Courbet-avant garde

The Painter’s Studio:  A Real Allegory Summarizing Seven Years of My

Life as an Artist, 1854-55

• Most ambitious picture, very large 10 by 21 ft

• Full allegory of what it is to be an artist and a seriois one at that...young boy cat and nude model looking on adoringly
• On the L figures of the everyday: poor, rich, social types, crucifixion mannequin...the everyday as the source of the works...land scape oriented towards these figures...artists must draw from world around them, not just entertain...subject matter

• On the right a patron class...buyers and critics like Charles Baudelaire….financial and emotional support

• But yet he is staying absolutely isolated in the middle...this is a tryptich...artist is tied to the real world, but keeps his autonomy

• Act of painting is something the artist projects himself almost bodily...he almost blends into the landscape he paints...landscape almost spills out into studio...brook flows out almost into water fall of cat and rhymed with cascade of drapery...sense of physical identification with what one is painting

The avante garde and Manet

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

• Painting of prostitute Victorine Meurent who has received a gift from an admirer...scandalous
• Why scandalous bc nude has always been painted?
  • Why avante garde?
  • Compare to other paintings at Salon of 1865… and  to Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863 with her miraculously long hair...what was the conventional taste of the period?  The objectification of the woman's body...kitsche...nothing left to the imagination so that the viewer can enjoy the virtually pornographic picture...both prudish and pornographic
  • Manet: makes things more difficult on the viewer...calling sex by the name sex not euphemistic...a prostitute confrontationally shown.  Olympia name is an ironic statement about the lack of fantasy.  Dares to name a social and financial operation clearly and lucidly instead if disguising it with pornographic politeness
  • Vs Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538: meant to commemorate a marriage of a 10 year old bride...picture of a prostitue...Manet's painting is ironically ripping on this
  • But debilitating this old Master fantasy
  • Social daringness
  • Striking flatness of the painting which is intermittent: the hand is a focus within the focus...the hand is the most illusionistically modeled of the whole picture see the depth around the fingers--intensifies the sexual terms of the picture.  Vs. flatness of the ankle and foot, almost incompetently brushy and unrealized...upper chest and face..lack of shading and modeling and sculpting of the body manifest in the milkiness of the chest...the pillows have depthful modeling. Striking outline of the figure...this contributed to people's discomfort
  • Flatness is avante garde refusing the fantasy of paint and calls attention to it as a material substance...painting is not an entertainment, scene not offered up to viewer, shows materiality of paint and canvas..making viewer actually confront reality not an illusion

Manet

Woman with a Parrot, 1866

• Sprig of violets bringing to nose, monacle...it's a man's monacle...must be a prostitute or kept woman...parrot is a reference to the brdello, house of prostitution

• Avante guarde: flatness, grey background is disastrously unmodulated...pink dress is flat..forms express and reexpress the vertical uprightness of the painting...she's central within the picture showing uprightness...orange rhyming hand calls attention to up and down of the picture...manet wants to emphasize the physical means of the painting in front of you...deductive structure...the forms call attention to the canvas itself...disconcerting to viewers

• Maddening unreadability of the scene…lack of storytelling
  • Vs. Èmile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, The Lady with the Glove, 1869...story: she's removing a glove and looking at us..narrative and painting go together in this picture
  • Whereas Manet uses dissonant (keyword) combination of element
  • Vs. James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1:  The White Girl, 1862: self-consciously wants to be different, but still possible for critics to understand painting narratively...consciousness and psychology implied in the young woman
  • Vs manet: unknowable flatness of story...not readily legible

• Also avante garde bc becomes visible to use all at once, immediately, doesn't unfold in degrees...presents itself all at once, what Clement Greenberg calls  “at-onceness”...immediacy and instantaneity connected to non-narrativity

The Luncheon (The Luncheon in the Studio), 1868

• The idea of facingness
• Boy is Leon Leenhoff, illigitimate son?
• Woman's directness of face...not turning back of Gericault
• Dissonance...scrambles sense of narrative...scale discrepancy of boy in the foreground, woman, and plant...the three items makes a fragmented effect, hard to ID the space...what is the relation of the young man to boy? Inspiration of photography, cropping of the boy at the knees.

Manet

The Balcony, 1868-69

• Deals in costumary refusal to come clean...though shows a recog social setting...three models...none satisfied with likeness
• Bourgeoisie taking in spectacle of the street from the balcony...removal from dirt and poverty of the city..Idfyable narrative
• Nonetheless, their poses and attitudes are fragmented from one another, hard to give narrative meaning...flatness of green shadings deduce the structure of the canvas..lattice marks of balcony give 2D remind of canvas
• Refusal to make a social statement in any way, defies expectations of a painting to comment socially 

Manet

Gare Saint-Lazare, 1872-73

• Railway station: woman seated on a stone base, girl poised above a railway yard...on the right is a bridge that suspends the railway tracks
• Socially history of art: this train station in Paris handled 40% of railway traffic of Paris
  • Image of the new modern Paris, redesigned to have wide boulevards of Baron Haussmann; thus the painting is extremely modern
  • Manet's commentary: the sense of alienation and dislocation given by modernity and modern technology
    • Woman's gaze of intimacy though alienation...alienation and intimacy in a gaze

Back to Gare Saint-Lazare, 1872-73

• The little girl with hand against bars, bored leisure and imaginative freedom..smoke is a thought balloon but bars are also containment and imprisonment...even though upper-class the bars symbolize she is unable to achieve complete freedom in the modern city
• At-onceness
• Not kitsche...avante garde.
• Vs. William Bouguereau, Mother and Children, 1879...ultimate kitsche painter...sentimentality: the cloying handy accessibility...the work dissolves before you in pleasant sentiment...like Rafael's Madonna and Child...to easily reflects this Old Master
• •  
• Manet's also draws on a Madonna, or maybe annunciation where Virgin reading...but Manet didn't copy, makes beautiful
• Kitsche not necessarily tasteless...its up to the audience to bring an emotional relation and passion to the work

Manet

The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881-82

• Nightclub in paris called a Café-Concert, glorified beer hall...mirrored surface reflects circus and crowd...Vegas like show place, things and people are for sale...the modern spectacle which all are offered up...fantasy reigns as long as no one recognizes the exploitation of the whole thing...but Manet recog this...in her impassiveity, refusal to play along with the exploitation and fantasy...her reflection in the mirror seems different from her pose to us….in the mirror leans toward gentlemen to please...but in front, impressive neutrality to this illusion and the fantastical exploitation

Paris, A Rainy Day, 1877

• The wide boulevard designed by Haussmann...allowed leisure and freedom for bourgeois couple...amdist all this beauty of freedom, people walk alone in isolation of each other..utter isolation

Gustave Caillebotte, Pont de l’Europe, 1876

• On the same bridge, man looking down into the same yard that the girl is looking into...this pic of a man who grew up in this new environment, shows social fragmentation and stratification: working class man off to the side and the bourgeois

• Modern metropolis filled with zooming st in which peopl walk alone

• People overarched by mechanations and industrialization

Art from late 19th Century!

Continuation of place of the artist, place of the avante garde and ambitious artists, and qualities of emotional directness and religious epiphany as they continue somehow in damaged Europe

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

• Van Gogh (1853-1890) had committed self to an asylum at Saint Remy...three biggest towns

Arles, Saint Rémy, Auvers, 1888-1890

• Only painted in last nine years of life
• A religious picture...image of swirling heavens, showing 11 radiating stars….like the Arena Chapel blueness...his father was a protestant pastor...in 1879, was the preacher in barious downtrodden towns in Belgium...lived in most penitent fashion...but in winter of 1880...epiphany of should be an artist not a preacher, but still God-like intensity
• 28 by 36 inches
• See church steeple….very Northern Euro church steeple
• Revalatory experience...palpable in cyprus tree in the foreground...licked flame with vertical ascendence...supercedes church, a symbol of religious estatic experience….personal religious experience slightly eclipses religious, still important, institution
• Meyer Schapiro, “On a Painting of Van Gogh” (1946) refers to Vangogh's "motor storm of brush work"
• The swirls look like the grain of old wood
• Sense that the world vividly present to the artist...eye-like quality
• Thickness of the paint: a desire to POSSESS the world...ephemerality of our own bodies...right degree of thick material means
  • Compare to Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, 1666  Van Gogh loved this painting...thick almost sculpturally laid pigment...hallmark of desire to make palpable the world with material means...try to encrust the world in paint
  • The golden moments in starry night have esp Rembrandt influence
  • ALL IN ALL TRYING TO HAVE A DIRECT RELATION TO THE WORLD when all was entertainment and fancy
  • Compare to Claude Monet, Valley of the Creuse, 1889...Monet much older than Van Gogh...the materiality of the pigment, full of impasto...surface is raised...difference from Van Gogh bc Monet's work is about passive sensation...recording the world as it flows before you...reverie without desire, still direct relation, but Van Gogh's is passionate esctatic, and moents' is dispassionate
  • Compare to Paul Gauguin, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888 (Pont-Aven)...abandoned wife children and businessman to contact life through painting...countrywomen, deeply pious...peasants looking on at some hallucination of biblical narrative...Gauguin aligns his perspective...he wants to directly relate to their naïve religiosity...both van goh and gouguin interested in religious epiphany, but Gauguin's work is somehow more calculated and trying too hard to align the painters vision with this epiphany, whereas Van Gough has this naïve single-minded, possessed sense that universe is looking back at you with directness

Van gogh   The Railroad Bridge, 1888

• View looking down railroad bridge but also into another arch in the back and looking into Place Lamartine
• How does this explains Van Gogh's motivations?  The alienations of modernity...move irrespective of one another….in an era traversed by a railroad alienates
• Suggests vanishing points of modernity….diagonal line zooms and then disappears immediately
  • Compare to Jacob van Ruisdael, Wheat Field, ca. 1670...Van Gogh might have admired this...but Ruisdael's vanishing orthogonals...beautiful account of Holland
    • Van Gogh uses perspective to show disenchantments of modernity

• Over bright high key color...the artist's purpose in the moment of disenchantment is to paint all the emotion that has been drained out at the time...artist is a lighting rod for all the emotion once lost

Chair and Pipe (Van Gogh’s Chair), 1888, Arle

• Relation to kitsche?

• I will take posession of an object in the world by painting

• But compare to Francis Barraud, His Master’s Voice, 1898-99
  • Fidelity of the sound...the master is dead so the voice coming from beyond the grave
  • This work too is about capturing and possessing the world...the spoken words which are ephemeral can actually be possessed now
  • Both paintings are part of a larger project of capturing the world and possessing the world that transcends both avante garde and kistche

• Also compare to Herbert Herkomer, Sunday at Chelsea Hospital, 1871
  • One of the veterans is dead, not sleeping
  • Van Gogh loved this kind of picture
  • Yes Van Gogh liked works like this chairs and sitting

• Compare to Luke Fildes, The Empty Chair, 1871, Charles Dicken's….very kitschy because sentimental clear story,
  • but van gogh admired this work...very naïve...self-trained..not aware of the you shouldn not paint kitschy

• Van Gogh doesn't have an obvious story...good modernist object because no narrative...structure of chair expresses orientation of canvas itself like Manet did, so different with Fildes...but still in Van Gogh there  is still a connection to some narrative, sentiment

Van Gogh  Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889

• 1888, Van Gogh got into dispute with Gauguin, sliced off part of his ear and gave it to a prostitute...bled copiously, but recovered

• 17 by 21 inches
• Artist is a martyr figure: compare to Kiss of Judas where Peter slices off ear of Malchus sevant to the high priest..the idea of religious martyrdom...Van Gogh is both the betraying malchus and the righteous peter...martyrdom of Van Gogh
• News  about Jack the Ripper who cut of the ear of one of his victims...Van Gogh almost artist as criminal subject to disturbing psychopathological powers unknown even to himself, as pariah

• Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” 1893 (Sidney Paget) compare to Sherlock Holmes stories...arrivals of a carboard box of ears...Van Gogh and self-mutilation not only criminal but also have something to do with history and attribution of art based on ears Morelli postulated that the attribution could be made (Giovanni Morelli, Italian Masters in German Galleries, 1883)...somehow these hypotheses factor into this painting...powerful relation btx psychology detective work and art history and attribution...the ar is related to one's style, and one's distinctive art

• The idea of the dandy who is beautiful and cool and removed, not emotional

James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels, 1889

•  parade streaming forward into our face, preceding Christ...parade of grotesques...all are portrayed as Bosch would have portrayed people

• Avante garde vs. kitshe?

• Procession is a parade, high kitsche artist like Jan Verhas, The Review of the Schoolchildren in 1878, 1880 (parade of 23,000 school children through Brussels because of wedding of King Leopold)  state sponsored pic of a state sponsored event...official spectacle...art breathlessly wants to portray that spectacle
• But Ensor's painting, made in tiny studio house in Belgium is a condemnation of that official state culture...prob a direct riff, but now a parade of grotesques
• IMPECCABLE AVANTE GARDE PEDIGREE...bc so crazy an wild that not even shown to the public
• Purposeful dissonance of this pic...opposite the cherished ideas of the culture

• After died, this painting became famous...but became hung at a casino...its the fate of an avante garde artist to give us new and dissonant and deeply critical images,  and yet fate of those gestures is to be accommodated and made famous by culture despised

Just like Van Gogh, this naïve passion doing it from isolation and very eccentric and very avante garde, and now his work is the epitome of a cliché...commercialized paintings...our bland happy commidified recognition and commodification of things THE BAD DREAM OF MODERNISM

Pablo Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

• Scene like Manet's Olympia od prostitution, but Manet's was a well to do prostitute, these are working class prostitutes

• Three engaged with the spectator...table juts out to audience with grapes and fruit
• Revolutionary in 2 repsects:  1. Treatment of space: flatness of the painting...compare to

Picasso, Two Women, 1906 and Paul Gauguin, Moon and the Earth, 1893..ripping on Gauguin's primitive sexualism...roundedness is suddenly made flat so that everything is pancaked to pic...permanently posed women...take on 2D...recumbent nude woman, woman who was posed on her side and now lifted vertically, becomes a sister to the figure at the center

• Making the picture NONNARRATIVE...not about two guys going to a house of prositution...but now the confrontation of 5 women with us as spectators, creating a sense of SHOCK, intense confrontation
• Viewing art refigured from contemplating a story (19th c painting) to presence of women

Paul Cezanne, The Large Bathers, ca. 1904-1906 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

                       The Large Bathers, ca. 1895-1906 (Barnes Foundation)...androgenous sexuality, the man has shadow...as though to defy classic conventions of art, having to do with sexuality...woman phallic head, dissonant

Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1559

• An evil eye, banishing Calisto, same kind of evil eye as Diana and Actaeon, 1556,

• Back to Picasso: women staring like Diana in Titian...petrifying and aggressive attitude...new idea in 1907...dissonnace of unapologetic stare alone...glare more than Manet's Olympia
• Freud's analysis of the stare...Freud's (Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, 1918 (“The Wolf Man”) patient had nightmare of five white wolves staring from tree, like women...has to do with a primal scene, very subjectivity as a person is shattered or broken...shocked, like in Picasso's pic...primal scene is shock

• Rivalry in Paris btxPicasso and Matisse...to be the most advances and avante garde painter
• Crouching figure...no face, no neck, just a mop of golden hair crouching down feeding a turtle...long arm reaching back and not looking at a turtle...interacting the only way humans can with a turtle
• Central figure: difficult to see what gazing at...what doing with mouth? Chewing? Distended tummy?
• Sitting, downcastedly looking at turtle, but not really, looking at feet.
• Seaside strip of ocean...this is a serious painting
• Compare to Matisse, The Bathers, 1907...but this is so much more narrative than turtle painting...sitting woman might be wiping sand off of feet...central figure drying self...crouching figure still more explicable...very story-oriented
• Compare to Game of Bowls, 1908, much more narrative...story of the game
• Whereas turtle painting hinges on permanent sense of mystery...never be an explanation...turtle may have been included last….so enigmatic
• Has dialogue with Cezanne...deliberate persuit of Large bathers in Philly Museum of Art...mystery and emptiness...phantom of storytelling but not really
• But also a riff on  Bathers at Rest, ca. 1875-77...alienated separateness..can't create a story...rpfound isolation and sadness of figures...philosophical element is presentation of sadness and isolation, besides just a defeat of narrative
• Freud:   “Mourning and Melancholia,” 1917 essay, for Freud the diff btx mourning and melancholy is that mourning is a healthy process...melancholy never end
• This turtle painting is a work of melancholy...interminate sadness of these figures in a downcast state, like Massaccio's "expulsion from the Garden"...that kind of grief that doesn't go away….anatomical inaccuracies intensify the grief...the distortions add paradoxically...how 20th c Masaccio's painting is...Masaccio's work has a life even in the 20th c.

Concept of Rivalry:  the triangulation of desire...when someone else likes someone that person can become desirable to you

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1862
• The Golden Age, 1862

• Both of these: Matisse is the first one to seize on the serpentine bodies on Ingres...Matisse wants to carry into 20th c….Matisse riffs on it in Joy of Life, ca. 1905-06
• This becomes an object of Picasso's desire...when Matisse shows Blue Nude, 1907, almost a strike at Picasso, but Picasso retaliates with Demoiselles d’Avignon which has the same primitive raw sexuality as Ingres, then Matisse retaliates with the Turtle, whose quietude was progressive and aggressive at Picasso

• Any painting is under the influence/ in dialogue with other artists...the art historian tries to work with dialogue

• These works spread out into both space and time (1939)...a very signal year for both Mademoiselles and Turtle...Mademoiselles was purchase into a museum, but Turtles, within a month painted, purchased by Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874-1921) and put in Museum Folkwang (Hagen, 1902-1921; Nazi's confiscated all German artwork that were false to a noble German character, all art that was degenerate (all modern/distorted art)...degenerate art show
  • The art that replaced this art in Germany was Ivo Saliger, Diana at Rest, ca. 1935 or

Ernst Liebermann, By the Water, ca. 1935

• In 1937, Turtles was confiscated and taken to Bessen and… Osthaus was defeated in court when didn't like
  • This painting was put up for auction
  • In 1939, sold to American collector Joseph Pulitzer, Jr….now in St. Louis...carries with it a sense of time that relates to 1908 but also relates to 1939...their sadness almost relfects the fate of the picture

World War I: disturbed the concept of narrative, to intensify the modernist questioning of concepts of coherence and rationality...some concept of beauty still articulated though after the war

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Artillerymen in the Shower, 1915

• Est in mode of expressionist art coming out of Gauguin, etc

• Enlisted in German military...military men taking a group shower
• Disfiguration and incoherence of Cezanne...headless man and man bending over, disfiguration like Cezanne's large bathers ay Philly art museum, phallic woman leaning evoked in spindling legs of soldiers...but disfigures Cezanne by turning the pastoral into a garrish claustrophobic scene
  • Also taking the bathers scene and recasting as a male manner...strange and oblique eroticness...saying that the pastoral no longer works in this time

• Also compare to Kirchner, Judgment of Paris, 1913...relation to clothed officer
  • Gender transformations
  • Gender transformation also seen in Lucas Cranach, Venus, ca. 1530...show same stance as the male body, now males vulnerable like women...the shower spikes reflect the veil
  • But bodies totally whole, narrative coherence still conserved even though troubling images

George Bellows, The Barricade, 1918

•  made in response to the Bryce Committee Report (alleged German atrocities in Belgium at the start of the war)

• He accepted everything in this report...that German soldiers forced the Belgium civilians to be barricades to fire at the Belgium soldiers
  • Shown as Chrsitian (cross-like) or St. Sebastian, as martyrs

• But maintained the narrative story to even show disfigurement

Bellows    The Barricade, 1918

·       In response to the Bryce Committee Report, which found German atrocities in Belgium at the start of WWI. The report said that the germans used belgium civilians as a barricade in their battles.

·       Echoes all of the hanging figures we’ve seen in the class before. Christian iconography

·       Religious iconography. Bodies are whole and there is continuity here – traditional style modes

Otto Dix, War Triptych, 1929-32

• This disfigurement even lower

• On the right a white figure dragging another figure across a hellish battlefied...center the only figure livi...tryptych wo God

Otto Dix   Skat Players, 1920

·       Three card playing veterans. All disfigured by the war in different ways. Man plays his hand with his teeth, has plaster for head

·       The soldesr are displaying themselves as they display cards

Otto Dix    Prague Street, 1920

·       Fracturing of space and society caused by the war. Disfiguration of space, rather than just the body.

·       Figures of ambivalence around the disfigured people, an indictment of post-war amnesia

Anna Coleman Ladd, Casts in Red Cross Studio, Paris, ca. 1919Cast of disifugring facial wounds in the world war

Casts in Red Cross Studio, Paris 1919

·       Actual casts of men who suffered disfiguring facial wounds during WWI on the top row

·       Bottom row: masks to be placed over their disfigured faces

o   Movies with disfigured faces started being made in the 20s after the war (phantom of the opera, and frankenstein, hunchbak of notre dame)

·       1900s: idea that the face is always a mask

·       Post WWII chaos: things are not as they should be

·       There are a slew of monster films during this time

·       The face is not some sort of given, it is a historical phenomemnon that reflects the time

Max Ernst,   The Master’s Bedroom, 1920

·       About the size of a postcard, making it the smallest painting we’ve seen in class

·       He painted over a children’s animal primer with watercolors (gauche), but leaves some of the animals visible

·       Symbolizes repression. War causes psychological repression

Giorgio de Chirico     The Enigma of a Day, 1914

·       Everything is strange. Perspetive is tipped up

·       You could say that this is rationalistic because of geometry but the perspective is so tipped up that it is almost animated to confront us

·       Everything remains enigmatic and turns away, refuses to be understood

·       Horror of lines and angles (scream)

·       Space palpitated with this unnerving sense of enigma

·       Sort of looks like beinecke plaza

·       Our War meorial is different though: it is classical, beautiful in face of disfiguration

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947

• At MOMA

• Dense almost sculptural mass...enamel paint (car paint)
• Objects embedded in it...almost a collage
• Compare to: cubism
• This is the formal approach Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910: Picasso embarked in cubist art, which ranged from 1908-14...Cubism is portrait… compared to honoring the capacity of painters to round a 2d canvas to 3d by shaping and modeling, this is FLAT like the canvas...everything is transferred from a 3d to 2d...there is a center to the work, things get softer at the edges, but stil a dispersal of the forms across the whole picture...polyphonic quality in which no part is more important than the other...and "all over" composition.
  • Pollack uses this flatness and "all-overness"...each snipet has same importance...dispersal, and evenness, a perfect distribution of elements across the whole canvas

• Formalism: think about the black lines, dripped onto the canvas...drip painting...black whorls:
  • Compare to Picasso "Portrait of an Artist painting a nude": black lines are avante garde but also uses line in a traditional way to bound and limit forms
    • Whereas in Pollack, line is free from take of always needing to bind and limit something...and innovation

• Another innovation of use of color in a  nonreferential way...color is divested of any req that match up with a sociological pantomime of world supposed to portray

• Line and color are autonomous
• For the critic Clement Greenberg, the stakes (political and experiential) are high...compares Rockwells painting "Freedom from Want" showing thxgiving dinner contemporaneous with Pollack...Rockwell is kitsch (every emotion is packaged to a consumer) vs. art can occupy a priveledged place of thickness and lines, these immediately contras the packaged entertainment...still possible to find something astonishing like the old masters of art had...the Avant garde trying to preserve the true reality and emotion (not just kitsch)
  • Artist in this scenario is priveledged because he is the alienated ind, in which real state of existance can exist
    • Compare to Manet, The Absinthe Drinker, 1858, avante garde...ID with homeless vagabond, alienated from culture at large...this alienation in French art now in american art with Pollack and by 1930s in France avante garde became slick and overstylized and kitsch...whereas Polllack and other American artists being isoated and alienated...the state in which one could address spirit and sensibility of the time

• Formalism delas with social alienation and unkitschified emotion of prominent culture

• Greenberg said haven't gone far enough

Phosphorescence, 1947

• Pigment squeezed directly out of the tube...Greenberg thought this one would live forever...encouraged Pollack to pursue that one

• In 1934 Pollack in NY making realist, social realist pics like this one: Going West, 1934: subject is nightmareish gaunt oxen and donkeys and a figure looks back...dark whirling turbulence of the artist

• Fell in workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937   ….interested in mocking and shocking the place of powers that be..encouraged students to make social and political,...and to ude industrial materials and unorthodox techniques...blow torches...give a middle finger to the prim and proper
  • Pollack took advice Birth, 1938….rhyme of screen with NA masks...turbulence of going West intensified
  • Even further turbulence in She-Wolf, 1943...he is a painter of the origins of civilization...humpback of bison as in the primitive...mixed sand into painting...coarseness
  • Greenberg said didn't like….too much exasperation, stridency and violence which is very typically american preoccupations like Poe and Melborn, etc….encouraged Pollack to lighten up and understand two key terms of formalism:
    • Greenbergs philosophies: Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 1637: story is of flaying of Marseyus, Apollo has challenged and wins musical contest with Marseyus ...Apollo wins and flays him
      1. The dionysiun: the emotion and expressiveness...the scream
      1. Vs. Apollo's impassive and calm and god-like, emotionless face...above it all, avoids stereotype of tortured pain and expressive art
    • Greenberg wanted Pollack to be more Apolinian

• Phosphoresence is something disinterested and Monet-like Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894 about brushwork and materiality of painting without expressing artist's desire: REVERIE WITHOUT DESIRE

•   Lavender Mist, 1950, Pollack took Greenberg's critique to heart...a quality of atmosphere as crushed and powdered jewels...Greenberg sees as wo desire and passion and thus all the more glorious and infinite  and Apolonian

1. the Existential emotion of Pollack's work

• Photo taken by Nameth of Pollack in the studio...get the sense of a choereo and improv dance making             Autumn Rhythm, 1950

• Harold Rosenberg is another critic 1952 "“The American action painters,” ArtNews (Dec. 1952)"...Rosenberg said that the final result is only the incidental thing...its only the process that matters bc artist is discovering and inventing himself...only in real time of making the work is one's identity made
  • Compare to Rembrandt Locretia knew what is was going to make
  • Whereas Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52….was in the process of making for 18 mo...Kooning had no idea what was going to produce when painting...the result would be a surprise to him...treating pic as AN ARENA IN WHICH TO ACT

• Existential power...primal unfolding of life itself in a surprising way...Greenberg hated this bc made a painting with it's sense of control and precision as random and existential...nevertheless Rosenberg still helped explain works like Autumn Rhythm

• For Greenberg, this painting about a clarified REVERY WITHOUT DESIRE SEVERED FROM THE DIONYSIAN...not kitsche
• For Rosenberg….it's about how he made the work not the incidental product...method and how act with cameras rolling...existential figures...in a pre-packaged culture, there are spontaneous and expressive of self...hollywood seized on this (did this kitschify him?)

• Greenberg's paradigm was also not immune from Hollywood...Vogue seized on impersonal imperfect beauty...Pollack's paintings used as backdrops...another instance of bad dream of modernism...something so avante garde becomes packaged and kitsch

1. Historical

• Compare to the Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1894...belongs to Van Gogh moment of expressive outcry, expressing hyperbolized terror, horror
• Pollack 1943 "Mural" made all in one night...an extrapolated extended wallpaperized version of the scream...anguished figure still present in whorling contours and colors and shrieks in this pic...terror present

• Axis between expressive art in 1890s and 1940s...like Van Gogh's Starry night and Pollack's "Eyes in the Heat...Vangoian swirls of piment...eyelike planets and stars...Van Goghs idea of painting in ecstasy also present in Van Gogh

• Picasso De Mademoiselles aslo present...angles, sharpness in  Excavation, 1950...in fleshy jigsaw puzzles of limbs

• How does terror and shock incorporate? Critic and artist Harry Jackson, who shipped to Tarawa during WWII...can see the action in a cowboy indian sense...Jackson wounded...pics get a little darker...more and more he departs from prim and proper style and things degrade to caricatures and satirically rimmed pics of corpses….people deconstructed….Jackson comes to see Pollack's show...Jackson liked it...because reminds him visceral feel of combat (kind of an eccentric reading of Pollack) but still Pollack conveys catastrophic events of the time...the events that were terrible and hardly believable
• Jackson believed in raw emotions of Pollack in it's historical context

Abstract painting...how does it address question of human emotion as can be imagined at that time...three separate accounts of Pollack's arts: 1. formal  2. Existential 3. Historical                            

POPART: ask questions about the portrayal of emotion...putting emotion in quotation marks...treating it with satirical distance...putting the word "like" in front of it; but vivid articulation of emotional intensities

Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963

• Painted in abstract expressionist way until 1960..switched to comic book style...manipulating them and changing them into oil and magna...ben-day dots

• Style signifies something momentously different from abstract expressionist painting
• Case history of abstract expressionism in 1950s

Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958: Rothko commissioned to paint for 4 seasons restaurant in NY...such a difference btx 1949 and 1959 of acceptance of abstract expressionist painting...now has become popular

• Rothko undercuts this commercialism...models work off of windows of Michelangelo, Laurentian Library, Florence, 1524-34...said he wanted to ruin the appetite of everyone who ate
• Alienation of the artist, resentful even at Yale...commissioned to make the 4 seasons pic
• He saw people in the centerplace of power at the 4 seasons and so he dispersed his project of rensentfully undermining them through his art in the 4 seasons...felt obsolete...spiritual décor of a leisure class...abstract expressionism coming to an end

• Tears called to mind Rothko's own emotion...depth of human emotion there...Lichtenstein responds to this saying tears degenerate the artist's work...makes fun of the tears cried in front of Rothko's work...Tears become satirical strike at emotion in art

• Spells the end of abstract expressionist idea of emotional overflow, BUT ALSO marks end of aim of the artist to deliver you to this extreme shared pathos...in 1960, we are in our own world now, and if we are to rediscover this emotion we have to cross the great divide of scpeticism and "like"

• BUT can claim Licthenstein as a continuation of this overflowing emotion?  Maybe but prob not...his art so much about melodrama, so much emphasis on emotion in quotation marks
  • Melodrama like the "weepies" of 1950 cultures...satirical sense of the melodrama of movies Douglas Sirk, director, Magnificent Obsession, 1954

                          All That Heaven Allows, 1956

                                      Imitation of Life, 1959

• BUT to many people melodrama might evoke pathos

• Just like Lichtenstein might still evoke emotion

• Lichtenstein riffs off of Tony Abruzzo comics...Lichtenstein has changed things around...bolder a little less narrative, more iconic, everything a little mire sumptuous and decorative...extract something out of comic book, hum drum lace

• New clacissism...to give momentousness llike that of an old master painting
  • Like James Rosenquist, Zone, 1961...billboard painter...incorporate ads, blow them up big and emphasize the distance btx the things that he is combining...the billboard is itsche personified...celebrates kitche and creates avant garde...BUT is possible that old master monumentality and that these drops on tomatoes are displaced tears not melodrama...but might also be melodrama

Lichtenstein

Okay Hot Shot, 1963

• Mock and quote, but maybe articulate with some authenticity human emotion...he's pressing the trigger button in the cock pit, full guns blazing

• Pouring is an art word though, but Licht is criticizing abstract expressionism...cliche of pouring of abstract art...it's a cool send up of the hotness of the abstract expresisonism...overmasculine macho expressionism, over dramatic

• Third quality of send up of emotion…"voomp" explosiom..onomatopoeia...vaungting abstract expr idea of immediacy...explosion calls to mind the abstract burst of the explosion
  • He's really refering to paintings like Willem de Kooning, Ruth’s Zowie, 1957...Ruth is figure of abstact expressionism when pollack died she was in the car….broad gestural marks… a paradigm of abstract
  • Also criticizing Morris Louis, Aleph, 1960...Greenberg shown these works...Greenberg would turn around and say whoa...the instantaneousness of abstract expr...the power and prestige apparent of one second of looking at it
  • Ed Ruscha, Oof, 1962: satirizes the sock you in the gut feeling of abstract expr painting

• BUT some attempt to recover depth of emotion? Compare to Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961 (Yossarian, Snowden) which is an ironical distancing from emotion that would characterize WWII...novel filled with comic book improbailities...mocking idea of action with emotion informing it...and yet the book still delivers emotion, esp during deathly fate of gunman Snowden (very romantic name like poet) and yossarian tries to help out of the depth of a human emotion that overwhelms him

• Licht may have this kind of emotion...wi shouting distance of a kind of painting like Pollacks in which emotion wa sthe centerpiece...so not toally gone

Lichtenstein Blam, 1962

• Distancing of emotions:

• Licht trained with Hoyt Sherman; Ohio State University...who would show images for a split second...and students expected to draw what saw in the dark...allow students to have a direct relationship to work and to see the thing itself

• That idea of a lab experiment of the now the sudeen  the flash that informs licht's art...a different kind of instantaneousness than Greenberg or Cooning...very distanced from emotion, lab like

Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram, 1962

• Deeply aggressive distancing from emotion and reclaiming of expresssivness

• Modeled on an ad for a learn to dance set of methods and lessons..a middle class notion of elegance...connotation of a social class

• Significance of being on the ground?  Pollack painted this way, canvas on ground...Pollack is presented as a paradigm of spontaneousness and expressiveness...by 1962, this kind of expressivness is a cliché a kind of paint by numbers and middle class...spontaneity is totally learnablle and predictable...savage demolition of pollacks art rendered into dryness and dispassion

Warhol    32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1961

• Each painted dispassionately...not same flavor in each case

• The grid of it: how impersonal and nonexpressive a grid is, it's just an array...development of the grid in modernism like Piet Mondrian, Composition with Light Colors, 1919….grid distances totally different than expressiveness of picture...impersonal and Apollonian pic...Greenberd hated because profoundly aggressive against the art he loves

• Grid is deadpan, unfeeling  zero emotion (unlike abstract expr)

• The commercial nature of art...satirzes abstract expr painters and himself is that the artist and art is not divine expression, it is commercial...art doesn't exist outside of commerce

• Warhol non expressive...dispassion and unreadable blankness...other artists tried to pick up too Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955...so diff than pollack who has emotion...this is the marlon brando idea of art

Warhol

Where Is Your Rupture?, 1960

• Using an overhead projector to project newspaper ads and painted with polymer paints...deadpan world...quasi painting of white on black lettering...abstract but not really

• BUT arrows are references to gay saint St Sebastian, like masachistic gay person as a martyred figure in Marsden Hartley, Sustained Comedy, 1939  and Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955 of male body parts...with it's target suggests St Sebastian as though all things are distancing but aoso about human pain and subjectivity to others meanness...and queer iconography of Warhol, Strong Arms and Broads, 1960

• Not completely distant from feeling

Warhol

Marilyn Diptych, 1962

• Silk screen...diptych of two panels of Marylin Monroe who had died that year

• Distance and mass commodified image, hollywood's glossy fake image of that which human

• But look again and see upclose and feel that there is some sort of emotion, just the fact that Monroe's death so proximate to this work and the faithful switchin of gold on left to fading blurring on right panel…,.both suggest a figure who might live for all time and also fade away
  • This is chiaroscuro...still in shouting distance of these artists...link to Manet's bartender girl pic...pic of distance...mirroring distance and silky come-ones to the consumer...but also expression inspiring veneration and devotion to Monroe

Jeff Koons, Louis XIV, 1986

•  gaudy Statuary series
• His work is all about the relation between art ad commerce

• Gaudy almost liquid dropping of stainless stell design...loooks expensive and yet cheap and vulgar….art and commerce is now a fact of life

• Unavoiable fact of doing business...about the process of commodification

• Compare to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Louis XIV, 1665, this is the shiny bolder nouveax riche middle class grab for princely taste, but without the spiritual reverb of the elite, btu instead the shiny material vulgar wealth
• Exhibitions of money: Gold Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun, 1323 B.C.; Treasures of Tutankhamun, exhibition, 1976-79...create a shopping mall atmosphere of the museum and to bring down with exhilaration (not disdain) the link btx art and commerce
• Also compare

The Treasure Houses of Great Britain, exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1985… a celebration of splendor...exhibition replete with room after room of gorgeous furniture and art

• Van Gogh's flower painting sold for millions of dollars...the goal of his paintings taking on coinage of culture of opulence
• Compare to Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece), 1982...masculine splendor of shiny opulence

• Also Kruger: Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture), 1985….(riffs off of Nazi saying, when I hear the word culture I take out my gun)...dummy says what vantriliquist says...the infantility of consumer desire "I want that!"...seen as a grotesque fantasy
• So in Koon's, slimy silveryness...gooey shiny materiality, is the opposite of artistic creation

• Class connotations to middle class white America...Bob Hope statue...bowling figure...meant to underscore degratation of taste and art that Koons is conveying with work
• Compare with Koons, Bear and Policeman, 1988 (“Banality”)...some 7 ft tall chachkes...raised to monstruous proportions...regressive fantasies of consumer desire...hand in hand with an infantile desire

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Natives Carrying Some Guns Bibles, 1982

•  Haitian artist...got start as an artist with graffiti tags
• Showed at Mary Boone Gallery in 1984

• Graffiti style...used markers on canvas to make works which illustrate what it was like for him as a black man to be taken up and affected by overwhelmingly white art scene

• White hunter type ….markings of colonization, commercial propheting...white figure propheting at the expense of the black

• Diagram of being an artist taken up and sold by white art est...abjection of black figure...a ritual business of humiliation

• Compare to pic of grotesque black figure opened up and flexible elastic to pay the part of black man who is celebrated at upper eschelons of art in NYC

• His preoccupation with brand names seen in Arm and Hammer 2...the branding of the black creative figure

• Inevitable confluence of art and money, but here has racial dimension

• Basquiat, Wall Segment, 1982...the morbidity of fame...but still courted this fame that gave him death...a martyrs economy

David Salle, Footmen, 1986

•  from Kansas

• Everything put in quotations...takes two icons of manifesting visual culture and dismantles them...central figure of Vellazques los borachos...this realism made into faked figure...rouged lips...the reference is now questioned….second figure looks like man riding the railroad trackxs, but this als seen as a kind of reference, a mere set of signs
• These two figures dismantled and deconstructed
• Whereas Rosenquist's work  of woman and tomatoes shows how advertising works, narrative of desire and sensuousness...kind of a logic
  • But in Salle, things are a pastige, paintings like novels, don’t refer directly to the world...paintings are a bunch of different sources that jumble together….deconstruct the creative process and all it is a grab bag of disparate sources into a random array meaning nothing exactly

• A diptych...figure on the left is drunk firgure on the right is emblematic of speed and of cocaine (speed speed action)
  • Diptych of alcoholism and cocaine in the 80s
  • History of drug use in visual arts:
    • John Martin, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, 1812...oblivion awaiting Sadak in cosmic swirl, reminiscent of Romantics use of opium..lurid fantasy of seeker reminiscnet of Romantic drug use
    • Also Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, 1846...described that pipe was smoking you..feathered plume of quil represents plumy evanescence of writing, production of hallucinations by reader and writer
    • Abstract painters obsession with alcohol...drunkenness was badge of honor for the artists
    • Hallucinatory world of acid

• Cocaine is the drug of the 80s world...attitude towards representation and attitude connected to book Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984...coke fest in book...at the end the protagonist has epiphany when walking down street and smells fresh bread...seeing the light
• No epiphanies or references in this work,  all is drugged

Robert Gober, Sink, 1985-87

•  the art of making sinks...used plaster and wire base...painted with a semigloss...not literaly sinks, but evoke sinks
• Evoke most famous Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 which is a urinal displayed as an aesthetic object
• Though a refernce to Duchamp, his work is artifice is created

• Not as much irony as Duchamp...these are tombstone like...anthropomorphic quaity which is both humorous and ironic
• Hermaphroditic qualities

• Torsos made out of wax and hair...something saclike...on the same continuum of the sinks...torso on continuum with Michelangelos David but rewritten for an era that we don't believe in the nude, but the body itself is under attack as an object of art
• Sinks are understood as nudes as torsos as bodies now not so much heroic, but strangely and disturbingly blank of state
• Theme of AIDS
  • When turned to making drains, these are orifices, indeterminate and androgenous, having to do with needing to be cleaned, as baptisms without water...lots of sacramental language

Allan McCollum, Untitled (Plaster Surrogates), 1982-83

• Can we recover the depths of emotion of previous artisits? With this artist , yes
• Part of surrogates sseires
• Painting objects...matting, image, framing, all made out of plaster, no image each is black

• Is this the serial like Monet's haystacks? No bc those had to do with seasonality

• Is it ike soup cans? No not really, because there is an absence of commentary
• But somehow still moving to see these blank representations...the emotion is not negated of erased but just witheld...still arrests us and moves us...like plaster casts of dogs...pain tragedy and horror as held at a distance put in quotation marks, but yet even these quotations still emotional

• Compare to Koons topiary puppy in Bilbao...fate of culture in our moment...bc the museum was built to be a destination a reason to come to Bilbbao to attract dolars...Koon oblliged to the need of a brand for the museum...massive friendly but menacing puppy

• Int the museum a metaphor for a cathedral of culture, and yet there's very little in it...museums are destinations that deliver us to the sanctity of emptiness..we are tourists to this culture...how maintain another attitude other than tourism

Lecture 25: What does it mean to undertake intellectual work? What does it mean to retire into one’s study, to turn away from the world?

The Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel 1560

·      Based on a scene from Ovid’s metamorphoses, where daedalus and icarus makes wings for them to fly out of crete, where they are trapped

·      Notice that no one is notificing his fate. The plowman ploughs, and the fisherman fishes. No one cares. The people on the ship ignore him.

·      Ploughman: the biggest figure, so his indiffernece to Icarus’ fate is the most dramatic. He represents the intellectual, the artist, the poet, the person who turns away from “mainstream” society

o   Art makes nothing happen. If artists had never existed, then the course of history would not have changed at all

o   Self-absorption, common to the intellectual. He’s plowing the field, which represents writing (line after line, writing things out, making marks)

·      There is a blip, that some people think is a face, in the bushes/trees on the left. The regenerative of plowing and creating is always paired with wounding, breaking the earth, creating fissures.

o   The artistic act is a reinscribing of the volatile task of creation

·      Presents us with a choice: Pollock is liberal individualism (I’m doing my own thing, discovering who I am, and that’s what art is). Pollock’s version of turning away from the world is much more aware of the world he’s turning away from

o   If we choose to be an intellectual, solitary life of mere self-expression OR or we conceive it as something that is deeply aware of something it cannot see but still manifests

·      The purpose of studying or making art is not self-discovery, learning what the world is, not about self-expression. It’s about making yourself part of the otherness of the world