This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Paintings II, Part II
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Do curso por Wesleyan University
Período Moderno e Pós Moderno (Parte 2)
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Paintings II
A very brief consideration of how artists are responding to the loss of foundations to produce work that redefines art.
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Michael S. Roth
You are looking at a painting of Degas from 1886.
It's at the Hillstead Museum of a woman bathing.
He was fascinated, as, as you know by women bathers.
by women preparing to go out into the world.
There's, of course, the erotics of that. There's a kind of male gaze beneath this
surface of feminine performance, to be sure.
Here's a woman combing her hair in 1885, from Degas.
the, there is also this critical or negative relation to convention.
To, to the, to the to the, what's portrayed out in public.
with the hopes of getting to something, that's, deeply private.
if I say the really real, I may be exaggerating.
But I confess to you that's what I have in mind Degas.
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.
Getting outside of space and time, conventional organization, is clearly a
project of surrealists, of the dadaists and of a, a strain of modernism that
becomes much more experimental. Here's a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp,
it's called a Nude Descending a Staircase.
you're seeing here a, a, a reproduction from the, the painting the, at the
Philadelphia museum. Duchamp trying to have the surface of the
painting also reflect the passage of time, which the cubist were aiming at
too. But you can see Duchamp takes a more
radical solution here in breaking up the object so that it, it is, it's descent
it's descent is conveyed through multiplicity, through multiplicity.
And duration is conveyed through repetition in this 1912 painting.
Duchamp's becomes a increasingly playful, and experimental artist challenging the
very notion of art. and that's why Duchamp, we might say
moves from trying to peer behind the conventions of space and time.
Let's to just exploding the whole notion of artistic vision.
and so he creates beginning around the time of the, and during the First World
War. Really, what we might call anti-art that
the art objects that meant to challenge the very status of art itself.
Not because art is really urinal here's the famous urinal that Duchamp submitted
to a gallery with the name R Mutt on it as you see.
but because Duchamp, was simply exploding the categories of art, not trying to find
the really, real behind convention. And so, Duchamp will be, from here on in,
from the First World War on, the Duchampian strain from modernism really
leads much into post modernism. And by that I simply mean, abandoning a
quest for the really real. you might say that in The New Descending
Staircase, if we go back to that image. There trying to get behind convention to
something, deeper, something perhaps more true.
You might even say that about the cubist work, right?
That you, you're breaking apart the conventions of the bourgeois morning
ritual and the,[FOREIGN] and seeing something fresh and new because it's more
powerful that way. It's more powerful when you see, duration
on the picture plane as you do in Nude Descending a Staircase.
in the urinal, you've given that up, you've given that up.
You just want to explode the categories we use, your not offering something else.
You're not offering the really, real in exchange.
So this actually this image, will lead us to a different kind of playful
aggressively playful postmodernism later on in the 20th century.
But there's another strain of art in this period that is not just playful, and it's
not just critical or it's not just engaged in negation.
It's engaged in a different kind of search, that goes really from, let's say,
Cézanne, and Picasso and Gris to a different kind of what we, we, it get's
called, Expressionism. And this is a Jackson Pollock painting.
it's from 1938, it's kind of early Pollack, late 30s.
He probably, he may not have finished it until 1941, and it's called, well it's
not called anything. It's untitled, it's a figure composition
but you see Pollack, I say finding his way that is be, before he gets to the
really anti figurative work the 50s, and this is a 1950 painting number 28 which
is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the when I say Pollock arriving, what
I mean by that, is that Pollock is here Pollock is here finding a, his own way of
intensifying the surface of the painting. Remember that phrase I used before I,
I've taken it from Michael Fried and his work both on Manet and his, some of his
comments on, on Pollock. Fried very much emphasizing the, the
optical challenges that Pollock was facing in the surface of the painting,
and him trying to solve those challenges by abandoning, abandoning the figure.
But, but intensifying the surface bringing an energy to the surface of the
painting that similar to what Monet was trying to do in bringing an energy
through facing this with Olympia, right? He's to, he's trying to bring energy to
the surface of the painting through the, through the strong gaze of the courtesan.
Here Pollack knows that that strong gaze wouldn't bring the same kind of energy
creating a new process for painting making, by dripping the paint on the
floor on the canvas is to intensifying the act of, of painting.
now Tim Clark who I've mentioned several time in this lecture Clark has talked
about the fragility of the surface. It may be intense, it may be energetic,
but there's also a kind of fragility that's barely holding together.
and one might say, despite all of the energy it's barely holding together you
know lightning is very powerful, but it's just there for a second and then it's
gone. This kind of incredible rush of energy to
the surface of the painting and that sense that the surface of the painting is
just a clinging to its own existence. But Pollack is in doing this, Pollack is
I, I think an example of a modernist a, a, master of modernist a, a artist on a
quest for a, a, a painting surface, that is adequate to the energy of the modern
age. And a painterly service that is adequate
to the energy of his own psyche. Pollock was an artist who was trying to
dredge up from himself the kind of, the core elemental energetics a a fantasy and
desire, exploding Into the making of painting.
And, and this you know, is a post World War II paintings, that tried to be alive
to the energy of the world out there, and alive to the tormented energy of the
internal world as well. but, in both cases, trying to get beyond
convention, get beyond polite painting. Get beyond polite society.
Get beyond bourgeois norms, to something both more intense and perhaps more
fragile, by producing this, by producing this, offering a critique of the kind of
eye candy and easy to look at work that one might find in corporate showrooms or
family living rooms or, or in advertising.
Pollock offering something that would be challenging to the status quo.
but also offering something that would really get at, well my phrase is always,
the really real. and and he arrives at these drip
paintings, he's arrived at one of the final stops of modernism.
when we come back to visual work at the very end of the class, we'll, we'll talk
about the strain that goes from Duchamp's urinal to that kind of playful
aggression, that pretends not, to offer alternatives, pretends not, to provide a
negation to the status quo, it just is ironic about that status quo.
There is no irony I think in Pollock's arrival.
Pollack's is looking for essence not irony he's looking in within modernism,
not post-modernism. So, see you soon where we continue our
work on the modern, and the post-modern.
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