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Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the first event in a series of four terror lectures in American art.

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This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering, exploration,

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understanding and the enjoyment of the visual art of the United States for both national and international audiences.

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In collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College,

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the foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art.

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This year, Emily C. Burns is the terror visiting professor for 20, 2020 21.

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My name is Wes Williams.

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I'm a professor in French and also the director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities here at the University of Oxford,

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and we are delighted to host this series, which has been included as part of the live online event series in the Humanities Cultural Programme.

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One of the founding students for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.

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Throughout this evening's lecture, if you have any questions,

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please feel free to type them in the YouTube chat box and we'll do our best to answer them as part of this session.

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I'm delighted that this lecture will be introduced and chaired by Professor Peter Gibson.

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Peter, who teaches American literature and culture in the English department at McGill University in McGreal in Canada,

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where has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life.

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And Oliver Wendell Holmes and The Culture of Conversation.

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So we should be in for a treat tonight as we have all of those involved conversation and also mass culture and everyday life.

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A fine person that interested to introduce today's lecture, not least because he has also worked on a wide range of writers and artists,

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done pioneering work in social and cultural spaces from shopping malls,

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spectacles through to the experience of Flannery wandering through the streets.

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Roughly speaking, in 19th century shopping arcades and cosmopolitanism in 19th century American literature,

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once you know what we're talking about this evening, you'll realise why he's one of the best people we could imagine to introduce tonight's lecture.

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And it's my great pleasure then to welcome Peter this evening. And now, Peter, I'll hand over to you and disappear from your screens for now.

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Thank you. Thank you, West, and thank you.

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It was great to meet you at this time, actually, and thanks to all the people at church for setting up this event.

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I'd also like to thank the Terra Foundation for their support for this lecture series,

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as well as for the visiting professor programme that has brought Professor Emily Burns to Oxford for this year.

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It's a real pleasure for me to have the opportunity to introduce Emily today and in the process

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to get reacquainted and updated on her work in a number of areas very close to my own interests.

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In fact, one of the outstanding things about Emily's work is that it is so wide ranging in its implications.

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And so can raise stimulating questions for a diverse range of audiences, bringing together visual arts,

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literature, cultural history, intellectual history and so on and so on.

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I first met Emily several years ago at a symposium in Utah in which she was testing out initial ideas about American art and innocence and fantasy.

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Eichler Paris the ideas that broke the ground for this ambitious project she will be lecturing about in this talk series.

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So I am truly excited to be here today to see where she has taken those initial intriguing ideas.

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Emily is an Associate Professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar of transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Her publications include a book Transnational Frontiers The American West in France, University of Oklahoma Press 2018,

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and a Forthcoming Volume co-edited with Alice Rudy Price mapping, impressionist painting and transnational contexts, which will be out this spring.

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She has also published journal articles. Exhibition catalogue essays and anthology chapters related to art and circulation to U.S. artists in France.

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Two American Impressionism during her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art.

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Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow at Worcester College,

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Professor Burns will complete a book manuscript from which today's talk comes.

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Performing innocence, cultural relatedness and U.S. Art and Fantasy Zecler Paris.

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So without further ado, I will hand things over to Emily Burns.

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Thank you so much, Peter, for that kind introduction and for acting as moderator and discussions.

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My thanks as well to my wonderful colleagues and students here in the history of our

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department at the University of Oxford and Worcester College for hosting me this year.

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I also want to thank Torch for managing the attack and making this lecture globally available.

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And, of course, the Terra Foundation for American Art for generously funding this professorship.

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In 1891, London's Independent printed a series of comments by Canadian novelist Gilbert Parker about American art students in Paris.

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Parker initiated his discussion. One cannot feel the force of American aspiration in culture and arts until one has seen art life in Paris.

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Four years earlier, the U.S. expatriate writer Henry James made a similar claim in an article about fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent's.

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It sounds like a paradox, but it is the simple truth that when today we look for American art, we find it mainly in Paris.

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Parker and James both imply that Paris became the unlikely staging ground for U.S. art in the fantasy club as U.S. artists arrived in waves,

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building towards thousands per year over the decades between the U.S. Civil War and the start of World War One,

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hoping to tap into a lucrative market for French painting in the United States.

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Most U.S. artists took undertook academic training at the occulted bazaar, or a smaller private ateliers.

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This training was designed to build the artistic maturity suggested by Frederick Arthur Bridgeman,

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glowing the monumental history of painting funeral of a Mummy on the Nile from the late 1870s and by a photograph of Elizabeth Jane Gardner,

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who lived in Paris from the 1860s and later married French painter William Adolph Boogaloo, who taught many US artists in Paris.

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Gardner pauses beside her painting of a Madonna and child holding her brush palette and miles stick to demonstrate her careful hand control.

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Yeah, it's by the late 1880s, backlash ensued about this aesthetic mirroring,

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with the New York Times declaring that Bridgeman quotes by method or subject or character in paint is not American at all.

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And with critic Theodore Childs sneering that Gardner's paintings must be by boogaloo rather than her own.

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In response to the feared adulteration of American art by French cultural hegemony, critics,

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writers and artists increasingly leaned on persistence articulations of American cultural innocence.

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After suggesting that a main goal of modern art was to be naive in his 1891 article,

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Parker mused What commands better suited to the American temperaments if it has any quality which is conspicuously eminent?

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It is naive to say it is a habit of looking at things as if they were seen for the first time.

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He persisted that the American sees things with no intervening veil of convention and tradition.

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He is made to be independent and free from his youth up. He is impelled to think things out for himself.

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He is told in effect from his cradle to be naive.

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With these comments, Parker taps into and reinforces a longstanding myth about US culture as innocence and naive compared with European civilisation.

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And while Parker's is a single text, as we will see, it is by no means singular.

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He is part of a chorus of constitutive commentaries both celebratory and derisive during this period.

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Parker's comments tease out the paradoxes at work in such claims of knowing innocence and savvy naivety.

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Phrases like Baid to be independent and free told to be naive.

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And his description of the habits of looking at things as if they're seen for the first time.

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Mark this wily contradiction.

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Philosopher Immanuel Kant had noted that there is a first within a sense since the definition of naivety is heartlessness.

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An art of being naive, he says, is a contradiction.

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Likewise, the art historian John House has observed quote all ideas of naivety and the primitive are themselves cultural, not natural.

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The very concept of innocence presupposes knowledge.

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Building on houses, insistence that one historic size these quests further than they have to and the primitive.

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This lecture series offers an intellectual history of the concepts of innocence,

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naivety and heartlessness that had currency for Americans in Fantasy Paris and explores how materiality,

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iconography, writing and social performance intersected with this discourse.

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These layered representations in text, image and dialogue resonate with the paradox of their very implausibility.

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The goal of these discussions is not to ratify these myths or to call them back into currency,

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but rather first to show how the myth operates as fiction through intermediate iterations,

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and second to show how cultural production, especially in the visual world, intersected and became part of this transnational conversation.

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While much of this material is humorous,

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I encourage us to think with and through that humour to the anxieties beneath the surface of these exaggerated operations of parody,

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as USA identity is perpetually questioned, contested, performed and re inscribed through art making and criticism.

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Today, I will build a matrix of fluid interwoven and layered definitions of innocence that circulated in and

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about the U.S. colony in Paris in art criticism in popular culture and literature by Mark Twain,

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Henry James and Edith Wharton. And consider some of the social, social, philosophical and artistic implications of this construct and its currency.

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These discussions build on earlier debates about aesthetics in U.S. literature.

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Mark Bauerlein has shown how Ralph Waldo Emerson projected the need not only for newness in literary contents from quotes,

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new lands, new men, new thoughts, but also a new mode of expression.

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Nancy Rittenberg argued that antebellum literary practise imagines a personality for US poetry, but in a paradoxically,

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I'm quoting from her here mandated prerequisite of inarticulate ness for an authentic national poetic selfhood.

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Well, Whitman's leaves of grass, published in 1855, idolises the US as a young country with no history in thoughts.

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Whitman extolled how America illustrates birth, muscular use, the promise, the sheer fulfilments, the absolute success.

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Yet Rutenberg points out his posturing of what she calls an aesthetic of innocence,

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which he's announcing through his own description of his indescribable freshness and unconsciousness.

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Pairing art and art looseness, he pointedly wrote, The art of Art's The Glory of expression and the sunshine of the letters is simplicity.

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This tension echoes in conversations about art practise in front of secular Paris.

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U.S. artists attempts to gain technical maturity,

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stumbled into long standing debates about what the arts in a so-called young country should look like.

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If critics similarly expected a U.S. art to emerge from perceived cultural innocence and the absence of art,

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what then were style or were artists stylistic choices?

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And further, if Bridgeman and Gardner's quoting of gleaming glazed surfaces were not its, could there be an art lost art?

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It is my contention that articulations of U.S. cultural innocence in Paris asserted an

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anxious cultural scarcity in the sense of claiming absence of art in the so-called new world,

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but also a projection of U.S. possibility which inverted this critique to imagine what security might offer to art making.

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Playing with these traits and their complexities in Paris, U.S. artists, writers and travellers projected their own relatedness.

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In other words, they collectively builds a sense of American culture as comparatively behinds to lead and not yet arrived.

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The ironic result American studies scholar Brent Burns, Hexagon Tensor General,

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has argued of constantly projecting a new sense of projecting a sense of newness and an obsession with futurity in cultural production hurts.

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The generous suggests a circularity unfolds between tellings of history and an end of myth,

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operating in a manner akin to what Griselda Pollock has called avant garde gambits.

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Americans performance of innocence in Paris functioned as a cultural gambits.

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Pollack describes a process of reference difference and sorry, let me start that again.

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Polly could. Describes the process of reference, deference and difference that characterised avant garde production in fantasy include Paris,

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where artists engage with and nod to previous artists and then distort and displace that model with their own intervention.

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This transnational dialogue operated in a similar feedback circuit, as French artists and critics keen to imagine US relatedness.

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Many individuals adopted and performed to these ideas of cultural use reciprocally,

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but also dislodged them for cultural gain through repeated iterative performances in material production and social practise.

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With this theoretical and critical foundation,

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let's turn to sketching out the trajectory of this discourse and contextualising the currency of these turns in constant refraction.

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In Franco US exchange, the late 19th and early 20th century conversation operates in dialogue with perhaps the original American Innocence in Paris.

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Benjamin Franklin living in Paris from eating from 1777 until 18 1785.

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Clearly, I'm stuck in the 19th century. Franklin became an icon of New World eccentricity.

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Then, in his 70s, his bumbling French and refusal to adapt to the comportment of the French

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aristocracy by wearing his simple and embroidered cloak and appearing in court

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without makeup or wig rendered him charming and peculiar to French observers curious about the citizens of an incipient nation primitive this mirage.

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One scholar called him French prince often present Franklin as a humble philosophy as

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in this image depicting him wearing spectacles and a fur wrapped around his head.

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A naive man in a sophisticated world, the image plays with stereotypes of the United States as an untamed wilderness and the fur trade,

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which framed French presence in the north in North America for centuries.

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A prince made in Philadelphia by Anton Lowenstein Franklin's reception at the Court of France imagines Franklin

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sticking out as a curiosity in the midst of the French courts as a woman places a laurel wreath over his witless head,

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resulting in the rapt attention and ears of King Louis, the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette's who are seated at right and leaning towards him.

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The sumptuous fabrics and gowns and drapes juxtaposed Franklin's simple dress, which cultivates the idea of the simple, humble and pious American.

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Yeah, it's Franklin's international personality is complex.

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While some fellow US revolutionaries, such as John Adams, were critical of his lack of French skills,

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and some French observers saw through what one described as a chameleon persona.

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Franklin's character of savvy naivety deflected attention from his goals of persuading French monarchical support for the revolutionary cause.

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As Peter Gibson has argued, Franklin's writings mark him as a key cosmopolitan figure for early Americans in his transnational abilities.

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And while the influx of Americans in Paris came a century after Franklin's stay,

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reminders of that cultural history circulated through the publication in the 1880s as an extended two volume book Franklin in France.

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The other important precursory voice for the circulation of these myths in front of secular Paris is Alexis de Tocqueville,

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whose democracy in America, published in the 1840s, remained in print.

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While Tocqueville was often a shrewd critic of U.S. racial politics.

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He also furthered ideas of national newness that French critics parroted when they made statements about Americans as A. Formulaic.

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Tocqueville described the American philosophical method as driven by the attempt to quote escape from imposed systems,

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the yoke of habits to treat tradition as valuable information only,

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and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better.

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Tocqueville pressed on the idea of Americans as enacting perpetual discovery and issuing formulae,

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writing No craftsman's axiom Nixon ever makes an American pause.

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He is not attached more to one way of working than to another. He has no preference for old methods compared to new one.

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He has created no habits of his own, and he can reasonably easily rid himself of any influence foreign habits might have over his mind.

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Four. He knows that his country is like no other and that his situation is something new in the world.

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The spectre of Tocqueville's assertions loom in the later century.

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Thomas Couture, a French painter who taught many American art students in Paris, remarks.

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For instance, in 1870, the American seems to hold the principle not to take what's offered to him going continually to discovery.

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He takes only that which he thinks he has discovered. U.S. writers in Paris later echoed Tocqueville's constructs, too.

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In nineteen one, the American Register, which was the English language newspaper of the U.S. Colony in Paris,

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advertised the American love of the new, which they described as the new the untried, the unexplored.

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As one of the country's national peculiarities across the span of decades,

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these comments suggest a refracted feedback loop of cultural stare stereotype of a futurity that resulted in relatedness in the art world.

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Explicit discussions of U.S. innocence and naivety began to appear around the end of the Civil War,

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concurrent with the first large wave of U.S. artists travelling to Paris, where they became so numerous as to be called their own genius.

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By the end of the century. Some of this rhetoric emerged in the early 1860s in the US as genocide.

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Simon has shown the arts magazine the new path encouraged artists to embrace their innate heartlessness.

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Editor Clarence Cooke celebrated that U.S. artists are, quote, not hampered by too many traditions,

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and they enjoy the almost inevitable advantage of having no past, no masters and no schools.

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Framing his conclusions with tropes of cultural youth, Cook wrote these conditions of a childish simplicity and ignorance in matters of arts,

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coupled with a strong and wide interest in such matters, albeit uninformed,

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untrained and perceptions naturally direct and true are nowhere to be found today as pure as they are in America.

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Cooke reshapes the liability, childishness, simplicity, ignorance,

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uninformed and trains of lacking art culture into an asset linked with fresh perception and even a suggested authenticity.

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On the eve of his departure to study in Paris in 1866, US Peter Thomas Eakins wrote to his friend and fellow artist William Sartain,

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offering an etymology of the word naive, which arose from their debates about whether nature and art were diametrically opposed.

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Eakins noted that Sartain had privileged, artless as central to the definition of native,

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and Eakins agreed that humans tended to create a frequent contrast between

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nature and art nature associated with the native and art with careful control.

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Then Eakins identified related concepts to naive, noting that they all emphasised things passively received.

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And he listed those terms, and in his actual letter, he offers a more detailed analysis of each one of them.

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But they are art less unaffected, unassuming, open, sincere on pretending, undisguised,

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candid, simple, unstudied frank unpremeditated concluding there are, I suppose, many more.

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Eakins resolved and suggested his aesthetic priorities as he began training in Paris by arguing, quote Nature and art are about the same words.

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While Eakins and Sartain focussed on whether nature and art were opposed or linked,

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US artists in in France publicly debated these and other aspects of innocence and its contradictions.

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They wondered, for instance, how the same term could be used to define use morality and also heedless ness and recklessness.

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Robert Henry wryly observed that in Paris quotes many things that in America would

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be the height of indecency occur about us with an innocence that is really amusing.

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Such discussions also reverberated back and forth between France and the United States.

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In 1895, this painting, I think this one by Alan Peter Hall,

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was removed from a dealer's window in Baltimore due to complaints about its propriety entitled Innocence.

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The painting shows a nude young girl with a bow on her head,

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kissing a dive which she cradles in her arms with the figure pressed up against the

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front of the picture plane and her body extended almost the full height of the canvas,

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with only a thin, gauzy veil stretching down in front of her pubic area.

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Some Baltimore residents saw the painting as immoral in spite of its title and the girl's young age.

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That this painting of the nude could be so titled suggest differences in defining the term in France than in the United States.

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In France, Pablo's title likely drew from the useful nature of the prepubescent figure veiled in modesty,

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whereas the painting's U.S. detractors associated the scarcely veiled body with depravity.

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The response of the U.S. community in Paris to the scandal fell between these fluctuating definitions,

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largely because of the painting's academic style.

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The writer for the American Register mused Consider the artist very discreet and conventional treatments,

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and it would seem difficult to find anything in the most remote way suggestive.

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These contradictory positions around this episode implies a spectrum of complex ideas

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of innocence circulating in objects and in newspapers between Paris and the US.

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Discussion of these terms and their related meanings for nation and art speaks to a building currency in the post-Civil War period,

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especially in Paris. While debates about U.S. cultural production have been going on since founding,

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overt claims to cultural innocence took on an urgency in this period, likely because it was a myth increasingly challenged by social realities.

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As James wrote in 1879, the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind.

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It introduced into the national consciousness a sense of the proportion and

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relation of the worlds being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed.

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The future more treacherous success more difficult. The American has eaten of the tree of knowledge.

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James intimated that the Civil War incited a paradigm shift in U.S. culture and self-perception,

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knowing postures of innocence sought to remedy a nation's shattered by war,

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failed reconstruction, divisive financial interests, unresolved racial politics, the genocide of indigenous populations, immigration and urbanisation.

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Uneasy projections of U.S. innocence resounded more loudly at precisely the moment when geopolitical events suggest its implausibility,

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and many U.S. artists, critics and writers seem to be attempting to enact a kind of return impossibly to the idealism.

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Of Whitman. Mark Twain cracked about the contradiction of this perpetual renewal in 1883.

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The world in books are so accustomed to use and overused the word new in connexion with our country

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that we early gets and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.

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Innocence also performs the cultural work of forgetting othering and obscuring imperialism, as critic comic Bob Barr has suggested.

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Building on comments from this period by writers such as Ernst Clinton,

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inscriptions of national character often and act of quote strange forgetting of the history of the nation's past.

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The violence involved in establishing the nation's writ in the U.S.

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Innocence in acts amnesia to deny and obfuscate the histories of slavery and American Indian removal.

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Constructions of national newness obscured settler colonialism by reinforcing

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misconceptions that the landscape was empty when Anglo European settlers arrived.

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Tocqueville, for instance, implied that the North American landscape was terra nullius, what he described as the still empty cradle of a great nation,

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a concept that was recycled by imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt, who reiterated the false narrative of the continent as little populate it.

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Furthermore, as performance, historian Robin Bernstein and young and psychologist Barry Spectre have both argued innocence requires and other.

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It insists upon the duality of being innocent from something or someone else.

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In this way, ideas of cultural innocence, re inscribed race hierarchies and finally,

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projections of cultural innocence deflected attention from U.S. imperial ambition,

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which were often played off in humour, such as in a comment in an illustration in 1881 that decried Americanisation with the comment.

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The new continent is menacing us with their purely Yankee novelty or, as Mrs. Tristan jokes to Christopher Newman in James's The American.

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You are the great western by their barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might gazing a while at this poor,

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effete old world and then swooping down on its innocence and might an uneasy pairing that renders a this paradoxical position.

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Such resounding, an exaggerated insistence reads as parody in trains The Innocents Abroad, which was published in 1869.

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Twain plays with the term innocence to refer to the gullibility of U.S. travellers who make the pilgrimage to Europe.

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The book's Frontispiece The Pilgrims vision, which you see here,

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depicts its white male figures gazing dreamily into formations of key world monuments in the clouds,

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underscoring the possibilities enabled by imaginary, flexible and unencumbered visions.

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There is an undergirding trope of U.S. discovery turning back to Europe here, but more explicitly,

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the text caricatures tourists desperately seeking European culture, their grand tour filling a gap in their identity.

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Tween mocks his narrator in Paris, whose breath is taken away most by the sight of an American flag hanging in front of the house in the next episode.

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The narrator guileless these shouts to his companion about the beauty of a woman nearby,

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assuming she spoke only French when she condemned his brashness in quotes.

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Good, pure English, he did not feel right.

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Comfortable for some time afterward, he ruminated, Why will some people be so stupid as to suppose themselves?

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The only foreigners amongst a crowd of ten thousand persons rendered by the New York Company fame, Cox, and loosely based on Twain himself?

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The figure in the accompanying illustration is displayed as uncouth, with his arms and legs splayed as though he is off balance.

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His eyebrows are raised, enhancing his wide eyed, open mouthed expression.

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His bowler hat renders him out of step with the chic stove hat stovepipe hats that abound in the background.

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The figure marks a parody of American newness, especially compared with Holly Years rendering of Whitman.

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Here, the poet's tilted hat in hand are casually resting on his hips.

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Both naturalising allusions to the rustic common American man he seems confident, assured, unencumbered in comparison with his ignorance.

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Twain can't muster the persona of Whitman's new American man,

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and I'm interested to note that this transition also seems to play out in aesthetics, too.

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If we think about the fine nuance of the stipple engraving that you see on the

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left in Collier's print of Whitman compared with the gestural and phonetic.

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Lines that make up the engraving from the innocents abroad, U.S. callousness in international settings was often also expressed in monetised terms.

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In another scene from innocents abroad, Twain mocks attempts by American tourists to engage culture by visiting the U.S.,

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but who were thwarted by insistent guides who brought them to markets and silk shops instead.

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The illustration depicts the helpless tourists swept amid their protestations to this magazine by the tour guide who directs the coach driver.

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Twain concluded that this situation recurred frequently.

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It need not be supposed that we were a stupider or an easier prey than our countrymen generally are for we were not.

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The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first time and

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sees insights alone or in the company with others as little experienced as himself.

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Twain's humour maps the closeness of his main characters onto Americans as a whole, and this becomes the trope in succeeding decades.

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I'll just say you one quick example.

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In 1892, Corwin Linson described a cab driver knowingly charging one franc too much from American art students arriving in Paris.

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In Winston's illustration, he renders the driver almost demonic,

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with his synder goggles gleaming as he stretches his palms out toward the viewer for the coins.

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And I apologise if this image gives anyone nightmares. A Parker Brothers word game.

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The amusing game of innocents abroad, released in 1888, invited players to imagine themselves as one of twins tourists.

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And it also reveals some of the strange contours of this discourse of cultural innocence and travel.

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On the cover of the box, a family hurriedly transfer across a dock from a train to the steamboats, the Port Washington.

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Yeah, it's this boat looks more like a riverboat than a transatlantic ship, and the view across the water renders close to the opposite side.

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The travellers overlaid them with bags as they scuttle across the dock do not seem to travel far with generic titles.

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The board also does not define any particular place, and there's no monuments or cities one would normally find on a grand tour,

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unlike the current game ticket to ride, which has very specific destinations.

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Here, the player remains scarcely abroad, travelling within the safe confines of an accessible, unplaced landscape.

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In the game, two ponds migrate the criminal lithographic board simultaneously, one through the pastoral landscape at the bottom and right,

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and the other through the possible outcomes of travelling, which are mostly pretty benign.

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Purchasing flippers or tooth powder and most drastically losing one's wallet, the winner makes it through the landscape the most quickly.

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But having spent the least amount of money, Twain's and Vincent's images and this game elevate a kind of anxiety of encountering the world outside the

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safe confines of the nation and draw particular attention to financial duress as a key danger of travel.

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In these iterations, the guileless American is no match for the savvy European.

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James's characters have a better shot ever attuned to what he described as the international theme.

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James was unsatisfied with the simplistic projection of a stifling and constructive American godlessness.

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He instead saw increasingly an art looseness that could be freeing for his U.S. travellers abroad,

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offering a kind of fortunate fall from a position of innocence.

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Even by embracing its very tenets, while contradicted the concept of artful naivety,

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he also wrote that there is quote certainly the possibility of presenting.

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They obtain a fictitious character and then it is a fine, though also rare art.

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This seems a fitting gauntlet for James is writing from Daisy Miller of 1878 to the

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ambassadors of Oh three James's characters exhibit a qualified innocence in Daisy Miller.

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Daisy's own guileless ness is complicated by Winterbourne awareness of her projection of innocence as a knowing social posture.

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He muses about the moonlit excursion that led Daisy to catch Ronan Fever and die.

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There you go. What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she feigned.

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How promptly she sought to play off on him a surprised and injured innocence.

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From here, James builds an increasingly complicated trope of innocence.

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He in 1982 offered a lengthy discussion on this theme The Dawn of the American Consciousness

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to the complicated world it was so persistently to annexe is the more touching,

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the more primitive we make that consciousness.

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But we must recognise that the latter can scarcely be interesting to us in proportion as we make it purely Sherman's primitives.

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The self-reflection places James's project as centred on an awakening of US culture to its naive position,

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and it also builds an imperialist tone through annexation of commandeering that world.

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But guileless isn't enough for James, who continues the interest is in its becoming perceptive and responsive,

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and the charming, the amusing, the pathetic. The romantic drama is exactly that process.

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The process must have begun in order to determine the psychological moments.

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But there is a fine bewilderment it must have kept in order not to anticipate the age of CTT.

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James notes his goals to move beyond simplistic dichotomies between innocence and experience to a qualified innocence in which a layered,

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naive take could awaken the spirit in the later novel.

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The ambassadors James entangles at least five different concepts of innocence, almost all of them tied to mobility.

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There is the newness projected by Lambert's brother when he arrived overseas with the goal to disentangle his fiancee,

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sons Chad, from his Parisian life.

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Playing with ideas of youth, then in his mid-50s stretched their notes quote, he had never expected again to find himself young.

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He also described feeling his quote Sense of self launched into something quite

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disconnected from the sense of the past and which was literally beginning there and then.

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Innocence is also framed in Struthers propriety,

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with his insistent perception of Chad's relationship with the married Madame Devaney as innocence as in Daisy Miller,

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Innocence operates through exterior social performance as Strother scrutinises the possible romance between Chad and Vivian.

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And probing whether quotes there art were all in innocence or their innocence were all in art.

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James also took up heartlessness as Strother in Paris becomes increasingly unencumbered, giving himself over to quote uncontrolled perceptions.

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The denouement of the book is framed by yet another kind of heartlessness through wandering

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on a rambling day stretched their attempts to be heartless as he takes a train out of Paris,

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selected almost at random with a destination chosen by instinct.

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And interestingly, this is also how US artists in Shivani describe initially finding the village in the 1880s.

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James narrates these scenes with languid and wandering language that parallels the experience of the character.

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Strother walks idly through the landscape alongside a river resting lazily in the fields,

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imagining himself and I quote again from James freely walking about and he's inside a painting by Amuse Charlotte, meaning that he recalled from a.

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An art gallery on Fremont Streets, James Toys,

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with the tension between the artfulness of walking inside a painting and the arts looseness that frames the day,

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or as literary scholar Zachary Sica puts it, quote heartless enough.

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And yet Struthers conception of the French countryside is wholly conditioned by art, and I want to linger with you in this passage.

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James leads us in and out of the quote oblong gilt frame that disposed its enclosing lines the poplars and willows, the reeds and river,

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a river of which he didn't know and didn't want to know the name, fell into a composition full of Felicity within them.

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The sky was silver and turquoise and varnish. The village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey.

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It was all there in shorts. It was all he wanted. It was Fremont Street.

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It was France. It was Lumbini.

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James's language re mingles nature and art as Akin sought to do in his deep dive on the naive in the sky of silver and turquoise and

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varnish perceptions of colour dissolve into material and matter the lighting painting as represented scene and as material surface.

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Struthers Ambling opens him to self-discovery as he saunters along put a river which set on to float almost before one could take up the oars.

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The idle play of which would be more over the aid to the full impression Strother breaks free from his stilted identity.

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The flow of the river currents taking control as this current carries a rowboat with Chad

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and Vuyani Anstruther understands finally the romantic nature of their relationship.

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He recognised at last that he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing.

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Verily, verily. His labour had been lost. He found himself.

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Supposing innumerable and wonderful things. Strother is heartless.

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Ramble through the countryside, forces him to move. Through his self-imposed naivety,

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instructor James designs a complex and awakening form of naivety that replaces guileless ness with something that is creative

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and personally generates generative possibility that is enabled by stepping into the liminal space between art and innocence.

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James's contest between these entangled,

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even paradoxical ideas of innocence that find bewilderment frames the layers of U.S. projections of naivety in Paris.

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Edith Wharton also played with the paradoxical nature of deliberate claims to innocence,

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recalling Cosmopolitan New York in the 1870s from 1920 in the age of innocence.

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Protagonist Newland Archer responds to his fiancee may well end highlighting the uneasy nature of the quote Hieroglyphic World,

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where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

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Wharton builds a semiotics of innocence when he had gone the brief round of her.

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He returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence was only an artificial product.

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Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent. It was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile,

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and he felt himself oppressed by this creation of fictitious purity so cunningly manufactured.

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As in James's late work, Horton stresses the contradictory and constructed postures behind Candide innocence,

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like Con Wharton, questions the possibility of true native innocence.

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She registers instead human nature as naturally riddled with instinctive guile

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together comments and critical discussion alongside these larger narrations by Twain,

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James and Wharton of the American innocent structure interwoven definitions of innocence that raise questions about interior and exterior selves,

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materiality and imagery. The simple and the complex that reverberates in the American community in Paris.

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The semiotics of innocence as projected and tried on for size,

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fundamentally shaped Franco US artistic dialogue in the second empire and Third Republic.

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At stake in these gambits was partly the question of what the United States could contribute to an international art world.

383
00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:29,100
For some, cultural relatedness enabled the freedom of eclectic selection.

384
00:45:29,100 --> 00:45:36,480
As Tocqueville had also opined, James wrote of this future amalgamation in a letter in 1867.

385
00:45:36,480 --> 00:45:41,460
To have no interest, no national stamp has hitherto been a regrets and drawback.

386
00:45:41,460 --> 00:45:46,200
But I think it's not likely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast

387
00:45:46,200 --> 00:45:51,990
intellectual fusion and synthesis of various national tendencies of the world

388
00:45:51,990 --> 00:45:57,270
is in the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen

389
00:45:57,270 --> 00:46:02,880
pulseaudio the architects who had designed the printing department store in Paris,

390
00:46:02,880 --> 00:46:11,160
likewise elevated synthesis when he honoured Bozak architect Richard Morris Hunt at an award dinner in 1893

391
00:46:11,160 --> 00:46:17,190
by suggesting that the use of U.S. art made it like a honeybee collecting nectar from around the world,

392
00:46:17,190 --> 00:46:23,400
which he said would quote Taste of the Future with marvels of art, young and new.

393
00:46:23,400 --> 00:46:32,430
The deal celebrates selective amalgamation enabled by the purported blank slate in Hunt's eclectic and layered engagements with European architectural

394
00:46:32,430 --> 00:46:42,690
traditions such as that seen in the Italianate Marble House at Newports and the neo-Gothic French inspired chateau of Biltmore in North Carolina.

395
00:46:42,690 --> 00:46:48,360
Others proposed that such a synthetic model would not suit and instead argued that U.S.

396
00:46:48,360 --> 00:46:54,840
artists could contribute an art less arts by building on what academic painter Walter Gilman,

397
00:46:54,840 --> 00:46:58,560
Ellen Page described as native crudeness.

398
00:46:58,560 --> 00:47:07,860
While French critic a man has been maligned that parsimonious American contributions to the Universal Exposition of 1867,

399
00:47:07,860 --> 00:47:13,510
which were a cottage and a rural schoolhouse and an Illinois bakery,

400
00:47:13,510 --> 00:47:19,680
and they were paltry submissions in part due to government just organisation following a civil war.

401
00:47:19,680 --> 00:47:26,580
But now has been concluded that they represented what he described as humble cabins,

402
00:47:26,580 --> 00:47:34,260
whose grandeur is entirely moral for in the middle of these riches in the fare around which are dead.

403
00:47:34,260 --> 00:47:38,640
They symbolise the birth of the future for malice being.

404
00:47:38,640 --> 00:47:48,540
These structures transform the absence of grandeur into an advantage, as well as a harbinger of future aesthetic of simplicity and morality.

405
00:47:48,540 --> 00:47:54,240
Although I should add that the late and very Mr Francois Bruni has suggested that

406
00:47:54,240 --> 00:48:00,030
Mao's theme was actually funded by the U.S. to make such a complimentary statements.

407
00:48:00,030 --> 00:48:11,250
But Malmsteen is not alone in this commentary. French art as art critic on Clay Michel observed in 1886 that with their retained attachment to nature,

408
00:48:11,250 --> 00:48:21,450
U.S. artists in France possessed a quote candour and even sincerity that all of the skill of our most talented virtuosos will never attain.

409
00:48:21,450 --> 00:48:25,990
They bring us and innocence of expression of vigorous and honest simplicity that.

410
00:48:25,990 --> 00:48:29,380
Captivates charms and calms us,

411
00:48:29,380 --> 00:48:36,730
Gilbert Parker also took up this thread when he wrote about the naivety of American artists in Paris as a contribution to modernism.

412
00:48:36,730 --> 00:48:42,220
Implicit in these ideas is the expectation of French cultural decline.

413
00:48:42,220 --> 00:48:46,850
Parker claims that French art was limited in its quest for naivety.

414
00:48:46,850 --> 00:48:51,190
A because of what Parker saw as an ennui, a more badness in the brain,

415
00:48:51,190 --> 00:48:58,070
which comes from overfed imaginations, so kind of fuelling a discourse of decadence.

416
00:48:58,070 --> 00:49:06,200
For Parker, French artists were overburdened with the weight of history and tradition, whereas U.S. cultural use was comparatively unencumbered.

417
00:49:06,200 --> 00:49:15,830
And in this discussion, long standing presumptions of U.S. innate heartlessness collided with modernism search for renewal.

418
00:49:15,830 --> 00:49:24,860
Whether a cultural blank slate enabled, eclectic accrual in original ways or a projection of an art less visual language,

419
00:49:24,860 --> 00:49:31,220
these tropes of innocence in Paris designed a U.S. art as pristine but also sterile,

420
00:49:31,220 --> 00:49:38,480
fresh but also undeveloped, rugged but also savage and childlike, but also childish.

421
00:49:38,480 --> 00:49:47,120
The next two three lectures will explore how U.S. artists working in Paris capitalised on these entangled definitions of innocence

422
00:49:47,120 --> 00:49:54,980
in both aesthetic and social practise as they navigated foreign art study through other discourse sources of the period,

423
00:49:54,980 --> 00:50:00,200
including Protestantism and work ethic, race and modern psychology.

424
00:50:00,200 --> 00:50:07,940
In closing, I'll note that the United States was by no means the only country that adopted Pileated strategically.

425
00:50:07,940 --> 00:50:13,790
Rather, this case is part of a larger rise of multiple and alternative modern isms,

426
00:50:13,790 --> 00:50:19,790
and temporality is that scholars are increasingly tracing in the age of nationalism.

427
00:50:19,790 --> 00:50:26,060
A study day on planning for later this spring will invite wider analysis of relatedness and modernity,

428
00:50:26,060 --> 00:50:34,580
such as that presented by settler artists in colonial Australia. Vasily Kandinsky is interested in Russian ethnography and folk arts,

429
00:50:34,580 --> 00:50:41,240
returns to handicraft production in the arts and crafts movements in Britain, the US and Russia,

430
00:50:41,240 --> 00:50:52,460
alongside projections of relatedness which were imposed as colonial exports, while paradoxical in claim and speaking to a discourse of exceptionalism.

431
00:50:52,460 --> 00:50:57,500
U.S. projections of relatedness in France were also not entirely unique.

432
00:50:57,500 --> 00:51:09,440
Thank you for your attention and I welcome your question, friends and comments.

433
00:51:09,440 --> 00:51:14,540
Thank you so much, Emily. That was a very loaded lecture.

434
00:51:14,540 --> 00:51:16,580
You know, a loaded 50 minutes,

435
00:51:16,580 --> 00:51:25,040
you sketched a wide sweep of history and you gave a lot of thought provoking case studies that should stimulate a lot of questions,

436
00:51:25,040 --> 00:51:32,210
and we do have some questions already coming in. Keep those questions and comments coming in as we talk.

437
00:51:32,210 --> 00:51:40,310
But and one of the first questions is something that touches on my sort of first question kind of it, but it's from Jane.

438
00:51:40,310 --> 00:51:46,700
And she said there must be evidence of the actual talents of some American art students.

439
00:51:46,700 --> 00:51:53,690
You know what, actual? Seriously. You know, we're working American art students.

440
00:51:53,690 --> 00:51:57,740
We're doing in Paris, and I would add my sort of my question.

441
00:51:57,740 --> 00:52:01,160
On top of that, those are what are what would you say the artists are?

442
00:52:01,160 --> 00:52:07,940
It seems such a paradox of your talk. What are the art students looking for in a trip to late 19th century Paris?

443
00:52:07,940 --> 00:52:18,410
Are they looking for training, learning about, you know, traditional techniques and traditional crafts and conventions of past art?

444
00:52:18,410 --> 00:52:25,040
Or are they, as you say, really interestingly, going to Paris for cultural rejuvenation?

445
00:52:25,040 --> 00:52:31,880
You know, like, you know, like which would mean in a way, going to Paris to perform, they're innocent.

446
00:52:31,880 --> 00:52:36,350
You know, how how are they doing both of those things? But Jane wanted to know, really what?

447
00:52:36,350 --> 00:52:41,780
I know you have a lot of anecdotes about this, but you know what we're actual artists doing in Paris.

448
00:52:41,780 --> 00:52:49,400
Why? Why did they have to go to Paris to discover, rediscover their pre-Civil War innocence?

449
00:52:49,400 --> 00:52:53,690
Yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Jean and Peter for that crap.

450
00:52:53,690 --> 00:53:00,290
Yeah, I know there's lots of evidence of what artists are producing and tremendous bodies of work survive from everything,

451
00:53:00,290 --> 00:53:05,240
from sketches that are made in the ateliers and academies to hundreds,

452
00:53:05,240 --> 00:53:09,830
maybe even thousands of paintings that are exhibited in the French salon system.

453
00:53:09,830 --> 00:53:17,450
And part of the draw of going to Paris for art making is that admission to the Ecole is free.

454
00:53:17,450 --> 00:53:21,350
If you can pass the test to go and train.

455
00:53:21,350 --> 00:53:29,120
And there's also a kind of flood of foreign artists coming from many other parts of the world to convene in this space as well.

456
00:53:29,120 --> 00:53:41,600
And so there is a kind of access to resources that is kind of more professionalised and more firmly established and an exhibition system,

457
00:53:41,600 --> 00:53:46,400
too, that operates as a kind of machine that artists want to participate in.

458
00:53:46,400 --> 00:53:56,540
But one of the things that is really complicated in its history is that so many of the U.S. artists are going to Paris not intending to stay.

459
00:53:56,540 --> 00:54:05,570
They see it as a kind of rite of passage and an opportunity to gain skills that they can then employ when they return to the United States.

460
00:54:05,570 --> 00:54:11,210
And much of the focus on U.S. artists in Paris is typically on the artists who did stay,

461
00:54:11,210 --> 00:54:18,530
who did integrate more fully in the cosmopolitan networks like Sargent and Whistler and Cassatt.

462
00:54:18,530 --> 00:54:25,640
But I think that for the rest of the artists who are going in this kind of rite of passage way,

463
00:54:25,640 --> 00:54:30,290
this kind of play of of rejuvenation and a play of innocence is about kind of

464
00:54:30,290 --> 00:54:39,380
safeguarding their cultural identity that they will then carry back with them to the U.S.

465
00:54:39,380 --> 00:54:42,140
I think that's only a partial answer to your question,

466
00:54:42,140 --> 00:54:51,080
but I think that the the other thing that pulls this question of rejuvenation together for me is that it's not just artists who are going,

467
00:54:51,080 --> 00:54:54,470
it's writers, it's tourists.

468
00:54:54,470 --> 00:55:01,610
And there are also a lot of people who ex-patriots Paris because it's a lot more inexpensive to live there in this time period.

469
00:55:01,610 --> 00:55:10,400
You have a kind of higher quality of life. And so there is, I think, so much attention to Paris as this kind of site for projecting American identity,

470
00:55:10,400 --> 00:55:20,990
in part because the colony is like varying in size permanently between kind of eight and ten thousand people, but it's really visible.

471
00:55:20,990 --> 00:55:30,140
And so across art and kind of writing and the development of their own newspapers,

472
00:55:30,140 --> 00:55:35,700
and there's a lot of kind of self-reflection that is happening in that space.

473
00:55:35,700 --> 00:55:44,340
This we just got a question in that I think might be a nice piggyback on on what we're already discussing, but from Leah,

474
00:55:44,340 --> 00:55:53,790
how does the idea of this innocence performed in in Paris maybe relate to American collectors in the late 19th century,

475
00:55:53,790 --> 00:55:58,800
art collectors who are acquiring artwork throughout Europe but in Paris?

476
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:06,000
Yeah, now that's another great question. And I think that so the other impetus for going to Paris is that the biggest

477
00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:10,230
collectors in the US after the Civil War are buying French academic painting.

478
00:56:10,230 --> 00:56:19,560
And so I think there's a hope that these art students will attain that system of painting and then find a market for their work when they return.

479
00:56:19,560 --> 00:56:27,990
And so there is definitely an interest in kind of trying to capitalise on that possibility.

480
00:56:27,990 --> 00:56:33,690
The other thing that this research has uncovered and we'll talk more about this next week is that there was a

481
00:56:33,690 --> 00:56:42,480
really close indicated relationship between U.S. businessmen who are also art collectors in Paris in the 1890s,

482
00:56:42,480 --> 00:56:49,470
especially and the U.S. art community. They were funding the artists clubs that were formed in that decade.

483
00:56:49,470 --> 00:56:55,110
They were commissioning U.S. artists in Paris to make advertisements for their businesses.

484
00:56:55,110 --> 00:57:01,680
And so there is a kind of close connexion there that not only fuels the possible market for art,

485
00:57:01,680 --> 00:57:07,650
but also kind of enables continued cultural practise in Paris.

486
00:57:07,650 --> 00:57:10,410
And there's a lot of commentary in the 1890s,

487
00:57:10,410 --> 00:57:17,820
especially about how there's enough of an infrastructure there that going to Paris is like going to the United States because you

488
00:57:17,820 --> 00:57:27,150
can navigate these systems that are put in place with without really having to interact or find yourself in the French milieu,

489
00:57:27,150 --> 00:57:31,190
except perhaps in the Italian.

490
00:57:31,190 --> 00:57:39,710
So I think that that's that would fit in with a James Ian trope of certain kinds of American businesspeople who go abroad and never leave home,

491
00:57:39,710 --> 00:57:46,730
really. But I think that but if the questioner was partly asking, you know, aren't, aren't these people,

492
00:57:46,730 --> 00:57:53,990
although they may be living in that American bubble that they that they're buying European art?

493
00:57:53,990 --> 00:58:03,080
And is there something you know it is? It isn't. Is that, you know, it's sort of going against the myth of innocence?

494
00:58:03,080 --> 00:58:08,100
Or is that is that some in some ways actually another another form?

495
00:58:08,100 --> 00:58:11,180
Well, that's a great question. I think I think it's layered.

496
00:58:11,180 --> 00:58:20,000
Peter, for example, one of the probably the favourite painting in the Louvre in this period is Maria, was immaculate conception.

497
00:58:20,000 --> 00:58:26,960
So many people write about it in their letters, in their diaries, and there is this interest in the picture.

498
00:58:26,960 --> 00:58:31,880
I think as a wrapper of kind of simple piety,

499
00:58:31,880 --> 00:58:40,190
and that's those are the kind of themes that people are looking for in the European painting of the period, at least in centred around that picture.

500
00:58:40,190 --> 00:58:50,390
Sure. And so I think that interest is indicative of the ways in which many of these individuals are being quite selective

501
00:58:50,390 --> 00:59:00,050
about what a European source material they're wanting to engage with as they kind of dip into this cultural space.

502
00:59:00,050 --> 00:59:05,960
But to I think the and this gets back, I think to our first question as well.

503
00:59:05,960 --> 00:59:15,830
I'm really interested in the kind of language of discovery that gets employed for discussing travel in France and the ways in which that is

504
00:59:15,830 --> 00:59:25,240
producing or reproducing the kind of exploration narrative that earlier had been so focussed on the borderlands of the US going to the West.

505
00:59:25,240 --> 00:59:28,010
Same kind of mantra, especially again in the 1890s,

506
00:59:28,010 --> 00:59:38,240
gets mapped back over to Europe in a way that I think is about building this exploratory discovery position.

507
00:59:38,240 --> 00:59:48,890
But it also is imperialist. That might relate to a just as a comment that you're a very interesting move at the end when you

508
00:59:48,890 --> 00:59:55,610
talked about Henry James and his idea of of a way in which a lack of a native artistic tradition,

509
00:59:55,610 --> 01:00:03,680
cultural tradition, perceived lack could actually lead not to an emphasis on present tense newness.

510
01:00:03,680 --> 01:00:08,450
But to a kind of a knowing approach to the wider world.

511
01:00:08,450 --> 01:00:15,950
A kind of, you know, a kind of a, you know, an opening up sort of like of the American Idol,

512
01:00:15,950 --> 01:00:21,560
unlike the Italian whose luck caught in Italian culture and the Frenchman who was caught in French culture, whatever.

513
01:00:21,560 --> 01:00:27,830
You know that that the American is somehow freed a little bit by its lack of cultural tradition,

514
01:00:27,830 --> 01:00:33,560
but not to become an innocent, but to become a kind of aesthetic cosmopolitan.

515
01:00:33,560 --> 01:00:37,280
Who exactly? That's the word that was sticking out to me as you were just speaking, Peter,

516
01:00:37,280 --> 01:00:44,410
that it makes me think about your work on kind of travelling culture and the ways in which it's easy for us

517
01:00:44,410 --> 01:00:50,600
to trace the threads of a kind of trope of American ness if we're talking about U.S. literature in the US.

518
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:57,650
But if we look at this kind of circulating writers who are circulating, we're writing about people who are circulating.

519
01:00:57,650 --> 01:01:05,660
We can also find this aesthetic that is kind of inflicting this ingenuous ness with a cosmopolitan energy kind of a knowledge

520
01:01:05,660 --> 01:01:14,600
of of multiple cultures and the multiplicity of cultures and about transcend the dynamics of international detriment.

521
01:01:14,600 --> 01:01:16,970
Franklin is also an example of this.

522
01:01:16,970 --> 01:01:25,360
But I want it's just there are also a couple of questions related to gender, OK, that I think might be really interesting here.

523
01:01:25,360 --> 01:01:31,550
And so one of them is that we're really having some interesting dialogue here.

524
01:01:31,550 --> 01:01:42,600
Tricia. Yeah. So was the idea of innocence naivete performed by American women artists in the late 19th century.

525
01:01:42,600 --> 01:01:50,640
Sorry, will you just say the first part of that again, Peter, I think what did did was the idea of this, you know,

526
01:01:50,640 --> 01:01:58,200
this performed in a sense or performed naivete, also something that we've seen in American women artists simply.

527
01:01:58,200 --> 01:02:01,770
Yes, thank you. That's such a great question. And we're going to talk a lot about that next week.

528
01:02:01,770 --> 01:02:06,510
So whoever asked, I hope you'll come back. But yes,

529
01:02:06,510 --> 01:02:11,730
and I think that the situation for women is particularly interesting because the there are

530
01:02:11,730 --> 01:02:19,110
estimates that about a third of the artists who went to Paris to train in this period were women.

531
01:02:19,110 --> 01:02:25,020
And so we have a lot of women artists who are going to France. But I,

532
01:02:25,020 --> 01:02:32,370
my sense is that women are also kind of put in a bind in the sense that this trope of innocence uses the kind of

533
01:02:32,370 --> 01:02:42,390
impressionable female flower as a metaphor for larger anxieties about American culture getting absorbed into French culture.

534
01:02:42,390 --> 01:02:51,660
And so as they become kind of allegories in this international exchange, and there's another book by I think it's William Dean Howells,

535
01:02:51,660 --> 01:03:00,360
the lady of the Aroostook, where the main character, Lydia kind of goes abroad and has this flirtation on the ship.

536
01:03:00,360 --> 01:03:10,650
And it's as much about this character as it is this speaking through this anxiety about American culture kind of losing its wealth.

537
01:03:10,650 --> 01:03:20,340
And there's a lot of discussion about women in France having access to the nude and having access to kind of bohemian society.

538
01:03:20,340 --> 01:03:23,730
The there is a woman named Mrs. John Sherwood,

539
01:03:23,730 --> 01:03:30,090
who wrote a few articles in the 1890s in which she articulates this kind of what I call it hysterical hyperbole,

540
01:03:30,090 --> 01:03:35,970
where she says 11000 virgins annually across the Atlantic.

541
01:03:35,970 --> 01:03:40,170
And so there is this kind of commentary that is kind of floating around.

542
01:03:40,170 --> 01:03:46,230
And I, my sense is that it allergies women artists who are going abroad because it kind of de professionalise them

543
01:03:46,230 --> 01:03:54,720
by implying that they will be more likely to be subsumed into this trope or into this kind of bohemian life.

544
01:03:54,720 --> 01:03:59,580
And so there are artists clubs that are formed in the 1890s, both for men and women.

545
01:03:59,580 --> 01:04:04,890
But the clubs for women are tend to kind of again de professionalise.

546
01:04:04,890 --> 01:04:11,100
Even as they have exhibition spaces, they focussed on lodging so that women are protected.

547
01:04:11,100 --> 01:04:15,360
And there's also and this is something we'll talk about next week to a large

548
01:04:15,360 --> 01:04:21,120
Protestant community in Paris and the chapel that they built that we'll talk about.

549
01:04:21,120 --> 01:04:24,810
I was just reading recently letters by a woman who worshipped there,

550
01:04:24,810 --> 01:04:30,450
and she comments often in her letters that it's mostly women who are attending the chapel there.

551
01:04:30,450 --> 01:04:38,850
And so I think that there are ways in which women are kind of caught up in this discourse in different ways.

552
01:04:38,850 --> 01:04:43,380
But then there's also the ways in which they are kind of pushing back against these

553
01:04:43,380 --> 01:04:48,180
tropes and really interesting ways that and I'll talk more about that next week.

554
01:04:48,180 --> 01:04:57,810
But that talking about this as a discourse, a gendered discourse and a series of tropes that leads to another question from come already that,

555
01:04:57,810 --> 01:05:04,530
you know, you may say that you don't you don't have any information to bring us on this subject, but I think it's very interesting and relevant.

556
01:05:04,530 --> 01:05:17,810
What are your thoughts on Nabokov's Lolita in the young American innocence versus the older European perspective and expectations?

557
01:05:17,810 --> 01:05:25,350
You know, is is is Nabokov an interesting example of the survival of this same discourse, the discourse?

558
01:05:25,350 --> 01:05:29,790
Well, you have suggested a book, but now I need to go read to because I've not read it,

559
01:05:29,790 --> 01:05:35,220
but I have looked there's a really wonderful book that I find really compelling.

560
01:05:35,220 --> 01:05:43,560
Written by Paul Giles called Virtual Americans, and it's about this transatlantic literary tradition in the 20th century.

561
01:05:43,560 --> 01:05:47,370
And I know that Nabokov is one of his big case studies in that text,

562
01:05:47,370 --> 01:05:55,380
but I'm interested in the way that he thinks about the idea of the virtual as a way to think about.

563
01:05:55,380 --> 01:06:02,850
Kind of demystifying myth and that we if we think about transnational refraction,

564
01:06:02,850 --> 01:06:12,360
he describes it as a kind of elliptical structure whereby doing comparative studies, we see that stereotypes are kind of flattening.

565
01:06:12,360 --> 01:06:19,170
But then we end up with this kind of elliptical shape if we compare cultural perspectives.

566
01:06:19,170 --> 01:06:24,390
And so I think that he will likely delve into that question in greater detail.

567
01:06:24,390 --> 01:06:27,870
Mm-Hmm. Well, I wondered if this might go back.

568
01:06:27,870 --> 01:06:35,940
I think one possible source for the Lolita dynamic and open discourse might be Daisy Miller.

569
01:06:35,940 --> 01:06:41,670
Henry James James is Daisy Miller. And in that work, I think you, you know, you make good use of it.

570
01:06:41,670 --> 01:06:47,880
It's a very interesting example for you sort of anticipate in the late 19th century issues you deal with, but they do.

571
01:06:47,880 --> 01:06:52,050
There is a Winterbourne who is an example of an American,

572
01:06:52,050 --> 01:06:58,020
but who is sort of paralysed by his internalisation of the European traditions and codes, et cetera.

573
01:06:58,020 --> 01:07:09,480
And then there's Daisy Miller, the woman American who is, you know, the figure of a weird kind of vulgar, you know,

574
01:07:09,480 --> 01:07:19,440
untouched, unformed innocence, but also, you know, sort of a mythic innocence, but also a performer of innocence.

575
01:07:19,440 --> 01:07:25,980
So it does that. Would that play out in that, you know, that same discourse?

576
01:07:25,980 --> 01:07:32,100
Yes, I think so. And yeah, I think that James is really rich for building these characters that are kind of already

577
01:07:32,100 --> 01:07:37,590
abroad and the ways in which they're sort of partially shaped by that experience,

578
01:07:37,590 --> 01:07:43,880
but then the kind of personalities that they try to retain.

579
01:07:43,880 --> 01:07:51,000
That just I think this also anticipates lectures to come in the series, which is a good thing.

580
01:07:51,000 --> 01:07:55,880
But John has a question about switching to race.

581
01:07:55,880 --> 01:08:06,710
And I actually wonder too, you said that you had a statement about the way innocence re and scribes racial hierarchy based on asked the question

582
01:08:06,710 --> 01:08:14,330
How did black artists burdened in the U.S. by racist assumptions that their naivete demonstrated ignorance,

583
01:08:14,330 --> 01:08:22,250
not promise or perceptiveness navigate debates over the innocence of U.S. artists in Paris?

584
01:08:22,250 --> 01:08:32,030
Thanks, John. That's a great question, and I hope you come in two weeks time because that will be a kind of fundamental question of the discussion.

585
01:08:32,030 --> 01:08:40,670
One of the things that I uncovered in this research is that the Big U.S. Artists Club in Paris, the American Heart Association,

586
01:08:40,670 --> 01:08:49,400
had an annual minstrel show blackface performance to raise money to fund the club's activities and and exhibitions.

587
01:08:49,400 --> 01:08:56,120
And I'm really interested in thinking about how that performance participates in this larger trajectory in building ideas

588
01:08:56,120 --> 01:09:07,070
for French observers that expect African Americans and Native Americans to be primitive in compared with white Americans.

589
01:09:07,070 --> 01:09:12,380
And I think that is part of the reason that this is starting to happen in the US colony.

590
01:09:12,380 --> 01:09:24,110
But the other half of that story is about the arrival of black artists who begin to work in Paris and especially in the 1890s and early 20th century,

591
01:09:24,110 --> 01:09:32,030
like Henry Osawa, Tanner Meadows, who work Fuller, William Harper as well.

592
01:09:32,030 --> 01:09:40,160
And so I'm really interested in thinking about how they intersect with not only ideas about race, but also ideas about innocence.

593
01:09:40,160 --> 01:09:49,130
And I'm also going to be looking at the exhibit of American Negroes that was in the Paris Exposition in nineteen hundred and the ways in

594
01:09:49,130 --> 01:10:02,780
which even as that exhibition is building a narrative of black culture that is all about kind of progress and incipient and a cultural youth,

595
01:10:02,780 --> 01:10:09,650
that that narrative is, of course, countering the racist stereotypes of caricature in minstrelsy.

596
01:10:09,650 --> 01:10:16,130
But it's actually replacing it with a narrative that fuels the larger narrative about U.S. culture in Paris.

597
01:10:16,130 --> 01:10:21,680
And so we'll look more at those intricacies and complexities in two weeks.

598
01:10:21,680 --> 01:10:25,460
I think we're kind of we're kind of getting near the end, but we have a.

599
01:10:25,460 --> 01:10:30,170
There are a lot of questions that are coming in now, which is a great sign.

600
01:10:30,170 --> 01:10:34,490
But but maybe we have time for one more one and a half more or something like that.

601
01:10:34,490 --> 01:10:44,630
But from Zack, is this something that actually, I'm not sure if it does preview preview a future lecture, but could you sketch briefly?

602
01:10:44,630 --> 01:10:56,160
Asks Zack how this dynamic perhaps played out for Americans in other European cities besides like Rome or Florence or what?

603
01:10:56,160 --> 01:11:04,370
Yeah, that's a great question. And certainly there are a lot of U.S. artists who are working in Rome a little earlier in the century.

604
01:11:04,370 --> 01:11:11,210
Some artists who are working in London earlier and also kind of concurrently.

605
01:11:11,210 --> 01:11:14,630
And I am trying to think about Rome.

606
01:11:14,630 --> 01:11:21,330
There are certainly ways in which these kinds of anxieties about European culture merging comes through.

607
01:11:21,330 --> 01:11:28,610
I'm thinking about like the The Marble Fan by Nathaniel Hawthorne, imagining artists in Rome.

608
01:11:28,610 --> 01:11:32,210
One of the other things we'll look at next week are artist studios in Paris,

609
01:11:32,210 --> 01:11:39,560
and Hawthorne creates a kind of studio of kind of seclusion and her medicine in Rome

610
01:11:39,560 --> 01:11:46,400
to kind of protect the U.S. artist from the kind of bohemian morale's around him.

611
01:11:46,400 --> 01:11:52,850
And so I think that discourse is a bit restage there as well.

612
01:11:52,850 --> 01:11:58,310
And I'm also thinking about Roderick Hudson to the other James novel where the character

613
01:11:58,310 --> 01:12:06,860
goes abroad and kind of in the line of Daisy Miller kind of falls into this personality.

614
01:12:06,860 --> 01:12:16,610
And the other thing that's coming to mind is actually not from this period, but from the late 18th century when Copley is working in London.

615
01:12:16,610 --> 01:12:22,820
Emily Value Neff has done some really interesting work about Copley in London and suggested the ways in which Copley

616
01:12:22,820 --> 01:12:31,580
is very aware of international perceptions of a U.S. attachment to nature and a kind of primitive west mentality.

617
01:12:31,580 --> 01:12:38,840
And she thinks that he is quite savvy in cultivating that in different ways as he's navigating the London art world.

618
01:12:38,840 --> 01:12:42,370
And that's an interesting case, too, because as in the U.S.

619
01:12:42,370 --> 01:12:52,270
Colony in Paris, there's not a direct equation between the discourse of this kind of native culture and the art that's produced.

620
01:12:52,270 --> 01:13:02,320
I think it plays through in more complicated ways and also for Copley, who is painting these incredibly mature academic paintings.

621
01:13:02,320 --> 01:13:09,160
Yeah, so too has an amalgamation of of a few other questions some people had,

622
01:13:09,160 --> 01:13:18,280
maybe as a as a capstone also that there were questions about the concept of the central concept of the lateness.

623
01:13:18,280 --> 01:13:25,030
I don't know that you didn't, you know, that came in and out of the lecture, but you know, but I think it's central to the book.

624
01:13:25,030 --> 01:13:32,470
It's the title of the book. But this and the question of whether maybe you could unpack it or expand upon it just as at the end here.

625
01:13:32,470 --> 01:13:35,500
But it seems the opposite in a sense.

626
01:13:35,500 --> 01:13:46,690
In some ways, if, as you say, in the cultural work performed by the myth of Innocence is forgetting a kind of a denial of history,

627
01:13:46,690 --> 01:13:49,030
that relatedness sounds like,

628
01:13:49,030 --> 01:13:58,840
you know, it's a very it's a concept that involves a great, anxious awareness of history, you know, like it's all been done before.

629
01:13:58,840 --> 01:14:03,730
I feel, you know, the weight of all the past achievements in history.

630
01:14:03,730 --> 01:14:06,190
There's room, no room for anything new.

631
01:14:06,190 --> 01:14:15,130
So, you know, again, kind of paralysed by what my aware of everything that's gone before, you know, so that just kind of that idea about,

632
01:14:15,130 --> 01:14:25,150
you know, an artist paralysed about relatedness and you're you're making you're describing it as as a different thing, I guess.

633
01:14:25,150 --> 01:14:31,420
But it is. It does. It does get into that paradox about history and the forgetting of history.

634
01:14:31,420 --> 01:14:35,800
Yeah, absolutely. No, that's really great. And I will definitely think more about this.

635
01:14:35,800 --> 01:14:44,050
But I think that, yeah, I'm thinking about how this kind of obsession with the new and obsession with kind

636
01:14:44,050 --> 01:14:50,550
of structure of innocence creates this idea that a culture has not emerged yet.

637
01:14:50,550 --> 01:14:55,450
And I do think that there is tremendous anxiety and in literary studies,

638
01:14:55,450 --> 01:15:03,160
but also in the history of art in this period about kind of American cultural production.

639
01:15:03,160 --> 01:15:08,440
And so I think that in the same way that innocence as a projection is a paradox.

640
01:15:08,440 --> 01:15:17,580
Relatedness and innocence also operate in a kind of paradoxical relationship and.

641
01:15:17,580 --> 01:15:20,610
There is, I think,

642
01:15:20,610 --> 01:15:32,790
like a I think one thing I want you to think through more is the question of how temporality is operating within both of those concepts,

643
01:15:32,790 --> 01:15:40,570
history and kind of a historicism, as well as innocence and and experience.

644
01:15:40,570 --> 01:15:49,350
You know, you really probed some, you know, just a number of very fascinating paradoxes, innocence and performance we didn't even get to.

645
01:15:49,350 --> 01:15:56,610
And I'm sure we'll get to later at innocence and sexuality, not gender, but the way that that painting,

646
01:15:56,610 --> 01:16:00,950
you know, that there could be an innocence in Walt Whitman or yes, definitely.

647
01:16:00,950 --> 01:16:06,000
But but there's room for more because this is not the end of the conversation,

648
01:16:06,000 --> 01:16:11,370
but I am getting messages that that this does look like we're out of time.

649
01:16:11,370 --> 01:16:19,140
So I would like to take this opportunity to thank Emily one less time for her very provocative,

650
01:16:19,140 --> 01:16:25,290
thought provoking lecture this evening and to torture again for hosting this event tonight.

651
01:16:25,290 --> 01:16:31,500
A big thank you also to the audience members at home for watching and for

652
01:16:31,500 --> 01:16:35,790
participating in a lively discussion and sending in your questions and so on.

653
01:16:35,790 --> 01:16:43,410
So I'm sorry that we weren't able to answer all of the questions, but as I said, the conversation continues.

654
01:16:43,410 --> 01:16:50,700
I'm looking forward to the next instalment, so Emily will be exploring related issues in the lectures to follow.

655
01:16:50,700 --> 01:16:57,660
Please do join us for next week's event, the second in this four part terror lecture series,

656
01:16:57,660 --> 01:17:04,500
which will take place on Wednesday 24th February at five p.m. UK time.

657
01:17:04,500 --> 01:17:15,150
Emily will be joined by one to Corn, the Robert and Ruth Halprin, Professor Emerita of Art History at Stanford University, for that second lecture.

658
01:17:15,150 --> 01:17:20,430
So we hope you will be able to join us again everyone next week.

659
01:17:20,430 --> 01:17:59,935
And thanks again to thanks to all once again for watching today for the great lecture and good bye for now.