Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us in the second in a series of four terror lectures in the American art.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the second in a series of four terror lectures in American art.
This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration,
understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States.
The national and international audiences, in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College.
The foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art.
Emily C. Burns is the terror visiting professor for 2020 through 2021.
My name is Jeff Bachem and I'm I'm the head of the history of art department at the University of Oxford.
Our thanks go to the Terra Foundation and to torch for hosting this series as part of the online events in the Humanities Cultural Programme.
One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Throughout this evening's lecture, if you have any questions,
please feel free to type that type them in the YouTube chat box and we will do our best to answer as many of them as we can during the session.
We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and chaired by Professor WonderCon.
Wanda is Robert and Ruth Halperin, professor in art history emerita at Stanford University,
where she taught from 1980 to 2008 and Mentor mentored many of those now teaching and curating in the field of American art.
She chaired the Department of Art and Art History Department, but sorry,
she chaired the art and art history department for several years and served a term as the director of the Stanford Humanities Centre,
a major study of avant garde modernist culture along the Atlantic Rim, The Great American Thing, Modern Art and American identity.
1915 through 1935,
was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldridge prise for distinguished fellowship in American Art,
Would you press? She also published Women Building History,
a book about Mary Cassatt and the decorative programme of murals and sculptures
for the woman's building at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition.
Active as a guest curator, Wanda has produced various books and exhibitions, including The Colour of Nude American Journalism 1990 1999 through 1910,
The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, the Regional Lost Vision, Seeing Gertrude Stein five stories and in 2017 to 2019.
Georgia O'Keeffe Living Modern. She is currently writing a biography of American Gothic,
a famous 1930 painting by Grant Wood that has often been reproduced in American high in popular culture.
In subsequent years, it's my absolute pleasure to welcome Professor one to corn and now wonder I hand it over to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And hello to all of you out there on whatever continent or country you are listening to this and tuning in,
wonderful that this kind of virtual presentation can find such a wide and diverse audience around the world.
I myself am greeting you from the shores of Cape Cod, land of the Wampanoag, and I happen to know that there will be a map later on in the lecture.
And you'll see very clearly if you look for the Wampanoag tribe, where I am resident as I speak with you,
it's my pleasure to introduce Emily Burns for the second of her four lectures.
She's associate professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar of transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In 2018, she published Transnational Frontiers the American West in France with the University of Oklahoma press,
and she has a forthcoming anthology co-edited with Alice in Rudy Price called Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts,
and that'll be published by Rutledge. Related to today's talk are her publications in anthologies on art and transnational exchange.
There were three of them there will co-edited, but let me mention their titles.
Artistic Migration and Identity in Paris 1870 to 1940,
another anthology in which her work has appeared foreign artists and communities in modern Paris 1870 to 1914.
And she's also written about her topic of today in Sheryl May and Marian Waddles a seamless web transatlantic art in the 19th century.
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art visiting professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford,
where she is also a visiting fellow at Worcester College,
Professor Burns is completing her book manuscript from which today's talk comes and the title,
or at least the working title of that manuscript is performing innocence, cultural relatedness and U.S. art in fantasy at Paris.
Emily, welcome again, and we look forward to today's presentation,
which follows on last week's which was called belated and was a construction of American innocence, particularly abroad.
And today your topic is simply short, I handed over to you.
Thank you so much, Wanda. I'll just share my thank you.
Jeff, as well for your introductions, also torch for managing.
And of course, the Terra Foundation for sponsoring this series. And thank you all for being here.
A reminder to to please not hesitate to send your questions over the chat function during the live stream.
Visitors passing the pity party at the centre of the Paris Exposition of 19:00
would have encountered a figure which our eyes might read as incongruous,
with fantastical Paris stalking forward and scowling down at pedestrians with a stern and disapproving
expression from a pedestal was the larger than life sculpture the Puritan by Augustus Think Gardens.
He holds a massive Bible and leans on a walking stick.
His upright back is enveloped by a thick, dense cloak that drapes behind his body while designed as a representation of a particular individual.
The 17th century Puritan Deacon Samuel Cheapen St. Gordon's made clear that he saw it as a quote embodiment of the Puritan.
A bronze of the sculpture had been installed in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1887,
which you see at Left and St. Garden signed a contract with a Parisian foundry in the late 1890s to produce bronze tabletop versions of it,
and about 40 at least were produced, one of which you can see on the right.
A plaster of the Puritan was displayed at the salon of the Societe Nacional de Brozak in 1898,
likely the version seen in the background of a photograph of the artist's Paris studio.
The artist in foreground subtly, subtly mimics the sculpture in posture and countenance in its circulation in Paris.
The Puritan enacted more than an icon of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 16 30.
The sculpture, both inscribed and marked a personality of steadfast focus,
rigidity and faith as it built and exported a lineage for U.S. history tied to Puritan Origins, New England identity and Anglo-Saxon white culture.
With a hat partly modelled on one that William Merritt Chase purportedly used while playing Puritan at a costume ball in Munich.
The figures clothing nods to U.S. identity performance abroad with both gravity and humour as it ratifies and undercuts myths,
which my colleagues, Erica Das and Julia Rosenbaum and Jennifer Greenhill have all explored, especially in the U.S. context.
The sculpture is both Das sums up quote Puritan backlash and Puritan exemplar for contemporaries encountering Saint John stalwart figure,
which won a grand prise at the Paris Exposition.
The contradictory ideals he represented were current, as they were then hotly debated in the US colony in Paris.
What Das has described as the fun hating figure not only frowned at passer by, but also towards Louis conveyors.
The Four Seasons, which was placed to the left of the entrance of the newly constructed petite Palais.
Its nude and scantily clad allegorical women delightedly and casually gathering fruit seems certain to have drawn the figures ire.
The tension invited by this pairing reverberated through much of the US colony in Paris,
which built an anxious narrative pitting French Bohemia against US puritanical culture polarising in essence,
the Parisian against the Puritan, edging between Protestant faith constructions of puritanism and a secularised moralism.
Many made claims that steadfast and focussed work ethic was a so-called American trait that needed to
be retained as a protective armour to avoid absorption into life and culture in the foreign capital.
These ideas also had implications for aesthetics. French critics wondered, for instance, if the Puritans quote massive book, which though closed,
must limit his mental horizons implicated, likely also quoting from a critic.
Narrow perspectives of U.S. artists abroad.
Yet one concluded that the broader imagination of Saint Gardens in depicting this complex figure indicated otherwise.
With its projections of moral innocence, this trope is laden with contradictions.
In addition to the colonial ethos embedded in the Puritan striding forward upon a wooded landscape,
inviting us to recall from last week what Henry James described as quote innocence and might and Edith Wharton inscribed as a quote factitious purity.
Innocence is incompatible with the extremist dogmatic fundamentalism and with Puritans persecution of native people along the eastern seaboard.
And here we can have a map shout out to Wanda in her present location.
But here, where in particular, members of the Wampanoag and Massachusetts nation, amongst other nearby nations,
were persecuted by Puritan colonists, as Chapman and his fellow Puritans sought to vanquish native voices and cultures.
They built a race hierarchy that retained its currency in the 19th century exported in Paris.
The Puritan cultivates and upholds that normative white male Protestant culture and highlights those origins of settler colonialism.
This figure also builds a hierarchy that excludes black and women artists.
A power structure unwittingly implied in the silence obscured labour visible in the photographs of the sculpture in Paris,
where two unnamed and darker skinned labourers rarely mentioned in the scholarship or in the title of the photograph.
When Reproduced stands behind the workbench,
exporting the trajectory of the so-called city on the hill rhetoric that fuelled the Puritan movement to the new world.
In the 17th century, Americans carried what Das termed the moral journey back to Europe as an icon of these Mobility's St. Garden sculpture.
Amid a larger constellation of U.S. spaces in Paris, which I will map out for us today,
you can see on this 1910 map tiny placed images of some of the sites that we'll look at and you'll see bigger images as we go.
But I'll just point out they're clustered.
Some in the affluent is more near the Arc de Triomphe, on the right bank and then a bunch of sites at the border between the fifth,
sixth and 14th alcoholism along the Boulevard Montparnasse, from churches to studios to artists clubs.
The U.S. built environment in Paris invited links with puritanism by connecting with the idea of the artists,
concludes this enclosed Eden Gardens framed by the Virgin Mary's purity.
Many terms were bantered around to define this construction not only of literal space in Paris,
but also the connected community that circulated through it, and I'll rundown a bunch of them for you.
Little America, the Parisian American worlds, the American Colony, the American Corner,
Americanised, Paris, American Paris, a little city within a big one and even a country unto itself.
The experiences of women artists in Paris were particularly shaped by the strident discourse about morality, which limited their professionalism.
Yet artists who were for any reason outside the the norms set by this discourse often subtly disrupted the operations of stereotype,
either by taking up or wholly rejecting these projections. While Contemporary sought to pin down distinctions between French and American characters,
the categories of Parisian and Puritan were never firmly fixed, operating instead in a constant, productive tension.
As in Blanche Howard's description of her protagonist, Everett Hammer, an American painter in her novel Gwen A Wave on the Breton Coast,
quote good old fashioned New England traits and rank bohemian ism played hide and seek in the nooks and crannies of his character.
So while problematic and contradictory,
the fluidity of the concept of the Puritan enabled black artists and women artists points of entry to mimic or critique the social order.
The large American Protestant community shaped much of this cultural conversation.
Two American churches were founded in the 1850s on the Right Bank,
a nondenominational evangelical church based at 21 bridges buried in 1857 and an Episcopal spin off two years later.
The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the latter opened its neo-Gothic structure in 1886, designed by British architect George Edmund Streets.
On the avenue, George sank just south of the Champs-Élysées in offering services in English and regular social events.
Both churches targeted the U.S. and wider Anglophone communities in Paris then and now, although the American church has relocated to the kid or say.
These institutions entered fierce, ongoing debates about religion and public life in front of secular friends.
The establishment of the Third Republic in 1871 brought many Protestants into powerful government positions,
and discussions ensued about the relationships between Republican values,
morality, education and tolerance that fuelled the fervour surrounding the Dreyfus Affair
in the 1890s and led to the separation between religion and state in 1945.
Within debates about this position, as Stephen House has explored.
Some observers cautioned that a Protestant conquest of France was taking place
by insisting on expansive displays of collective religion in public life,
and two by connecting themselves with French Huguenot tradition and also with British Protestants practise.
And these American churches are occupying uneasy terrain.
But Reverend E.W. Hitchcock, the rector of the Ecumenical American Church in the early 1880s,
argued that Protestantism was the antidote to the perils of the city,
and he gave a long and detailed sermon of which I just pull one pithy quotation if anywhere there is need a
fixed principles of action and settled faith and watchfulness and prayer and every part of the Christian Armour.
It is in Paris. Church leadership imagines twin enemies for Americans in Paris as extremes of sensual excess Catholic worship and bohemian life.
Many U.S. travellers wrote of their shock at the pomp and ostentation they associated with Catholic worship.
They articulated similar anxiety about the drama of bohemian life.
Waves of articles in the American press warned of quote hotbeds of immorality and widespread moral filth.
However, mythic, the idea that bohemian culture enabled art making through creative spurts and debauchery
seemed antithetical to the trope of success through constant and focussed work.
Visual representations fuelled these perceived cultural differences.
Published in 1984, John and Greg Huston's novel FATA Morgana, a romance of Art Student Life in Paris, polarises the Parisian and the Puritan.
A French artist named Pwf I Left carves a sculpture bust in his studio erratically quote,
hammering the clay with a terrible blow of his fist as his body curves,
wildly juxtaposing PUFA eyes, undulating body and while gesticulations,
the aptly named Phil Longwell stands with rigidly straight posture, opposing pouf and stature and demeanour.
His tailored suit counters the French artist's dishevelled, wrinkled clothing,
who sighs crowded and unkempt studio, which Castaneda described as an astonishing place heaped up with mud.
Chaos of clay and plaster matches his impassioned art making.
He does not even look at the sculpture as he strikes it.
And just yesterday, when I was practising this talk, I noticed another detail I'm going to bring the mouse pointer to it here,
so you can see there's actually a poster on the wall behind Phil that says, Vive La Liberté, my freedom.
Conveniently placed over Phil's head in this pairing, PUFA is especially disturbed by Phil's appearance,
which he perceives as entirely constricted with his buttons collar.
He shouts at the American artist, Foul, take off your collar.
The sight of you with that instrument of torture chokes me in the novel and Illustration II and feels dramatic.
Opposition frames a constructed dichotomy between French and American.
The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity used this rhetoric to justify an intervention in the art world by building in 1891,
a satellite location in the Latin Quarter. In honour of its intended regulars.
It was named St. Luke's for the patron saint of artists based at five Rue de la Construire in an iron,
wood and glass structure, which became known as the Little Tin Church.
It was humble, akin to an artist's studio. Some worshippers described it as a garage adjacency and like a workshop.
It's largely unadorned. Interior was designed to isolate American art students from the perceived temptations outside the garden walls.
The unchristian chairs that lined the rows of the interior amazingly still extends,
although the seats have been retained are encouraging one to take on a posture of pious, careful attention with austere, upright forms.
The seats small enough to ensure that one must sit erect with both feet on the floor, knees overhanging the seat base.
No slouch. Only focus and a few artists even commented in their letters on how uncomfortable these chairs were,
and I can also concur, having had the opportunity to sit in them myself.
Americans in Paris regularly wrote home and in their diaries about all three churches.
But these performances of religious and national identity were not necessarily embedded in religious belief or in historical fact.
You'll find a whole range of themes across this number of artists. Regardless,
the frequent use of Protestantism to announce cultural and artistic identities as steadfast
and morally driven reverberated back to the United States in letters and newspaper articles.
The notion of hermetic separation from the Parisian media folded into the ostensibly
secular artists clubs formed in the 1890s as community spaces for Americans in Paris,
where leadership and donors claimed to insulate members from the foreign city by encouraging
focussed work and uninterrupted nationalism as an articulation of retains Puritan ethos.
Artists clubs like the American Heart Association of Paris, which I'll refer to as by its acronym AARP and the American Girls Club AGC,
which opened in 1890 and 1893 respectively, sought to revise ideas of bohemian culture by establishing a hermetic US enclave in Paris.
The clubs became icons of the utility of Paris for artists by showing that American time abroad was not squandered,
as Richard Harding Davis celebrated artists who quote made use of Paris instead of permitting Paris to make use of them.
And of course, these clubs operated with major support from the U.S. churches in Paris.
Members of both clubs used the garden rhetoric to define their separation from the city at the AP.
Secretary Nesbitt Benson stressed that the quote raising of the streets around us makes our
little garden all the more shut in and you can see in the photograph on the upper left.
The kind of pine trees that are discussing the building and then in the background, you can see larger Parisian structures behind it.
Another writer commented Quote Outside the wall lies Paris.
Inside is America. Meanwhile, a year after St. Luke's opens, the AGC moved into the building behind it, which had been a Calvinist school for boys.
As one contemporary noted, the entry to the club from the street seemed like a church door,
as seen in the postcard at bottom right sent by painter Mildred Bridge to her family in Maine.
Most representations of the structure emphasise seclusion,
with a view from inside the garden looking back towards the U-shaped building from St Luke's Chapel.
This perspective highlights the enclosed nature of the compound, which I should add is still extant now as the Columbia University Centre in Paris.
Another photograph from 19 of three places AGC members up on the balcony have the sites with Reverend Van Winkle,
who was the Minister of St. Luke's, acting as the gatekeeper and liberalising the US religious community as the protectorate of national morality.
These institutions imagines themselves to be behaviour shaping with messages to men, not to be too loud and to women, probably not to make art.
One of the illustrations by member George H.
Leonard, left, depicts the AARP bulletin board pairing exhibition announcements with the sign.
The members are requested to refrain from loud conversation and on the right.
A Scribner's illustration of a demure female art student at the AGC shows a woman sitting with her hands in her lap,
revealing no evidence at all that she is an artist and the use of girls in the title of the organisation suggested the need for guardianship.
And even after the organisation changed its name, the original title stuck.
The kind of hermetic seclusion for grounded by the churches and clubs also appears in many U.S. artists studios interests.
And we will look at a few examples of Laredo tasks.
Henry, also a tanners, and James McNeill, Whistler Paris spaces like the interior of St. Luke's.
The walls were frequently austere.
This aesthetic revised tropes of bohemian laziness and rendered remedied the experience of crowded ateliers in Paris,
like the Academy Julianne, of which Turner declared quote, Never had I seen or heard such a bedlam or men waste so much time.
They also redirected the cosmopolitan studio design of an earlier generation,
including Chase and expatriate painter Frederick Arthur Bridgeman in the 1880s,
both of whom adopted the model of French academic studios in their design in the AP journal Cartier Le10.
The writer, Ernest Thompson, complained about such overstuffed studios with what he called useless odds and ends,
and he caricatured an artist to Paris because he could not relinquish his belongings.
The accompanying illustration by club member John Peter Pemberton offers a thinly veiled portrait of Chase,
inspecting a varies amongst a dizzying array of objects in a topsy turvy space.
For many artists of a younger generation coming to Paris and modest representations took up seclusion in place of worldly connexion scholars like
students to task Svetlana Alpers and other working on the interior and studio have argued that representations of space are metaphors of self.
Indeed, some studio paintings by U.S. artists in Paris can be seen as abstract self-portraits that imagined the austerity,
cleanliness and purity of the American colony. Yet, of course, the images they produce aren't are necessarily inter social.
They are designed to be shown to others, even as they inflect the idea of their own solitude.
Further, this visual language operates as a harbinger of modernist aesthetics.
One of the earliest examples of this burgeoning approach that I found was the American sculptor Laredo Tufts representation of his sharp turban,
which is the maid's chamber in Paris,
located at the top of one hundred and forty two steps on the Rue palettes in 1880, in TAFEs carefully pencilled and penned chamber,
which he claims required four hours to meticulously draw the clean lines of his sketch to match the bare room.
His inclusion of the door frame on both sides draws attention to the threshold into the artist's space task.
Hermetic enclosure is exaggerated by the linear perspective,
which pulls the viewer's I quickly through the room and then out the window, rather than inviting us to linger in his private space.
Taft wrote to his family with an intensity typical of the letters of the period.
I am in earnest in my work here. Terribly in earnest and no earthly power or obstacle that I can overcome shall prevent my reaching
the mark I am aiming at to have connected the design of his room with work ethic and moral focus,
which was also linked with his own Protestant worship at the American Church and
his involvement with a church supported philanthropy called the McCole Mission.
One of the artist's short stories constructed his Paris face as a moral battleground when he imagined
a beautiful French woman arriving at his door in the middle of the night asking to move in.
But and I quote from his story training and tradition came to the rescue and he sends her away.
Temptations rendered inaccessible also come to the fore in an intriguing early sketch
from the window of Edward Hopper's room in his Baptist pantheon decades later.
Tanner's Paris Studios also billed hermetic seclusion,
though he shared a studio at 15 Rue Descend with sculptor Herman Atkins McNeil when he first arrived in Paris.
The space he renders in 1893 here seems devoid of human presence, with only filtered lights coming in from the windows at right.
The room seems a cavern protectively removed from the world outside and entirely.
Still, its seclusion parallels Tanner's recollections about the overwhelming city when he arrived,
where he quote felt what it was to be a stranger in a strange land.
How strange it was to have the power of understanding and being understood suddenly withdrawn.
The strangeness of it, perhaps, is what made me feel so isolated here.
Noting quote, I had come to study at such a cost that every minute seemed precious and not to be frittered away.
Tanner, just defiant, designed a space for uninterrupted work.
Tanner moved to a studio alone at 51 Boulevard son Jack in 1895,
and this larger space continued to match the ethos of focussed work described in his autobiographical essays.
A glowing lights of fuses the photographs of his studio,
of which there are several building a spiritual sanctuary for the painter of mostly biblical iconography,
whose father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister in one photograph.
Tanner's Mary on the easel seems to resonate with the glow from the skylights above and in the painting,
which is a nativity with a floating gold halo here and just over the shrouded cradle,
an evocative light from multiple directions frames the Virgin Mary.
Another photograph renders Tanner in his studio, contemplating the now lost Christ before the doctors.
As Marcus Bruce compellingly suggests, Tanner mimics the figures in his painting, who are listening to Christ's teaching.
The photograph renders visible for Bruce quote both the manner in which Tanner
hoped to present himself to the world and the message he hoped to impart.
The focus on his pictures and light is enabled by the lack of decor throughout the studio, especially on the walls.
And the contemporary critic Helen Cole, when she visited, described it as a quote studio, which is exclusively for work.
Because there are no giggles or knickknacks about it is spotless and in perfect order,
quite an exception to the popular idea of what a studio ought to be, she said.
By this period, Tanner was, amongst many such exceptions,
to cause construct of typical artist studios as Americans work in secluded spaces became something of a stereotype.
In George Tomori's 1894 novel about Paris, Bohemia,
Trilby Little Billy and his friends returned to Paris to discover their former studio taken over by
U.S. artists who whitewashed the graffiti on the walls and transformed it into an unrecognisable,
clean aesthetic quote very [INAUDIBLE] and span space.
The U.S. painters in their Italian. And here again, I quote from the novel work coldly civil and thus being disturbed in the middle of their work.
Such a literary characterisation suggests European perceptions of US character as focussed on moral rigidity in the hermetic studio.
The strict studio also became associated with modernism.
Davis described a conversation with the US student in Paris in a in a studio that he perceived as empty.
And the artist explains, We believe in lines and subdued colours and broad, bare surfaces.
There is nothing in this room that has not a meaning of its own.
You are quite right. There's very little in it. But what is here could not be altered or changed without spoiling the harmony of the whole.
And nothing in it could be replaced or improved upon.
While the strip studio appears most frequently amongst younger generation of U.S. artists abroad,
Whistler's studio in the 1890s on the top floors of a purpose built studio building
on the ruinous condition marks an intriguing exception at the twilight of his career,
as Sarah Burns has argued. He began to cultivate an image of himself as a living old master in a photograph of his studio by George P. Jackson Hood.
Vertical panels lined the walls, which contemporaries described as painted in a quote flesh colour,
likely a pink peach or beige combination based on Whistler's use of that term to title a few of his paintings.
With all of the woodwork painted a quote dazzling white and with only a small, single framed image, perhaps a mirror on the wall.
While his display strategies converged with the hermetic, creative,
haughty conspiracy of Taft and Tanner Studios as Anna Gerstner Robbins and John Siebert have explored,
Whistler's Paris studio operated more as a place of sociality than a place of work, as suggested in this photograph by his conferring with a client.
Its clean lines operate in dialogue with the modern exhibition airy aesthetic he hoped he helped to promote.
So perhaps it evolved in parallel terms, an aesthetic engaged with the nationalist discourse of puritanism and spirituality.
Here subtly mingles with modernism. Works of art offered iterative expressions on this cultural map of American Paris
in the form of ephemeral displays sprinkled throughout the city and museums.
At the spring salons or at the artists clubs. And we're going to kind of time travel a bit.
Through 1889 and nineteen oh five, as we move between the loos, the salon of the National de Beaux Arts, which was located on the Shandon Mars.
And this is where all of the salon objects I mentioned for the rest of the talk were shown.
And I'll also briefly take us to the Palace of Social Economy at the Paris Exposition of 19:00,
which was located here for the remainder of the talk, also focussed on one thread which investigates the operations of gender within this period.
Sinister discourse and I've hinted to this a bit already in talking about the American Girls Club,
but thinking about how gender is being constructed through these exchanges,
as well as how a few women artists navigated this restrictive conversation.
And I'll briefly mentioned for anyone who's interested in following more about this conversation related to
gender I've organised with the Birkbeck Centre and Durham centres for nineteenth century studies in England,
a set of roundtables, and unfortunately this Fridays is sold out.
But there is another next Friday which is dealing specifically with gender.
Although a lot of the themes from this Friday discussion will resurface,
and I think my Twitch colleagues have posted a link for registration for that second round table,
so please do join us to dig deeper into this conversation.
In this period, women were often featured as metaphors of quote innocent flowers and anxieties about the adulteration of U.S. art in France,
and the female body became an allegorical site of temptation that embodied the need for protection.
If museum goers in the Louvre stumbled upon William John Whitmore working on his
picture of Charles Courtney Curran and painting in the classical gallery in 1888,
they might have noted an array of fragments of sculptures of female figures.
A recently restored crouching Aphrodite, a female, had a female pubic region.
The freeze of Celine and Endymion, in which the female character replaces her lover in an eternal sleep.
Yeah, in their passing across the composition with a more effectively sexualised is them hard
at work and painting with a small stick for steady control bowler hat on his head.
Karen evacuates all emotion and sensuality, even as he is directly nose to nose with a crouching Aphrodite,
countering the white marble made beige over time and wear with a more reserves the whitest whites in his painting for Curran's own collar.
Perhaps anticipating because Daniels later construction of the American colour
British critic Walter Armstrong's comments about what he described as a certain
coldness in American painting in 1889 with repressed emotion rendered like where he
described the calm infallibility of a surgeon resonate with Whitmore's aesthetic,
which itself played into ongoing discussions about the need for academic finish to prove the labour of production.
Society painter Julius the Blank stewards also articulated limited possibilities for
women in his gigantic life science drama Redemption Unmissable at the salon in 1985.
The headline for the New York Herald, which was picked up by newspapers across US cities,
described a quote orgy in the present day, noting the solitary woman in relief that left with a glowing Christ on the cross,
glaring down over her shoulder as she awakens to her moral quandary against the glittering lamps and crystals and debauchery around her to the right,
and which the New York Herald described as mystical and philosophical painting.
As Stewart mingled both in the U.S. artists community and in the elite US society in Paris,
viewers likely perceived the characters in the painting as enacting this imagined clash between US and Paris more Paris moral systems.
So here women's positions were restricted to being pure or perience.
How did U.S. women artists in Paris disrupt the systemic sexism that led to the dismembered or hypersexualized female body?
Some cultivated links between New England history and myth. Philadelphia painter Cecilia Bowles shipped her portrait of Connecticut,
her Connecticut cousin, Mrs. Julia Levitt Richards, across the Atlantic in 1896 for the salon.
Her iconography and titles in Paris, woman from Connecticut and in Pennsylvania.
New England women cultivated links with the American northeast.
French critic Charlotte, the dreamy who frequently wrote about US culture in general and American women in particular,
had the year before highlighted French perceptions of New England culture as focussed on a quote
simple and wholesome life full of work and religion with no time for vain regrets or idle dreams.
St. John's friends Paul beyond roots of both quotes respectable grandmothers who inspire veneration,
but also in echoes of the Puritan quote fear of reprimands in her studio and in wearing Mary White.
The woman is associated with virginal purity.
And years ago, a colleague suggested that this composition also reminds of George Stella towards Magdalene paintings.
And I think that's a beautiful comparison. She sits here idle but poised by mental activity.
Her newspaper held briefly down closed books on the table beside the candle.
Bow offers, though, a wily transnational pairing, not only registering international expectations of the innocence and stoicism of her sister,
but also by exploring painting techniques which were in this period associated with Paris.
Beau had studied in Paris and Kano from 19 1888 to 1889,
and her dynamic study of colours within the Whites and her actions facture resonates
with Impressionism and with Whistler's Symphony in white to number one the white girl,
which had been exhibited at the salon geoglyph,
you say in Paris in 1863, enhanced with occasional periwinkle and violet strokes to juxtapose the sitter's peach face,
bow emphasise the shades of white in the woman's dress handkerchief that close curtain and chair using blue and yellow and violet for shadows.
The only pure white on the painting comes in the heightening articulated in the impasto that you can see in this detail.
Eugene Benson had noted in the 1860s that the quote roots of American life in Puritanism must forever keep the artistic sentiment subordinates.
In other words, that's art making and puritanism were incompatible, but French critics saw something ennobling in those moral figure.
Beyond wrote that both salon submissions revealed Quote a side of America free from Henry retired and tranquil,
and we rest content and meditated in the atmosphere created by her admirable talent beyond connected,
both style and subject explicitly with US identity, and I quote again from him his her brush is wholly at ease.
Intimately American and shows us ways simple. The true, though remote.
The peaceful drying of your family morals beyond comments attempted to cement what we're fluid links between character,
morality, nationalism and painting practise.
Pleased to see pictures quote as pretty as plums on a tree, he joked about the identical references endemic in American Paris.
Madame Cecilia Blueprint's presents us to them. Let me start that again.
Madame Cecilia Bello presents them to us like fruits from the garden.
Is that not indeed American? A photograph by Atlanta based black photographer Thomas Askew,
which was included in the volume types of American Negroes at the exhibit of American Negroes in the Paris Exposition in nineteen hundred,
just around the corner from where the Puritan sculpture was installed taps into the same
discourse of strident work ethic and moral steadfastness that fuelled HBO's painting.
This exhibition, which we'll turn to in much greater detail next week,
engaged with such traits to define progress in the African-American community following emancipation.
A light skinned black nursing student in three quarter view in her starched white uniform sits studiously reading a book.
Her work ethic on full display. The prose composition,
contemplation and insistent layered tones of white as a signal of steadfastness recall
those New England women here to delicately decorates the wall behind the woman's chair,
and the cultivated plant reminds of social uplift. Those excuse and this unknown sitter's engagement with the visual culture of focus and work ethic
suggests that white male artists in Paris who did not have a monopoly on the Puritan discourse.
Academic painter Lucy Lee Robbins took another tack to challenge constrictions for American or for US women artists in life and art.
She achieved achieved critical success in Paris with her paintings of nude women,
most of which are unfortunately currently unallocated, although many were reproduced in the salon,
catalogues her iconography and purported affair with instructor Kylie Jahan,
and led her to be vilified by the US community in Paris, as art historian Brandon Fortune has considered.
Lee Robbins adopted the female nude as a subject and divorced her from mythological
contexts in ways that unsettled U.S. viewers anxious about Paris temptation.
In Indomie at right, the artist is positioned over a bed on which a nude woman sleeps.
Her body almost fully available to the viewer who stands looking down at her.
The US community in Paris linked lascivious ness in her art with their perceptions of her immorality.
Yet Lee Robbins exhibited annually at the salon for over three decades and four times at the American Girls Club between 1981 in 1993,
and her successful academic career belied the moralising discourse that framed
her before her marriage in the mid 1890s as a form of misogynist mimicry.
Her nudes challenged the assertion that U.S. women could not manage the foreign art scene.
Women artists like Bill and Lee Robbins Revere reverberating as well in his photographs pushed at the edges of these constructions.
Yet most U.S. women artists in Paris in the period did not have the critical or artistic success of these
outliers and remained more confined by anxieties about the morality and godlessness of U.S. women abroad.
As the Russian painter and Paris Marie Best Skirts commented,
women who challenged limitations on their liberty quickly found themselves further restricted.
So not only the Puritan then, but the culture of American Paris, as refracted and contested through puritanism,
was wrapped up in the cloak of Saint Garden sculpture on the Paris Exposition Grounds in nineteen hundred.
Yet it is in this cloak where the Puritans contradictions are perhaps most of parents.
As Jennifer Greenhill has observed,
this billowing and dynamic coat undercuts the forward inertia and the rigidity of the figure building a paradoxical instability.
The Puritan was an archetype and a gambit in terms taken up and subverted in Paris.
Both a restriction and a possibility in religious and secular contexts.
It was also a layered transnational symbol that was passed back and forth between French and US viewers.
Critics and artists in both text and image For many U.S. artists,
the adoption of stereotypes of the Puritan was both a defensive and offensive gesture.
Defensive in the sense of constructing these hermetic spaces designed to separate a US culture from French society and offensive
in the sense that there was a tone of trying to improve aspects of French life and culture that many Americans scorned.
The reissued placement of these objects locates them not only spatially,
but also shows the operations of discourse as an ever dynamic constellation across the city.
It reads Scribes the cultural colonisation of this innocent righteousness abroad,
while emphasising how artists who were minorities by the Puritan structure due to race and gender identities navigated and manipulated the concept.
Thank you for your time and attention, and I welcome one to back to talk through some of this material further.
All right, I am. Hi, Wanda. Hi. Elbows criss crossed, implanting a transatlantic move here.
Oh, that was a very interesting talk and so interesting to see your your argument building from last week to this week this week,
more maybe on the performative side of of innocents abroad or at least making,
making making something of innocence and making it a stance, a construction on an ethics to live by and and so on,
and various ways in which you bring that out in the church, the clubs, the studio construct the new kind of studio that that that you've detected.
I want to return to that in just a second.
Let me just remind our audience to this is the moment to pop your questions into the chat box and we'll see if we can't get to them to give to Emily.
I wasn't really just love your mappings. I'm always interested.
Ask about how making our own maps these days, thanks to the internet is possible,
but I love the way you showed us the relations on both the right and the left bank of these various hotspots,
if you will, of the American, would you call it the American corner of the world unto itself?
But to be able to see where actually an American artist abroad would would walk, what the territory the region would look like of of his or her?
Paris, that was that was very beautifully done. And I know they take time.
So thanks. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
And let me just maybe launch a question that came up in my mind when you talk about the minimalist cleaned up studio,
I was fascinated by that because my acquaintance with and I don't have the full range of studios that you looked at,
and that's what was very heavy because I do know the Whistler example and I know Sargent's studios abroad.
But and and your way in which you do bring in modernism, which is what I was kind of hanging on because I've always thought of these studios as an,
if you will, a new model of how to the the place in which to work.
And then I was I have a question, but I presume these work spaces also not the little sleep spaces, but the Tanner studio, for instance,
may also have been places where commerce took place,
where there was the collector or the person interested in talking to the artist about the commission and so on would also come.
But the question is really about the intersection of your construction of of of
puritanism with modernism and another space in which I think that's happening.
But tell me if this fits your your study is primarily a Gilded Age study and more or less around World War One,
but that does encompass something like a topic close to my heart as Gertrude Stein's studio,
in which I can certainly make an argument for the bohemian presence in the way she concocted that studio,
the sounds that she had on on a weekly basis with her brother, Leo.
But maybe just the open question. The open ended question is this interface between modernism and puritanism?
And does it go beyond the studio when the space I was just suggesting or just elaborate a little bit more on that, if you would.
Thank you so much, Monica. That's such a rich question. And I think that one of the things that has been sort of tricky to pass in this material
is the kind of visual simulacrum between kind of Whistler's Studio and Tanner Studio,
for instance, even though as artists, they're at different moments in their career and they're positioning themselves in different ways.
And I really admire a lot of the scholarship from, say,
the last 10 years that has really rethought the role of religion in modernism, like thinking it out and signs of grace.
Kristen Swain's book and, for instance, amongst amongst many others.
And I think that I do want to suggest, and I think we can suggest that there is more kind of overlap and cohesion between these values.
But I think the other piece that you're bringing in is the kind of thread of bohemian studio practise that does appear in some circles.
And I think that Stein's case is really interesting, one,
because she is cultivating a kind of cosmopolitan space where she is gathering kind of artists from all over who are based in Paris in her salons.
And there are some U.S. artists in Paris who go there, but that doesn't seem to me.
To be her main focus of kind of how she's inserting herself in this more avant garde conversation.
But I think that in the context of the studios of artists who are more academic like Tanner's,
there is a kind of tone of greater tie with a kind of nationalist connexion, perhaps than what Stein is building.
And I think too, as ever, with these kind of discourses,
there are always exceptions and certainly there are artists who shed this kind of Puritan discourse entirely
and take up this kind of bohemian ethos that's that's constructed and imagined and real for some in Paris.
Yeah. And I'm wondering, I don't know quite how you bring this all to a closure in your bigger study, but I'm wondering if,
in fact, part of the closure might not be a increasing if you will desire to be bohemian as an American abroad.
And that brings us to the post-war generation post-World War One generation very desirous of even becoming an expat in the 20s
because of that very bohemian culture which is being in your during your period is more suspect if you think too long to.
That point speaks to the performative nature of all of this,
because some of the artists who claim this insularity and this kind of Puritan ethos in Paris,
when they go back to the U.S., they'll celebrate their bohemian lives in Paris.
Like Joseph Henry, Schaap writes about having a Latin quarter Thanksgiving in Cincinnati when he got back,
and they kind of celebrated how they celebrated Thanksgiving in Paris at the American Artists Club,
but then dressed as kind of French artists with berets and said There's this way in which this identity is kind of tried on in Paris,
but then shared an inverted upon return to the U.S. even in the 1890s.
Yeah, that's very interesting. That's an earlier example than mine.
Mine example would be Grant Wood, who also brought back customs, and he started something called the Garlic Club, which was the Beach Club.
I mean, this is not necessarily a bohemian custom. It's a French custom,
but the rubbing of the of the salad bowl with with with garlic before you put in the oil and vinegar
and so on was thought to be kind of a French affectation that he returned to Cedar Rapids with.
But he also tried to set up something that in the 20s, he disavowed this.
Later in the 30s, but in the 20s, he tried to set up something that was called the Latin Quarter or the Latin Quarter of Cedar Rapids.
So he doing something similar to to sharp. Well, one of our commentators, one of our questioners, I don't have a country for this for Jane.
But Jane, actually, I think is touching on she's sort of feeling sorry for those in the American Quarter because what they're losing out on.
So, she writes, the Americans who unfortunately chose not to mix with the French because of
language or religion and so on word that weren't they left the poorer for it?
Maybe Jane's from France or from someone who's had a very influential experience?
Yeah, no. Absolutely. Comment, Jane. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jane.
It's so true. I mean, as as a person who values cosmopolitan exchange and thinks about how dissenting one's
perspective is one of the most important things that kind of adult citizen of the world can do.
It's hard to read some of these comments about the insularity that's happening.
And like, there is a comment that's in the larger chapter from an artist who says,
like, basically, you don't need to talk to anyone when you get to Paris,
you just get in a taxi and you show them the address of the American artist club and they will take you there.
And then from there you'll find everything that you need and you'll kind of be implicated in the satellite America.
And certainly that comes at a loss. But I think it also speaks to the ways in which a kind of corporate structure starts to form in Paris,
that Americans are going as this kind of rite of passage.
They want to gain technical training. They want to kind of go through this as a phase and most of them not intending to ever stay in the long term.
And some of them were quite successful, and some of them did stay forever.
But many of them never even exhibited in the salons, which were one of the big goals that they had.
And so these artists clubs, those set up many exhibitions where artists who were club members could show their work.
And so. Some of the some artists use this as a kind of stepping stone to more professional and international spaces.
But for some artists, that was the kind of pinnacle of their their Paris time.
But I think too, there were just so many thousands of artists who were going.
And so while this is indicative of a kind of thread that recurs throughout the material,
we have a whole array of experiences that kind of results in a complicated network.
Well, Jane is just self-identified as American. So when Rachel has asked after thanking you for your talk,
would you say a little bit more about the defensiveness of these artists in relationship to Catholicism?
For example, she's wondering about Tanners Marian images.
That's a great question, Rachel, thank you. And it is a kind of recurrent comment in letters that I've found between the 1850s and
the early 20th century where people write about going to the gothic cathedrals in Paris,
for instance, and they find themselves kind of fascinated with this.
Basically what they see as an antiquity of architecture.
But when they attend the service, they see a kind of ritual that they find to be and they find themselves disconnected from.
And they find that they are the kind of collective worship to is something that they often comment upon in their letters.
And in the 1850s, there's a great letter by an American woman who was in Paris, who was there when the American Church first opened,
and she writes about what it feels like to go to church at an American church worshipping in a kind of Protestant based structure.
And what that felt like. And so it's something that is kind of often discussed, but I think it's kind of a kind of critique of ritual.
And the question about Tanner is a really rich one, and I'm not sure at this moment I'm equipped to answer it well,
except to point you to Anna Marley's wonderful Tanner catalogue that has many essays about Tanner's practise.
And also there's an essay by Alan Braddock about Tanner and his religious paintings that's in the 19th century art worldwide.
And I think that Tanner is thinking about too religion in the sense of a personal experience, rather than perhaps a collective one.
And I think Braddock writes really evocatively about the ways in which he is trying to navigate
race in a more nuanced and compelling ways through the representation of biblical stories.
But I would have to dig further to get at your question of kind of how his belief system,
as registered through his religious paintings, engages with ideas of Catholicism.
So that's a great question, and I will dig into it. One last question.
Emily, I think it's all we have time for, but this one comes from Jessica making the comment that the austere artist studios are so like
the New England boarding house bedrooms of female mill workers from earlier in the 19th century.
And she wonders, and I think maybe this is a statement where there are similar moral and religious anxieties.
I think that's really more an observation and giving you another sort of, if you will, another kind of a space and to compare your studios.
Yeah, that's a really wonderful thought. Thank you. I don't know the images directly that you're speaking about that.
I would imagine that in the same way, especially with regard to collection collectives of women,
that there is, especially when women are kind of lodging together,
which at the case of the American Girls Club was the structure and to an American woman named Anna
Lester wrote about wanting to live at the American Girls Club but not finding a space there available.
But then a club would recommend other boarding houses and other organisations where one could reside.
And so thinking about how it maybe because of anxieties about prostitution that shape
laws about how many women still in some states can even live in the same building,
there is this tone of morality that gets inflected.
But it's interesting. Your comment makes me think that class is also something that I might address more in thinking about the
women who are participating in the artists clubs in Paris and and this kind of rhetoric of protection.
Emily, when you get stateside next and presumably the national parks reopen, you must come to Lowell,
Massachusetts, where the there's a national park dedicated to the Mill Mills of Lowell,
Massachusetts, and you can go to some of the dormitories or I don't think they're even distinguished enough to be called boarding houses,
but maybe they were.
But in any case, you get to see some of these bedrooms and they look a lot like that image of TAFEs in the maid's quarters that that you show.
Well, it's now my job to close this down because we've reached the bewitching hour.
Thank you all for being with us. Thank you for sending in your questions.
And certainly big thanks to Emily for her thought-provoking lecture today.
We thank tortured Oxford for hosting it.
Jeff Machin for also hosting not only Emily and her programme, but also this session today.
Join us next week, the third in the Tara lecture series, where she will be joined by James B. Smalls,
the professor and chair of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Her lecture at that time and in a week with entitled Primitive Dash or Incipient,
I hope you will all be able to join us again then and there'll be a fourth lecture, of course, two weeks from now.
Thank you all. Thank you, Emily.
Wish this could be person, but I love the fact that we are, I'm sure, beaming this to many quarters around the world that cares about American art.
So thanks very much, everyone. And good evening to some of you and good lunch hour to those of us on the East Coast.
Bye bye.