I just wanted to give a few words of thanks first to the warden and fellow of all souls for their hospitality.
Second, to Craig Clueless and his colleagues in the history of arts have been extremely welcoming and supportive.
Also to Christopher Brown and his colleagues at the Ashmolean Museum, who's also been very welcoming.
I must take my wife, who has prevented me from saying so far.
Anything to Asthana in these lectures. She is a considerable scholar in this field herself.
And I would also finally like to thank my audience who have been extremely loyal.
Thank you very much. I do know what I'm going to do next Wednesday and probably.
I'm fed up that I've changed the title of this last lecture.
It was going to be called Naturalism Strikes Back in honour of George Lucas and Star Wars,
but I chickened out for a more Oxfords title in my final lecture.
I want to consider a current in French painting, which I believe has rarely been fully acknowledged, let alone closely analysed.
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.
There is a tendency in our history of modern painting to assume that the innovations of the late 18th, 80s and early 80s,
90s continued to have a forward momentum until the early years of the 20th century,
when they were washed aside by the new innovative forces of first cubism, a foot first flavoursome and then Cubism.
After all, such an assumption might go, go, go, continue to work until later.
Another three and says and until 1960, cineaste has one of the neo impressionist old guard who exhibited at the last Impressionist exhibition
in 1886 and who in 1974 hosted Matisse on the brink of folk wisdom at his home in South Pay.
These are content continuity's, which suggest a consistency of painterly impact and innovation,
and they underlie it implicitly, at least the somewhat numbing concept of post impressionism.
This modernist notion uses a term only coined in 1910, one quite alien to the artists it so glibly covers.
But my chief objection to the term post Impressionism is that it pays little attention to the pictorial evidence of advanced
painting during the 80s 90s and fails to situate that evidence within the larger social and cultural patterns of the decade.
As I tried to address these deficiencies in this lecture, I don't make a different case.
My argument is that from about 1880 three to four, the progressive dynamic of avant garde painting,
which in these lectures I have considered in terms of style, began to wane.
I'll give evidence to support that case, but I want in particular to concentrate on two other related points.
The first is the apparent paradox of the avant garde, sporadic but significant engagement with tradition.
How was it that some of the most inventive artists of this period than half
Cenac or the Door deliberately engaged their work with the art of the past?
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.
This latter argument returns, of course,
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.
Just as I've argued that one of the reasons for this were natural isms, elisions with Republicanism.
So I will propose today that the return to naturalism, which one can trace in the work of several important painters,
had some consistencies with wider politico cultural processes.
By the end of the 90s, it was evident to informed art critics that momentum had been lost in avant garde painting.
Reviewing the 1897 Salome's and the Condor for LA Plume, the disappointed evalu a horn,
Bhosle regretted that we're a long way from that rich period six or eight years ago,
which had seen the emergence of artists such as Disney, Baba and Cotty writing.
In 1889, Julia LeClaire agreed that 1886 the mighty two had been the years in which innovative painting had thrived at the undead Cornhill.
He voiced this opinion in a review of an exhibition at the dual Ruelle Gallery,
which combined new impressionists such as Syria and Moose Bear at the top.
All right, we've managed it. And nubby painters like we are a dinny there at the bottom.
LeClaire saw this alliance as a means of showing a degree of unity amongst avant garde artists and that instinct for cohesion,
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,
no major innovative pictorials style emerged in the 80s 90s to coalesce and drive young painters.
Both the imagined is of colour and decorative pattern in the mabie and the slightly longer established.
Division is chromatics and harmonious arabesques of me and Impressionism evolved and consolidated during the 90s.
But there was an awareness of diminished momentum as the decade passed.
There was an increasing appreciation that Suzanne was a painter of real stature.
But his work appeared. Truculently individual says Allen himself did little to promote it.
And there was no collective effort to make something of the stylistic potential of his painting.
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.
The whole notion of the abogado might be sense to be shifting both personnel and even institution.
Visiting the conservative Saladin's Artists, Hall said in 1887,
SILLIAC was horrified to find that only Muftah then producing decorations like the apotheosis
of Claymores Zschau for major buildings such as the city halls of Paris and Toulouse,
was using a technique that SILLIAC thought pillaged from neo impressionism in Celiacs eyes.
The offence here was not merely appropriating neo impressionist style by an equally trained artist,
but also it's being put to the service of the state in major civic buildings.
By the end of the 80s 90s, the sombre toned painting emerging at the middle of the road,
Salon de la Nasional, the work of naturalist's such as Côté and Seymour,
as well as more elusive artists like had they made up and orby the sedately
could be taken by contemporaries to define the new painters of the avant garde.
Today, we might consider Mehtar and CDMA as symbolist artists, but little links them in terms of style.
The one rhetorical and muscular, it is elegies to antiquity.
The other understated and diffuse in his Flemish town scapes.
But then symbolist painting had never coalesced around any individual style.
Rather, it is encompass the range of possibilities. Amongst these were, for example,
Air Force Osbey was muted static classicism compositions indebted to prove it to
Chavan and the self consciously graceful and with a tub that pictures of other,
more plump, such deliberately and descriptive and manat work repudiating naturalism for idealism
provoke a backlash from writers and artists who valued at the Kabul and healthy Zula,
attacking such images of sexless virgins who have neither breasts nor buttocks.
The intellectual and cultural mentality which had marred and expected naturalism
with its steady grasp on the material world ratified by science and technology,
remained deeply entrenched. In 1895, Clode Monet exhibited 20 of his series of Rural Cathedral at the Door Whale Gallery.
These are paintings of the gym on a street, perhaps as far as he ever did, from the objectively descriptive.
This is evident both from his practise. The canvases were painted gradually over many months, mainly in his studio,
away from the motif and from the way the room cathedrals look with their densely lad and crustaceans of pigment.
So contrary to ordinary visual experience, yet a number of the critics who reviewed the show,
both supporters and detractors, slipped into scientific language,
mentioning the chromatic theories of Fusion Chavel and Ogden room,
or judging the pictures as schemers of optical theorems to use their more Beuys expression.
Such responses to works of art that demand for vigour and carnality,
the instinct for scientific parallels testified to the cultural hegemony of the actual in the modern mortality that I have termed naturalism.
I want now to trace the abogado engagement with tradition. We're on tricky territory here.
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.
But this elastic word as common parlance in the 80s, 90s.
And I want to explore how it manifested itself within the avant garde from the start.
I must knowledge that avant garde painters engagements with the art of the past with various sporadic and inconsistent.
But if we piece together some of the evidence, the apparently paradoxical conjunction of an old guard and tradition raises some fascinating issues.
One reading of naturalist painting was that it was based on direct observation, attention to the motif for the doctrine more and by implication.
It had no need of tradition. It simply recorded.
This was Marlboro's take on momos direct painting from nature.
When he wrote in 89 1889 that with Monsieur Claude Monet, we are far from tradition.
Another approach was the support of critics or artists themselves to trace the
genealogy of naturalist's painting back through the work of Edouard Manet.
The staff call back and tell those people. But naturalist artists did look attentively at the art of the past.
I discussed in a previous lecture halls and Bandar's visits to Belgium to study Rubins.
Both Bastia and the part on the left and feel on the right visited the Netherlands
and were particularly impressed by the precision of Paul Biden's portraits.
The echo of which can be seen in their work on occasion.
The even more recent naturalist heritage was quite directly cited at the 1893 artist Paul Said.
Daniel Booth of a exhibited in the meadow on the left, a simple motif of a peasant woman and a cow in a sparse,
extensive landscape, subject and composition recalled.
For me, this one year is 1858 woman pasturing a cow, which Daniel would have seen at me as equal.
Their Bouzar retrospective. In 1887, MEAC Gleaners had also been shown in 1887 and again at the Exposition into that cell in 1889.
The following year, the Senate shelled the countervail way exhibited at the sale of his artist tool,
say his oyster gatherers at Krukow, a composition which echoes the gleaners by making such implicit pictorial references.
A naturalist painter identified his work with tradition.
In this case, the work of me made only three days. Three decades ago and recently validated by the official retrospective of 1887.
So a modern naturalist tradition blessed by the republic elsewhere and engagement with tradition could involve
a consultation of past art with motives which were distinctly non naturalist and involve the search for style.
In 1898, labels Benedita could identify a return to the Masters.
He found it in very diverse areas of contemporary French painting.
He traced it in all costar's work with its deliberately benzion character and also in the work of Gustaaf Motto's pupils.
Artists like George Poole, whose work combined the brooding chromatics of Rembrandt with the graphic Gosha B of Catterick Genter Art Benedita
classify these distinct and independent initiatives as a poetic reaction against the Naturaliste movement.
If Nasserism remained the dominant aesthetic against which some artists needed to define themselves,
the art of the past offered a spectrum of solutions as much to avant garde painters as the students emerging from Motto's.
I tell you equally, it was are, after all, even the most audacious art needs its own justifications.
Philly, Asians and Continuity's that could be seen on the yellow walls of Gagas Paris studio in January 1895.
In this private showing aimed at an elite audience, Ghoga showed his recent work from Britany,
along with Japanese prints and photographs of work by old masters such as Krajina,
Holbein and Botty Cheney and his favourite modern painters, Dagar, Manet and Privity Chavan Gugga also displayed work by contemporaries.
He admired all Sezen and Van Hoffe with typical temerity.
Google reveals what the critics you now LeClaire called his mourned his music.
Imagine where we might ask what it was that made an avant garde painter in the 80s 90s need such a world.
Did the return to the Masters symptoms a deficiency in the avant garde?
In Google's case was his fraternity with artists.
He knew douga the door or had even worked Vanderhoff an insufficient bond to justify an contextualises at work.
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
confidence by suggesting or even drawing attention to the links between one's own work and one's chosen antecedents?
One could assert the continuity's and the vitality of style, justifying innovative style with reference to the past.
And in so doing, one could define one's distance from naturalism.
Vanderhoff made regular references to past art in his correspondence,
but his most intense engagement with tradition came with the 28 copies he made it Sahili between September 1889 and early 1890.
Why should an artist in his mid 30s, with a decades experience of hundreds of paintings and voids under his belt,
returned to what was usually a TIROS practise? In his letters, that of game gave a range of reasons it typically scattershot matter.
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.
I want to learn. This was not an expression of fading confidence, but a useful exercise in the bad weather of Fortum.
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.
The examples he chose me above all with 20 copies,
but also Dellacqua a Rembrandt were artists confident and a kind of drawing of
the human figure with torsion and contra posto which Bahnhof had never mastered.
Copying them was a practical lesson in his isolation.
Copying another painter's composition gave him a surrogate partner, a fellow artist with whom to collaborate.
Copying also had an emotional dimension. The same September letter explained that copying gives me consolation for his isolation.
Vanderhoff imagined me a surrounded by a big family and wanted his pregnant sister in law, Joe, to see his copy of me.
Love being there on the right, an evening scene of a family.
A. In a bitter, sweet way, copying reminded him of what he lacked and diverted it from it.
In addition to use the composition of a mirror or another artist via the medium of a
reproductive print as the basis for a painting made with that Hotta choice of colour,
mark and surface was like to use his own metaphors and instrumentalists interpretation
of a composer's piece of music or the translation of a text into another language.
But although this transformative process was personal, Bahnhof also came to see it as having an educational purpose.
In September 1889, he suggested that reproductions after mediate in schools would benefit children.
But by the following January, he went further,
envisaging his own copies as an attempt to make me AI's work more accessible to the great general public.
Then Höss copies, thus had complex motives. Amongst these were issues of style, the imposition of the created more onto an existing design.
But Vincent also made more inclusive references to other art.
In the summer of 1890, he spent the last two months of his life at over SIOC was shuffled dooby ne,
one of the pioneering naturalist landscape painters of MIT century, had lifted over from 1860 until his death in 1878.
Vincent painted dhobis house on two occasions,
and his homage to his predecessor was also evident in the double square landscapes he painted of the fields at Harvest,
which both in their format and breadth of touch, referred to doubling his own canvases of local terrain.
And that's dhobi on the top. And Vanderhoff at the bottom of your door presents a very different case.
Highly individual as is lithographs may appear at first sight.
They quite frequently refer to past images of the kind that the enlightened amateur were privately perusing an album might be expected to recognise.
Take the first state of the frontispiece to Woodall's album and Gustaaf Flowback of 1889.
The Winged Devil Bear on the left fly from right to left head twisted and knee cruft
calls to mind the lithograph of Mephistopheles fly over the town from Dila was 1828.
First album or ahead entitled My Kisses Have the Taste of a Fruit from Gardels third album inspired by Flo Bastille.
Testing of the Soul that won this 1886 lithograph with its ornate helmet and passive features is another quotation.
This time of the idealised heads of Michelangelo's presentation, groynes.
Such references laid a very careful trail by a very tactical artist by recognising.
Such illusions. The spectator affirmed his own cultivated status amongst the doors elite audience and sensed his empathy with the artists.
For his part, Poodle acknowledged his inheritance from the great imaginative art of the past,
claiming for himself a pedigree that only the elite could recognise.
In other words, tradition and style elided to validate an exclusive art for an exclusive public.
Sinead provides a third example of an avant garde artist's positive dialogue with past art.
The first decade of celiacs neo impressionism from the mid 80s to the mid 90s
looks like a confident development of style with a progress towards individuality,
of touch, audacity of colour and harmoniously arabesques compositions.
But by the mid 80s, 90s, the value of past art began to enthuse.
The self-taught artist in 1894, working on the major painting in time of harmony,
Cenac wrote in his journal and seised by the desire to go to Italy to revisit Florence and Rome.
How much good it would do me to see Michelangelo's decorative figures again before finishing my painting.
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
consensus voiced by the critics with whom I began this lecture that neo impressionism and other avant garde painting hadn't lost momentum.
So the combative Syriac tradition, a term used, had double value.
The first was oppositional revisiting the salad days artist El-Sayed, 1897.
He recoiled. No, no, they are not in the tradition.
The sad image makers or photographers of the salon tradition then was a.
metallist. The second was practical.
Tradition could be used for problem solving. Primarily a landscape painter.
Cenac was hobbled by the extent to which his picture making practise should or need respond to nature.
In spring 1898, he made a three week pilgrimage to Turner, intently studying the collections in the National Gallery in the British Museum.
A year later, he set himself to draw from Turner's The Rivers of France, making notes full of technical observations.
Turner clusters, lights or dots on the same curve. He duplicates objects for extra impact.
He puts three points of interest on a single axis celiacs painting.
Bovey of 1899 derives its composition from Turner's watercolour of Sir Blue made about 1832 upon Turner's armature,
Cenac amplified his own stylisation, unifying the picture surface under his decorative dotted touch,
adding symmetrical, hoopoe Sua Kreis and introducing warm tints from the muted pinks of blossoms and
clouds to the sharp orange tiles which strike against the chilled blue of the river.
Immediately on returning from London in April 1888,
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.
How restricting it is that one should copy how unlimited it is that one could create.
One of the first canvases that SILLIAC painted after this was captured nobody based on recollections
of a walking holiday on the Italian Riviera 18 months before it was made from memory,
not even a preliminary drawing. Celia wrote in his journal that I'd like to achieve an extreme pollet crummy.
And to further this medley of Rich Chromatics, he juxtaposed samples of intensely coloured silks.
Then transferring is chosen conjunctions onto the canvas.
Kabiru Demona is indeed an extreme painting, modern in its first colouring and rescuer's touch,
traditional in its balanced collodion composition and utterly insistent on style in that composition.
What conclusions can we draw from this evidence about tradition?
Looking back to the past had practical uses. Copying Dellacqua of me made Van Vanderhoff invent colour for their compositions.
Studying. Turner encouraged see act create tense whether in technical matters like encouraging chromatic innovation or in more general terms,
reinforcing ideas about continuity's of style and engagement with past art widens the
divide between avant garde stylisation and the naturalism it's so determinedly opposed.
That said, one cannot escape the sentence.
But generating a deliberate dialogue between past and contemporary art was symptomatic of a diminishing momentum within the avant garde.
The drive to detach. Painting from naturalism, which it so much took the years between about 1885 and 92, had diminished.
Turning back to past art may have been an attempt to resuscitate that energy,
but it might also be seen as a concern to validate what had been gain for the later 1990s.
I want to argue was a period in which the avant garde found it necessary to consolidate in response to wider pressures.
The second argument of this lecture is the one which will lead me to close the series
for I believe that we can trace a distinct return to lateral ism in the later 80s 90s,
a series of shifts by several avant garde painters who actually retreated from style to more descriptive work.
Before we start analysing such renunciations or consolidation's, let me just show you some examples of what I mean.
But this is a current that you will not find identified in the literature amongst the older impressionists Kamei.
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.
But at the beginning of the decade, there remained a pantheistic rhetoric to some of his landscapes,
and he even essayed some evocative figures subjects. By the second half of the decade, however,
both in his landscapes and the cityscapes of Paris boulevards and rural keys, Pissarro had returned his impressionism,
took the doggedly descriptive, strict adherence to local colour, whether in all her moods, scenes of quotidian banality.
If Mommy's raw cathedrals shown in 1895, represent an apogee of painterly style over description.
In the succeeding years, his work eased back to the sureties of observation the Japanese bridges showed in 1899,
maybe stylised in their symmetry and harmonies of green.
But they represent a return to a more conventional understanding of colour, texture and fall of light.
Several of the younger, quite unconnected Nabby painters followed similar paths.
Take it while we R's work pictures of early in the decade, like mother and daughter at the table of 1881 to two,
made the domestic subject conform to the experimental demands of consistent flat touch.
Variegated Pattani and the willed chromatics by the decades and work such as Woman Sweeping of 1889,
had restored closer observation of detail along with truth to texture and local colour.
Much the same is true of peer Bonnar. What might have motivated these shifts back to naturalism on the part of these various painters?
First, we often fail to recognise how very difficult it was the painters trained on the life
model to observe and copy nature expected by that mentality of scientific realism.
I outlined in my first lecture to abandon Naturaliste Practise.
The most celebrated story of the old guard at this period is the incident at Ponto Van in Britain in September 1888,
when Google gave Paul Sousa the painting lesson that resulted in the little talisman
so called because of its importance for Ceruzzi Parisian friends such as Dinni Bolla.
We are. If you see Green Frehley's Ghoga, instructed Ceruzzi eight, just paint them so with green straight from the tube.
This in cover is taken to typify the rejection of exact representation of observe nature for a synthetic simplification of form,
the liberation of colour and imagination. There's nothing wrong with that account, but I'll put it in perspective.
Jury AC, DC eight seven U.S.A. had been painting Naturaliste canvases such as Interior Act,
Ponto Van Docky more an image of community making the talisman did not mean instant conversion.
A year later, in midsummer 1889, Saluzzi was anxiously writing to Moggies Deni.
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.
Poor copyists that I am, if abandoned in naturalism, was intellectually, even psychologically taxing.
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
right to party of 1882 is often discussed as an example of how he adapted from Japanese prints flat Pattani,
animated by undulating contours to suggest the body beneath as part of his identifiable Nabby style.
But we neglect the preparatory watercolour,
which shows that the original idea was more cluttered and descriptive with the including figures seen from behind a naturalist cliché.
We are like Saluzzi. I was articulate, just articulate about how difficult he found abandoning the descriptive naturalism in which he had been so
scrupulously schooled in the late 80s for the Nabby emphasis on synthetic form surface touch a non objective colour.
About September 1890, he wrote in his journal about Shovelled as Still Lives,
which is a student he had so closely emulated that we asked to life on the right difficulty of establishing my head.
After long hours passed two years ago in front of these canvases, imbued with naturalist ideas, not reeling,
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.
Around 1890, Saluzzi, a bomber and we are founded a wrench to abandon naturalism that made it easier to return.
Another motive for the return to naturalism was commercial.
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.
Descriptive rather than experimental impressionist canvases provided that banka with the Nabby Felix Valot.
All the evidence is also clear. In May 1889, he married and had a wife and stepchildren to support.
In March that year, he had exhibited a double Hoiles six.
Shocklee delineated terribly cold coloured intimacies.
One of them on the left styled perfectly, serving the subject of dangerously the easels only one seems to have so immediately.
While a couple more were passed off at auction in nineteen hundred, two others were sold in nineteen oh eight and nine respectively.
And the six valot or never sold.
However, the softer, more conventional interiors on the right, which you began in 1889, sold well, five within months of completion.
And in nineteen hundred and three women arranging her hair that was purchased by the state on the
recommendation of Hodgy marks the market attuned to the Naturaliste mortality preferred more descriptive art,
it seems, and plain to commercial expectations paid off.
But with both we are Valot all whose work in the late 1980s had been determinedly naturalistic and
whose transition into the stylisation is of Mabie painting had required a real effort of adaptation.
The gradual relinquishing of style,
the work that was more immediately legible in the later eighteen nineties was at once a return to their artistic instincts and formation,
and perhaps a recognition that the pursuit of style ran the risk of being too metric and a elitist.
That, in turn, suggests the style as the lever by which the pies are free from naturalism was not
always a sustainable solution that the avant garde project itself was friable to probe.
The return to naturalism further. It's essential, I think, to look beyond the avant garde.
Indeed, beyond the history of art and return for a moment to the wider dimensions of France during the 80s 90s.
There is a tendency to think of the decades politics in terms of extremes.
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.
Even the Chamber of Deputies finally culminating in the assassination of President Cavalo in 1884.
The image now on the left. The second half appears increasingly preoccupied with the deeply divisive Dreyfuss affair,
beginning with Dreyfus's condemnation in 1894 on the right and culminating in the dramas of 1899 Dead,
who led the attempted coup in February and Dreyfus's pardon in September.
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.
After all, the republic was toppled neither by anarchist terrorism nor by sarcasms over Dryfoos.
The Holy War, launched in 1891, moderated the tensions between Republican Church, which had been so acute in the 1980s,
where middle class Catholics and Republicans found common ground was in their anxiety about the rise of socialism.
Jill GRAD's party for the A wholesale, for example, made a negligible impact of the 1889 election,
but it won 160000 votes in 1893 and doubled that in 1888.
But if anything, the gradual advance of socialism encouraged consolidation around the centre,
where rising politicians like Louis Buck to formed a strong suckles centrist bloc.
Allowing moderate social reform to stave off leftist demands in literature to a new centrism emerged in the late 1980s and early 80s.
Noticed the gun symbolist elite had attacked the literary hegemony of naturalism,
arguing that naturalism was too concentrated on the doctrine more often to gross.
And vaunting poetry has a more subtle medium than the novel.
This struggle reached a public climax in 1881 with the journalist Jill Kyoto's publication of a
series of interviews with writers of different factions discussing whether naturalism was finished,
replaced by symbolism. But naturalism continued its hegemony.
Zola's books dominated library loads of novels throughout the 80s 90s, symbolism remade the elite taste.
It had always been regularly attacked that they emetic and witnessing important defections from its ranks.
The later 80s 90s saw the emergence of a new consensual, literate current nativism, an attempt to fuse the best of naturalism and symbolism.
In 1896, Mochis Loblaw published is Cecil the Metaphase.
This was followed in 1887 by the Homebrew Naturalist with a manifesto by Loblaws friends, the poet Sam George.
The Guinier, who also published his first volume of verse poetry was put aside.
But Loblaws essay is significant because it's consensual tone.
An engagement with the visual arts was important. The blue attacks symbolism for the.
Pressure, so they letus, while admiring Zola as naturalism, a strong and healthy.
He prays when they search for a national art based on the pantheistic fusion of nature and mysticism.
Loblaw involved painters in his manifesto. He admired the natural brio of and says an damned the bloodless dream imagery of Dignon
Osbey unfound nature ism's a deal pantheist painter encompassing the sun and colours,
but also God and ideas in Vincent van Hoffe as Solidaire ism was in politics.
So was naturism in literature. A shift to the consensual centre both aims to synthesise the best from contemporary thought and culture.
Both emerged from the nexus of Republicanism naturalism on which I have hinged these lectures for both need emphasis on
egalitarianism and the national seeking to reach out with policies which were inclusive and literature which was legible.
And a parallel engagement with modern scientific ideas can be found in solider prisms, organism and naturism sense of evolutionary metamorphosis.
Crucially, both these concepts entered contemporary cultural parlance, and they coalesced around kinds of painting,
which about nineteen hundred typified the continuing development of naturalism.
For example, Alfred Hall's work since the early 80s,
closely engaged with social themes and Republican ideology, was taken to encompass both terms if for lay offs.
Benedict canvases like the miners strike articulated human solidarity.
Hey, man, we could write off the naturism of other pictures as a hymn to life, like on the joy of life the right.
In nineteen hundred one,
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.
This, Metrowest finds Albie Matar's work a bit,
symbolising a judgement crew of the kind of painting that had so irritated SILLIAC in 1897 pictures such as Claymores, Easeful and serenity.
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,
the city hall of his needed to needed to lose his work.
That changed Martez declaration.
Summer is the biggest of four canvases representing the seasons with young lovers of the spring composition and an old woman in autumn.
The cycle of the seasons also incorporates the human cycle.
Summer represents the apogee of both in the midsummer sunshine vigorous men's side.
Hey, while their female offspring play in the foreground,
it is an image of health and plenty of natural and human fecundity and continuity with its embracing pantheism.
Summer might be read as metallist, but look at the way Muftah Sivers work to the same rhythm in repeated poses.
The work is shared. The men collaborate discreetly, but legibly suggested are Republican notions of Égalité and fight every day.
Indeed, given modern parlance and the pictures,
natural environment of solidarity and we should go further still for summer is executed in a loosely did visualises touch.
It's coloured marks giving surface dynamism an optical vibration.
This was what it annoyed SILLIAC, not just what he alleged was the plagiarism of the neo impressionist style,
but it's being put to the service of the state. For Senior.
This was the offensive subordination of an adult God style,
which he associated with the individualist ideology of anarchism to the collective demands of Republican ideology.
But an alternative account would have been different. Summer was a painting.
One could argue, that simultaneously conveyed civic values and an artist's own personal style.
Subir exemplified the consensual character of Republicanism.
Broad collective as well as the enduring value of naturalism as a flexible idiom with which to broadcast it.
The Great Exposition Universelle of nineteen hundred staged in Paris to celebrate
the turn of the century is an appropriate place to bring this series to an end.
The main entrance to the Expositional was via a monumental gate designed by the architect of her late BNA.
This extraordinary structure comprised of tripod of vast arches submerged by a
sculpture of a fashionably dressed woman representing the city of Paris and
flanked by two minarets bidets Clwyd Central Arches in play chromes stone derived from his fascination with the work of German zoologist Ernes Haikal,
from whose study of microscopic marine forms the architect derived his enfolding shapes.
I'm going to talk about these elements of the side here.
East facing Arch embraced the incoming visitor with walls reaching out to right and left along these walls.
Run the freeze of labour by the sculptor Anatol Gil in high relief figures.
With perhaps song in homely figures slightly larger than life,
Geo represented the workers of the many trades which had made the expositional possible.
These carpenters, masons, painters and blacksmiths were depicted descriptively in the clothing and with the tools of their métier.
This all saw was extremely eclectic in style and by no means pleased all visitors, but it somehow characterised France in nineteen hundred.
On the surface, confident and grandiose pitching itself the chic and modern, but also concerned to give its values concrete and legible form.
Reading bidets arches in terms of organic CISM and scientific modernity may have occurred to few, but below.
Giorgos Free's of labour was self evident.
Writing an art deco hassel, Paul Vitka immediately recognised its overt Republican credentials, legible just above head height as the crowds entered.
He read Deo's workers as healthy and energetic, manifesting the solidarity and the egalitarianism of labour.
One understood them as voters vitali the adverb in a work of elevated Democratic and educational purpose.
The entrance to the exposition may have been eclectic, but it was a naturalist work of art,
egalitarian in its rhetoric and legible in its forms that the Republic chose to introduce.
The Visitors Experience of the Exposition of Outsell.
Reviewing the French paintings on show at the Exposition, the experienced critic as an Alec Zord noted how The Sun Talaal,
a survey of French painting throughout the 19th century, was linked to the D.C. owl.
A review of work of the last 10 years by a carefully selected gallery.
These canvases spange in the 1960s to the 80s 90s.
They included Manet's station.
Your lab, so controversial in 1863, brought Impressionism into the fold with Renoir's 1874 dancer and Mommy's Pynes at all.
TEEB of 1888 acknowledged the new organic cism of Carias sculptor de Les and of course,
featured a range of Naturaliste canvases from a historical scene by George Paul Lottos
Full Delatour as 1878 Duesberg family and Rafaela's at the Founders and Exalted told his
readers at the centrist Republican governor that subject criticism was apt because just
making a moral virtue out of the expedient instinct of the Republic's artistic policy.
Collymore we a critic of inclined to the poetic and the traditional,
admired the decibel exhibition for show how recent paintings had developed from what he called the impersonal.
In fact,
the visual textual mechanical naturalism of the 1889 Exposition Universelle to accommodate the subtle Puzder Caleigh landscapes of George Schild,
Casa Hall's exuberant flesh painting, and Daniel Bouvier's imposing Last Supper.
But for all this is vaunting of diversity. This welcoming of more individual styles such as Monarrez or Cathy Ayres,
this admiration for the lyrical over the literal naturalism was still the mainstream of French art by naturalism.
I'd been, as I have throughout these lectures,
more than the use of nature as the foundation of visual representation so central to Western European culture.
I mean that Montanti take that belief system whereby the formation and progress of society was comprehended, gauged,
promoted and learnt through an intellectual and representational system which tightly linked image and ideology.
Naturalist, art in particular. Naturalist painting could serve the republic so well because, as I've tried to show,
it was flexible, supple enough to encompass varied talents, adaptable enough to depict any subject,
not just the necessary pedagogical virtues like exactitude and legibility,
but also with more creative characteristics such as ingenuity, impact and memorability.
A dozen years into the new century. In 1912,
the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts published an educational package for use in schools comprising slides of paintings of modern life,
accompanied by commentaries on each image. Many of the paintings and the ideological values they promoted will be familiar to you.
The Citizen's Duty to celebrate and defend the Republic in Roll's 14th of July.
The virtues of skilled fraternal labour and the trauma of social division in Rafaelle is that the founders or roles minus Strupp,
which we just see urban existence and modern technology at Daniel's wedding at
the photographers alongside rural life from time on its skills in Martez summer,
newer styles but consistent values of youthful and familiar sociability.
And no one was Mullah Della Galette and Caviars brothers kiss two of the paintings included amongst these officially
accredited images with the two with which I began these lectures Feels All Saints Day a Cottee's the farewells.
This is not surprising.
They were in the state collections at breakfast respectively, won gold medals at the 1889 and nineteen hundred Exposition Universelle.
But such paintings had to function like flagships to the great flicked of images produced at this time.
Canvases to be purchased for museums bought for private collectors illustrated in the mass circulation press and such paintings had to lead.
The line works like fields, all seats, day and Cottee's.
The farewells became more than paintings.
They were resonant with fundamental values around which the Republic sought to organise society to begin with.
The paintings accommodate difference of style, of course, but in their subjects,
differences of class, bourgeois and labouring and of setting specific in N-E generic in Britany.
Overriding these differences are the consistencies above all that of duty.
A social cement duty to care and to work to family, a memory to the collective and to continuity.
You probably feel that I've been hammering away at these values, at the civic worthiness of these images,
as if I had been some pompous Republican Minister for public instruction.
Forgive me, but that's been the point.
If paintings from the eighteen eighties were still being used in schools in 1912 for the grooming of future citizens,
it proves how functional, dominant and heavy handed was that naturalist's Republican alliance.
It suggests how closely most art with public recognition remained tied to the mainstream mortality.
That, in turn, questions the extent to which the appled guards invasion of the dominant naturalism virus search for style in the eighteen,
eighties and nineties had actually succeeded in having much impact on the mainstream and makes
more understandable the return to the more naturalistic image idioms by artists like Bob Carr.
And we are by nineteen hundred.
In essence, I'd been arguing that while it is a great pleasure to admire the outstanding pictorial achievements of Duggal and Monet,
CFR or Goga, we do well not to overestimate the forward marks of modernism.
Such artists had to work within and against and around the dominant, insistent, deeply entrenched naturalism.
By nineteen hundred, it even looked as if the individuality of less descriptive, more modernist art was buckling under naturalism, its hegemony.
Loni's of Renoir's work was being absorbed into the mainstream of the Exposition Universelle monos.
Recent painting like Pizarro's or Balaton or Bonners or WAS was edging back from style to description.
Cenac was railing against the absorption of neo impressionist style into Republic Civic Commissions.
There was a way out, but it was drastic. Look at Matisses still life with blue tablecloth painted about nineteen hundred.
It makes no attempt to approximate to the consistency of vision, making a focus of a jug,
but reducing the table to a patchwork of chromatic marks rather than a regular surface,
completely denying any substance to the background where what might be the illusion of physical space.
Bye bye Ghoul's becomes a medley of marks on the picture. This is a wonderful painting of energy and audacity.
The canvas pulsing with juxtaposed oranges and blues, reds and greens.
A picture in which much has gone into the risk of painting and precious little into description.
Take LeMay's viscously painted floozie, also made in nineteen hundred.
Can we call it a portrait or even the type? It's Carol Couture to use my term.
But it's even more of a caricature of a painting than it is of a woman that coagulated paint, that rhenish of amateurism,
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.
There are no two ways about it. These paintings do violence with the rules and expectations of painting the modernist account of painting.
This period is to housetrained, habituated to its patterns, knitted by theory.
It doesn't take sufficient account of not truisms dominance. Neither does is a cut.
Acknowledge the shear creative aggression that was needed to rupture one's reliance
on the basis to sum up painting from description to discard illusion for process
in order to understand the heroic modernism of the nineteen hundreds in particular
climactic work such as Matisse's Blue Nude and Picasso's Demoiselle Dabiri all.
We must acknowledge the violence of this kind of painting and recognise that what made such aggression
necessary was the pact between the naturalist aesthetic and the values of the board to our republic.
I hope that I show you that taking naturalist painting seriously is worth doing.
Trying to place it within the history and the mentality of Early Third Republic illuminates
the ways in which imagery and ideology could intersect at the end of the 19th century.
And one can unearth some good arresting and even bizarre paintings.
The process also makes us look again at avant garde painting.
That, in turn, encourages us to question patterns and assumptions about modernism, which are often taken for granted.
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.
But I do hope that I've given a richer sense of visual culture in France during
the eighteen eighties and nineties with all its diversity and contradictions.
Above all, I hope that the next time you visit the Musee d'Orsay or any other collection of late 18th century French child,
you will see the works differently,
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.
Thank you.