Samson and Delilah, Peter Paul Rubens, c1609

Samson's death appears to be predicted by his drunken posture
He is rendered in a very Christ-like fashion
There seem to be five different lighting sources (compare to Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath)
There is a palpably over-blown sensuality that is very over-the top - the painting is in your face.
Emotions are very muscular while the muscles also have a very emotional quality

Daniels in the Lions Den, Rubens 1614-1616

This painting is also over-the-top and bombastic
Consider the figure - it seems like two other renditions of the figure have been blended together: Michelangelo's Rebellious Slave can be seen in the muscles while Caravaggio's John the Baptist can be seen in the rustic setting of the body.
The lions represent what it is to make a painting

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Vision of St Peter Nolasco, ca 1629

St. Peter is crucified upside down --> consider Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter
This work takes Caravaggio's immediacy and turns it into miraculous visions
This is meta-representation in painting (like a play within a play in Hamlet)

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Veil of St. Veronica, c 1635

Jesus Christ wipes brow with cloth, an archetype of miraculous representation
Wants to have same magical power of St. Veronica's veil itself
Delivers world in physical manifestation
Super-fervent religiosity

Francisco de Zurbaran, St. Serapion, 1628

Super-intensified picture of Catholic martyr
Astoundingly somber, in presence of gravity not of our world
Animal quality of Saint, barbarian, primitive saint
Weird cradling quality, baby swaddling with man's head
The flatness of the canvas echoes flatness of cloth
Defeats painting, kills painting to create a painting that is majestically there

Georges de la Tour, Penitent Magdalen, c1630-35

Chiaroscuro
Flame --> the extinguishing of us all
Caravaggio as depicter of thought - St John the Baptist's inwardness.
Fits the Catholicism of France, humanist quality as well.
Open flame is significant representation of illumination (light bulb going off over someone's head)
Virgin thinking is displayed by candlelight
Flame connected to painting, what it is to represent painting aligned with mysterious illumination

Bernardo Strozzi, Tobias Curing the Blindness of his Father Tobit, c1635

Take gall from fish bladder, apply it to eye --> compare to Doubting Thomas, and the idea of a rustic figure being in your face
Strozzi's taming of Caravaggio - Tobias is like a painter
Tobit is a figure for the artist, allowing people to see light

Nicolas Poussin, Echo and Narcissus, c1629-1630

Domestication is impervious to Caravaggio's example (consider Caravaggio's Narcissus)
More figures than just Narcissus.
Water prefigures his own descent into underworld (Ovid)
Storytelling picture, unlike the sudden usual image of Caravaggio
Painting as intellectual thoughtfulness - different from Caravaggio

Diego Velazquez, Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618

Genre painting (bodegon painting) – one of everyday life, street life
Aligns what it is to make a painting with a humble, yet powerful ordinariness of the daily life it depicts
Her grasp of the spoon is like an artist holding a paintbrush, but the spoon gives the relationship a degree of earthiness
The boy is in the space where we would believe the old woman’s painting would be, so he may be a symbol of what the old woman brings into being given her earthy manipulation of the stuff around her
Equates painting with materials and creativity, an organic creativity for which the egg is an ultimate symbol

Velazquez, Water Seller of Seville, 1619

Perhaps there is some allegory here about stages of life: purity, wisdom coming from the greater burdens of an older age to a respectful youth (see a man of intermediate age in the background)
This is also about painting: the water seller’s thumb fits around the handle of a jug like it would around a painter’s palette – Velasquez equating painting with old age
See the earthy, creative, feminine motif about painting continued – the jug is a “pregnant” vessel, made of earthen materials, just like the eggs were for the old woman in the previous picture

Velazquez, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618

Shows a scene from the Gospel of Luke in which Christ comes to rest in a house, the house of Mary and Martha. While Martha attends to her guest, Mary just sits and listens to him speak. Martha scolds her for not being more helpful, at which point Christ tells her that the contemplative life is better than the active life, and you should listen to what I have to say
Meta-pictorial moment: It is the first painting we’ve seen that shows a picture within itself – unclear whether that is a view into the dining room or a mirror or another painting
Equates painting with cooking, which might seem denigrating, but to Velasquez, it is honorific
Beautiful echoes and rhymes in the picture:
Diagonal curve of the woman’s arm and the fish
Triangle of negative space between the women’s heads and the fish
Sparkling of the fisheyes and the gleaming tip of the vessel
The real action for Velasquez is still in the earthy creation of painting

Velazquez, The Forge of Vulcan, 1630

Depicting a scene from Ovid, where Apollo the Sun God appears at the Forge of Vulcan to inform Vulcan (the blacksmith) that his wife Venus has been cheating on him with Mars (the god for whom Vulcan is making the armor here)
Discussion of two distinct models of creativity:
Apollo can make things instantly: lined up with the vast heavenly world outside
Vulcan and his workers are aligned with the closed rustic world inside with metals, etc
The anvil at Apollo’s feet suggests that he must avail himself with labor too

Velazquez, The Drinkers, 1629

Shows Bacchus, the god of wine, also with a set of rustic figures, but not the blacksmiths like in Vulcan, but peasants who are drinking wine and are grateful to the god for bestowing upon them this beverage
Suggests that Velasquez conceives himself as a kind of god figure who bestows laurel wreaths on the humble and lowly in life, making them more noble than they could ever be
Also in this picture, Velasquez is seated with these figures (as Bacchus) – he is sitting with them, yet he is also turned away from them at the same time
Unlike Apollo in Vulcan, Bacchus is still wrapped up in the earthly sensual world that he creates and is a part of
The man with the cowboy grin and weirdly living face is aligned with liquid, fluidity, and ongoing liveliness – his smile is liquid 

Velazquez, Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, 1630

Thought to be a matching picture to the Forge of Vulcan
As a comment on painting, it suggests something weird about the physical materials of painting:
Think of the grimy, visceral cloth here as evocative of a canvass that is smeared with pigment
Thick physicality of a painting is shown here
The window presents another picture within a picture
Portrays the double nature of art: the earthly and the divine or distant:
The process in play is sublimation:  when something that is physical, sensual, immediate, primal becomes beauty, distance, ideas, thought
 Not a coincidence that of all his paintings, this in the only one painted on a burlac-sack, rugged type of canvas

Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656

Is a painting about the nobility of art
It is a tour de force of spatial relationships
The mirror shows two people who are the king and queen – so are seeing the fiction of the king and queen standing in front of the scene, their features reflected back in this mirror, and this is why the figures in the foreground act as they do
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait was in the King’s collection at this time, so no doubt that Velasquez knew of it and was riffing it
The orthogonals of the lights and the picture frames perfectly come down to a vanishing point
Notice the different levels of recognition amongst the different figures
Captures something about the nature of perception – how we cast our eyes across an entire space when we enter
Shows that Velasquez has come far from the streets of Seville

Velazquez, The Tapestry Weavers, 1657

Revisitation of the kinds of scenes he was painting at the beginning of his career: representation of a feminine, physical activity – spinners
In the background, another situation: The mythical artistic contest described in Ovid between Inerva and Arachne (a mortal)
Tapestry in the background: Titian’s Rape of Europa (was in the royal collection, so know that Velasquez had seen it, was riffing on it)
Two staging of creativity: the creation of the work, the noble creation (as Titian and Arachne were both noble in their artwork), and taking pride a place, the earthy activity of “making” makes this painting incredible
 Think of the woman on the right’s stains of yarn and the way they strangely echo the jug in the water seller picture
Think of the yarn also as Velasquez’s late life emblems of what it is like to be a maker of the things of the mind, but also to be always immersed in the sensuous and utterly mysterious activity of making

Rembrandt, The Artist in His Studio, 1628-29

Poses the “what is a painting?” question explicitly
Painting as a confrontation, a showdown between the artist and the monumental, looming picture in the foreground.
Doesn’t show the front of the picture — mysterious and ominous to the viewer, doubling our sense of unease
To be a painter is to bring something into the world larger and more mysterious than oneself; like life, but somehow strange or uncanny
We can compare this image to Rembrandt’s “Supper at Emmaus” (1629) - the shock on the face of one disciple as Jesus is revealed. Think of Jesus as the canvas and the painter as the disciple. Is painting a revelation?
Painting is also associated with the flaking plaster in the image; decay

Rembrandt, The Blinding of Samson, 1636

Diana has cut Samson’s hair and she is fleeing from the tent as the Philistines set upon the now-powerless man
The “pièce de résistance” of this image is the stabbing directly into one of Samson’s eyes
There is a Rubensian sense of excess, recalling some of Rubens’s images (“Lion Hunt” from 1617 — sensuousness of the action; “Prometheus” from 1611 - energetic)
There is a lot of darkness in the foreground; Rembrandt tends to equate darkness to introspection, psychologized space, murkiness, unclarity
The stabbing gesture isn’t just sadistic but suggestive of Rembrandt’s fascination with inwardness, mortality and pain
Compare with Rubens’s “Head of Medusa” (1617–18): “Medusa” is all about extroversion. In “Samson,” however, there is the beginning of a sense of inwardness and feeling

Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642

This painting is another “essay in Rubenesque theatricality” that is turned inward
Shows an Amsterdam militia company
Rubensian in size and theatrical event
Compare to Velazquez - “Surrender at Breda” from 1634: a big military event, handing over of the keys to the city. Victors are joyous, and there is a Rubensian influence. Rembrandt adopts this grandeur to local events and personalities.
Look also at van Dyck’s “Charles I”: van Dyck was a pupil of Rubens. Rembrandt depicts local militiamen in the same manner at van Dyck depicts the King.
Creates a sense of civic order
It is secularly homogeous: clattering, noisy, chaotic, but coherent
Coherence of public space
The lighting system creates order amidst seeming randomness
The painting was meant to hang in the largest public hall in Amsterdam
It doesn’t just show civil space, it was situated in a room in which members of society could gather & enact the notion of a public sphere: individuals coalescing around a common cause.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1653

Profound move away from Rubens
Rembrandt is able to bend Rubens to different civil purposes and psychologize Rubens’s sensuousness; this is an example of the latter
Bestows dignity on the bust of Homer
Inwardness, anatomizing the self
Compare to Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deyman,” an image with the skull sawed away and the skin lifted back to reveal the brain
Indicative of Rembrandt’s urge toward interiority
Effects are Rubensian, but the ends are inward
Blindness of Homer is an inwardness par excellence; Homer has no outwardness
Is this picture only about a life of the mind?
Look at the chain across Aristotle’s chest: it is rendered with raised pigment, impasto, to catch the light. This is a Rubensian sign of extroverted life, contrasted with introverted life
This picture as a meditation on the contrast between inward and outward rewards and meditations.

Rembrandt, The Slaughtered Ox, 1654

Moving away from human psychology and toward a still life?
Still suggests the same themes
The image is disturbing and poignant
The ox is strung up in a torture-like way
Painted in impasto, fleshy, blood and bone
Contrast with other Northern artists’ representations of meat:
Pieter Aertsen’s “Kitchen Still Life” from 1595: It has a hard brilliance, and little to do with the somber, darkened, compassionate view of the creature in Rembrandt’s work
We can also see an echo of Christ on the cross
Idea of sacrifice and mortality, along with the physical decay and vulnerability of all living creatures
Again, representative of Rembrandt’s lifelong exploration on “what is inside”

Rembrandt, The Mill, 1645-48

This is a landscape: yet another genre showing some of the same themes
The mill sits on maybe an old ruin, a human-made structure; there are figures on the bottom, walking on a murky path
How is this about the states of interiority?
Mill itself is a lonely emblem (like the ox)
It’s cruciform, like a lone cross
Heavens are beautiful but tempestuous; represent a world of volatility and action contrasting with the quietude of human everyday life at the bottom
There is a larger allegory implied: a heavenly world? Anchored by a cross?
The “murk” at the bottom is another example of inwardness in landscape:
Contrast this picture with typical Dutch ideas about landscape
They wanted to map it, design it, understand it. Compare to a map of Amsterdam from the 1660s: indicative of Dutch civic pride-based desire to map and catalog things
Rembrandt goes against this desire, exploring murky meditations
The picture is unmapped, refuses to map; it is interested in mystery.

Rembrandt, Bathsheba, 1654

Story behind this image: Bathsheba received a letter from King David asking for her, but she’s married to a loyal soldier. Should she be untrue to her husband or untrue to her king?
Can see inwardness in her face
Different from Rubens’s display of the female body, which was about display and extroversion
Even though Bathsheba has a Rubensian nakedness, she has a more inward exploration
She has no easy choices: it’s not like “life of the mind” vs. the “gold chain” (in “Aristotle” above). Life is never that simple.
This is reflected in the echoes and rhymes in the image
She’s looking down, which is a sign of humility but also weakness
Her flesh is weak; it’s hard to be a warrior of Righteousness
For Rembrandt, “purity” is a myth
White cloth suggests purity while gold suggests wealth
The letter she holds rhymes perfectly with the cloth; contrast between the desires of the King and the purity of the woman
The letter, again, is superimposed on the leg itself; suggests something about the body’s fall from purity into darkness and mystery. The letter signifies the descent.

To be human is to be “a bundle of infallibility and honesty”
The lights and shadows throughout the work represent that these two things never clearly separate out
Rembrandt as a poet of humanity: meditations on the murkiness of behavior, attitudes and beliefs

Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Necklance, 1663

showing off riches, but not in a vain way. Rather, quite content inwardness
Cooptation of religious iconography- the donor praying

Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1663-1664

Again, woman showing off wealth- Mercantile Dutch culture in wake of Westphalia
Wealth creates space for privacy, contemplation and inward reflection
Nothing in the cups: she is measuring something weightless- “the value of valuelessness,” the meaning of an artistic act?

Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, 1663-64

Encroachment of the Outside world on the theme of inwardness
Letter, map behind her visual symbols of Dutch global expansion
Similar to other Vermeer painting, Young Woman reading a Letter
Even more dialogue with outside world
Remember Rembrandt’s Bathsheba- letter receiving culture

Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, 1666-67

Challenge to sacrosanct inwardness
Inwardness jarred by the maid, interrupting letter writing to deliver another one. Outer world disrupting personal calm
Every day moment, yet given gravitas and duration
Gap between self image and the image of self out in the world- when you put yourself out in the world, somehow it is no longer you, more out of your control

Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, 1666

Nemerov compared  the absolute inwardness in this painting to Vermeer, says that it is resisting the far flung world that Vermeer acknowledges

Vermeer, Soldier and a Laughing Girl, 1660

Soldier likely in the position Vermeer would be painting in
Courting the woman
Map- crossing him and pointing outward: again, reference to the outside
Does him (the soldier/Vermeer) being there disrupt the scene he is trying to show?

Vermeer, Woman with a Wine Glass, 1659-1660

Three men as meditations on what it is for a man to paint a woman. Openly vulgar amoroueness, stern commentary, or useless absorbed meditativesness

Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Earring, 1664

Looking out, not just at us but at the person painting her
Resonance between her eyes and the pearl earring
Suspended between crystallization and dissolution- metaphor of painting

Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 1666-67

Again, existence of other. Meditations on presence in scene
Allegorical figure of history: book, trumpet. Map- united provinces of Netherlands before Westphalia
Even the painter being there does not interrupt the model’s serenity
Artist’s hand the least clearly defined part of the painting, takes the place of the model’s face: attests to violence in painting
“The Summa of what it means to paint”- the moment when art touches canvass is a disquieting oddity. Realism, representation as violent at its core

Vermeer, The Concert, 1665

Another rift on male artist painting inward scenes
Man playing an instrument sitting on chair before woman playing piano, another woman signing
Artist sort of pasted onto the painting- a moment of unease, violence
Painting in upper left corner is van Baburen’s The Procuress, 1625: suggests transactional qualities of the artistic presence (??)

Vermeer, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1672

Related to last one- looking out at us with a melancholy look
For Vermeer, what it meant to paint was to experience both the tremendous creative power of painting as well as melancholy all at the same time
Building, making something miraculous that is fading at the same time
Even as you paint, bringing a being into life, with each stroke the painted person is becoming further apart from the real person

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin,  The Scullery Maid 1736-38

-    a way for painting to move away from text and stories, a more autonomous art form that produces its own powers and intesities purely in pictoral form
-    born at end of 17th century, 1699
-    small picture, no obvious narrative- cant impose moral or narrative on it
-    Vermeer like, but didn’t know him. Compare to other Dutch paintings at time, like Nicolaes Maes: his is an allegory, fable, story.
-    In this, she is scrubbing a pain with straw, going about household chores. Does so in a way that is not negative, something of that religiosity in Vermeer. Blonde light cascading across her, sanctified in mysterious ways
-    Dress and apron: Pain texture of it, warp and weave of the canvass. Evident application of pain as meaningful (here in and Rembrandt). Intensifies sense of physical reality of figure shown. Suggests something about painting as physical object too- making of it as a palpable subtsnace as part of the pictorial intelligence: think about materials of painting able to deliver emotional impact
-    One of two paintings meant to match: along with his Cellar Boy
o    Also going about his own task- filling jug of wine from a vat
o    Openly expressed paint surface
o    Connection between the two: rhyming back and forth that has to do with pictorial intelligence. Making one picture express the other. Tub of win and wash bucket, white figures match each other, and others
o    Like wings of an altarpiece? One key difference- no middle scene. As though chardin wants to divest himself of the impressive but labored history of art that says you will paint jesus in the middle. What if one were to paint just the flanking figures? Borrow and adapt from altarpiece with some religiosity but absence in the center       

Jean Baptiste Chardin, A House of Cards, 1737

-    first look, innocent enough genre scene
-    further- little boy wrapped up in task
-    idea of chardin and absorption, showing states of absorption. Fried’s book at the bottom
-    Fried: looking at this and others, like boy blowing soap bubbles, he seems unusually fascinated by showing figires wrapped in absorbtion. Sees something related to pictorial intelligence in this state. In this period, pictures showing this are trying to defeat sense in which they know a viewer is before them. If condition of painting is to know the painting will be seen, these figures by Chardin imply/work against that idea, a self sufficient picture that is AUTONOMOUS, separated from us. unstead of pleading magisterial demands and commands of altarpieces etc, naming us the viewer and saying to kneel before the scene, made self conscious before the picture, now autonomous
o    Something about art making that implores this: A Young Artist,
o    A Young Student Drawing
•    Within the pictures that portray autonomy from us, he still indicates a theatrical mode in a few details: painting in it has a model posing,
-    Similarly, the two cards in the foreground. One faces inward, standing for the boy and inwardness, the other looks out at us. like the posing model, looking out at us

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, A Lady Taking Tea, 1735

-    Chardin’s wife
-    Another quotidienne subject, seems absorbed in what she is doing. Compare posture with donor from old pictures
-    Something more intense about this than just autonomy
-    Michael Baxandall: areas of acute focus in the work and other things not so focused. Tea pot and hand very intensely shown, but the face blurs a bit, back wall loses focus, steam almost sign of smokiness of the surround behind her. The chair is perspectivally wrong
-    B says that chardin is not representing a subject in the world so much as the act of perception itself- what it means for us to behold a scene in the world, may be more focused on some and blur or fail to visualize others. Like we might notice it’s a chair but not grant it attention, thus doesn’t give it vividness
-    In keeping with 18th century optics, meditation with perception itself
-    Play between the knob on the drawer and steam ? substantive, physical, but evanescent and swimming. A sign for the way perception operates
-    Definite sign of pictorial intelligence

Chardin, The Ray, 1725-26

-    central figure is the skate/ray, hung on a chain
-    cat about to eat the oysters, there are fish, a white sheet, whats this still life about?
-    Idea of all put palpable pain and sacrifice are in his still lifes of dead creatures
o    Jesus on the Cross not so far removed from the scene. But the full narrativeness of that has been converted into something mysterious before your eyes. Emotion hasn’t gone away, but driven underground to be expressed even more intensely in nonreligious format
-    The false eyes, the gills, brings that about
-    The pathos is there, but it also is not because it converts the themes into something whose virtue is that it is before your eyes and not delivering up message or theme
-    Can still feel the suffering
-    Le Brun’s expression of the passions rendered as inscrutable
-    Pictures confront us in an inscrutable but demanding way

Antoine Watteau, Pierrot, ca 1718-19

-    theater clown figure in troop of Italian comedians
-    theatrical picture, going against absoptiveness of chardin
-    scene from theater, but figures around still engaged in the performance itself whereas Pierrot steps out, maybe allowing us to see him outside the play standing there as the actor
-    principal of the real being invoked, equated not with portrayal of theatrical features of dramatizations, but trying to pinpoint it, bring it devastatingly into presence
o    The Italian Comedians- its like a curtain call, when the figures come out and are actually themselves.
-    World in excess of polite stories and theatricalizations that we are used to seeing when we look at paintings
-    Face of Pierrot:
o    Impassive, no clear sense
o    Specifically a contrast with 17th century French art and art theory
•    Charles Le Brun- court painter to Louis 14. He said every emotion, rage joy, sadness, could be shown legibly according to a system in art. Legibility of face to reveal world
o    Against that, wants to give you something that is not readable. Mystery is a poor choice of words because it comports too easily- I don’t know what its about. Something more demanding about this face. Meant to produce a sense of disquiet, not self contented pleasure at mystery of the world
-    Compares him to a Rockwell panting of the Cubs, the Dugout. The batboy is pIerrot. The figure Pierrot is a loser. Art is not necessarily your friend, here it is equated with alienation, losing, sense of nobody and nothing aligning with ambitious art. Self portrait for Watteau in some way, aligning himself with alienation and losing

Antoine Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera, 1720

-    difference is the unreadablitity, trouble you have seeing it is relevant
-    resisting story telling- this is the painting, not just what it is about. Inviting you into this space but maybe not giving a clear meaning. Meant to imagine viewer who in 18th cent wanst a pic without a coded message, a place like the islanc itself where one can become lost and enchanted
-    idea of conisseurship- entering a picture to get lost, not found

Giambattista Tiepolo, The Finding of Moses, ca. 1738

-    Venitian painter
-    Maybe oddest painting we have seen in course, least hangs together
-    Moses being found by Pharaoh’s daughter, maid servant looking on, young woman gesturing
-    See scale discrepancy between pointing woman and then man on the right. Also why is there the weird gap there where nothing happens? And then the giant man on the right. Why is the dog given more emphasis than Moses, the center of the story? It was thought to be so poor that a person took it upon themselves to correct it- cut off the right half
-    What can we say other than he was a bad painter and the decline of Venice?
-    Pictorial Intelligence
o    Compare cut down version and Veronese’s Finding of Moses. Veronese’s if very narratively clear. Calm, composition holds together, trees funnel you down
o    Could say Tiepolo’s is a falling off of that, or that he is taking Veronese as a given, for granted, on which he can rip and play variation. Liberated from having to make the theme and story be the fundamental thing, a basis for other more pictorial things to investigate
o    Even scale distortions make sense in that way. Not concerned with te right side by the time the artist gets to the left
o    Danger of using the word mystery. Rather than calling it ambiguous, say it is indeterminate- power of invention in this work, looking at how it was made. Make a picture that’s not in a bossy way, instead like a horizontal scroll. Letting you move along the width, not demanding one correct meaning or point of view- is that automatically bad painting? Or does it make certain demands that you would be remiss for not recognizing?

William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress (plate one) 1732

•    It is not a painting, is a print
•    He understood how to make pictures that are much more legibly narrative are nevertheless pictorial
•    Part of a six part print series that Hogart created, distributed, and sold in 1732 as the master satirist of his time
•    Is a procuress scene as the madam sizes up the country girl as she arrives in the degraded, debauched city
•    The world is askew, the very forces of morality are blind
•    Look at the play between the bell above and the belle of a country girl
•    Even beyond all of these smart visual rhymes which are delivered in the name of legibility, there is also a quoting of the old masters at work here
•    This is a visitation scene like the one by Lorenzo Lotto from 1530
•    The visitation is when the mothers of Jesus and John the Baptist get together and realize that they are both pregnant
•    Hogarth is recognizing that this art is no longer plausible or possible, but does that mean it’s useless or moribund? No. It can be channeled into prints
•    It’s like the old masters have gone underground here – they haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been channeled into some other space
•    See this quotation of classical art again in the portrait of Keppel and MacLeod which quote the Apollo Belvedere
•    Hogarth, however, satirizes and drives underground that same old master vocabulary into order to make it relevant and powerful in commenting on contemporary society

Jaques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1785

Subject Matter: Father is giving the swords to his three sons (of the Roman Horatii family) who have been chosen for a ritual dual against three members of a neighboring city (the Curiatii), in order to settle a dispute between the two cities.

How is the painting revolutionary?
Date is before revolution and the subject matter is about swearing allegiance to the empire, so not revolutionary in these regards
   It is revolutionary in it’s STYLE
    -Sons are on same level as father
    -this is highly unusual relative to the other pieces in the saloon showings it was debuted in, see the punished son painting on sheet, melodrama,
    -the severity of this painting
    -Everything is ruthlessly rational, art is no longer a space for pietes or flourishes, no smoke and mystery, no impasto, paint is spread evenly •    The geometry of the floor, everything is almost ruthlessly rational → painting is no longer the space of pieties or erotic flourished, but it is something that is kind of mathematic and rational (Enlightened?)
    -Also a dissonance, the back left arm, the forearms reaching for blade,
    -its thumbing its nose at the royally approved style, this painting is done in a style where anyone can grasp the electric charge

•    David’s new mode of painting is much more aligned with heroic potentials of the male body

Jean-Germain Drouais, Marius at Minturnae, 1786

Drouais is 15 years younger than David and is his prized pupil, and you can see him mimicking his teacher here (i.e. mimicking the oath of horatii)

Subject Matter: The roman general marius (right) who has been exiled for his murderous bruatility. Mercenary, on left, has been hired to kill him. Marius lays down the law on assassin, assassin is embarrassed and turns and runs,

Again: Style is what makes this painting revolutionary, paired down electric feel, that none of the pomp and flourishes of most of the other work

BUT, in addition, painting has another significance: a revolutionary gesture that is not acted upon, the assassin comes to kill, but cannot do it, the failure to execute the revolution

•    What you’re left with is this pregnant gap of generations here, each isolated and alone, unable to relate to one another

Jaques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793

Background: Marat was a dissenter, a polemicist. Woman has just snuck in and stabbed him while he is in his medicinal bath.

Big Points:

1) he is depicted as a man of the people
    -his writing space is just a wood box
    -the second letter is a letter documenting him giving aid

2) David is so much more reductionistic than his contemporaries, it just hits you, much more dense, to see this compare David’s rendition with the one done by roque, (top left) which has a madam tosseau thatricality. With David there is almost a Xian connection (i.e. portrayal of Marat as Christ like figure), a Xian severity contrasts with the madame T theatricality of roque

3) Here the male body, the muscled male body that is wounded, injured, is a symbol of the revolution. Again, see this in Drouais’ The Dying Athlete, 1785 painting (bottom left), he is in pain, but he holds his poise. David will take this to depict what is revolutionary

Girodet, The Sleep of Endvmion, 1791

A heroic male depiction not about pain.

Background: Depicts scene where moon god Selene is chided for her infatuation with hunter boy who likes to sleep nude after day’s exertions,

Big Points:

1) Girodet was also a student of David and this painting is in many ways him differentiating himself: heroic male not in pain, but erotic and sensual, but not in a vulgar or cheap way, still maintains dignity

2) Girodet was painting in Rome, and this painting could be seen as a shout out to Michelangelo’s Adam

David, The Death of Bara, 1794

Background: Bara was a 14yr old that was killed while fighting in the Revolution

Big Points:

1) Combines the eroticism of Endymion w/ the pain of Marat. Pain contorts the body esp. the legs (although they also function to conceal the genitals to suppress sexuality and highlight the martyrdom)

2) Bara, Marat, and Endymion together as paintings of revolution yet weirdness:
    Marat’s big empty area, why?
    Endymion: oddity around collar/neck
    Bara: weird luminosity
The paintings together are forming a new ‘language’ that is not yet completely crystallized; coherent take on the same theme of the heroic male body

Gericault, The Raft of Medusa, 1818-19

Background:  depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on July 5, 1816. At least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 of them died in the 13 days before their rescue and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism, and madness. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain acting under the authority of the recently restored French monarchy.

Big Point: The Painting is both a continuation and discontinuation of the heroic male archetype set up by David
   
    Continuation:
1) taking older grand language of history painting and the classical power of the torsos depicted in some of the male bodies on the ship (influenced by Michelangelo or perhaps even Rubens, in the language of history painting) But bestows the grandeur of history painting/heroic bodies on ordinary people and makes it clear and forceful to the ordinary viewer. In short, here a common people have the glory of a rubensian composition. Compare, for instance, with Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa, 1804, where Napoleon’s ‘christ-like’ is healing the suffering figures. Here They don’t need emperors, or gods, they just need themselves.

2) Gericault orig. wanted the picture to be hung high but realized that it lost the sense of equality and the powerful sensation of the ppl’s flight that he wanted his viewers to experience In person everything is almost twice life-size: everything seems very close to help involve the audience in the scene
   
    Discontinuation: But, also a darkness, G studied dead bodies in morges, this is about as far away from the heroic male as one can get. There are disembodied limbs, we are witnessing the dismantling of the heroic athlete, Body is being dismantled and also glorifies in the same picture!

see decapitated heads painting, this is the dark side of romanticism, the body in pieces, this is really the first example of painting by the ‘alienated’ artist, ruminating on his perception and dark apartness.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

Content: Depicts a moment from the July revolution in Paris when the bourgeoisie and the proletariat joined together to overthrow the Bourbon monarch Charles X and to reinstitute a constitutional monarchy. Shows the revolution unfolding in Paris.  You can see Notre Dame in the distance. Allegorical figure of liberty in the center and dead below her is a national guardsman in military uniform.  A member of the bourgeoisie is dead on the other side while every other star character in the foreground is a member of the proletariat

Importance: Takes the rhetoric of the revolution seriously and because of its literalism if was controversial.  There is one member of the bourgeoisie outnumbered by the working class. It reminded bourgeois of their own tenuous situations because showed that the revolution was really about the proletariat. The picture was relevant, relevant to its world, making contact with it. People reacted to the painting

Compare to Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1834 which is very skillful and entertains. Delacroix still sees art as relevant and about the people whereas Delaroche aimed to pacify middle class viewers in a salon.

Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850

Content: Portrays a rustic, middle class funeral – the local bourgeoisie gathering to bury one of their own. A procession coming in from the left of pall bearers, churchmen, mourners

Importance: Demonstrative of the new avant garde.  Avant garde is a very specific term that comes into being only in 1850. It is a desire to preserve what used to be this raging fire of artistic intensity which has now become a mere flame (Greenberg in 1939 would juxtapose avant garde with kitsch, a negatively associated term he created to mean a mere-artistic gesture without meaning,  “A”rt for commercial consumption only) 

There is now a sense that all the things that art once upon a time represented, must be kept alive, and this picture does that with social content.  It wants to be in your face, with all of the figures foregrounded and impossible to miss. This is an art that wants to matter, and wants to use the old master grandeur of 10x22 feet to gain this shocking purchase on relevance

Avant garde in style: The very refusal of this work to let you go out into death and take it in as a spectacle, forces you to face the painting as a painting with a grey and solemn physical presence that grips you. Courbet’s paint surfaces are thick and raised and you notice it. The robes of the mourning woman converge into a wall of black that is abstract. Courbet is denying the desire to depict the pleasantries of the world

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory…1854-55, Oil on canvas

Content: Courbet in the center painting a landscape – many of his works were landscapes. Viewed by the nude model, child, and cat. As if in a triptych the paintings have wings with friends of the artist on the right and common people on the left. The artist is autonomous in the middle

Importance: He is separated out, but related to the figures behind him – has an apparatus of critics, philosophers and writers equally alienated and equally committed to a notion of what high art might be Seems to say the avant garde artist must be connected to a class by “an umbilical cord of gold”  need money to be a bohemian. The artist seems oblivious to the nursing mother and poor even though he is facing them. He instead makes art for the people behind him (friends like Baudelaire and Champfleury)

It is a commentary on what it is to be an artist. His right leg seems to have no room to operate, and with his leg and his arm, he is becoming one with the scene he paints, incorporating himself into it, and being so close to what he is painting. Almost as if painting is related to his own body because to be serious for Courbet means to create a kind of physical embodied art that is strange and at odds with the pleasing fictions going on at this time.

The model rhymes with the scene: her hair with the trees, for example as if to imply that the scene is coming out of itself and finding expression in the world even outside of its border. Strange flowing effects going inward and outward with the long garment is particularly spectacular as it connects to the waterfall in the scene – a figurative spilling out of the picture. Think of art as physically affecting you, about something that flows viscerally out of the painting.

Courbet. The Wheat Sifters, 1853-4, Oil on canvas

Content: Peasant scene

Importance: Central wheat sifter turns inward, resisting our easy wish to have everything rendered accessible for us as if to say Art is not your friend, it’s not there it ingratiate itself and give us all the answer. You can see Velazquez spinners in her, bringing back the old masters to show there is still something to draw upon that can provide intensity for viewers. Shows a woman figuratively staining a sheet, intensely self reflexive moment. He is physically incorporated into the scene, as if only that type of embodiment could make a painting feel alive

Courbet, The Quarry, 1856-1857

Content/Quality: Dead deer hanging from the tree by one leg. Very physical, thick brushy paint, and not smooth. The dogs are incredibly powerful and muscular

Importance: Idea of painting as an animal something that is creaturely and physical in a way that resists the bland understandings of what we see is what Courbet wants to confront us with
Courbet as the hunter on the tree and the start of the painting was the deer and the Courbet hunter (the rest was added on). The two figures complement each other like a yin and yang. Over intensity of body is related to own investment in such physical creatures

Corbier, The Fringe of the Forest, 1856, Oil on canvas

Content: Landscape painting with heavy layering of paint (on the rock) which is fairly new

Importance:  Courbet is trying to rescue landscape from being a charming backdrop to feeling the world around you. Also the picture represents a doubt in God typical of the time.

Nature: The picture gives the sense that nature is no longer a pretty picture, but has a weird physicality as if there is a throbbing energy in what we see before us and the physicality of nature and of paint are one and the same thing. He asks you to confront it as pigments on a canvas.

God: There is vertical, physical blockage here of the vista that you get in other pictures, it’s struggling for air in this thick, physical atmosphere. Seems to say God is not present – seems to be pondering an alien world. In this decade of Darwin, it makes sense that the old theology is under attack “Show me an angel and I’ll paint you one,” Courbet once said.

William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent October 5th 1858, 1858-1860

Content: Figures in the foreground are the artist’s wife and two sisters, accompanied by the painter’s son

Importance: This is not Kitsch -  it marks an age of questioning the existence of God. God existed for the artist it seems, and yet everything here suggests that Darwinian age of doubt at that same time (the low tide with the slimy seaweed, the isolation of the figures to make them psychologically apart from one another, and most powerfully, the figure on the right in the distance his head is cocked upward toward the sky because he is watching a comet, which appeared all over Europe – a one in every 2150 years comet). Yet, God is the guarantee not just of rocks and shells, but a manifestation of  heavenly presence
Or is it? Does the comet give you a sense of the emptiness of the universe, that there is nothing up there but the sublimely incomprehensible distances. These doubts start to emerge in the world of Darwin and so you could say for Courbet and Dyce, these pictures mark that age

Manet, Olympia, 1863

Echoes Titian’s Birth of Venus, but that one is kitsch (“courtesan,” “nude”) and this one is avant garde (“prostitute,” “naked”).  Her gaze seems to lock in the transactional nature of the encounter
Conventional readings of body are disturbed – flatness of skin, scandalously unfinished parts of her body (ex – her foot)
Modernism: the flatness of the work signifies a kind of breakdown, “not just of art, but in the social sphere.”
•    Announces non-euphemistically, directly that this is a woman who sells her body for a living
o    Is an electric and disturbing charge
•    The flesh of her body seems suggestively not fully articulated or shaded in the way Caravaggio or Rembrandt would have done

Manet, In the Conservatory, 1879

Distribution of elements in the picture: none of it comes off as more important than any other part
Oddities throughout the picture: visual field doesn’t seem to unify or cohere.  The lines of the bench aren’t parallel to the frame, the guy’s finger looks like a cigar and his leg disappears into the potted plants.  It’s Manet’s way of showing the dislocating qualities of vision in a modern world.  Whatever that means.

•    The brilliance of this painting is how this visual discrepancy of the painting is also portrayed formally in the way the painting is painted
o    Distribution of elements none of which is more important than another
o    Wants to show that in modernity we cannot focus on any one thing, but must get a glimpse of everything
•    Look at the way the bottom of the bench is coincident with the bottom of the frame on the right, but not from the left

Manet, The Railway, 1873

Portrays one of the millions of unmemorable encounters on the city streets.  The woman is neither interested nor uninterested in us.
We can’t characterize the relationship of the woman and girl – it indicates a strangeness of the modern world, as does the fact that the girl is facing away from us.

•    Visuality: the idea that vision, rather than being a neutral, universal thing, has a history
o    Once long ago, people saw things more attentively, more intensely, and the visuality of modernity is characterized by the glance, the glimpse, the taking in and short attention span
o    The presumption that we cannot look at anything for more than 3 seconds
•    Vision has a history, but how is it manifested in this?
•    A picture that seems to underscore the power of vision in the new Haussmann Paris, wherein these vistas allow certain attitudes of visual domination to take place

Manet, The Balcony, 1868

it’s a way to idly take in the new Paris, to look out in a way that does not require you to be in the street, but instead allows you this distance, spectatorial way of taking it in
•    Observing without an emotional commitment to what they see
•    The woman on the left gazes down to line up with the parallel diagonals of the railing
o    The man as well
•    The difference between this painting and its prototype by Goya (Majas…) underscores the different kind of visuality by modernity
•    As against that more direct commitment to whatever they behold (in Goya), look at the impassive, bored look of the Manet figures
•    Relative indifference, not unpleasure, and the power and pleasure of it
•    The whole world that is made active by glancing
•    Manet is smart enough to want to represent that in his work
•    Inattentiveness of modernity itself

Manet, The Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1881-1882

About modernity and alienation.  Like Olympia, she’s willing to go along with whatever flirtation this is because it’s her job, but she’s doing no more than tolerating her patron.

•    She seems more supplicating in the reflection than she does standing in front of us
•    The sketch of the painting makes things much clearer
•    These night clubs are a place where the illusion of it is a sexualized co-mingling of all different classes of Paris, allowing for a thrill of erotic chance encounter
•    Manet could have shown that in a celebratory way, but the oddness shows that he means to be critical of this new world, of commercialized proximity and promiscuity between peoples
•    Has qualities of that transactional world of sexuality as a hallmark of modernity
•    Underscored in the resolute two dimensionality of the picture – the burgeoning of the mirror is so much paint on the canvas
o    The bulbs are 2 dimensional dots
o    The beer bottle is a blotch of red that sits on the canvas itself
•    And the bar maid herself
o    She suggests a person, the hallmark of modernity, who is willing to go along with the spectacle of the opened metropolis: yes, I will serve you because it’s my job, but do I care about this or you? No!
o    That resolute, indifference or impassivity, that refusal to really play the role to the hilt, to really imagine oneself at the erotic beck and call of one stranger is what Manet wants to underscore and keep sacrosanct and untouchable in this woman who is in this world of availability
•    It is this which distinguishes Manet’s work from his contemporaries who give you pictures that are meant for nothing more or less than for your immediate gratification

Caillebott, Pont de l'Europe, 1876

All about the new alienation.  The men and women aren’t actually a couple (he’s walking ahead of her).  There’s a separation between them (both of the middle class) and the working man on the right. The new Paris’ lucidity of urban planning allows for more class distinction.
(Caillebotte grew up in the new Paris)

•    The new iron bridge is the symbol of industrial, modern Paris
•    The man on the right might be one who helped build the modern Paris, but the middle class has a more distance, a more spectatorial view of the new Paris

Caillebotte, A Rainy Day Paris 1877

Unlike Manet, Caillebotte has a hyper-lucid modernism, but it’s not kitsch
He’s showing the liberating qualities of the new, vista metropolis Paris.  Later artists would use the same kind of subject but intensify it with paranoia and strangeness.

Van Gogh, Wheat Fields and Cyprus, 1889

Emotion in Van Gogh’s work
Bright colors
Van Gogh shows (over-the-top?) emotion unabashedly
Wanted to convey the sense that “this man felt something” when faced with this scene
•    Maybe emotion has a history
o    Maybe we exist in a post-emotional world in which cynicism and detachment are the order of the day
o    Irony, distance, skepticism, these are the modes
o    Maybe van Gogh understood this as how emotions have been detached from their organic root

Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

Religiosity in Van Gogh - attempt to reverse Darwinian trend Abyss vs. presence of god
Dialogue with earlier works that took God’s presence as given
Medieval swirling and emotional religiosity at odds with modernity

Related to Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus' halo

Van Gogh, Church at Auvers, 1889

Religiosity, continued (aka more religious than Monet which was "reverie w out desire")
Thick, feminine curves and undulating form of the church show the intensity of Van Gogh’s religious feeling
Van Gogh taking possession of the overblown, “feminine” emotion that infuses his art

Van Gogh, Landscape View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground, 1888

Immediacy of subject matter; Van Gogh intensely making contact with the landscape
Contrast to dispassion and technicality of contemporary artists (Seurat and Monet, e.g.)
Empathy with the subject; emotional investment in each figure Monet as a more touristy less immersed feel

VanGogh, Interior of the Artists Bedroom at Arles, 1888

LINE – intense outlining of objects shows raw and primitive “gathering” of them
Notion that drawing a thing is to possess it
Contrast to Seurat and Pointillism, where shapes are conveyed merely by collections of dots
Van Gogh wants to return to 3d concreteness and physicality of forms while Seurat wants to embrace the alienation and pleasure of new modern culture

Van Gogh, Postman Joseph-Etienne Roulin, 1889

Van Gogh still trying to make intimate contact with the world
Sincerity and directness of the portrayal
Approaches modernity by isolating himself from it and seeking primitive sincerity
Contrast to Monet’s bar scenes, which confront modernity by portraying ephemeral subjects
Compare to Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride, whose thick impasto is Van Gogh’s precedent

Van Gogh, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear

Stereotype^10 of the damaged, tormented artist; becomes cultural shorthand for discussing van gogh
Contemporary reference: Sherlock Holmes “Adventures of the Cardboard Box”
Also reference to Giovanni Morelli’s art historical illustrations of ears by different old masters; VG’s self-mutilation becomes an autographic gesture
Despite voluminous expression, the artist can’t be heard
Van Gogh’s version of The Scream
Opposition to the modern ideal of perfect imitation and reproduction (this ear as a true thing can never be recreated)

Van Gogh, Crows on the Cornfield, 1890

Van Gogh’s last painting
Pictorial euphoria
Lightning rod of emotion created by being in the world and experiencing it
Yet the crows flocking to the foreground serve as counters to the ecstatic, perspectival rush into the background
Ecstasy and damage are joined together

James Ensor, Christ's Entry into Brussels, 1889

Christ riding through a mardi gras parade in the streets
grotesque figures abound (some become masks)
Takes a savage and satirical view of the new boulevards of modern Brussels and Paris
Ensor wants to deal with the savagery and brutality of the modern world; Van Gogh wants to escape it
Both understand that a serious artist in the modern world is consigned to freak-hood
Bad Dream of Modernism
Ensor’s painting was undesirable when first painted
1949 (60 yrs later): Ensor dies
1951: Christ’s Entry into Brussels is hung in a nightclub
NORMALIZATION
Consumer culture is omnivorous; no level of subversion or antagonism can escape co-option
Van Gogh has now become the stuff of dorm room posters; a clichéd symbol of artistic expression

Picasso, Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1910

Brothel scene reaching for primitive like Gauguin
Madame pulling back curtain
Not comfortable safety, energized atmosphere engages us, super condensed
Spanish women with African masks
Reclining nude shown vertically=authority/command of woman
Stares=evil eye, Medusa effect (Freud’s Wolf Man), only rivaled by “Las Meninas,” THE PRIMAL SCENE
Disturbing sexuality
Shocking=relationship to art as a sexual one

a more complicated expression of a more sexualized relation between a man and these women
o    Want to amplify this by talking about the specific powers of these women
•    Two central figures – Spanish types
•    Three masked figures – African types
•    Has to do with raw primitive sexuality of others, of different ethnicities
o    Deeply racialized
•    Complexity of Picasso’s work has to do with specific power of the figures
o    What’s striking about the figure second from left is that she is a reclining nude turned vertical and made into an emblem of authority or command
o    Normal supine position is welcoming, objectified, as opposed to vertical authority
•    Massively centripetal
•    Energies are condensed into narrow, supercharged space
•    The gesture of pulling back the curtain seems to emphasize this centripetal closing of these figures
•    So too is the uncanny way that all five gazes are distinct from one another
o    Don’t give you the pleasure of a unified fiction; instead, each figure stares solemnly out of a strange isolation that is itself disquieting

Matisse, Bathers with a Turtle, 1910

Turtle as enigma, loss of secure allegorical qualities, descended into world w/o meaning, loss of secure meanings, loss of secure structures
Isolation like Cezanne’s “Bathers at Rest”
Channeling Masaccio's “Expulsion for the Garden”
Loneliness, isolation

Strangeness of sexuality

Kirchner, Artillerymen in thet Shower, 1915

Founder of pre-war movement Die Bruke, all about bright colors and jagged design

Hell scene

"strong misreading" of cezanne's bathers to create a homoerotic rewriting while saving the overpowering strangeness of Cezanne like the missing head

Nevinson,  Bursting Shell, 1915

Gist: introduces us to futurism, the aesthetics of violence, sanitized

Destruction = ecstasy

Modernity = excitement

In love with velocity

•    The impact of a painting is about instant teneity, immediacy, the shock and suddenness
•    The power of the burst is now appropriated as that which art must deliver to you – an impact

CW Nevinson, Returning to the Trenches

•    It’s this way of capturing the thrill of masculine militarism as not a polite sequence of unfolding actions, but as an instant in which all those actions are coalesced that would occupy Nevinson and the other futurists
•    Modern fantasy of the primal and even cleansing beauty of war
•    Kirchner and Nevinson are polar opposites
o    Kirchner’s are troubled and underground
o    Nevinson is the Marinetti-like heroiciser of the war

Otto Dix, Storm Troopers Advance Under Gas, 1924

Gist: war cripples or disables the very notion of self; masks represent anonymity and loss of identity in the midst of war

Otto Dix, Card Players, 1920

Gist: address the faceless disfigurement of the veterans; shows how humans have become monsters; same culture has the beautiful Greta Garbo. Raises notion of beauty and disfigurement

Max Ernst, The Masters Bedroom, 1920

Gist: painted these figures on a child’s primer, psychoanalytic dynamics; our unconscious is a weltering array of objects we have come across

•    This suggests that amid the rationality implied by that perspectival system, things emerge almost Edgar Allen Poe-like
•    It’s a catalog, an indiscriminate inventory of pictures that we’ve come across
•    It’s an emblem, or a figuring of the unconscious
•    Freud’s essay called “The Uncanny” → what does uncanny mean? Is it terrifying or horrifying? No (terrifying – fear, horrifying – revulsion)
•    Uncanny is when things return from repression, that it’s the sense you can have when you’ve been somewhere before

•    That’s a war shock kind of notion, for Freud and for Ernst

Andre Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1926

Gist: surrealist; automatism as a cardinal virtue; doodling considered to be a road to discover and enactment of libidinal energies

•    Phenomena of Ecstasy by Dali represents this ecstatic release that this surrealist automatism would produce
o    The images indicate not just a response to the war, but that bad dream of modernism
o    These images are the very images of consumer culture that we live in now
•    Surrealism starting out very antithetical to contemporary regimes, becomes a lingua franca for how we live now
o    Ecstasy, release can be yours
•    Does surrealism merely await the fate of being coopted into the mainstream
•    The Dark Surrealism represented by fascination with manikins, robots, automatons
o    What is ticking is not the libidinal river, but a mechanistic impulse
o    As if at the deepest level we are machines, like talking dummies
o    We have nothing but a machine like quality at our heart

John Singer-Sargent, Gassed, 1918-1919

Gist: painted as a commemoration; blind leading the blind; last ditch effort to recoup our humanity in the midst of the darkness

•    Sense that each of these works of art are desperately trying to conserve and contain and make meaningful in a classical vocabulary that which has exceeded all bounds of representation in its horror

•    The politics of beauty - After that war, does it make any sense to believe in the beauty of Michelangelo’s Adam, the kind of beauty that the Nazis appropriated. Can we think of beauty as something to believe in, to aspire to?

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947

Surrealism is very different from what Pollock finally wanted to achieve
Full Fathom Five has a title that refers to a subject
Compare to Picasso and Cubism
Cubism: there is three dimension, face and hands
All three dimensional forms must also be expressed on the planarity of the flat canvass
Picasso’s cubism also has a deductive structure, the way each line might be said to deduce the overall rectangular shape of the canvass
Pollock’s Full Fathom Five
Also has an all-overness
The flatness: the thickness of the paint is pan caking any depth into two dimensions
In Pollock, the black lines have taken a recognizably Picasso-like gesture in that it forms outlines, but Pollock has freed it from the task of having to represent something
What if line could just be on its own?
Color too is also now liberated from the task of having to represent something, pigment is said to be liberated from the task of representation
Might have to do with a wish to connect with the world, might have to do with the task of standing in front of a painting and not being taken away to any other world: to make the viewer experience what it is to be alive and to experience a moment in time in one spot

Pollock, Phosphorescence, 1947

There’s a way that these drip paintings were made by Pollock as a kind of opening up
There is a deductive structure in the white web-like squirts of painting that are applied directly out of the tube
There is also the physical presence of paint
There is flatness, and all-overness
Phosphorescence is light and bright, an optimistic piece
There is a cheerfulness, a lyrical possibility in the piece

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950, 1950

The tonality is landscape-esque, the lines are coherent, tree-esque, mindful of the palette
There is a dramatic difference between this and an earlier piece – Number 1A, 1948 with the barbed wire esque lines in the top image, chaotic turbulence in the middle
Seems elemental, there is a hand print that evokes pushing and entrapment in the earlier piece
There is a beauty in this work
Pollock’s paintings are already part of haute couture, commercialized
Pollock becomes a metaphor for American freedom, used propaganda

Pollock, Number 7, 1951, 1951

His work is under siege from within
It returns to the figure, drawing
Meant to how what a good draughts-person
It is taking away the power of the drip painting
Picasso lurks as whom Pollock needs to take on

•    This is all meant to convey a figure of some kind and to demonstrate his skill as a draftsman (an answer to those critics who claimed they could do that), but it’s taking away what was so powerful about the initial drip paintings
•    Another idea would be that this is disastrous for Pollock’s work – don’t bring Picasso back into this, you already transcended him
•    Pollock is also under threat because Rosenberg published an article called “the American action painters” after seeing Namuth’s photos of Pollock painting
•    Allowed himself to be portrayed as melancholic, alcoholic beast or savage in the popular portrayal of him
•    This is the Pollock that people have related to Marlon Brando, etc – volcanic performances
•    Allowing himself to be portrayed this way is to stereotype his paintings as being representative of angst
o    That rage, however, is never quite absent in his work (think of the handprints in Number 1A)
o    That notion of masculinity from the 1950s that Pollock’s work (oscillation between rage and softness) suggest
o    Two understandings of Pollack – the modernist and the beast

Pollock, Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952), 1952

In many ways, this is an interestingly incoherent picture
It’s a bright, toxic canvas, van Gogh-esque, emotion exists usefully no where else in the world except the wall
Pollock has perhaps become aware that in many ways he has become too pretty
He has become famous, his work is acclaimed, and in some ways he is raging against that
The poles were supposedly applied last-minute by a 2x4 that was dipped in the blue paint to give some structure to the all-over work

•    The bright, poisonous palate and the overall sense of emotion is reminiscent of van Gogh – an emotion that knows not what to do with itself, but can exist no where else other than in the spaces of a painting on a wall
•    Think about van Gogh as one figure of isolation and Pollock as another
•    Abstract expressionism was coined with respect to van Gogh
•    Strangers in the world aiming to find something that the rest of us have lost, but only finding something that is strange to us but may have been perfectly natural in an earlier time: feeling, emotion, intensity

Willem de Kooning,  Suburb in Havana, 1958

•    Evokes an image of van Gogh’s Crows over the Wheatfield
o    A way of activating van Gogh in the 50s of avant-garde principledness
o    Now in the 50s, that mode is an empty gesture – it’s a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing
o    The big expansive emptiness of the painting, the savage gestures that don’t signify, suggest the outmoded-ness of the van Gogh model
o    Big, grand, but finally empty extrapolations of the self

Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958

•    The expressive power of works of art that are about nothing at all is where an authentic response to being alive resides, not in subject matter
•    Made this painting as a part of a big commission for the 4 Seasons restaurant in NYC
•    Illustrates a quandary for him because Rothko has made it – huge commission – you’re making a painting for a hugely popular restaurant in hugely popular part of NYC
•    Is he going to go down without a fight? No – he has a plan – makes paintings so claustrophobic and dark that no one will be able to eat anything
•    His inspiration comes from the black, blind windows in Michelangelo’s library
•    When he came to look at the hotel space, the first thing he sees is Pollock’s Blue Poles, which means that this art is now part of the décor, part of the décor where the wealthy and powerful leave their stress to rejoice in triumphs over bottles of burgundy
o    Art is the backdrop for that pompous importance, and that is a bad dream
•    He then realizes his plan is impossible to execute, and he drops out of the commission
•    The idea of the abstract painter as the person opposed in his savage sensibility is no longer relevant

Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961

•    Has to do with abstract painting – Donald is looking down at the water as Pollock looked down at his canvass, and more precisely the idea of narcissus that is evoked or implied in the Namuth films
•    This idea is criticized as being all about pure narcissism, a circular logic – the joke is on Donald and Mickey is laughing at that joke
•    Is Lichtenstein’s work then just an art world joke? No, there is something more to it than that
•    It activates Disney as a key part to what Lichtenstein is talking about
o    Disney implies the corporate structuring of narcissistic pleasure in American culture
o    Referring to the way the culture at large, for all of us, is pitching a childish enjoyment and pleasure offered to us by a corporate culture that knows the joke it proffers on us and understands this mode would never let us experience the world
o    In that sense, he wants to say that artwork can no longer, with respect, and with purpose and seriousness, consider itself outside that culture as the abstract expressionists did – it must see itself as commenting on that culture and in it

Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, 1961

o    Pleasure, experience, and being in the world are now the stuff of industrial production
o    The very idea of the most liberating fantasy you can imagine is a commercialized vehicle of production
o    Art cannot stand idly by and imagine itself in narcissistic scenarios, it must instead comment on this larger world around
•    He’s not just a social critic – it’s not that easy, just a sense of rightness in what he is doing
•    Seems to lock into something that is of the moment
•    Look at this as compared with Desmoiselles
o    Putting into the past the notion that there could be some kind of primitive experience with the world as offered up by painting, something primal and beyond the ordinary everyday
o    The sexual allure is now a commodified spectacle

Lichtenstein, Okay Hot Shot, 1963

•    Commodification of emotion, both conventionally male and conventionally female

The word “pouring” suggests abstract expressionist painting
o    Critique on authentic, gestural emotion
o    Trying to convey intensity like the onomatopoeic “woomp!”

Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963

•    The idea is about emotion itself as a product
•    Art cannot simply imagine that it has some sort of privileged relationship to real emotion
•    Lichtenstein went from a “seeing and feeling” philosophy to this – came a long way
Compare to Morris Lewis’ Beta Kappa (below) that is emotionless, are we left with an emotionless world? 
reminding Nemerov of that embarrassed sentiment when we get emotional around others/strangers

Warhol, 32 Campbell Soup Cans, 1961-1962

each is a different variety of Campbell’s soup, reminiscient of middle class, differences not always apparent

Displays the post abstract expressionist movement bc he takes commodities as a subject The Warhol is more being with the rhythms of industrial production, art can no longer ignore that overwhelmingness of industrial production – it must itself acknowledge it in its form

In a consumer culture of plenty, you aren’t sure which ‘soup‘ you are
Soup cans in a gallery make the gallery into a store, making art the commodity
Seriality- painting a series was common among other artists, such as Monet’s “hay stacks”
 grid pattern is necessary (and likens the painting to the “light colors” from 1919 ) and emphasizes the lack of expression and composition in the piece- which was reflected in Warhol’s overall persona as a dandy

Warhol, WHere is your Rupture, 1960

•    The arrows in the ad are reminiscent of St. Sebastian – the gay saint who was pierced and penetrated
•    Gay artists like Marsden Hartley (Sustained Comedy, 1939)
•    Work like this refers to a world of prosecution, endangerment, closetedness
•    Johns, who in many ways is Warhol’s opposite, expresses the same thing

Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962

This medium allows for uneven effect and a blurring or masking of the picture
Artist fascinated with death
Choice of photo doesn’t reveal much about the person, only the persona, and even then it is relatively emotionless 
Marilyn was part of the emotional school of acting, described as an unmapped voyage to self discovery which Warhol was fascinated by
She is as an icon a commodity

Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955

•    Is an equal reference to Saint Sebastian
•    Shows the target and the plaster cast of various body parts – penis, heel, nipple
•    Looks weirdly painted because is painted with encaustic, which is the mixing of oil paint with hot wax, which produces a thick, coagulated surface
•    It’s a gay refusal of that hetero-abstract expressionist mode, the slashing brushwork rendered into an austere stillness
•    The target and the body parts implies something about being targeted
•    Has to do something with Warhol’s Rupture picture, even though Johns probably viewed Warhol as being too queer

Pop: Abstract Expressionism :: Gay: Straight

Jeff Koons, Louis XIV, 1986

Stainless steel
Emphasizes the tacky, commercialism of the gallery culture of the time
The rhetoric of the work is purposely hideous, vulgar and kitschy
Nouveau riche collections
Warhol: “the gallery is the store”
Fascination of the object, acquisitiveness, fetishes
Context: the record-setting auction of van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the exhibition of the Tutenkhamen treasures (“blockbuster exhibitions’’)

David Salle, Footmen, 1986

Diptych
Incongruous juxtaposition of subjects
No longer is painting a record of experience, but only of representations
Randomness is the subject matter
Focuses on elements of the male heroics, or “Macho bombast”
This genre can be seen as a recuperation from the sentimentality of the deKoonings and Pollocks
“…epitomizes, for me, cocaine.”- Nemrov (I just really wanted to include that quote…)
The work conveys ideas of speed, excitement, thrill
“not a more coked-out decade than the 80s” – Nemrov (another fun quote from lecture)
Suggests that decade’s obsession with speed and thrill, the lack of a moral center, drug is somehow synonymous with the pastiching, anything-goes aesthetic

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Natives Carrying Bibles, 1982

Artist was a graffiti artist who somehow got into the gallery world
Conveys Basquiat’s recognition that he was the puppet of the white art culture and was catering to their need for a token black
He knows what the deal is, what the dynamics are, that he is on display
A really nice summary of the role of Basquiat’s art: “The only thing the market liked better than a hot young artist was a dead hot young artist, and it got one in Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose working life of about nine years was truncated by a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven. His career, both actual and posthumous, appealed to a cluster of toxic vulgarities. First, the racist idea of the black as naif or rhythmic innocent, and of the black artist as "instinctual," someone outside "mainstream" culture and therefore not to be rated in its terms: a wild pet for the recently cultivated collector. Second, a fetish about the freshness of youth, blooming among the discos of the East Side scene. Third, guilt and political correctness, which made curators and collectors nervous about judging the work of any black artist who could be presented as a "victim." Fourth, art-investment mania. And last, the audience's goggling appetite for self-destructive talent: Pollock, Montgomery Clift. All this gunk rolled into a sticky ball around Basquiat's tiny talent and produced a reputation. “

Robert Gober, Untitled (Sink), 1985-7

“Gober's sculptural works address a variety of formal and humanistic concerns by juxtaposing functionality and dysfunction, and the familiar and the strange”
His works are “psychological furniture”
Sink, 1985-87
“a domestically nondescript motif, carries a psychological charge that is at once idiosyncratic and common, mysterious and humorous. “
The paradox of the suggested ritual cleansing is frustrated by the lack of plumbing and functionality
Gober references Duchamp’s Urinal and the ready-made

Allan Mccollum, Unititled (Plaster Surrogates), 1982-1983

“By endowing these cast objects — nearly identical plaster forms with painted perimeters and central "pictures" of uniformly applied black enamel — with the bare-bones characteristics of paintings, McCollum confounds viewers’ expectations, heightening their awareness of how they recognize and act toward art. “--MoMA
What is art about that offers no pleasure, but you could say about these pieces that they speak of negation in art- the I won’t do this, I cannot do this.  Statement as old as the mid 19th century and the avant garde.  Gives it the pathos of rejection instead of nihilism.
Raises the question of what we are to do now.  Commercial era still remains and how are we to address this?
“Handmade but standardized, Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates integrates art and mass production. McCollum asks viewers to rethink conventional distinctions between types of labor and to take into consideration the human effort embedded in all objects, artistic and otherwise. “