1 00:00:19,530 --> 00:00:29,630 Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us in the second in a series of four terror lectures in the American art. 2 00:00:29,630 --> 00:00:36,380 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the second in a series of four terror lectures in American art. 3 00:00:36,380 --> 00:00:42,740 This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration, 4 00:00:42,740 --> 00:00:46,760 understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States. 5 00:00:46,760 --> 00:00:54,920 The national and international audiences, in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College. 6 00:00:54,920 --> 00:00:59,810 The foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art. 7 00:00:59,810 --> 00:01:07,250 Emily C. Burns is the terror visiting professor for 2020 through 2021. 8 00:01:07,250 --> 00:01:13,800 My name is Jeff Bachem and I'm I'm the head of the history of art department at the University of Oxford. 9 00:01:13,800 --> 00:01:22,410 Our thanks go to the Terra Foundation and to torch for hosting this series as part of the online events in the Humanities Cultural Programme. 10 00:01:22,410 --> 00:01:28,500 One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 11 00:01:28,500 --> 00:01:31,830 Throughout this evening's lecture, if you have any questions, 12 00:01:31,830 --> 00:01:41,060 please feel free to type that type them in the YouTube chat box and we will do our best to answer as many of them as we can during the session. 13 00:01:41,060 --> 00:01:48,460 We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and chaired by Professor WonderCon. 14 00:01:48,460 --> 00:01:55,240 Wanda is Robert and Ruth Halperin, professor in art history emerita at Stanford University, 15 00:01:55,240 --> 00:02:05,180 where she taught from 1980 to 2008 and Mentor mentored many of those now teaching and curating in the field of American art. 16 00:02:05,180 --> 00:02:09,350 She chaired the Department of Art and Art History Department, but sorry, 17 00:02:09,350 --> 00:02:17,720 she chaired the art and art history department for several years and served a term as the director of the Stanford Humanities Centre, 18 00:02:17,720 --> 00:02:26,630 a major study of avant garde modernist culture along the Atlantic Rim, The Great American Thing, Modern Art and American identity. 19 00:02:26,630 --> 00:02:29,900 1915 through 1935, 20 00:02:29,900 --> 00:02:40,370 was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldridge prise for distinguished fellowship in American Art, 21 00:02:40,370 --> 00:02:44,480 Would you press? She also published Women Building History, 22 00:02:44,480 --> 00:02:49,100 a book about Mary Cassatt and the decorative programme of murals and sculptures 23 00:02:49,100 --> 00:02:54,900 for the woman's building at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. 24 00:02:54,900 --> 00:03:07,560 Active as a guest curator, Wanda has produced various books and exhibitions, including The Colour of Nude American Journalism 1990 1999 through 1910, 25 00:03:07,560 --> 00:03:19,230 The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, the Regional Lost Vision, Seeing Gertrude Stein five stories and in 2017 to 2019. 26 00:03:19,230 --> 00:03:25,890 Georgia O'Keeffe Living Modern. She is currently writing a biography of American Gothic, 27 00:03:25,890 --> 00:03:32,940 a famous 1930 painting by Grant Wood that has often been reproduced in American high in popular culture. 28 00:03:32,940 --> 00:03:40,830 In subsequent years, it's my absolute pleasure to welcome Professor one to corn and now wonder I hand it over to you. 29 00:03:40,830 --> 00:03:55,780 Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And hello to all of you out there on whatever continent or country you are listening to this and tuning in, 30 00:03:55,780 --> 00:04:05,470 wonderful that this kind of virtual presentation can find such a wide and diverse audience around the world. 31 00:04:05,470 --> 00:04:18,040 I myself am greeting you from the shores of Cape Cod, land of the Wampanoag, and I happen to know that there will be a map later on in the lecture. 32 00:04:18,040 --> 00:04:26,410 And you'll see very clearly if you look for the Wampanoag tribe, where I am resident as I speak with you, 33 00:04:26,410 --> 00:04:32,650 it's my pleasure to introduce Emily Burns for the second of her four lectures. 34 00:04:32,650 --> 00:04:42,160 She's associate professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar of transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th century. 35 00:04:42,160 --> 00:04:51,520 In 2018, she published Transnational Frontiers the American West in France with the University of Oklahoma press, 36 00:04:51,520 --> 00:05:01,990 and she has a forthcoming anthology co-edited with Alice in Rudy Price called Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts, 37 00:05:01,990 --> 00:05:14,860 and that'll be published by Rutledge. Related to today's talk are her publications in anthologies on art and transnational exchange. 38 00:05:14,860 --> 00:05:19,450 There were three of them there will co-edited, but let me mention their titles. 39 00:05:19,450 --> 00:05:24,700 Artistic Migration and Identity in Paris 1870 to 1940, 40 00:05:24,700 --> 00:05:34,300 another anthology in which her work has appeared foreign artists and communities in modern Paris 1870 to 1914. 41 00:05:34,300 --> 00:05:46,730 And she's also written about her topic of today in Sheryl May and Marian Waddles a seamless web transatlantic art in the 19th century. 42 00:05:46,730 --> 00:05:56,360 During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art visiting professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford, 43 00:05:56,360 --> 00:05:59,540 where she is also a visiting fellow at Worcester College, 44 00:05:59,540 --> 00:06:06,170 Professor Burns is completing her book manuscript from which today's talk comes and the title, 45 00:06:06,170 --> 00:06:16,150 or at least the working title of that manuscript is performing innocence, cultural relatedness and U.S. art in fantasy at Paris. 46 00:06:16,150 --> 00:06:21,610 Emily, welcome again, and we look forward to today's presentation, 47 00:06:21,610 --> 00:06:30,190 which follows on last week's which was called belated and was a construction of American innocence, particularly abroad. 48 00:06:30,190 --> 00:06:36,660 And today your topic is simply short, I handed over to you. 49 00:06:36,660 --> 00:06:42,420 Thank you so much, Wanda. I'll just share my thank you. 50 00:06:42,420 --> 00:06:47,850 Jeff, as well for your introductions, also torch for managing. 51 00:06:47,850 --> 00:06:53,800 And of course, the Terra Foundation for sponsoring this series. And thank you all for being here. 52 00:06:53,800 --> 00:07:02,850 A reminder to to please not hesitate to send your questions over the chat function during the live stream. 53 00:07:02,850 --> 00:07:08,520 Visitors passing the pity party at the centre of the Paris Exposition of 19:00 54 00:07:08,520 --> 00:07:13,890 would have encountered a figure which our eyes might read as incongruous, 55 00:07:13,890 --> 00:07:21,510 with fantastical Paris stalking forward and scowling down at pedestrians with a stern and disapproving 56 00:07:21,510 --> 00:07:29,220 expression from a pedestal was the larger than life sculpture the Puritan by Augustus Think Gardens. 57 00:07:29,220 --> 00:07:33,630 He holds a massive Bible and leans on a walking stick. 58 00:07:33,630 --> 00:07:43,410 His upright back is enveloped by a thick, dense cloak that drapes behind his body while designed as a representation of a particular individual. 59 00:07:43,410 --> 00:07:53,280 The 17th century Puritan Deacon Samuel Cheapen St. Gordon's made clear that he saw it as a quote embodiment of the Puritan. 60 00:07:53,280 --> 00:07:58,350 A bronze of the sculpture had been installed in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1887, 61 00:07:58,350 --> 00:08:08,160 which you see at Left and St. Garden signed a contract with a Parisian foundry in the late 1890s to produce bronze tabletop versions of it, 62 00:08:08,160 --> 00:08:13,390 and about 40 at least were produced, one of which you can see on the right. 63 00:08:13,390 --> 00:08:20,920 A plaster of the Puritan was displayed at the salon of the Societe Nacional de Brozak in 1898, 64 00:08:20,920 --> 00:08:26,560 likely the version seen in the background of a photograph of the artist's Paris studio. 65 00:08:26,560 --> 00:08:34,960 The artist in foreground subtly, subtly mimics the sculpture in posture and countenance in its circulation in Paris. 66 00:08:34,960 --> 00:08:42,130 The Puritan enacted more than an icon of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 16 30. 67 00:08:42,130 --> 00:08:47,890 The sculpture, both inscribed and marked a personality of steadfast focus, 68 00:08:47,890 --> 00:09:00,100 rigidity and faith as it built and exported a lineage for U.S. history tied to Puritan Origins, New England identity and Anglo-Saxon white culture. 69 00:09:00,100 --> 00:09:08,290 With a hat partly modelled on one that William Merritt Chase purportedly used while playing Puritan at a costume ball in Munich. 70 00:09:08,290 --> 00:09:17,020 The figures clothing nods to U.S. identity performance abroad with both gravity and humour as it ratifies and undercuts myths, 71 00:09:17,020 --> 00:09:25,300 which my colleagues, Erica Das and Julia Rosenbaum and Jennifer Greenhill have all explored, especially in the U.S. context. 72 00:09:25,300 --> 00:09:36,040 The sculpture is both Das sums up quote Puritan backlash and Puritan exemplar for contemporaries encountering Saint John stalwart figure, 73 00:09:36,040 --> 00:09:38,950 which won a grand prise at the Paris Exposition. 74 00:09:38,950 --> 00:09:47,680 The contradictory ideals he represented were current, as they were then hotly debated in the US colony in Paris. 75 00:09:47,680 --> 00:09:55,570 What Das has described as the fun hating figure not only frowned at passer by, but also towards Louis conveyors. 76 00:09:55,570 --> 00:10:02,920 The Four Seasons, which was placed to the left of the entrance of the newly constructed petite Palais. 77 00:10:02,920 --> 00:10:12,310 Its nude and scantily clad allegorical women delightedly and casually gathering fruit seems certain to have drawn the figures ire. 78 00:10:12,310 --> 00:10:18,310 The tension invited by this pairing reverberated through much of the US colony in Paris, 79 00:10:18,310 --> 00:10:26,890 which built an anxious narrative pitting French Bohemia against US puritanical culture polarising in essence, 80 00:10:26,890 --> 00:10:36,970 the Parisian against the Puritan, edging between Protestant faith constructions of puritanism and a secularised moralism. 81 00:10:36,970 --> 00:10:43,840 Many made claims that steadfast and focussed work ethic was a so-called American trait that needed to 82 00:10:43,840 --> 00:10:50,860 be retained as a protective armour to avoid absorption into life and culture in the foreign capital. 83 00:10:50,860 --> 00:10:59,380 These ideas also had implications for aesthetics. French critics wondered, for instance, if the Puritans quote massive book, which though closed, 84 00:10:59,380 --> 00:11:05,110 must limit his mental horizons implicated, likely also quoting from a critic. 85 00:11:05,110 --> 00:11:09,160 Narrow perspectives of U.S. artists abroad. 86 00:11:09,160 --> 00:11:17,860 Yet one concluded that the broader imagination of Saint Gardens in depicting this complex figure indicated otherwise. 87 00:11:17,860 --> 00:11:23,260 With its projections of moral innocence, this trope is laden with contradictions. 88 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:29,350 In addition to the colonial ethos embedded in the Puritan striding forward upon a wooded landscape, 89 00:11:29,350 --> 00:11:40,180 inviting us to recall from last week what Henry James described as quote innocence and might and Edith Wharton inscribed as a quote factitious purity. 90 00:11:40,180 --> 00:11:50,980 Innocence is incompatible with the extremist dogmatic fundamentalism and with Puritans persecution of native people along the eastern seaboard. 91 00:11:50,980 --> 00:11:56,500 And here we can have a map shout out to Wanda in her present location. 92 00:11:56,500 --> 00:12:04,210 But here, where in particular, members of the Wampanoag and Massachusetts nation, amongst other nearby nations, 93 00:12:04,210 --> 00:12:13,420 were persecuted by Puritan colonists, as Chapman and his fellow Puritans sought to vanquish native voices and cultures. 94 00:12:13,420 --> 00:12:20,770 They built a race hierarchy that retained its currency in the 19th century exported in Paris. 95 00:12:20,770 --> 00:12:30,550 The Puritan cultivates and upholds that normative white male Protestant culture and highlights those origins of settler colonialism. 96 00:12:30,550 --> 00:12:35,920 This figure also builds a hierarchy that excludes black and women artists. 97 00:12:35,920 --> 00:12:43,450 A power structure unwittingly implied in the silence obscured labour visible in the photographs of the sculpture in Paris, 98 00:12:43,450 --> 00:12:50,440 where two unnamed and darker skinned labourers rarely mentioned in the scholarship or in the title of the photograph. 99 00:12:50,440 --> 00:12:54,550 When Reproduced stands behind the workbench, 100 00:12:54,550 --> 00:13:01,270 exporting the trajectory of the so-called city on the hill rhetoric that fuelled the Puritan movement to the new world. 101 00:13:01,270 --> 00:13:12,500 In the 17th century, Americans carried what Das termed the moral journey back to Europe as an icon of these Mobility's St. Garden sculpture. 102 00:13:12,500 --> 00:13:18,590 Amid a larger constellation of U.S. spaces in Paris, which I will map out for us today, 103 00:13:18,590 --> 00:13:26,510 you can see on this 1910 map tiny placed images of some of the sites that we'll look at and you'll see bigger images as we go. 104 00:13:26,510 --> 00:13:28,760 But I'll just point out they're clustered. 105 00:13:28,760 --> 00:13:37,100 Some in the affluent is more near the Arc de Triomphe, on the right bank and then a bunch of sites at the border between the fifth, 106 00:13:37,100 --> 00:13:45,680 sixth and 14th alcoholism along the Boulevard Montparnasse, from churches to studios to artists clubs. 107 00:13:45,680 --> 00:13:53,150 The U.S. built environment in Paris invited links with puritanism by connecting with the idea of the artists, 108 00:13:53,150 --> 00:13:59,090 concludes this enclosed Eden Gardens framed by the Virgin Mary's purity. 109 00:13:59,090 --> 00:14:04,610 Many terms were bantered around to define this construction not only of literal space in Paris, 110 00:14:04,610 --> 00:14:10,400 but also the connected community that circulated through it, and I'll rundown a bunch of them for you. 111 00:14:10,400 --> 00:14:16,760 Little America, the Parisian American worlds, the American Colony, the American Corner, 112 00:14:16,760 --> 00:14:25,490 Americanised, Paris, American Paris, a little city within a big one and even a country unto itself. 113 00:14:25,490 --> 00:14:34,280 The experiences of women artists in Paris were particularly shaped by the strident discourse about morality, which limited their professionalism. 114 00:14:34,280 --> 00:14:43,460 Yet artists who were for any reason outside the the norms set by this discourse often subtly disrupted the operations of stereotype, 115 00:14:43,460 --> 00:14:53,600 either by taking up or wholly rejecting these projections. While Contemporary sought to pin down distinctions between French and American characters, 116 00:14:53,600 --> 00:15:02,240 the categories of Parisian and Puritan were never firmly fixed, operating instead in a constant, productive tension. 117 00:15:02,240 --> 00:15:11,840 As in Blanche Howard's description of her protagonist, Everett Hammer, an American painter in her novel Gwen A Wave on the Breton Coast, 118 00:15:11,840 --> 00:15:21,470 quote good old fashioned New England traits and rank bohemian ism played hide and seek in the nooks and crannies of his character. 119 00:15:21,470 --> 00:15:23,900 So while problematic and contradictory, 120 00:15:23,900 --> 00:15:34,970 the fluidity of the concept of the Puritan enabled black artists and women artists points of entry to mimic or critique the social order. 121 00:15:34,970 --> 00:15:40,760 The large American Protestant community shaped much of this cultural conversation. 122 00:15:40,760 --> 00:15:46,100 Two American churches were founded in the 1850s on the Right Bank, 123 00:15:46,100 --> 00:15:55,220 a nondenominational evangelical church based at 21 bridges buried in 1857 and an Episcopal spin off two years later. 124 00:15:55,220 --> 00:16:05,150 The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the latter opened its neo-Gothic structure in 1886, designed by British architect George Edmund Streets. 125 00:16:05,150 --> 00:16:13,190 On the avenue, George sank just south of the Champs-Élysées in offering services in English and regular social events. 126 00:16:13,190 --> 00:16:25,260 Both churches targeted the U.S. and wider Anglophone communities in Paris then and now, although the American church has relocated to the kid or say. 127 00:16:25,260 --> 00:16:31,410 These institutions entered fierce, ongoing debates about religion and public life in front of secular friends. 128 00:16:31,410 --> 00:16:38,310 The establishment of the Third Republic in 1871 brought many Protestants into powerful government positions, 129 00:16:38,310 --> 00:16:42,930 and discussions ensued about the relationships between Republican values, 130 00:16:42,930 --> 00:16:48,720 morality, education and tolerance that fuelled the fervour surrounding the Dreyfus Affair 131 00:16:48,720 --> 00:16:55,380 in the 1890s and led to the separation between religion and state in 1945. 132 00:16:55,380 --> 00:17:00,000 Within debates about this position, as Stephen House has explored. 133 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:06,690 Some observers cautioned that a Protestant conquest of France was taking place 134 00:17:06,690 --> 00:17:11,280 by insisting on expansive displays of collective religion in public life, 135 00:17:11,280 --> 00:17:19,290 and two by connecting themselves with French Huguenot tradition and also with British Protestants practise. 136 00:17:19,290 --> 00:17:23,820 And these American churches are occupying uneasy terrain. 137 00:17:23,820 --> 00:17:29,940 But Reverend E.W. Hitchcock, the rector of the Ecumenical American Church in the early 1880s, 138 00:17:29,940 --> 00:17:34,380 argued that Protestantism was the antidote to the perils of the city, 139 00:17:34,380 --> 00:17:42,480 and he gave a long and detailed sermon of which I just pull one pithy quotation if anywhere there is need a 140 00:17:42,480 --> 00:17:49,170 fixed principles of action and settled faith and watchfulness and prayer and every part of the Christian Armour. 141 00:17:49,170 --> 00:18:01,350 It is in Paris. Church leadership imagines twin enemies for Americans in Paris as extremes of sensual excess Catholic worship and bohemian life. 142 00:18:01,350 --> 00:18:08,790 Many U.S. travellers wrote of their shock at the pomp and ostentation they associated with Catholic worship. 143 00:18:08,790 --> 00:18:13,230 They articulated similar anxiety about the drama of bohemian life. 144 00:18:13,230 --> 00:18:21,420 Waves of articles in the American press warned of quote hotbeds of immorality and widespread moral filth. 145 00:18:21,420 --> 00:18:27,960 However, mythic, the idea that bohemian culture enabled art making through creative spurts and debauchery 146 00:18:27,960 --> 00:18:33,540 seemed antithetical to the trope of success through constant and focussed work. 147 00:18:33,540 --> 00:18:38,130 Visual representations fuelled these perceived cultural differences. 148 00:18:38,130 --> 00:18:49,890 Published in 1984, John and Greg Huston's novel FATA Morgana, a romance of Art Student Life in Paris, polarises the Parisian and the Puritan. 149 00:18:49,890 --> 00:18:56,220 A French artist named Pwf I Left carves a sculpture bust in his studio erratically quote, 150 00:18:56,220 --> 00:19:00,900 hammering the clay with a terrible blow of his fist as his body curves, 151 00:19:00,900 --> 00:19:06,870 wildly juxtaposing PUFA eyes, undulating body and while gesticulations, 152 00:19:06,870 --> 00:19:15,660 the aptly named Phil Longwell stands with rigidly straight posture, opposing pouf and stature and demeanour. 153 00:19:15,660 --> 00:19:20,400 His tailored suit counters the French artist's dishevelled, wrinkled clothing, 154 00:19:20,400 --> 00:19:26,940 who sighs crowded and unkempt studio, which Castaneda described as an astonishing place heaped up with mud. 155 00:19:26,940 --> 00:19:31,680 Chaos of clay and plaster matches his impassioned art making. 156 00:19:31,680 --> 00:19:35,100 He does not even look at the sculpture as he strikes it. 157 00:19:35,100 --> 00:19:40,830 And just yesterday, when I was practising this talk, I noticed another detail I'm going to bring the mouse pointer to it here, 158 00:19:40,830 --> 00:19:48,420 so you can see there's actually a poster on the wall behind Phil that says, Vive La Liberté, my freedom. 159 00:19:48,420 --> 00:19:56,010 Conveniently placed over Phil's head in this pairing, PUFA is especially disturbed by Phil's appearance, 160 00:19:56,010 --> 00:20:00,240 which he perceives as entirely constricted with his buttons collar. 161 00:20:00,240 --> 00:20:03,900 He shouts at the American artist, Foul, take off your collar. 162 00:20:03,900 --> 00:20:11,310 The sight of you with that instrument of torture chokes me in the novel and Illustration II and feels dramatic. 163 00:20:11,310 --> 00:20:17,220 Opposition frames a constructed dichotomy between French and American. 164 00:20:17,220 --> 00:20:25,620 The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity used this rhetoric to justify an intervention in the art world by building in 1891, 165 00:20:25,620 --> 00:20:30,810 a satellite location in the Latin Quarter. In honour of its intended regulars. 166 00:20:30,810 --> 00:20:38,580 It was named St. Luke's for the patron saint of artists based at five Rue de la Construire in an iron, 167 00:20:38,580 --> 00:20:42,870 wood and glass structure, which became known as the Little Tin Church. 168 00:20:42,870 --> 00:20:51,570 It was humble, akin to an artist's studio. Some worshippers described it as a garage adjacency and like a workshop. 169 00:20:51,570 --> 00:21:01,080 It's largely unadorned. Interior was designed to isolate American art students from the perceived temptations outside the garden walls. 170 00:21:01,080 --> 00:21:07,140 The unchristian chairs that lined the rows of the interior amazingly still extends, 171 00:21:07,140 --> 00:21:17,160 although the seats have been retained are encouraging one to take on a posture of pious, careful attention with austere, upright forms. 172 00:21:17,160 --> 00:21:23,580 The seats small enough to ensure that one must sit erect with both feet on the floor, knees overhanging the seat base. 173 00:21:23,580 --> 00:21:29,530 No slouch. Only focus and a few artists even commented in their letters on how uncomfortable these chairs were, 174 00:21:29,530 --> 00:21:34,510 and I can also concur, having had the opportunity to sit in them myself. 175 00:21:34,510 --> 00:21:40,240 Americans in Paris regularly wrote home and in their diaries about all three churches. 176 00:21:40,240 --> 00:21:47,650 But these performances of religious and national identity were not necessarily embedded in religious belief or in historical fact. 177 00:21:47,650 --> 00:21:52,150 You'll find a whole range of themes across this number of artists. Regardless, 178 00:21:52,150 --> 00:21:58,180 the frequent use of Protestantism to announce cultural and artistic identities as steadfast 179 00:21:58,180 --> 00:22:05,750 and morally driven reverberated back to the United States in letters and newspaper articles. 180 00:22:05,750 --> 00:22:11,030 The notion of hermetic separation from the Parisian media folded into the ostensibly 181 00:22:11,030 --> 00:22:17,420 secular artists clubs formed in the 1890s as community spaces for Americans in Paris, 182 00:22:17,420 --> 00:22:22,970 where leadership and donors claimed to insulate members from the foreign city by encouraging 183 00:22:22,970 --> 00:22:30,050 focussed work and uninterrupted nationalism as an articulation of retains Puritan ethos. 184 00:22:30,050 --> 00:22:39,410 Artists clubs like the American Heart Association of Paris, which I'll refer to as by its acronym AARP and the American Girls Club AGC, 185 00:22:39,410 --> 00:22:50,210 which opened in 1890 and 1893 respectively, sought to revise ideas of bohemian culture by establishing a hermetic US enclave in Paris. 186 00:22:50,210 --> 00:22:57,530 The clubs became icons of the utility of Paris for artists by showing that American time abroad was not squandered, 187 00:22:57,530 --> 00:23:06,050 as Richard Harding Davis celebrated artists who quote made use of Paris instead of permitting Paris to make use of them. 188 00:23:06,050 --> 00:23:12,240 And of course, these clubs operated with major support from the U.S. churches in Paris. 189 00:23:12,240 --> 00:23:19,860 Members of both clubs used the garden rhetoric to define their separation from the city at the AP. 190 00:23:19,860 --> 00:23:24,870 Secretary Nesbitt Benson stressed that the quote raising of the streets around us makes our 191 00:23:24,870 --> 00:23:29,790 little garden all the more shut in and you can see in the photograph on the upper left. 192 00:23:29,790 --> 00:23:37,410 The kind of pine trees that are discussing the building and then in the background, you can see larger Parisian structures behind it. 193 00:23:37,410 --> 00:23:41,310 Another writer commented Quote Outside the wall lies Paris. 194 00:23:41,310 --> 00:23:52,680 Inside is America. Meanwhile, a year after St. Luke's opens, the AGC moved into the building behind it, which had been a Calvinist school for boys. 195 00:23:52,680 --> 00:23:59,790 As one contemporary noted, the entry to the club from the street seemed like a church door, 196 00:23:59,790 --> 00:24:06,210 as seen in the postcard at bottom right sent by painter Mildred Bridge to her family in Maine. 197 00:24:06,210 --> 00:24:10,170 Most representations of the structure emphasise seclusion, 198 00:24:10,170 --> 00:24:17,220 with a view from inside the garden looking back towards the U-shaped building from St Luke's Chapel. 199 00:24:17,220 --> 00:24:27,870 This perspective highlights the enclosed nature of the compound, which I should add is still extant now as the Columbia University Centre in Paris. 200 00:24:27,870 --> 00:24:35,430 Another photograph from 19 of three places AGC members up on the balcony have the sites with Reverend Van Winkle, 201 00:24:35,430 --> 00:24:46,650 who was the Minister of St. Luke's, acting as the gatekeeper and liberalising the US religious community as the protectorate of national morality. 202 00:24:46,650 --> 00:24:56,220 These institutions imagines themselves to be behaviour shaping with messages to men, not to be too loud and to women, probably not to make art. 203 00:24:56,220 --> 00:24:59,460 One of the illustrations by member George H. 204 00:24:59,460 --> 00:25:05,010 Leonard, left, depicts the AARP bulletin board pairing exhibition announcements with the sign. 205 00:25:05,010 --> 00:25:10,440 The members are requested to refrain from loud conversation and on the right. 206 00:25:10,440 --> 00:25:17,520 A Scribner's illustration of a demure female art student at the AGC shows a woman sitting with her hands in her lap, 207 00:25:17,520 --> 00:25:26,670 revealing no evidence at all that she is an artist and the use of girls in the title of the organisation suggested the need for guardianship. 208 00:25:26,670 --> 00:25:36,770 And even after the organisation changed its name, the original title stuck. 209 00:25:36,770 --> 00:25:45,290 The kind of hermetic seclusion for grounded by the churches and clubs also appears in many U.S. artists studios interests. 210 00:25:45,290 --> 00:25:48,980 And we will look at a few examples of Laredo tasks. 211 00:25:48,980 --> 00:25:55,490 Henry, also a tanners, and James McNeill, Whistler Paris spaces like the interior of St. Luke's. 212 00:25:55,490 --> 00:25:58,580 The walls were frequently austere. 213 00:25:58,580 --> 00:26:06,530 This aesthetic revised tropes of bohemian laziness and rendered remedied the experience of crowded ateliers in Paris, 214 00:26:06,530 --> 00:26:16,220 like the Academy Julianne, of which Turner declared quote, Never had I seen or heard such a bedlam or men waste so much time. 215 00:26:16,220 --> 00:26:21,890 They also redirected the cosmopolitan studio design of an earlier generation, 216 00:26:21,890 --> 00:26:27,620 including Chase and expatriate painter Frederick Arthur Bridgeman in the 1880s, 217 00:26:27,620 --> 00:26:35,990 both of whom adopted the model of French academic studios in their design in the AP journal Cartier Le10. 218 00:26:35,990 --> 00:26:43,160 The writer, Ernest Thompson, complained about such overstuffed studios with what he called useless odds and ends, 219 00:26:43,160 --> 00:26:48,380 and he caricatured an artist to Paris because he could not relinquish his belongings. 220 00:26:48,380 --> 00:26:55,100 The accompanying illustration by club member John Peter Pemberton offers a thinly veiled portrait of Chase, 221 00:26:55,100 --> 00:27:02,410 inspecting a varies amongst a dizzying array of objects in a topsy turvy space. 222 00:27:02,410 --> 00:27:12,460 For many artists of a younger generation coming to Paris and modest representations took up seclusion in place of worldly connexion scholars like 223 00:27:12,460 --> 00:27:22,270 students to task Svetlana Alpers and other working on the interior and studio have argued that representations of space are metaphors of self. 224 00:27:22,270 --> 00:27:29,680 Indeed, some studio paintings by U.S. artists in Paris can be seen as abstract self-portraits that imagined the austerity, 225 00:27:29,680 --> 00:27:38,380 cleanliness and purity of the American colony. Yet, of course, the images they produce aren't are necessarily inter social. 226 00:27:38,380 --> 00:27:44,500 They are designed to be shown to others, even as they inflect the idea of their own solitude. 227 00:27:44,500 --> 00:27:50,470 Further, this visual language operates as a harbinger of modernist aesthetics. 228 00:27:50,470 --> 00:27:58,630 One of the earliest examples of this burgeoning approach that I found was the American sculptor Laredo Tufts representation of his sharp turban, 229 00:27:58,630 --> 00:28:01,150 which is the maid's chamber in Paris, 230 00:28:01,150 --> 00:28:10,060 located at the top of one hundred and forty two steps on the Rue palettes in 1880, in TAFEs carefully pencilled and penned chamber, 231 00:28:10,060 --> 00:28:17,470 which he claims required four hours to meticulously draw the clean lines of his sketch to match the bare room. 232 00:28:17,470 --> 00:28:24,640 His inclusion of the door frame on both sides draws attention to the threshold into the artist's space task. 233 00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:28,270 Hermetic enclosure is exaggerated by the linear perspective, 234 00:28:28,270 --> 00:28:36,190 which pulls the viewer's I quickly through the room and then out the window, rather than inviting us to linger in his private space. 235 00:28:36,190 --> 00:28:41,050 Taft wrote to his family with an intensity typical of the letters of the period. 236 00:28:41,050 --> 00:28:48,850 I am in earnest in my work here. Terribly in earnest and no earthly power or obstacle that I can overcome shall prevent my reaching 237 00:28:48,850 --> 00:28:55,990 the mark I am aiming at to have connected the design of his room with work ethic and moral focus, 238 00:28:55,990 --> 00:29:00,430 which was also linked with his own Protestant worship at the American Church and 239 00:29:00,430 --> 00:29:05,200 his involvement with a church supported philanthropy called the McCole Mission. 240 00:29:05,200 --> 00:29:10,660 One of the artist's short stories constructed his Paris face as a moral battleground when he imagined 241 00:29:10,660 --> 00:29:16,000 a beautiful French woman arriving at his door in the middle of the night asking to move in. 242 00:29:16,000 --> 00:29:23,170 But and I quote from his story training and tradition came to the rescue and he sends her away. 243 00:29:23,170 --> 00:29:28,450 Temptations rendered inaccessible also come to the fore in an intriguing early sketch 244 00:29:28,450 --> 00:29:36,420 from the window of Edward Hopper's room in his Baptist pantheon decades later. 245 00:29:36,420 --> 00:29:40,140 Tanner's Paris Studios also billed hermetic seclusion, 246 00:29:40,140 --> 00:29:46,860 though he shared a studio at 15 Rue Descend with sculptor Herman Atkins McNeil when he first arrived in Paris. 247 00:29:46,860 --> 00:29:56,010 The space he renders in 1893 here seems devoid of human presence, with only filtered lights coming in from the windows at right. 248 00:29:56,010 --> 00:30:00,960 The room seems a cavern protectively removed from the world outside and entirely. 249 00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:07,440 Still, its seclusion parallels Tanner's recollections about the overwhelming city when he arrived, 250 00:30:07,440 --> 00:30:12,180 where he quote felt what it was to be a stranger in a strange land. 251 00:30:12,180 --> 00:30:20,190 How strange it was to have the power of understanding and being understood suddenly withdrawn. 252 00:30:20,190 --> 00:30:26,190 The strangeness of it, perhaps, is what made me feel so isolated here. 253 00:30:26,190 --> 00:30:32,310 Noting quote, I had come to study at such a cost that every minute seemed precious and not to be frittered away. 254 00:30:32,310 --> 00:30:37,940 Tanner, just defiant, designed a space for uninterrupted work. 255 00:30:37,940 --> 00:30:43,310 Tanner moved to a studio alone at 51 Boulevard son Jack in 1895, 256 00:30:43,310 --> 00:30:49,910 and this larger space continued to match the ethos of focussed work described in his autobiographical essays. 257 00:30:49,910 --> 00:30:53,030 A glowing lights of fuses the photographs of his studio, 258 00:30:53,030 --> 00:30:59,510 of which there are several building a spiritual sanctuary for the painter of mostly biblical iconography, 259 00:30:59,510 --> 00:31:05,480 whose father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister in one photograph. 260 00:31:05,480 --> 00:31:12,560 Tanner's Mary on the easel seems to resonate with the glow from the skylights above and in the painting, 261 00:31:12,560 --> 00:31:18,500 which is a nativity with a floating gold halo here and just over the shrouded cradle, 262 00:31:18,500 --> 00:31:23,510 an evocative light from multiple directions frames the Virgin Mary. 263 00:31:23,510 --> 00:31:30,860 Another photograph renders Tanner in his studio, contemplating the now lost Christ before the doctors. 264 00:31:30,860 --> 00:31:38,240 As Marcus Bruce compellingly suggests, Tanner mimics the figures in his painting, who are listening to Christ's teaching. 265 00:31:38,240 --> 00:31:42,890 The photograph renders visible for Bruce quote both the manner in which Tanner 266 00:31:42,890 --> 00:31:48,710 hoped to present himself to the world and the message he hoped to impart. 267 00:31:48,710 --> 00:31:55,640 The focus on his pictures and light is enabled by the lack of decor throughout the studio, especially on the walls. 268 00:31:55,640 --> 00:32:02,510 And the contemporary critic Helen Cole, when she visited, described it as a quote studio, which is exclusively for work. 269 00:32:02,510 --> 00:32:08,870 Because there are no giggles or knickknacks about it is spotless and in perfect order, 270 00:32:08,870 --> 00:32:14,510 quite an exception to the popular idea of what a studio ought to be, she said. 271 00:32:14,510 --> 00:32:17,810 By this period, Tanner was, amongst many such exceptions, 272 00:32:17,810 --> 00:32:26,030 to cause construct of typical artist studios as Americans work in secluded spaces became something of a stereotype. 273 00:32:26,030 --> 00:32:30,140 In George Tomori's 1894 novel about Paris, Bohemia, 274 00:32:30,140 --> 00:32:36,380 Trilby Little Billy and his friends returned to Paris to discover their former studio taken over by 275 00:32:36,380 --> 00:32:42,560 U.S. artists who whitewashed the graffiti on the walls and transformed it into an unrecognisable, 276 00:32:42,560 --> 00:32:47,180 clean aesthetic quote very [INAUDIBLE] and span space. 277 00:32:47,180 --> 00:32:56,420 The U.S. painters in their Italian. And here again, I quote from the novel work coldly civil and thus being disturbed in the middle of their work. 278 00:32:56,420 --> 00:33:06,410 Such a literary characterisation suggests European perceptions of US character as focussed on moral rigidity in the hermetic studio. 279 00:33:06,410 --> 00:33:10,460 The strict studio also became associated with modernism. 280 00:33:10,460 --> 00:33:18,080 Davis described a conversation with the US student in Paris in a in a studio that he perceived as empty. 281 00:33:18,080 --> 00:33:24,830 And the artist explains, We believe in lines and subdued colours and broad, bare surfaces. 282 00:33:24,830 --> 00:33:28,970 There is nothing in this room that has not a meaning of its own. 283 00:33:28,970 --> 00:33:37,040 You are quite right. There's very little in it. But what is here could not be altered or changed without spoiling the harmony of the whole. 284 00:33:37,040 --> 00:33:41,870 And nothing in it could be replaced or improved upon. 285 00:33:41,870 --> 00:33:48,050 While the strip studio appears most frequently amongst younger generation of U.S. artists abroad, 286 00:33:48,050 --> 00:33:53,450 Whistler's studio in the 1890s on the top floors of a purpose built studio building 287 00:33:53,450 --> 00:33:59,510 on the ruinous condition marks an intriguing exception at the twilight of his career, 288 00:33:59,510 --> 00:34:10,970 as Sarah Burns has argued. He began to cultivate an image of himself as a living old master in a photograph of his studio by George P. Jackson Hood. 289 00:34:10,970 --> 00:34:17,810 Vertical panels lined the walls, which contemporaries described as painted in a quote flesh colour, 290 00:34:17,810 --> 00:34:25,190 likely a pink peach or beige combination based on Whistler's use of that term to title a few of his paintings. 291 00:34:25,190 --> 00:34:35,120 With all of the woodwork painted a quote dazzling white and with only a small, single framed image, perhaps a mirror on the wall. 292 00:34:35,120 --> 00:34:38,630 While his display strategies converged with the hermetic, creative, 293 00:34:38,630 --> 00:34:45,890 haughty conspiracy of Taft and Tanner Studios as Anna Gerstner Robbins and John Siebert have explored, 294 00:34:45,890 --> 00:34:55,520 Whistler's Paris studio operated more as a place of sociality than a place of work, as suggested in this photograph by his conferring with a client. 295 00:34:55,520 --> 00:35:02,720 Its clean lines operate in dialogue with the modern exhibition airy aesthetic he hoped he helped to promote. 296 00:35:02,720 --> 00:35:11,150 So perhaps it evolved in parallel terms, an aesthetic engaged with the nationalist discourse of puritanism and spirituality. 297 00:35:11,150 --> 00:35:22,830 Here subtly mingles with modernism. Works of art offered iterative expressions on this cultural map of American Paris 298 00:35:22,830 --> 00:35:27,210 in the form of ephemeral displays sprinkled throughout the city and museums. 299 00:35:27,210 --> 00:35:32,260 At the spring salons or at the artists clubs. And we're going to kind of time travel a bit. 300 00:35:32,260 --> 00:35:43,230 Through 1889 and nineteen oh five, as we move between the loos, the salon of the National de Beaux Arts, which was located on the Shandon Mars. 301 00:35:43,230 --> 00:35:48,480 And this is where all of the salon objects I mentioned for the rest of the talk were shown. 302 00:35:48,480 --> 00:35:54,690 And I'll also briefly take us to the Palace of Social Economy at the Paris Exposition of 19:00, 303 00:35:54,690 --> 00:36:03,390 which was located here for the remainder of the talk, also focussed on one thread which investigates the operations of gender within this period. 304 00:36:03,390 --> 00:36:08,880 Sinister discourse and I've hinted to this a bit already in talking about the American Girls Club, 305 00:36:08,880 --> 00:36:14,700 but thinking about how gender is being constructed through these exchanges, 306 00:36:14,700 --> 00:36:19,770 as well as how a few women artists navigated this restrictive conversation. 307 00:36:19,770 --> 00:36:25,020 And I'll briefly mentioned for anyone who's interested in following more about this conversation related to 308 00:36:25,020 --> 00:36:33,510 gender I've organised with the Birkbeck Centre and Durham centres for nineteenth century studies in England, 309 00:36:33,510 --> 00:36:38,280 a set of roundtables, and unfortunately this Fridays is sold out. 310 00:36:38,280 --> 00:36:42,990 But there is another next Friday which is dealing specifically with gender. 311 00:36:42,990 --> 00:36:47,430 Although a lot of the themes from this Friday discussion will resurface, 312 00:36:47,430 --> 00:36:53,370 and I think my Twitch colleagues have posted a link for registration for that second round table, 313 00:36:53,370 --> 00:36:58,560 so please do join us to dig deeper into this conversation. 314 00:36:58,560 --> 00:37:08,610 In this period, women were often featured as metaphors of quote innocent flowers and anxieties about the adulteration of U.S. art in France, 315 00:37:08,610 --> 00:37:15,330 and the female body became an allegorical site of temptation that embodied the need for protection. 316 00:37:15,330 --> 00:37:20,160 If museum goers in the Louvre stumbled upon William John Whitmore working on his 317 00:37:20,160 --> 00:37:26,220 picture of Charles Courtney Curran and painting in the classical gallery in 1888, 318 00:37:26,220 --> 00:37:31,260 they might have noted an array of fragments of sculptures of female figures. 319 00:37:31,260 --> 00:37:38,880 A recently restored crouching Aphrodite, a female, had a female pubic region. 320 00:37:38,880 --> 00:37:46,390 The freeze of Celine and Endymion, in which the female character replaces her lover in an eternal sleep. 321 00:37:46,390 --> 00:37:52,500 Yeah, in their passing across the composition with a more effectively sexualised is them hard 322 00:37:52,500 --> 00:37:57,330 at work and painting with a small stick for steady control bowler hat on his head. 323 00:37:57,330 --> 00:38:05,010 Karen evacuates all emotion and sensuality, even as he is directly nose to nose with a crouching Aphrodite, 324 00:38:05,010 --> 00:38:12,870 countering the white marble made beige over time and wear with a more reserves the whitest whites in his painting for Curran's own collar. 325 00:38:12,870 --> 00:38:18,810 Perhaps anticipating because Daniels later construction of the American colour 326 00:38:18,810 --> 00:38:23,190 British critic Walter Armstrong's comments about what he described as a certain 327 00:38:23,190 --> 00:38:29,490 coldness in American painting in 1889 with repressed emotion rendered like where he 328 00:38:29,490 --> 00:38:35,550 described the calm infallibility of a surgeon resonate with Whitmore's aesthetic, 329 00:38:35,550 --> 00:38:43,830 which itself played into ongoing discussions about the need for academic finish to prove the labour of production. 330 00:38:43,830 --> 00:38:49,320 Society painter Julius the Blank stewards also articulated limited possibilities for 331 00:38:49,320 --> 00:38:57,540 women in his gigantic life science drama Redemption Unmissable at the salon in 1985. 332 00:38:57,540 --> 00:39:02,010 The headline for the New York Herald, which was picked up by newspapers across US cities, 333 00:39:02,010 --> 00:39:10,230 described a quote orgy in the present day, noting the solitary woman in relief that left with a glowing Christ on the cross, 334 00:39:10,230 --> 00:39:20,730 glaring down over her shoulder as she awakens to her moral quandary against the glittering lamps and crystals and debauchery around her to the right, 335 00:39:20,730 --> 00:39:27,420 and which the New York Herald described as mystical and philosophical painting. 336 00:39:27,420 --> 00:39:33,180 As Stewart mingled both in the U.S. artists community and in the elite US society in Paris, 337 00:39:33,180 --> 00:39:42,660 viewers likely perceived the characters in the painting as enacting this imagined clash between US and Paris more Paris moral systems. 338 00:39:42,660 --> 00:39:47,850 So here women's positions were restricted to being pure or perience. 339 00:39:47,850 --> 00:39:57,090 How did U.S. women artists in Paris disrupt the systemic sexism that led to the dismembered or hypersexualized female body? 340 00:39:57,090 --> 00:40:04,290 Some cultivated links between New England history and myth. Philadelphia painter Cecilia Bowles shipped her portrait of Connecticut, 341 00:40:04,290 --> 00:40:11,580 her Connecticut cousin, Mrs. Julia Levitt Richards, across the Atlantic in 1896 for the salon. 342 00:40:11,580 --> 00:40:16,920 Her iconography and titles in Paris, woman from Connecticut and in Pennsylvania. 343 00:40:16,920 --> 00:40:21,750 New England women cultivated links with the American northeast. 344 00:40:21,750 --> 00:40:29,070 French critic Charlotte, the dreamy who frequently wrote about US culture in general and American women in particular, 345 00:40:29,070 --> 00:40:34,710 had the year before highlighted French perceptions of New England culture as focussed on a quote 346 00:40:34,710 --> 00:40:41,800 simple and wholesome life full of work and religion with no time for vain regrets or idle dreams. 347 00:40:41,800 --> 00:40:48,720 St. John's friends Paul beyond roots of both quotes respectable grandmothers who inspire veneration, 348 00:40:48,720 --> 00:40:56,490 but also in echoes of the Puritan quote fear of reprimands in her studio and in wearing Mary White. 349 00:40:56,490 --> 00:40:59,490 The woman is associated with virginal purity. 350 00:40:59,490 --> 00:41:06,210 And years ago, a colleague suggested that this composition also reminds of George Stella towards Magdalene paintings. 351 00:41:06,210 --> 00:41:12,930 And I think that's a beautiful comparison. She sits here idle but poised by mental activity. 352 00:41:12,930 --> 00:41:18,280 Her newspaper held briefly down closed books on the table beside the candle. 353 00:41:18,280 --> 00:41:27,750 Bow offers, though, a wily transnational pairing, not only registering international expectations of the innocence and stoicism of her sister, 354 00:41:27,750 --> 00:41:33,210 but also by exploring painting techniques which were in this period associated with Paris. 355 00:41:33,210 --> 00:41:38,670 Beau had studied in Paris and Kano from 19 1888 to 1889, 356 00:41:38,670 --> 00:41:45,030 and her dynamic study of colours within the Whites and her actions facture resonates 357 00:41:45,030 --> 00:41:49,920 with Impressionism and with Whistler's Symphony in white to number one the white girl, 358 00:41:49,920 --> 00:41:51,960 which had been exhibited at the salon geoglyph, 359 00:41:51,960 --> 00:42:00,990 you say in Paris in 1863, enhanced with occasional periwinkle and violet strokes to juxtapose the sitter's peach face, 360 00:42:00,990 --> 00:42:10,890 bow emphasise the shades of white in the woman's dress handkerchief that close curtain and chair using blue and yellow and violet for shadows. 361 00:42:10,890 --> 00:42:18,570 The only pure white on the painting comes in the heightening articulated in the impasto that you can see in this detail. 362 00:42:18,570 --> 00:42:28,170 Eugene Benson had noted in the 1860s that the quote roots of American life in Puritanism must forever keep the artistic sentiment subordinates. 363 00:42:28,170 --> 00:42:37,620 In other words, that's art making and puritanism were incompatible, but French critics saw something ennobling in those moral figure. 364 00:42:37,620 --> 00:42:45,120 Beyond wrote that both salon submissions revealed Quote a side of America free from Henry retired and tranquil, 365 00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:52,020 and we rest content and meditated in the atmosphere created by her admirable talent beyond connected, 366 00:42:52,020 --> 00:43:00,780 both style and subject explicitly with US identity, and I quote again from him his her brush is wholly at ease. 367 00:43:00,780 --> 00:43:05,820 Intimately American and shows us ways simple. The true, though remote. 368 00:43:05,820 --> 00:43:13,710 The peaceful drying of your family morals beyond comments attempted to cement what we're fluid links between character, 369 00:43:13,710 --> 00:43:17,280 morality, nationalism and painting practise. 370 00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:26,640 Pleased to see pictures quote as pretty as plums on a tree, he joked about the identical references endemic in American Paris. 371 00:43:26,640 --> 00:43:31,770 Madame Cecilia Blueprint's presents us to them. Let me start that again. 372 00:43:31,770 --> 00:43:36,960 Madame Cecilia Bello presents them to us like fruits from the garden. 373 00:43:36,960 --> 00:43:45,800 Is that not indeed American? A photograph by Atlanta based black photographer Thomas Askew, 374 00:43:45,800 --> 00:43:54,170 which was included in the volume types of American Negroes at the exhibit of American Negroes in the Paris Exposition in nineteen hundred, 375 00:43:54,170 --> 00:43:59,270 just around the corner from where the Puritan sculpture was installed taps into the same 376 00:43:59,270 --> 00:44:05,210 discourse of strident work ethic and moral steadfastness that fuelled HBO's painting. 377 00:44:05,210 --> 00:44:09,110 This exhibition, which we'll turn to in much greater detail next week, 378 00:44:09,110 --> 00:44:16,630 engaged with such traits to define progress in the African-American community following emancipation. 379 00:44:16,630 --> 00:44:25,000 A light skinned black nursing student in three quarter view in her starched white uniform sits studiously reading a book. 380 00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:28,990 Her work ethic on full display. The prose composition, 381 00:44:28,990 --> 00:44:35,020 contemplation and insistent layered tones of white as a signal of steadfastness recall 382 00:44:35,020 --> 00:44:41,110 those New England women here to delicately decorates the wall behind the woman's chair, 383 00:44:41,110 --> 00:44:50,980 and the cultivated plant reminds of social uplift. Those excuse and this unknown sitter's engagement with the visual culture of focus and work ethic 384 00:44:50,980 --> 00:44:58,310 suggests that white male artists in Paris who did not have a monopoly on the Puritan discourse. 385 00:44:58,310 --> 00:45:06,320 Academic painter Lucy Lee Robbins took another tack to challenge constrictions for American or for US women artists in life and art. 386 00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:11,770 She achieved achieved critical success in Paris with her paintings of nude women, 387 00:45:11,770 --> 00:45:17,210 most of which are unfortunately currently unallocated, although many were reproduced in the salon, 388 00:45:17,210 --> 00:45:23,780 catalogues her iconography and purported affair with instructor Kylie Jahan, 389 00:45:23,780 --> 00:45:31,700 and led her to be vilified by the US community in Paris, as art historian Brandon Fortune has considered. 390 00:45:31,700 --> 00:45:36,620 Lee Robbins adopted the female nude as a subject and divorced her from mythological 391 00:45:36,620 --> 00:45:42,590 contexts in ways that unsettled U.S. viewers anxious about Paris temptation. 392 00:45:42,590 --> 00:45:48,470 In Indomie at right, the artist is positioned over a bed on which a nude woman sleeps. 393 00:45:48,470 --> 00:45:53,240 Her body almost fully available to the viewer who stands looking down at her. 394 00:45:53,240 --> 00:46:00,050 The US community in Paris linked lascivious ness in her art with their perceptions of her immorality. 395 00:46:00,050 --> 00:46:09,530 Yet Lee Robbins exhibited annually at the salon for over three decades and four times at the American Girls Club between 1981 in 1993, 396 00:46:09,530 --> 00:46:14,120 and her successful academic career belied the moralising discourse that framed 397 00:46:14,120 --> 00:46:20,540 her before her marriage in the mid 1890s as a form of misogynist mimicry. 398 00:46:20,540 --> 00:46:26,000 Her nudes challenged the assertion that U.S. women could not manage the foreign art scene. 399 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:34,460 Women artists like Bill and Lee Robbins Revere reverberating as well in his photographs pushed at the edges of these constructions. 400 00:46:34,460 --> 00:46:40,400 Yet most U.S. women artists in Paris in the period did not have the critical or artistic success of these 401 00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:47,960 outliers and remained more confined by anxieties about the morality and godlessness of U.S. women abroad. 402 00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:51,740 As the Russian painter and Paris Marie Best Skirts commented, 403 00:46:51,740 --> 00:46:57,860 women who challenged limitations on their liberty quickly found themselves further restricted. 404 00:46:57,860 --> 00:47:05,720 So not only the Puritan then, but the culture of American Paris, as refracted and contested through puritanism, 405 00:47:05,720 --> 00:47:12,440 was wrapped up in the cloak of Saint Garden sculpture on the Paris Exposition Grounds in nineteen hundred. 406 00:47:12,440 --> 00:47:17,570 Yet it is in this cloak where the Puritans contradictions are perhaps most of parents. 407 00:47:17,570 --> 00:47:19,550 As Jennifer Greenhill has observed, 408 00:47:19,550 --> 00:47:29,150 this billowing and dynamic coat undercuts the forward inertia and the rigidity of the figure building a paradoxical instability. 409 00:47:29,150 --> 00:47:34,760 The Puritan was an archetype and a gambit in terms taken up and subverted in Paris. 410 00:47:34,760 --> 00:47:40,190 Both a restriction and a possibility in religious and secular contexts. 411 00:47:40,190 --> 00:47:46,640 It was also a layered transnational symbol that was passed back and forth between French and US viewers. 412 00:47:46,640 --> 00:47:51,830 Critics and artists in both text and image For many U.S. artists, 413 00:47:51,830 --> 00:47:58,100 the adoption of stereotypes of the Puritan was both a defensive and offensive gesture. 414 00:47:58,100 --> 00:48:08,060 Defensive in the sense of constructing these hermetic spaces designed to separate a US culture from French society and offensive 415 00:48:08,060 --> 00:48:15,170 in the sense that there was a tone of trying to improve aspects of French life and culture that many Americans scorned. 416 00:48:15,170 --> 00:48:20,030 The reissued placement of these objects locates them not only spatially, 417 00:48:20,030 --> 00:48:26,810 but also shows the operations of discourse as an ever dynamic constellation across the city. 418 00:48:26,810 --> 00:48:32,660 It reads Scribes the cultural colonisation of this innocent righteousness abroad, 419 00:48:32,660 --> 00:48:44,060 while emphasising how artists who were minorities by the Puritan structure due to race and gender identities navigated and manipulated the concept. 420 00:48:44,060 --> 00:48:56,260 Thank you for your time and attention, and I welcome one to back to talk through some of this material further. 421 00:48:56,260 --> 00:49:06,840 All right, I am. Hi, Wanda. Hi. Elbows criss crossed, implanting a transatlantic move here. 422 00:49:06,840 --> 00:49:15,380 Oh, that was a very interesting talk and so interesting to see your your argument building from last week to this week this week, 423 00:49:15,380 --> 00:49:22,190 more maybe on the performative side of of innocents abroad or at least making, 424 00:49:22,190 --> 00:49:30,950 making making something of innocence and making it a stance, a construction on an ethics to live by and and so on, 425 00:49:30,950 --> 00:49:41,330 and various ways in which you bring that out in the church, the clubs, the studio construct the new kind of studio that that that you've detected. 426 00:49:41,330 --> 00:49:43,370 I want to return to that in just a second. 427 00:49:43,370 --> 00:49:53,990 Let me just remind our audience to this is the moment to pop your questions into the chat box and we'll see if we can't get to them to give to Emily. 428 00:49:53,990 --> 00:49:58,790 I wasn't really just love your mappings. I'm always interested. 429 00:49:58,790 --> 00:50:04,190 Ask about how making our own maps these days, thanks to the internet is possible, 430 00:50:04,190 --> 00:50:11,990 but I love the way you showed us the relations on both the right and the left bank of these various hotspots, 431 00:50:11,990 --> 00:50:17,480 if you will, of the American, would you call it the American corner of the world unto itself? 432 00:50:17,480 --> 00:50:29,750 But to be able to see where actually an American artist abroad would would walk, what the territory the region would look like of of his or her? 433 00:50:29,750 --> 00:50:34,880 Paris, that was that was very beautifully done. And I know they take time. 434 00:50:34,880 --> 00:50:38,930 So thanks. Thanks for taking the time to do that. 435 00:50:38,930 --> 00:50:49,070 And let me just maybe launch a question that came up in my mind when you talk about the minimalist cleaned up studio, 436 00:50:49,070 --> 00:50:57,020 I was fascinated by that because my acquaintance with and I don't have the full range of studios that you looked at, 437 00:50:57,020 --> 00:51:06,620 and that's what was very heavy because I do know the Whistler example and I know Sargent's studios abroad. 438 00:51:06,620 --> 00:51:15,290 But and and your way in which you do bring in modernism, which is what I was kind of hanging on because I've always thought of these studios as an, 439 00:51:15,290 --> 00:51:21,410 if you will, a new model of how to the the place in which to work. 440 00:51:21,410 --> 00:51:31,310 And then I was I have a question, but I presume these work spaces also not the little sleep spaces, but the Tanner studio, for instance, 441 00:51:31,310 --> 00:51:33,620 may also have been places where commerce took place, 442 00:51:33,620 --> 00:51:41,480 where there was the collector or the person interested in talking to the artist about the commission and so on would also come. 443 00:51:41,480 --> 00:51:47,690 But the question is really about the intersection of your construction of of of 444 00:51:47,690 --> 00:51:54,860 puritanism with modernism and another space in which I think that's happening. 445 00:51:54,860 --> 00:52:04,160 But tell me if this fits your your study is primarily a Gilded Age study and more or less around World War One, 446 00:52:04,160 --> 00:52:11,360 but that does encompass something like a topic close to my heart as Gertrude Stein's studio, 447 00:52:11,360 --> 00:52:20,390 in which I can certainly make an argument for the bohemian presence in the way she concocted that studio, 448 00:52:20,390 --> 00:52:25,070 the sounds that she had on on a weekly basis with her brother, Leo. 449 00:52:25,070 --> 00:52:33,740 But maybe just the open question. The open ended question is this interface between modernism and puritanism? 450 00:52:33,740 --> 00:52:42,230 And does it go beyond the studio when the space I was just suggesting or just elaborate a little bit more on that, if you would. 451 00:52:42,230 --> 00:52:50,660 Thank you so much, Monica. That's such a rich question. And I think that one of the things that has been sort of tricky to pass in this material 452 00:52:50,660 --> 00:52:55,610 is the kind of visual simulacrum between kind of Whistler's Studio and Tanner Studio, 453 00:52:55,610 --> 00:53:03,050 for instance, even though as artists, they're at different moments in their career and they're positioning themselves in different ways. 454 00:53:03,050 --> 00:53:06,710 And I really admire a lot of the scholarship from, say, 455 00:53:06,710 --> 00:53:16,280 the last 10 years that has really rethought the role of religion in modernism, like thinking it out and signs of grace. 456 00:53:16,280 --> 00:53:22,310 Kristen Swain's book and, for instance, amongst amongst many others. 457 00:53:22,310 --> 00:53:33,500 And I think that I do want to suggest, and I think we can suggest that there is more kind of overlap and cohesion between these values. 458 00:53:33,500 --> 00:53:41,570 But I think the other piece that you're bringing in is the kind of thread of bohemian studio practise that does appear in some circles. 459 00:53:41,570 --> 00:53:44,300 And I think that Stein's case is really interesting, one, 460 00:53:44,300 --> 00:53:55,340 because she is cultivating a kind of cosmopolitan space where she is gathering kind of artists from all over who are based in Paris in her salons. 461 00:53:55,340 --> 00:53:59,810 And there are some U.S. artists in Paris who go there, but that doesn't seem to me. 462 00:53:59,810 --> 00:54:06,800 To be her main focus of kind of how she's inserting herself in this more avant garde conversation. 463 00:54:06,800 --> 00:54:16,850 But I think that in the context of the studios of artists who are more academic like Tanner's, 464 00:54:16,850 --> 00:54:30,410 there is a kind of tone of greater tie with a kind of nationalist connexion, perhaps than what Stein is building. 465 00:54:30,410 --> 00:54:33,770 And I think too, as ever, with these kind of discourses, 466 00:54:33,770 --> 00:54:41,120 there are always exceptions and certainly there are artists who shed this kind of Puritan discourse entirely 467 00:54:41,120 --> 00:54:48,320 and take up this kind of bohemian ethos that's that's constructed and imagined and real for some in Paris. 468 00:54:48,320 --> 00:54:55,130 Yeah. And I'm wondering, I don't know quite how you bring this all to a closure in your bigger study, but I'm wondering if, 469 00:54:55,130 --> 00:55:06,500 in fact, part of the closure might not be a increasing if you will desire to be bohemian as an American abroad. 470 00:55:06,500 --> 00:55:18,530 And that brings us to the post-war generation post-World War One generation very desirous of even becoming an expat in the 20s 471 00:55:18,530 --> 00:55:28,670 because of that very bohemian culture which is being in your during your period is more suspect if you think too long to. 472 00:55:28,670 --> 00:55:32,570 That point speaks to the performative nature of all of this, 473 00:55:32,570 --> 00:55:37,520 because some of the artists who claim this insularity and this kind of Puritan ethos in Paris, 474 00:55:37,520 --> 00:55:42,170 when they go back to the U.S., they'll celebrate their bohemian lives in Paris. 475 00:55:42,170 --> 00:55:49,940 Like Joseph Henry, Schaap writes about having a Latin quarter Thanksgiving in Cincinnati when he got back, 476 00:55:49,940 --> 00:55:54,950 and they kind of celebrated how they celebrated Thanksgiving in Paris at the American Artists Club, 477 00:55:54,950 --> 00:56:02,750 but then dressed as kind of French artists with berets and said There's this way in which this identity is kind of tried on in Paris, 478 00:56:02,750 --> 00:56:09,230 but then shared an inverted upon return to the U.S. even in the 1890s. 479 00:56:09,230 --> 00:56:12,020 Yeah, that's very interesting. That's an earlier example than mine. 480 00:56:12,020 --> 00:56:24,460 Mine example would be Grant Wood, who also brought back customs, and he started something called the Garlic Club, which was the Beach Club. 481 00:56:24,460 --> 00:56:27,740 I mean, this is not necessarily a bohemian custom. It's a French custom, 482 00:56:27,740 --> 00:56:34,580 but the rubbing of the of the salad bowl with with with garlic before you put in the oil and vinegar 483 00:56:34,580 --> 00:56:43,130 and so on was thought to be kind of a French affectation that he returned to Cedar Rapids with. 484 00:56:43,130 --> 00:56:47,900 But he also tried to set up something that in the 20s, he disavowed this. 485 00:56:47,900 --> 00:56:56,270 Later in the 30s, but in the 20s, he tried to set up something that was called the Latin Quarter or the Latin Quarter of Cedar Rapids. 486 00:56:56,270 --> 00:57:06,440 So he doing something similar to to sharp. Well, one of our commentators, one of our questioners, I don't have a country for this for Jane. 487 00:57:06,440 --> 00:57:16,880 But Jane, actually, I think is touching on she's sort of feeling sorry for those in the American Quarter because what they're losing out on. 488 00:57:16,880 --> 00:57:22,550 So, she writes, the Americans who unfortunately chose not to mix with the French because of 489 00:57:22,550 --> 00:57:28,790 language or religion and so on word that weren't they left the poorer for it? 490 00:57:28,790 --> 00:57:36,740 Maybe Jane's from France or from someone who's had a very influential experience? 491 00:57:36,740 --> 00:57:40,940 Yeah, no. Absolutely. Comment, Jane. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jane. 492 00:57:40,940 --> 00:57:48,680 It's so true. I mean, as as a person who values cosmopolitan exchange and thinks about how dissenting one's 493 00:57:48,680 --> 00:57:54,680 perspective is one of the most important things that kind of adult citizen of the world can do. 494 00:57:54,680 --> 00:57:58,880 It's hard to read some of these comments about the insularity that's happening. 495 00:57:58,880 --> 00:58:02,780 And like, there is a comment that's in the larger chapter from an artist who says, 496 00:58:02,780 --> 00:58:07,340 like, basically, you don't need to talk to anyone when you get to Paris, 497 00:58:07,340 --> 00:58:12,320 you just get in a taxi and you show them the address of the American artist club and they will take you there. 498 00:58:12,320 --> 00:58:20,000 And then from there you'll find everything that you need and you'll kind of be implicated in the satellite America. 499 00:58:20,000 --> 00:58:29,150 And certainly that comes at a loss. But I think it also speaks to the ways in which a kind of corporate structure starts to form in Paris, 500 00:58:29,150 --> 00:58:32,930 that Americans are going as this kind of rite of passage. 501 00:58:32,930 --> 00:58:42,650 They want to gain technical training. They want to kind of go through this as a phase and most of them not intending to ever stay in the long term. 502 00:58:42,650 --> 00:58:46,880 And some of them were quite successful, and some of them did stay forever. 503 00:58:46,880 --> 00:58:52,520 But many of them never even exhibited in the salons, which were one of the big goals that they had. 504 00:58:52,520 --> 00:58:58,680 And so these artists clubs, those set up many exhibitions where artists who were club members could show their work. 505 00:58:58,680 --> 00:59:06,930 And so. Some of the some artists use this as a kind of stepping stone to more professional and international spaces. 506 00:59:06,930 --> 00:59:12,960 But for some artists, that was the kind of pinnacle of their their Paris time. 507 00:59:12,960 --> 00:59:16,830 But I think too, there were just so many thousands of artists who were going. 508 00:59:16,830 --> 00:59:23,370 And so while this is indicative of a kind of thread that recurs throughout the material, 509 00:59:23,370 --> 00:59:31,620 we have a whole array of experiences that kind of results in a complicated network. 510 00:59:31,620 --> 00:59:40,410 Well, Jane is just self-identified as American. So when Rachel has asked after thanking you for your talk, 511 00:59:40,410 --> 00:59:47,070 would you say a little bit more about the defensiveness of these artists in relationship to Catholicism? 512 00:59:47,070 --> 00:59:53,750 For example, she's wondering about Tanners Marian images. 513 00:59:53,750 --> 01:00:03,740 That's a great question, Rachel, thank you. And it is a kind of recurrent comment in letters that I've found between the 1850s and 514 01:00:03,740 --> 01:00:10,610 the early 20th century where people write about going to the gothic cathedrals in Paris, 515 01:00:10,610 --> 01:00:15,260 for instance, and they find themselves kind of fascinated with this. 516 01:00:15,260 --> 01:00:19,460 Basically what they see as an antiquity of architecture. 517 01:00:19,460 --> 01:00:28,640 But when they attend the service, they see a kind of ritual that they find to be and they find themselves disconnected from. 518 01:00:28,640 --> 01:00:38,750 And they find that they are the kind of collective worship to is something that they often comment upon in their letters. 519 01:00:38,750 --> 01:00:47,420 And in the 1850s, there's a great letter by an American woman who was in Paris, who was there when the American Church first opened, 520 01:00:47,420 --> 01:00:56,630 and she writes about what it feels like to go to church at an American church worshipping in a kind of Protestant based structure. 521 01:00:56,630 --> 01:01:04,610 And what that felt like. And so it's something that is kind of often discussed, but I think it's kind of a kind of critique of ritual. 522 01:01:04,610 --> 01:01:12,020 And the question about Tanner is a really rich one, and I'm not sure at this moment I'm equipped to answer it well, 523 01:01:12,020 --> 01:01:21,080 except to point you to Anna Marley's wonderful Tanner catalogue that has many essays about Tanner's practise. 524 01:01:21,080 --> 01:01:32,330 And also there's an essay by Alan Braddock about Tanner and his religious paintings that's in the 19th century art worldwide. 525 01:01:32,330 --> 01:01:47,120 And I think that Tanner is thinking about too religion in the sense of a personal experience, rather than perhaps a collective one. 526 01:01:47,120 --> 01:01:54,830 And I think Braddock writes really evocatively about the ways in which he is trying to navigate 527 01:01:54,830 --> 01:02:03,080 race in a more nuanced and compelling ways through the representation of biblical stories. 528 01:02:03,080 --> 01:02:10,370 But I would have to dig further to get at your question of kind of how his belief system, 529 01:02:10,370 --> 01:02:15,560 as registered through his religious paintings, engages with ideas of Catholicism. 530 01:02:15,560 --> 01:02:20,210 So that's a great question, and I will dig into it. One last question. 531 01:02:20,210 --> 01:02:29,330 Emily, I think it's all we have time for, but this one comes from Jessica making the comment that the austere artist studios are so like 532 01:02:29,330 --> 01:02:36,560 the New England boarding house bedrooms of female mill workers from earlier in the 19th century. 533 01:02:36,560 --> 01:02:44,810 And she wonders, and I think maybe this is a statement where there are similar moral and religious anxieties. 534 01:02:44,810 --> 01:02:54,020 I think that's really more an observation and giving you another sort of, if you will, another kind of a space and to compare your studios. 535 01:02:54,020 --> 01:02:59,870 Yeah, that's a really wonderful thought. Thank you. I don't know the images directly that you're speaking about that. 536 01:02:59,870 --> 01:03:07,490 I would imagine that in the same way, especially with regard to collection collectives of women, 537 01:03:07,490 --> 01:03:11,570 that there is, especially when women are kind of lodging together, 538 01:03:11,570 --> 01:03:19,340 which at the case of the American Girls Club was the structure and to an American woman named Anna 539 01:03:19,340 --> 01:03:24,950 Lester wrote about wanting to live at the American Girls Club but not finding a space there available. 540 01:03:24,950 --> 01:03:31,310 But then a club would recommend other boarding houses and other organisations where one could reside. 541 01:03:31,310 --> 01:03:39,650 And so thinking about how it maybe because of anxieties about prostitution that shape 542 01:03:39,650 --> 01:03:44,660 laws about how many women still in some states can even live in the same building, 543 01:03:44,660 --> 01:03:49,640 there is this tone of morality that gets inflected. 544 01:03:49,640 --> 01:03:57,260 But it's interesting. Your comment makes me think that class is also something that I might address more in thinking about the 545 01:03:57,260 --> 01:04:06,160 women who are participating in the artists clubs in Paris and and this kind of rhetoric of protection. 546 01:04:06,160 --> 01:04:15,610 Emily, when you get stateside next and presumably the national parks reopen, you must come to Lowell, 547 01:04:15,610 --> 01:04:20,560 Massachusetts, where the there's a national park dedicated to the Mill Mills of Lowell, 548 01:04:20,560 --> 01:04:26,470 Massachusetts, and you can go to some of the dormitories or I don't think they're even distinguished enough to be called boarding houses, 549 01:04:26,470 --> 01:04:27,970 but maybe they were. 550 01:04:27,970 --> 01:04:37,960 But in any case, you get to see some of these bedrooms and they look a lot like that image of TAFEs in the maid's quarters that that you show. 551 01:04:37,960 --> 01:04:45,790 Well, it's now my job to close this down because we've reached the bewitching hour. 552 01:04:45,790 --> 01:04:50,080 Thank you all for being with us. Thank you for sending in your questions. 553 01:04:50,080 --> 01:04:56,020 And certainly big thanks to Emily for her thought-provoking lecture today. 554 01:04:56,020 --> 01:04:59,890 We thank tortured Oxford for hosting it. 555 01:04:59,890 --> 01:05:09,910 Jeff Machin for also hosting not only Emily and her programme, but also this session today. 556 01:05:09,910 --> 01:05:17,770 Join us next week, the third in the Tara lecture series, where she will be joined by James B. Smalls, 557 01:05:17,770 --> 01:05:23,740 the professor and chair of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 558 01:05:23,740 --> 01:05:33,640 Her lecture at that time and in a week with entitled Primitive Dash or Incipient, 559 01:05:33,640 --> 01:05:41,590 I hope you will all be able to join us again then and there'll be a fourth lecture, of course, two weeks from now. 560 01:05:41,590 --> 01:05:43,630 Thank you all. Thank you, Emily. 561 01:05:43,630 --> 01:05:54,850 Wish this could be person, but I love the fact that we are, I'm sure, beaming this to many quarters around the world that cares about American art. 562 01:05:54,850 --> 01:06:02,980 So thanks very much, everyone. And good evening to some of you and good lunch hour to those of us on the East Coast. 563 01:06:02,980 --> 01:06:39,939 Bye bye.