Let's begin with a very famous painting and a problem.
Vincent Van Hock's Starry Night was made in early June 1889, within weeks of his arrival at the asylum at South Aming painted from memory.
The canvas went against the grain. Its astronomical configurations invented its village motif, essentially generic.
It's tumbling horizon lifted from other canvases, experimental and a typical.
It may have been, but Vanderhoff nevertheless had set himself the task not only of painting the night sky,
but imagining it in dynamic relationship with the landscape.
For Starry Night is a great painting of energy from the cosmic movements of the planets above to the pulsing up reach of the cypress trees.
All this is set within the strange geology of the appeal hills and beneath vast billowing currents,
perhaps suggesting the Mistral winds or the rhythms of astral bodies.
This remarkable painting was made by a man cut off in an asylum in touch with his brother Theo, and occasionally other artists only by post.
Was it a solitary freak of imagination, or does it belong within some broader context.
Coincidentally, in Paris at the same time, Albert, BNR was working on a new commission.
Was a successful artist, too, by the late 1980s was pioneering new kinds of public decoration.
He had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for the reconstructed hotel, The Ville.
The subject was truth, leading the sciences and Allegri apparently quite different from the landscape.
Starry Night.
However, the original concept been proposed in 1889, envisaged the city of Paris below, illuminated by a scientific allegory above simultaneously.
Yet independently, two artists, one unknown and painting for himself and a probable sale asylum.
The other, reputed and working on a public decoration in Paris,
were trying to find ways to paint the superhuman energies of nature and to find modern styles for doing so.
My problem is how to make sense of this coincidence.
In this lecture, I want to explore the painting of energies.
This is a way of enquiring how certain kinds of naturalism adapted themselves to address
new understandings of the world and how painting attempted to keep pace with science.
It also leads one to ask if, in this wider context,
there are links or consistencies between the public work of an artist like BNR and the private artist.
The art of a Van Hoff.
But before we look at some unfamiliar pictures, it's essential to Adam breaks the close relations between the Third Republic and science.
We have seen how after 1880, the Third Republic swung into reformist mode.
Social reforms such as the lifting of censorship or the liberalisation of divorce were matched by
the promotion of mass education and an emphasis on science and technology by such initiatives.
The Republic sought to seise the initiative from conservative opponents such as the Catholic Church by manifesting its progressive credentials,
a forward looking ideology which would energise France.
The republic's commitment to scientific modernity coincided with a dynamic period in French scientific research,
which politicians supported and used actively trying to harness the benefits of science for the public good.
Louis Pasteur, seen here, and Albert Adolph Felt's 1885 portrait, had been working on germ theory and microorganisms since 1857.
By the 1888, Pasteur had brought bacteriology to the scientific centre stage.
And by nineteen hundred, the germs causing major social diseases such as cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis had been identified.
Leading scientists took up government posts. Paul Bav, professor of physiology at the Sorbonne,
became Minister of Public Instruction in Gorm Better's brief ministry of 1881 to two putting hygiene on the list curriculum.
The great Hawkei organic chemist Mux Alam Batalha became Inspector General of Public Instruction in 1885.
If these were scientists who worked on a microscopic scale, others particularly a strong.
I worked on an almost imagine unimaginably vast scales of distance and time.
Astronomy was a rapidly developing science. In 1870, less than 100 minor planets were known, a number that had tripled.
By 1890, frauds built new observatories in Mador, Baldo,
Leo and Basil Soy in the eighteen seventies and in 1881 opened a museum of astronomy at the Paris Observatoire to meet public interest.
Indeed, this period was one in which publications popularising scientific innovation burgeoned to satisfy the mass interest in science.
But the scientific momentum was also changing the character of science,
whether scientists studied bacteria through a microscope or galaxies through a telescope.
They were increasingly aware that the world of the universe in which we live was in constant flux.
Old notions that mankind was somehow superior to and separate from other parts of creation or that species were immutable, were no longer tenable.
This gradual but growing realisation threatened the determinism on which naturalism was founded, for example.
Equally, Ten's notion, minted in the eighteen sixties, that the identity of art could be determined by a house.
Moomaw in mid-year began to look to regulatory modern French culture was encouraged to put its faith in science.
If science was changing, how might this affect art?
The dominant aesthetic of naturalism was founded on scientific ideas.
If those were shifting to embrace concepts of flux rather than determinism,
how could naturalism adapt to absorb these new notions and maintain its engagement with scientific modernity?
To begin with, I want to consider a certain current in public art.
It might broadly be defined as Rubén Zeehan neo baroque.
Appropriately enough, given that this lecture is about flux and the organic,
it's not a style that I would consider fixed when it what it gave an impact and credibility was indeed its mutability.
This room, Benzinger Neo Baroque was an answer to the requirement of public art to articulate social and ideological energy.
It was an emphatically modern alternative to the conventional classicism of both the murals of Poovey de Shabaan,
such as the sacred Grove of 1884 to six, or sculpture like the Moth's Brothers Republic unveiled in the plaster Lafe public in Paris in 1883.
It also, one might hazard offered a means for naturalism to extend itself into new stylistic territory.
I will deal with it by looking at two painters AlphaBeta Hall and about BNA, born in 1846.
A hole was drawn to the room benzion in the early 1870 as he travelled to Belgium to study Rubins.
And a painting like, say, Leena's, shown at the Salon of 1879, demonstrates Raul's proclivity for turbulent compositions and sexual extravagance.
Hall staked a claim as an accredited Republican artist,
painting a sequence of very large scale multi finger compositions throughout the 18th, 80s and 90s.
The 14th of July 82 80 shown at the salon of 1882, was followed by Labour in 1885,
the celebration of the Centenary of the Estate's General 1889 in 1893 and exciting picture the posing of the first stone of the Alexander.
What toile bridge in eighteen ninety nine. The 14th of July set the tone with its emphasised emphasis on the milling crowd in the foreground
through the centre of which one can make out the more ordered march past the soldiery.
The bandstand and scaffolding allowed Hall to draw attention to the Morrises statue of the Republic.
For this is necessarily an overtly Republican image.
The Ticona fluttering above, matching the Liberté, Égalité and Fratta every day of the various classes,
cheering, saluting, pedalling and the one must say on the far left, groping in the crowd below.
The whole included himself and his wife, seen from behind to centre right at the salon of 1884.
Dave Roll showed a huge canvas of men at work.
It's about four times the size of that labour. It presented a quite different concept of composition and human energy to the 14th of July.
On the one hand, Labour deals with specifics. It represents the construction of a weir at sea, often in the western suburbs of Paris.
A hole made a large number of drawings of workmen at that particular tasks,
using these for the figures dressing stones, shifting piles or sewing timber on the other.
The painting has a generic character. The title, Labour Pabbi, was a civic value vaunted by the Republic.
It is seen as collective. The skills and muscle of the workers bringing to completion a project to public benefit.
It is also egalitarian. For no worker is more important than another.
Not even the top at its supervisor in the middle distance or a hole himself.
Looking in the left, the naturalist painter as honest a toiler as the navvy writing of the guys at their Bouzar all today,
Michel praised Rolls close observation of specifics, but worried about what he saw as the dispersion of figures and groups.
To my eye, this was a deliberate strategy on role's part.
Lack of central focus meant lack of hierarchy, dispersion of groups met the I looked here and then there, which was at once naturalistic.
One cannot take in such a complex scene at a single glance and ideological.
Every labourer's task is a value. Lack of composition was thus doubly Republican in its actuality and in its egalitarianism.
It was also modern because it asserted the value of collective activity.
The energy and flow of which will produce positive results.
Reverting to his instinctual Rubén Zionism role further develop this kind of freewheeling composition.
A decade later, in another huge painting could have a very different subject for a different purpose.
The joys of life. Women, flowers, music.
I'm not making a joke about that section.
True was commissioned as a decoration for one of the grand reception rooms in the Paris Lodge of the Revealed.
An exhibit is at the 1895 Salon de la Nasional claimed to do so.
Once I looked to the centre of the composition and the joys of life finds just a void, thus diffused to the margins.
It sees dancers to the left, lovers to the right, with musicians playing a naked women frolicking in the flowers in the lower spaces.
Actually, they looked like roses. Frolicking naked near a rosebush is ill advised.
The painting is broadly and naturalistically painted with life sized figures, but there is no narrative, let alone plausibility to it.
But the joys of life is not intended to be descriptive.
It chaotically inventories delites bodies, sunshine, music play the joys of life as no conventional allegory of the senses.
Although sight, sound, smell and touch are all to the fore but a thoroughly modern celebration of physical and experiential well-being.
The paintings incongruities confused some in 1895.
George Latinist, the writing in the conservative everyday demand, found the bricolage difficult.
But he recognised, as did a completely different writer. The Nabby painter Felix Valletta that rolls painting was about health and energy.
Hodgy Marx agreed, invoking the Rubén Zern by compounding role to Jakob Judeans and another Republican functionary layoffs.
Benedict later called the joys of life a sort of vast naturalist and pantheist symphony in this painting.
Raul attempted something distinctly experimental,
using his descriptive skills and bringing into play the rich with Benza and carnality that appealed to him.
Discarded most of the rules of pictorial composition composites.
Your composition, your May son, Nick Zeist. He was to tell a younger painter a few years later by choosing to distribute his
figures in Congress in their various activities across the loosest of armatures,
role denied a single legible subject the better to evoke the sensual effect of a whole variety of experiences,
all positive and gratifying, a flow of energy and pleasure in life.
Let us now turn to Albert BNA. Born in 1849, winner of the prestigious predominating 74, Baner had the full academic training.
That role had not returning from Rome. Baner went not to Paris, but to London, where he spent the late 80s, 70s and early 80s there.
He, too, was much struck by Rubins. This can be seen in one of the first mural decorations Baner completed on settling in Paris in 1883.
His three paintings, made in 1886 to seven for the Town Hall of the Premier,
are on this small take the three seasons of spring, summer and winter as three stages of life.
The central summer of which I show the installation and the oil sketch represents a family at harvest time.
The husband vigorously loading a powerful horse, the mother breastfeeding the smallest bear, several children.
This is an image of the fundamental unit of society of healthy bodies and fecund loins,
suckered by a fertile nature, rich crops and invigorating sunshine.
A Republican Idil, as the Tlicho blur of their clothing reminds us that muscular sap filled energy once again typifies the rube benzion neo baroque.
But even more than the whole BAINO was prepared to diversify his style.
Between 1884 and 1888, he produced nine decorations for the entrance hall of the eight called the Pharmacy.
The first group of paintings, such as the sick woman exhibited at the Salon of 1884, deals with illness and its treatment with medicines.
The sick woman is particularly dramatic, using Benos draughtsmen these skills with foreshortening to give his narrowest,
narrow it to go give a narrative urgency to a design which effectively animates the rather intractable space for later.
Paintings made between 1886 and eight depict different kinds of university instruction to each of botanical and
geological fieldwork and another two of dread subject professors giving lectures on physiology and chemistry.
All these are quite typical descriptive pictures satisfy the demand for the document.
Indeed, the composition of the 1888 chemistry course,
with its view over and through the audience to the lecturer appropriate appropriate to composition developed by Douga and others a decade earlier,
prompting the spectators sense of physical participation in the picture.
But Benos work at the age called the pharmacy began to take naturalism into other areas.
Seven smaller panels took on subjects such as the formation of the earth,
the appearance of plants and primitive man representing what Baner could not have actually seen, such as primitive man.
Such objects called for. Eventually, their overriding theme was, of course, evolution,
and the artist was thus required to use the descriptive capacities of pictorial
naturalism to represent the past realities which the natural sciences were uncovering.
Together, the old equalled the pharmacy decorations. Visualise the practise of medicine at the science taught in the modern university as emerging
from the lawn of the GOP of evolution and the gradual development of scientific knowledge.
Here was art, closely geared to modern ideas.
Benos embrace of the scientific took a further step in his next major commercial.
This was the ceiling for one of the three rooms in the cellar. There's a card in the Paris Hotel de Ville.
The subject, as we've seen before, truth leading to science is behind her spreads light over mankind.
The completed ceiling was exhibited in 1891. The composition was radical in several respects.
Conventionally, ceiling painting suggests a great space by the upward momentum of the figures.
Boehner did not deny distant space. And here it's not just the artifice of pictorial space, but the infinite space of the universe.
The space being discovered by science truth is representing not rising, but rushing downwards towards us.
This is visually arresting and also significant. We, like the men in the ceiling, receive the benefits of science and are enlightened.
Such a notion accorded with Republican.
Ideology, Boehner pitched this in modern scientific terms at the top of the composition astronomy, as we've seen,
a burgeoning discipline points to the planets depicted in detail derived from photographs taken through telescopes in formal terms,
Benos truth leading the sciences is sharply coloured, causing the OTL DVDs architect for me J to complain about the under scripted chromatics.
It's also unusual in design with its dynamic and brightly coloured main figure, followed by a sequence of more muted, repetitive, subsidiary's.
Such a pictorial solution seems to me to owe to the poster designs of visual.
Shafaei Shanghai was in fact a friend of Beaner who drew a portrait of him in 1888.
The two travelling together to Spain in 1891, the very year they now completed his ceiling.
A poster like Loopy Defence of 1889 typifies Shanghai's angular drawing,
striking use of yellows, blues and oranges and echoing figures in repetitious momentum.
Beina may well have intended this to be recognised as a means of linking his modern allegory to popular forms of representation.
The whole package of truth leading the sciences. Post-flight chromatics and composition, scientific knowledge and its dissemination.
Republican progressiveness made the ceiling emphatically.
Modern critics duly responded to it in terms of scientific modernity.
For Gustaaf, just while all this infinitely large makes one think very logically of the infinitely small of a drop of water seen through a microscope.
The symbolist writer George Holden both praised how everything is treated in a scientific spirit.
The groups circle like planets. One might call it a firmament of faces.
Such reactions show how aware informed contemporaries were of the new scientific
understanding of constant flux and the harmonies between the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Benos next decorative scheme was for the Sorbonne and here for followed scientific subject even more closely painted
for the chemistry lecture theatre Life Reborn from Death attempted to summarise the theory of transform ism.
The continuum continuum of being of the unity of all matter life reborn from death centres
on the sun whose very visible yellow rays transmit generative energy to the earth below.
In the middle of the top apartment of the middle of the top. Yeah.
Not all that easy to see is the green putrefying corpse of a mother spewing forth yellow flowers while the baby,
which still clings to her, is painted in the same brown tones as the mother's hair.
The central image thus playing directly,
if gruesomely to the theme of the cyclical and regenerative continuity's of chemical reactions to the right in the rich green foliage.
I think you could just make it out. Adam lifts Eve to pick fruit.
Another image of continuity and nutrition to the left all is flux from the rising column of brown
gases to the lava like river in deep pectoral blue and orange from which figures seem to emerge.
A bubble life reborn from death as a painting about flux, the cycle of growth and decay,
the flow of liquids and gases, the burgeoning of vegetation, and the eternal Life-Giving energy of the sun.
From the Paintings exhibition at the Cellar de la Nasional of 1896, critics recognised this,
but it was Kamir McClair writing in nineteen hundred who most closely acknowledged how Boehner had adapted style to convey scientific ideas.
Kirchner described how the acidic and metallic colours,
green and sulphurous yellow evoked chemicals and the swirling flowers and butterflies and the sunset sunlight, the thickened energy of natural cycles.
Boehner himself was proud of life, reborn from death, but feared that it might not be comprehensible.
A fear that you probably accept. Indeed, for 1896, the decoration was a highly daring essay in pictorial organism,
a pulsing a Morphos composition which seems to prefigure the biomorphs ism of the surrealists.
By several decades. But. Beamer was surely right to be anxious in his endeavours to find new pictorials, solutions to match new scientific thinking,
life reborn from death had pushed a long way beyond the legible imagery, both state and public preferred.
Whereas this analysis of hall and brain are taken, this first their allegiance to the room benzion sporadic,
though it may have been claimed a more natural, less than classical ancestry,
one legible in terms of energy and physicality that immediately linked with modern imperatives at
a time when there was anxious debate about degeneration of the core standards of public health.
The Rubén Benzion figure full of strength and sap typified exemplary vigour and Benos and Hall's painting this frequently admired as vital healthy.
Second, these artists show different ways of experimenting with naturalism in public art with a subject such as The Joys of Life,
Raw essayed a new kind of painting in which almost random elements coalesced in a free-form composition.
Paradoxically, it's such a decoration.
Apparent distain for Form created a new kind of form where harmony was evoked by fluid elements such as colour masses,
spatial voids and scattered centres of interest.
Beina took painting even more demonstrably into the new scientific understanding of the universe in flux.
If truth leading the scientists injected modernity into an allegory of the sciences by its cosmic setting,
dynamic movement and post-flight chromatics, life reborn from death took formal innovation further.
Here, they now found an equivalent for science's new concept of the natural world as an unceasing continuum of organisms in flux.
Again, in formal terms, by painting fluid shapes in chemical colours, using brushwork to convey energy.
Both Hall and the banner took the opportunity in the mid 80s 90s to experiment,
trying perhaps not always successfully, to find ways of painting which corresponded with progressive thinking.
If the dominant naturalism of the eighteen,
eighties and nineties mapped comfortably onto mainstream Republicanism commitment to egalitarianism, accuracy and legibility,
then the organic CISM with which role and Baner attempted to produce new work,
represented a further engagement between painting and progressive ideas.
Can it go any further to explain this interplay between art and science?
Was the interest in energy and flux manifested in the work of the hall and Ben are just apparent in a few public decorations?
Or was it to be found in other art, more private or avant garde work?
Indeed. How can we account for this new concept of the flux of time and matter and its transmission
from the Hermitage world of scientific research into mainstream consciousness?
We can begin to answer some of these questions by tracing some points of contact and crossover roles.
Joys of life and Beaners Life Reborn from Death, completed in 1895 and six,
respectively, coincided with the emergence of a new movement within Republicanism.
Lay on board was solider ism bourgois book Solidarité was published in eighteen ninety six.
He argued that society protects us, but in return we have a duty to contribute to it.
Humans are interdependent. We function not as individuals but as cells within the largest social organism.
Bordelaise principles had various dimensions. One was Republican in that he was in essence supplying the notion of that every day.
Another was loosely anticlerical as he was replacing the Christian notion of charity, which is voluntary with the new scientific solidarity.
Crucially, a third was scientific because both were brought into play.
Ideas from the natural sciences. He was influenced by the work of the chemist.
Enough slammed Batalha and in particular by the zoologist Alfred Milton Edwards.
He was called Alfred M. Edwards, but he was French.
His analysis of the way cells operate in mutual and dynamic support for the benefit of the organism which they collectively comprise.
It's perhaps no surprise that Boardwalk was a close friend of all.
Thus, we have three elements in play. Science is conception of nature's constant flux, solider ism's, promotion of mutual social development,
and the search for new painterly solutions to convey the continuum of interactive energies.
All were progressive, aware of each other's initiatives, and had organic CISM as their central core.
What I would like to suggest is that here we have naturalist painting the
rolls fleshy nudes and Benos decomposing woman are fundamentally descriptive,
matching to an extreme to match the ever expanding knowledge of natural sciences and to sustain its alliance with progressive Republicanism.
Another point of contact was the crucial role of publications popularising science.
This took off in the eighteen eighties with the success of periodicals like Lana Ture and of
writers such as Camil Flappy or a Guest or Tsundere to say nothing of the novels of you there.
The vogue for popular science suited the Republic's secular ideology.
Better to understand the world vast sums, and God had received the backing of leading lights such as Pasteur.
The Popularisation literature covered all aspects of science,
giving the general public a broad understanding of the gradual processes of geological formation and the evolution of species,
or the mysterious, mutating and invisible existence of microbes.
Electricity was a particular popular fascination because it serves man's physical needs for light and heat.
Yet it was an energy quota's and unseen, electrically lit fountains around the Eiffel Tower.
Well, one of the great attractions of the 1889 excluding in of ourselves.
There's a drawing of them by Camilla Pizarro in the Ashmolean.
And in November 1892, the American dancer Loewy Fuller made her debut at the Folley Baja with an act for which electric light was essential.
Fuller stood still on stage, manipulating on long sticks, great swathes of material.
The combination of the movement she made with the material and the coloured light projected from below her through the glass plate on which she stood,
defined the dance sinuous and green blue for the serpentine dance.
Flickering and red, orange for the fire dance. Phyllis seduced artists and photographers amongst them.
Tudor's Lautrec there with the two lithographs on the right,
whose every impression of this lithograph made in 1893 was printed in different colours to suggest the currents of rhythm and colour,
which characterised her performances. But novelist Paul Adwar are amazed how it was the coloured electrical lighting,
which enraptured businessmen and shopkeepers who would normally only be interested in dancers, busts and bums.
When Louis Fuller performed said Adore. She was no longer a woman, but a whirlwind or a nebula.
Here, then, is an example of how popular entertainment culture grew on scientific advances,
in turn stimulating metaphors which drew on scientific observation of constantly mutating natural forms.
One final example of crossover of a team of civil engineers whose achievements during the 1980s numbered a series of
pioneering new bridges and viaducts and culminated in the Great Tower built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle,
included Mollis Kershner and Our Session.
Kushner had studied at the Polytechnic home in Zurich,
where he had learnt the concept of bio mimicry developed by Herman von Meyer, a professor of anatomy.
This linked bone structures with the mathematics of load bearing and came to interest Eifel.
Thus, it comes as no surprise to find in the gallery of Combat Comparative Anatomy at the Jabot Dead plant in Paris.
Dinosaur bones, which echo and may have inspired the splayed legs, which evenly spread the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
I'm on dangerous ground here. I know nothing about civil engineering.
But here is another, an utterly different example of the contemporary interplay between science and arts, in this case architecture,
an interplay that recognised consistencies of form and function that was implicitly
metaphorical but is again symptomatic of a mentality with an instinct for interdisciplinarity.
Let's return to art and widen the range, however inscrutable the processes of cross-fertilisation,
the development of scientific ideas overlapped with forms of representation.
This interplay can be traced in public as well as private art.
And appropriately enough, both on the macro and the micro scales.
In 1898, several Cudmore completed a ceiling and 10 panels for the music Destroy Our Match.
Yeoval in Paris, tracing the evolution of humanity as far as the Iron Age,
the ceiling humanity conveyed that Darwinians sense of evolution by rising arcs of figures to the left.
The Aryan races led by beauty and to the right.
The Semitic races guided by faith kormos formal decisions, monochrome rather than full colour.
The Upwood spirals movement from dark to light linked style to the idea of evolution.
By contrast, Odille Huddle's lithographic album lays off a gene.
Published in 1883 was quite different in medium and scale,
intended to be meditated in private, not seen in a public museum, but at its intimate level.
Its two uses formal means to convey evolutionary flux on the frontispiece.
None of these strange creatures has a resolved identity, while to the lower right they're barely defined a tool here.
The process of delineation echoes the process of evolution.
That sense of evolving takes on an even more ambiguous associative quality.
In lay bets, Dylan now owned companies to the creatures of the sea round as water flasks from the third tortoise,
the old desalt and one series of 1896. Huddle's forms here are like jellyfish or hooded figures taking shape in the centre,
but trailing off at the lower edges as if still in development, perhaps hatched from the spools.
Behind the images Livedoor gathered in his albums of lithographs were pioneering in the way they often ask the viewer to dwell on organic process.
But by the eighteen nineties,
very different artists making work for very different purposes were becoming interested in picture making that by allowing a more fluid play,
a form to evoke a sense of process corresponded with the new awareness of the world in flux.
Reading art, whose forms suggested process rather than art, whose images used established pictorial systems troubled, even sophisticated spectators.
The curator labels Benedict objected that Kormos humanity was incomprehensible because
it rejected centuries of allegories and conventions for synthetic conceptions.
One has to decode like a rebus. But the way organism allied form and meaning made for a new kind of art, for a modern sensibility.
Fluid associative energised by the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties allegory was a struggle
for artists required to find imagery for new subjects for which there were no conventions.
Ernest do is there on the left was in Beaners team to decorate the Salon de S.O.S in the Hotel de Viel commissioned to paint physics.
His solution is splendidly ridiculous. A young woman draped in satin, leaning on four tomes and speaking on the telephone.
A hot air balloon drifts in the distance and a flash of lightning in the corner apologetically alludes to electricity.
Jenny McCarthy ever painted the surrounding spaniel's whips.
Sorry, you can see one of the spaniel's up there. But this isn't another one.
Kathy has technique of thin monochrome washes from which the forms emerge,
integrated their shapes with the architecture and the root benzion pulse of the fleshy figure of medicine.
They're on the right aptly alludes to health and vitality without the need for obtrusive accessories.
Caviars characteristic style had emerged in the late 1980s.
During the second half of the decade, his work has shifted from the tenor of Tenebrous naturalism painting like 1885 sick child on the left.
Canvases like the yarn whined does if 1887, in which the figures are simultaneously unified by and subsumed into the muted ambient light which
in wraps Caviars mature style received public affirmation that his one man show at the Bueso,
a valid or gallery in spring 1891 with pictures like these.
And it was paintings like these by Kafia. That inspired one of Dugas most masterful putdowns.
I see they've been smoking again in the nursery.
In his catalogue preface, Gustaaf Geoff was suggestive prose evoked caviars sense of the flux of life.
Emotions erupt, paths lead and follow each other across mobile physiologies, he wrote in images about life mixed with the life of others.
The radical critic about all his response to the exhibition also acknowledged Flux, but analysed it in terms of time as well as emotion.
Asking Is the immediate sensation worth canting when it's hardly have the time to occur before it tumbles into the Gulf of memory?
Jeff Poire and opiated, followed by others, saw Kathy as fluid painting in terms of psychology.
The inner life of individuals and the interplay of emotion between them.
Can you McClair also writing in 1891, sort beaners work in similar fashion when he argued that the constantly shifting light
falling on his subjects meant constantly shifting emotional reactions within the painter.
So the light and the continuum of natural energies was the incessant psychological stimulator of the artist.
Such analysis, seeking to harmonise new painting with new scientific ideas, was shaping a modern frame of intellectual and cultural reference.
If the world in the microcosm and the macrocosm was in constant flux,
then the physical could not be separated from the psychological or the past from the present.
These various currents run together in an image produced, appropriately enough, right at the end of the period we're dealing with in nineteen hundred.
The sculptor Googoosh Loader asked his close friend Cathy Eyre to produce an
image that could be used for the poster to promote his one man show of work,
which would take place during the Exposition Universelle. It was probably Roder himself who suggested that he be represented at work.
Simple as it may first seem, Cathy has lithograph is richly associative.
Light falls on the sculptor's intent gaze and on his powerful hands, which rests on the basis of the figure he is shaping.
This is a moment when I and mind consider the next move and the hands await instruction.
A moment in the process of creation. The sculpted figure is only generalised, not fully formed.
Much of it remains in shadow, awaiting the sculptors continued work to make it ready for the light.
The sculptors ability to create human form from inert matter, together with his wise, bearded presence,
suggests a divine authority and the play of light and shadow only revealing a half formed figure
suggests Genesis in such an image form itself and the process of becoming form becomes a metaphor.
Artists adoption of fluid, organic SIST forms affected how works of art were understood here,
symbolism, naturalism as rival aesthetic from the late 1980s played an important part.
The writers who dealt most empathetically with organist images were usually those who were either symbolist
writers themselves and thus at home with the elusive and metaphoric or those who are sympathetic to symbolism.
A good example of this comes with Taylor, with Carrie, as turned out for Populaire,
a picture that is at least that big exhibited at the 1895 Salon de la Less Yellow,
representing an audience at the local theatre in the proletarian CAFTA of Bellview.
The painting encouraged many contemporary critics to discuss it in terms of the character of the Parisian working classes.
Did it show the good natured, enthused by culture, or did it thinly mask their potentially destructive instincts?
But there were others who approached the painting differently.
For the symbolist poet and novelist George Auden, both the very large composition payouts were popular,
literally flowed from the small landscapes studies.
That caveat painted in brittanie landscapes like this.
Not that one.
Here are those Finistere Marines enthuse rokan bar tromps opposed to paint the eddying masses at the theatre isn't a crowd just a sea swell.
Kiev has painted a crowd, returned to nature, become so to speak, an element and which surges with the drama like the sea beneath the moon.
Rudan Bath was obviously well informed about Caviars creative practise,
not only his pictorial linkage of landscape and figurative forms, but also his conceptual equivalents of the natural and the human.
I want to close by looking briefly at the tensions between the organic and the descriptive with care.
Cahiers touts were popular at the 1895 Cellar de la Nasional hung level meets Lay Owl.
This is a huge painting which has now rolled up.
Hence the black and white image, a picture conventionally naturalistic in its depiction of traders and shoppers at the Paris central market.
Just found this huge canvas frustrating. The artist was too concerned to document.
He forgot that in a crowd you can only look at one element at a time.
A crowd is not an accumulation of detail, but in all and a wave of movement for sheffler limits.
Naturalism not only failed to be naturalistic,
it also neglected the new perceptual and psychological understanding of the flux of experience for both Jaffa and Rowden.
Both had come to favour painting, which was not too descriptive and documentary, but rather organic and metaphoric.
If Gordon Back and Jeff was shared an oceanic metaphor in accounting for those crowd pictures in 1895,
Jeff OIR had earlier used an animal one in his account of one of Moniz paintings of Bellshill off the Britannic coast.
In 1887, Jeff Waas described rocks that poor girl far painted the previous year as Hamis Hilux,
yellowed and reddened by autumnal vegetation, rounded and thick, like clumsily shaped creatures, pachyderms with thick crusts.
This is a surprising reading.
We'd expect Moniz rocks at Povo Floor to be seen as an example of impressionist naturalism painted Schoeffler motif true to local colour,
responsive to specific atmospheric conditions. But Jeff White chose to read it metaphorically and organically.
Eliding natural landscape with bestial forms.
Alber all the aid did the same when he wrote about Hock's work.
In January 1890, although he did not describe a specific canvas, it is difficult not to think of Starry Night when one reads is prose.
There are cypresses shooting up their nightmarish silhouettes of blackened flames, mountains arching their backs like mammoths or rhinoceroses.
It was easier for Oria to write about than Hock's work in such a way because some
of Vincent's recent canvases were so evidently quite distant from the descriptive,
certainly further so the monitor's work.
But using metaphor, as these critics did, was a means of responding to painting, which allied the critic with the artist,
setting both against descriptive naturalism, which logically required critical response in descriptive prose.
Metaphore allowed the writer a subtle suggested means of writing about new painterly idioms,
which themselves sprang from artist's own changing intuitions about the external world.
But critics could be no more consistent in their responses to paintings. The artists were in making them.
We should not expect absolute consistency and artists any more than we should demand of painters and lucid theoretical account.
But the inconsistencies can be eloquent. Look at Mommy's work in the Curs Valley in the massive stone tile in 1889,
a painting looking down into a rushing mountain stream can be read as a triumph of impressionist naturalism.
The play of paint approximating so closely to the immediate experience of vision.
And yet that instant is part of a constant as the stream flows on and on past the watching artist.
The sense of time is doubly apparent in canvases of sunset over the KERS Gorge.
The sunset marks a moment in the short delay of the day, but the reveal itself comes by.
The flowing river embodies the infinitely longer delay of geological time.
Such canvasses inherently deal with time and flux.
But monos letters written as he made them give no indication that such thoughts were on his mind.
However, critics more habituated to articulating the wider intellectual culture, could make such connexions.
In his preface for the exhibition of greenstick paintings that Monet staged in Paris in May 1891,
just one praised Moniz ability to seise the ephemeral instant which has just happened, which dies and will never return, as well as what is ceaseless.
The corpse of the Earth through space. This is very similar to the language Jack White would use a year later when he talked about Benos truth,
leading the sciences to suggesting both the infinitely large and the infinitely small.
In both cases, the intellectual making connexions between contemporary science and art, which the painter could only intuit.
But painters did have a sense of larger patterns struggled with on their canvases.
In 1889, the year Monet worked in the curs, Vanderhoff was painting 250 miles away in Sahili.
Vincent was considerably more articulate in his letters than Monet.
Much of his correspondence concerns the tension in his work between paintings made from nature,
his preferred method and done from the imagination, which he found difficult.
This dilemma is often taken to be a struggle between her habitual practise and personal expression.
Stop the subject of my next lecture. That was indeed a central issue.
But does it make enough of the differences between paintings such as Starry Night and this Olive Grove?
One is still fundamentally descriptive, concerned to recreate the earth tones and textures of the trees and paint.
The other is in my meaning of the term organic sist adapting style to become
metaphorically analogous to the infinitude and indivisibility of time and nature.
It would be quite wrong to attribute to Vanderhoff the ambition to realise a new
kind of painting which tried to harmonise art and new understandings of science.
That was Beaners aim when he was specifically commissioned to decorate buildings where experimental science was taught.
But Van huh? Like Monet, intuited this interplay.
And an astute critic like Jeff Quar could grasp it.
Intuition is the crucial word here. I think this lecture has taken a meandering path through some very varied and perhaps surprising territory.
Baner and Hall artists, little rated today, and probably you wouldn't expect to find their work considered alongside Moniz or Van Hock's.
I've tried not to insist upon a single narrative when there isn't one.
Neither would I try to claim that what I've called organic CISM qualifies as a style with certain consistent characteristics.
But in the later eighties 1990s, there were intuitions or Montanti,
which caused artists to think and work and critics and public to writer respond differently.
These included the growing understanding that the material world in both macrocosm and microcosm was in constant flux.
And so too was R ah psychological experience about world in terms of perception and memory.
Linked to this was the recognition that it was science and its varied forms which generated this
changing understanding and that in order to be modern art needed to keep pace with science.
These pressures began to encourage some artists to rethink their relation to the naturalistic aesthetic,
which itself was rooted in a scientific ethos that of positivist determinism, a whole and BNR,
as we've seen, adapted from the conventional naturalism of the 14th of July.
And the chemistry course to the chaos of energies, of the joys of life and life reborn from death.
These were artists undertaking public commissions, promoting the Republic's energetic commitment to modernity and science.
Significantly, they were prepared to adapt their styles to address developing scientific ideas, ideas that influenced politics itself,
as in the case of solider ism BNR and carry out particularly aware of the need to generate new pictorial idioms which gave
visual correspondence to the organism that by the 80s 90s was the most sophisticated way of understanding the world.
Independent artists making work for private consumption had similar intuitions.
Monet and Van Hoffe might have continued to work largely from nature, but their work became increasingly,
if not always consistently concerned, to articulate responses to the visible world that were mobile quite independently.
They used personal style. The pattern of brushwork.
The exaggeration of rhythm. The harmonisation of colour to create paintings.
The handling of which did not depict, but echoed the energies of flux of at the energies and flux of nature paintings that
caused observers to discuss them either with scientific analogies or with metaphors,
which are both the cross referential comprehension of things which were so modern.
If we have a sense of these intuitions that I think we can see that Van Starry Night and Benos truth leading the sciences have a degree of overlap.
It is certainly not stylistic.
The organism which I've been Adam rating found varied forms only loosely consistent and their fluid contours and pulsing shapes.
But such paintings shared an unspoken aesthetic, striving to create a new painting,
articulating modernity but no longer describing modern life sensitive to scientific progress
and deeply responsive to the vast energies and eternally interactive rhythms of nature.