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ALEX SOLOVYEV: All right. Well, hi, everyone. Welcome to the first session of the History of Art Research Seminar series hosted by

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the history of art department at Oxford and led by Departamental DPhil students.

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The series features recent work by researchers currently working in the history of art department.

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My name is Alex Solovyov. I'm a DPhil candidate in the department and I'll be moderating today's session.

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We ask that you keep your cameras off and your microphones muted during the presentation.

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After the presentation we'll have a moderated Q&A session,

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during which time you can raise your hand to speak or type your question in the chat, whatever you prefer.

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And I also want to let you all know that the audio of this session will be recorded.

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So our presenter tonight is Saul Nelson, who will be presenting a talk titled 'Grace Hartigan Fashion or Painting'.

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Saul Nelson is a departmental lecturer in the history of art department at the University of Oxford.

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His work analyses the global development of modernist art in the aftermath of World War Two, and you didn't.

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It uses this broader context to rethink the work of artists who have formerly been seen as regressive or conservative,

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asking how their work might have engaged such vital political concerns such as Cold War, nationalism or the critique of colonialism.

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An example of this approach, his work writing to Barrett Newman(?), Ethan Souza (?) and of modernism has recently appeared in the journal Art History.

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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.

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So, Saul the floor is yours. Thanks, Alex.

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Yeah, thanks so much to you and all the DPhil students for organising this.

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It's nice to have a forum for sharing research. 

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And yeah, lovely to be here and thank you for asking me.

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And yes, it's a preface, this.

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This is an abridged version of a much longer piece of writing or any kind of glaring leaps in logic or narrative - apologies.

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And hopefully I can pick them up in the Q&A.

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And so to begin on the 11th of May 1953, the painter Grace Hartigan gathered her brushes and a few pots of paint.

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She left her studio on Essex Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side and travelled uptown to the Museum of Modern Art.

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The distance was almost four miles and the day it was very, very hot.

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Perhaps she took the subway or a taxi rather than walking the hour and a half laden with her equipment.

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I have a hunch, however, that she chose the cheaper option given the anxieties about money that punctuate her journal for that year.

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So let's say she walked. The museum's director of collections, the famous Alfred Barne Junior in the auditorium.

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From there, she was conducted to an office, not Barne's,

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but one of his subordinates waiting her inside that office was her painting The Persian Jacket.

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Hartigan had finished it the previous November, working from a session with a model dressed in garments purchased at a local market.

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At that point, she called the painting the best work she'd ever done.

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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.

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There was Matisse, of course, her title was direct in its quotation.

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She would have known his figure with a Persian robe.

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Then in the Barnes collection though for me, I'm not sure whether she'd seen this painting at this point,

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but it's always Matisse's great woman before a black background.

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Now in the Nelson Atkins collection in Kansas City that I think comes closest to the

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form of Persian jacket. Hartigan was obsessed by Matisse during the early 1950s.

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She called him 'My Master'.

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It makes sense that Persian Jacket, a painting of furnishings and attire, would look to him so closely.

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He, too had found a surface for abstract pattern and bright block colours in the odalisques and fabrics of an imaginary orient.

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The swirls Hartigan added to her own sitters lapels the way she rolled up the jacket's cuffs to show the weave such minutiae

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would not have looked out of place thrown across one of the Mattisse's armchairs or draped over his balcony in Nice.

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But Matisse's exotic sized renderings of Morocco are far from the paintings only resource. Whole eras of early modernism.

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Picasso in the 20s, Cezanne in the 1870s summoned up in the ghostly play.

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The painting makes out of its theme from the seated portrait in an airless, bourgeois interior.

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But if Hartigan used the subject matter of Persian jacket to foreground an array of canonical references whose lodestar was Matisse,

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it is equally the case that in technical terms, her painting insisted on its contermporaneity.

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For one thing it is much larger than Matisse's is typical format for a portrait.

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It is almost life size, almost as large as Willem de Kooning's Woman I.

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Then there is the white, high heeled shoes that her sitter plants flat at the base of her canvas.

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This is a high street shoe. It channels the contemporary advertising exigency of depicting heeled shoes in profile.

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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.

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Artworks with titles such as 'I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Shoes' or 'Golden Shoe'.

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'Diana Vreeland' or as the one illustrated here, and appropriately enough,

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given the connexions between fashion tradition and historical recollection that I want to pursue here.

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'A la recherche du shoe perdu', a sort of silly pun on the title of Proust's master work.

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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.

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Hartigan had admired the painting as she watched it develop in De Kooning's studio.

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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.

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"To me" she wrote after seeing the finished 'Woman I' in 1953.

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"One of the real mysteries is how she sits. She does, but she doesn't".

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In 'Persian Jacket', she employed the same frayed out brushwork, what Clement Greenberg called the Tenth Street Touch,

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and de Kooning called the Rubens brush to produce similar contradictions.

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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.

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And one go on spotting the kinds of multiplication going on in this painting

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One way of understanding 'Persian Jacket' is as a meditation on fashion and modishness, on being in the know.

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Hartigan and de Kooning were friends. She respected his judgement, craved his approval, copied down his sayings on art.

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She knew all about the women long before their first scandalous outing ay Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953.

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The critic, Leo Steinberg, wrote that it took the art world two years to catch its breath after seeing the six paintings,

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de Kooning showed there. Hartigan, by contrast, had already articulated her response.

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By the time the show opened, Persian Jacket is thus doubly fashionable.

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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".

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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.

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It is these bright orange, radiant yellow that move beyond De Kooning's example.

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Tying this painting ends with the modernism of Matisse. Persian Jacket works between levels of fashionability.

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It mimics the contemporary, even as it gestures beyond it.

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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".

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Alfred Barr shared Hartigan's enthusiasm for her painting when he and MoMA's senior curator of American painting,

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Dorothy Miller, visited her gallery, Tibor de Nagy on May 3rd.

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As director of collections, Barr was responsible for building,

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organising and maintaining the museum's recently established permanent collection intended to represent the

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whole history of modern art from the late 19th century up until the present day. When MoMA was founded in 1929.

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The collection had been impermanent, with a strong emphasis on contemporary artworks that would be sold on to the Metropolitan Museum.

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Once they got to old. This drew a dividing line between the modern and the traditional, the living and the dead.

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A line which provided the logic that Barr's notorious diagrams of the collection, as a torpedo

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moving through time, picking up new work through its nose and shedding the old through its tail.

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This approach made sense during the interwar period, but things had changed by the 1950s.

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Not only had the value of modernist art increased as the articulation of its tradition

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became more precise and its assimilation to western high culture grew more secure.

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The museum's pedagogical and historicist agenda had also gained significance, in no small part due to Barr's own work.

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The catalogues, which he wrote public to accompany the retrospectives of Picasso and Matisse in 1939 in 1951,

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set new standards for the scholarship of modernism. Standards that in some respects still stand.

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They outlined a genealogy leading from masterpiece to masterpiece, a sequence of artefacts, names of movements, styles and influences in WJT

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Mitchell's words. On Mitchell's account, Barr's writings stripped the history of modernism down to what he calls a quest for purity,

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a linear progression leading from Cezanne to Matisse and Picasso, and onto Abstract Expressionism.

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It was to retain some such illustrative selection of masterpieces that the museum had announced a policy shift on the 15th of February 1953.

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A few months before, before Barr visited Hartigan's Studio.

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It would still collect, quote "all significant and promising aspects of today's artistic production",

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but it would also make quote "the most important works of art in the museum's

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possession the nucleus for a new permanent collection of masterworks of modern art."

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Now with this shift, the demands of contemporaneity were leavened by tradition.

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And Barr and Miller would have thrilled to see these two imperatives balanced for a fleeting moment in

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Hartigan's painting both the technical relation to advanced contemporary painting, to de Kooning,

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to Abstract Expressionism and the citation of a whole chronology of modernist art reaching back through Matisse to Cezanne.

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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.

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Hartigan's must have seemed a fitting pendant.

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They bundled her and Persian Jacket into a taxi and went to the museum, where Barr wanted to observe the work at great length.

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After six days, he telephoned, it is easy to imagine her excitement.

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He still liked the painting. He said he didn't rule out buying it.

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But he had doubts about top left corner. This is dark in Persian jackets, current states, a field of vertical black strokes.

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Haste is evident in that application. Traces of orange underlay are still visible running down the left hand edge of the canvas.

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A blob of red and sienna pushes up through the black, covering above the city's shoulder.

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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.

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I'm sure the Greenberg had this kind of effect in mind a decade later,

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when he complained about the latent tendency in Abstract Expressionist painting

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towards depth and what he called "a heightened illusion of three dimensional space".

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He blamed the impulse towards painterliness, the Tenth Street touch that Hartigan, like so many others of a generation, had borrowed from de Kooning.

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To quote Greenberg again, he says that "uneven densities of paint created gradations of light and dark, like those of conventional shading".

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Although he was insistent that these gradations were kept from actually modelling back into deep space in de Kooning's painting,

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he thought the increased number of representational paintings that, like Hartigan,

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made use of Abstract Expressionist means, were the culmination of de Kooning logic.

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I think he was right. Nothing in de Kooning's women produces a powerful an impression of death as the point implosion jacket,

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which the eye slides off from the orange of the armchairs edge and into the darkness that surrounds it.

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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.

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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.

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I'm unsure whether one exists, but it is clear from Hartigan's diary that most, if not all,

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of the black paint in the pictures upper left hand section came later after it had arrived at the museum.

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Orange was initially its major note.

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This would have pushed the background forwards, level with the armchair in the seated figure. Matisse had used for this kind of tactic.

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Barr on the other hand, thought it ungainly in a painting like Hartigan's that was more realist in his words, than abstract.

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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.

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In traditional painting would work as the background. He asked her to come up to the museum and change it.

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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"

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"They moved Persian Jacket into Richie's office, and I worked on it for about half an hour,"

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"brushing out the orange on the left side of the canvas and working in Siena,"

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"Umbers and black. Also touched a few other areas. It's a great improvement in my eyes."

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"I don't know how Barr feels about it, although he did say he thought it read better that way."

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"He said nothing about the future of the picture, and I left quickly. Helped"

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"John Bernard Myres (?)" the gallerist "to hang the group show. My Gladiolas"

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"still life hangs by the window and looks good. I pray to God I sell it or something."

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"My money is almost gone already." She sold nothing from the group show. Few women artists sold anything at the time.

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But Persian Jacket did sell. Barr found a donor and had it bought for the museum.

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Evidently, it read well enough in its new state. The episode leaves an odd taste, however, is it clearly did for Hartigan.

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"I feel no compromise is involved in my integrity with this affair."

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She wrote, rather too emphatically. The proximity in her journal between the alterations she made to Perisian Jacket and catastrophic financial worries.

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"My money is almost gone" Drives the point home.

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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.

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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.

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Unlike other women artists who rose to prominence during the period, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler come to mind.

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She had no family backing to speak of, no money to draw on. Barr and Miller were to become her most important supporters.

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Throughout the 1950s, they made her famous. She could not afford to pass up this kind of patronage.

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Yet the changes she made to Persian Jacket at Barr's instigation require some accounting for. Barr was

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responding to the historical dimensions of Hartigans project when he asked her to make these changes.

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It is no coincidence that he thought Picasso and Matisse, both of his work, he wrote, was never purely abstract.

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The greatest artists of the century that the charge frequently levelled against him,

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that he took less interest in American art than in European had weight, that he considered non-objective abstraction to be an impoverishment,

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and that at the same time as it promoted Abstract Expressionism of the Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning variety, MoMA,

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under his influence in the 1950s,

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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.

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This as a collection policy is no longer visible in the galleries at MoMA, but they all put bought an awful lot of

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This kind of painting. Barr never was the evangelist of the quest for purity.

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That critics like Mitchell have since made him into. Nor did he equate representation with regression.

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He was no Greenberg. He thought modernism could manifest a progressive tendency towards abstraction,

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while also accommodating in dialectical fashion commitments to the kinds of representational practise that it had nominally surpassed.

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He not only enjoyed Hartigan's paintings thrust into deep space and figuration "their realism" as he called it.

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He thought such historical imprints were important vital proof of modernism's ongoing relevance.

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Greenberg saw this challenge to abstraction for what it was. He had very harsh things to say about it.

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He's on record snarling that "everyone knows Barr is a fool and know's nothing about art"

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When informed of Barr's liking for Hartigan's work. But Barr knew what he was doing. Not only were the alterations

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He asked Hartigan to make to Persian Jacket supposed to fit with a category in the genealogy of modernism he was building.

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They also responded all too arrogantly and domineeringly,

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to the character of the work itself, to its reflection on history, tradition, painterly energy and fashion.

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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,

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the model of the Persian Jacket, is typically narrated as evincing the triumph of individual creativity over the pressures of fashion in the market.

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Howard Rosenberg recalled De Kooning resisting pressure from Sidney Janis to

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stop painting his women as they were so difficult to sell and Rosalind Krauss',

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his recent book on De Kooning, repeats this narrative. Persian Jacket emerged from no such scruples regarding external intercession.

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The painting is derivative and mimetic as close to a direct statement of late modernist painting

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conceived of as the following of established fashions from Cezanne to Matisse and through to De Kooning,

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as one is likely to find. Far from the stanmp of autonomous objectivity.

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It bears that of economic compulsion and another's taste - Barr's - in its very structure.

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I want to ask what happens when we stop reading these signs of compulsion as limitations?

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The forces driving critical art making in the period were very often derivative or imitative.

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Hartigan work is not so very far from De Kooning.

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After all, if her painting made much of its affiliation to various modernist and pre modernist archetypes,

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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.

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Even before Barr's intervention forced the point,

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then, Hartigan knew that reconciling the Janis figures of fashion and tradition was not to be achieved simply by painting fewer

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abstractions for Sidney Janis. Late modernism operated within a society and an art world increasingly under fashion's sway.

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This was just one of the costs of capitalism's post-war hegemony. What was needed were strategies for working within this structure.

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The turning proximity into some form of critique. Persian Jacket insists on this point in its plural relation to fashion and tradition.

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The painting is a dialogue between history and fashion, a contest from which neither emerges unscathed.

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It fixed the point at which clear-eyed recognition of contemporary conditions might shade into submission and crucially, vice versa.

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Understanding these effects in all their complexities is work for a history of modernism that might

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cease to rotate around the old endless return to the binary between regression and progress.

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It demands a more nuanced and more unresolved approach to modernity.

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Thank you. That's the end of the talk.

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AS: Thank you so much, Saul. What a fascinating presentation. We will open up the floor for Q&A now.

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And yeah, just thank you for presenting this really interesting history of this one painting.

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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,

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I don't know, just we don't usually find that much detail about the process itself that I find really interesting.

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And yeah, your primary point that this is like simultaneously contemporary and historical, that it's referencing De Kooning,

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that it's referencing Matisse and that this all fits into the genealogy that Barr was trying to build at MoMA.

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Like you say, it's a really, it's a really nuanced and new understanding of modern painting.

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So, yes, please put your questions in the chat or raise your hands.

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So we have a question from [name]. And I'll just read it out loud.

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QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: you for such a compellingly attentive analysis of a fascinating painting and a set of critical networks.

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Saul, might you tell us more about how you interpret the title's invocation of Persian and clothing?

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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.

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At this point, she's kind of best friends with Frank O'Hara and kind of circle of New York school poets,

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as well as this whole second generation of New York school painters. All interested in kind of dynamics of performance,

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Mascarade, reclaiming certain elements of the legacy of surrealism,

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and often that manifest in the kind of immediate sense in that going out into the city

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and and sort of ploughing through the flea markets for kind of various costumes,

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which obviously brings won over to Perisna because clearly this is supposed to kind of hark

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to a very deliberate kind of Orientalism coming back to ways in which Matisse has used.

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Outfits, clothing to summon up this kind of exoticized other, I guess, the point to make to this painting is that.

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It doesn't seem to share Matisse's link between a kind of available sexuality and an orientalized other, whose Hartiga's figures almost.

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I mean, she kind of wear's the clothing of femininity but doesn't really share the marks of gender,

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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.

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So doing something new there but, definitely participating,

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quite deliberately in that, obviously, super problematic kind of modernist line

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of an orientalized Persian exterior. I hope that answered your question.

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Well. Well.

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ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] please go ahead. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for a great, great presentation

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You gave a lot of life to this image, and I love thinking about the ways practicality, constraints, and how

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much kind of practicalities are part of the work that we look at.

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My question is from somebody who very much does not study modernism,

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but from what I recall from my previous studies of modernism, is kind of real emphasis(?) a problematic emphasis(?),

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on Clement Greenberg and his concept of medium specificity.

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I was really struck in this painting. The number of media(?) influences, not only kind of the spatial temporal, coming from(?),

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you know, artists from over a century, but kind of the impact of advertising.

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And I guess I was curious in your understanding of this kind of mid-century meteoric(?) artistic milieu, which includes curators, dealers and buyers.

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How much conversation was there about this kind of intermediality versus media, medium specificity and a kind of Greenberg claim on modernism,

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One that was active at the time or was something that was kind of developed, kind of we see in retrospect,

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As a great jumping off point for postmodernism. SAUL NELSON: Yeah, thanks.

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That's yeah, marvellous. Marvellous question.

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And yeah, I guess what's attractive about the period is that even in Greenberg himself, this is kind of being worked out dynamically.

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And indeed, if you look at his relation to a painter like Hartigan it's really interesting for the ways in which.

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She kind of butts up against this nascent, you know,

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pure medium specific kind of definitions, because he backs her. Her whole taking off was as an abstract painter.

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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.

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And so, you know,

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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

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figurative painting and all of these external references as a kind of slap in the face and obviously got really annoyed and hated her.

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And I mean,

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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.

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But I guess, yeah, he emerges as one coordinate amongst many.

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And the interesting point about seeing him

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seeing him kind of clash with someone like Alfred Barr that these are both possiblef of a kind of pure fight, linear modernism.

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You know, it's not like Barr is any less invested in this idea of the masterpiece.

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This idea of kind of Cezanne raises these problems. Picasso picks them up.

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You know, when we move on from Picasso, like, that's the whole chronology of modernism that he builds at MoMA.

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It's just that obviously, there's kind of, you know,

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there's gaps in omissions and kind of dialectical regressions in that construction

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and the fact that obviously him and Greenberg couldn't really stand one another.

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It just goes to show that it's kind of not enough to simply say that these guys were interested in purity because.

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You know, when one kind of pays close attention to the history,

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the discourse that interest often means backing completely different voices, you know.

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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,

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like Alfred Barr torpedo drawings that you showed because those are super interesting.

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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?

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SAUL NELSON: I think, yeah, I love the torpedo. I mean, he's a very interesting, complicated figure.

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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,

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different kind of visual aids, I guess, for imagining not only modernism on the whole,

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but how the museum that will encapsulate modernism is going to function.

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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.

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So I suppose we tend to imagine modernism as it were.

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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.

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But yeah, Barr often visualises a battlefield.

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So the torpedo is the march of the museum of the time.

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It kind of gains work at the front and it spits it out the back as jet fuel or whatever.

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At other points, yeah, it's the collision of different schools that fight one another to death.

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A bit, I guess the way that Proust describes different schools of art as devouring one another.

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He's a kind of aficionado of that kind of modernism. And so, yeah, it's quite savage.

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It's quite kind of oppositional. And one more point is there often is reflected in his strategy as a curator.

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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.

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So in the big 25th anniversary show, he did at MoMa, again, it

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has this huge chronological focus, right?

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And it starts with like the 1860s and then it goes all the way up to the present day and Abstract Expressionism.

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And you would expect if you were this kind of apostle of purity for the abstract impressionism bit to be kind of pure,

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but it's not like at all, he counterposes this incredibly retrograde painting by Hartigan of river bathers that just quotes Matisse, quotes Cezanne.

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it's like this whole, you know, it's all about bathers, you know, back in the south of France,

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all be it in the 1950s with one of Rothko's colour fields as the kind of climax.

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And they both use the same kind of palette. They even have a similar kind of set of themes.

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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.

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And you know, you see the photos and you think, well you know, the Rothko is a kind of abstract beach,

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which presumably horrified, Rothko, but I mean, who knows? Ayeah, and then to there it's it's kind of agonistic.

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It's about putting works next to one another and watching them kind of, yeah, fight.

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ALEX SOLOVYEV: Thank you, that's super interesting. We have a question that shot from [name].

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He says: it's interesting that Hartigan sought her painting was that was the better for the Barr inspired changes.

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In what direction did her work go after this incident? SAUL NELSON: Yeah, that's a nice question.

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It went further to it. It started kind of started exaggerating this.

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It started repeating classic modernist compositions, but figured in a mode of kind of terminal excess.

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So more colour, more figures, more quotation,larger and larger surfaces,fusing with this weird kind of.

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Kind of idiom of viewing this stuff,

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so she she starts to include viewer figures within the excess. There is a kind

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of terminal refiguring of the themes of Cezanne and a painting of these kind

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of surrogates for herself or for the viewer of modernism within the

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canvas itself. As they get larger and larger and more and more ornate.

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And then she stops doing that, moves away, leaves New York, starts making much less interesting paintings that.

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yeah, I suppose they're more interesting if you're a kind of classical modernist because they're more

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into kind of exploring the potential of thinned paint in a kind of Helen Frankenthalerish like colour fieldiness.

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But yeah, they lose that tension. They stop kind of being quite so hyper self-referential.

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ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] has a question. Is that working?

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Yeah. Absolutely fascinating paper, I find the idea of Barr intervening like that pretty appalling,

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it's much like a Renaissance patron saying, you know "I want less Putti in here, paint them over" and so on.

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But my question is a rather historical one looking at that seated figure.

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The echoes it had for me, were of Titian, Rembrandt and these great colourful images of men of course,

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in this case, for the most part, not exclusively. And I was thinking across to Bacon,

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who obviously looks at these things, like Velazquez(?), very directly and I wonder whether that is simply a historian's fantasy,

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or whether there is a deliberate genealogy as it were of seated figures in fancy bright costumes.

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SAUL NELSON: Yeah, I mean, that's that's fascinating to think, isn't it?

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Because I guess that they are more or less directly contemporary,

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just separated by the Atlantic and also -I need to look into the dates - but MoMA's buying Bacon at this point as well.

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So whether that's, you know, a strategy there. But she would have agreed with you on,

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I mean, she had this kind of autodidact anxiety about the history of art.

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So when she decided to stop painting abstract paintings, she thought she needed to kind of educate herself in art history.

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And so she went to the Met with Larry Rivers and copied masterpieces, you know, 

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Rembrandt, Delacroix.

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I mean, it's the problem with writing about this kind of painting because you can just kind of accrue references to ad infinitum.

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QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Yeah, indeed, you don't want to turn art history into this sequence of initiations and so on.

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But it is interested in the context of where you see her positioning herself if she's deliberately building in these kind of references.

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SAUL NELSON: Yes, definitely. OK, thanks very much, very good.

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[name], go ahead. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Hi, Saul, thank you so much.

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That was brilliant. This isn't my question, but just picking up on what [name] said, I totally agree.

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And I think one of the things that the resonances of those earlier painters brings out is the sense of power in that figure,

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which is maybe a contrast to the Matisse Persian figures.

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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.

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So I totally agree there. I wanted to ask if there are other instances that you've come across of some painters being

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asked to change their works by collectors or museum directors and also about the way she writes it in her diary.

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Do you think that she kind of intended that that would be read by other people?

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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?

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and would have been aware that people would understand the work this way.

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Or do you think it was meant really to be more of a kind of private thing that people wouldn't

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know about and that it would maybe be seen as a negative thing that she'd been asked to do this? 

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SAUL NELSON: Great question. Yeah, I don't know it's really hard to say when you're reading her diaries because they.

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I would actually I would imagine it would be the latter. On the one hand, they're extremely technical and they're very

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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,

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who are the great figures, how did Cezanne paint, what are the questions, where is art going?

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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,

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you know, I guess probably many people here will be

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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?"

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Or, you know, "I should just chuck it all in"

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I mean, and in that sense, you don't imagine - they're just split, you know, between this, "I'm a great painter"

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"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,

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"I just saw the Jackson Pollock show and I thought he was a good painter"

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"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"

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And so, yeah, I'd imagine given the amounts of vulnerability there, they probably weren't intended for publication.

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And indeed, she didn't write them for that long.

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They cover sort of five years and they're quite irregular.

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Yeah, and the point in your question about. What that means for her kinds of self-justification.

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Again, it's a difficult one, because.

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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.

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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 -

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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 -

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But so he recalls her to apparently Delacroix changing some detail of the Massacre at Chios because of,

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you know, sort of an exhibition exigencies like, you know, right on the day that it kind of went on show.

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And I kind of tried to look up and didn't see it anyway.

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So yeah, I think I just kind of left it there, but that's how he kind of talked her into it.

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And then she put that in, said she went up, then said, yeah, "there's absolutely no kind of compromise at all"

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"I'm completely fine with it, absolutely wonderful" which does imply that, that she wasn't so fine with it at all.

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And felt a bit kind of used because, yeah, it's rare, especially.

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Amongst art historical narratives of modernism, I mean it's striking that [name] mentioned, obviously, you know,

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it wouldn't be nearly as uncommon if we go back to the 15th century,

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but in the way we write modernism up, you know, you never want to see, these are all heroic individuals and,

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You never want to see them changing things and a collectors behest.

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That's a complete kind of compromise. But yeah, that's life isn't it.

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00:44:32,027 --> 00:44:33,597
I mean, you do have to compromise. QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Yes, nice.

372
00:44:33,597 --> 00:44:39,237
It makes you wonder how many other painters were actually there, all doing it and everyone's being asked to do it.

373
00:44:39,237 --> 00:44:44,297
But nobody could admit it because that would puncture the illusion. SAUL NELSON: Exactly.

374
00:44:44,297 --> 00:44:48,697
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Can I just have a quick follow up?

375
00:44:48,697 --> 00:44:56,727
I've been to Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I didn't see the painting.

376
00:44:56,727 --> 00:45:01,887
Is it there on display or has she been written out of the story?

377
00:45:01,887 --> 00:45:11,097
[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.

378
00:45:11,097 --> 00:45:17,757
You've got to go their big storage facility out in the Bronx and they'll get it out for you.

379
00:45:17,757 --> 00:45:21,357
But yeah, she'd out of the story. She falls between schools.

380
00:45:21,357 --> 00:45:22,527
You know, she's not quite figurative. Not quite abstract.

381
00:55:21,357 --> 00:55:27,527
She doesn't quite, she doesn't kind of overcome the way that someone like Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell does.

382
00:55:27,527 --> 00:55:33,527
Who just keep painting the way they want to paint and are revered by history, because she's kind of such a conflicted figure.

383
00:55:33,357 --> 00:55:39,527
She she's hard to kind of slot into anything.

384
00:55:39,527 --> 00:56:00,527
But you feel for them, you know, it's a curatorial problem.


385
00:56:00,450 --> 00:56:09,810
ALEX SOLOVYEV: I know that MOMA, like in the past several years, kind of redesigned their main collection galleries.

386
00:56:09,810 --> 00:56:13,980
I know you mentioned none of her stuff is still on display, but I don't know.

387
00:56:13,980 --> 00:56:19,140
Was there a way she could have been written into that kind of new narrative that know that MoMA is presenting now?

388
00:56:19,140 --> 00:56:30,990
Or is her kind of like contradictory nature still kind of against this idea of modern art that the museum is trying to present?

389
00:56:30,990 --> 00:56:37,260
SAUL NELSON: I don't know. I mean, it is. This is it's complicated. I mean.

390
00:56:37,260 --> 00:56:41,430
I guess she's interesting for kind of reflexive history of modernism, you know,

391
00:56:41,430 --> 00:56:48,150
one that would kind of think about actually the place of the museum itself in developing the kinds

392
00:56:48,150 --> 00:56:55,710
of ideas about genius and creativity and genealogy that if you're going to study modernism,

393
00:56:55,710 --> 00:56:58,410
you know, you just you just given.

394
00:56:58,410 --> 00:57:09,990
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,

395
00:57:09,990 --> 00:57:17,160
as it were because of their omissions and their failings than you do from all of the articles denouncing them.

396
00:57:17,160 --> 00:57:20,880
Simply because it was it was this kind of, you know,

397
00:57:20,880 --> 00:57:27,990
this magnetic force in in the construction of all of these narratives and all of these histories that that we've received.

398
00:57:27,990 --> 00:57:31,440
And she's helped, you know, you'd think in kind of deconstructing that,

399
00:57:31,440 --> 00:57:35,700
thinking about it, you know, breaking that history up, she'd be eminently helpful.

400
00:57:35,700 --> 00:57:41,130
And definitely, like, you know, could find a place.

401
00:57:41,130 --> 00:57:45,600
But yeah, I guess she's the victim of numerous things.

402
00:57:45,600 --> 00:57:49,500
I mean, another reason why I think I mean, I love.

403
00:57:49,500 --> 00:57:55,340
I love Hartigan I think if it's a very charming figure, she's identified her many ways and I like the art.

404
00:57:55,340 --> 00:58:00,750
A lot of people don't. A lot of my friends don't and people who I share it to don't.

405
00:58:00,750 --> 00:58:05,670
And she also suffers from just proximity to people like Frank O'Hara,

406
00:58:05,670 --> 00:58:13,260
whose work is so influential and so kind of powerful and definitive of that kind of period.

407
00:58:13,260 --> 00:58:23,380
This kind of nuanced and a little bit, yeah, repetitive production kind of looked a bit limp next.

408
00:58:23,380 --> 00:58:35,660
And so, yeah, I mean, that's another potential reason. ALEX SOLOVYEV: Thank you.

409
00:58:35,660 --> 00:58:44,210
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.

410
00:58:44,210 --> 00:58:45,620
I mean, did she do any portraits?

411
00:58:45,620 --> 00:58:52,070
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.

412
00:58:52,070 --> 00:58:57,080
Did she? Is there any record of her using models and painting portraits of people?

413
00:58:57,080 --> 00:59:05,660
Or do you think it's really a kind of confection from history and sort of drawing on these various traditions?

414
00:59:05,660 --> 00:59:15,680
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.

415
00:59:15,680 --> 00:59:22,280
And so she and alot of contemporaries who begin making figurative art.

416
00:59:22,280 --> 00:59:29,180
Do you start working with models. Not in the way I guess they can with more photographs.

417
00:59:29,180 --> 00:59:32,150
But yeah, she I don't think she could afford.

418
00:59:32,150 --> 00:59:39,860
I mean, she couldn't afford to do the number of sessions to actually like, make it as it were kind of proper portrait.

419
00:59:39,860 --> 00:59:50,120
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.

420
00:59:50,120 --> 00:59:55,020
Take a photo and pin that to the wall and then use that along.

421
00:59:55,020 --> 01:00:01,580
But that was as it were up into the wall alongside all of these other postcards and images from collections.

422
01:00:01,580 --> 01:00:09,860
And so that would be confected too. But yeah, the the the sitter themselves do come in and - actually, now I'm talking-

423
01:00:09,860 --> 01:00:15,680
I remember in other paintings often there's paintings of Frank O'Hara in his paintings of her friends.

424
01:00:15,680 --> 01:00:32,550
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.

425
01:00:32,550 --> 01:00:37,590
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Thanks. And the other thing I was thinking about is Persian miniatures,

426
01:00:37,590 --> 01:00:42,810
just thinking of their kind of impact on Matisse and whether there's an element

427
01:00:42,810 --> 01:00:46,630
of the kind of use of space in Persian miniatures is influenced to imitate.

428
01:00:46,630 --> 01:00:54,810
So she referenced at the time. But the weird thing is that that is that by making that background so dark,

429
01:00:54,810 --> 01:01:03,480
it kind of moves away from the Matisse sort of way of expressing space, which is not complete flatness or complete abstraction,

430
01:01:03,480 --> 01:01:10,920
but its bright colour on bright colour, and is pushing it much more towards the kind of old master tradition of portraiture,

431
01:01:10,920 --> 01:01:15,990
which is an interesting move for Barr, it's funny that he sort of saw that as well.

432
01:01:15,990 --> 01:01:23,580
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?

433
01:01:23,580 --> 01:01:27,750
Yeah. And it's difficult. It's difficult to piece it back together.

434
01:01:27,750 --> 01:01:33,300
I guess the way that conversation is is less about someone like Matisse and more about,

435
01:01:33,300 --> 01:01:40,830
you know, Delacroix was the the antecedent that she mentions in that passage in her diaries.

436
01:01:40,830 --> 01:01:49,110
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,

437
01:01:49,110 --> 01:02:01,260
to two schools of painting already a hundred years old than to Matisse when actually to my eye, it's much more.

438
01:02:01,260 --> 01:02:06,990
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.

439
01:02:06,990 --> 01:02:12,480
But then yet he's there saying, 'give me more background. It needs to have a background', which is weird.

440
01:02:12,480 --> 01:02:17,210
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: But it's also an Orientalist painting, isn't it?

441
01:02:17,210 --> 01:02:21,560
Massacre at Chios, I can't remember exactly, where it's set.

442
01:02:21,560 --> 01:02:31,610
You know, maybe there were associations in his mind set up by this kind of relationship to this imagined Orient.

443
01:02:31,610 --> 01:02:37,400
SAUL NELSON: Maybe that's it. Yeah, it's kind of fake Persian. That means that he's what he needs to do.

444
01:02:37,400 --> 01:03:00,960
I doubt he knew very much about Persian miniatures, to be honest.

445
01:03:00,960 --> 01:03:07,590
ALEX SOLOVYEV: [name] shared a recent New Yorker cover called Modern Life by Sergio Garcia Sanchez

446
01:03:07,590 --> 01:03:12,210
after the recent MoMA renovation and says: 'Thank you for a brilliant presentation Saul'

447
01:03:12,210 --> 01:03:27,020
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.

448
01:03:27,020 --> 01:03:35,930
It just reminded me of this and of the T.J. Clark quote. So I thought I'd pass it on.

449
01:03:35,930 --> 01:03:44,840
SAUL NELSON: Thank you.

450
01:03:44,840 --> 01:04:01,900
ALEX SOLOVYEV: There are no lingering questions.

451
01:04:01,900 --> 01:04:10,150
No. OK, well, please join me in thanking So Nelson for presenting a really wonderful

452
01:04:10,150 --> 01:04:17,950
presentation and thank you for being the first person in the series to present.

453
01:04:17,950 --> 01:04:21,760
SAUL NELSON: Thank you. Thank you for such wonderful questions. I've never.

454
01:04:21,760 --> 01:04:24,460
I've never read that. I've never presented that before.

455
01:04:24,460 --> 01:04:30,970
It's great to get feedback from such an intelligent and also receptive audience.

456
01:04:30,970 --> 01:04:38,620
So, yeah, thanks to everyone for coming and to you Alex for organising.