We're going to be talking about modernism and mass culture.
This is a kind of vast topic.
So we're just going to dig into it briefly today.
I suppose I could start by saying that it's very often that arts engagement in the modern period with a
broader visual culture or mass culture is often seen as one of the key characteristics of modernism,
modernism in the visual arts.
And it's often that's often seen as something that distinguishes modernism from earlier periods when, according to a somewhat oversimplified view,
the arts were much more interested in, the concept of art was seen as a much more exclusive category.
That art was not like the cheap stuff that you could buy in markets, market stalls and so forth.
As I say, that's an oversimplification.
And you could probably give a similar kind of lecture, although you wouldn't use the term mass culture might be popular culture for an early period,
but you could give a similar lecture about earlier periods and how oil painting was always inflected by cheap prints and vice versa.
Know, this is I say one of the it is one of the claims. It's often made for modernism.
And that's certainly been the case since the 1950s, when just to pick the most obvious example, Warhol,
Andy Warhol famously crossed from advertising to off Madison Avenue to to Soho and took with him a set
of technical procedures and formal conventions that would reconfigure the artworks relation to commerce,
to fashion and more specifically to serial reproduction.
So this is a this is Warhol working for an ad agency.
This is a magazine ad where he develops this slightly coquettish style to advertise
shoes and he takes some of what he's learnt over into making art objects.
This this particular version of the computer model is sold for 40 million, was a series of Christi's in the last week or so.
So we've gone from there. Well, we've absolutely directly inexplicitly from mass reproduced stuff in a high end magazine,
but still no original cheap paper mass produce something that's going to end up absolutely firmly in the museum world,
the fine art world and so forth.
Another example from the same period is this is James Rosenquist on the left president elect 1960 to 64, who also pulls his images as well.
This is a Coke bottle from the mass media. So this is a painted version of a photograph of JFK.
So photographing the mass media and then a car and an ad for a particular kind
of cake mix from an American magazine so full of images from mass culture,
translate some into here a large scale painting.
Also, like Warhol, he comes from a different world of enigmatical.
This is Rosenquist on a scaffold standing and really is on a scaffold view of a New York street is if he starts life as a painter of billboards.
And in 50s, the vast,
large scale billboards in places like New York were hand painted because the printing printing penology was not up to printing such long,
large images. The guys would go up on the scaffold to paint according to a predetermined, predetermined design.
Paint the billboard by hand. And again, as with Warhol, he takes something of what he learns.
Technically, doing that in around it is very big in mass culture and translates into what he
then does in images destined destined for the gallery and for the for the museum.
Since the 50s or 60s, by the time we get to Rosenquist,
that the breakdown in the boundary between quote unquote art with a capital A. and other registers of visual culture and the
crossing and recrossing of the line between those different registers has only accelerated to the point that it's not clear,
I think, anymore that the boundary exists in any meaningful way.
So just as an example, to underscore that this is a painting by Murakami Kashima,
our economy is very, very successful, uber successful kind of art industry.
One man art production industry with vast teams of workers working in his factory, producing images and so forth.
What we're looking at here is what he calls Superflat painting,
which is a combination of fine arts materials because it's oil on canvas with traditional,
very traditional material, certainly in the West, a combination fine art materials and popular culture.
And the culture that he looks at specifically is the Otaku world, which is the Japanese term for obsessive fandom.
And this is a district in Japan, in Tokyo, where there's obsessive fans gathered looking for go in their stores, collecting snow obsessively.
So he's interested in that culture and he's interested in one of the things that gets collected in that culture is anime,
anime and manga, which is a animated films of which we have a few clips here.
And manga is comics. So he pulls something with the look of this kind of material and puts it into a fine art context in that he's very like Warhol,
very like Rosenquist, an updating of what they did.
He pushes it, though, even further. So here he is on the left holding a canvas.
So this is a painting. But you can see it has the same design.
Here it is in the gallery, has a similar design to the bags that he designs, that Banksy designs the Louis Rete home.
And it's the designs, the combination to Louis we call monogram and the camouflage happen.
This is from a show with from outside the show that took place in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum,
which one of the great old American museums of Art Brooklyn Museum stop opening on the 1st of January 2008.
And the items were said to have been released on January 1st, 2008.
So the language is the language of of a commercial. The latest Louis Vuitton handbag has been released to the market.
That's in Brooklyn. January the 1st. Then June the 15th of the same year they were released that Louis, we told stores worldwide.
So here we have an artist who is utterly impregnated both in the art world.
He's got big show, One-Man Show in Brooklyn. But also in the world of utterly commercial, absolutely, explicitly commercial world.
What we're looking at on the right. These are a series of 10 booths outside the Brooklyn Museum.
When the show had been designed to look like street vendors sold the kind you see all prosper
with Manhattan cities worldwide where you'd only get knockoffs of proven time handbags.
So there's a whole game being played here with, you know, these are real Murakami reform bags.
But looking at being sold in the places you think to get knockoffs.
So there's a whole game going on here with the I think Murakami is playing with questions of authenticity.
What is the real thing? Where does the real reside with us? How does one find authentic value in the contemporary moment?
They're very divided opinions about Murakami. Some people think some people have more in.
You think he's a total Sell-Out, you know that.
But the indication here of museum we re is a bad thing that he's basically cashing in as fast as he can on that.
On bringing those things together.
There are others who who want to see in him a slightly more critical meditation on what it means when those worlds come together.
So maybe he's offering a critique here of the museum and the fact that the museum,
increasingly, as the years pass, is willing to hold hands with the corporation,
or perhaps it is a critique of religion home, trying to maintain value by associating itself with museum,
even as it's threatened from from another side, by countless knockoffs and fakes and so forth.
We could debate Murakami. He stands here for us is the latest point, the most fully involved stage, if you like,
in a trajectory that starts sometime in the late 19th century, and it's that that we can look at for the most part today.
And there will be, I think, two core questions that we should think about as we look at this material.
First is what it does to what happened to the concept of what happens to the way that it looks and so forth as it reaches out into.
And of course, we should think about the verbs here.
What does it mean to reach out, reach out the right word, but is it reaches out into something like a broader visual culture?
As one question. Second question. Equally important is what we might think happens to the audience.
So what is implied about who the audience might be as modern art engages with a broader visual culture?
And that is blunt is the question is, is this about an expansion of audience? Is it speaking to a broader audience or is it taking something?
Is it taking forms that are designed for a broader audience,
but bringing them back into a kind of elite, hermetic world of still fine art with a capital A.
As I say, the late 19th century is going to be the moment that we look at most closely here.
And we can look at three artists, each of whose work I think raises those both of those questions in slightly different ways.
So this is the first our first example of the chap on the bottom here.
This is Poovey de Shiban on the top, the sacred grove.
Eighteen eighty three to four. And on the bottom to lose the tracks parody of that same painting painted around 1885.
This is HOOVEY was in a in the mid 80s, probably the most successful painter in terms of official recognition.
What are critics like in the academy, like in the government to local government?
Love him. He's getting endless commissions for museums and powerful the big new identities in public buildings.
And this is the big smash of the official salon in 1884.
What Poovey, which is the Treasury and his towel's with who he knocked out of this apparently thought about to be.
Is pretty clear they don't think much of this kind of official art.
This is a it's a pretty big paintings, about 10 feet, maybe even 12 feet across,
which gives some indication of how seriously they took the job of making fun of the movie.
And you can see essentially this painting is a series of negations or refusals of the values of this thing.
This is the sacred grove with the muses of music. And poetry is, of course, floating around and debating and so forth.
And at every step, Poovey, as I say, negates the values that were hui's airborne.
Muses floated, strumming a liar his come and holding just about make this out and gleaming metal cylinder.
That's a sliver of oil paint. So the claim here is one of the criticisms of paint is not made out of ideal, lofty ideas.
It's made out of sticky oil based pigment that comes in a mass manufactured metal to cover the surface of that.
There are various other negations here.
A little boy who's making a lot of wreath removal kind of activity is replaced by a less elegant voice stuffing his mouth full of roughly bread.
So, again, it's it's kind of materiality material needs of the body.
Does it look at it?
And then, of course, most obviously to the pollutes the sacred grove by having these nondescript, contemporary's wander in and trampled sacred turf.
And most notably is this little bit here,
which is the trap facing into the fitting into the picture and looking for all the world and quite deliberately so.
He's pissing onto the sacred. That's the ultimate and most brutal debasement of everything.
That official art, that high culture, one might say, stood for.
In conjunction with that, in conjunction with the rejection for the noble ideals of high culture to attract,
is very interested in what we might call low culture, popular forms of mass culture and so forth.
So these are here. This is Jane Avro, two photos on the right of someone who was one of the great stars of the day.
Dancer, singer in the nightclubs seem more lock on the north side of Paris.
So big media star of the day. And this is truly track painting her painting, her image in 1893.
And the image, I think, begins to tell us something about what interests the about this kind of culture.
It's he emphasises here the ungainly ness of her dance.
I think that this is not you know, this is the opposite of ballet. It's kind of common.
It's ungainly. It looks a little awkward. And he also, I think, perhaps rather cruelly changes her face in the photograph.
She looks sort of conventionally pretty good. What would say that in the painting he makes it look her face look much Bonior much harder.
And I think what he's wanting to emphasise here or what he wanted to convey visually is her working classes that he's made.
He's emphasised what is the important thing for him about it, about her,
which is that she's a working class girl who's risen to be a star of the sea, singing bawdy songs, dancing in the sun infection and so forth.
To lose the track is that is fascinated by this kind of figure in a time he if he addresses it,
he addresses them in ways that still leave what he's making pretty firmly in the realm of fine art.
This is these are a couple of photos of Loewy Fuller, who's another of the great stories of the day.
Two things, sort of an actual the butterfly, which is what she's doing here.
And actually got the blur of a photograph, the slow show, a few photograph conveys perfect.
I think. What was the effect on people in the theatre?
She visits these this drapery around and under the lighting, the theatre looks like this aethereal floating butterfly.
So it's a kind of map. It was a magical spectacle. This is sort of stuff that blew people's minds in the late 19th century, were pretty easily amused.
In those days, the track was also pretty impressive by it.
And he made this sort of image. This is a lithograph of Louis Fuller.
And you can see that he's proud to be trying to capture in this medium.
Something of the effect of the show is something of that of the magic of that spectacle.
As I say,
we're still firmly here in terms of what in terms of the thing that Lautrec himself makes in the realm of high are what he's not doing here is.
What's someone like SRES Judiciary?
Well, a great post to of the period is there is a large, colourless, old folk poster made to be stuck around Paris on billboards to advertise.
The show is a much smaller object, and it's real.
It's very much high end art lithography.
The technique is incredible. People sees it in flashes.
It's mostly not done with it with a wax crayon, but with a little air, a gun spattering out, foiling liquid onto the surface.
You have a wonderful spatter of and then it's printed up in a very limited edition, very expensive kind of print.
So this is what we see here is the magic of mass cultural phenomenon transferred, as I say, into the realm of or co-opted by perhaps fine art.
At other times, however, the track moves directly into the register that Shray is operating in.
This is the truth. A mountain or another big hit of the day.
And this is to lose the tracks poster advertising.
And this is this is a poster that's designed to be just like the SURYA'S put up on billboards around parents.
And if you can see the style that he has that the track uses is not unlike fishery and simplified lines.
Simplified blocks are designed to be instanced and eye catching from the eye, from the street.
You see photographs of Paris at this period. It is every single wall is absolutely plastered with posters.
So the kind of short, sharp shock of a powerful, simplified,
intensely coloured image was what you had to do to make your points to stand out against against others.
So a question we might ask would be, what does it mean to align oneself as a fine artist here with the style of mass circulation
images and also with the technology is my circulation images is not a small run top end print.
Is a poster designed to be mass reproduced and pasted up around and around the capital.
At times, Lautrec very directly addresses that mass audience and seems quite deliberately to be doing that.
This is in the circus, Fernando, the ringmaster. It's a painting from 1888.
Subject matter is we see as popular entertainment the circus.
And in terms of address the audience, it's important to know that there were two versions of this painting.
One of them, and that's this one, which is one that we that survived, was exhibited at the Moulin Rouge, Moulin Rouge.
One of the great emerging nights, nightclub entertainment locations on Lombok, again emerging into becoming popular in the late 19th century.
So it's one of the Moulin Rouge. He painted a larger version, which is now lost.
That was shown at the Circus Fernando itself.
So it's a this is a fine art,
something out of a fine art after making large scale images for exhibition in non art locations and for at least implicitly, a mass audience.
It's not it's not a gallery. It's not where the concert is going to look at it.
It's just in front of the great show, in front of the great public.
And serving, of course, as an advertisement for the for the circus to is the track also exhibited in other non art locations.
So, for example, there was a large and inexpensive restaurant or more like a cafe called The Grown Bouillon.
And he showed some of his works in there, as did this chap.
This is Van Goff's portrait of Pat Tongji.
And thinking about someone like Van Gogh thing about someone like Lautrec exhibiting their works in that sort
of location might make us rethink what we might have expected about how modern art was seen by a broader,
broader public. It's worth noting that Lautrec was a something of a lefty.
He's a he's a fallen Risden. He comes out of an aristocratic family, but his personal politics seemed to incline mostly towards anarchism.
So the so the idea that, well, there's the sense that he might have wanted, at least at times, to have engaged with a broader audience,
not just to have the elite, the money lead, look at his work authorities images, but a broader audience makes some sort of sense.
My Tyson in some way with his what we understand of his politics.
There is, however, a counter view toward what I've been doing so far is essentially the kind of Lautrec as outreach model.
There is a counter view which says that although the track represented working class
entertainers at times in arenas with the working class could also be the audience.
And although one might argue that the poster makes the image more Democratic to the poster on the streets of Paris,
it's something that anybody can see that actually there's something else going on here.
And a question we might ask is what happens in Lautrec to the notion of class or the popular here?
We're back with Jane Avro. It's been argued that rather than democratisation,
what Lautrec is doing is essentially marketing an image of social marginality for essentially still a middle class audience.
So, for example,
that the calories a meal marks places like the Moulin Rouge that we were just talking about had originally been when they first found it,
when they first emerged, mostly frequented by the local working class.
My markers are working class. Neighbourhood still has little bits of working for us.
The remnants today. But at that time, it's it's a working class area.
What happens then is that the artists stop moving in because the rents, achieving the studios and so forth.
So move in partly for financial reasons,
partly because certain there was a way of thinking oneself of oneself as an artist that had to do with marginality.
You point talk already in this class about romances and things like this.
So, you know, the idea of the artist is outcast who isn't welcomed by polite society and so forth.
So living in a working class neighbourhood,
rubbing shoulders with workers was something that appealed to certain kinds of offers during the during the 19th century.
What happens is these these nightclubs become more established is that they start
becoming destinations for the Korean border as the only certain kinds of programmes.
And the appeal of these places was specifically that they were kind of grotty and it was sort of edgy.
It was a kind of 19th century version of slumming it in some way that you went to these places.
They were kind of workers around. There was some weird artists and, you know, they might sit at the next table.
And that made it kind of a cool experience for this to come back to choose the trek.
Specifically, one argument about his work is that it reflects that kind of commodification of the idea of marginality and that this sort of image,
even though it's all the working class. What would you say, Roosen, have a successful career on stage?
It's not aimed at the working class at all. This is still an object that is made for an elite and kind of hip audience.
You know, there's a lot of the bourgeoisie in Paris and Los Angeles, the trafficking.
This is Portugal. It's not like classical, you know.
There are lots of people still like to be. But there's a sub section of the bourgeoisie who see themselves or construct their
own identity around the idea that they're sort of hip and they sort of you know, they're the sort of people who on the weekend go up to my mom.
Even on Monday, they go back to the bank and continue that that their life is as usual.
This is the debate that I'm outlining for you here, Flooz attract as Democratic leftie or to lose the track is catering to a particular
subsection of the elite and commodifying or objectifying the image of the worker.
For that to lead is an ongoing debate in the literature. So there are people who argue what many people will argue the other way.
If you are inclined to argue for the latter view that he's really just catering for a middle class elite audience.
You might point to this sort of photographic evidence,
visible physical Trask himself with one of his artist buddies doing a kind of dress up masquerade.
There are endless photographs of the track doing this sort of thing.
He and his buddies goof around a lot, did a lot of press after recorded them in photographs.
And this is Track Treki addressed as to the role that he's playing.
Mascarenhas playing is worker and his friend as you see him dressed as the gym.
So they're re-enacting in this photograph. Precisely the sort of frisson that was supposed to occur at a place like the
Moulin Rouge where you still have workers still working class neighbourhood.
But the chance there at the next table were even at the same table and as a kind of tension between tension between the classes.
And of course, the trick is not a work, right, so this is, you know, he's adopting across you as a worker,
but playing it for laughs, really, with his buddies when he shows his photograph of himself to his buddies.
And we might continue with a map of this debate around this kind of image.
This is Tetch attempt supper on the left and at the Moulin Rouge.
Again, in that nightclub on the right, there are some who argue that this sort of painting is soft, daunting.
It's critical. It's showing the people who you see within the painting in a bad light.
So she looks likely the words who were looking at her, not looking at her best kind of sense of alienation between her and the guy,
just cut off so that there at this table very close together.
But they're not really enjoying any real sense of community.
In other words, these are red as these paintings can be read as aligning themselves with to loosely attract as a critical lefty,
if that's what we think he is.
And there are people who write as soon as this work starts being exhibited in the period, there are critics who read him that way.
Think he's mostly left wing critics think he's a good guy because he's making
fun of those debauched bourgeois who come up to my mom and get that case.
But you could equally argue what people have argued, the counter view,
which is that that subsection of the middle class who see themselves as kind of hidden, also quite happy to see themselves in this way,
that this is not that these are not images that contradict the appeal of slumming in that part
of what you think is cool by yourself when you had to go off on a on a party on Saturday night.
Is that you end up in this sort of stage, know that you don't look elegant anymore,
that you're kind of becoming part of that part of that nightclub scene.
I just thought that for my book, it's this image in particular which in terms of its style, is fantastically innovative.
The unorthodox perspective, garish stage lighting, strong contos, startling colour choices, et cetera, et cetera.
In other words, it looks very much like advanced painting.
And again, the idea of what might say is that whatever is shown within the painting, the painting itself is not for a mass audience,
that this is the most advanced painting that appeals again to a particular kind of elite
who see themselves as the people who can understand this sort of this sort of painting.
Just one more example to double example to to underscore this idea of the difficulty of pinning the track down.
This is Lautrec dressed as Jane Averitt. So this is another of those photographs where he's goofing around, dressing up, having a snack,
keep him visible, attract dressed in a kimono as a Japanese woman, somebody holding his baby baby doll.
So there's a lot of fun being had around these around these circles.
And again, the question is, does it say what does it mean when you dress up with King Avro?
Does that mean he identifies with her and is suffering in some way on his side?
What does it show that it's really just all a joke for him, that these are all just images that you can pick up if you can discover.
So what my this tells us about how he represents Jane Avro herself.
OK, so that was the first example. And I figure I've left you with more questions about it than answers.
But that reflects I think that's not a bad reflection of the state of the literature.
He's a much contested figure. I think an example is equally contested.
This is Zarar, who, like Lautrec, takes up as part of his subject matter, actually,
whose primary subject matter for a big for the big paintings, for the large and ambitious paintings that he produces.
Essentially want to hear the case of popular entertainments is the subject.
Here's the sideshow. This is a this is what one would have seen on the street outside a circus or a larger entertainment taking place out of view.
They put a few of the indicators of musicians, the dwarf and so forth, to pull the crowd.
It's a kind of it's a it's an enticement,
but then a new line of move the stairs and pay at the ticket office and go in and see the full the full show.
He also paints the nightclubs. This is LA Show, which was apparently a slightly more rowdy and eroticize version of the cancan.
So we're in, again, a place like the Moulin Rouge watching modern entertainment.
And we also like to lose the track paints the circus.
In terms of exhibition strategy, they're very different, Cerar is always in galleries spaces.
These are the works. These big works, which have you seen?
Three are all shown at the Salone design, which had a rival.
And this one designed to be a rival to the official salon, which is seen by many of its 7000 likes,
raw as impossibly high bound type tradition and impossible to get into because it had an ugly,
brutal jury to reject anything that didn't look rather like to down.
So this design is an economy was founded and was a kind of innovative space.
It had its motto was that it had neither jury nor prises.
So the idea was that anybody could exhibit had to be a very small exhibition free, but not one that would put was designed to put anyone off.
So anyone from the rankest challenger to the most advanced avant garde painter could put that stuff in.
It was all home. It was hung alphabetically. So there was no not only was the new jury stopping people getting in,
but there was no jury putting certain things in a better position to be seen or grouping pages because they thought that they belong together.
It's kind of radically them Democratic exhibitions policy.
Lassiter's Saraa exhibits these works.
So it's sort of the sort of democratic in terms of who can show there. But it's still very much a fine arts location.
The government provides the space for it to in which it takes place.
So there's a kind of unofficial or tacit acceptance by the government that these that this is an art space that is needed.
It's not the circuits. In other words, it's not likely track. Putting the circus, Fernando in the circus.
Fernando. Let's take a seat.
Saraa sorry. Thought the like. Lautrec is also thinking about mass culture.
This is another thing about mass culture, not into it.
Only what he represents. What he thinks is what he represents represents that subject matter.
This is another shery post here for a different circus.
But Cerar, when he died, had 60 or so SRES in his collection.
So he'd been he'd been collecting these things.
And he talked about wanting to do to distil from Shery his secrets, the secrets of how this kind of subject.
And you can see the way that Schrade represents the dance.
When we saw Acrobat who did she's on the force through all picks up, something of that, something of the formal vocabulary.
These simplified, jagged lines reappearing is here in a very different kind of image.
Oil on canvas painting. The reason Thoreau was interested in ensuring.
I think, is that he saw how he found the possibilities for expressing this kind of subject matter.
As I said, he said he wanted to talk. He wanted to get to what he thought thought were the secrets of Turay.
The question was, Thoreau, I think is what he thinks of that subject matter,
what is what his view really is of the mass cultural entertainments that he represents.
It's often argued that he's very cynical about what he's looking at.
That he sees it, that he doesn't dig the surface and he doesn't dig the shuhui, he thinks it's all rather problematic.
So you take the the shadows as an example. It's very often argued that this shows here the emptiness of the pleasure that is supposedly on offer here.
So that poses a rigid kind of cannot be repeated.
Who's at the top of the dancers? The whole scene looks kind of lifeless.
The smiles look extremely fixed. And the chap, he's a paying customer.
These are paper forms. He's a paying customer who looks for outside rather paid like so wanted.
How do these these paintings has it? The draw is, as I say, rather dubious about the idea that this is a site of real pleasure.
The guy who pays is an exploitative pig. These are exploited workers who are forced to repeat endlessly the same movements.
But there's no real sense of enjoyment on their part in this kind of parody of pleasure.
Throw that might be seen as something like the opposite of to lose the track,
the track, at least one view of the track is that he finds it mass culture,
the possibility of authentic pleasure and of a kind of democratisation, a possibility reaching out to a broader audience throng.
One might say seise that whole arena as inherently problematic.
But this is a place of not a place of pleasure, not a place of authentic community.
It's all about what some of his contemporaries claimed that he was up to.
Which is to show that this was essentially a social phenomenon invaded by this sort of language.
One of his pals at the U.S. Invaded by capital. And what they meant by that was that this was that this was a sort of hollowed out.
Shell of what cook communal life could be.
And it was hollowed out by the fact that it was all about commerce, it was all about capital.
So once the life of the Wal-Mart stock developing, entrepreneurs come in.
They buy them. They start paying people to advertise and. And so forth.
And it is, as I say, some of THROVE pals were wary about that kind of phenomenon.
They thought that once it's a painful once people are getting paid to entertain you and you pay,
then any idea that this is really about pleasure or committee or whatever it is, is that it's become impossible.
So that's, as you say, one count of throwing it comes out of the period.
It's also the case. Just come back to this, the thing he said about wanting to get to the secrets of Shray.
It can also be argued that straw is locked into that world in another way, rather different way.
These are a couple of sheets of studies that he does.
So this is she said this is the letter that he wrote to the capital, Boufal, in which he is drawing,
laying out or repeating something that you see in the image below, which is a page from combat,
the Super Bowl's exploration of the idea that certain lines and certain configurations of lines have intrinsic
will have in them the intrinsic part to produce kind of automatic emotional responses on the part of importance.
I hear it's really so simple. The lines that head up invoke feelings of happiness and keep in mind that hate them or about sadness.
Horizontal lines are about calm and he generalise this from those it on human
face here to the idea that lines in and of themselves will produce this effect.
And as I say, you can see through all the repeating things, Keith,
or here laying out a working design and ordering Tebogo that this therefore produces a kind of automatic effect in the in the viewer,
that these are lines that have a kind of intrinsic or configurations of lines that have an intrinsic power.
If we come back to Marsha,
who one might suggest that what Straw is doing here is if you can see very clearly structuring the image around a series of Reykjanes diagonals,
which is to say that how it was cynical he might be about the world of mass culture.
He built into his own work something of the world.
Cooperating with them were something of the desire for producing automatic effects that someone likes Turay.
I think Rob Leave had master that there's something in the rate that will generate this.
What I'll find so fascinating will generate an automated response.
That still leaves us with a slight question about how to read this email.
This is not entirely clear whether these are ascending lines or descending lines that they're sending that in theory.
This is a joyous picture and it is not as simple as we might have thought.
But I suppose if we take it from the central line, at least some of us are down.
So perhaps this is better. Perhaps this is a picture that is designed in its very composition and structure to produce feelings of sadness,
which might be appropriate to what Cerar perhaps thought about this kind of this kind of scene.
OK, so the third example, just a matter, again,
to open up a slightly different way of thinking about these questions is the least famous of the three is,
chuckled Maximilian Lupe's, who was a close colleague of thralls.
So it becomes a pointless following in Ferrars enthrals way to produce a very different
kind of word is just to give you a sense of the sort of stuff that he paints.
This is the rooftop on the left and the forge on the right.
In his depictions of Paris room with ties in front of the streets,
a lot of student hostels on it now for some of you may have stayed on or walk up and down a rooftop.
This was in the subjects that he chooses.
Luce was resolute, attached to working class locations.
This is not this a very, very different kind of street from the sort of street that the impressionists had been had normally painted,
which would be the Grand Boulevard on the on the right bank.
This was very much at that time a working class neighbourhood.
And you can see the posters on the wall and Watchmen, which will one day mostly cap space posters.
In other words, these are not the glossy Shari's that one might have seen in other parts of parts of town in terms of how what the style looks like.
The figures are shown in very blocky and solid type of form, which is meant,
I think Lucy tends to rhyme with what he thinks is a very down to earth subject matter.
So there's an unflashy technique here that Rines would be the non flashy nature of the people and of the end of the neighbourhood.
Alongside this sort of scene, he paints images of the industrial worker here illuminated by his by the forge.
And we might contrast this with to lose the track who when he thinks of the working class.
It's all about entertainers here. It's just a mundane worker.
It's worth noting that Luce never does any sort of sexualised imagery.
So going to night is very different from. To lose track. He's also working as a printmaker.
This is a these are two political posters.
One is an ad on the left that would've been put up in a new newsagent's window or perhaps on one of the little advertising columns in Paris,
Philly, Tom Nouveaux,
which was an anarchist journal in the late 19th, 19th century, and then on the left for Beti Sandy syndicalist, which is the kind of unionist battle.
And as they say, that the politics of race does it.
This guy calling the crowd to action and proud to be carrying the red flag of socialism and the black flag of anarchism here.
This chap is waving towards his papers, says your enemy is your master.
A good part of class warfare evocation here pulled from life on 10.
These are, as I say, is a kind of simple, smallish posters aimed at mass circulation.
And Lewis was always very willing to work for this sort of to produce the sort of image alongside his career as an oil on canvas painter.
He wants to be able to one feels it a real, genuine desire to be able to speak to a broader mass audience.
So he makes endless friends. I just have a couple more to show you. This is on the left.
On the right. Sorry. A cover foolish. The Qambar Socialist.
And on the right. On the left, a print, as you see, attacking capital and the stage and these images, they're supposed to be simple in two ways.
One is this would be easy to read. It's not it's not about kind of esoteric or complicated high art meanings.
That's got to be utterly legible to any sort of audience.
Very simple messages. So he have the worker chained I by capital, by commerce and by the state.
Here you have the divorce stock exchange with a big fat pig in front of it with a dollar sign underneath it.
So it's pretty clear what the politics of here and how you do it.
It's fairly free for the full right to enjoy some milk from the cow.
The front man says, oh, how they are these bouchra hydrates.
Love it. But of course, the meaning of the images that they're not hearing any of the words this know, this is the guy is actually in the country.
These guys are just daytrippers who imagine they love the French countryside but don't understand that it's based on based on labour.
So it's very simple image that they are very simple images in terms of their message.
They're also very simple in terms of their form.
So that does a kind of declared simplicity here in terms of the representation of the figures, in terms of how the image looks stylistically.
And again, that's designed, I think, to make the prints clearly legible.
You don't want the reader to be both of you to be confused that you know, that these are propaganda pieces.
Confusion is not good for propaganda, but it also aligns the artist with the viewer.
So the look of these images effectively say something like, look, I to the artist, unlike you, I'm not a sophisticated guy.
I'm just a regular guy. And of course, that makes the message conveyed by the print more believable,
makes it able to speak more convincingly, I think, to the intended, intended audience.
This again, I was thinking about this alongside our first example to lose the track complicates something
is the idea that he's aiming at the democratisation of the image when he's producing posters,
or at least if he is, he's doing it in a slightly different, slightly different way.
Penny, I want to end with that briefly as this.
This is another loose call to Paris Street in 1871. He painted in 1985.
1871 is the year of the Paris conference.
These are workers who have set up the COMMUN in Paris and there's a French army is sent in and which is them, which is the Middle East.
If you leave the left wing accounts, 30000 works is supposed to be killed.
Seven days elusive. Both Luce is a lefty.
That's become pretty right for what we've seen. So he's on the side of the communal.
These are innocent victims of the brutality of the state and the military and so forth.
What's interesting about this painting is that it's it shows the difficulty, I think, of trying to carry through what Luce did.
Imprint's into a form that has or put a register within the.
Two different registers of visual culture, which has all sorts of associations that make it harder to do this sort of work in it.
And that Richard, of course,
is fairly big or long canvas painting that gets shown in the slot is an account of this where it first exhibits, exhibits this work.
The difficulty is that the kind of simplicity of this image, I think is deliberately made it simple.
So the shutters of these boarded up shops behind were all very simple blocks of blocks of colour.
This even, I think, had a deliberate simplicity to the way the figure is drawn.
So it's possible in some way unsophisticated.
It's not a flashy not to be flashy painting. It's not.
He doesn't want the viewer to feel that he's flexing his artistic muscles, showing us what a great artist to do.
Is it suppose we kind of found Earth undemonstrative painting in the way that the prints are?
The problem is that by 1985, nobody seems to think you should do that.
Nobody thinks that painting. But has this had direct simplicity is worth much.
So when he exhibited in nineteen of five various critics, a sort of sympathetic to the idea that you might want to remember the commu
that with the memory of that event might carry some sort of political weight,
but none of them find this painting particularly moving or convincing or successful.
And part of the reason is that I didn't bring this in.
But afterwards, you know, the painting is just around the corner from Loop's because it's hung alphabetically.
So l you take a very close is cheeses, looks how we both paint, just painting it, you know, get into the critics to test McKees.
But they also know that that's kind of where it's at.
But the questions of a cohesive painting asks, which are really questions about formal innovation, et cetera, et cetera.
But that's kind of what's going on in painting life with kids that they know that that's that's what painting is headed.
And this thing just looks like it's kind of caught out of time a little bit.
The real problem, the underlying problem, I think, is, of course, that there are different audiences here,
the critics, the published critics, review journal writing in newspapers and so forth.
Of course, are old, were always all educated, middle class, almost all male.
And they have different kinds of they want different things from pinkly than other kinds of audience money.
And watch looses. The people to whose painting is really speaking for the workers is very interesting.
Post history to this forehands of this painting season. Who's loses studio?
Don't revise it. And then the CJK, which is a key U.S. Confederation of unions in France, agreed to take it.
So they feel there's there's an audience out there that's not the usual audience who feel that this
is a worthwhile painting and that it speaks to something that they know that they might believe in.
So they agree to take it, although it's actually not clear that they ever go round the studio and pick it up.
Then there's a very interesting exchange in the records of the Music d'Orsay,
which is at that time well from before the news agency existence, the Music Luxenberg, which is the modern art museum.
Parents were in the minutes with some of their meetings.
There's a debate about whether to accept this painting to the national collection because it's done on the afternoon films and dies.
And you can tell from the debate that this unease essentially about the politics and the painting.
Do we really want this painting in the national collection? Is this speaking correctly to our values?
And I think the values a double for both political. Do we want to remember the communal but also aesthetic?
Is this the right sort of painting? Do we think that this is.
Do we think that this painting fits into the glorious story of 20th century French modernism?
And eventually they do see it sometimes in the residual say they haven't sometimes.
And we just to reinforce what I've been told, that one of the things we've been thinking about, which is audiences for all.
And how different audiences might respond to be expected to respond to different different kinds of changes.