déjeuner.
This is actually earlier but, but Petit Déjeuner you see the newspaper kind of
cause a journal would say but orm, right? And and you see her a cups there in awe.
The, the, the, notion is that the artist, again, can get behind the conventions of
seeing, to find a more or powerful mode of representing the world.
and especially in relation to space and time pre their conventional organization.