1 00:00:00,210 --> 00:00:04,860 It's a great honour to be giving the Slade lectures this year. 2 00:00:04,860 --> 00:00:11,850 And for me, a great pleasure also to come back to Oxford for both personal and professional reasons, 3 00:00:11,850 --> 00:00:15,900 for personal reasons, because my father was at the beginning of his career. 4 00:00:15,900 --> 00:00:20,250 Chaplain of Harvard and in retirement at the end of his career, chaplains of All Souls. 5 00:00:20,250 --> 00:00:29,670 And I was a boy at the Dragon School for professional reasons, because the first day I came to study modern history here at St Cats, 6 00:00:29,670 --> 00:00:37,850 I opened up the examination decree's and saw that one could do a course in months, finally called Baudelaire and the artists of his time. 7 00:00:37,850 --> 00:00:44,610 And I decided there and then to do it, which I did studying under Francis Haskell and T.J. Clark. 8 00:00:44,610 --> 00:00:55,200 And in that way, I was launched on my career as an artist store in which a third of a century later sees me on this podium. 9 00:00:55,200 --> 00:01:10,890 So let me give you a lecture. But I can't because I don't know how to dim the lights because this is dark. 10 00:01:10,890 --> 00:01:23,400 Defining the dominant naturalism, naturalism was the dominant aesthetic of late 19th century France in painting as in literature. 11 00:01:23,400 --> 00:01:34,620 It sets the cultural tone shaped and suited the mentality of the mainstream work hand-in-hand with the political ideology of the Third Republic. 12 00:01:34,620 --> 00:01:44,040 And no wonder naturalist painting, descriptive, frank, direct was a dynamic kind of art. 13 00:01:44,040 --> 00:01:51,360 Look at the canvases that won gold medals at the great exposition in that cell in 1889 and 14 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:59,700 nineteen hundred Emil Feels All Saints Day represents a snatched moment of something seen. 15 00:01:59,700 --> 00:02:05,400 The little girl in Mid Step is just about to give the blind beggar a coin as her family 16 00:02:05,400 --> 00:02:12,780 follows behind on their way to the annual visit to the municipal cemetery in Charlotte Cortez. 17 00:02:12,780 --> 00:02:21,420 The farewells all is still and meditative in the central panel of the final meal before the Breton fisherman's 18 00:02:21,420 --> 00:02:29,480 set out to sea and in the side panels of the men on their vessel and the women waiting on the cliffs. 19 00:02:29,480 --> 00:02:36,660 Both canvases in bed on their day were held up a standing for the best in modern French painting. 20 00:02:36,660 --> 00:02:38,420 How different they are. 21 00:02:38,420 --> 00:02:48,450 The feel encapsulating in its Life-Size figures, a moment of experience conjuring up the cold, making evident its class contrasts, 22 00:02:48,450 --> 00:02:56,550 and the dutiful act of charity of the côté using its equally large scale to quasi ritual effect. 23 00:02:56,550 --> 00:03:01,260 Its groups of figures silent in the gloomy light. 24 00:03:01,260 --> 00:03:12,630 Yet both are fundamentally naturalistic, describing the material world with attention to the physical actuality of bodies and textures. 25 00:03:12,630 --> 00:03:16,950 They are also both conscious of their different painterly artifices. 26 00:03:16,950 --> 00:03:26,860 All Saints Day, with its cut off figures and central void, the farewells with its almost symmetrical play with the triptych format. 27 00:03:26,860 --> 00:03:37,030 And there are other similarities. The idea of the family is pivotal, together with its inescapable dimensions of continuity and loss. 28 00:03:37,030 --> 00:03:47,490 Both have a religious resonance for yours in the depiction of an annual act of observance Cottee's in its echo of a scene of the Last Supper. 29 00:03:47,490 --> 00:03:51,540 How surprising throughout the 18, 80s and 80s, 90s, 30 00:03:51,540 --> 00:04:00,690 the Third Republic set up to wrest influence from the Catholic Church in a hard fought struggle for determining influence over the national mind. 31 00:04:00,690 --> 00:04:06,290 And yet the two French paintings, which won gold medals at successive Exposition Universelle, 32 00:04:06,290 --> 00:04:13,890 were purchased by the state for the national collections. Had religious associations dealing with such paintings. 33 00:04:13,890 --> 00:04:23,040 Then we have to cope with more than mere description contrived in their making and moving in their impact, 34 00:04:23,040 --> 00:04:28,260 modern in their forms of representation and rich in contradictions. 35 00:04:28,260 --> 00:04:32,880 These are complex works of art. 36 00:04:32,880 --> 00:04:44,760 Between 1880 and nineteen hundred, the span of these lectures, naturalist painting created a panorama, an encyclopaedia of contemporary French life. 37 00:04:44,760 --> 00:04:56,130 Let's have a tall Duthie Zoar and look at some polarities. We might begin in 1880 with horses, static cars, collector of flotsam, 38 00:04:56,130 --> 00:05:02,520 lifesize and emphatically filling the space immediately in front of us with her load of wreckage. 39 00:05:02,520 --> 00:05:11,330 Sturdy presence and surly unwillingness to make eye contact and end in nineteen hundred and one with Everlast. 40 00:05:11,330 --> 00:05:20,160 George Banjoes is visit to the factory after a sway with the director, an equally arresting painting. 41 00:05:20,160 --> 00:05:27,090 This time setting prosperity and proprietorship within the grim realities of industrial production. 42 00:05:27,090 --> 00:05:39,270 With its startling conjunction of fan and furnace, satin and sweat, and its strange compositional combination of the statuesque and the precarious. 43 00:05:39,270 --> 00:05:45,510 Top and bottom of society then. And also industry and agriculture. 44 00:05:45,510 --> 00:05:50,910 Joseph Felt. To Day Labourers Steelworks of Sachem More 1889 dwarfs. 45 00:05:50,910 --> 00:05:56,010 The workers by the huge factory as they cast a gun for a battleship. 46 00:05:56,010 --> 00:06:07,050 While Lail now meets market at Chateau TIAR, he painted a decade earlier, embraces the mainly female shoppers in the placid town square. 47 00:06:07,050 --> 00:06:13,140 Descriptive in their representation, both paintings tackle aspects of the economy, 48 00:06:13,140 --> 00:06:18,960 alluding to the larger issues of France's still troubled status as a great power and anxieties 49 00:06:18,960 --> 00:06:25,350 about the deep population of the countryside as people left for industrial work in the cities. 50 00:06:25,350 --> 00:06:35,460 The pictures, too, are explicit about place Lahore's factory at the Department of the Noir Lab Mix Market there in the EIN. 51 00:06:35,460 --> 00:06:44,020 Collectively by accretion, such paintings built up that Encyclopaedia of France. 52 00:06:44,020 --> 00:06:53,430 And how different is leisure meat market to Camil Pizarro's market scenes such as the Schuckert year of 1883, 53 00:06:53,430 --> 00:06:59,310 Pissarro used some brighter colour and are more evident brushstroke and here employed a close up design. 54 00:06:59,310 --> 00:07:05,490 But both artists built their compositions around strongly drawn figures describing 55 00:07:05,490 --> 00:07:11,820 different activities and detailing the nuances of class in rural communities. 56 00:07:11,820 --> 00:07:22,920 Impressionist painters like Pissarro were, one can argue, engaged in a form of naturalism, a need to be written in to its historical analysis. 57 00:07:22,920 --> 00:07:31,410 Let's look at one other polarity, this time in the work of a single artist at the Salon of 1887. 58 00:07:31,410 --> 00:07:41,100 All these years, Becs exhibited before the operation a portrait of the celebrated surgeon you repeal and his team, 59 00:07:41,100 --> 00:07:49,770 a carefully staged account of medical practise and instruction, not failing to draw attention to surgical instruments of payroll's own devising. 60 00:07:49,770 --> 00:07:55,770 Before the operation typifies naturalism alliance with modern science. 61 00:07:55,770 --> 00:07:59,870 Four years later, at the Societe Nasional, LeBeau's up. 62 00:07:59,870 --> 00:08:06,870 Joe X showed his ceiling for the grand Saldate effect at the Paris Hotel de Ville. 63 00:08:06,870 --> 00:08:13,200 For the theme music, JAV X opted to counterpoint the here and now of a modern, 64 00:08:13,200 --> 00:08:17,970 naturalistic image of a singer onstage seen across the heads of spectators, 65 00:08:17,970 --> 00:08:26,370 an orchestra with a vertiginous composition of musicians in 18th century costume set amongst allegorical figures. 66 00:08:26,370 --> 00:08:32,220 The whole creating a rather bizarre combination of Duga and Tupelo. 67 00:08:32,220 --> 00:08:40,050 But with these two paintings for different purposes, Joe Vex demonstrated naturalism is elasticity, 68 00:08:40,050 --> 00:08:49,920 how it could be adapted to depict the most contemporary in scientific medicine and elide with traditional forms of representation. 69 00:08:49,920 --> 00:08:57,860 You can already see, I hope, that there were many natural isms at its best. 70 00:08:57,860 --> 00:09:06,070 Naturalist painting could be daring and varied, instructive, confrontational, grand, even meditative. 71 00:09:06,070 --> 00:09:13,810 And one of the things I want to do in these lectures is to show that at best its qualities and complexities deserve better than art. 72 00:09:13,810 --> 00:09:24,000 History often allows. Naturalist painting had two characteristics which I want to insist upon at the outset. 73 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:31,230 First, as I've already hinted, it was flexible, adaptable to different subjects and purposes, 74 00:09:31,230 --> 00:09:38,500 accommodating to individual manners of painting within its broad compass of the descriptive. 75 00:09:38,500 --> 00:09:44,710 Second, it was modern. It depicted the here and now, of course, what could be seen. 76 00:09:44,710 --> 00:09:52,210 What was part of contemporary experience. But it's modern character resided not merely in its descriptive bliss, 77 00:09:52,210 --> 00:09:57,640 but also in the way in which the representation of the actual elided with 78 00:09:57,640 --> 00:10:03,670 broader ideological and philosophical understandings of how the world worked. 79 00:10:03,670 --> 00:10:08,620 Naturalism, what might say was more than an aesthetic. 80 00:10:08,620 --> 00:10:18,040 It was also a state of mind. Much of this lecture series will be concerned with enquiring how this kind of art functioned and flourished. 81 00:10:18,040 --> 00:10:28,210 But it will also consider the opposition for the two decades between 1880 and nineteen hundred saw the burgeoning of modernism in France. 82 00:10:28,210 --> 00:10:35,800 These years saw at Goodooga and Claude Monet working at impressively consistent levels of achievement, 83 00:10:35,800 --> 00:10:41,330 as well as the emergence of such talents as Odey or her door, one of whom was chuckles is on the left. 84 00:10:41,330 --> 00:10:47,920 Your Qahar Paul Goga. Not to mention that Dutch visitor Vincent van Hoff. 85 00:10:47,920 --> 00:10:51,400 What do I bring? These artists work into play. 86 00:10:51,400 --> 00:11:00,250 I will do so by considering it, considering it in terms of the dominant naturalism rather than simply on its own terms. 87 00:11:00,250 --> 00:11:04,840 The history of modernism tends to be exclusive and linear, 88 00:11:04,840 --> 00:11:14,440 privileging an elite to the exclusion of contemporaries and following a progressive sequence preordained by hindsight. 89 00:11:14,440 --> 00:11:21,580 My objective is to return all these kinds of painting to history, to their context. 90 00:11:21,580 --> 00:11:28,810 Under the Third Republic. In so doing, I shall try to treat the works I discuss equally. 91 00:11:28,810 --> 00:11:35,230 I have no intention of diminishing great innovative canvases by CFR and his peers. 92 00:11:35,230 --> 00:11:44,530 The CEO has been yard up there. Nor do I seek to promote certain kinds of painting above their functional functional station. 93 00:11:44,530 --> 00:11:54,230 And I will be showing some fairly numbing canvases. A Joie de Thai's funeral of Pasteur Springs to mind. 94 00:11:54,230 --> 00:12:02,570 There is no question of revisionism here then, but rather a respect for history and the contemporary Montanti de. 95 00:12:02,570 --> 00:12:06,110 There are two central hypotheses. 96 00:12:06,110 --> 00:12:14,510 The first is the claims have already made that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in France between 1880 and nineteen hundred. 97 00:12:14,510 --> 00:12:20,450 Why and how this was. I shall explore in the early lectures. 98 00:12:20,450 --> 00:12:26,540 But one answer will be that it suited the ideology of the Third Republic. 99 00:12:26,540 --> 00:12:31,490 Naturalism in the visual arts, as in literature, was comprehensible. 100 00:12:31,490 --> 00:12:36,170 It dealt with matters at the moment with common experience. 101 00:12:36,170 --> 00:12:41,750 Naturalist paintings with their everyday subjects were immediately legible. 102 00:12:41,750 --> 00:12:49,280 They required only vernacular culture to be brought to them to be understood from these points of view. 103 00:12:49,280 --> 00:12:52,700 They were egalitarian. 104 00:12:52,700 --> 00:13:01,280 The republic put great emphasis on being a progressive regime supportive of modern thinking in sciences such as medicine and engineering, 105 00:13:01,280 --> 00:13:06,500 naturalism was suckered by shared and sustained. 106 00:13:06,500 --> 00:13:16,670 That mentality of exactitude, which characterised France's NICE's technocracy and naturalism, is central concern. 107 00:13:16,670 --> 00:13:27,170 The description of actuality could be made to serve the public's need to articulate and broadcast its ideological values, 108 00:13:27,170 --> 00:13:33,200 hence the value of a painting like de daytime's funeral of Pasteur. 109 00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:38,960 If naturalist art to a considerable extent went hand in hand with Republicanism, 110 00:13:38,960 --> 00:13:45,470 how might an artist who had no wish to either paint naturalistically or to ally 111 00:13:45,470 --> 00:13:53,220 with the republic and consensus negotiate ways around that dominant aesthetic? 112 00:13:53,220 --> 00:13:57,840 The second hypothesis is in response to these questions, 113 00:13:57,840 --> 00:14:05,670 naturalism might have the virtues that I've outlined, but it also had its flaws in its worthiness. 114 00:14:05,670 --> 00:14:10,680 It might lack irony, and it's in its loyalty to Macy's. 115 00:14:10,680 --> 00:14:21,510 However flexible, it might lack style to moderate and modify or even entirely circumvent its broad and encompassing reach. 116 00:14:21,510 --> 00:14:28,920 Art seeking a pictorial and ideological independence would do well to seek style. 117 00:14:28,920 --> 00:14:31,560 Individual visual idioms of colour, 118 00:14:31,560 --> 00:14:42,290 touch and design that went beyond the reach of the hegemony of the actual and legible style will be a constant theme in these lectures. 119 00:14:42,290 --> 00:14:50,540 Exploring these two hypotheses will, I hope, lead us away from certain quite commonly held assumptions and present art history. 120 00:14:50,540 --> 00:14:55,400 One of these is the view, ironically held by modernists and revisionists alike. 121 00:14:55,400 --> 00:15:03,890 That naturalist painting of this period was content with surface description derived such modernity as it mustered from a reliance on 122 00:15:03,890 --> 00:15:13,160 photography and was in essence as conservative in the social values of its subjects as it was in the pictorial representation of them. 123 00:15:13,160 --> 00:15:16,280 Quite the contrary, I will argue. 124 00:15:16,280 --> 00:15:25,970 Naturalism allowed very diverse kinds of execution and representation and was conscious in the range and diversity of its artifices, 125 00:15:25,970 --> 00:15:36,560 of which photography was only one. In addition, it was a deeply ideological aesthetic, often hand in glove with Republican rhetoric. 126 00:15:36,560 --> 00:15:47,410 The cumulative impact year on year of hundreds of descriptive canvases of contemporary French life, rural and urban, agricultural and industrial set, 127 00:15:47,410 --> 00:15:58,840 totally or natural and methods are now created a collective notion of national identity substantially shaped to the priorities of the republic. 128 00:15:58,840 --> 00:16:06,680 Therein lay naturalism is power to sustain its position as the dominant aesthetic. 129 00:16:06,680 --> 00:16:17,990 The second assumption is that the avant garde ism of a soha are a ghoga was a reaction against entrenched academic art, stalled impressionism or both. 130 00:16:17,990 --> 00:16:24,650 It could be argued that naturalist painting itself was a reaction to the academic system. 131 00:16:24,650 --> 00:16:29,990 After all, artists such as Zilberstein bastion apart and they all complained about their academic 132 00:16:29,990 --> 00:16:36,650 tuition while Alfred Hall boasted of succeeding with negligible training for such artists. 133 00:16:36,650 --> 00:16:47,660 Naturalism was a means of introducing modernity into the established conventions of picture making, of making art useful for a wider society. 134 00:16:47,660 --> 00:16:50,000 As for the old guard, by the 1880, 135 00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:59,870 the sclerotic traditions of academic painting or the rather fragmented impressionism were less at issue than the dominant naturalism. 136 00:16:59,870 --> 00:17:10,820 This had either to be adapted to serve individualistic, even subversive ends or better still, circumvented by innovative style. 137 00:17:10,820 --> 00:17:16,730 A third assumption concerns the importance of symbolism. 138 00:17:16,730 --> 00:17:24,380 It would be a fool who denied the importance of the symbolist aesthetic that emerged in the late 1980s as a critical counter to naturalism, 139 00:17:24,380 --> 00:17:29,640 an aesthetic that engendered and sustained the work of creative figures as significant as Odeo. 140 00:17:29,640 --> 00:17:38,500 Woodall is another of his jungle's on the left, and Mochis, Dinny, Paul Verlaine and Stefan Mallat made there on the right must be respected. 141 00:17:38,500 --> 00:17:42,860 But symbolism was an aesthetic which perhaps because of its very suggests, Stephen, 142 00:17:42,860 --> 00:17:55,670 even hermetic idioms necessarily spoke for an end to an elite public, whereas naturalism had a national ubiquity and audience. 143 00:17:55,670 --> 00:18:00,860 Some of these aspects I will not have time to discuss fully in these lectures and will do so in the book to come. 144 00:18:00,860 --> 00:18:10,520 But I must raise them now to indicate that I am not ignoring them. Testing these hypotheses has wider methodological perspectives. 145 00:18:10,520 --> 00:18:18,470 One might say that these lectures are about building bridges. One of these is between history and the history of art. 146 00:18:18,470 --> 00:18:27,770 Over the next eight weeks, I will place the emphasis first on works of art with historical material in a more supportive role in a sense. 147 00:18:27,770 --> 00:18:35,600 These lectures then are very different from my last book, The Troubled Republic, which began with historical problems in 1890 France, 148 00:18:35,600 --> 00:18:45,140 social degeneration, the crowd, church state relations and Franco German rivalry and brought the images to the problems. 149 00:18:45,140 --> 00:18:49,780 While I won't be bringing in a great deal of historical evidence and data into these lectures, 150 00:18:49,780 --> 00:18:55,280 they will be consistent, historical underpinning to my arguments. 151 00:18:55,280 --> 00:19:02,390 The other bridge, one might say, is between Anglo Saxon and French approaches to art history. 152 00:19:02,390 --> 00:19:08,130 British and Americans often tend to focus on modernism, considering work that doesn't fit, 153 00:19:08,130 --> 00:19:13,730 that's aesthetics, established patterns at best as mere context. 154 00:19:13,730 --> 00:19:20,030 The danger of such approach is that its values about what a good or interesting works, 155 00:19:20,030 --> 00:19:26,060 what is useful evidence, are preordained and not necessarily the values of the period. 156 00:19:26,060 --> 00:19:32,570 In recent years, the French have almost surrendered the modernist torain to the Anglo Saxons. 157 00:19:32,570 --> 00:19:37,970 However, French scholars are busily reviving the mainstream art of the Third Republic. 158 00:19:37,970 --> 00:19:48,830 Coincidentally, and to my advantage, there has been a. Lot of recent exhibitions feel top left and molholm 2006 Bastia in the past. 159 00:19:48,830 --> 00:19:56,090 All and Buelow in 2007, Schappell Chieh Poovey had been up in 2008. 160 00:19:56,090 --> 00:20:07,920 We might ask, why is it because France is currently at an impasse and looks back to images which show old certainties of rural France. 161 00:20:07,920 --> 00:20:17,630 A French France. But we shouldn't forget that the art we admire perhaps tells us as much about who we are as the art we make. 162 00:20:17,630 --> 00:20:24,800 French scholars, however, tend to accumulate useful material about artists rather than interpret their work. 163 00:20:24,800 --> 00:20:31,670 Ideologically, my approach involves looking at a very wide range of pictures from grand public 164 00:20:31,670 --> 00:20:36,680 declarations through easel paintings for exhibition and private ownership to posters, 165 00:20:36,680 --> 00:20:41,360 magazine illustrations and albums of lithographs for reasons of time. 166 00:20:41,360 --> 00:20:46,610 I will deal chiefly with painting, occasionally touching on sculpture, but not the decorative arts. 167 00:20:46,610 --> 00:20:53,900 There will be some dinosaur bones you might think redundant in this museum, but I promise you not. 168 00:20:53,900 --> 00:20:59,570 I will be looking at well-known works and artists. Great names like Monet, CFR and Tunisia attract. 169 00:20:59,570 --> 00:21:07,030 But from unexpected perspectives and in unusual contexts, trying to escape conventional categorisations. 170 00:21:07,030 --> 00:21:15,230 And I will assume a certain knowledge on my audience is part so won't be stopping to define neo impressionism. 171 00:21:15,230 --> 00:21:19,220 Explain the Nabby or outline Third Republic political history. 172 00:21:19,220 --> 00:21:24,630 This is not a survey course, but a series of arguments and propositions. 173 00:21:24,630 --> 00:21:29,300 I will also be analysing paintings by many artists celebrated in their own day 174 00:21:29,300 --> 00:21:35,360 figures such as Loudly Beina Kathy Air and Feore and taking them seriously. 175 00:21:35,360 --> 00:21:40,610 I'll be introducing some striking and weird works to. 176 00:21:40,610 --> 00:21:46,490 If you want to see a painting of a woman having a blood transfusion from a goat. 177 00:21:46,490 --> 00:21:55,700 Come next week. I intend to avoid dealing with these pictures with hindsight. 178 00:21:55,700 --> 00:22:03,740 My interest is in how it was for people then by doing using a wide range of their pictures and their own words. 179 00:22:03,740 --> 00:22:10,430 One can better explore the mortality of the artists, critics, politicians and administrators of the period in particular. 180 00:22:10,430 --> 00:22:16,680 I'm going to read naturalist pictures ideologically rather than as description or anecdote. 181 00:22:16,680 --> 00:22:21,800 And this brings historical processes into art history. 182 00:22:21,800 --> 00:22:31,850 Let me give you an example. It feels Oarsman of the Myrt was exhibited at the salon of 1887. 183 00:22:31,850 --> 00:22:35,900 At one level, it is a carefully contrived image of actuality, 184 00:22:35,900 --> 00:22:44,780 with its Life-Size figures caught in actions like pouring wine, removing a jacket or passing of roast fowl. 185 00:22:44,780 --> 00:22:54,500 But there are more allusive readings. The title gives us a specific regional clue for the Almost from North Sea on the Myrt. 186 00:22:54,500 --> 00:23:01,590 This is a picture about pride in one's pee. It's also about vitality, about appetites. 187 00:23:01,590 --> 00:23:11,180 Worked up after a hard outing on the river. A positive image of young Frenchman's physical prowess at a time of anxiety about national degeneration, 188 00:23:11,180 --> 00:23:19,130 the spread of alcoholism and venereal diseases, and the conviviality of the moment can also be taken as fact. 189 00:23:19,130 --> 00:23:24,890 Every day deepened from genial anecdote into Republican ideology. 190 00:23:24,890 --> 00:23:33,200 Should that reading's suit discover that the straw hatted man on the left is Eugene Coolabah, 191 00:23:33,200 --> 00:23:37,760 leading figure of the Rowing Club and Stein of a North Sea Department store. 192 00:23:37,760 --> 00:23:45,050 Owning family and oarsman of the MLT with its young packed hall and more ordinary style, 193 00:23:45,050 --> 00:23:50,390 becomes a painting about cross-class harmony under the Republic. 194 00:23:50,390 --> 00:23:54,980 Such a picture should not be discarded as just a conventionally painted narrative. 195 00:23:54,980 --> 00:24:04,030 By the standards of 1887, it was modern in its actuality and in its inherent values and shown first in a private gallery 196 00:24:04,030 --> 00:24:09,860 at North Sea and then seen by half a million at the Paris Paracel and many more across France. 197 00:24:09,860 --> 00:24:14,820 When given a full page in the mass circulation Le Monde illustrate, 198 00:24:14,820 --> 00:24:26,980 a painting like this disseminated its message of well-being and collectivity very broadly. 199 00:24:26,980 --> 00:24:34,630 I need to explain some of my terms of reference. What do I mean by naturalism? 200 00:24:34,630 --> 00:24:40,720 Not too far. Leestma was a word widely used in France during the second half of the 19th century. 201 00:24:40,720 --> 00:24:45,670 So was Zionism. But I've preferred naturalism for several reasons. 202 00:24:45,670 --> 00:24:49,570 It was in more consistent usage in the 20 years that I'm exploring. 203 00:24:49,570 --> 00:24:54,910 Whereas realism was declining as a term for discussion of the arts, 204 00:24:54,910 --> 00:25:02,470 whether it was the conservative critic or the you say in 1882 worrying about the increasing prevalence of NATO, 205 00:25:02,470 --> 00:25:09,160 Islay and Ampicillin East works at the salon or the progressive administrator and critic Loggi Marks, 206 00:25:09,160 --> 00:25:16,170 noting in 1889 that le naturalism it or father to such an extent that even academic artists had 207 00:25:16,170 --> 00:25:26,590 begun pand academic more Delahanty naturalism was the key term in common aesthetic parlance. 208 00:25:26,590 --> 00:25:32,920 Naturalism was touted as a cultural movement by important figures such as the widely read novelist Emil Zoner. 209 00:25:32,920 --> 00:25:42,970 It played across disciplines and media and might be discussed in terms of theatre and sculpture, let alone painting of a novel. 210 00:25:42,970 --> 00:25:50,430 In addition, naturalism had echoes of the natural sciences, a link Zola, for one, was keen to promote. 211 00:25:50,430 --> 00:25:54,820 And this enhanced its impact and modernity. 212 00:25:54,820 --> 00:26:05,650 For as a concept, naturalism meant more than merely the mimetic process of representing nature, description was linked with exactitude. 213 00:26:05,650 --> 00:26:16,690 Take an example of an art historian writing in 1880 or so about a famous old master of the AVAR praised Rembrandt's Night Watch. 214 00:26:16,690 --> 00:26:27,050 Above all, for that exactitude, that truth in the physiognomy is and in the action which one identifies as naturalism exactitude, 215 00:26:27,050 --> 00:26:32,350 it was understood as a virtue. Overlapping with scientific accuracy. 216 00:26:32,350 --> 00:26:36,450 Precise evidence. Pure knowledge and moral truth. 217 00:26:36,450 --> 00:26:44,140 Honesty. Clear thinking. But a source of such values could easily become ideological, 218 00:26:44,140 --> 00:26:52,390 as we will see in a republic and mortality which strove to assert its values of modernity and rationality. 219 00:26:52,390 --> 00:26:56,410 Naturalism may have been the dominant aesthetic term. 220 00:26:56,410 --> 00:27:02,920 But that's not to say that it was undisputed. The influential but reactionary theatre critic Forese Sarsae. 221 00:27:02,920 --> 00:27:07,540 Right that while we accept that some people have warts on their faces, 222 00:27:07,540 --> 00:27:13,630 we should not accept novelists and painters who get pleasure from contemplating walks. 223 00:27:13,630 --> 00:27:21,340 And in a 1891, the journalist Zuel Kyohei ran an important series of interviews in liquid heat, 224 00:27:21,340 --> 00:27:28,150 asking leading writers if naturalism was finished and whether symbolism had replaced it. 225 00:27:28,150 --> 00:27:33,190 But looking back from 1914, it was naturalism that had taken to. 226 00:27:33,190 --> 00:27:40,660 Was taken to have dominated the previous generations, painting, as one critic drily put it. 227 00:27:40,660 --> 00:27:45,700 The trend in the studios around 1885 was naturalism. 228 00:27:45,700 --> 00:27:55,900 People talked of the masterpieces to make with subjects like the Vault Malakoff railway station and the Bettino Kishi Odille bus. 229 00:27:55,900 --> 00:28:00,580 But the decoration of a new town hall was an occasion for a wedding banquet 230 00:28:00,580 --> 00:28:08,600 under the pergola or promenade of the bridal couple in the park more smoothly. 231 00:28:08,600 --> 00:28:13,820 The intellectual background to this aesthetic predominance was summed up by the 232 00:28:13,820 --> 00:28:20,210 academic gappy and Monod in 1894 in a book on three major modern historians, 233 00:28:20,210 --> 00:28:27,290 Ernest Duno, A Bullet 10 and you Michali model, identified scientific realism. 234 00:28:27,290 --> 00:28:33,950 My naturalism as the organic principle of French intellectual life in recent decades. 235 00:28:33,950 --> 00:28:41,510 This analysis of objective and demonstrable truth, studied in concrete reality was a monads view. 236 00:28:41,510 --> 00:28:45,830 A tendency so general. So deep. So truly organic. 237 00:28:45,830 --> 00:28:53,090 That one finds the same passionate search for truth, for scientific realism in every aspect of intellectual life. 238 00:28:53,090 --> 00:28:55,850 Whether that authors know it or not. 239 00:28:55,850 --> 00:29:04,220 And he cited the paintings of Bastiaan, the Pasion, Ernest, Miss Sonja, the novels of Zola and Gajda, Microsoft and the writings of 10. 240 00:29:04,220 --> 00:29:05,480 Above all, the Monod. 241 00:29:05,480 --> 00:29:14,020 This does this current US cross disciplinary not only linking literature and the visual arts, but also the arts and sciences for poor Borgia. 242 00:29:14,020 --> 00:29:20,660 Use psychology in his novels and Zola physiology and pathology in his. 243 00:29:20,660 --> 00:29:29,150 A key figure in this contemporary intellectual framework which made naturalism the basis of modern thought was epaulette 10. 244 00:29:29,150 --> 00:29:35,180 Seen here in a portrait by level Bonnar, professor of the history of art at the Acle, they Bouzar in Paris. 245 00:29:35,180 --> 00:29:43,520 Since 1864, Ten had put forward his ideas in books such as Philosophy de la 1865. 246 00:29:43,520 --> 00:29:52,310 Above all, he believed in the deterministic principle that artistic production was shaped by by historical and cultural circumstances, 247 00:29:52,310 --> 00:29:56,660 that perhaps Moomaw Emilia made a work of art. 248 00:29:56,660 --> 00:30:04,040 Look, as it did, this concept was so prevalent as a means of judging and justifying Naturaliste paintings that 249 00:30:04,040 --> 00:30:10,760 it was consistently alluded to by contemporary writers with no necessary citation of 10. 250 00:30:10,760 --> 00:30:20,120 Thus, when the museum curator, Leyla's Benedek, summed up Alfred Hall's work, it was as exclusively of his time, of his country and of his media. 251 00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:27,980 Equally, arguing that an artist did not live up to Ten's formula was a way of distancing his work from naturalism, 252 00:30:27,980 --> 00:30:32,840 as the symbolist writer George Lautenbach did when he saw Eugen County as workers 253 00:30:32,840 --> 00:30:41,540 voluntarily neglecting disdaining what is to do with race period or class. 254 00:30:41,540 --> 00:30:50,210 Another prominent figure in the shaping of this naturalist mentality named in Monod schema was the novelist Emile Zola. 255 00:30:50,210 --> 00:30:56,720 Between 1870 and 1893, Zola produced the 20 novels of the Rural Machol series. 256 00:30:56,720 --> 00:31:01,640 Their ideas on heredity and determinism, influenced by 10 zero, 257 00:31:01,640 --> 00:31:08,240 also made theoretical contributions, helping to define naturalism as intellectual scope. 258 00:31:08,240 --> 00:31:14,960 His Lahoma experiments are published in 1880, was a manifesto for literary naturalism, 259 00:31:14,960 --> 00:31:22,370 vaunting writing that would describe and analyse absolutely any aspect of modern experience. 260 00:31:22,370 --> 00:31:30,560 Significantly, there was a section entitled Liow Hyperbolic in Literature in which Zola proclaimed 261 00:31:30,560 --> 00:31:38,270 his own Republicanism and then insisted like public scarnati of at least in part, 262 00:31:38,270 --> 00:31:42,410 the republic would be naturaliste or it won't exist. 263 00:31:42,410 --> 00:31:52,470 This was a play on the statement by Adults Teer, the first president of the Third Republic, that the Republic will be conservative or it won't exist. 264 00:31:52,470 --> 00:31:58,070 Zebra's argument was that naturalism is a Republican literature, 265 00:31:58,070 --> 00:32:05,810 given that the Republic was based on a Democratic decision itself made after five factual analysis of the nation's needs. 266 00:32:05,810 --> 00:32:11,630 He saw the republic emerging from the same process of scrupulous observation of material reality as 267 00:32:11,630 --> 00:32:17,930 manifested by his novels or the medicine of the late Clode banner with whose experimental pathology. 268 00:32:17,930 --> 00:32:32,480 He also sought to draw parallels. Zola defined naturalism as the analytical and experimental method modern enquiry based on facts and human documents. 269 00:32:32,480 --> 00:32:39,110 Failure to capitalise on the modernity of Naturaliste method was to fail to be truly model. 270 00:32:39,110 --> 00:32:50,810 Yet Zoner recognised that the description and analysis of the material world as a creative rather than scientific act needed to allow flexibility. 271 00:32:50,810 --> 00:32:55,790 Not everyone responds and sees in the same way. 272 00:32:55,790 --> 00:33:01,970 So his next theoretical text, little more and that's a list of 1881, acknowledged that Zoners, 273 00:33:01,970 --> 00:33:07,170 a middle group of naturalist's writers, including moop us on Christmas, had personal. 274 00:33:07,170 --> 00:33:12,240 Literary styles within their collective naturalist aesthetic. 275 00:33:12,240 --> 00:33:18,690 And he said the same painters. These texts by Zola are significant. 276 00:33:18,690 --> 00:33:27,810 They help define naturalism, moderating its core belief in close descriptive analysis with generosity towards personal means of expression, 277 00:33:27,810 --> 00:33:35,280 stressing the aesthetics, interdisciplinarity, its reach encompassing literature and the visual arts. 278 00:33:35,280 --> 00:33:43,890 Its mortality shared with the sciences. These were all terms with which monotones academic survey would agree. 279 00:33:43,890 --> 00:33:47,760 A decade and a half later, finally, 280 00:33:47,760 --> 00:33:57,270 it is no coincidence that Lahoma experimental title was published in 1880 as Republican politics really got into gear because for Zoner, 281 00:33:57,270 --> 00:34:06,440 with his play on tears admonition about the Republic's future, naturalism was inescapably ideological, notably dark. 282 00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:11,340 Zoners intellectual impact within the work world of the visual arts. 283 00:34:11,340 --> 00:34:15,660 The novelist may have written very little art criticism during the eighteen eighties and nineties, 284 00:34:15,660 --> 00:34:21,720 but his earlier naturalist definition of a work of art learnt that you are the art there. 285 00:34:21,720 --> 00:34:29,430 Top of hour, Moore was constantly quoted, invoked and impugned to give just two examples. 286 00:34:29,430 --> 00:34:39,750 When Octave Millo praised Rafael is act at the founders there on the left in 1886, as nature seemed by a masculine temperament. 287 00:34:39,750 --> 00:34:46,050 He was using a naturalist dictum for a naturalist picture, whereas when in 1892, 288 00:34:46,050 --> 00:34:53,930 Mochis Dinny found Louis all Cotard's recent work re-engaging with the theory of nature seen through temperament, 289 00:34:53,930 --> 00:35:01,080 the committed symbolist Dinni was somewhat disappointed by what he saw as this recidivist Lapps. 290 00:35:01,080 --> 00:35:09,180 The common currency of that definition was one instance of the hegemony of that cultural and intellectual agenda. 291 00:35:09,180 --> 00:35:18,360 Whether you call it zoners, naturalism tends positivist determinism, Monod scientific realism, naturalist painting emerged from it, 292 00:35:18,360 --> 00:35:29,770 belonged within it and contributed to it, giving visual and broadcast to all form to the Republic's dominant Montanti de. 293 00:35:29,770 --> 00:35:35,710 What of the Third Republic itself? I got no time to go into detail about the policies, 294 00:35:35,710 --> 00:35:42,580 manoeuvrings and personalities of 20 years of complex pictorial activity, but let's build an armature. 295 00:35:42,580 --> 00:35:49,930 At least the Third Republic was founded on the 4th of September 1870 in the wake of military defeat 296 00:35:49,930 --> 00:35:55,990 at the hands of the invading German armies and the subsequent collapse of the second empire. 297 00:35:55,990 --> 00:36:02,320 However, the eighteen seventies was a decade of false starts and conservative reaction. 298 00:36:02,320 --> 00:36:08,320 It wasn't until the elections of January 1879 that a politically authentic republic was in 299 00:36:08,320 --> 00:36:14,280 place with a majority in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies and a genuine Republican, 300 00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:19,840 usually gravy scene there painted by Bonner in 1880 as president. 301 00:36:19,840 --> 00:36:22,300 This is where I begin. 302 00:36:22,300 --> 00:36:31,150 The eighteen seventies had at least shown Republicans clearly who their enemies were and the extent of the work necessary to defeat them. 303 00:36:31,150 --> 00:36:40,840 In broad terms, the Republican Project was to create a civic religion using the Republic to give moral unity to France. 304 00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:48,580 Republicans beacon principles, liberty, equality, fraternity were values drawn from enlightenment, 305 00:36:48,580 --> 00:36:54,160 thought and tempered in the fire of the French Revolution. A century on. 306 00:36:54,160 --> 00:37:04,690 It was time to put them in place. The republic drew value from this inheritance and the visual arts were only one medium used to validate it. 307 00:37:04,690 --> 00:37:16,030 For example, at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a team of painters led by Joe VACs and Alfred Stovall's painted the giant Panorama de Sickler. 308 00:37:16,030 --> 00:37:23,470 Those are only some fragments of it. A pictorial survey of the great and good of the past century. 309 00:37:23,470 --> 00:37:30,220 Its central section of the top player was comprised of an arch surmounting a monument to the glory of France. 310 00:37:30,220 --> 00:37:35,950 And behind it for knishes with statues, books, statues of enlightenment. 311 00:37:35,950 --> 00:37:49,210 Philos of this insistence on historical continuity was echoed in Kamei Lefevre as 1895 Sculpture of the Republic for the Mathie of E.C Lee Moutinho. 312 00:37:49,210 --> 00:37:57,640 Here the figures of liberty, equality and fraternity as they reach down towards Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, 313 00:37:57,640 --> 00:38:03,960 are each given a date which you might be able to see on the carving that the photograph was taken by me. 314 00:38:03,960 --> 00:38:09,460 So not very good. And the dates of their 1789, 1830, 315 00:38:09,460 --> 00:38:20,380 1848 registering revolutions in French society and the chronological progression towards the realisation of present Republicanism. 316 00:38:20,380 --> 00:38:28,480 Liberté, Égalité and Stephanie Té are political values standing for and against. 317 00:38:28,480 --> 00:38:32,710 Under the early Third Republic, they stood against the past. 318 00:38:32,710 --> 00:38:38,620 Liberty from the autocratic rule of monarchal emperor. From religious belief or superstition. 319 00:38:38,620 --> 00:38:47,320 From control by the Catholic Church and the KYOHEI equality rather than the class hierarchy of aristocrats notables. 320 00:38:47,320 --> 00:38:55,900 They also stood for the present and future, for liberty of thought and expression of political association. 321 00:38:55,900 --> 00:39:04,330 Equality between the Couche socio fraternity as a means of building a unified nation forth, as Graham Robb has recently reminded us. 322 00:39:04,330 --> 00:39:11,980 France was a very diverse country language, social customs, food, building materials, 323 00:39:11,980 --> 00:39:18,310 agricultural practises all differed from region to region across the EXI God. 324 00:39:18,310 --> 00:39:26,470 France was in an analogous position to two neighbouring countries which had recently unified politically Germany and Italy, 325 00:39:26,470 --> 00:39:32,740 in that it's still in the Republican scheme needed to cohere into a single nation. 326 00:39:32,740 --> 00:39:39,960 Republicanism was therefore a political ideology with a job to do. 327 00:39:39,960 --> 00:39:50,850 Nation building that hasn't been recently somewhat debased, this necessitated the promotion of the collective. 328 00:39:50,850 --> 00:39:54,990 In March 1882. Ernest Hummel. 329 00:39:54,990 --> 00:40:00,090 Seen here again in a portrait by Bonner. I will be showing you other pictures than portraits by Bonner. 330 00:40:00,090 --> 00:40:05,610 I can assure you. In March 1882, Ernest Keweenaw gave a famous lecture at the Sorbonne. 331 00:40:05,610 --> 00:40:07,950 What is a Nation? 332 00:40:07,950 --> 00:40:21,770 His conclusion a great aggregation of men, healthy of spirit and a room of art creates a moral consciousness that is called a nation. 333 00:40:21,770 --> 00:40:30,920 The republic sought to shape that consciousness to its own principles to unite that aggregation under the banner of fraternity. 334 00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:41,120 That process was identified with modernity for the progressive and scientific principles inherited from the Enlightenment led ever forward. 335 00:40:41,120 --> 00:40:47,660 The pictures that I'm going to explore in these lectures, pictures that went on show in Paris and other cities that were photographed and 336 00:40:47,660 --> 00:40:54,710 reproduced in magazines contributed by the process of accretion to this consciousness, 337 00:40:54,710 --> 00:41:03,050 whether a landscape of Old TEEB by Claude Monet or of the Vogue by Louis for, say, a peasant scene by Leone. 338 00:41:03,050 --> 00:41:10,130 Let me talk Cammi Pissarro, a Parisian suburb by luging large or foreswear half valy. 339 00:41:10,130 --> 00:41:16,850 The cumulative impact of descriptive canvases in such a climate was a contribution to the 340 00:41:16,850 --> 00:41:26,000 constant definition of the moral consciousness of nationhood that Al-Noor had identified. 341 00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:34,310 Broadly speaking, Republicans wanted a conservative regime, although there was universal manhood, suffrage, 342 00:41:34,310 --> 00:41:37,490 a radical constitutional situation in contemporary Europe, 343 00:41:37,490 --> 00:41:45,020 the actively political classes sought stability and consensus to protect the elites and their property. 344 00:41:45,020 --> 00:41:54,920 Social reform tended to be a limited objective. There were, of course, shifting political patterns during the two decades with which I'll be dealing. 345 00:41:54,920 --> 00:42:04,280 During the 18th 80s, Republican's chief opponent was the church politicians determined to wrest influence on the nation's young from the church. 346 00:42:04,280 --> 00:42:11,960 The better to mould the Republican future. And they pursued anticlerical policies, particularly in education. 347 00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:18,740 The steady process of laicisation enfold vote that involved the gradual removal of Catholic influence in schools, 348 00:42:18,740 --> 00:42:28,760 beginning with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1880, as well as other social reforms such as the liberalisation of the divorce law in 1884. 349 00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:34,820 But by the 1990s, relations between church and state had become less confrontational. 350 00:42:34,820 --> 00:42:40,400 In the 90s, it was increasingly the political left, especially the growing threat of socialism, 351 00:42:40,400 --> 00:42:46,160 as well as the resurgent right which troubled the majority Republican centre. 352 00:42:46,160 --> 00:42:50,390 Of course, the broad front of Republicanism itself was very diverse. 353 00:42:50,390 --> 00:42:59,330 There were many strains, opportunist, radical solitaries and social jostling and regrouping in often short lived administrations. 354 00:42:59,330 --> 00:43:04,340 Again, there were different commitments to the republic in different regions, and the Catholic right was strong. 355 00:43:04,340 --> 00:43:06,890 In Britain and the North, for example, 356 00:43:06,890 --> 00:43:18,480 different interests and constituencies could be truculent and might need to be addressed in different ways to suit their different demands. 357 00:43:18,480 --> 00:43:24,980 What you will be asking was the place of the visual arts and this. 358 00:43:24,980 --> 00:43:32,220 Well, that's one of the main questions that I'll be addressing in this series when I will, I can assure you, be talking more about pictures. 359 00:43:32,220 --> 00:43:38,760 But I want to close this introductory lecture by returning to painting if Republicanism. 360 00:43:38,760 --> 00:43:42,540 Liberty, equality, fraternity was to become a civic religion. 361 00:43:42,540 --> 00:43:45,570 It needed to be taught. 362 00:43:45,570 --> 00:43:57,000 So education, the instilling of Republican values across France to create that broad ideological consensus was a crucial political mechanism. 363 00:43:57,000 --> 00:44:00,960 The introduction to the official publication of the Great Exposition Universelle, 364 00:44:00,960 --> 00:44:07,080 held in 1889 right at the middle of my period, made this crystal clear. 365 00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:20,100 We will show to our sons what their fathers have done in a century through the progress of education, the love of work and respect for liberty. 366 00:44:20,100 --> 00:44:28,530 Education meant more than schooling. It meant the subtle and constant indoctrination of all citizens with Republican values. 367 00:44:28,530 --> 00:44:35,070 This was addressed particularly at men who had the vote in France's new democracy. 368 00:44:35,070 --> 00:44:45,630 It was no coincidence that the official official rhetoric I've just quoted talked to fathers and sons and I will return to virility in later lectures. 369 00:44:45,630 --> 00:44:50,910 This discreet process of propagandising the electorate involved a wide variety of 370 00:44:50,910 --> 00:44:55,200 methods amongst them that this year will art's almost throughout this period. 371 00:44:55,200 --> 00:45:04,110 There was a Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, an indication of how the Republic understood art as an ideological tool. 372 00:45:04,110 --> 00:45:11,690 As you know, fairly, a leading politician in the eighteen eighties was quite frank about this in a speech of April 1881. 373 00:45:11,690 --> 00:45:23,060 For a society like ours, a lively democracy. Art Mazia is, above all and before all, a major means of popular education. 374 00:45:23,060 --> 00:45:28,790 What politicians required civil servants delivered in an 1895 speech. 375 00:45:28,790 --> 00:45:35,240 The senior functionary, Gustaf Lahoma, insisted that modern democracy gives art a public role, 376 00:45:35,240 --> 00:45:41,260 a bubble through its museums, which are a form of instruction. 377 00:45:41,260 --> 00:45:45,790 To address its many constituencies and satisfy diverse interests, 378 00:45:45,790 --> 00:45:53,350 the state had to acknowledge different forms of art and embrace an eclectic range of styles. 379 00:45:53,350 --> 00:46:02,590 I do not want to be doctrinaire in my lectures and assume that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in competition with no stylistic alternatives. 380 00:46:02,590 --> 00:46:07,660 Undoubtedly, forms of classicism, notably that of Poovey to Chavan, 381 00:46:07,660 --> 00:46:16,420 seem there on the left or the neo baroque of artists such as labelled Bonnar on the right had a substantial impact in grand public painting, 382 00:46:16,420 --> 00:46:26,440 for example. This eclecticism became a problem with big public commissions such as the Hotel de Ville and Paris and the Capitol in Toulouse, 383 00:46:26,440 --> 00:46:33,400 where many different interests had to be admitted, leading to a chaos of styles. 384 00:46:33,400 --> 00:46:43,240 But I think that it is too easy to conclude with pure lace that the republic's liberal embrace of eclectic styles is the main story. 385 00:46:43,240 --> 00:46:49,930 Undoubtedly, both expediency and Republican egalitarianism encouraged leading administrators such as 386 00:46:49,930 --> 00:46:56,470 Lavall May and June Castagnetti to recognise diverse kinds of work and in so doing, 387 00:46:56,470 --> 00:47:05,680 accept a degree of laissez faire eclecticism. But within that surface, liberalism was a naturalist drive. 388 00:47:05,680 --> 00:47:11,200 Until now, plussed, seen here in a bust by loadout, minister of Culture and Gambetta, 389 00:47:11,200 --> 00:47:16,360 short lived government, a pivotal figure at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, 390 00:47:16,360 --> 00:47:22,330 explained that while he could find merit in allegories and historical subjects, 391 00:47:22,330 --> 00:47:29,440 I confess that I have a marked predilection for the representation of something seen. 392 00:47:29,440 --> 00:47:37,960 Those on the left were also clear on the committee charged with commissioning decorations for the reconstructed Paris Hotel de Viel counsellor's, 393 00:47:37,960 --> 00:47:45,550 such as the Socialist, while Vidal and former Communist label or Dunner demanded real and true images of the political, 394 00:47:45,550 --> 00:47:50,560 economic and social life of the everyday people of Paris. 395 00:47:50,560 --> 00:47:56,380 One suspects that such a position is common across much of the Republican spectrum. 396 00:47:56,380 --> 00:48:06,640 A primary means by which the state could promote its values and manipulate mortality via the fine arts were inevitably committees. 397 00:48:06,640 --> 00:48:14,140 The Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts set up the committee de Tabo DA in February 1882. 398 00:48:14,140 --> 00:48:22,870 Its remit to vet public commissions and by works for the state collections effectively. 399 00:48:22,870 --> 00:48:31,390 This meant that the state bought art that suited it take its purchases from the sale of 1889. 400 00:48:31,390 --> 00:48:37,990 One was lab meets portrait of the great pathologist Clode Bhavna Zoners Inspiration. 401 00:48:37,990 --> 00:48:42,100 A picture intended for the Academy Dimmit scene at the new Sorbonne. 402 00:48:42,100 --> 00:48:48,360 An exemplary image of the scientific progress vaulted by the Republic. 403 00:48:48,360 --> 00:48:53,180 Another was your four losses. Men of the Holy Office. 404 00:48:53,180 --> 00:48:58,970 A typical naturalistic historical reconstruction of a scene of the Inquisition. 405 00:48:58,970 --> 00:49:02,000 Destined for the eles, a palace. 406 00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:10,400 It would have served as a reminder to the president of the autocratic illiberalism of the church if he needed such a reminder. 407 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:17,420 In addition, there were over a dozen landscapes. Amongst them pull signs near Avignon. 408 00:49:17,420 --> 00:49:27,050 These landscapes represented sites all over France, from Flanders to also the noires to the short BINYA on exhibition at the Selo. 409 00:49:27,050 --> 00:49:36,500 They would have given visitors a descriptive reminder of the nation's geographical diversity distributed to provincial museums and town halls. 410 00:49:36,500 --> 00:49:47,830 They would have satisfied this all that regional pay, deputy or mayor consolidating the republic status through the visual arts. 411 00:49:47,830 --> 00:49:56,080 What kind of art suited the Republican project? This is another question which I'll explore in much greater detail in the next two lectures. 412 00:49:56,080 --> 00:50:04,380 But let me give you some quick, far answers, because they support my case that the Naturaliste aesthetic had a strong ideological foundation. 413 00:50:04,380 --> 00:50:10,000 First, Republicanism favoured art, which was democratic and egalitarian. 414 00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:16,330 Some examples of the Dhall submitted an informal sequence of paintings to the as of the 18th, 415 00:50:16,330 --> 00:50:21,880 80s and 1990s of various social types, usually of the lower classes. 416 00:50:21,880 --> 00:50:33,940 Amongst these were Luby cement worker at the 1884 salon, Amanda Lamay to the farmer's wife purchased from the state from the 1888 Sello. 417 00:50:33,940 --> 00:50:46,660 LifeSize and giving names and media. These were portraits of Égalité, ordinary citizens, given the pictorials status of a Grandy's. 418 00:50:46,660 --> 00:50:54,280 The city of Paris bought Zoo Duluth's large high relief every day from the 1883 salon, 419 00:50:54,280 --> 00:50:58,480 intending it for a grand room in the reconstructed Otar de Ville. 420 00:50:58,480 --> 00:51:09,470 Dalou, like Roll., a committed Republican, protested that he would rather it were mounted in a public garden visible to the many, not just the few. 421 00:51:09,470 --> 00:51:18,560 This egalitarianism had other visual manifestations. Thus, when his great tower was completed in spring 1889, 422 00:51:18,560 --> 00:51:32,700 Gustaaf Eifel had the names of the 100 99 workers who had been employed on its construction from start to finish painted prominently on a girder. 423 00:51:32,700 --> 00:51:36,120 A second Republican requirement was legibility. 424 00:51:36,120 --> 00:51:48,030 So when in 1888, Alford born to submitted his preliminary sketch there for universal suffrage, subject central to Republican ideology for the soldier, 425 00:51:48,030 --> 00:51:55,200 say, at the mathie of Leelah in the Parisian suburbs, he was required to make changes for the final decoration. 426 00:51:55,200 --> 00:52:01,920 He had to reverse the composition, placing registration on the left and voting on the right. 427 00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:05,970 So the public picture read in a logical sequence. 428 00:52:05,970 --> 00:52:15,030 But Bolto had already established in his sketch that much of what was was expected was easily legible. 429 00:52:15,030 --> 00:52:24,050 Voters from across the Couche. So Seattle, the quasi religious act of casting the vote. 430 00:52:24,050 --> 00:52:29,900 A third does a desideratum. Was that art should be exact and scientific. 431 00:52:29,900 --> 00:52:37,670 In other words, that the fine art should comply with the cultural mentality of zoners naturalism or Monarchos scientific realism. 432 00:52:37,670 --> 00:52:46,490 There's time, for one example. That fascination with exactitude was not restricted to the contemporary of the summer of 1880. 433 00:52:46,490 --> 00:52:56,450 Georgia is a villes exhibited Mafa assassinated 13th of July 1793, eight o'clock in the evening, 434 00:52:56,450 --> 00:53:02,270 which as a defining moment of the revolution was purchased by the state. 435 00:53:02,270 --> 00:53:11,840 The painting is highly dramatised and the gestures of its Life-Size figures, with the scene set back from The Spectator as if on stage. 436 00:53:11,840 --> 00:53:17,960 But that theatricality is tempered by the specificity of texture, 437 00:53:17,960 --> 00:53:26,240 costume and accessory right down to the exact number six, seven, eight of the news sheet. 438 00:53:26,240 --> 00:53:30,980 Let me do purple tipping into Marfa's bath. 439 00:53:30,980 --> 00:53:41,450 On its frame was a cartouche with a detailed 18th century account of the murder, identifying figures such as Marfa's common law wife, Chalmette. 440 00:53:41,450 --> 00:53:50,010 Thus, Vinces canvas is as accurate in documentary terms as it is immediate and dramatic. 441 00:53:50,010 --> 00:54:02,040 On the 8th of July 1886, the music Guyver purchased the actual tub in which Maher was seated when Charlotte Corday knifed him. 442 00:54:02,040 --> 00:54:11,760 The waxwork museum used it in a reconstruction of the event, which opened in autumn 1886 and was loosely derived from Vinces composition. 443 00:54:11,760 --> 00:54:21,000 The music Gilliver was as determined to advocate its authenticity as befits its catalogue, devoted five pages to describing Maher's death, 444 00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:30,330 explaining how the music had traced his actual bathtub and even reprinting the deed of sale in both grand experts, 445 00:54:30,330 --> 00:54:36,390 exhibition painting and the popular culture of the waxwork exactitude. 446 00:54:36,390 --> 00:54:42,720 And the document were understood to be central to validating visual representation. 447 00:54:42,720 --> 00:54:53,760 In presenting the wide public with reliable information, in promoting knowledge appropriate to the Republican Project, in the next two lectures, 448 00:54:53,760 --> 00:55:01,950 I'll explore how naturalist painting functioned, how it might be imbued with Republican rhetoric, and how it might be read. 449 00:55:01,950 --> 00:55:07,460 The aim is to do more than prove that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in France during the 1980s and 90s. 450 00:55:07,460 --> 00:55:12,420 It's to demonstrate that naturalist paintings dominance was due to the way the image of the world 451 00:55:12,420 --> 00:55:20,910 it offered was consistent with and indeed contributed massively to the formation of a consensus. 452 00:55:20,910 --> 00:55:26,520 That consensus gravitated around several overlapping mortality. 453 00:55:26,520 --> 00:55:38,550 The broad spectrum of Republican ideology, a shared grasp of social, national and civic values, and a sense of what was modern. 454 00:55:38,550 --> 00:55:44,920 All this is encapsulated overtly in a painting such as your bellows, Lamar says. 455 00:55:44,920 --> 00:55:52,350 With its carefully staged commutable Republicanism and rather more suggestively in Fleer was political discussion of 456 00:55:52,350 --> 00:56:02,610 1890 scrupulously representing the penetration of literacy and liberty of debate amongst the provincial parties. 457 00:56:02,610 --> 00:56:08,850 These mortality were those of the dominant classes and imagery in a public mural 458 00:56:08,850 --> 00:56:14,880 decoration and exhibition painting or magazine illustration served to disseminate them. 459 00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:18,970 But what I want to do more in these lectures than explore this with you. 460 00:56:18,970 --> 00:56:26,550 I'm sorry. I want to do more of these lectures than explore this with you. After all, what comes down from above can attract ridicule. 461 00:56:26,550 --> 00:56:33,720 So how did caricature play on that dominant naturalism and what comes up from below? 462 00:56:33,720 --> 00:56:42,870 Can be hard to trace. So what evidence can we find of art tempered not by the bourgeois but by the Populaire? 463 00:56:42,870 --> 00:56:48,120 But these propositions and speculations lead towards a much larger issue. 464 00:56:48,120 --> 00:56:57,160 This concerns the status of avant garde painting. We understand the eighteen eighties and nineties in France as the crucible of modernist art. 465 00:56:57,160 --> 00:57:07,230 And I, for one, am not going to deny the value or importance of Douga or Monet, Soha or Ghoga, all of whom will feature later lectures. 466 00:57:07,230 --> 00:57:13,650 But if we really value naturalism, acknowledges its aesthetics and tragedy, 467 00:57:13,650 --> 00:57:20,310 register its embodiment of what most contemporary is considered as modern in both subject and style. 468 00:57:20,310 --> 00:57:25,680 Do we not need to recalibrate our understanding of the avant garde? 469 00:57:25,680 --> 00:57:30,660 Might we not need to consider avant garde ism less as heroic, 470 00:57:30,660 --> 00:57:37,740 pioneering of new forms of expression and more as a modification of a deliberately negotiated 471 00:57:37,740 --> 00:57:46,370 repudiation of perhaps even of an eventual submission to that dominant naturalism? 472 00:57:46,370 --> 00:57:51,923 Let's see.