ALEX SOLOVYEV: All right. Well, hi, everyone. Welcome to the first session of the History of Art Research Seminar series hosted by
the history of art department at Oxford and led by Departamental DPhil students.
The series features recent work by researchers currently working in the history of art department.
My name is Alex Solovyov. I'm a DPhil candidate in the department and I'll be moderating today's session.
We ask that you keep your cameras off and your microphones muted during the presentation.
After the presentation we'll have a moderated Q&A session,
during which time you can raise your hand to speak or type your question in the chat, whatever you prefer.
And I also want to let you all know that the audio of this session will be recorded.
So our presenter tonight is Saul Nelson, who will be presenting a talk titled 'Grace Hartigan Fashion or Painting'.
Saul Nelson is a departmental lecturer in the history of art department at the University of Oxford.
His work analyses the global development of modernist art in the aftermath of World War Two, and you didn't.
It uses this broader context to rethink the work of artists who have formerly been seen as regressive or conservative,
asking how their work might have engaged such vital political concerns such as Cold War, nationalism or the critique of colonialism.
An example of this approach, his work writing to Barrett Newman(?), Ethan Souza (?) and of modernism has recently appeared in the journal Art History.
His work has also been published in the Oxford Art Journal and the London Review of Books, and he has worked forthcoming in the journal American Art.
So, Saul the floor is yours. Thanks, Alex.
Yeah, thanks so much to you and all the DPhil students for organising this.
It's nice to have a forum for sharing research.
And yeah, lovely to be here and thank you for asking me.
And yes, it's a preface, this.
This is an abridged version of a much longer piece of writing or any kind of glaring leaps in logic or narrative - apologies.
And hopefully I can pick them up in the Q&A.
And so to begin on the 11th of May 1953, the painter Grace Hartigan gathered her brushes and a few pots of paint.
She left her studio on Essex Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side and travelled uptown to the Museum of Modern Art.
The distance was almost four miles and the day it was very, very hot.
Perhaps she took the subway or a taxi rather than walking the hour and a half laden with her equipment.
I have a hunch, however, that she chose the cheaper option given the anxieties about money that punctuate her journal for that year.
So let's say she walked. The museum's director of collections, the famous Alfred Barne Junior in the auditorium.
From there, she was conducted to an office, not Barne's,
but one of his subordinates waiting her inside that office was her painting The Persian Jacket.
Hartigan had finished it the previous November, working from a session with a model dressed in garments purchased at a local market.
At that point, she called the painting the best work she'd ever done.
Quote "It has all I've learnt so far from the masters in it" those masters where numerous. Persian jacket picks them up as quickly as it throws them away.
There was Matisse, of course, her title was direct in its quotation.
She would have known his figure with a Persian robe.
Then in the Barnes collection though for me, I'm not sure whether she'd seen this painting at this point,
but it's always Matisse's great woman before a black background.
Now in the Nelson Atkins collection in Kansas City that I think comes closest to the
form of Persian jacket. Hartigan was obsessed by Matisse during the early 1950s.
She called him 'My Master'.
It makes sense that Persian Jacket, a painting of furnishings and attire, would look to him so closely.
He, too had found a surface for abstract pattern and bright block colours in the odalisques and fabrics of an imaginary orient.
The swirls Hartigan added to her own sitters lapels the way she rolled up the jacket's cuffs to show the weave such minutiae
would not have looked out of place thrown across one of the Mattisse's armchairs or draped over his balcony in Nice.
But Matisse's exotic sized renderings of Morocco are far from the paintings only resource. Whole eras of early modernism.
Picasso in the 20s, Cezanne in the 1870s summoned up in the ghostly play.
The painting makes out of its theme from the seated portrait in an airless, bourgeois interior.
But if Hartigan used the subject matter of Persian jacket to foreground an array of canonical references whose lodestar was Matisse,
it is equally the case that in technical terms, her painting insisted on its contermporaneity.
For one thing it is much larger than Matisse's is typical format for a portrait.
It is almost life size, almost as large as Willem de Kooning's Woman I.
Then there is the white, high heeled shoes that her sitter plants flat at the base of her canvas.
This is a high street shoe. It channels the contemporary advertising exigency of depicting heeled shoes in profile.
That is to say, it is modern, up to the minute, commercial. Warhol still in fashion illustration at this point in 1952 was painting shoes like this.
Artworks with titles such as 'I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Shoes' or 'Golden Shoe'.
'Diana Vreeland' or as the one illustrated here, and appropriately enough,
given the connexions between fashion tradition and historical recollection that I want to pursue here.
'A la recherche du shoe perdu', a sort of silly pun on the title of Proust's master work.
De Kooning painted such shoes as well, the feet of 'Woman I' a stocking and healed white shoe fastened to the ankle by a little blue strap.
Hartigan had admired the painting as she watched it develop in De Kooning's studio.
She liked the contradictory postures he was able to extract from a brush so thickly loaded with paint that each stroke splayed into the one beside it.
"To me" she wrote after seeing the finished 'Woman I' in 1953.
"One of the real mysteries is how she sits. She does, but she doesn't".
In 'Persian Jacket', she employed the same frayed out brushwork, what Clement Greenberg called the Tenth Street Touch,
and de Kooning called the Rubens brush to produce similar contradictions.
Her figure has three left hands a left leg that seems to split in two just below the knee, a foot that is in at least two places at once.
And one go on spotting the kinds of multiplication going on in this painting
One way of understanding 'Persian Jacket' is as a meditation on fashion and modishness, on being in the know.
Hartigan and de Kooning were friends. She respected his judgement, craved his approval, copied down his sayings on art.
She knew all about the women long before their first scandalous outing ay Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953.
The critic, Leo Steinberg, wrote that it took the art world two years to catch its breath after seeing the six paintings,
de Kooning showed there. Hartigan, by contrast, had already articulated her response.
By the time the show opened, Persian Jacket is thus doubly fashionable.
Not only does it reply ahead of the curve, no less to that new fashion in painting announced by de Kooning's "return to the figure".
It does so in a way that places a literal emphasis on fashion's everyday manifestations on the costume and furnishings that bedeck her sitter.
It is these bright orange, radiant yellow that move beyond De Kooning's example.
Tying this painting ends with the modernism of Matisse. Persian Jacket works between levels of fashionability.
It mimics the contemporary, even as it gestures beyond it.
And here one could recall Walter Benjamin's words on fashion as being both up to the minute and obsessively retrograde a "tiger's leap into the past".
Alfred Barr shared Hartigan's enthusiasm for her painting when he and MoMA's senior curator of American painting,
Dorothy Miller, visited her gallery, Tibor de Nagy on May 3rd.
As director of collections, Barr was responsible for building,
organising and maintaining the museum's recently established permanent collection intended to represent the
whole history of modern art from the late 19th century up until the present day. When MoMA was founded in 1929.
The collection had been impermanent, with a strong emphasis on contemporary artworks that would be sold on to the Metropolitan Museum.
Once they got to old. This drew a dividing line between the modern and the traditional, the living and the dead.
A line which provided the logic that Barr's notorious diagrams of the collection, as a torpedo
moving through time, picking up new work through its nose and shedding the old through its tail.
This approach made sense during the interwar period, but things had changed by the 1950s.
Not only had the value of modernist art increased as the articulation of its tradition
became more precise and its assimilation to western high culture grew more secure.
The museum's pedagogical and historicist agenda had also gained significance, in no small part due to Barr's own work.
The catalogues, which he wrote public to accompany the retrospectives of Picasso and Matisse in 1939 in 1951,
set new standards for the scholarship of modernism. Standards that in some respects still stand.
They outlined a genealogy leading from masterpiece to masterpiece, a sequence of artefacts, names of movements, styles and influences in WJT
Mitchell's words. On Mitchell's account, Barr's writings stripped the history of modernism down to what he calls a quest for purity,
a linear progression leading from Cezanne to Matisse and Picasso, and onto Abstract Expressionism.
It was to retain some such illustrative selection of masterpieces that the museum had announced a policy shift on the 15th of February 1953.
A few months before, before Barr visited Hartigan's Studio.
It would still collect, quote "all significant and promising aspects of today's artistic production",
but it would also make quote "the most important works of art in the museum's
possession the nucleus for a new permanent collection of masterworks of modern art."
Now with this shift, the demands of contemporaneity were leavened by tradition.
And Barr and Miller would have thrilled to see these two imperatives balanced for a fleeting moment in
Hartigan's painting both the technical relation to advanced contemporary painting, to de Kooning,
to Abstract Expressionism and the citation of a whole chronology of modernist art reaching back through Matisse to Cezanne.
They would have known that MoMa had almost completed the purchase of Woman I. De Kooning's painting was to be unveiled at the following months.
Hartigan's must have seemed a fitting pendant.
They bundled her and Persian Jacket into a taxi and went to the museum, where Barr wanted to observe the work at great length.
After six days, he telephoned, it is easy to imagine her excitement.
He still liked the painting. He said he didn't rule out buying it.
But he had doubts about top left corner. This is dark in Persian jackets, current states, a field of vertical black strokes.
Haste is evident in that application. Traces of orange underlay are still visible running down the left hand edge of the canvas.
A blob of red and sienna pushes up through the black, covering above the city's shoulder.
This is difficult painting. Depth is not all that it invokes, but it dissolves into background in a manner that the rest of the pack surface resists.
I'm sure the Greenberg had this kind of effect in mind a decade later,
when he complained about the latent tendency in Abstract Expressionist painting
towards depth and what he called "a heightened illusion of three dimensional space".
He blamed the impulse towards painterliness, the Tenth Street touch that Hartigan, like so many others of a generation, had borrowed from de Kooning.
To quote Greenberg again, he says that "uneven densities of paint created gradations of light and dark, like those of conventional shading".
Although he was insistent that these gradations were kept from actually modelling back into deep space in de Kooning's painting,
he thought the increased number of representational paintings that, like Hartigan,
made use of Abstract Expressionist means, were the culmination of de Kooning logic.
I think he was right. Nothing in de Kooning's women produces a powerful an impression of death as the point implosion jacket,
which the eye slides off from the orange of the armchairs edge and into the darkness that surrounds it.
The sitter's whole body tilts forwards, whether it did so on the 9th of May 1953, when Barr telephoned Hartigan is another question entirely.
I've been unable to locate a photograph of Persian Jacket in its original state, the state in which it travelled by taxi to MoMa.
I'm unsure whether one exists, but it is clear from Hartigan's diary that most, if not all,
of the black paint in the pictures upper left hand section came later after it had arrived at the museum.
Orange was initially its major note.
This would have pushed the background forwards, level with the armchair in the seated figure. Matisse had used for this kind of tactic.
Barr on the other hand, thought it ungainly in a painting like Hartigan's that was more realist in his words, than abstract.
He was worried. He told her that the area might bend into too much, that it didn't sit right, that it had failed to account for what.
In traditional painting would work as the background. He asked her to come up to the museum and change it.
She went. Who could refuse MoMa, her journal The May the 12th records the trip since she writes, "I took my paints to the museum yesterday"
"They moved Persian Jacket into Richie's office, and I worked on it for about half an hour,"
"brushing out the orange on the left side of the canvas and working in Siena,"
"Umbers and black. Also touched a few other areas. It's a great improvement in my eyes."
"I don't know how Barr feels about it, although he did say he thought it read better that way."
"He said nothing about the future of the picture, and I left quickly. Helped"
"John Bernard Myres (?)" the gallerist "to hang the group show. My Gladiolas"
"still life hangs by the window and looks good. I pray to God I sell it or something."
"My money is almost gone already." She sold nothing from the group show. Few women artists sold anything at the time.
But Persian Jacket did sell. Barr found a donor and had it bought for the museum.
Evidently, it read well enough in its new state. The episode leaves an odd taste, however, is it clearly did for Hartigan.
"I feel no compromise is involved in my integrity with this affair."
She wrote, rather too emphatically. The proximity in her journal between the alterations she made to Perisian Jacket and catastrophic financial worries.
"My money is almost gone" Drives the point home.
This is not to suggest that she should not have made these changes or even that she regretted them especially. What would regret mean in this case.
She was a young woman scratching out a precarious living in a sexist art world, still far off the short lived commercial heights of the mid-1950s.
Unlike other women artists who rose to prominence during the period, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler come to mind.
She had no family backing to speak of, no money to draw on. Barr and Miller were to become her most important supporters.
Throughout the 1950s, they made her famous. She could not afford to pass up this kind of patronage.
Yet the changes she made to Persian Jacket at Barr's instigation require some accounting for. Barr was
responding to the historical dimensions of Hartigans project when he asked her to make these changes.
It is no coincidence that he thought Picasso and Matisse, both of his work, he wrote, was never purely abstract.
The greatest artists of the century that the charge frequently levelled against him,
that he took less interest in American art than in European had weight, that he considered non-objective abstraction to be an impoverishment,
and that at the same time as it promoted Abstract Expressionism of the Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning variety, MoMA,
under his influence in the 1950s,
was so often involved in the purchase and display of the kind of painting that restaged and re-engaged with the icons of historicized tradition.
This as a collection policy is no longer visible in the galleries at MoMA, but they all put bought an awful lot of
This kind of painting. Barr never was the evangelist of the quest for purity.
That critics like Mitchell have since made him into. Nor did he equate representation with regression.
He was no Greenberg. He thought modernism could manifest a progressive tendency towards abstraction,
while also accommodating in dialectical fashion commitments to the kinds of representational practise that it had nominally surpassed.
He not only enjoyed Hartigan's paintings thrust into deep space and figuration "their realism" as he called it.
He thought such historical imprints were important vital proof of modernism's ongoing relevance.
Greenberg saw this challenge to abstraction for what it was. He had very harsh things to say about it.
He's on record snarling that "everyone knows Barr is a fool and know's nothing about art"
When informed of Barr's liking for Hartigan's work. But Barr knew what he was doing. Not only were the alterations
He asked Hartigan to make to Persian Jacket supposed to fit with a category in the genealogy of modernism he was building.
They also responded all too arrogantly and domineeringly,
to the character of the work itself, to its reflection on history, tradition, painterly energy and fashion.
To understand how far all of this draws us away from modernism's usual narratives, one has only to recall how the production of Woman I,
the model of the Persian Jacket, is typically narrated as evincing the triumph of individual creativity over the pressures of fashion in the market.
Howard Rosenberg recalled De Kooning resisting pressure from Sidney Janis to
stop painting his women as they were so difficult to sell and Rosalind Krauss',
his recent book on De Kooning, repeats this narrative. Persian Jacket emerged from no such scruples regarding external intercession.
The painting is derivative and mimetic as close to a direct statement of late modernist painting
conceived of as the following of established fashions from Cezanne to Matisse and through to De Kooning,
as one is likely to find. Far from the stanmp of autonomous objectivity.
It bears that of economic compulsion and another's taste - Barr's - in its very structure.
I want to ask what happens when we stop reading these signs of compulsion as limitations?
The forces driving critical art making in the period were very often derivative or imitative.
Hartigan work is not so very far from De Kooning.
After all, if her painting made much of its affiliation to various modernist and pre modernist archetypes,
it is equally true that De Kooning's did the same. That she took her cues from the uses to which his women had put Rubens and Picasso.
Even before Barr's intervention forced the point,
then, Hartigan knew that reconciling the Janis figures of fashion and tradition was not to be achieved simply by painting fewer
abstractions for Sidney Janis. Late modernism operated within a society and an art world increasingly under fashion's sway.
This was just one of the costs of capitalism's post-war hegemony. What was needed were strategies for working within this structure.
The turning proximity into some form of critique. Persian Jacket insists on this point in its plural relation to fashion and tradition.
The painting is a dialogue between history and fashion, a contest from which neither emerges unscathed.
It fixed the point at which clear-eyed recognition of contemporary conditions might shade into submission and crucially, vice versa.
Understanding these effects in all their complexities is work for a history of modernism that might
cease to rotate around the old endless return to the binary between regression and progress.
It demands a more nuanced and more unresolved approach to modernity.
Thank you. That's the end of the talk.
AS: Thank you so much, Saul. What a fascinating presentation. We will open up the floor for Q&A now.
And yeah, just thank you for presenting this really interesting history of this one painting.
It's really wonderful that you have all these specific historical details accounting like how she got the paintings to the MoMA and like the specific,
I don't know, just we don't usually find that much detail about the process itself that I find really interesting.
And yeah, your primary point that this is like simultaneously contemporary and historical, that it's referencing De Kooning,
that it's referencing Matisse and that this all fits into the genealogy that Barr was trying to build at MoMA.
Like you say, it's a really, it's a really nuanced and new understanding of modern painting.
So, yes, please put your questions in the chat or raise your hands.
So we have a question from [name]. And I'll just read it out loud.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: you for such a compellingly attentive analysis of a fascinating painting and a set of critical networks.
Saul, might you tell us more about how you interpret the title's invocation of Persian and clothing?
SAUL NELSON: The clothing point comes back to a whole kind of dynamic in Hartigan's work and the circle in which she was operating.
At this point, she's kind of best friends with Frank O'Hara and kind of circle of New York school poets,
as well as this whole second generation of New York school painters. All interested in kind of dynamics of performance,
Mascarade, reclaiming certain elements of the legacy of surrealism,
and often that manifest in the kind of immediate sense in that going out into the city
and and sort of ploughing through the flea markets for kind of various costumes,
which obviously brings won over to Perisna because clearly this is supposed to kind of hark
to a very deliberate kind of Orientalism coming back to ways in which Matisse has used.
Outfits, clothing to summon up this kind of exoticized other, I guess, the point to make to this painting is that.
It doesn't seem to share Matisse's link between a kind of available sexuality and an orientalized other, whose Hartiga's figures almost.
I mean, she kind of wear's the clothing of femininity but doesn't really share the marks of gender,
certainly not in the way that you know you'd expect one of the odalisques from Matisse's nude's of this period to do so.
So doing something new there but, definitely participating,
quite deliberately in that, obviously, super problematic kind of modernist line
of an orientalized Persian exterior. I hope that answered your question.
Well. Well.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] please go ahead. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for a great, great presentation
You gave a lot of life to this image, and I love thinking about the ways practicality, constraints, and how
much kind of practicalities are part of the work that we look at.
My question is from somebody who very much does not study modernism,
but from what I recall from my previous studies of modernism, is kind of real emphasis(?) a problematic emphasis(?),
on Clement Greenberg and his concept of medium specificity.
I was really struck in this painting. The number of media(?) influences, not only kind of the spatial temporal, coming from(?),
you know, artists from over a century, but kind of the impact of advertising.
And I guess I was curious in your understanding of this kind of mid-century meteoric(?) artistic milieu, which includes curators, dealers and buyers.
How much conversation was there about this kind of intermediality versus media, medium specificity and a kind of Greenberg claim on modernism,
One that was active at the time or was something that was kind of developed, kind of we see in retrospect,
As a great jumping off point for postmodernism. SAUL NELSON: Yeah, thanks.
That's yeah, marvellous. Marvellous question.
And yeah, I guess what's attractive about the period is that even in Greenberg himself, this is kind of being worked out dynamically.
And indeed, if you look at his relation to a painter like Hartigan it's really interesting for the ways in which.
She kind of butts up against this nascent, you know,
pure medium specific kind of definitions, because he backs her. Her whole taking off was as an abstract painter.
He recommended her to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. And and he, you know, he gave a list to John Burden Myers and she was at the top of the list.
And so, you know,
he had a lot of support for her and respect for her as a painter and then kind of saw her following sort of Willem De Kooning off towards
figurative painting and all of these external references as a kind of slap in the face and obviously got really annoyed and hated her.
And I mean,
there's loads of other stuff going on there around gender and you know what space he had for women artists to a certain kind of independence.
But I guess, yeah, he emerges as one coordinate amongst many.
And the interesting point about seeing him
seeing him kind of clash with someone like Alfred Barr that these are both possiblef of a kind of pure fight, linear modernism.
You know, it's not like Barr is any less invested in this idea of the masterpiece.
This idea of kind of Cezanne raises these problems. Picasso picks them up.
You know, when we move on from Picasso, like, that's the whole chronology of modernism that he builds at MoMA.
It's just that obviously, there's kind of, you know,
there's gaps in omissions and kind of dialectical regressions in that construction
and the fact that obviously him and Greenberg couldn't really stand one another.
It just goes to show that it's kind of not enough to simply say that these guys were interested in purity because.
You know, when one kind of pays close attention to the history,
the discourse that interest often means backing completely different voices, you know.
Thanks. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: This is just a bit like of me expressing my ignorance, but I was hoping you could talk about the distinction between those two,
like Alfred Barr torpedo drawings that you showed because those are super interesting.
I'd only ever seen the classic Barr like flow chart that he did, but could you just speak to what was going on there?
SAUL NELSON: I think, yeah, I love the torpedo. I mean, he's a very interesting, complicated figure.
And that, yeah, that's just he's obsessed with diagrams, you know, so he's not just drawing the flowchart or drawing loads of different,
different kind of visual aids, I guess, for imagining not only modernism on the whole,
but how the museum that will encapsulate modernism is going to function.
And often the metaphor. Appropriately enough, I guess for someone who has this kind of formative years as a curator during World War is battle.
So I suppose we tend to imagine modernism as it were.
As opposed to World War Two, as you know, the victim of fascism is a kind of, you know, humanist whatever resistance to those kinds of forces.
But yeah, Barr often visualises a battlefield.
So the torpedo is the march of the museum of the time.
It kind of gains work at the front and it spits it out the back as jet fuel or whatever.
At other points, yeah, it's the collision of different schools that fight one another to death.
A bit, I guess the way that Proust describes different schools of art as devouring one another.
He's a kind of aficionado of that kind of modernism. And so, yeah, it's quite savage.
It's quite kind of oppositional. And one more point is there often is reflected in his strategy as a curator.
So he is and I've written about this elsewhere, but he often pitches types of modern art against one another in his layouts for exhibitions.
So in the big 25th anniversary show, he did at MoMa, again, it
has this huge chronological focus, right?
And it starts with like the 1860s and then it goes all the way up to the present day and Abstract Expressionism.
And you would expect if you were this kind of apostle of purity for the abstract impressionism bit to be kind of pure,
but it's not like at all, he counterposes this incredibly retrograde painting by Hartigan of river bathers that just quotes Matisse, quotes Cezanne.
it's like this whole, you know, it's all about bathers, you know, back in the south of France,
all be it in the 1950s with one of Rothko's colour fields as the kind of climax.
And they both use the same kind of palette. They even have a similar kind of set of themes.
I mean, or at least the juxtaposition makes it look like because the Rothko is blue and blue and orange, and the Hartigan is blue and orange.
And you know, you see the photos and you think, well you know, the Rothko is a kind of abstract beach,
which presumably horrified, Rothko, but I mean, who knows? Ayeah, and then to there it's it's kind of agonistic.
It's about putting works next to one another and watching them kind of, yeah, fight.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: Thank you, that's super interesting. We have a question that shot from [name].
He says: it's interesting that Hartigan sought her painting was that was the better for the Barr inspired changes.
In what direction did her work go after this incident? SAUL NELSON: Yeah, that's a nice question.
It went further to it. It started kind of started exaggerating this.
It started repeating classic modernist compositions, but figured in a mode of kind of terminal excess.
So more colour, more figures, more quotation,larger and larger surfaces,fusing with this weird kind of.
Kind of idiom of viewing this stuff,
so she she starts to include viewer figures within the excess. There is a kind
of terminal refiguring of the themes of Cezanne and a painting of these kind
of surrogates for herself or for the viewer of modernism within the
canvas itself. As they get larger and larger and more and more ornate.
And then she stops doing that, moves away, leaves New York, starts making much less interesting paintings that.
yeah, I suppose they're more interesting if you're a kind of classical modernist because they're more
into kind of exploring the potential of thinned paint in a kind of Helen Frankenthalerish like colour fieldiness.
But yeah, they lose that tension. They stop kind of being quite so hyper self-referential.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] has a question. Is that working?
Yeah. Absolutely fascinating paper, I find the idea of Barr intervening like that pretty appalling,
it's much like a Renaissance patron saying, you know "I want less Putti in here, paint them over" and so on.
But my question is a rather historical one looking at that seated figure.
The echoes it had for me, were of Titian, Rembrandt and these great colourful images of men of course,
in this case, for the most part, not exclusively. And I was thinking across to Bacon,
who obviously looks at these things, like Velazquez(?), very directly and I wonder whether that is simply a historian's fantasy,
or whether there is a deliberate genealogy as it were of seated figures in fancy bright costumes.
SAUL NELSON: Yeah, I mean, that's that's fascinating to think, isn't it?
Because I guess that they are more or less directly contemporary,
just separated by the Atlantic and also -I need to look into the dates - but MoMA's buying Bacon at this point as well.
So whether that's, you know, a strategy there. But she would have agreed with you on,
I mean, she had this kind of autodidact anxiety about the history of art.
So when she decided to stop painting abstract paintings, she thought she needed to kind of educate herself in art history.
And so she went to the Met with Larry Rivers and copied masterpieces, you know,
Rembrandt, Delacroix.
I mean, it's the problem with writing about this kind of painting because you can just kind of accrue references to ad infinitum.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Yeah, indeed, you don't want to turn art history into this sequence of initiations and so on.
But it is interested in the context of where you see her positioning herself if she's deliberately building in these kind of references.
SAUL NELSON: Yes, definitely. OK, thanks very much, very good.
[name], go ahead. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Hi, Saul, thank you so much.
That was brilliant. This isn't my question, but just picking up on what [name] said, I totally agree.
And I think one of the things that the resonances of those earlier painters brings out is the sense of power in that figure,
which is maybe a contrast to the Matisse Persian figures.
There's just this sense of kind of real potency and that goes back to those kind of older portraits of powerful men in fancy costumes.
So I totally agree there. I wanted to ask if there are other instances that you've come across of some painters being
asked to change their works by collectors or museum directors and also about the way she writes it in her diary.
Do you think that she kind of intended that that would be read by other people?
Or do you think is it more of a kind of very private record? So do you think she was kind of justifying herself to a future audience?
and would have been aware that people would understand the work this way.
Or do you think it was meant really to be more of a kind of private thing that people wouldn't
know about and that it would maybe be seen as a negative thing that she'd been asked to do this?
SAUL NELSON: Great question. Yeah, I don't know it's really hard to say when you're reading her diaries because they.
I would actually I would imagine it would be the latter. On the one hand, they're extremely technical and they're very
You know, they're very obsessed. In a similar way to Alfred Barr, I mean, you can see where they got on they're obsessed with like,
who are the great figures, how did Cezanne paint, what are the questions, where is art going?
And in that sense? I mean you might imagine they were quite public, but they're also just riddled with the kind of creative anxiety that,
you know, I guess probably many people here will be
well familiar with, and I certainly am, you know, like "am I doing right thing" like, you know, "wouldn't I be happier if I was doing X?"
Or, you know, "I should just chuck it all in"
I mean, and in that sense, you don't imagine - they're just split, you know, between this, "I'm a great painter"
"These are all the great, the greats that I'm like" And you've got these like marvellous passages where she'll say, like, you know,
"I just saw the Jackson Pollock show and I thought he was a good painter"
"But now I can see that he's rubbish" and you know, "no one's as good as me" And then just like, "Oh God, I'm terrible"
And so, yeah, I'd imagine given the amounts of vulnerability there, they probably weren't intended for publication.
And indeed, she didn't write them for that long.
They cover sort of five years and they're quite irregular.
Yeah, and the point in your question about. What that means for her kinds of self-justification.
Again, it's a difficult one, because.
It's kind of just a transcription of - First, it's a transcription of what Barr said to her, the kind of changes he wanted to make.
And then quite clearly she found it uncomfortable because she then runs through all of the justifications that he made over the phone, which included -
And I didn't put this in because I couldn't find what they were referring to and whether or not this had actually happened -
But so he recalls her to apparently Delacroix changing some detail of the Massacre at Chios because of,
you know, sort of an exhibition exigencies like, you know, right on the day that it kind of went on show.
And I kind of tried to look up and didn't see it anyway.
So yeah, I think I just kind of left it there, but that's how he kind of talked her into it.
And then she put that in, said she went up, then said, yeah, "there's absolutely no kind of compromise at all"
"I'm completely fine with it, absolutely wonderful" which does imply that, that she wasn't so fine with it at all.
And felt a bit kind of used because, yeah, it's rare, especially.
Amongst art historical narratives of modernism, I mean it's striking that [name] mentioned, obviously, you know,
it wouldn't be nearly as uncommon if we go back to the 15th century,
but in the way we write modernism up, you know, you never want to see, these are all heroic individuals and,
You never want to see them changing things and a collectors behest.
That's a complete kind of compromise. But yeah, that's life isn't it.
I mean, you do have to compromise. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Yes, nice.
It makes you wonder how many other painters were actually there, all doing it and everyone's being asked to do it.
But nobody could admit it because that would puncture the illusion. SAUL NELSON: Exactly.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Can I just have a quick follow up?
I've been to Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I didn't see the painting.
Is it there on display or has she been written out of the story?
[SAUL NELSON] Well out of the story. And yeah, they bought quite a lot of work in the 50s and now it's never out on display.
You've got to go their big storage facility out in the Bronx and they'll get it out for you.
But yeah, she'd out of the story. She falls between schools.
You know, she's not quite figurative. Not quite abstract.
She doesn't quite, she doesn't kind of overcome the way that someone like Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell does.
Who just keep painting the way they want to paint and are revered by history, because she's kind of such a conflicted figure.
She she's hard to kind of slot into anything.
But you feel for them, you know, it's a curatorial problem.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: I know that MOMA, like in the past several years, kind of redesigned their main collection galleries.
I know you mentioned none of her stuff is still on display, but I don't know.
Was there a way she could have been written into that kind of new narrative that know that MoMA is presenting now?
Or is her kind of like contradictory nature still kind of against this idea of modern art that the museum is trying to present?
SAUL NELSON: I don't know. I mean, it is. This is it's complicated. I mean.
I guess she's interesting for kind of reflexive history of modernism, you know,
one that would kind of think about actually the place of the museum itself in developing the kinds
of ideas about genius and creativity and genealogy that if you're going to study modernism,
you know, you just you just given.
I mean, there's that line of T.J. Clark saying that, you know, you still learn more by walking through those galleries in MoMA,
as it were because of their omissions and their failings than you do from all of the articles denouncing them.
Simply because it was it was this kind of, you know,
this magnetic force in in the construction of all of these narratives and all of these histories that that we've received.
And she's helped, you know, you'd think in kind of deconstructing that,
thinking about it, you know, breaking that history up, she'd be eminently helpful.
And definitely, like, you know, could find a place.
But yeah, I guess she's the victim of numerous things.
I mean, another reason why I think I mean, I love.
I love Hartigan I think if it's a very charming figure, she's identified her many ways and I like the art.
A lot of people don't. A lot of my friends don't and people who I share it to don't.
And she also suffers from just proximity to people like Frank O'Hara,
whose work is so influential and so kind of powerful and definitive of that kind of period.
This kind of nuanced and a little bit, yeah, repetitive production kind of looked a bit limp next.
And so, yeah, I mean, that's another potential reason. ALEX SOLOVYEV: Thank you.
QUESTION: Hi again, sorry for the question. Yeah, I just wondered if it makes any sense to you to consider this painting as a portrait.
I mean, did she do any portraits?
I'm just thinking of the Bacon comparison and of this kind of really powerful presence of the figure or maybe even a self-portrait.
Did she? Is there any record of her using models and painting portraits of people?
Or do you think it's really a kind of confection from history and sort of drawing on these various traditions?
SAUL NELSON: Yeah, it it's bit of both. Yeah, because I think, you know, she has this kind of deep anxiety and this desire to be a classical artist.
And so she and alot of contemporaries who begin making figurative art.
Do you start working with models. Not in the way I guess they can with more photographs.
But yeah, she I don't think she could afford.
I mean, she couldn't afford to do the number of sessions to actually like, make it as it were kind of proper portrait.
I think what she would do is hire a model for, you know, an hour and do the kind of first sketches and mock ups and stuff.
Take a photo and pin that to the wall and then use that along.
But that was as it were up into the wall alongside all of these other postcards and images from collections.
And so that would be confected too. But yeah, the the the sitter themselves do come in and - actually, now I'm talking-
I remember in other paintings often there's paintings of Frank O'Hara in his paintings of her friends.
She does use people she knows, but yet never with that kind of verisimilitude that you might expect in a more kind of portrait portrait.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Thanks. And the other thing I was thinking about is Persian miniatures,
just thinking of their kind of impact on Matisse and whether there's an element
of the kind of use of space in Persian miniatures is influenced to imitate.
So she referenced at the time. But the weird thing is that that is that by making that background so dark,
it kind of moves away from the Matisse sort of way of expressing space, which is not complete flatness or complete abstraction,
but its bright colour on bright colour, and is pushing it much more towards the kind of old master tradition of portraiture,
which is an interesting move for Barr, it's funny that he sort of saw that as well.
And when it's so clearly figurative, Anyway I'm going to stop asking questions and thank you. SAUL NELSON: No it's great, yeah, it's a it's one of those paradoxes, isn't it?
Yeah. And it's difficult. It's difficult to piece it back together.
I guess the way that conversation is is less about someone like Matisse and more about,
you know, Delacroix was the the antecedent that she mentions in that passage in her diaries.
So perhaps Barr just saw it somehow, which would be an interesting kind of historical question in itself, but saw it as more linked, yeah,
to two schools of painting already a hundred years old than to Matisse when actually to my eye, it's much more.
It's much more up to the minute, really in the way it's doing things. It's much more like De Kooning or Matisse than it is like Delacroix.
But then yet he's there saying, 'give me more background. It needs to have a background', which is weird.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: But it's also an Orientalist painting, isn't it?
Massacre at Chios, I can't remember exactly, where it's set.
You know, maybe there were associations in his mind set up by this kind of relationship to this imagined Orient.
SAUL NELSON: Maybe that's it. Yeah, it's kind of fake Persian. That means that he's what he needs to do.
I doubt he knew very much about Persian miniatures, to be honest.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] shared a recent New Yorker cover called Modern Life by Sergio Garcia Sanchez
after the recent MoMA renovation and says: 'Thank you for a brilliant presentation Saul'
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: When you were reflecting on kind of the role of MoMA in constructing narrative about modernist art and shaping what that actually was.
It just reminded me of this and of the T.J. Clark quote. So I thought I'd pass it on.
SAUL NELSON: Thank you.
ALEX SOLOVYEV: There are no lingering questions.
No. OK, well, please join me in thanking So Nelson for presenting a really wonderful
presentation and thank you for being the first person in the series to present.
SAUL NELSON: Thank you. Thank you for such wonderful questions. I've never.
I've never read that. I've never presented that before.
It's great to get feedback from such an intelligent and also receptive audience.
So, yeah, thanks to everyone for coming and to you Alex for organising.