In this lecture these lectures, I want to talk to you about advanced painting again and, and how in European painting, especially in France. we'll move on to a couple of other things in the course of these lectures, how advanced painting deals with some of the issues that are at stake. In the modern, in the post modern. And we'll start off with, with Manet. And the first image you see here is Manet's Olympia. And we talked last time, or I talked last time, about, Manet's, Calling attention to the surface of the picture. And the, the reflexivity of Manet's art in Olympia. I, I also want to remind everybody that one of other things that Manet is doing here. is to, call attention to, the the changing nature of class relations in the 1860s, the, changing bourgeois culture. and putting a prostitute front and center, naked and at the same time decked out a lower class person at the same time being served a great bouquet of flowers by a servant. a, a woman of the night one might say, who you might normally see hiding in the shadows. They are looking right at us, in a gallery right at us as we are beholders of fine art. What Manet is also doing here is calling attention to social class. and the chaning dimensins of social class and public and private life in the 1860s. in France the body of Olympia being unavoidable. but also the way the body, of this courtesan is, is accessorized you might say today from head with flower to toe. with her shoe on the bed. TJ Clark, a great, art historian. an English artist who's been working for many years in the United States has, talked at length about how, Manet is a, a part of a movement in painting and public life, that challenges the conventions of public life. And not just challenges the conventions of painting. the second image we have here the, the girl the Folies Bergere, which we've talked about before. Just to remind you that Manet's picture is looking at us looking at it, right? Its its changing the pictorial game where the painting is acknowledging its own objectness, its own status as an object to be beheld. Just as Olympia was acknowledging her own status as an object to be beheld and the commodities like this woman. Are object to be beheld. the, the other painting I just again as we get our feet wet in this lecture that I wanted you to see is the Déjeuner sur l'herbe of Manet's. which has been seen as a negation of Bousier values. a kind of critical negation of convention that someone like TJ Clark has said is a part and parcel of modernism generally. That modernism according to Clark is always a offers negation of bourgeois values. but also has been seen by other artists, let's say like Michael Freed for example as as modernism as solving some pictorial problems that are also are problems of our relationship to works of art. and that what you see here in the paintings what Freed calls the paintings facing this, the painting acknowledging it, itself as being an object to be beheld. What you see here is a modernist artist raising the stakes in Victorial representation, not just content to provide eye candy, not content to have ahh uhh a painting as uhh part of ritual practices. A painting becomes a a quest, a quest for pictorial solutions that also have to do with are, the problems we have of relating to other people, and to objects and our world. free talks about modernist are wanting to intensify the surfaces of painting and you can see that intensification of the surfaces of painting. In the work of impressionists in the latter quarter or third of the 29th century in France, and our next image is a a river scene by Camille Pissarro. Pissarro, I'll just flip to the next image here which is a a photographic portrait of the artist. You have a sense of who he was. Pissarro as an artist was concerned with capturing light as it fell on a changing world. And you see here a scene of great peacefulness. but also was seen on the river this punctuated by the industrial smokes tech, just down the river a bit. and, and as we go to our next Pissarro images which is a landscape a landscape punctuated here by a worker who with his walking stick, is carrying his burden through this glorious field that it seems alive with light, right? Pissarro was working in a, in a, in a cultural context in which. There were changing notions of leisure. Changing notions of work. And changing notions of art. And one of the things Pissarro and some of his other impressionist, buddies were trying to achieve, was to capture those altered senses of art, leisure. And work as they were changing. And the part about impressions and it's so interesting is that trying to capture change on a canvas, give, giving a sense of ephemerality in a a static surface was a challenge that the impressionist. took on with gusto, and taking it on while looking at new subjects in the new economy and the new, specially the new city. Turning now to an artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who is really known mostly for his posters, as you've probably seen in lots of his posters. for cabarets, for concerts, a, a, but, we're going to look at some of his his, a, paintings and prints. because he like many other impressions was very interested in. The world of work as it intersects with the world of desire and pleasure. Toulouse-Lautrec here he is in a, in a photograph was famous for his bizarre appearance. To be sure, his, his, his legs stopped growing because of a series of minor accidents he had. As an adolescent Toulouse Lautrec was known also for, not just his first painting, in his quick drawing skills and posters, but he was known for his ex exuberant lifestyle. and it died young having lived a kind of wild, intense and painful life as an artist who was so interested in, in in the intersection of desire. and labor prostitution and entertainment and in the new urban environment of late 19th century Paris. Here's a painting from 1894 called Two Friends. and again from, from, from the erotics of friendship or the fascination with lesbian sub culture, not so sub, culture. here's another Lautrec from the middle of the 1890s. This is at the MET Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's called The Sofa. Lautrec was eager to catch his subjects when they were not performing for him. Remember, as you go back to Lipke, you can flip back to the beginning of this lecture later on and see that picture of Olympia. She is looking right at us. She is challenging our gaze. Here, Lautrec's subjects are absorbed in one another as we are absorbed by a surface of the painting that again, is energized by the quick brush strokes. And the, the attempt to capture the play of light on surfaces while the figures in this in, within that play of light are absorbed in one another. An artist who was equally fascinated by the world of work, the world of work that perhaps would not have made its way into paintings a century before, was Degas. And we're going to look at some of his paintings from the 1890s, which focused on the workers. And I'm showing you these not because painters didn't make art out of bourgeois culture and rich people[LAUGH], but I want to show you also how painting was taking on the challenge of new class relations and the tensions among classes. They were coming to the floor in the second half of the 19th century. Uhm,there are picotrial problems they are working on. They're working on plains, and and capturing light, and capturing light, and solutions of a to bringing to the surface of painting not a a illusion of depth but but some sense of reality. These are certainly formal and pictorial problems that the painters were tackling. But they are also tackling changing social norms changing social relations that they felt were not foreign to the, to the problems of an artist. That an artist had to deal with, or should be dealing, with public life. Should be dealing with the world of work, the world of desire. even as the artist tried to solve pictorial problems by taking into account quintessentially modern activities and conflicts between and amongst social classes. Here are some portraits of Degas. on the left is a self portrait painting and on the right, a photograph of Degas. Degas, just to remind you, because photography starts in 1839, by the time Degas is working in the 1880s and 1890s photography is very much present and Degas is one, one of the, one of the few painters that whose photographs we really still spend time with. he, he was very interested in photography not just as a tool for painting but in, in its own right So I'm going to show you some Degas just to remind you of the, of the, the issues that he was concerned with. again, a changing the angle at which you see the world. When you change the angle with, from which you see the world. You can see the world. unconventionally you can see the world in ways that may not just replicate the way everybody else sees the world. When you change the angle on a performace you of course get to see things that perhaps you were not meant to see. by the director, by those in charge. And if that's true, if that's one of the things that's going on in Degas' work is changing your relationship to the world by changing your relationship to the pictorial surface, you can see why some would say that Degas, as a modernist. Degas as a modernist had a critical relationship to bourgeois or conventional culture. Trying to find the angle on the world that would allow you to see it properly, to see it as it really is, to see it In a fundamental way, this I think would be characteristic of a modernist art project. And I want to underscore that because it's, you can't just see it any old way. You're seeing it in a critical way to reveal what's wrong or what's shaky about The conventions of seeing and acting normally. And your seeing in a way that should lead you to a core truth. That should lead you to something, fundamental. But what will see in postmodernism is an abandonment of getting to the the perfect angle or getting to the core. Insight even solving pictorial problems becomes suspect in postmodernism. Because there are, they, they may be pictorial challenges, but there are no real solutions to them. There are there are more or less interesting ways. Of of adapting to them, of coping with them. [BLANK_AUDIO]
