Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The schools may close, the pond may fall against the euro, but the slide lectures go on.
You. Thank you for turning out in these blizzard conditions.
Naturalism may have mapped conveniently onto many of the ideological coordinates of the Third Republic and so benefited from state support.
As my previous lecture suggested. But by the 1980s and 1990s, its cultural position, although dominant, was not unchallenged.
It was a matter of style and ideology. The two inevitably intertwined naturalism had to compete with both the traditions and assumptions of the past,
as well as with new initiatives and expectations generated often enough by the Republic's own forward momentum or lack of it.
France's cultural past offered manifold examples of different cultural styles.
Collectively, these formed France's identity as Europe's cultural arbiter,
a position the Third Republic strove to sustain via such systems as the Exposition
Universelle separately period styles carried with them associations of period politics,
the sense U.S. arabesques of the rococo echoing the Assad regime or the severe authority of neoclassicism, the Napoleonic era.
These were both styles and histories that could be read variously.
The OCR regime as monarchies, political and economic failure,
or as a flowering of intellectual enlightenment, the empire as glory and order or despotism of disaster.
But past styles continued to have present roles in our period.
Indeed, they could be employed by the Republic.
Pierre Poovey to Chapin's Pro Patrie, A Ludus commissioned by the States for the museum at Achmea in 1880,
exhibited at the Salon of 1887 and finally installed the following year.
Maybe broadly classical in its balance to design and freeze like grouping's, but it nevertheless conveys apte civic values, family continuity,
community, national defence and infiltrates the Truecaller in the centre there as definit as deftly as any Matthew Decoration.
Post style could also appeal to the Republic's opponents.
Jovani Bodine's 1894 Postell of the reactionary comic writer Gipp macht soft virtuoso touch and a Purley tonality in a rococo pastiche.
APT for the sitter, aristocratic, elitist and anti Republican naturalism didn't just have to compete against other stylistic
vocabularies with their multivalent cultural associations and claims on Frenchness.
It also had to deal with the pressures of the present. The Republic's commitment to structural and social reform,
its promotion of science and technology all gave rise to new expectations as well as to disappointments.
Could visual culture adapt to the scientific mortality or to the burgeoning of the political left?
Didn't natural ism's emphasis on the material ally of secular Republicanism neglect the spiritual in all these broad inheritances?
Assumptions and questions, style and ideology intertwine.
One of the issues that haunted naturalism was whether it was a style at all.
This was a consistent beef of more conservative critics reviewing the 1894 salad.
These artists wholesale as Juliet adores nationalist nouvelle her view only Dashan of year devoted a dozen pages to the religious and history
paintings before skimming through the scenes of everyday life in a page and half asking if such realism was appropriate in the fine arts.
But more sympathetic commentators had been weighing up the question for some time.
Andre Michel writing in 1885 because it did Bouzar.
The art review of Record,
argued that if the secret of emotion for a painting or a statue lies in the exact itude of its imitation and in its precision as a document,
nothing would be more beautiful than a photograph or a cast from life. Real artists transform what they see.
He went on. Modernity does not lie simply in contemporary subjects, and an artist like Gustaaf Moho is modern because of his stylistic individuality.
This was a warning, but naturalism could appear style, less lessa art than the evidently sui generous.
In this passage, Michelle twice used the word leap out to emphasise artists freedom of choice.
Perhaps consciously and ironically, adopting this political term, the republic advocates liberty.
Yet impels artists towards an only quasi consensual naturalism.
That's the soul of 1887. Christmas was faced with a number of medical subjects,
including Dr. Shockoe giving his course in front of Monsieur NRK and massive clackety
by all they believe the right and people working at the obiter salary by Jove acts.
Chris, most complained that these canvases were impersonal in style.
Either artist could have painted the other picture. But he also made a point of naming the leading figures.
I suggest that this identification went beyond expected accuracy.
Chako, the doctor in the image on the right of his chair in maladies of the nervous system to go better's parliamentary support.
The anticlerical deputy, NRK, had been the prime mover of the new divorce legislation in 1884.
Clarity directed the state to comedy for says and wrote for the moderate Republican.
Little Paul was a pioneering abdominal surgeon elected to the Academy Dimmit scene in 1887.
Smalls was a listing Republican stalwarts, and when he called such a painting Orthodox well-behaved, he was implying more than styled wiseness.
The young intellectuals, reading his critique in the Hebrew and despondent, would have picked up the Orthodox equation.
Republicans staff edge Republican style Urgo naturalism from the late 1980s.
This kind of painting increasingly came under attack from the generation in their 20s,
critical for the republic and thus its dominant aesthetic, sympathetic to innovative currents such as symbolism.
Félix Finials Review of the 1889 CELAL again from the heavyhanded Paul d'Hondt can stand for this position damning.
Painters such as Emil, Phil and Pascale Daniel Bouvier as statistician's and cataloguers anxious to leave to the future.
Documents on a plenipotentiary minister, an actor or a heating workshop, I might add here.
The unemployed and the churchgoers. All of which, Vanney or said look the same and seem effectively photographic.
But how well do these criticisms stand up?
Certainly the condemnation of naturalist's painting is photographic was a commonplace as early as eight in 83,
the reactionary Catholic critic Joseph Peladon had pronounced that of the two thousand four hundred eighty eight paintings at the salon,
2300 would have been better realised using colour photography by the first year of the 80s 90s,
symbolist critics such as Alfonso JAMA puffed their preferred artists in Jamelske
case and exhort a sale by praising the distinctly on photographic styles.
And even a civil servant like George Latinist, aloof curator, was complaining that photographic exactitude made for desiccated painting,
accusations that paintings were photographic bandied about to criticise any kind of descriptive painting inapposite by Christmas.
In the case of roles,
huge la by the figures in which had in fact been crafted from many drawings from life and the picture was broadly and robustly painted.
Paintings could also be defended from the photographic slur.
In 1887, George Ohlendorf reckoned that Eduardo Tolle's The Cast from Life had been saved from being a motif from pornographic photography.
By the quality of its painterly tonalities. While two years later, Paul Months admiring the almost scientific accuracy of Creoles All Saints,
they found the way the painter and evoked a sense of movement. Excellent.
At a time when instantaneous photography was beginning to clarify the mysteries of locomotion, Flello in fact, had gone out of his way.
In this large canvas to prove his Pinta leanness, the road and the wall, for instance,
are visibly and scribbly brushed and critics and cartoonists determination to deal with this picture one way or the other.
In photographic terms only goes to show the persistence of this up to the minute cliché.
On occasion, a picture could even be praised for surpassing a photograph.
Mixing his journalistic metaphors promiscuously, Louis Enno thought that Gilberto's 1890 casino scene of, quote,
the Moorish room where the Roulet Fairy holds grand assizes at the moment when the croupier pronounces the sucker.
Mental Ohio Novar opinion was so superior to the most and instantaneous have cameras in its ability to catch the gambler's fever,
the idea of the photographic coloured contemporary criticism.
This was less because paintings actually looked like photographs.
Most artists were keen to show their graphic and painterly skills and not to be merely mimetic,
but rather because the photograph was a useful metaphor.
Apparently, as legible as a naturalist painting, the photographic analogy was similarly polyvalent.
It could summarise paintings, vises, imminent, imitative and imaginative style less, or its virtue's precise, spontaneous model.
It is important to remember that at this period, photography itself was in a state of constant technological development.
The colour photography about which Peladon are Ani's was still only of an experimental stage.
But photography was making greater inroads into public experience and practise.
It was gradually being used in books and periodicals.
George Holdbacks novel Bush Lamore, published in 1892, was one of the very first novels to be illustrated with photographs.
But that innovatory character was mitigated by Rowden Black's deliberately anti modern attitudes,
first in selecting photographs only of mediaeval Brugge to suit the text.
And second, in preferring old fashioned collodion photographs.
Edgar Dagar, who took up photography with enthusiasm in the 80s 90s,
used outdated equipment which required his sisters to endure painfully slow exposure times.
This is Mallat may not Anwar and I show it small because these photographs are very small.
This goes some way to explaining both the self supporting poses as cities frequently
adopted and also the somewhat meditative character of his subtlely lit interiors.
A generation younger while we are brought, HM's bought himself a new Kodak in the late 80s 90s with its fast shutter speed,
the Kodak made snapshots still SportsNet, hitherto possible only for the expert available to the amateur public.
The technological advance, however, was offset by disadvantages.
The Kodak had no viewer and could only be printed, hopefully in the direction of the subject, and its fixed focus might catch the central motif.
But the pull of periphery would likely be blurred. We are appreciated the Kodak's accidental results using it enthusiastically as an aid memoir.
But he only rarely used his photographs as foundations for a painting.
The same seems to have been true for Dagar. If we are undergo photography was a stimulating new media medium allied to looking,
fixing things seen, prompting possibilities for posies and grouping's,
but never challenging the business of making that truculent crafting of an image from intractable materials by the
alliance of eye and hand style came first innovations in photography into played with naturalist art throughout the 18th,
80s, 90s. But in ways that linked painting to wider patterns.
During the eighteen eighties they asked for more time. They allowed amateurs their fun.
But it also had specific engagement with picture making.
The celebrated painter Alice met Sonja expected that the sequential photographs of equine movements
taken in California by Edward May Bridge reprove the validity of his own pictorials solutions.
When my bridge visited Paris in 1881,
Mussolini acted as translator when the photographer's work was presented at the South Pole de Loonier Artistic that December.
But whereas the photographs in attitudes of animals in motion sustained May the previous treatment of the horses walk,
they showed him at fault with cropped canter and gallop.
Subsequent paintings such as General Short Yohei on the Seashore, show how the humbled May Sonja anxiously retouched the animal's gait.
Apparently, his own copy of May Sonis photographic album is hardly touched,
as it may Sonis flinched from the scientific evidence that had not certified the accuracy by which he set so much store.
This kind of interdisciplinary exchange was not uncommon at the period in his 1889 book, Leesburg to Do Silk.
It's a lovely shorthand itself. A documentary account of forsook.
World, who described how in June of the previous year,
a clown and a gymnast who performed privately at the Hippodrome in front of 50 photographers organised by the president of the society,
Dick Scuffs, your host says the photography.
Each cameraman took a dozen plates, 600 in all, a mere 10 of which were judged worth printing as precise records of the acrobats in as low who put it.
Those intermediary paint poses which the eye can never sees.
And the quickest into instantaneous photography has not fixed until now.
Nine of those 10 photographs were then drawn by Xu Galani.
To illustrate Lohaus book the images photographic provenance matching the accuracy of the texts detailed account.
Those 10 photographs had been selected by Albir Lawned Director of the Photographic Section at the Salpetriere Mental Hospital,
whose day job was recording the faces of hysterical fits and other conditions as a
scientific archive for the researchers of CHAKO and his psychologist colleagues.
If the collaboration is between May Sonia and My Bridge or Lulu Lawned and Gunya or semi public the accurate fruit of the storm,
Tony could also be picked on the sly.
Working with Alfred Stiffness, Jovanka led a team of artists who painted the Panorama do Sechler long strips of which I showed in my first lecture.
And this is a a more Life-Size section now in the news they can overlay.
It was a vast survey of major figures in French history and culture since the French
Revolution and formed one of the attractions of the 1889 expertise sealed into that cell.
Prestigious visitors were welcomed to the studio where this huge enterprise was underway,
and Eubanks took these opportunities surreptitiously to photograph individuals
seising a spontaneous pose for inclusion in the Panorama section of the panorama,
including President Covino has some figures who appeared grouped into the group,
suggesting that the composition was a Burri collage of portraits painted from life and from photographs.
If this was the creative use of the new technology for the benefit of painting,
it seems that painters might also appropriate the forms of photography.
The Paris prefecture of police had not been slow to introduce scientific aides of various kinds and
by 1882 had some 66000 photographs of criminals in their archives to help identify recidivists.
The system was becoming more sophisticated under the aegis of our force.
Back to you. The head of the statistical section.
Back to your introduced profile photographs to supplement frontal ones, wittily submitting himself to the process and developed unflappable metric,
the measurement of the head and its features to supplement photography as an aide to ID and more and more jaw's portrait of 1882 of the poet Paul.
There, LAN seems to echo the formalised from Talenti of criminal photography.
The portraits institutionalised character was entirely appropriate given that the painting was made, if not at a police station, then at the hospital.
Goussis, where President Shupe, the professor shofar, treated Verlaine syphilis and ammos or represented him gruff and constrained.
It is wrong to suggest, as some recent historians have,
that photo realism was a clandestine strategy employed by certain artists as a means
of generating a sophisticated form of Naturaliste painting during the 1980s and 90s.
Many artists had recourse to photographs.
Amongst them, painters such as Gustaaf Mohle, a modest Dinni, whose work was emphatically on naturalistic photography,
simply provided the artist with another tool towards the creation of a work,
adding to more time honoured means, such as the life drawing oil sketch, lay figure or plaster model.
On occasion, using a photograph as unavoidable as when Joseph Piner commissioned a commemorative portrait of Gambetta from Bonnar in 1888,
five years after the politicians death at the summer of 1885, Jaheim exhibited the Barth's at Bursa, which critics liked.
Ohlendorf described as photographic. Having no access to a harem,
Jaheim would have been obliged to concoct his composition using photographs of the architecture to which he added the figures which were.
Oldendorf were very exactly painted. But then nudity is not respectable, even though photography was used as a necessary expedient.
It nevertheless served to validate the ethnographic validity of such a painting jobs.
Former pupils certainly used photographs. Jurel Alexis Meneer, who lived in his Masters old house near Visual,
had his own photographic studio that details like the plants in the 1890 painting catechism
lesson were taken from glass plate photographic negatives which survive like Douga and Rowden,
but when he was not necessarily cutting edge with his behaviour, I think.
But as with so many of these paintings, the catechism lesson was probably based on a combination of methods preliminary drawings,
photographs, direct painting, the combination of which was intended to achieve the illusion of actuality.
Another jar on cupola used photography extensively was Daniel Bouvier, the Bretons at a pardon,
which he exhibited at the 1887 sallow used photographs taken at the Human Gold Britany in 1886 and at all more his home in eastern France.
The following year, the artifice of his naturalism, if not his use of photography, did not escape Oakdale's.
Mirabeau,
who are advised in the echoes of Pattee Monsieur Daniel Booth of A brings us back a hand picked a selection of Breton's direct from the Jorah.
The crucial point here is that naturalism was never natural, however exact or photographic or style, unless it appeared to be natural.
His painting was always the result of the craft and contrivances of studio practise.
One of the painters whose work most consciously, I believe,
acknowledged artifice in his painting or thought of his restoration, showed that the 1891 Saladin's artist pulsated.
Now Lost shows a craftsman sculptor repairing the neoclassical winter by John
Baptiste Dubé as the model descends from the days on which she's been posing.
The scene is scrupulously observed in both material and moral terms, with the inventories of costs and tools in the background,
the specific and momentary movements of concentrated carving and careful steps,
as well as the absolute indifference to each other of the working man and naked woman
don't or used photography in his studio practise and may have done so with this printing.
But restoration is to knowingly a meditation on the artifice of craft artifices, of crafting the ideal from the real.
To be summarised as merely photographic photography was only a tool for naturalism, an aid to boost the expected exactitude, not a defining technique.
But photography did intersect with different worlds.
I've already touched on medicine, the police, zoology and the circus because it was a practical aid in many fields,
but also because it was new, scientific and modern.
No wonder photographic parallels of one kind or another were so often drawn with painting.
They were shorthand for dealing with material things and the exact and above all with the modern.
But for painters. Photography was a double edged sword. On the one hand, it served artists as a useful tool.
It aided the achievement of accuracy that satisfied the contemporary demand for the document.
But on the other hand,
the public's expectation of pictorial actuality and its easy assumption that photography offered visual truth increasingly put pressure on painters.
Should they continue to paint descriptively suiting the documentary Montanti today of the cultural consensus,
could they enlarge the scope of the Naturaliste aesthetic, ensuring that their manipulation of touch and surface gave their work a creative
individuality which would absolve it from gibes about being mechanistic and stylus?
Or was the increasing sophistication of photography as a medium and its ubiquity in the public mind combined with naturalism,
collusion with consensual bourgeois Republicanism, enough to drive the independent painter toward style?
In his review of the sale of 1884 for The Gazetteer Bazaar, Louis DeFalco,
an experienced critic, friend of artists and by no means implacably opposed to naturalism,
which he recognised as part of the French tradition, launched an attack on what he saw as wilful ISA eccentricities of composition.
In recent painting, Falko resented the modernism which had proliferated off centre.
Broken, divided, paradoxical compositions offering to the eye for no valid reason, people or animals cropped by a golden frame.
He identified one particular originator of these compositional devices,
who he acknowledged as an artist of high rank observer of a marvellous acuity draughtsmen of the first order.
Edgar Dagar Dukat was not showing at the salon.
Had not done so since 1870. But at the independent impressionist exhibitions of the mid and late seventies,
he had been exhibiting pictures which Falko described as pioneering these compositional eccentricities focussed special specified in his article
Ballet Subjects representing only the bottom of the stage of the top of the orchestra at a racecourse picture with a horse as if sliced by a post.
The problem, in his view, was not Dugas remarkably innovatory composition.
But the fact that they had already become a convention, a mania with other artists.
The critic was particularly incensed by an equestrian portrait of a gentleman of a general.
By now forgotten artist of the 1884 salon, which represented him in procession with half lancers and half horses.
Falko was correct, of course, about the outstanding calibre and invention of degassed work.
But he was misguided on two counts. First for all, dagoes extraordinary innovation.
He was not singlehandedly responsible for the compositional devices Falko itemise.
On the one hand, Dagi had invented such prosit developed such possibilities from the study of earlier art,
whether old master painting or Japanese woodcuts of the other pictorial artifices,
such as off centre focus of interest, cut off figures and spatial void's had been pioneered in parallel,
if not even in collaboration with colleagues such as Giuseppe Divinities as paintings such
as Ryders and The Shores Alli's they of 1875 demonstrate Falco's second slip is linked,
for he neglected to ask why such compositional conventions were explored and then widely adopted.
We should look for answers.
I suggest beyond the mere business of description and in a growing consciousness about perception, a painting like Dagmar's Ballet of Hobb,
our Lidegaard probably exhibited at the 1876 Impressionist exhibition, is alert to processes of looking.
If our gaze is on our immediate surroundings, the gentlemen around us in the front stalls,
then what is on stage is only in our peripheral vision, which dagi correspondingly evokes by more approximate brushwork.
Dominguez's riders on the shores of these A prompts notions about how the act of looking is one of constant readjustment.
A moment ago, the riders were in bright sunshine. Our eyes see them differently.
Now they have moved to shadow the birds pecking at the horse droppings will in a
moment fly away as the dogs and horses approach by depicting an instant present.
Such a picture suggests an immediate past and future under the continuum of perception across French and particularly Parisian culture.
There was an increasing understanding that the pace of life was speeding up because urban life gave rise to the accidental,
because visual experience could seem partial or spatial perception disconcerting forms of
representation needed to adapt to the new momentum and perceptual disequilibrium that went with it.
If conditions of modernity were unstable and ambiguous, then the conventions of representations needed to be adapted to accommodate them.
The modernism that Falko found formulaic was in fact an aspect of the Naturaliste aesthetics
adaptation of its representational languages to the newly prevailing conditions of life.
This adaptation was not merely concerned with modern subject.
But also with how to represent it in a modern way, thus with style, and it was interdisciplinary,
working across the cultural forms, reviewing the performance of Edmund de Gaulle cause.
Please, sir. Fellow men at all. Today on ones take up to leave in October 1887, the influential theatre critic for Sisk, CSC,
fulminated against the actors showing the back performing and delivering lines while facing away the audience.
His objection was similar to foreclose the breaking of stylistic convention in favour of the artifices of actuality.
Interestingly enough, all once theatrical innovations were recycled in relation to the visual arts for an 1893,
your IBK responded to roles and centenary of the Estate's general by reminding
his readers in La Avey day that the figures seen from behind were darkness,
as Monsieur Antoine would have directed equivalent responses to the fragmentation of experience found
in painting can be read in the naturalist's novel Air Force Do Days Hommel Journey of his life.
Any, for example, includes a section during a banquet. The guests were turning towards one another.
The sleeve of a dress suit was visible behind of advise of Asclepius,
a child smiling face above an ice cream which parallels the choppy visual disjunction and
dagoes pictures and coincides in date 1874 with the start of such pictorial experiments.
This sort of fragmentary description became as commonplace in naturalist's literature as painting,
but finds it again in 1885 in a crowd scene in Mopar, says Bellamy.
Jostled, bumped and squashed, swept this way and that they kept on seeing nothing but a population of hearts.
The girls and pairs were threading their way expertly through the press of men slipping between elbows and chests and backs.
Artist, novelist and theatre director were all interested in innovative equations of stylistic devices,
which didn't just deal with the everyday world a subject,
but which adapted their medium's language to the pace and disjunction of one's everyday perception.
That artists at this period were very conscious of the processes of looking is found not only in the evidence of their pictures,
but also in their statements.
The pastor told his friend Topia, that contemplating a landscape when seated set things against the sky with ample surrounding space.
But from a standing position, one sees objects against others further away, as Bastia La Parch himself said.
They mingle confusedly with the background, which, instead of receding, seems to come forward.
In effect, that he had tried to realise in power. Jack of 1882.
Bastia went on. We need to revisit the education of our eye, looking sincerely at how things are in nature instead of taking for absolute truths.
The theories or conventions of art school bustiers,
understanding of the differences of looking from different angles was applied in another canvas of 1882 part Meche or nothing doing.
The village urchin has aged about 10, and the spectators viewpoint is that of an adult looking slightly down on his cheeky presence.
Viewpoint was crucial to pictures which wanted to suggest a sense of likelihood as much by their evocation of perceptual,
even physical states as by the accuracy of their depiction.
Thus, Frances tatter cars returned from fishing at the banks.
Your map of 1878 makes the spectator look up, puts up the vessel playing towards us as if our boat were in the trough between two waves.
A disconcerting but entirely plausible viewpoint.
One of your Belrose paintings from the sale of 1882.
How does it total not the location of his cityscape, which is exact enough the top of the up tree of looking eastwards.
Instead, the title accords with the swaying woman's sensations up there and our own plunging view down onto the shores and is a vertigo.
This physical reaction is enhanced by the way Baho tilted the surface on which the spectator implicitly
stands and used the sharply rising perspective of the avenue below to heighten the sense of void.
On the other side of the parapet, both. Secular and Baho employed compositional devices, notably angle of vision and perspective.
The better to conjure up in the spectator the physical sensation and perceptual plausibility style.
Working with subject to sharper but naturalistic actuality.
Critics were aware that this is what artists intended and relayed this to their readers.
As George Laffan Essence did in 1892, when he pointed out Visa of the Napoleonic battle picture by Dati that we The Spectator,
are standing amongst the Austrian staff officers. All these compositional gambits are to be found in dagoes work from the mid 80s, 70s onwards.
The precise implication of the spectators placement occurs in the shop angle downward.
In late one from the 1877 Impressionist exhibition, as if we're looking from a box,
while the awareness of looking up at something from below is salient in Molalla at the circus,
Fernando, shown in 1879 during his compositional inventiveness, was prodigious.
His understanding of the nature of looking acute. But in 1884, fuko over estimated his individual impact.
Indeed, there was no substantial display of took guys work in Paris between 1881 and 1886.
And artists like Tatanka, who moved in quite different circles, were arriving independently at similar solutions to God's work when it could be seen.
Set standards but is important even for younger artists who knew him was equivocal.
George Jania remembered that on his second visit to our studio in 1881, he had seen a racecourse picture on the easel.
Not necessarily that one, but one similar to it.
The asymmetrical distribution of the figures and the use of angled spatial voids that one finds in dagoes racing subjects
of the early 80s may well have informed the composition of Janosch as the line of fire exhibited at the 1886 salon.
But Janosch painting operates on quite different levels at two by three metres.
So the size that you see there, it is much larger than dagoes racecourses.
And Janosch deliberately used the size as he did the detail of stubbled field incoming bullets.
Wounded men and obscuring Gunsmoke for particular purposes.
That was to create a pictorial evocation of an engagement during the Battle of Leslieville on the 16th of August 1870,
at which Janiro had fought as a sublieutenant in the Twenty Third Infantry.
The painting was at one level personally cathartic at another.
A Life-Size head on recreation for the genteel summer public of the physical and psychological realities of combat noise, pain, fear, confusion.
Critics such as Malpaso and Outward the Lost Alow responded to Janosch line of fire,
both in terms of its their Ristic depiction of violence and in terms of style.
The unusual chromatics of a harsh summer light attracting attention.
My point here is that in the best naturalist painting style was carefully contrived by decisions about composition,
colour and touch, and that its elision with description gave the picture value beyond merely accurate accounting.
What's is important to my argument is the sustainability and vitality of naturalism.
In the 80s, 90s. By this I mean more than the tedious, repetitive repetitiveness of descriptive paintings at public exhibitions,
a turgid current that carried on well into the 20th century and which in its dreary continuity, has much to say about the lure of the mimetic.
The very volume of that kind of art in France and many other countries confirms that appetite.
More specifically,
I would like to argue that during the 80s 90s naturalism and here I remind you of my broad understanding of the term remained a dominating dynamic,
even still innovatory current in French visual culture.
This is not an argument that all my listeners will immediately accept, I suspect,
because the modernist bias of our culture and of much art history draws us to peaks of individuality and innovation focuses
on figures such as Mallat Man Sezen and assumes by the eighteen nineties the primacy of symbolism or post Impressionism.
But these were individual isolated voices that contemporary resonance reaching only small elites.
My argument is concerned less with aesthetic quality or durability,
as with the more tangible practicalities of that decade's pictorial production and understanding.
From this point of view,
naturalism flourished because its stylistic flexibility gave artists scope and its legibility continued to address public expectations.
By the 90s, the pictorial devices, which had seemed innovatory in the early 80s, had become commonplace.
But they survived as a valid gambit, which artistic in the artistic repertoire,
because they still carried with them assumptions about modernity in canvases of the 80s 90s,
who are, after a decade of stylistic diversity and dead ends,
returned to the reassurance of naturalism painting such as Christine Lahor all embroidering or breakfasted.
Baton Ovalle, painted in the later eighteen nineties,
represent the foreground figures only partially and divert our attention by activity in a further space.
Even at that date, such paintings could seem challenging.
But when Christina Hall was posing for one of the last pictures, her grandfather, probably in her 70s, muttered less than new painting.
Even the young already Matisse, in one of his earliest FIGGER compositions,
the Breton made of 1896, had recourse to the cut off figure and the open door,
which work both in pictorial terms, contrasting volume and void,
introducing cool tones against the wall and naturalistically catching the momentary movement, implying action off.
My final lecture will explore the unrecognised return to naturalism amongst some of the avant garde in the late 80s 90s.
But I want to close this one by giving some sense of the ways in which natural's painting developed during that decade.
Reviewing the two salons of 1891. They gaze at the Bouzar. The Swiss novelist Etoile Hodd first suggested that realistic painting has disappeared.
It's hiding in the town halls, decorating the walls with electoral scenes or rather, having lost its gross, violent qualities.
It's become jolly kind and good natured and gives us the lovely Kliman from Aage Blue Cellar by Monsieur Dawan Borges.
Wonderful paintings are not enough to trace, but what then moderated his position, admiring the ingenious realism of Joe X, Janno and others.
Naturalism has had no more departed in painting than it had in literature.
1891 was also the year when the journalist Jewelled Houli ran a series of interviews in Lekota party with
poets and novelists asking whether naturalism was finished and whether it had been supplanted by symbolism.
Published as a book on Kept Sealed Liberally,
Scioli to have the title manifested the Darwinian notion of evolutionary struggle that underpinned he'll raise questions.
I would argue that in the 80s 90s,
naturalist painting evolved shifts in the political and social environment shaped those gradual changes in the 1980s.
Many major salon paintings had concentrated on images of often lower.
Laughs collectivity We found this in lab mix harvesters feels oarsman Daniels pardon and Hall's work.
Such paintings addressed the Nouvelle Couche socio publicly validating their role in
the Republic in images of Égalité and fretfully day paintings like these assumed as,
um, as fundamentally unproblematic the subjects they took of the civic values that they implied.
Labour duty, family, community by the 1890 is that sense of a relatively consistent politico social
momentum sharing which sharing in which many artists I've written on my text.
I'll read it anyway.
But that sense of a relatively consistent political social momentum propelled by government support had stuttered and even begun to fragment.
While the Republic held the centre ground strongly enough. The dangerously populist Bluejay affair of the late 1980s had shown the republics of
the appeal to important fringes nationalists and a pretty bored Wasey was was friable.
The financial chicanery of the Panama scandal of the early 1990s has exposed the Republican political elite and the increasing success of
the Socialists at the polls demonstrated that growing sections of the proletariat were dissatisfied with the pace of industrial reform.
It was within this shifting political social environment that naturalist painting evolved in the 1990s.
It had to deal with a greater sense of social disjunction.
Artists such as Zoo Atlanta, whose work we will see in a moment, emerge with opinions to the left of Republicanism and an end,
an imagery of strikes and unemployment to match Robbs 1891 assessment was not entirely wrong.
There was a current in naturalism that was gentle and engaging, the kind of art that pleased the public.
That seemed true enough and avoided the harsher aspects of contemporary existence and even perhaps acknowledged the elusive,
emotive ambience of symbolism. One thinks here of pictures such as Daniels and the Jike in the Forest of 1892 or the
elderlies you bottles sequence of nostalgic sundown landscapes of his native artwork.
These were only some of the ways in which naturalism evolved in the 80s and 90s.
It's one of the trends in the later 18, 70s and 80s, 80s,
naturalism had been the development of devices intended to evoke in the eye of the viewer a sense of spontaneous actuality.
This was answered in the 90s by an inclination toward slightly more stylised, even ritualistic kinds of composition.
As we've seen Frijoles 1888, All Saints Day depicted the customary annual visit to the cemetery.
The immediate happenstance of the unfolding appearance of the Borza our family into our field division and the girls preparing
to give the blind beggar a coin is subtly formalised by the loosely processional progress across the snow covered pavement.
A decade later, all the highways in Flanders evening again used Life-Size figures requiring the viewer to read them.
One to one player used several of the actualising devices.
We've observed figures in mid step seen from behind off centre placement, half hidden features.
But the paintings, dimming light black capes and processional pairing were creative decisions apt from representing
life amongst the workers terraces in the still strongly Catholic departments of northern France.
Jurel ad letters in the land of the mine of nineteen hundred one represents Flemish miners leaving
their shift while Abdel-Hamid painterly choices which were consistent with the grimness of the scene.
A dark brown tonality with slagheap chimneys and lifting GEF silhouetted against the livid failing light,
they were matched with an almost ironic decision to represent the miners bent backed from their work below ground,
moving in silent procession across the canvas.
Adler's title, Hoopy de la Mean, may well have deliberately echoed the prefix hoopy de la Mer,
which Sha Cotty used generically from 1895 for his scenes of rugged finace down at the 1897.
Dylan Nazionale, Côté exhibited under this rubric. Stormy evening.
People passing. Of which I'm afraid I can only show you the print, not the painting here.
Brought on many women to and fro a lower key side at camera.
Once more, the artist is descriptive.
But quaffed so no doubt specific to place and uses nationalism's ploys of actuality starfish close to no specific focus.
Cut off figures. And yet again, what is conscious of the crafting of style.
Hi Horizon and limited sky cramped. The space for the sombre coloured roughly brush heavily silhouetted figures.
How the painting was made adds empathetically to its subject, anxious, waiting for fishing boats to come in from the store.
These two paintings of workers by Adler and Cotty show substantial numbers of people, but they are neither quite crowds nor collectives.
The pictures cluster generally separate figures caught up in their own thoughts and purposes.
Their image is less of individuality.
Although fatigue or anxiety may be read on their faces then of alienation, the oppression of labour, the absence of escape by their search for style,
not just the individual imprint of the artist, but a knowing play with representational conventions.
Such paintings once again demonstrate the flexibility of naturalism.
It was able to evolve as a visual language to add style to description while staying true to observation.
Early in his career, Cottee's work had hovered between this slightly caricature and the very descriptive.
The coast of Toolangi, a pastel of 1891, shows Cotty at his most scrupulously precise tracing every tide mark and crack in the granite.
As if to satisfy geologist in this image of one of the furthest fingers of Finnie stare reaching out into the Atlantic.
Cottee had discovered the fishing port of Camaguey at the end of the Kosovo Peninsula in 1886, Subway R and burgeois son of a judge.
He was an outsider there,
but committed himself to the representation of this p returning annually and staying throughout the cholera epidemic of 1894.
The only foreigner to do so closely, as Cotty got to know, came off a folkways.
He abandoned a highly descriptive technique used by others for quasi ethnographic painting and evolved a rougher manner,
which drew comparison with Rembrandt, Sharda and particularly Corbi paintings such as George W.
They are your own. Or for more people from Westlaw,
staying up with a dead baby from the 1899 Selander than Nazionale typify the way in which Côté took scenes
from the harsh Brett on life that he had experience at first and made from them intense works of art,
powerfully impacted strokes, sumba tonalities illuminated by sharp accents of colour,
ritualised profiles all characterised Cottee's OPIS de la Mer canvases, including the great triptych of 1898.
Lee's idea the farewells. Critics were unsure how to define these powerful paintings.
Writing in 1898, Benedicte argued that Cotey and his close friend Lucien Seymour,
were reacting against naturalism and looking back to the old Masters.
This was not a new way of assessing côté.
And when one looks at Seymours, major painting of the period procession that parmar of nineteen hundred with its confident,
painterly handling of Rubick and faces and strongly lit drapery,
one recognises the lessons Seymour had drawn from House, Rubins and Velasquez on trips to the low countries in Spain earlier in his career.
But then in its position on Cottee's, Seymour and naturalism, a somewhat elastic as a Republican falsey on air.
It was instinctive for him to find in their work ideals of fraternity and justice and to see them as characterising the epoch.
The painter Letitia Azami do maths test writing in nineteen hundred one,
argued that Cottee's depiction of Finistere that people had gone beyond the quasi scientific what she called the heredity of Fizi.
Anomic evidence to achieve a higher kind of naturalism works, suggested Natalie Truth.
Amongst the most intercropping definitions of humanity by nineteen hundred and four Benedicta derived at the same.
Position. Qatar had surpassed ethnographic description to achieve a mythic humanitarianism.
Some of you may find it difficult today to agree with these claims that Qatar was a major artist, but around nineteen hundred, he certainly appeared.
So the triptych Lee's idea won a gold medal at the Nineteen Hundred Exposition Universelle,
having been purchased by the state two years before, the paintings of Côté and of Seymour Adler and others stretched the bounds of naturalism,
pulling away from the descriptive and dangerously stylist's to work in which style counted
in which to adapt zoners dictum temperament began to get the upper hand over nature.
Cottee's cultivated crudeness or Seymours confidence surfaces made for more individualistic
phrasings of the naturalistic aesthetic than older artists such as a Loudermilk or a danial,
let alone the official art of Dipti. The generation which matured in the 80s 90s no longer had to make such a sharp break from the
convention of art school training or make such obviously common cause with Republican rhetoric.
By the 90s, these currents had coalesced the experts, spectators of how art should be made and what it should address.
Uniting in the naturalistic aesthetic which dominated because in its diversity, it so suited political ideology,
educational desiderata, public taste and the articulation of national identity.
Above all, naturalism is flexibility.
Its ability to evolve deepened its roots in the national mentality because it could reach out to the multiple constituencies that made up France.
Thank you.