1 00:00:00,870 --> 00:00:08,550 Let's begin with a very famous painting and a problem. 2 00:00:08,550 --> 00:00:19,500 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. 3 00:00:19,500 --> 00:00:27,770 The canvas went against the grain. Its astronomical configurations invented its village motif, essentially generic. 4 00:00:27,770 --> 00:00:33,510 It's tumbling horizon lifted from other canvases, experimental and a typical. 5 00:00:33,510 --> 00:00:40,560 It may have been, but Vanderhoff nevertheless had set himself the task not only of painting the night sky, 6 00:00:40,560 --> 00:00:45,510 but imagining it in dynamic relationship with the landscape. 7 00:00:45,510 --> 00:00:56,190 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. 8 00:00:56,190 --> 00:01:03,480 All this is set within the strange geology of the appeal hills and beneath vast billowing currents, 9 00:01:03,480 --> 00:01:09,060 perhaps suggesting the Mistral winds or the rhythms of astral bodies. 10 00:01:09,060 --> 00:01:19,800 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. 11 00:01:19,800 --> 00:01:27,060 Was it a solitary freak of imagination, or does it belong within some broader context. 12 00:01:27,060 --> 00:01:34,230 Coincidentally, in Paris at the same time, Albert, BNR was working on a new commission. 13 00:01:34,230 --> 00:01:41,130 Was a successful artist, too, by the late 1980s was pioneering new kinds of public decoration. 14 00:01:41,130 --> 00:01:46,470 He had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for the reconstructed hotel, The Ville. 15 00:01:46,470 --> 00:01:53,780 The subject was truth, leading the sciences and Allegri apparently quite different from the landscape. 16 00:01:53,780 --> 00:01:55,440 Starry Night. 17 00:01:55,440 --> 00:02:09,540 However, the original concept been proposed in 1889, envisaged the city of Paris below, illuminated by a scientific allegory above simultaneously. 18 00:02:09,540 --> 00:02:16,470 Yet independently, two artists, one unknown and painting for himself and a probable sale asylum. 19 00:02:16,470 --> 00:02:20,970 The other, reputed and working on a public decoration in Paris, 20 00:02:20,970 --> 00:02:30,210 were trying to find ways to paint the superhuman energies of nature and to find modern styles for doing so. 21 00:02:30,210 --> 00:02:36,180 My problem is how to make sense of this coincidence. 22 00:02:36,180 --> 00:02:40,620 In this lecture, I want to explore the painting of energies. 23 00:02:40,620 --> 00:02:45,990 This is a way of enquiring how certain kinds of naturalism adapted themselves to address 24 00:02:45,990 --> 00:02:52,260 new understandings of the world and how painting attempted to keep pace with science. 25 00:02:52,260 --> 00:02:56,460 It also leads one to ask if, in this wider context, 26 00:02:56,460 --> 00:03:03,090 there are links or consistencies between the public work of an artist like BNR and the private artist. 27 00:03:03,090 --> 00:03:05,430 The art of a Van Hoff. 28 00:03:05,430 --> 00:03:14,880 But before we look at some unfamiliar pictures, it's essential to Adam breaks the close relations between the Third Republic and science. 29 00:03:14,880 --> 00:03:20,250 We have seen how after 1880, the Third Republic swung into reformist mode. 30 00:03:20,250 --> 00:03:25,950 Social reforms such as the lifting of censorship or the liberalisation of divorce were matched by 31 00:03:25,950 --> 00:03:33,030 the promotion of mass education and an emphasis on science and technology by such initiatives. 32 00:03:33,030 --> 00:03:41,120 The Republic sought to seise the initiative from conservative opponents such as the Catholic Church by manifesting its progressive credentials, 33 00:03:41,120 --> 00:03:46,310 a forward looking ideology which would energise France. 34 00:03:46,310 --> 00:03:54,390 The republic's commitment to scientific modernity coincided with a dynamic period in French scientific research, 35 00:03:54,390 --> 00:04:03,630 which politicians supported and used actively trying to harness the benefits of science for the public good. 36 00:04:03,630 --> 00:04:14,790 Louis Pasteur, seen here, and Albert Adolph Felt's 1885 portrait, had been working on germ theory and microorganisms since 1857. 37 00:04:14,790 --> 00:04:20,610 By the 1888, Pasteur had brought bacteriology to the scientific centre stage. 38 00:04:20,610 --> 00:04:30,390 And by nineteen hundred, the germs causing major social diseases such as cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis had been identified. 39 00:04:30,390 --> 00:04:37,020 Leading scientists took up government posts. Paul Bav, professor of physiology at the Sorbonne, 40 00:04:37,020 --> 00:04:45,510 became Minister of Public Instruction in Gorm Better's brief ministry of 1881 to two putting hygiene on the list curriculum. 41 00:04:45,510 --> 00:04:53,670 The great Hawkei organic chemist Mux Alam Batalha became Inspector General of Public Instruction in 1885. 42 00:04:53,670 --> 00:05:00,020 If these were scientists who worked on a microscopic scale, others particularly a strong. 43 00:05:00,020 --> 00:05:06,360 I worked on an almost imagine unimaginably vast scales of distance and time. 44 00:05:06,360 --> 00:05:15,660 Astronomy was a rapidly developing science. In 1870, less than 100 minor planets were known, a number that had tripled. 45 00:05:15,660 --> 00:05:21,030 By 1890, frauds built new observatories in Mador, Baldo, 46 00:05:21,030 --> 00:05:31,200 Leo and Basil Soy in the eighteen seventies and in 1881 opened a museum of astronomy at the Paris Observatoire to meet public interest. 47 00:05:31,200 --> 00:05:42,210 Indeed, this period was one in which publications popularising scientific innovation burgeoned to satisfy the mass interest in science. 48 00:05:42,210 --> 00:05:47,930 But the scientific momentum was also changing the character of science, 49 00:05:47,930 --> 00:05:54,120 whether scientists studied bacteria through a microscope or galaxies through a telescope. 50 00:05:54,120 --> 00:06:01,140 They were increasingly aware that the world of the universe in which we live was in constant flux. 51 00:06:01,140 --> 00:06:12,930 Old notions that mankind was somehow superior to and separate from other parts of creation or that species were immutable, were no longer tenable. 52 00:06:12,930 --> 00:06:21,570 This gradual but growing realisation threatened the determinism on which naturalism was founded, for example. 53 00:06:21,570 --> 00:06:28,680 Equally, Ten's notion, minted in the eighteen sixties, that the identity of art could be determined by a house. 54 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:38,220 Moomaw in mid-year began to look to regulatory modern French culture was encouraged to put its faith in science. 55 00:06:38,220 --> 00:06:43,410 If science was changing, how might this affect art? 56 00:06:43,410 --> 00:06:48,210 The dominant aesthetic of naturalism was founded on scientific ideas. 57 00:06:48,210 --> 00:06:53,580 If those were shifting to embrace concepts of flux rather than determinism, 58 00:06:53,580 --> 00:07:02,820 how could naturalism adapt to absorb these new notions and maintain its engagement with scientific modernity? 59 00:07:02,820 --> 00:07:08,190 To begin with, I want to consider a certain current in public art. 60 00:07:08,190 --> 00:07:14,250 It might broadly be defined as Rubén Zeehan neo baroque. 61 00:07:14,250 --> 00:07:18,810 Appropriately enough, given that this lecture is about flux and the organic, 62 00:07:18,810 --> 00:07:27,780 it's not a style that I would consider fixed when it what it gave an impact and credibility was indeed its mutability. 63 00:07:27,780 --> 00:07:36,630 This room, Benzinger Neo Baroque was an answer to the requirement of public art to articulate social and ideological energy. 64 00:07:36,630 --> 00:07:45,240 It was an emphatically modern alternative to the conventional classicism of both the murals of Poovey de Shabaan, 65 00:07:45,240 --> 00:07:56,250 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. 66 00:07:56,250 --> 00:08:05,370 It also, one might hazard offered a means for naturalism to extend itself into new stylistic territory. 67 00:08:05,370 --> 00:08:14,520 I will deal with it by looking at two painters AlphaBeta Hall and about BNA, born in 1846. 68 00:08:14,520 --> 00:08:21,420 A hole was drawn to the room benzion in the early 1870 as he travelled to Belgium to study Rubins. 69 00:08:21,420 --> 00:08:32,820 And a painting like, say, Leena's, shown at the Salon of 1879, demonstrates Raul's proclivity for turbulent compositions and sexual extravagance. 70 00:08:32,820 --> 00:08:37,200 Hall staked a claim as an accredited Republican artist, 71 00:08:37,200 --> 00:08:45,300 painting a sequence of very large scale multi finger compositions throughout the 18th, 80s and 90s. 72 00:08:45,300 --> 00:08:54,300 The 14th of July 82 80 shown at the salon of 1882, was followed by Labour in 1885, 73 00:08:54,300 --> 00:09:05,580 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. 74 00:09:05,580 --> 00:09:17,670 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 75 00:09:17,670 --> 00:09:23,490 through the centre of which one can make out the more ordered march past the soldiery. 76 00:09:23,490 --> 00:09:30,490 The bandstand and scaffolding allowed Hall to draw attention to the Morrises statue of the Republic. 77 00:09:30,490 --> 00:09:35,910 For this is necessarily an overtly Republican image. 78 00:09:35,910 --> 00:09:43,620 The Ticona fluttering above, matching the Liberté, Égalité and Fratta every day of the various classes, 79 00:09:43,620 --> 00:09:50,960 cheering, saluting, pedalling and the one must say on the far left, groping in the crowd below. 80 00:09:50,960 --> 00:09:59,870 The whole included himself and his wife, seen from behind to centre right at the salon of 1884. 81 00:09:59,870 --> 00:10:04,550 Dave Roll showed a huge canvas of men at work. 82 00:10:04,550 --> 00:10:15,260 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. 83 00:10:15,260 --> 00:10:24,630 On the one hand, Labour deals with specifics. It represents the construction of a weir at sea, often in the western suburbs of Paris. 84 00:10:24,630 --> 00:10:28,820 A hole made a large number of drawings of workmen at that particular tasks, 85 00:10:28,820 --> 00:10:36,290 using these for the figures dressing stones, shifting piles or sewing timber on the other. 86 00:10:36,290 --> 00:10:44,990 The painting has a generic character. The title, Labour Pabbi, was a civic value vaunted by the Republic. 87 00:10:44,990 --> 00:10:53,030 It is seen as collective. The skills and muscle of the workers bringing to completion a project to public benefit. 88 00:10:53,030 --> 00:10:58,520 It is also egalitarian. For no worker is more important than another. 89 00:10:58,520 --> 00:11:03,530 Not even the top at its supervisor in the middle distance or a hole himself. 90 00:11:03,530 --> 00:11:12,740 Looking in the left, the naturalist painter as honest a toiler as the navvy writing of the guys at their Bouzar all today, 91 00:11:12,740 --> 00:11:22,130 Michel praised Rolls close observation of specifics, but worried about what he saw as the dispersion of figures and groups. 92 00:11:22,130 --> 00:11:26,660 To my eye, this was a deliberate strategy on role's part. 93 00:11:26,660 --> 00:11:37,790 Lack of central focus meant lack of hierarchy, dispersion of groups met the I looked here and then there, which was at once naturalistic. 94 00:11:37,790 --> 00:11:43,940 One cannot take in such a complex scene at a single glance and ideological. 95 00:11:43,940 --> 00:11:56,450 Every labourer's task is a value. Lack of composition was thus doubly Republican in its actuality and in its egalitarianism. 96 00:11:56,450 --> 00:12:01,760 It was also modern because it asserted the value of collective activity. 97 00:12:01,760 --> 00:12:07,790 The energy and flow of which will produce positive results. 98 00:12:07,790 --> 00:12:13,910 Reverting to his instinctual Rubén Zionism role further develop this kind of freewheeling composition. 99 00:12:13,910 --> 00:12:20,840 A decade later, in another huge painting could have a very different subject for a different purpose. 100 00:12:20,840 --> 00:12:26,060 The joys of life. Women, flowers, music. 101 00:12:26,060 --> 00:12:28,110 I'm not making a joke about that section. 102 00:12:28,110 --> 00:12:35,060 True was commissioned as a decoration for one of the grand reception rooms in the Paris Lodge of the Revealed. 103 00:12:35,060 --> 00:12:40,280 An exhibit is at the 1895 Salon de la Nasional claimed to do so. 104 00:12:40,280 --> 00:12:49,730 Once I looked to the centre of the composition and the joys of life finds just a void, thus diffused to the margins. 105 00:12:49,730 --> 00:12:59,420 It sees dancers to the left, lovers to the right, with musicians playing a naked women frolicking in the flowers in the lower spaces. 106 00:12:59,420 --> 00:13:06,170 Actually, they looked like roses. Frolicking naked near a rosebush is ill advised. 107 00:13:06,170 --> 00:13:16,070 The painting is broadly and naturalistically painted with life sized figures, but there is no narrative, let alone plausibility to it. 108 00:13:16,070 --> 00:13:18,860 But the joys of life is not intended to be descriptive. 109 00:13:18,860 --> 00:13:28,310 It chaotically inventories delites bodies, sunshine, music play the joys of life as no conventional allegory of the senses. 110 00:13:28,310 --> 00:13:37,190 Although sight, sound, smell and touch are all to the fore but a thoroughly modern celebration of physical and experiential well-being. 111 00:13:37,190 --> 00:13:41,750 The paintings incongruities confused some in 1895. 112 00:13:41,750 --> 00:13:48,020 George Latinist, the writing in the conservative everyday demand, found the bricolage difficult. 113 00:13:48,020 --> 00:13:57,440 But he recognised, as did a completely different writer. The Nabby painter Felix Valletta that rolls painting was about health and energy. 114 00:13:57,440 --> 00:14:05,960 Hodgy Marx agreed, invoking the Rubén Zern by compounding role to Jakob Judeans and another Republican functionary layoffs. 115 00:14:05,960 --> 00:14:14,360 Benedict later called the joys of life a sort of vast naturalist and pantheist symphony in this painting. 116 00:14:14,360 --> 00:14:18,470 Raul attempted something distinctly experimental, 117 00:14:18,470 --> 00:14:25,160 using his descriptive skills and bringing into play the rich with Benza and carnality that appealed to him. 118 00:14:25,160 --> 00:14:30,110 Discarded most of the rules of pictorial composition composites. 119 00:14:30,110 --> 00:14:38,780 Your composition, your May son, Nick Zeist. He was to tell a younger painter a few years later by choosing to distribute his 120 00:14:38,780 --> 00:14:44,100 figures in Congress in their various activities across the loosest of armatures, 121 00:14:44,100 --> 00:14:53,720 role denied a single legible subject the better to evoke the sensual effect of a whole variety of experiences, 122 00:14:53,720 --> 00:15:00,590 all positive and gratifying, a flow of energy and pleasure in life. 123 00:15:00,590 --> 00:15:11,540 Let us now turn to Albert BNA. Born in 1849, winner of the prestigious predominating 74, Baner had the full academic training. 124 00:15:11,540 --> 00:15:22,010 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. 125 00:15:22,010 --> 00:15:32,720 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. 126 00:15:32,720 --> 00:15:36,990 His three paintings, made in 1886 to seven for the Town Hall of the Premier, 127 00:15:36,990 --> 00:15:44,330 are on this small take the three seasons of spring, summer and winter as three stages of life. 128 00:15:44,330 --> 00:15:51,920 The central summer of which I show the installation and the oil sketch represents a family at harvest time. 129 00:15:51,920 --> 00:15:59,660 The husband vigorously loading a powerful horse, the mother breastfeeding the smallest bear, several children. 130 00:15:59,660 --> 00:16:06,200 This is an image of the fundamental unit of society of healthy bodies and fecund loins, 131 00:16:06,200 --> 00:16:12,170 suckered by a fertile nature, rich crops and invigorating sunshine. 132 00:16:12,170 --> 00:16:25,730 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. 133 00:16:25,730 --> 00:16:31,670 But even more than the whole BAINO was prepared to diversify his style. 134 00:16:31,670 --> 00:16:41,600 Between 1884 and 1888, he produced nine decorations for the entrance hall of the eight called the Pharmacy. 135 00:16:41,600 --> 00:16:51,770 The first group of paintings, such as the sick woman exhibited at the Salon of 1884, deals with illness and its treatment with medicines. 136 00:16:51,770 --> 00:16:58,530 The sick woman is particularly dramatic, using Benos draughtsmen these skills with foreshortening to give his narrowest, 137 00:16:58,530 --> 00:17:07,130 narrow it to go give a narrative urgency to a design which effectively animates the rather intractable space for later. 138 00:17:07,130 --> 00:17:15,320 Paintings made between 1886 and eight depict different kinds of university instruction to each of botanical and 139 00:17:15,320 --> 00:17:25,610 geological fieldwork and another two of dread subject professors giving lectures on physiology and chemistry. 140 00:17:25,610 --> 00:17:32,090 All these are quite typical descriptive pictures satisfy the demand for the document. 141 00:17:32,090 --> 00:17:36,020 Indeed, the composition of the 1888 chemistry course, 142 00:17:36,020 --> 00:17:45,560 with its view over and through the audience to the lecturer appropriate appropriate to composition developed by Douga and others a decade earlier, 143 00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:51,170 prompting the spectators sense of physical participation in the picture. 144 00:17:51,170 --> 00:17:56,870 But Benos work at the age called the pharmacy began to take naturalism into other areas. 145 00:17:56,870 --> 00:18:02,990 Seven smaller panels took on subjects such as the formation of the earth, 146 00:18:02,990 --> 00:18:13,700 the appearance of plants and primitive man representing what Baner could not have actually seen, such as primitive man. 147 00:18:13,700 --> 00:18:19,610 Such objects called for. Eventually, their overriding theme was, of course, evolution, 148 00:18:19,610 --> 00:18:23,750 and the artist was thus required to use the descriptive capacities of pictorial 149 00:18:23,750 --> 00:18:29,840 naturalism to represent the past realities which the natural sciences were uncovering. 150 00:18:29,840 --> 00:18:39,740 Together, the old equalled the pharmacy decorations. Visualise the practise of medicine at the science taught in the modern university as emerging 151 00:18:39,740 --> 00:18:46,340 from the lawn of the GOP of evolution and the gradual development of scientific knowledge. 152 00:18:46,340 --> 00:18:52,160 Here was art, closely geared to modern ideas. 153 00:18:52,160 --> 00:18:58,670 Benos embrace of the scientific took a further step in his next major commercial. 154 00:18:58,670 --> 00:19:04,670 This was the ceiling for one of the three rooms in the cellar. There's a card in the Paris Hotel de Ville. 155 00:19:04,670 --> 00:19:12,080 The subject, as we've seen before, truth leading to science is behind her spreads light over mankind. 156 00:19:12,080 --> 00:19:20,000 The completed ceiling was exhibited in 1891. The composition was radical in several respects. 157 00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:26,900 Conventionally, ceiling painting suggests a great space by the upward momentum of the figures. 158 00:19:26,900 --> 00:19:35,600 Boehner did not deny distant space. And here it's not just the artifice of pictorial space, but the infinite space of the universe. 159 00:19:35,600 --> 00:19:45,950 The space being discovered by science truth is representing not rising, but rushing downwards towards us. 160 00:19:45,950 --> 00:19:57,140 This is visually arresting and also significant. We, like the men in the ceiling, receive the benefits of science and are enlightened. 161 00:19:57,140 --> 00:19:59,520 Such a notion accorded with Republican. 162 00:19:59,520 --> 00:20:09,690 Ideology, Boehner pitched this in modern scientific terms at the top of the composition astronomy, as we've seen, 163 00:20:09,690 --> 00:20:19,020 a burgeoning discipline points to the planets depicted in detail derived from photographs taken through telescopes in formal terms, 164 00:20:19,020 --> 00:20:30,210 Benos truth leading the sciences is sharply coloured, causing the OTL DVDs architect for me J to complain about the under scripted chromatics. 165 00:20:30,210 --> 00:20:40,830 It's also unusual in design with its dynamic and brightly coloured main figure, followed by a sequence of more muted, repetitive, subsidiary's. 166 00:20:40,830 --> 00:20:46,170 Such a pictorial solution seems to me to owe to the poster designs of visual. 167 00:20:46,170 --> 00:20:51,780 Shafaei Shanghai was in fact a friend of Beaner who drew a portrait of him in 1888. 168 00:20:51,780 --> 00:20:58,730 The two travelling together to Spain in 1891, the very year they now completed his ceiling. 169 00:20:58,730 --> 00:21:06,030 A poster like Loopy Defence of 1889 typifies Shanghai's angular drawing, 170 00:21:06,030 --> 00:21:13,080 striking use of yellows, blues and oranges and echoing figures in repetitious momentum. 171 00:21:13,080 --> 00:21:22,680 Beina may well have intended this to be recognised as a means of linking his modern allegory to popular forms of representation. 172 00:21:22,680 --> 00:21:31,410 The whole package of truth leading the sciences. Post-flight chromatics and composition, scientific knowledge and its dissemination. 173 00:21:31,410 --> 00:21:35,880 Republican progressiveness made the ceiling emphatically. 174 00:21:35,880 --> 00:21:42,900 Modern critics duly responded to it in terms of scientific modernity. 175 00:21:42,900 --> 00:21:54,360 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. 176 00:21:54,360 --> 00:22:00,030 The symbolist writer George Holden both praised how everything is treated in a scientific spirit. 177 00:22:00,030 --> 00:22:06,780 The groups circle like planets. One might call it a firmament of faces. 178 00:22:06,780 --> 00:22:13,170 Such reactions show how aware informed contemporaries were of the new scientific 179 00:22:13,170 --> 00:22:20,700 understanding of constant flux and the harmonies between the macrocosm and the microcosm. 180 00:22:20,700 --> 00:22:32,040 Benos next decorative scheme was for the Sorbonne and here for followed scientific subject even more closely painted 181 00:22:32,040 --> 00:22:40,950 for the chemistry lecture theatre Life Reborn from Death attempted to summarise the theory of transform ism. 182 00:22:40,950 --> 00:22:48,450 The continuum continuum of being of the unity of all matter life reborn from death centres 183 00:22:48,450 --> 00:22:55,110 on the sun whose very visible yellow rays transmit generative energy to the earth below. 184 00:22:55,110 --> 00:22:59,480 In the middle of the top apartment of the middle of the top. Yeah. 185 00:22:59,480 --> 00:23:08,880 Not all that easy to see is the green putrefying corpse of a mother spewing forth yellow flowers while the baby, 186 00:23:08,880 --> 00:23:14,100 which still clings to her, is painted in the same brown tones as the mother's hair. 187 00:23:14,100 --> 00:23:16,650 The central image thus playing directly, 188 00:23:16,650 --> 00:23:27,150 if gruesomely to the theme of the cyclical and regenerative continuity's of chemical reactions to the right in the rich green foliage. 189 00:23:27,150 --> 00:23:31,350 I think you could just make it out. Adam lifts Eve to pick fruit. 190 00:23:31,350 --> 00:23:38,490 Another image of continuity and nutrition to the left all is flux from the rising column of brown 191 00:23:38,490 --> 00:23:45,830 gases to the lava like river in deep pectoral blue and orange from which figures seem to emerge. 192 00:23:45,830 --> 00:23:53,340 A bubble life reborn from death as a painting about flux, the cycle of growth and decay, 193 00:23:53,340 --> 00:24:02,310 the flow of liquids and gases, the burgeoning of vegetation, and the eternal Life-Giving energy of the sun. 194 00:24:02,310 --> 00:24:08,190 From the Paintings exhibition at the Cellar de la Nasional of 1896, critics recognised this, 195 00:24:08,190 --> 00:24:17,820 but it was Kamir McClair writing in nineteen hundred who most closely acknowledged how Boehner had adapted style to convey scientific ideas. 196 00:24:17,820 --> 00:24:22,110 Kirchner described how the acidic and metallic colours, 197 00:24:22,110 --> 00:24:33,660 green and sulphurous yellow evoked chemicals and the swirling flowers and butterflies and the sunset sunlight, the thickened energy of natural cycles. 198 00:24:33,660 --> 00:24:41,220 Boehner himself was proud of life, reborn from death, but feared that it might not be comprehensible. 199 00:24:41,220 --> 00:24:50,520 A fear that you probably accept. Indeed, for 1896, the decoration was a highly daring essay in pictorial organism, 200 00:24:50,520 --> 00:24:56,880 a pulsing a Morphos composition which seems to prefigure the biomorphs ism of the surrealists. 201 00:24:56,880 --> 00:25:08,210 By several decades. But. Beamer was surely right to be anxious in his endeavours to find new pictorials, solutions to match new scientific thinking, 202 00:25:08,210 --> 00:25:19,070 life reborn from death had pushed a long way beyond the legible imagery, both state and public preferred. 203 00:25:19,070 --> 00:25:26,520 Whereas this analysis of hall and brain are taken, this first their allegiance to the room benzion sporadic, 204 00:25:26,520 --> 00:25:31,460 though it may have been claimed a more natural, less than classical ancestry, 205 00:25:31,460 --> 00:25:39,350 one legible in terms of energy and physicality that immediately linked with modern imperatives at 206 00:25:39,350 --> 00:25:44,960 a time when there was anxious debate about degeneration of the core standards of public health. 207 00:25:44,960 --> 00:25:57,170 The Rubén Benzion figure full of strength and sap typified exemplary vigour and Benos and Hall's painting this frequently admired as vital healthy. 208 00:25:57,170 --> 00:26:05,540 Second, these artists show different ways of experimenting with naturalism in public art with a subject such as The Joys of Life, 209 00:26:05,540 --> 00:26:15,230 Raw essayed a new kind of painting in which almost random elements coalesced in a free-form composition. 210 00:26:15,230 --> 00:26:17,870 Paradoxically, it's such a decoration. 211 00:26:17,870 --> 00:26:27,560 Apparent distain for Form created a new kind of form where harmony was evoked by fluid elements such as colour masses, 212 00:26:27,560 --> 00:26:31,790 spatial voids and scattered centres of interest. 213 00:26:31,790 --> 00:26:38,510 Beina took painting even more demonstrably into the new scientific understanding of the universe in flux. 214 00:26:38,510 --> 00:26:45,350 If truth leading the scientists injected modernity into an allegory of the sciences by its cosmic setting, 215 00:26:45,350 --> 00:26:53,540 dynamic movement and post-flight chromatics, life reborn from death took formal innovation further. 216 00:26:53,540 --> 00:27:03,870 Here, they now found an equivalent for science's new concept of the natural world as an unceasing continuum of organisms in flux. 217 00:27:03,870 --> 00:27:13,670 Again, in formal terms, by painting fluid shapes in chemical colours, using brushwork to convey energy. 218 00:27:13,670 --> 00:27:19,490 Both Hall and the banner took the opportunity in the mid 80s 90s to experiment, 219 00:27:19,490 --> 00:27:26,660 trying perhaps not always successfully, to find ways of painting which corresponded with progressive thinking. 220 00:27:26,660 --> 00:27:28,610 If the dominant naturalism of the eighteen, 221 00:27:28,610 --> 00:27:37,460 eighties and nineties mapped comfortably onto mainstream Republicanism commitment to egalitarianism, accuracy and legibility, 222 00:27:37,460 --> 00:27:43,340 then the organic CISM with which role and Baner attempted to produce new work, 223 00:27:43,340 --> 00:27:50,960 represented a further engagement between painting and progressive ideas. 224 00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:56,200 Can it go any further to explain this interplay between art and science? 225 00:27:56,200 --> 00:28:03,580 Was the interest in energy and flux manifested in the work of the hall and Ben are just apparent in a few public decorations? 226 00:28:03,580 --> 00:28:08,160 Or was it to be found in other art, more private or avant garde work? 227 00:28:08,160 --> 00:28:14,890 Indeed. How can we account for this new concept of the flux of time and matter and its transmission 228 00:28:14,890 --> 00:28:20,140 from the Hermitage world of scientific research into mainstream consciousness? 229 00:28:20,140 --> 00:28:28,180 We can begin to answer some of these questions by tracing some points of contact and crossover roles. 230 00:28:28,180 --> 00:28:34,360 Joys of life and Beaners Life Reborn from Death, completed in 1895 and six, 231 00:28:34,360 --> 00:28:41,210 respectively, coincided with the emergence of a new movement within Republicanism. 232 00:28:41,210 --> 00:28:50,470 Lay on board was solider ism bourgois book Solidarité was published in eighteen ninety six. 233 00:28:50,470 --> 00:28:57,190 He argued that society protects us, but in return we have a duty to contribute to it. 234 00:28:57,190 --> 00:29:05,280 Humans are interdependent. We function not as individuals but as cells within the largest social organism. 235 00:29:05,280 --> 00:29:14,800 Bordelaise principles had various dimensions. One was Republican in that he was in essence supplying the notion of that every day. 236 00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:26,320 Another was loosely anticlerical as he was replacing the Christian notion of charity, which is voluntary with the new scientific solidarity. 237 00:29:26,320 --> 00:29:30,880 Crucially, a third was scientific because both were brought into play. 238 00:29:30,880 --> 00:29:35,470 Ideas from the natural sciences. He was influenced by the work of the chemist. 239 00:29:35,470 --> 00:29:41,340 Enough slammed Batalha and in particular by the zoologist Alfred Milton Edwards. 240 00:29:41,340 --> 00:29:45,790 He was called Alfred M. Edwards, but he was French. 241 00:29:45,790 --> 00:29:55,390 His analysis of the way cells operate in mutual and dynamic support for the benefit of the organism which they collectively comprise. 242 00:29:55,390 --> 00:30:01,570 It's perhaps no surprise that Boardwalk was a close friend of all. 243 00:30:01,570 --> 00:30:14,560 Thus, we have three elements in play. Science is conception of nature's constant flux, solider ism's, promotion of mutual social development, 244 00:30:14,560 --> 00:30:22,960 and the search for new painterly solutions to convey the continuum of interactive energies. 245 00:30:22,960 --> 00:30:30,700 All were progressive, aware of each other's initiatives, and had organic CISM as their central core. 246 00:30:30,700 --> 00:30:35,380 What I would like to suggest is that here we have naturalist painting the 247 00:30:35,380 --> 00:30:41,710 rolls fleshy nudes and Benos decomposing woman are fundamentally descriptive, 248 00:30:41,710 --> 00:30:53,380 matching to an extreme to match the ever expanding knowledge of natural sciences and to sustain its alliance with progressive Republicanism. 249 00:30:53,380 --> 00:30:59,290 Another point of contact was the crucial role of publications popularising science. 250 00:30:59,290 --> 00:31:04,600 This took off in the eighteen eighties with the success of periodicals like Lana Ture and of 251 00:31:04,600 --> 00:31:12,310 writers such as Camil Flappy or a Guest or Tsundere to say nothing of the novels of you there. 252 00:31:12,310 --> 00:31:17,710 The vogue for popular science suited the Republic's secular ideology. 253 00:31:17,710 --> 00:31:25,430 Better to understand the world vast sums, and God had received the backing of leading lights such as Pasteur. 254 00:31:25,430 --> 00:31:29,770 The Popularisation literature covered all aspects of science, 255 00:31:29,770 --> 00:31:37,210 giving the general public a broad understanding of the gradual processes of geological formation and the evolution of species, 256 00:31:37,210 --> 00:31:43,150 or the mysterious, mutating and invisible existence of microbes. 257 00:31:43,150 --> 00:31:50,860 Electricity was a particular popular fascination because it serves man's physical needs for light and heat. 258 00:31:50,860 --> 00:31:58,750 Yet it was an energy quota's and unseen, electrically lit fountains around the Eiffel Tower. 259 00:31:58,750 --> 00:32:03,590 Well, one of the great attractions of the 1889 excluding in of ourselves. 260 00:32:03,590 --> 00:32:07,200 There's a drawing of them by Camilla Pizarro in the Ashmolean. 261 00:32:07,200 --> 00:32:18,820 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. 262 00:32:18,820 --> 00:32:27,940 Fuller stood still on stage, manipulating on long sticks, great swathes of material. 263 00:32:27,940 --> 00:32:37,000 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, 264 00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:43,060 defined the dance sinuous and green blue for the serpentine dance. 265 00:32:43,060 --> 00:32:50,290 Flickering and red, orange for the fire dance. Phyllis seduced artists and photographers amongst them. 266 00:32:50,290 --> 00:32:53,560 Tudor's Lautrec there with the two lithographs on the right, 267 00:32:53,560 --> 00:33:03,400 whose every impression of this lithograph made in 1893 was printed in different colours to suggest the currents of rhythm and colour, 268 00:33:03,400 --> 00:33:11,530 which characterised her performances. But novelist Paul Adwar are amazed how it was the coloured electrical lighting, 269 00:33:11,530 --> 00:33:18,760 which enraptured businessmen and shopkeepers who would normally only be interested in dancers, busts and bums. 270 00:33:18,760 --> 00:33:26,470 When Louis Fuller performed said Adore. She was no longer a woman, but a whirlwind or a nebula. 271 00:33:26,470 --> 00:33:32,350 Here, then, is an example of how popular entertainment culture grew on scientific advances, 272 00:33:32,350 --> 00:33:41,770 in turn stimulating metaphors which drew on scientific observation of constantly mutating natural forms. 273 00:33:41,770 --> 00:33:51,820 One final example of crossover of a team of civil engineers whose achievements during the 1980s numbered a series of 274 00:33:51,820 --> 00:34:00,370 pioneering new bridges and viaducts and culminated in the Great Tower built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, 275 00:34:00,370 --> 00:34:04,450 included Mollis Kershner and Our Session. 276 00:34:04,450 --> 00:34:08,410 Kushner had studied at the Polytechnic home in Zurich, 277 00:34:08,410 --> 00:34:16,840 where he had learnt the concept of bio mimicry developed by Herman von Meyer, a professor of anatomy. 278 00:34:16,840 --> 00:34:24,970 This linked bone structures with the mathematics of load bearing and came to interest Eifel. 279 00:34:24,970 --> 00:34:33,130 Thus, it comes as no surprise to find in the gallery of Combat Comparative Anatomy at the Jabot Dead plant in Paris. 280 00:34:33,130 --> 00:34:43,510 Dinosaur bones, which echo and may have inspired the splayed legs, which evenly spread the weight of the Eiffel Tower. 281 00:34:43,510 --> 00:34:49,150 I'm on dangerous ground here. I know nothing about civil engineering. 282 00:34:49,150 --> 00:34:57,850 But here is another, an utterly different example of the contemporary interplay between science and arts, in this case architecture, 283 00:34:57,850 --> 00:35:02,920 an interplay that recognised consistencies of form and function that was implicitly 284 00:35:02,920 --> 00:35:12,750 metaphorical but is again symptomatic of a mentality with an instinct for interdisciplinarity. 285 00:35:12,750 --> 00:35:21,360 Let's return to art and widen the range, however inscrutable the processes of cross-fertilisation, 286 00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:26,850 the development of scientific ideas overlapped with forms of representation. 287 00:35:26,850 --> 00:35:30,720 This interplay can be traced in public as well as private art. 288 00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:37,530 And appropriately enough, both on the macro and the micro scales. 289 00:35:37,530 --> 00:35:44,770 In 1898, several Cudmore completed a ceiling and 10 panels for the music Destroy Our Match. 290 00:35:44,770 --> 00:35:50,580 Yeoval in Paris, tracing the evolution of humanity as far as the Iron Age, 291 00:35:50,580 --> 00:36:00,420 the ceiling humanity conveyed that Darwinians sense of evolution by rising arcs of figures to the left. 292 00:36:00,420 --> 00:36:04,650 The Aryan races led by beauty and to the right. 293 00:36:04,650 --> 00:36:13,650 The Semitic races guided by faith kormos formal decisions, monochrome rather than full colour. 294 00:36:13,650 --> 00:36:22,710 The Upwood spirals movement from dark to light linked style to the idea of evolution. 295 00:36:22,710 --> 00:36:28,260 By contrast, Odille Huddle's lithographic album lays off a gene. 296 00:36:28,260 --> 00:36:34,140 Published in 1883 was quite different in medium and scale, 297 00:36:34,140 --> 00:36:40,330 intended to be meditated in private, not seen in a public museum, but at its intimate level. 298 00:36:40,330 --> 00:36:47,790 Its two uses formal means to convey evolutionary flux on the frontispiece. 299 00:36:47,790 --> 00:36:56,010 None of these strange creatures has a resolved identity, while to the lower right they're barely defined a tool here. 300 00:36:56,010 --> 00:37:01,800 The process of delineation echoes the process of evolution. 301 00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:07,470 That sense of evolving takes on an even more ambiguous associative quality. 302 00:37:07,470 --> 00:37:16,320 In lay bets, Dylan now owned companies to the creatures of the sea round as water flasks from the third tortoise, 303 00:37:16,320 --> 00:37:26,680 the old desalt and one series of 1896. Huddle's forms here are like jellyfish or hooded figures taking shape in the centre, 304 00:37:26,680 --> 00:37:33,660 but trailing off at the lower edges as if still in development, perhaps hatched from the spools. 305 00:37:33,660 --> 00:37:45,360 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. 306 00:37:45,360 --> 00:37:47,250 But by the eighteen nineties, 307 00:37:47,250 --> 00:37:56,530 very different artists making work for very different purposes were becoming interested in picture making that by allowing a more fluid play, 308 00:37:56,530 --> 00:38:05,490 a form to evoke a sense of process corresponded with the new awareness of the world in flux. 309 00:38:05,490 --> 00:38:16,260 Reading art, whose forms suggested process rather than art, whose images used established pictorial systems troubled, even sophisticated spectators. 310 00:38:16,260 --> 00:38:21,900 The curator labels Benedict objected that Kormos humanity was incomprehensible because 311 00:38:21,900 --> 00:38:27,180 it rejected centuries of allegories and conventions for synthetic conceptions. 312 00:38:27,180 --> 00:38:38,460 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. 313 00:38:38,460 --> 00:38:46,200 Fluid associative energised by the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties allegory was a struggle 314 00:38:46,200 --> 00:38:53,400 for artists required to find imagery for new subjects for which there were no conventions. 315 00:38:53,400 --> 00:39:04,710 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. 316 00:39:04,710 --> 00:39:15,350 His solution is splendidly ridiculous. A young woman draped in satin, leaning on four tomes and speaking on the telephone. 317 00:39:15,350 --> 00:39:25,320 A hot air balloon drifts in the distance and a flash of lightning in the corner apologetically alludes to electricity. 318 00:39:25,320 --> 00:39:29,550 Jenny McCarthy ever painted the surrounding spaniel's whips. 319 00:39:29,550 --> 00:39:35,490 Sorry, you can see one of the spaniel's up there. But this isn't another one. 320 00:39:35,490 --> 00:39:41,190 Kathy has technique of thin monochrome washes from which the forms emerge, 321 00:39:41,190 --> 00:39:47,610 integrated their shapes with the architecture and the root benzion pulse of the fleshy figure of medicine. 322 00:39:47,610 --> 00:39:56,440 They're on the right aptly alludes to health and vitality without the need for obtrusive accessories. 323 00:39:56,440 --> 00:40:01,650 Caviars characteristic style had emerged in the late 1980s. 324 00:40:01,650 --> 00:40:11,170 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. 325 00:40:11,170 --> 00:40:22,980 Canvases like the yarn whined does if 1887, in which the figures are simultaneously unified by and subsumed into the muted ambient light which 326 00:40:22,980 --> 00:40:30,540 in wraps Caviars mature style received public affirmation that his one man show at the Bueso, 327 00:40:30,540 --> 00:40:36,090 a valid or gallery in spring 1891 with pictures like these. 328 00:40:36,090 --> 00:40:42,720 And it was paintings like these by Kafia. That inspired one of Dugas most masterful putdowns. 329 00:40:42,720 --> 00:40:48,750 I see they've been smoking again in the nursery. 330 00:40:48,750 --> 00:40:57,780 In his catalogue preface, Gustaaf Geoff was suggestive prose evoked caviars sense of the flux of life. 331 00:40:57,780 --> 00:41:10,740 Emotions erupt, paths lead and follow each other across mobile physiologies, he wrote in images about life mixed with the life of others. 332 00:41:10,740 --> 00:41:19,740 The radical critic about all his response to the exhibition also acknowledged Flux, but analysed it in terms of time as well as emotion. 333 00:41:19,740 --> 00:41:31,110 Asking Is the immediate sensation worth canting when it's hardly have the time to occur before it tumbles into the Gulf of memory? 334 00:41:31,110 --> 00:41:38,130 Jeff Poire and opiated, followed by others, saw Kathy as fluid painting in terms of psychology. 335 00:41:38,130 --> 00:41:43,010 The inner life of individuals and the interplay of emotion between them. 336 00:41:43,010 --> 00:41:52,830 Can you McClair also writing in 1891, sort beaners work in similar fashion when he argued that the constantly shifting light 337 00:41:52,830 --> 00:41:58,500 falling on his subjects meant constantly shifting emotional reactions within the painter. 338 00:41:58,500 --> 00:42:07,380 So the light and the continuum of natural energies was the incessant psychological stimulator of the artist. 339 00:42:07,380 --> 00:42:18,240 Such analysis, seeking to harmonise new painting with new scientific ideas, was shaping a modern frame of intellectual and cultural reference. 340 00:42:18,240 --> 00:42:24,270 If the world in the microcosm and the macrocosm was in constant flux, 341 00:42:24,270 --> 00:42:31,710 then the physical could not be separated from the psychological or the past from the present. 342 00:42:31,710 --> 00:42:41,910 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. 343 00:42:41,910 --> 00:42:45,480 The sculptor Googoosh Loader asked his close friend Cathy Eyre to produce an 344 00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:49,800 image that could be used for the poster to promote his one man show of work, 345 00:42:49,800 --> 00:42:59,700 which would take place during the Exposition Universelle. It was probably Roder himself who suggested that he be represented at work. 346 00:42:59,700 --> 00:43:05,940 Simple as it may first seem, Cathy has lithograph is richly associative. 347 00:43:05,940 --> 00:43:15,270 Light falls on the sculptor's intent gaze and on his powerful hands, which rests on the basis of the figure he is shaping. 348 00:43:15,270 --> 00:43:22,470 This is a moment when I and mind consider the next move and the hands await instruction. 349 00:43:22,470 --> 00:43:29,580 A moment in the process of creation. The sculpted figure is only generalised, not fully formed. 350 00:43:29,580 --> 00:43:36,270 Much of it remains in shadow, awaiting the sculptors continued work to make it ready for the light. 351 00:43:36,270 --> 00:43:42,900 The sculptors ability to create human form from inert matter, together with his wise, bearded presence, 352 00:43:42,900 --> 00:43:50,040 suggests a divine authority and the play of light and shadow only revealing a half formed figure 353 00:43:50,040 --> 00:44:02,830 suggests Genesis in such an image form itself and the process of becoming form becomes a metaphor. 354 00:44:02,830 --> 00:44:10,450 Artists adoption of fluid, organic SIST forms affected how works of art were understood here, 355 00:44:10,450 --> 00:44:16,900 symbolism, naturalism as rival aesthetic from the late 1980s played an important part. 356 00:44:16,900 --> 00:44:22,960 The writers who dealt most empathetically with organist images were usually those who were either symbolist 357 00:44:22,960 --> 00:44:31,210 writers themselves and thus at home with the elusive and metaphoric or those who are sympathetic to symbolism. 358 00:44:31,210 --> 00:44:36,730 A good example of this comes with Taylor, with Carrie, as turned out for Populaire, 359 00:44:36,730 --> 00:44:43,780 a picture that is at least that big exhibited at the 1895 Salon de la Less Yellow, 360 00:44:43,780 --> 00:44:49,330 representing an audience at the local theatre in the proletarian CAFTA of Bellview. 361 00:44:49,330 --> 00:44:56,350 The painting encouraged many contemporary critics to discuss it in terms of the character of the Parisian working classes. 362 00:44:56,350 --> 00:45:05,140 Did it show the good natured, enthused by culture, or did it thinly mask their potentially destructive instincts? 363 00:45:05,140 --> 00:45:09,820 But there were others who approached the painting differently. 364 00:45:09,820 --> 00:45:15,610 For the symbolist poet and novelist George Auden, both the very large composition payouts were popular, 365 00:45:15,610 --> 00:45:20,050 literally flowed from the small landscapes studies. 366 00:45:20,050 --> 00:45:24,820 That caveat painted in brittanie landscapes like this. 367 00:45:24,820 --> 00:45:26,770 Not that one. 368 00:45:26,770 --> 00:45:38,930 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. 369 00:45:38,930 --> 00:45:51,990 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. 370 00:45:51,990 --> 00:45:56,260 Rudan Bath was obviously well informed about Caviars creative practise, 371 00:45:56,260 --> 00:46:06,490 not only his pictorial linkage of landscape and figurative forms, but also his conceptual equivalents of the natural and the human. 372 00:46:06,490 --> 00:46:13,570 I want to close by looking briefly at the tensions between the organic and the descriptive with care. 373 00:46:13,570 --> 00:46:21,070 Cahiers touts were popular at the 1895 Cellar de la Nasional hung level meets Lay Owl. 374 00:46:21,070 --> 00:46:23,230 This is a huge painting which has now rolled up. 375 00:46:23,230 --> 00:46:32,980 Hence the black and white image, a picture conventionally naturalistic in its depiction of traders and shoppers at the Paris central market. 376 00:46:32,980 --> 00:46:40,360 Just found this huge canvas frustrating. The artist was too concerned to document. 377 00:46:40,360 --> 00:46:45,190 He forgot that in a crowd you can only look at one element at a time. 378 00:46:45,190 --> 00:46:55,780 A crowd is not an accumulation of detail, but in all and a wave of movement for sheffler limits. 379 00:46:55,780 --> 00:46:59,230 Naturalism not only failed to be naturalistic, 380 00:46:59,230 --> 00:47:07,810 it also neglected the new perceptual and psychological understanding of the flux of experience for both Jaffa and Rowden. 381 00:47:07,810 --> 00:47:17,020 Both had come to favour painting, which was not too descriptive and documentary, but rather organic and metaphoric. 382 00:47:17,020 --> 00:47:24,550 If Gordon Back and Jeff was shared an oceanic metaphor in accounting for those crowd pictures in 1895, 383 00:47:24,550 --> 00:47:34,000 Jeff OIR had earlier used an animal one in his account of one of Moniz paintings of Bellshill off the Britannic coast. 384 00:47:34,000 --> 00:47:43,140 In 1887, Jeff Waas described rocks that poor girl far painted the previous year as Hamis Hilux, 385 00:47:43,140 --> 00:47:55,930 yellowed and reddened by autumnal vegetation, rounded and thick, like clumsily shaped creatures, pachyderms with thick crusts. 386 00:47:55,930 --> 00:47:58,480 This is a surprising reading. 387 00:47:58,480 --> 00:48:07,000 We'd expect Moniz rocks at Povo Floor to be seen as an example of impressionist naturalism painted Schoeffler motif true to local colour, 388 00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:14,950 responsive to specific atmospheric conditions. But Jeff White chose to read it metaphorically and organically. 389 00:48:14,950 --> 00:48:20,020 Eliding natural landscape with bestial forms. 390 00:48:20,020 --> 00:48:24,280 Alber all the aid did the same when he wrote about Hock's work. 391 00:48:24,280 --> 00:48:35,800 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. 392 00:48:35,800 --> 00:48:47,250 There are cypresses shooting up their nightmarish silhouettes of blackened flames, mountains arching their backs like mammoths or rhinoceroses. 393 00:48:47,250 --> 00:48:51,600 It was easier for Oria to write about than Hock's work in such a way because some 394 00:48:51,600 --> 00:48:56,970 of Vincent's recent canvases were so evidently quite distant from the descriptive, 395 00:48:56,970 --> 00:48:59,830 certainly further so the monitor's work. 396 00:48:59,830 --> 00:49:06,630 But using metaphor, as these critics did, was a means of responding to painting, which allied the critic with the artist, 397 00:49:06,630 --> 00:49:15,330 setting both against descriptive naturalism, which logically required critical response in descriptive prose. 398 00:49:15,330 --> 00:49:22,170 Metaphore allowed the writer a subtle suggested means of writing about new painterly idioms, 399 00:49:22,170 --> 00:49:30,240 which themselves sprang from artist's own changing intuitions about the external world. 400 00:49:30,240 --> 00:49:36,490 But critics could be no more consistent in their responses to paintings. The artists were in making them. 401 00:49:36,490 --> 00:49:44,620 We should not expect absolute consistency and artists any more than we should demand of painters and lucid theoretical account. 402 00:49:44,620 --> 00:49:55,270 But the inconsistencies can be eloquent. Look at Mommy's work in the Curs Valley in the massive stone tile in 1889, 403 00:49:55,270 --> 00:50:02,530 a painting looking down into a rushing mountain stream can be read as a triumph of impressionist naturalism. 404 00:50:02,530 --> 00:50:09,400 The play of paint approximating so closely to the immediate experience of vision. 405 00:50:09,400 --> 00:50:21,790 And yet that instant is part of a constant as the stream flows on and on past the watching artist. 406 00:50:21,790 --> 00:50:29,800 The sense of time is doubly apparent in canvases of sunset over the KERS Gorge. 407 00:50:29,800 --> 00:50:37,600 The sunset marks a moment in the short delay of the day, but the reveal itself comes by. 408 00:50:37,600 --> 00:50:46,150 The flowing river embodies the infinitely longer delay of geological time. 409 00:50:46,150 --> 00:50:50,800 Such canvasses inherently deal with time and flux. 410 00:50:50,800 --> 00:50:57,550 But monos letters written as he made them give no indication that such thoughts were on his mind. 411 00:50:57,550 --> 00:51:05,500 However, critics more habituated to articulating the wider intellectual culture, could make such connexions. 412 00:51:05,500 --> 00:51:12,160 In his preface for the exhibition of greenstick paintings that Monet staged in Paris in May 1891, 413 00:51:12,160 --> 00:51:24,100 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. 414 00:51:24,100 --> 00:51:33,460 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, 415 00:51:33,460 --> 00:51:38,860 leading the sciences to suggesting both the infinitely large and the infinitely small. 416 00:51:38,860 --> 00:51:47,440 In both cases, the intellectual making connexions between contemporary science and art, which the painter could only intuit. 417 00:51:47,440 --> 00:51:53,320 But painters did have a sense of larger patterns struggled with on their canvases. 418 00:51:53,320 --> 00:52:01,450 In 1889, the year Monet worked in the curs, Vanderhoff was painting 250 miles away in Sahili. 419 00:52:01,450 --> 00:52:06,460 Vincent was considerably more articulate in his letters than Monet. 420 00:52:06,460 --> 00:52:13,090 Much of his correspondence concerns the tension in his work between paintings made from nature, 421 00:52:13,090 --> 00:52:18,010 his preferred method and done from the imagination, which he found difficult. 422 00:52:18,010 --> 00:52:24,480 This dilemma is often taken to be a struggle between her habitual practise and personal expression. 423 00:52:24,480 --> 00:52:30,670 Stop the subject of my next lecture. That was indeed a central issue. 424 00:52:30,670 --> 00:52:38,470 But does it make enough of the differences between paintings such as Starry Night and this Olive Grove? 425 00:52:38,470 --> 00:52:47,380 One is still fundamentally descriptive, concerned to recreate the earth tones and textures of the trees and paint. 426 00:52:47,380 --> 00:52:53,590 The other is in my meaning of the term organic sist adapting style to become 427 00:52:53,590 --> 00:53:01,540 metaphorically analogous to the infinitude and indivisibility of time and nature. 428 00:53:01,540 --> 00:53:05,980 It would be quite wrong to attribute to Vanderhoff the ambition to realise a new 429 00:53:05,980 --> 00:53:11,560 kind of painting which tried to harmonise art and new understandings of science. 430 00:53:11,560 --> 00:53:19,900 That was Beaners aim when he was specifically commissioned to decorate buildings where experimental science was taught. 431 00:53:19,900 --> 00:53:24,520 But Van huh? Like Monet, intuited this interplay. 432 00:53:24,520 --> 00:53:29,700 And an astute critic like Jeff Quar could grasp it. 433 00:53:29,700 --> 00:53:39,750 Intuition is the crucial word here. I think this lecture has taken a meandering path through some very varied and perhaps surprising territory. 434 00:53:39,750 --> 00:53:49,110 Baner and Hall artists, little rated today, and probably you wouldn't expect to find their work considered alongside Moniz or Van Hock's. 435 00:53:49,110 --> 00:53:53,550 I've tried not to insist upon a single narrative when there isn't one. 436 00:53:53,550 --> 00:54:01,620 Neither would I try to claim that what I've called organic CISM qualifies as a style with certain consistent characteristics. 437 00:54:01,620 --> 00:54:07,110 But in the later eighties 1990s, there were intuitions or Montanti, 438 00:54:07,110 --> 00:54:14,340 which caused artists to think and work and critics and public to writer respond differently. 439 00:54:14,340 --> 00:54:22,290 These included the growing understanding that the material world in both macrocosm and microcosm was in constant flux. 440 00:54:22,290 --> 00:54:30,540 And so too was R ah psychological experience about world in terms of perception and memory. 441 00:54:30,540 --> 00:54:36,090 Linked to this was the recognition that it was science and its varied forms which generated this 442 00:54:36,090 --> 00:54:42,390 changing understanding and that in order to be modern art needed to keep pace with science. 443 00:54:42,390 --> 00:54:48,630 These pressures began to encourage some artists to rethink their relation to the naturalistic aesthetic, 444 00:54:48,630 --> 00:54:55,950 which itself was rooted in a scientific ethos that of positivist determinism, a whole and BNR, 445 00:54:55,950 --> 00:55:01,030 as we've seen, adapted from the conventional naturalism of the 14th of July. 446 00:55:01,030 --> 00:55:08,370 And the chemistry course to the chaos of energies, of the joys of life and life reborn from death. 447 00:55:08,370 --> 00:55:16,320 These were artists undertaking public commissions, promoting the Republic's energetic commitment to modernity and science. 448 00:55:16,320 --> 00:55:26,100 Significantly, they were prepared to adapt their styles to address developing scientific ideas, ideas that influenced politics itself, 449 00:55:26,100 --> 00:55:35,130 as in the case of solider ism BNR and carry out particularly aware of the need to generate new pictorial idioms which gave 450 00:55:35,130 --> 00:55:44,880 visual correspondence to the organism that by the 80s 90s was the most sophisticated way of understanding the world. 451 00:55:44,880 --> 00:55:51,030 Independent artists making work for private consumption had similar intuitions. 452 00:55:51,030 --> 00:55:57,420 Monet and Van Hoffe might have continued to work largely from nature, but their work became increasingly, 453 00:55:57,420 --> 00:56:06,750 if not always consistently concerned, to articulate responses to the visible world that were mobile quite independently. 454 00:56:06,750 --> 00:56:10,860 They used personal style. The pattern of brushwork. 455 00:56:10,860 --> 00:56:15,120 The exaggeration of rhythm. The harmonisation of colour to create paintings. 456 00:56:15,120 --> 00:56:23,430 The handling of which did not depict, but echoed the energies of flux of at the energies and flux of nature paintings that 457 00:56:23,430 --> 00:56:29,160 caused observers to discuss them either with scientific analogies or with metaphors, 458 00:56:29,160 --> 00:56:35,700 which are both the cross referential comprehension of things which were so modern. 459 00:56:35,700 --> 00:56:48,630 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. 460 00:56:48,630 --> 00:56:51,620 It is certainly not stylistic. 461 00:56:51,620 --> 00:57:01,140 The organism which I've been Adam rating found varied forms only loosely consistent and their fluid contours and pulsing shapes. 462 00:57:01,140 --> 00:57:07,950 But such paintings shared an unspoken aesthetic, striving to create a new painting, 463 00:57:07,950 --> 00:57:15,150 articulating modernity but no longer describing modern life sensitive to scientific progress 464 00:57:15,150 --> 00:57:27,797 and deeply responsive to the vast energies and eternally interactive rhythms of nature.