1 00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:07,890 I just wanted to give a few words of thanks first to the warden and fellow of all souls for their hospitality. 2 00:00:07,890 --> 00:00:15,030 Second, to Craig Clueless and his colleagues in the history of arts have been extremely welcoming and supportive. 3 00:00:15,030 --> 00:00:20,550 Also to Christopher Brown and his colleagues at the Ashmolean Museum, who's also been very welcoming. 4 00:00:20,550 --> 00:00:25,110 I must take my wife, who has prevented me from saying so far. 5 00:00:25,110 --> 00:00:30,900 Anything to Asthana in these lectures. She is a considerable scholar in this field herself. 6 00:00:30,900 --> 00:00:37,290 And I would also finally like to thank my audience who have been extremely loyal. 7 00:00:37,290 --> 00:00:45,030 Thank you very much. I do know what I'm going to do next Wednesday and probably. 8 00:00:45,030 --> 00:00:47,790 I'm fed up that I've changed the title of this last lecture. 9 00:00:47,790 --> 00:00:54,210 It was going to be called Naturalism Strikes Back in honour of George Lucas and Star Wars, 10 00:00:54,210 --> 00:01:01,230 but I chickened out for a more Oxfords title in my final lecture. 11 00:01:01,230 --> 00:01:11,010 I want to consider a current in French painting, which I believe has rarely been fully acknowledged, let alone closely analysed. 12 00:01:11,010 --> 00:01:22,260 This is the increasing lack of momentum in avant garde French painting in the 80s 90s, particularly in the final two thirds of the decade. 13 00:01:22,260 --> 00:01:29,130 There is a tendency in our history of modern painting to assume that the innovations of the late 18th, 80s and early 80s, 14 00:01:29,130 --> 00:01:34,920 90s continued to have a forward momentum until the early years of the 20th century, 15 00:01:34,920 --> 00:01:43,590 when they were washed aside by the new innovative forces of first cubism, a foot first flavoursome and then Cubism. 16 00:01:43,590 --> 00:01:48,280 After all, such an assumption might go, go, go, continue to work until later. 17 00:01:48,280 --> 00:01:57,030 Another three and says and until 1960, cineaste has one of the neo impressionist old guard who exhibited at the last Impressionist exhibition 18 00:01:57,030 --> 00:02:05,670 in 1886 and who in 1974 hosted Matisse on the brink of folk wisdom at his home in South Pay. 19 00:02:05,670 --> 00:02:12,180 These are content continuity's, which suggest a consistency of painterly impact and innovation, 20 00:02:12,180 --> 00:02:19,950 and they underlie it implicitly, at least the somewhat numbing concept of post impressionism. 21 00:02:19,950 --> 00:02:28,710 This modernist notion uses a term only coined in 1910, one quite alien to the artists it so glibly covers. 22 00:02:28,710 --> 00:02:36,360 But my chief objection to the term post Impressionism is that it pays little attention to the pictorial evidence of advanced 23 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:46,560 painting during the 80s 90s and fails to situate that evidence within the larger social and cultural patterns of the decade. 24 00:02:46,560 --> 00:02:52,230 As I tried to address these deficiencies in this lecture, I don't make a different case. 25 00:02:52,230 --> 00:02:58,830 My argument is that from about 1880 three to four, the progressive dynamic of avant garde painting, 26 00:02:58,830 --> 00:03:04,950 which in these lectures I have considered in terms of style, began to wane. 27 00:03:04,950 --> 00:03:12,060 I'll give evidence to support that case, but I want in particular to concentrate on two other related points. 28 00:03:12,060 --> 00:03:20,940 The first is the apparent paradox of the avant garde, sporadic but significant engagement with tradition. 29 00:03:20,940 --> 00:03:25,830 How was it that some of the most inventive artists of this period than half 30 00:03:25,830 --> 00:03:32,310 Cenac or the Door deliberately engaged their work with the art of the past? 31 00:03:32,310 --> 00:03:42,300 The second is to suggest that by the end of the decade, a number of leading avant garde artists had reverted to forms of naturalism. 32 00:03:42,300 --> 00:03:44,760 This latter argument returns, of course, 33 00:03:44,760 --> 00:03:55,140 to the main theme of these lectures that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic of French visual culture in the last two decades for the 18th century. 34 00:03:55,140 --> 00:04:01,860 Just as I've argued that one of the reasons for this were natural isms, elisions with Republicanism. 35 00:04:01,860 --> 00:04:08,340 So I will propose today that the return to naturalism, which one can trace in the work of several important painters, 36 00:04:08,340 --> 00:04:15,270 had some consistencies with wider politico cultural processes. 37 00:04:15,270 --> 00:04:22,860 By the end of the 90s, it was evident to informed art critics that momentum had been lost in avant garde painting. 38 00:04:22,860 --> 00:04:29,100 Reviewing the 1897 Salome's and the Condor for LA Plume, the disappointed evalu a horn, 39 00:04:29,100 --> 00:04:35,730 Bhosle regretted that we're a long way from that rich period six or eight years ago, 40 00:04:35,730 --> 00:04:41,880 which had seen the emergence of artists such as Disney, Baba and Cotty writing. 41 00:04:41,880 --> 00:04:51,210 In 1889, Julia LeClaire agreed that 1886 the mighty two had been the years in which innovative painting had thrived at the undead Cornhill. 42 00:04:51,210 --> 00:04:55,950 He voiced this opinion in a review of an exhibition at the dual Ruelle Gallery, 43 00:04:55,950 --> 00:05:01,950 which combined new impressionists such as Syria and Moose Bear at the top. 44 00:05:01,950 --> 00:05:09,690 All right, we've managed it. And nubby painters like we are a dinny there at the bottom. 45 00:05:09,690 --> 00:05:18,480 LeClaire saw this alliance as a means of showing a degree of unity amongst avant garde artists and that instinct for cohesion, 46 00:05:18,480 --> 00:05:27,780 which he noticed is an issue to which I shall return. But after the flowering of the Nabby between 1890 and waiting three or so, 47 00:05:27,780 --> 00:05:37,440 no major innovative pictorials style emerged in the 80s 90s to coalesce and drive young painters. 48 00:05:37,440 --> 00:05:43,010 Both the imagined is of colour and decorative pattern in the mabie and the slightly longer established. 49 00:05:43,010 --> 00:05:51,050 Division is chromatics and harmonious arabesques of me and Impressionism evolved and consolidated during the 90s. 50 00:05:51,050 --> 00:05:56,360 But there was an awareness of diminished momentum as the decade passed. 51 00:05:56,360 --> 00:06:01,220 There was an increasing appreciation that Suzanne was a painter of real stature. 52 00:06:01,220 --> 00:06:07,040 But his work appeared. Truculently individual says Allen himself did little to promote it. 53 00:06:07,040 --> 00:06:11,990 And there was no collective effort to make something of the stylistic potential of his painting. 54 00:06:11,990 --> 00:06:19,880 Much the same was true of Van Hoffs work. If avant garde painting was no longer seemed to be flourishing at the hour, they called off. 55 00:06:19,880 --> 00:06:27,470 The whole notion of the abogado might be sense to be shifting both personnel and even institution. 56 00:06:27,470 --> 00:06:32,290 Visiting the conservative Saladin's Artists, Hall said in 1887, 57 00:06:32,290 --> 00:06:39,920 SILLIAC was horrified to find that only Muftah then producing decorations like the apotheosis 58 00:06:39,920 --> 00:06:45,650 of Claymores Zschau for major buildings such as the city halls of Paris and Toulouse, 59 00:06:45,650 --> 00:06:52,880 was using a technique that SILLIAC thought pillaged from neo impressionism in Celiacs eyes. 60 00:06:52,880 --> 00:06:59,870 The offence here was not merely appropriating neo impressionist style by an equally trained artist, 61 00:06:59,870 --> 00:07:07,130 but also it's being put to the service of the state in major civic buildings. 62 00:07:07,130 --> 00:07:11,930 By the end of the 80s 90s, the sombre toned painting emerging at the middle of the road, 63 00:07:11,930 --> 00:07:16,670 Salon de la Nasional, the work of naturalist's such as Côté and Seymour, 64 00:07:16,670 --> 00:07:21,950 as well as more elusive artists like had they made up and orby the sedately 65 00:07:21,950 --> 00:07:27,980 could be taken by contemporaries to define the new painters of the avant garde. 66 00:07:27,980 --> 00:07:35,990 Today, we might consider Mehtar and CDMA as symbolist artists, but little links them in terms of style. 67 00:07:35,990 --> 00:07:40,700 The one rhetorical and muscular, it is elegies to antiquity. 68 00:07:40,700 --> 00:07:45,470 The other understated and diffuse in his Flemish town scapes. 69 00:07:45,470 --> 00:07:50,330 But then symbolist painting had never coalesced around any individual style. 70 00:07:50,330 --> 00:07:55,490 Rather, it is encompass the range of possibilities. Amongst these were, for example, 71 00:07:55,490 --> 00:08:01,400 Air Force Osbey was muted static classicism compositions indebted to prove it to 72 00:08:01,400 --> 00:08:06,010 Chavan and the self consciously graceful and with a tub that pictures of other, 73 00:08:06,010 --> 00:08:14,590 more plump, such deliberately and descriptive and manat work repudiating naturalism for idealism 74 00:08:14,590 --> 00:08:20,690 provoke a backlash from writers and artists who valued at the Kabul and healthy Zula, 75 00:08:20,690 --> 00:08:27,980 attacking such images of sexless virgins who have neither breasts nor buttocks. 76 00:08:27,980 --> 00:08:33,740 The intellectual and cultural mentality which had marred and expected naturalism 77 00:08:33,740 --> 00:08:39,380 with its steady grasp on the material world ratified by science and technology, 78 00:08:39,380 --> 00:08:50,170 remained deeply entrenched. In 1895, Clode Monet exhibited 20 of his series of Rural Cathedral at the Door Whale Gallery. 79 00:08:50,170 --> 00:08:56,750 These are paintings of the gym on a street, perhaps as far as he ever did, from the objectively descriptive. 80 00:08:56,750 --> 00:09:04,040 This is evident both from his practise. The canvases were painted gradually over many months, mainly in his studio, 81 00:09:04,040 --> 00:09:13,160 away from the motif and from the way the room cathedrals look with their densely lad and crustaceans of pigment. 82 00:09:13,160 --> 00:09:20,000 So contrary to ordinary visual experience, yet a number of the critics who reviewed the show, 83 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:25,040 both supporters and detractors, slipped into scientific language, 84 00:09:25,040 --> 00:09:29,510 mentioning the chromatic theories of Fusion Chavel and Ogden room, 85 00:09:29,510 --> 00:09:37,100 or judging the pictures as schemers of optical theorems to use their more Beuys expression. 86 00:09:37,100 --> 00:09:42,350 Such responses to works of art that demand for vigour and carnality, 87 00:09:42,350 --> 00:09:54,960 the instinct for scientific parallels testified to the cultural hegemony of the actual in the modern mortality that I have termed naturalism. 88 00:09:54,960 --> 00:10:01,320 I want now to trace the abogado engagement with tradition. We're on tricky territory here. 89 00:10:01,320 --> 00:10:10,020 Tradition is a slippery term. One artist's understanding of tradition, how it might be valued and used would not be the same as another artist's. 90 00:10:10,020 --> 00:10:14,010 But this elastic word as common parlance in the 80s, 90s. 91 00:10:14,010 --> 00:10:20,280 And I want to explore how it manifested itself within the avant garde from the start. 92 00:10:20,280 --> 00:10:28,790 I must knowledge that avant garde painters engagements with the art of the past with various sporadic and inconsistent. 93 00:10:28,790 --> 00:10:41,460 But if we piece together some of the evidence, the apparently paradoxical conjunction of an old guard and tradition raises some fascinating issues. 94 00:10:41,460 --> 00:10:51,420 One reading of naturalist painting was that it was based on direct observation, attention to the motif for the doctrine more and by implication. 95 00:10:51,420 --> 00:10:56,430 It had no need of tradition. It simply recorded. 96 00:10:56,430 --> 00:11:00,270 This was Marlboro's take on momos direct painting from nature. 97 00:11:00,270 --> 00:11:07,420 When he wrote in 89 1889 that with Monsieur Claude Monet, we are far from tradition. 98 00:11:07,420 --> 00:11:12,160 Another approach was the support of critics or artists themselves to trace the 99 00:11:12,160 --> 00:11:16,660 genealogy of naturalist's painting back through the work of Edouard Manet. 100 00:11:16,660 --> 00:11:25,480 The staff call back and tell those people. But naturalist artists did look attentively at the art of the past. 101 00:11:25,480 --> 00:11:31,000 I discussed in a previous lecture halls and Bandar's visits to Belgium to study Rubins. 102 00:11:31,000 --> 00:11:36,280 Both Bastia and the part on the left and feel on the right visited the Netherlands 103 00:11:36,280 --> 00:11:40,600 and were particularly impressed by the precision of Paul Biden's portraits. 104 00:11:40,600 --> 00:11:45,190 The echo of which can be seen in their work on occasion. 105 00:11:45,190 --> 00:11:53,670 The even more recent naturalist heritage was quite directly cited at the 1893 artist Paul Said. 106 00:11:53,670 --> 00:12:01,990 Daniel Booth of a exhibited in the meadow on the left, a simple motif of a peasant woman and a cow in a sparse, 107 00:12:01,990 --> 00:12:06,510 extensive landscape, subject and composition recalled. 108 00:12:06,510 --> 00:12:13,720 For me, this one year is 1858 woman pasturing a cow, which Daniel would have seen at me as equal. 109 00:12:13,720 --> 00:12:25,990 Their Bouzar retrospective. In 1887, MEAC Gleaners had also been shown in 1887 and again at the Exposition into that cell in 1889. 110 00:12:25,990 --> 00:12:31,530 The following year, the Senate shelled the countervail way exhibited at the sale of his artist tool, 111 00:12:31,530 --> 00:12:42,610 say his oyster gatherers at Krukow, a composition which echoes the gleaners by making such implicit pictorial references. 112 00:12:42,610 --> 00:12:47,110 A naturalist painter identified his work with tradition. 113 00:12:47,110 --> 00:12:56,410 In this case, the work of me made only three days. Three decades ago and recently validated by the official retrospective of 1887. 114 00:12:56,410 --> 00:13:06,490 So a modern naturalist tradition blessed by the republic elsewhere and engagement with tradition could involve 115 00:13:06,490 --> 00:13:14,410 a consultation of past art with motives which were distinctly non naturalist and involve the search for style. 116 00:13:14,410 --> 00:13:20,080 In 1898, labels Benedita could identify a return to the Masters. 117 00:13:20,080 --> 00:13:24,580 He found it in very diverse areas of contemporary French painting. 118 00:13:24,580 --> 00:13:32,530 He traced it in all costar's work with its deliberately benzion character and also in the work of Gustaaf Motto's pupils. 119 00:13:32,530 --> 00:13:42,130 Artists like George Poole, whose work combined the brooding chromatics of Rembrandt with the graphic Gosha B of Catterick Genter Art Benedita 120 00:13:42,130 --> 00:13:51,410 classify these distinct and independent initiatives as a poetic reaction against the Naturaliste movement. 121 00:13:51,410 --> 00:13:57,190 If Nasserism remained the dominant aesthetic against which some artists needed to define themselves, 122 00:13:57,190 --> 00:14:04,650 the art of the past offered a spectrum of solutions as much to avant garde painters as the students emerging from Motto's. 123 00:14:04,650 --> 00:14:11,760 I tell you equally, it was are, after all, even the most audacious art needs its own justifications. 124 00:14:11,760 --> 00:14:23,190 Philly, Asians and Continuity's that could be seen on the yellow walls of Gagas Paris studio in January 1895. 125 00:14:23,190 --> 00:14:29,350 In this private showing aimed at an elite audience, Ghoga showed his recent work from Britany, 126 00:14:29,350 --> 00:14:35,340 along with Japanese prints and photographs of work by old masters such as Krajina, 127 00:14:35,340 --> 00:14:45,220 Holbein and Botty Cheney and his favourite modern painters, Dagar, Manet and Privity Chavan Gugga also displayed work by contemporaries. 128 00:14:45,220 --> 00:14:51,460 He admired all Sezen and Van Hoffe with typical temerity. 129 00:14:51,460 --> 00:14:56,350 Google reveals what the critics you now LeClaire called his mourned his music. 130 00:14:56,350 --> 00:15:05,290 Imagine where we might ask what it was that made an avant garde painter in the 80s 90s need such a world. 131 00:15:05,290 --> 00:15:11,410 Did the return to the Masters symptoms a deficiency in the avant garde? 132 00:15:11,410 --> 00:15:14,350 In Google's case was his fraternity with artists. 133 00:15:14,350 --> 00:15:24,190 He knew douga the door or had even worked Vanderhoff an insufficient bond to justify an contextualises at work. 134 00:15:24,190 --> 00:15:33,880 But there is a counter question. Might one not argue that the other guards periodic allusions to past art were to a certain extent an expression of 135 00:15:33,880 --> 00:15:42,760 confidence by suggesting or even drawing attention to the links between one's own work and one's chosen antecedents? 136 00:15:42,760 --> 00:15:51,130 One could assert the continuity's and the vitality of style, justifying innovative style with reference to the past. 137 00:15:51,130 --> 00:15:57,740 And in so doing, one could define one's distance from naturalism. 138 00:15:57,740 --> 00:16:02,920 Vanderhoff made regular references to past art in his correspondence, 139 00:16:02,920 --> 00:16:12,820 but his most intense engagement with tradition came with the 28 copies he made it Sahili between September 1889 and early 1890. 140 00:16:12,820 --> 00:16:20,260 Why should an artist in his mid 30s, with a decades experience of hundreds of paintings and voids under his belt, 141 00:16:20,260 --> 00:16:30,100 returned to what was usually a TIROS practise? In his letters, that of game gave a range of reasons it typically scattershot matter. 142 00:16:30,100 --> 00:16:37,670 Aware of his isolation in the Provençal asylum, he explained in a letter of mid-September that copying was a kind of study that I need. 143 00:16:37,670 --> 00:16:47,530 I want to learn. This was not an expression of fading confidence, but a useful exercise in the bad weather of Fortum. 144 00:16:47,530 --> 00:16:57,550 The letter pragmatically stated that copying means that I must not lose sight of the figure, even though I have no models at the moment. 145 00:16:57,550 --> 00:17:01,750 The examples he chose me above all with 20 copies, 146 00:17:01,750 --> 00:17:06,250 but also Dellacqua a Rembrandt were artists confident and a kind of drawing of 147 00:17:06,250 --> 00:17:13,150 the human figure with torsion and contra posto which Bahnhof had never mastered. 148 00:17:13,150 --> 00:17:18,100 Copying them was a practical lesson in his isolation. 149 00:17:18,100 --> 00:17:26,170 Copying another painter's composition gave him a surrogate partner, a fellow artist with whom to collaborate. 150 00:17:26,170 --> 00:17:36,410 Copying also had an emotional dimension. The same September letter explained that copying gives me consolation for his isolation. 151 00:17:36,410 --> 00:17:45,720 Vanderhoff imagined me a surrounded by a big family and wanted his pregnant sister in law, Joe, to see his copy of me. 152 00:17:45,720 --> 00:17:49,030 Love being there on the right, an evening scene of a family. 153 00:17:49,030 --> 00:17:57,100 A. In a bitter, sweet way, copying reminded him of what he lacked and diverted it from it. 154 00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:02,260 In addition to use the composition of a mirror or another artist via the medium of a 155 00:18:02,260 --> 00:18:07,420 reproductive print as the basis for a painting made with that Hotta choice of colour, 156 00:18:07,420 --> 00:18:13,290 mark and surface was like to use his own metaphors and instrumentalists interpretation 157 00:18:13,290 --> 00:18:19,690 of a composer's piece of music or the translation of a text into another language. 158 00:18:19,690 --> 00:18:27,940 But although this transformative process was personal, Bahnhof also came to see it as having an educational purpose. 159 00:18:27,940 --> 00:18:34,840 In September 1889, he suggested that reproductions after mediate in schools would benefit children. 160 00:18:34,840 --> 00:18:37,240 But by the following January, he went further, 161 00:18:37,240 --> 00:18:45,280 envisaging his own copies as an attempt to make me AI's work more accessible to the great general public. 162 00:18:45,280 --> 00:18:56,290 Then Höss copies, thus had complex motives. Amongst these were issues of style, the imposition of the created more onto an existing design. 163 00:18:56,290 --> 00:19:01,060 But Vincent also made more inclusive references to other art. 164 00:19:01,060 --> 00:19:08,380 In the summer of 1890, he spent the last two months of his life at over SIOC was shuffled dooby ne, 165 00:19:08,380 --> 00:19:17,800 one of the pioneering naturalist landscape painters of MIT century, had lifted over from 1860 until his death in 1878. 166 00:19:17,800 --> 00:19:20,920 Vincent painted dhobis house on two occasions, 167 00:19:20,920 --> 00:19:28,180 and his homage to his predecessor was also evident in the double square landscapes he painted of the fields at Harvest, 168 00:19:28,180 --> 00:19:35,290 which both in their format and breadth of touch, referred to doubling his own canvases of local terrain. 169 00:19:35,290 --> 00:19:44,980 And that's dhobi on the top. And Vanderhoff at the bottom of your door presents a very different case. 170 00:19:44,980 --> 00:19:48,940 Highly individual as is lithographs may appear at first sight. 171 00:19:48,940 --> 00:20:00,670 They quite frequently refer to past images of the kind that the enlightened amateur were privately perusing an album might be expected to recognise. 172 00:20:00,670 --> 00:20:09,010 Take the first state of the frontispiece to Woodall's album and Gustaaf Flowback of 1889. 173 00:20:09,010 --> 00:20:15,580 The Winged Devil Bear on the left fly from right to left head twisted and knee cruft 174 00:20:15,580 --> 00:20:21,490 calls to mind the lithograph of Mephistopheles fly over the town from Dila was 1828. 175 00:20:21,490 --> 00:20:30,680 First album or ahead entitled My Kisses Have the Taste of a Fruit from Gardels third album inspired by Flo Bastille. 176 00:20:30,680 --> 00:20:40,660 Testing of the Soul that won this 1886 lithograph with its ornate helmet and passive features is another quotation. 177 00:20:40,660 --> 00:20:46,930 This time of the idealised heads of Michelangelo's presentation, groynes. 178 00:20:46,930 --> 00:20:56,710 Such references laid a very careful trail by a very tactical artist by recognising. 179 00:20:56,710 --> 00:21:07,420 Such illusions. The spectator affirmed his own cultivated status amongst the doors elite audience and sensed his empathy with the artists. 180 00:21:07,420 --> 00:21:12,760 For his part, Poodle acknowledged his inheritance from the great imaginative art of the past, 181 00:21:12,760 --> 00:21:17,680 claiming for himself a pedigree that only the elite could recognise. 182 00:21:17,680 --> 00:21:27,270 In other words, tradition and style elided to validate an exclusive art for an exclusive public. 183 00:21:27,270 --> 00:21:35,160 Sinead provides a third example of an avant garde artist's positive dialogue with past art. 184 00:21:35,160 --> 00:21:40,740 The first decade of celiacs neo impressionism from the mid 80s to the mid 90s 185 00:21:40,740 --> 00:21:45,990 looks like a confident development of style with a progress towards individuality, 186 00:21:45,990 --> 00:21:52,290 of touch, audacity of colour and harmoniously arabesques compositions. 187 00:21:52,290 --> 00:21:57,300 But by the mid 80s, 90s, the value of past art began to enthuse. 188 00:21:57,300 --> 00:22:05,730 The self-taught artist in 1894, working on the major painting in time of harmony, 189 00:22:05,730 --> 00:22:12,270 Cenac wrote in his journal and seised by the desire to go to Italy to revisit Florence and Rome. 190 00:22:12,270 --> 00:22:20,070 How much good it would do me to see Michelangelo's decorative figures again before finishing my painting. 191 00:22:20,070 --> 00:22:30,810 This enthusiasm for past art only grew in the second half of the decade after the lukewarm reception of In the time of Harmony and with the increasing 192 00:22:30,810 --> 00:22:39,810 consensus voiced by the critics with whom I began this lecture that neo impressionism and other avant garde painting hadn't lost momentum. 193 00:22:39,810 --> 00:22:47,340 So the combative Syriac tradition, a term used, had double value. 194 00:22:47,340 --> 00:22:53,580 The first was oppositional revisiting the salad days artist El-Sayed, 1897. 195 00:22:53,580 --> 00:22:59,040 He recoiled. No, no, they are not in the tradition. 196 00:22:59,040 --> 00:23:05,820 The sad image makers or photographers of the salon tradition then was a. 197 00:23:05,820 --> 00:23:10,500 metallist. The second was practical. 198 00:23:10,500 --> 00:23:15,540 Tradition could be used for problem solving. Primarily a landscape painter. 199 00:23:15,540 --> 00:23:23,400 Cenac was hobbled by the extent to which his picture making practise should or need respond to nature. 200 00:23:23,400 --> 00:23:33,480 In spring 1898, he made a three week pilgrimage to Turner, intently studying the collections in the National Gallery in the British Museum. 201 00:23:33,480 --> 00:23:42,230 A year later, he set himself to draw from Turner's The Rivers of France, making notes full of technical observations. 202 00:23:42,230 --> 00:23:47,880 Turner clusters, lights or dots on the same curve. He duplicates objects for extra impact. 203 00:23:47,880 --> 00:23:53,190 He puts three points of interest on a single axis celiacs painting. 204 00:23:53,190 --> 00:24:03,600 Bovey of 1899 derives its composition from Turner's watercolour of Sir Blue made about 1832 upon Turner's armature, 205 00:24:03,600 --> 00:24:10,890 Cenac amplified his own stylisation, unifying the picture surface under his decorative dotted touch, 206 00:24:10,890 --> 00:24:17,790 adding symmetrical, hoopoe Sua Kreis and introducing warm tints from the muted pinks of blossoms and 207 00:24:17,790 --> 00:24:24,840 clouds to the sharp orange tiles which strike against the chilled blue of the river. 208 00:24:24,840 --> 00:24:28,650 Immediately on returning from London in April 1888, 209 00:24:28,650 --> 00:24:38,570 Cenac had written that Turner's works proved to me that one must be free of any idea of imitation or copy, and that one must create templates. 210 00:24:38,570 --> 00:24:45,540 How restricting it is that one should copy how unlimited it is that one could create. 211 00:24:45,540 --> 00:24:51,900 One of the first canvases that SILLIAC painted after this was captured nobody based on recollections 212 00:24:51,900 --> 00:24:57,480 of a walking holiday on the Italian Riviera 18 months before it was made from memory, 213 00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:06,780 not even a preliminary drawing. Celia wrote in his journal that I'd like to achieve an extreme pollet crummy. 214 00:25:06,780 --> 00:25:13,770 And to further this medley of Rich Chromatics, he juxtaposed samples of intensely coloured silks. 215 00:25:13,770 --> 00:25:18,660 Then transferring is chosen conjunctions onto the canvas. 216 00:25:18,660 --> 00:25:26,040 Kabiru Demona is indeed an extreme painting, modern in its first colouring and rescuer's touch, 217 00:25:26,040 --> 00:25:35,580 traditional in its balanced collodion composition and utterly insistent on style in that composition. 218 00:25:35,580 --> 00:25:40,740 What conclusions can we draw from this evidence about tradition? 219 00:25:40,740 --> 00:25:48,280 Looking back to the past had practical uses. Copying Dellacqua of me made Van Vanderhoff invent colour for their compositions. 220 00:25:48,280 --> 00:25:58,080 Studying. Turner encouraged see act create tense whether in technical matters like encouraging chromatic innovation or in more general terms, 221 00:25:58,080 --> 00:26:03,630 reinforcing ideas about continuity's of style and engagement with past art widens the 222 00:26:03,630 --> 00:26:11,430 divide between avant garde stylisation and the naturalism it's so determinedly opposed. 223 00:26:11,430 --> 00:26:14,700 That said, one cannot escape the sentence. 224 00:26:14,700 --> 00:26:24,690 But generating a deliberate dialogue between past and contemporary art was symptomatic of a diminishing momentum within the avant garde. 225 00:26:24,690 --> 00:26:34,070 The drive to detach. Painting from naturalism, which it so much took the years between about 1885 and 92, had diminished. 226 00:26:34,070 --> 00:26:39,050 Turning back to past art may have been an attempt to resuscitate that energy, 227 00:26:39,050 --> 00:26:46,070 but it might also be seen as a concern to validate what had been gain for the later 1990s. 228 00:26:46,070 --> 00:26:58,890 I want to argue was a period in which the avant garde found it necessary to consolidate in response to wider pressures. 229 00:26:58,890 --> 00:27:04,710 The second argument of this lecture is the one which will lead me to close the series 230 00:27:04,710 --> 00:27:11,670 for I believe that we can trace a distinct return to lateral ism in the later 80s 90s, 231 00:27:11,670 --> 00:27:20,820 a series of shifts by several avant garde painters who actually retreated from style to more descriptive work. 232 00:27:20,820 --> 00:27:27,310 Before we start analysing such renunciations or consolidation's, let me just show you some examples of what I mean. 233 00:27:27,310 --> 00:27:34,530 But this is a current that you will not find identified in the literature amongst the older impressionists Kamei. 234 00:27:34,530 --> 00:27:45,150 The Pissarro had begun the 80s 90s, painting his way out of the stylistic constraints of neo impressionism and returning to a more spontaneous touch. 235 00:27:45,150 --> 00:27:51,060 But at the beginning of the decade, there remained a pantheistic rhetoric to some of his landscapes, 236 00:27:51,060 --> 00:27:57,720 and he even essayed some evocative figures subjects. By the second half of the decade, however, 237 00:27:57,720 --> 00:28:05,460 both in his landscapes and the cityscapes of Paris boulevards and rural keys, Pissarro had returned his impressionism, 238 00:28:05,460 --> 00:28:17,050 took the doggedly descriptive, strict adherence to local colour, whether in all her moods, scenes of quotidian banality. 239 00:28:17,050 --> 00:28:25,110 If Mommy's raw cathedrals shown in 1895, represent an apogee of painterly style over description. 240 00:28:25,110 --> 00:28:35,490 In the succeeding years, his work eased back to the sureties of observation the Japanese bridges showed in 1899, 241 00:28:35,490 --> 00:28:39,240 maybe stylised in their symmetry and harmonies of green. 242 00:28:39,240 --> 00:28:46,860 But they represent a return to a more conventional understanding of colour, texture and fall of light. 243 00:28:46,860 --> 00:28:52,800 Several of the younger, quite unconnected Nabby painters followed similar paths. 244 00:28:52,800 --> 00:29:01,320 Take it while we R's work pictures of early in the decade, like mother and daughter at the table of 1881 to two, 245 00:29:01,320 --> 00:29:08,160 made the domestic subject conform to the experimental demands of consistent flat touch. 246 00:29:08,160 --> 00:29:17,550 Variegated Pattani and the willed chromatics by the decades and work such as Woman Sweeping of 1889, 247 00:29:17,550 --> 00:29:24,600 had restored closer observation of detail along with truth to texture and local colour. 248 00:29:24,600 --> 00:29:36,600 Much the same is true of peer Bonnar. What might have motivated these shifts back to naturalism on the part of these various painters? 249 00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:43,020 First, we often fail to recognise how very difficult it was the painters trained on the life 250 00:29:43,020 --> 00:29:49,200 model to observe and copy nature expected by that mentality of scientific realism. 251 00:29:49,200 --> 00:29:55,140 I outlined in my first lecture to abandon Naturaliste Practise. 252 00:29:55,140 --> 00:30:02,610 The most celebrated story of the old guard at this period is the incident at Ponto Van in Britain in September 1888, 253 00:30:02,610 --> 00:30:08,220 when Google gave Paul Sousa the painting lesson that resulted in the little talisman 254 00:30:08,220 --> 00:30:14,540 so called because of its importance for Ceruzzi Parisian friends such as Dinni Bolla. 255 00:30:14,540 --> 00:30:24,280 We are. If you see Green Frehley's Ghoga, instructed Ceruzzi eight, just paint them so with green straight from the tube. 256 00:30:24,280 --> 00:30:34,080 This in cover is taken to typify the rejection of exact representation of observe nature for a synthetic simplification of form, 257 00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:42,430 the liberation of colour and imagination. There's nothing wrong with that account, but I'll put it in perspective. 258 00:30:42,430 --> 00:30:48,670 Jury AC, DC eight seven U.S.A. had been painting Naturaliste canvases such as Interior Act, 259 00:30:48,670 --> 00:30:58,540 Ponto Van Docky more an image of community making the talisman did not mean instant conversion. 260 00:30:58,540 --> 00:31:05,800 A year later, in midsummer 1889, Saluzzi was anxiously writing to Moggies Deni. 261 00:31:05,800 --> 00:31:15,190 What is the role of nature in the picture? Must one work after nature or only to look and memorise to greater liberty frightens me. 262 00:31:15,190 --> 00:31:24,400 Poor copyists that I am, if abandoned in naturalism, was intellectually, even psychologically taxing. 263 00:31:24,400 --> 00:31:34,180 So it was practically. We find this in the work of fellow Nabis at work we are peer Bonnar Bonners chequered blouse there on the 264 00:31:34,180 --> 00:31:42,550 right to party of 1882 is often discussed as an example of how he adapted from Japanese prints flat Pattani, 265 00:31:42,550 --> 00:31:50,380 animated by undulating contours to suggest the body beneath as part of his identifiable Nabby style. 266 00:31:50,380 --> 00:31:53,830 But we neglect the preparatory watercolour, 267 00:31:53,830 --> 00:32:04,180 which shows that the original idea was more cluttered and descriptive with the including figures seen from behind a naturalist cliché. 268 00:32:04,180 --> 00:32:14,370 We are like Saluzzi. I was articulate, just articulate about how difficult he found abandoning the descriptive naturalism in which he had been so 269 00:32:14,370 --> 00:32:24,220 scrupulously schooled in the late 80s for the Nabby emphasis on synthetic form surface touch a non objective colour. 270 00:32:24,220 --> 00:32:30,010 About September 1890, he wrote in his journal about Shovelled as Still Lives, 271 00:32:30,010 --> 00:32:39,170 which is a student he had so closely emulated that we asked to life on the right difficulty of establishing my head. 272 00:32:39,170 --> 00:32:46,900 After long hours passed two years ago in front of these canvases, imbued with naturalist ideas, not reeling, 273 00:32:46,900 --> 00:32:57,370 realising that there's no rapport between those ideas of copying then and the pleasure of harmonies of tone, pure and simple, striving for style. 274 00:32:57,370 --> 00:33:10,120 Around 1890, Saluzzi, a bomber and we are founded a wrench to abandon naturalism that made it easier to return. 275 00:33:10,120 --> 00:33:13,300 Another motive for the return to naturalism was commercial. 276 00:33:13,300 --> 00:33:21,580 Pissarro, in his later 60s, was conscious of the need to produce canvases, a saleable capital to provide for his wife and children after his death. 277 00:33:21,580 --> 00:33:29,660 Descriptive rather than experimental impressionist canvases provided that banka with the Nabby Felix Valot. 278 00:33:29,660 --> 00:33:38,260 All the evidence is also clear. In May 1889, he married and had a wife and stepchildren to support. 279 00:33:38,260 --> 00:33:42,550 In March that year, he had exhibited a double Hoiles six. 280 00:33:42,550 --> 00:33:47,350 Shocklee delineated terribly cold coloured intimacies. 281 00:33:47,350 --> 00:33:58,240 One of them on the left styled perfectly, serving the subject of dangerously the easels only one seems to have so immediately. 282 00:33:58,240 --> 00:34:05,900 While a couple more were passed off at auction in nineteen hundred, two others were sold in nineteen oh eight and nine respectively. 283 00:34:05,900 --> 00:34:09,560 And the six valot or never sold. 284 00:34:09,560 --> 00:34:20,170 However, the softer, more conventional interiors on the right, which you began in 1889, sold well, five within months of completion. 285 00:34:20,170 --> 00:34:25,430 And in nineteen hundred and three women arranging her hair that was purchased by the state on the 286 00:34:25,430 --> 00:34:34,730 recommendation of Hodgy marks the market attuned to the Naturaliste mortality preferred more descriptive art, 287 00:34:34,730 --> 00:34:39,800 it seems, and plain to commercial expectations paid off. 288 00:34:39,800 --> 00:34:45,950 But with both we are Valot all whose work in the late 1980s had been determinedly naturalistic and 289 00:34:45,950 --> 00:34:52,580 whose transition into the stylisation is of Mabie painting had required a real effort of adaptation. 290 00:34:52,580 --> 00:34:55,100 The gradual relinquishing of style, 291 00:34:55,100 --> 00:35:04,460 the work that was more immediately legible in the later eighteen nineties was at once a return to their artistic instincts and formation, 292 00:35:04,460 --> 00:35:12,590 and perhaps a recognition that the pursuit of style ran the risk of being too metric and a elitist. 293 00:35:12,590 --> 00:35:20,780 That, in turn, suggests the style as the lever by which the pies are free from naturalism was not 294 00:35:20,780 --> 00:35:29,930 always a sustainable solution that the avant garde project itself was friable to probe. 295 00:35:29,930 --> 00:35:34,970 The return to naturalism further. It's essential, I think, to look beyond the avant garde. 296 00:35:34,970 --> 00:35:42,560 Indeed, beyond the history of art and return for a moment to the wider dimensions of France during the 80s 90s. 297 00:35:42,560 --> 00:35:48,320 There is a tendency to think of the decades politics in terms of extremes. 298 00:35:48,320 --> 00:35:57,710 The first years might seem to be dominated by anarchists, terrorism, by the campaign of propaganda, by deed, which saw bombs thrown in central Paris. 299 00:35:57,710 --> 00:36:04,520 Even the Chamber of Deputies finally culminating in the assassination of President Cavalo in 1884. 300 00:36:04,520 --> 00:36:12,200 The image now on the left. The second half appears increasingly preoccupied with the deeply divisive Dreyfuss affair, 301 00:36:12,200 --> 00:36:19,910 beginning with Dreyfus's condemnation in 1894 on the right and culminating in the dramas of 1899 Dead, 302 00:36:19,910 --> 00:36:25,490 who led the attempted coup in February and Dreyfus's pardon in September. 303 00:36:25,490 --> 00:36:37,340 But these are the headlines of history. One cannot argue that the 80s 90s was less a period of division than one of coalescence at the centre. 304 00:36:37,340 --> 00:36:43,760 After all, the republic was toppled neither by anarchist terrorism nor by sarcasms over Dryfoos. 305 00:36:43,760 --> 00:36:51,380 The Holy War, launched in 1891, moderated the tensions between Republican Church, which had been so acute in the 1980s, 306 00:36:51,380 --> 00:36:59,240 where middle class Catholics and Republicans found common ground was in their anxiety about the rise of socialism. 307 00:36:59,240 --> 00:37:06,500 Jill GRAD's party for the A wholesale, for example, made a negligible impact of the 1889 election, 308 00:37:06,500 --> 00:37:13,550 but it won 160000 votes in 1893 and doubled that in 1888. 309 00:37:13,550 --> 00:37:19,580 But if anything, the gradual advance of socialism encouraged consolidation around the centre, 310 00:37:19,580 --> 00:37:25,940 where rising politicians like Louis Buck to formed a strong suckles centrist bloc. 311 00:37:25,940 --> 00:37:39,020 Allowing moderate social reform to stave off leftist demands in literature to a new centrism emerged in the late 1980s and early 80s. 312 00:37:39,020 --> 00:37:43,970 Noticed the gun symbolist elite had attacked the literary hegemony of naturalism, 313 00:37:43,970 --> 00:37:49,210 arguing that naturalism was too concentrated on the doctrine more often to gross. 314 00:37:49,210 --> 00:37:54,140 And vaunting poetry has a more subtle medium than the novel. 315 00:37:54,140 --> 00:38:00,230 This struggle reached a public climax in 1881 with the journalist Jill Kyoto's publication of a 316 00:38:00,230 --> 00:38:05,900 series of interviews with writers of different factions discussing whether naturalism was finished, 317 00:38:05,900 --> 00:38:11,060 replaced by symbolism. But naturalism continued its hegemony. 318 00:38:11,060 --> 00:38:18,560 Zola's books dominated library loads of novels throughout the 80s 90s, symbolism remade the elite taste. 319 00:38:18,560 --> 00:38:26,600 It had always been regularly attacked that they emetic and witnessing important defections from its ranks. 320 00:38:26,600 --> 00:38:40,010 The later 80s 90s saw the emergence of a new consensual, literate current nativism, an attempt to fuse the best of naturalism and symbolism. 321 00:38:40,010 --> 00:38:45,860 In 1896, Mochis Loblaw published is Cecil the Metaphase. 322 00:38:45,860 --> 00:38:52,850 This was followed in 1887 by the Homebrew Naturalist with a manifesto by Loblaws friends, the poet Sam George. 323 00:38:52,850 --> 00:38:58,640 The Guinier, who also published his first volume of verse poetry was put aside. 324 00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:02,870 But Loblaws essay is significant because it's consensual tone. 325 00:39:02,870 --> 00:39:08,510 An engagement with the visual arts was important. The blue attacks symbolism for the. 326 00:39:08,510 --> 00:39:14,150 Pressure, so they letus, while admiring Zola as naturalism, a strong and healthy. 327 00:39:14,150 --> 00:39:22,940 He prays when they search for a national art based on the pantheistic fusion of nature and mysticism. 328 00:39:22,940 --> 00:39:33,260 Loblaw involved painters in his manifesto. He admired the natural brio of and says an damned the bloodless dream imagery of Dignon 329 00:39:33,260 --> 00:39:41,060 Osbey unfound nature ism's a deal pantheist painter encompassing the sun and colours, 330 00:39:41,060 --> 00:39:50,090 but also God and ideas in Vincent van Hoffe as Solidaire ism was in politics. 331 00:39:50,090 --> 00:40:00,920 So was naturism in literature. A shift to the consensual centre both aims to synthesise the best from contemporary thought and culture. 332 00:40:00,920 --> 00:40:09,470 Both emerged from the nexus of Republicanism naturalism on which I have hinged these lectures for both need emphasis on 333 00:40:09,470 --> 00:40:20,240 egalitarianism and the national seeking to reach out with policies which were inclusive and literature which was legible. 334 00:40:20,240 --> 00:40:31,280 And a parallel engagement with modern scientific ideas can be found in solider prisms, organism and naturism sense of evolutionary metamorphosis. 335 00:40:31,280 --> 00:40:39,500 Crucially, both these concepts entered contemporary cultural parlance, and they coalesced around kinds of painting, 336 00:40:39,500 --> 00:40:45,980 which about nineteen hundred typified the continuing development of naturalism. 337 00:40:45,980 --> 00:40:49,250 For example, Alfred Hall's work since the early 80s, 338 00:40:49,250 --> 00:40:56,920 closely engaged with social themes and Republican ideology, was taken to encompass both terms if for lay offs. 339 00:40:56,920 --> 00:41:03,890 Benedict canvases like the miners strike articulated human solidarity. 340 00:41:03,890 --> 00:41:13,970 Hey, man, we could write off the naturism of other pictures as a hymn to life, like on the joy of life the right. 341 00:41:13,970 --> 00:41:15,470 In nineteen hundred one, 342 00:41:15,470 --> 00:41:26,630 the painter Asar Dhamar first wrote a text featuring a fictional naturist who admires the work of naturalist artists as varied as Lembit and Côté. 343 00:41:26,630 --> 00:41:30,170 This, Metrowest finds Albie Matar's work a bit, 344 00:41:30,170 --> 00:41:41,120 symbolising a judgement crew of the kind of painting that had so irritated SILLIAC in 1897 pictures such as Claymores, Easeful and serenity. 345 00:41:41,120 --> 00:41:49,450 But by nineteen hundred and three, when Muftah exhibited the first large canvas he had painted for a room of his work in the capital, 346 00:41:49,450 --> 00:41:53,120 the city hall of his needed to needed to lose his work. 347 00:41:53,120 --> 00:41:56,270 That changed Martez declaration. 348 00:41:56,270 --> 00:42:06,050 Summer is the biggest of four canvases representing the seasons with young lovers of the spring composition and an old woman in autumn. 349 00:42:06,050 --> 00:42:11,120 The cycle of the seasons also incorporates the human cycle. 350 00:42:11,120 --> 00:42:18,080 Summer represents the apogee of both in the midsummer sunshine vigorous men's side. 351 00:42:18,080 --> 00:42:22,010 Hey, while their female offspring play in the foreground, 352 00:42:22,010 --> 00:42:30,440 it is an image of health and plenty of natural and human fecundity and continuity with its embracing pantheism. 353 00:42:30,440 --> 00:42:39,950 Summer might be read as metallist, but look at the way Muftah Sivers work to the same rhythm in repeated poses. 354 00:42:39,950 --> 00:42:50,960 The work is shared. The men collaborate discreetly, but legibly suggested are Republican notions of Égalité and fight every day. 355 00:42:50,960 --> 00:42:53,510 Indeed, given modern parlance and the pictures, 356 00:42:53,510 --> 00:43:03,600 natural environment of solidarity and we should go further still for summer is executed in a loosely did visualises touch. 357 00:43:03,600 --> 00:43:09,230 It's coloured marks giving surface dynamism an optical vibration. 358 00:43:09,230 --> 00:43:15,410 This was what it annoyed SILLIAC, not just what he alleged was the plagiarism of the neo impressionist style, 359 00:43:15,410 --> 00:43:19,920 but it's being put to the service of the state. For Senior. 360 00:43:19,920 --> 00:43:24,590 This was the offensive subordination of an adult God style, 361 00:43:24,590 --> 00:43:32,300 which he associated with the individualist ideology of anarchism to the collective demands of Republican ideology. 362 00:43:32,300 --> 00:43:37,520 But an alternative account would have been different. Summer was a painting. 363 00:43:37,520 --> 00:43:44,240 One could argue, that simultaneously conveyed civic values and an artist's own personal style. 364 00:43:44,240 --> 00:43:48,440 Subir exemplified the consensual character of Republicanism. 365 00:43:48,440 --> 00:43:58,520 Broad collective as well as the enduring value of naturalism as a flexible idiom with which to broadcast it. 366 00:43:58,520 --> 00:44:04,640 The Great Exposition Universelle of nineteen hundred staged in Paris to celebrate 367 00:44:04,640 --> 00:44:10,910 the turn of the century is an appropriate place to bring this series to an end. 368 00:44:10,910 --> 00:44:19,010 The main entrance to the Expositional was via a monumental gate designed by the architect of her late BNA. 369 00:44:19,010 --> 00:44:24,890 This extraordinary structure comprised of tripod of vast arches submerged by a 370 00:44:24,890 --> 00:44:29,390 sculpture of a fashionably dressed woman representing the city of Paris and 371 00:44:29,390 --> 00:44:43,340 flanked by two minarets bidets Clwyd Central Arches in play chromes stone derived from his fascination with the work of German zoologist Ernes Haikal, 372 00:44:43,340 --> 00:44:51,200 from whose study of microscopic marine forms the architect derived his enfolding shapes. 373 00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:56,530 I'm going to talk about these elements of the side here. 374 00:44:56,530 --> 00:45:05,560 East facing Arch embraced the incoming visitor with walls reaching out to right and left along these walls. 375 00:45:05,560 --> 00:45:12,770 Run the freeze of labour by the sculptor Anatol Gil in high relief figures. 376 00:45:12,770 --> 00:45:16,220 With perhaps song in homely figures slightly larger than life, 377 00:45:16,220 --> 00:45:22,130 Geo represented the workers of the many trades which had made the expositional possible. 378 00:45:22,130 --> 00:45:31,640 These carpenters, masons, painters and blacksmiths were depicted descriptively in the clothing and with the tools of their métier. 379 00:45:31,640 --> 00:45:42,620 This all saw was extremely eclectic in style and by no means pleased all visitors, but it somehow characterised France in nineteen hundred. 380 00:45:42,620 --> 00:45:54,560 On the surface, confident and grandiose pitching itself the chic and modern, but also concerned to give its values concrete and legible form. 381 00:45:54,560 --> 00:46:03,020 Reading bidets arches in terms of organic CISM and scientific modernity may have occurred to few, but below. 382 00:46:03,020 --> 00:46:07,190 Giorgos Free's of labour was self evident. 383 00:46:07,190 --> 00:46:19,130 Writing an art deco hassel, Paul Vitka immediately recognised its overt Republican credentials, legible just above head height as the crowds entered. 384 00:46:19,130 --> 00:46:27,110 He read Deo's workers as healthy and energetic, manifesting the solidarity and the egalitarianism of labour. 385 00:46:27,110 --> 00:46:37,040 One understood them as voters vitali the adverb in a work of elevated Democratic and educational purpose. 386 00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:43,070 The entrance to the exposition may have been eclectic, but it was a naturalist work of art, 387 00:46:43,070 --> 00:46:49,460 egalitarian in its rhetoric and legible in its forms that the Republic chose to introduce. 388 00:46:49,460 --> 00:46:55,160 The Visitors Experience of the Exposition of Outsell. 389 00:46:55,160 --> 00:47:03,650 Reviewing the French paintings on show at the Exposition, the experienced critic as an Alec Zord noted how The Sun Talaal, 390 00:47:03,650 --> 00:47:09,860 a survey of French painting throughout the 19th century, was linked to the D.C. owl. 391 00:47:09,860 --> 00:47:15,620 A review of work of the last 10 years by a carefully selected gallery. 392 00:47:15,620 --> 00:47:19,880 These canvases spange in the 1960s to the 80s 90s. 393 00:47:19,880 --> 00:47:21,560 They included Manet's station. 394 00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:31,520 Your lab, so controversial in 1863, brought Impressionism into the fold with Renoir's 1874 dancer and Mommy's Pynes at all. 395 00:47:31,520 --> 00:47:39,020 TEEB of 1888 acknowledged the new organic cism of Carias sculptor de Les and of course, 396 00:47:39,020 --> 00:47:43,820 featured a range of Naturaliste canvases from a historical scene by George Paul Lottos 397 00:47:43,820 --> 00:47:51,380 Full Delatour as 1878 Duesberg family and Rafaela's at the Founders and Exalted told his 398 00:47:51,380 --> 00:47:58,820 readers at the centrist Republican governor that subject criticism was apt because just 399 00:47:58,820 --> 00:48:05,060 making a moral virtue out of the expedient instinct of the Republic's artistic policy. 400 00:48:05,060 --> 00:48:09,530 Collymore we a critic of inclined to the poetic and the traditional, 401 00:48:09,530 --> 00:48:15,860 admired the decibel exhibition for show how recent paintings had developed from what he called the impersonal. 402 00:48:15,860 --> 00:48:16,400 In fact, 403 00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:27,950 the visual textual mechanical naturalism of the 1889 Exposition Universelle to accommodate the subtle Puzder Caleigh landscapes of George Schild, 404 00:48:27,950 --> 00:48:36,380 Casa Hall's exuberant flesh painting, and Daniel Bouvier's imposing Last Supper. 405 00:48:36,380 --> 00:48:44,180 But for all this is vaunting of diversity. This welcoming of more individual styles such as Monarrez or Cathy Ayres, 406 00:48:44,180 --> 00:48:53,570 this admiration for the lyrical over the literal naturalism was still the mainstream of French art by naturalism. 407 00:48:53,570 --> 00:48:56,030 I'd been, as I have throughout these lectures, 408 00:48:56,030 --> 00:49:02,960 more than the use of nature as the foundation of visual representation so central to Western European culture. 409 00:49:02,960 --> 00:49:12,890 I mean that Montanti take that belief system whereby the formation and progress of society was comprehended, gauged, 410 00:49:12,890 --> 00:49:22,710 promoted and learnt through an intellectual and representational system which tightly linked image and ideology. 411 00:49:22,710 --> 00:49:31,340 Naturalist, art in particular. Naturalist painting could serve the republic so well because, as I've tried to show, 412 00:49:31,340 --> 00:49:38,780 it was flexible, supple enough to encompass varied talents, adaptable enough to depict any subject, 413 00:49:38,780 --> 00:49:44,180 not just the necessary pedagogical virtues like exactitude and legibility, 414 00:49:44,180 --> 00:49:52,770 but also with more creative characteristics such as ingenuity, impact and memorability. 415 00:49:52,770 --> 00:49:56,940 A dozen years into the new century. In 1912, 416 00:49:56,940 --> 00:50:06,780 the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts published an educational package for use in schools comprising slides of paintings of modern life, 417 00:50:06,780 --> 00:50:16,440 accompanied by commentaries on each image. Many of the paintings and the ideological values they promoted will be familiar to you. 418 00:50:16,440 --> 00:50:24,090 The Citizen's Duty to celebrate and defend the Republic in Roll's 14th of July. 419 00:50:24,090 --> 00:50:31,980 The virtues of skilled fraternal labour and the trauma of social division in Rafaelle is that the founders or roles minus Strupp, 420 00:50:31,980 --> 00:50:36,630 which we just see urban existence and modern technology at Daniel's wedding at 421 00:50:36,630 --> 00:50:42,990 the photographers alongside rural life from time on its skills in Martez summer, 422 00:50:42,990 --> 00:50:48,400 newer styles but consistent values of youthful and familiar sociability. 423 00:50:48,400 --> 00:50:57,540 And no one was Mullah Della Galette and Caviars brothers kiss two of the paintings included amongst these officially 424 00:50:57,540 --> 00:51:07,920 accredited images with the two with which I began these lectures Feels All Saints Day a Cottee's the farewells. 425 00:51:07,920 --> 00:51:09,210 This is not surprising. 426 00:51:09,210 --> 00:51:17,280 They were in the state collections at breakfast respectively, won gold medals at the 1889 and nineteen hundred Exposition Universelle. 427 00:51:17,280 --> 00:51:24,710 But such paintings had to function like flagships to the great flicked of images produced at this time. 428 00:51:24,710 --> 00:51:32,730 Canvases to be purchased for museums bought for private collectors illustrated in the mass circulation press and such paintings had to lead. 429 00:51:32,730 --> 00:51:36,870 The line works like fields, all seats, day and Cottee's. 430 00:51:36,870 --> 00:51:40,470 The farewells became more than paintings. 431 00:51:40,470 --> 00:51:48,090 They were resonant with fundamental values around which the Republic sought to organise society to begin with. 432 00:51:48,090 --> 00:51:53,580 The paintings accommodate difference of style, of course, but in their subjects, 433 00:51:53,580 --> 00:52:01,440 differences of class, bourgeois and labouring and of setting specific in N-E generic in Britany. 434 00:52:01,440 --> 00:52:07,490 Overriding these differences are the consistencies above all that of duty. 435 00:52:07,490 --> 00:52:19,290 A social cement duty to care and to work to family, a memory to the collective and to continuity. 436 00:52:19,290 --> 00:52:27,540 You probably feel that I've been hammering away at these values, at the civic worthiness of these images, 437 00:52:27,540 --> 00:52:33,420 as if I had been some pompous Republican Minister for public instruction. 438 00:52:33,420 --> 00:52:36,060 Forgive me, but that's been the point. 439 00:52:36,060 --> 00:52:44,250 If paintings from the eighteen eighties were still being used in schools in 1912 for the grooming of future citizens, 440 00:52:44,250 --> 00:52:52,260 it proves how functional, dominant and heavy handed was that naturalist's Republican alliance. 441 00:52:52,260 --> 00:53:00,690 It suggests how closely most art with public recognition remained tied to the mainstream mortality. 442 00:53:00,690 --> 00:53:07,770 That, in turn, questions the extent to which the appled guards invasion of the dominant naturalism virus search for style in the eighteen, 443 00:53:07,770 --> 00:53:13,980 eighties and nineties had actually succeeded in having much impact on the mainstream and makes 444 00:53:13,980 --> 00:53:19,920 more understandable the return to the more naturalistic image idioms by artists like Bob Carr. 445 00:53:19,920 --> 00:53:23,270 And we are by nineteen hundred. 446 00:53:23,270 --> 00:53:31,260 In essence, I'd been arguing that while it is a great pleasure to admire the outstanding pictorial achievements of Duggal and Monet, 447 00:53:31,260 --> 00:53:38,640 CFR or Goga, we do well not to overestimate the forward marks of modernism. 448 00:53:38,640 --> 00:53:47,220 Such artists had to work within and against and around the dominant, insistent, deeply entrenched naturalism. 449 00:53:47,220 --> 00:53:57,520 By nineteen hundred, it even looked as if the individuality of less descriptive, more modernist art was buckling under naturalism, its hegemony. 450 00:53:57,520 --> 00:54:04,560 Loni's of Renoir's work was being absorbed into the mainstream of the Exposition Universelle monos. 451 00:54:04,560 --> 00:54:13,010 Recent painting like Pizarro's or Balaton or Bonners or WAS was edging back from style to description. 452 00:54:13,010 --> 00:54:22,080 Cenac was railing against the absorption of neo impressionist style into Republic Civic Commissions. 453 00:54:22,080 --> 00:54:30,390 There was a way out, but it was drastic. Look at Matisses still life with blue tablecloth painted about nineteen hundred. 454 00:54:30,390 --> 00:54:36,390 It makes no attempt to approximate to the consistency of vision, making a focus of a jug, 455 00:54:36,390 --> 00:54:41,940 but reducing the table to a patchwork of chromatic marks rather than a regular surface, 456 00:54:41,940 --> 00:54:47,730 completely denying any substance to the background where what might be the illusion of physical space. 457 00:54:47,730 --> 00:54:56,180 Bye bye Ghoul's becomes a medley of marks on the picture. This is a wonderful painting of energy and audacity. 458 00:54:56,180 --> 00:55:02,180 The canvas pulsing with juxtaposed oranges and blues, reds and greens. 459 00:55:02,180 --> 00:55:11,480 A picture in which much has gone into the risk of painting and precious little into description. 460 00:55:11,480 --> 00:55:18,620 Take LeMay's viscously painted floozie, also made in nineteen hundred. 461 00:55:18,620 --> 00:55:24,830 Can we call it a portrait or even the type? It's Carol Couture to use my term. 462 00:55:24,830 --> 00:55:32,870 But it's even more of a caricature of a painting than it is of a woman that coagulated paint, that rhenish of amateurism, 463 00:55:32,870 --> 00:55:46,340 that utter denial of any requirements to be exact, is about finding an equivalent for her coarse sexual presence in the media, not in description. 464 00:55:46,340 --> 00:55:56,360 There are no two ways about it. These paintings do violence with the rules and expectations of painting the modernist account of painting. 465 00:55:56,360 --> 00:56:03,410 This period is to housetrained, habituated to its patterns, knitted by theory. 466 00:56:03,410 --> 00:56:08,360 It doesn't take sufficient account of not truisms dominance. Neither does is a cut. 467 00:56:08,360 --> 00:56:15,200 Acknowledge the shear creative aggression that was needed to rupture one's reliance 468 00:56:15,200 --> 00:56:22,580 on the basis to sum up painting from description to discard illusion for process 469 00:56:22,580 --> 00:56:27,320 in order to understand the heroic modernism of the nineteen hundreds in particular 470 00:56:27,320 --> 00:56:32,780 climactic work such as Matisse's Blue Nude and Picasso's Demoiselle Dabiri all. 471 00:56:32,780 --> 00:56:39,980 We must acknowledge the violence of this kind of painting and recognise that what made such aggression 472 00:56:39,980 --> 00:56:48,540 necessary was the pact between the naturalist aesthetic and the values of the board to our republic. 473 00:56:48,540 --> 00:56:55,260 I hope that I show you that taking naturalist painting seriously is worth doing. 474 00:56:55,260 --> 00:57:00,300 Trying to place it within the history and the mentality of Early Third Republic illuminates 475 00:57:00,300 --> 00:57:05,550 the ways in which imagery and ideology could intersect at the end of the 19th century. 476 00:57:05,550 --> 00:57:10,890 And one can unearth some good arresting and even bizarre paintings. 477 00:57:10,890 --> 00:57:14,850 The process also makes us look again at avant garde painting. 478 00:57:14,850 --> 00:57:22,650 That, in turn, encourages us to question patterns and assumptions about modernism, which are often taken for granted. 479 00:57:22,650 --> 00:57:32,730 I've tried not to discredit the artists who we acknowledge as creative innovators or to entirely disavow the modernist narrative that makes that case. 480 00:57:32,730 --> 00:57:36,960 But I do hope that I've given a richer sense of visual culture in France during 481 00:57:36,960 --> 00:57:41,790 the eighteen eighties and nineties with all its diversity and contradictions. 482 00:57:41,790 --> 00:57:48,420 Above all, I hope that the next time you visit the Musee d'Orsay or any other collection of late 18th century French child, 483 00:57:48,420 --> 00:57:50,790 you will see the works differently, 484 00:57:50,790 --> 00:57:59,910 looking in fresh ways of famous names and getting a chance to the ones that I have tried to judge in the light of history. 485 00:57:59,910 --> 00:58:09,280 Thank you.