Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the fourth and final lecture 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 for both 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.
This year, the terror visiting professor is Emily C. Burns.
My name is Jeff Bachem, and I'm head of the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford.
Our thanks go to the Terra Foundation and to torch the hosting the 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, this evening's lecture, if you have any questions,
please feel free to type them in the YouTube chat box below, and we will do our best to answer as many of them as part of the session.
We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and moderated by my colleague, Alister Wright,
an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and affiliated with St. John's College here at Oxford.
Elsa writes research focuses primarily on European modernism.
His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004.
More recently, he curated an exhibition of Paul Gurgaon's prints at the Princeton University Art Museum.
The accompanying catalogue, Gurgaon's Paradise, remembered the No.
One, No Prince examined the role played by reproduction in Gergen's understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti.
Alister has since published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin,
Burlington Magazine Gazette, The Bazaar Art Forum, 19th century art worldwide and in various edited volumes.
It's my absolute pleasure to welcome Alice to this evening and now Alice to handle the proceedings to you.
Thank you. All right. Thank you, Jeff.
It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce Speaker Emily Burns for the fourth and final in her series of terror lectures in American art.
Emily is an associate professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar
of transnational transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Amongst her many significant publications are her 2018 book Transnational Frontiers The American West in France,
published with University of Oklahoma Press and a forthcoming Rutledge anthology entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts,
co-edited with Alice M. Rudy Price.
This year, she is the Terra Foundation for American Art visiting professor in the Department of History of Art here in Oxford,
but she has been making a hugely positive and important contribution, both as a teacher.
My students are delighted to have her here and is a very highly appreciated colleague, amongst other things.
She has been greatly enriching the research culture of the department, not least through her work on her soon to be completed book manuscript,
conforming innocence, cultural relatedness and US art in fantasy at Club Paris.
And it's from this project that today's talk is drawn. So again, it is with real pleasure that I welcome Emily and turn them over to her.
Thank you so much, Alastair and Jeff.
And you did. All right, I'll start again. Thank you so much,
Alastair and Jeff and all of my colleagues and students here at the University of Oxford
for making what is a tricky time to be a visiting professor abroad so fulfilling.
I also think the Terra Foundation for supporting this professorship,
as well as my church colleagues, especially Liz, Holly and Kristina, for managing the online series.
In 1998, Mary Cassatt included the Mirror in a solo exhibition after Andrew Wall's Paris Galleries.
The composition uses two mirrors to layer and refract figures of a woman and a child.
A synchrony in bright, contrasting colours juxtaposes the woman's yellow dress with a large sunflower over her breast pink upholstery,
peeking through around the folds of that dress and a mint green chair frame,
which bleeds into the matching green frame of the mirror without any ground line.
The chair is tilted at an awkward angle from which the figures teeter forward.
In this uneasy, irregular space,
the child with bulbous belly is uncomfortably placed astride the mother's knee as she adjusts the child's position by its shoulder,
proximity and distance between the mirror on the wall are complicated by the scale
of the chair and the relative to munition of the figures in that back reflection.
While the mother figure appears twice, the child appears thrice.
In painted body painted wall mirror and in the handheld mirror held by both mother and
child as the mothers gaze deflects our attention back to the child's handheld reflection.
She's relegated to the background as the child's active gaze engages itself and the viewer already thick with texture.
The painting is most layered with busy and dense brush strokes on that mirror round roundel,
as though this elements becomes the fulcrum externalising the interior layers of the child through the face.
These strokes fracture further this already past self through the multiple reflections.
This painting is one of hundreds of mother child scenes that Cassatt made between the 1880s and the early 20th century in the period,
and often still today because that is claimed as an iconic and sentimental painter of this feminine iconography.
Yet critics in the period did not always see her paintings in this way.
In 1881, Albert Wolfe noted occasional quote deformed and monstrous corners in her paintings.
In 1892, the French critic shortly noted that her quote baby's gesticulate with exquisite uncertainty and clumsiness.
In 1895, a reviewer for The New York Times concurred that cassettes paintings are quote frequently, hard crude and have a tendency toward the brutal.
The critic elaborated, And I quote again in harmonious masses of uncomplimentary colour are brought side by side and shock.
The eye of strength at times out of keeping with the subject is noticeable and takes away in a measure for the charm of femininity.
Looking at the Mirror, the art historian Rebecca Gardell has recently reiterated this tension,
some critics observed between the subject matter and the rough and textured surface,
which Fidel reads as a quote skirmish with the sentimental as the artist concedes to it in her subject matter.
Yet lashes at it with her brush.
Other scholars, especially Hollis Gleason, have pressed on the awkwardness of the parent child relations in consorts paintings,
especially in the scale distortions between the gangly and sometimes even gigantic toddlers,
and the parental figures whom, as Nancy M. Matthews has observed, increasingly become pedestals for the more dynamic and layered children.
Gleason reads these visual tensions as indicative.
Of course, that's perpetual struggle to paint the nude form within socially acceptable conditions and more importantly,
for our purposes today as quote indices of her dilemma as a voluntary exile with hybrid and contested cultural nationality.
Not quite French, though she lived in France for most of her life,
where she exhibited in the last four of the eight impressionist exhibitions in Paris and not quite American.
Due to that, expatriation, corset occupies a fraught transnational space increasingly characterised by uneasy belonging
rather than mere maternal affection or symbiotic absorption between mother and child.
Many of kickstarts paintings speak to other cultural conversations, and in this lecture, I propose to supplement Mathews read on cassettes,
modern madonnas and Claassens read on her voluntary exile with another lens through
which to understand cassettes complex and often uneasy mother child relations.
And that is the transnational dialogue between France and the United States,
in which France was often declared the artistic mother of U.S. artists who were figured as children,
as scholars working on representations of children in the United States and France.
In this period, including Barbara de Galati, Greg Thomas, Robin Bernstein and Anna Green, amongst others,
have shown meanings associated with childhood were fluid and shaped in dialogue with use, a symbol for deference in academic training.
A modernist icon of independence. A reference to white innocence to structure racial difference.
And a psychological foil for adulthood.
The implications of Castparts precocious and layered children might be understood in dialogue with the wider spectrum
of possibilities explored by many U.S. artists working and exhibiting in Paris in both academic and modernist contexts,
including Edwin Blanchfield and Henry,
also a tenor amongst other women artists who took up the motif of the child, including Cecilia Boo and Ellen Emmett Rand,
taking Cassatt as a fractal in the larger kaleidoscope of paintings of adult child relationships made by U.S. artists in Paris.
This talk explores the anxious terrain in which the child signalled deference and independence in turns in dialogue with narratives
of French influence on US arts and in dialogue with modern psychology in ways that are also linked with French and US colonialism.
In 1900, the critic Richard Whiting defined nations in terms of human generations, noting quote,
The ages of nations might be fixed by correspondence with the ages of individual man.
And of course, in his estimation, France was old and the United States young.
As literary historian Malcolm Bradbury has argued of the founder Sierra Club and quote,
Oedipal formation between the United States and Europe was based on measuring
out the way the child differed from the parent or the new world from the old.
If the American, if America was the newborn child of history, Europe was the presumed parents.
Many art critics used this foil to highlight French artistic and cultural superiority by figuring France the quote mother of the arts.
According to one critic and the United States as a dependent child.
French critic and Chenault wrote in 1867 about the role of the Universal Exposition in Paris in
educating quote nations still in their infancy to extract precious fruit from the lessons of Europe.
In 1890, Rudolph Giuliani, the founder of the academy Julien,
where many U.S. artists studied to find the Franco American artistic relationship as follows The American school is an offshoot of our own.
It was born. And baptised in Paris.
And in spite of or perhaps because of all of the awards given to us artists in Paris, at the Expo in nineteen hundred,
the French critic lay on place scoffed that U.S. artists were still as infants wearing large,
which are diapers who exhibited quoting from him only excessive submission before their masters.
This discourse of France as artistic motherland reverberates in paintings like William Bigelow's 1883 Alma Perrins or the Motherland,
in which nine sturdy children compete for the mother's breasts and gaze fondly at her as she stoically stares at the viewer.
In a period in which U.S. artist journals and letters abound,
with comments about their French teachers referring to them as children and listings in the salon catalogues
emphasising a lineage of art study by publishing the name of the teacher alongside the name of the pupil.
Hugo's painting allegories as French artistic centrality, one of the most avidly collected painters by U.S. patrons.
The year before, the artist had become a full faculty member at the Academy's through the end photographs of boogaloo,
seated at the centre, surrounded by his male and female students,
implying what a contemporary described as his quote entirely paternal role for his young students, whom one critic described as embryo painters.
In 1883, the same year as Booker was, painting was installed at the salon.
The French critic Arthur S. Chirac reminded his readers that international artists quote, all too equal degrees sucked art from French breasts.
Chirac presented an image of France as artistic mother.
The rest of the world her children inculcated in the arms of the French Academy and scholars have observed the
nationalistic tone in the central figures deep blue and white clothing with red flowers added to the wheat wreath,
and I realised the colour is a little bit off. It looks like her robe is black, but it's actually a deep blue.
Building on Republican imagery like Honoré Adams's midcentury allegory of the French Republic,
Bulgaria's strong triangular composition evokes stability and centrality.
Yeah, it's such steadiness and permanence hides French anxieties in this period after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
One art historian has suggested that the stormy mountains background in the painting
refers to Alsace and the home to French territories that were annexed during the war.
After that, crushing defeats and with many discussions of declining birth rates, France's civilisation was feared to be on the wane.
As Robert Nye has shown, birth rates in France fell far behind those of the rest of Europe and the United States between 1890 and 1895.
Death rates exceeded birth rates in France annually, inciting a repopulation movement.
In this context,
we might read pictures that celebrate France as cultural motherland as an absorption of anxieties about the declining French populace.
Even if French power were on the wane, it remains the cultural superior.
Further, Google are very skin tone between white and beige and olive flesh across the children in his painting,
offering racial markers that build ideas of difference absorbed into that French state in the context of concurrence,
French imperial projects underway in North Africa and Southeast Asia,
the French motherland underscored the growth of French population through colonialism.
Hugo's painting implies that if the country were in question within the nation state through the spread of arts and colonialism,
French culture could still grow.
Some U.S. artists renderings of parent child relationships intercepts these complex discourses of art nation and imperial networks.
Academic painter Edwin Blast Fields approach typified in the music lesson of 1880 marks
a dutiful child in homage to the emulated relationship between French and U.S. painting.
The artist made the small painting just after studying at the Italia of Leon Boonah between 1867 and 1870 and again from 1874 to 1880.
The painting portrays a statuesque woman in Greco-Roman garb,
holding out a flute in demonstration and sitting in front of three cherubic children who positioned on the ground before her also hold small flutes.
The classical white children are simultaneously endearing and bumbling in their attempts to master their craft,
echoing what Blanchfield described as his artistic parentage.
He recalled his 1867 experience studying painting with Boehner, using the metaphor of a horse and child, both deferential creatures.
Quote We trotted along wearing blinders, not turning our eyes from side to side, but fixing them on the master.
In our first kindergarten of art training and before our vision was strong enough to bear looking upon more than one thing at a time.
The description of the eyes trained on the master closely aligns with the gaze of the children in their own kindergarten in the music lesson,
and this also played in Rugova's painting as well.
And Last Fields painting, I kind of graphically, stylistically and metaphorically allegories is learning and the experience of being taught.
His classical subject matter is appropriate for his adoption of the conventions of academic visual language,
which emphasised instruction and emulation of established artistic authorities.
Blanchfield carefully exhibits his academic lessons with his brushwork, his colour choices and his compositional construction.
He broadcasts his skill in modelling the human body,
particularly with the boy in the foreground for whom the brush strokes mind the play of light across the contours of his back.
His technique is modelled with a smooth a surface.
In the tradition of Boehner, who slightly later four steps indicates his own academic practise with another motif that highlights parentage,
Flash signed his painting at lower left with the date and the word Paris label
frequently appended to paintings made by U.S. artists in France in this period.
But Blanchfield didn't show this painting in Paris.
Rather, he exhibited it in 1880 in Boston and Philadelphia as an ideal display of the Fruits of art study in Paris,
as he was moving back to the United States to undertake academic instruction,
perpetuating ideas of the United States as heir to Western civilisation by quoting Greco-Roman subjects.
And indeed, this iconography framed much of Field's practise as he transitioned in the role between people and instructor.
The truth of Old Europe, crowned by young America,
circulated widely and dubbed in Anna Junkies 1898 photographic portrait of her partner Rosa Bonheur.
Yet some U.S. artists increasingly toyed with their models of deference to French tradition.
Three of Henry, also a Tanners first major compositions produced or exhibited in Paris in the early 1890s,
all engaged the theme of the lesson as a symbol of the diffusion of cultural knowledge in music and craft production.
Made in Brittany, the bagpipe lesson features a humorous triad at left the people's cheeks filled with air as they awkwardly blow into the mouthpiece,
and there's a distant spectre of a child watching.
This painting was rejected from the Paris salon, but shown in Philadelphia and Chicago in 1893, made in Philadelphia that exhibited in Paris in 1894.
Tanner's banjo lesson also takes up the notion of tutelage here,
with familial intergenerational tones begun before the banjo lesson and completed after it's the young Sybil
maker depicts an apprentice learning to make wooden shoes commonly produced in family workshops in Brittany,
where it was shown in the salon of 1895.
While Albert Bone has interpreted these lesson paintings through the transmission of skills in an African-American context,
in dialogue with the ideas of Booker T. Washington and in his attempts to redefine
more typically denigrating representations of banjo playing in minstrelsy,
Tanner's paintings have not yet been placed in a transnational dialogue with the French academic
system with which Tanner was actively in dialogue in the early 1890s since he arrived in Paris,
where he studied with genial charm Jean Joseph, Benjamin Johnson and Jean Paul Jones.
I think all three of the paintings, and especially the young cigar maker,
are weighing in and moderating similar questions about tutelage that inflect splash fields the music lesson.
In some ways, the painting imagines the same, almost controlling deference from apprentice to master.
Tanner's pose of the boy in profile, turning and pressing on a tool to carve out the inside of the shoes concentrates his effort on the labour.
The placement of the father figure in the background positions his own action, which you can see here,
and I will go forward to a detail to appear almost to be sculpting the same shoes with which the boy struggles.
And you can see that visual relationship here between the axe and the shoes in the foreground.
In this way, a heavy handed instructor carefully moulds the work of the novice.
Tanner's academic handling is apparent throughout the painting in building up
glazes with touches of impasto in the spirals of wood scattered around the floor.
On the other hand, an especially compared with Blanche Field's dutiful students, Tanner's apprentice is the focal point.
The instructor relegated to the background, his squash and pastel studies, which you see here, highlight the solitary effort of the boy's labour.
His motion, emphasised by the hatch marks that mimic his directed force.
Also present in the sketches is a mother figure who can see her here and back here and her back to the viewer,
and she's erased altogether in the exhibited painting. In tracing Tanner's relationship with African-American genre scenes of the period,
Dewey Mosby and Albert Boehm have suggested that The Apprentice represents a black or mixed race figure,
noting in particular the structure of his nose and lips.
I agree that the rendering is suggestive and ambiguous, and racial markers also represented differently across the sketches.
This more visible differentiation across those sketches merged together in the exhibited
version suggests that the artist is building an amalgamation of racial signifiers and effect,
which serves to universalise that figure, as Alan Braddock argues about Tanner's quote Ambiguous racial construction of Christ.
Just a few years later, such a melding of signifiers suggests Tanner's critiques of race,
and here I'm quoting again from Braddock as an epistemological category.
In this way, the divisions amongst Booker was raised. Children perhaps become adapted into a single figure,
an icon of the diverse art student body working in fantastical Paris, while the young sable maker was shown at the salon.
French critics did not comment. On the painting,
and US critics seem to map narratives of the pupils discarded simple attempts all over the floor as indicative of the painter's phase.
Helen Cole emphasised it as part of Tanner's path to an incipient individual practise.
The New York Times concurred that the painting still reveals quote traces of academic lessons,
but Tanner would soon outgrow these kinds of claims concurrent with Black Fields and
Tanner's paintings of lessons and dynamic debates about emulation and innovation.
Cassatt made statements of her own spirit of independence and defiance of structures and institutional practises.
For instance, in the painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,
which was exhibited in the fifth impressionist exhibition in 1879, the seated girl overwhelming an oversized chair.
Her pose and gaze suggests her wilful rejection of adult expectations implied by the living room made one year before Blanche Field's music lesson.
The painting defied the academic language that Blanchfield idolised, but Carson's painting was not immune to the politics of influence.
The painting also established her complicated artistic relationship with her French contemporaries,
including Edgar Dagar, whom she said helped to paint the background.
Some critics read their artistic relationship as a master pupil connexion akin to bona and blast fields,
because that meant that spent much of her the rest of her career denying the influence of dagga.
And, as Matthews has shown, turned increasingly to mother and child compositions as a move away from shared iconography and as a sustained,
mature art practise for the rest of her career, she played with figure ground relationships,
the fictions of space moderating between naturalistic renderings of awkward gangly toddlers and stylised figurines of renaissance and baroque models.
In many of the mother child paintings, the limbs of the child seem overgrown in relation to the scale of the mother.
These visual effects are enhanced by the placement of the disjointed figures pressed up to
the front of the picture plane with radically diagonal compositional elements behind them.
Her paintings seem to draw on ideas of the child as a metaphor for fresh vision, which began in mid-century and circulated around the Impressionists.
Gustav Corb had included two child muses in the artist's studio from 1855, one positioned at centre,
looking up at the artist and another sprawled at the right of the composition on the floor,
on top of a large sheet of paper making a schematic drawing of a figure Charles
Baudelaire declared in his 1863 discussion of the painter of modern life.
That's quote genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.
But for Baudelaire, it was an adapted and volitional childhood.
He continued to describe a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood capacities and power of analysis.
A cartoon in Harper's in 1885 joked about the lengths artists might go to adapt the child's perspective.
The last scene figures a painting before his, a painter before his canvas, using Let me see what do I need with which to produce this effect?
As he reaches towards his table of materials where a child watches in paint in the second image,
the painter has scooped up that child top of the table and starts rubbing the boy's head against
the canvas while looking up to the sky as though channelling the artist's the child's energy.
This representation literally rises, but also marks the idea of de skilling and the mantra of the child's perspective.
Some proponents of the child as an icon for fresh vision warned of studying academic practise too closely.
In the ambassadors, Henry James described the fate of Little Dylan as an art students quote study had been fatal to him,
and his productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew.
In Blanche Howard's 1884 novel Gwenn, about American artists in Brittany, the main character,
Hammer similarly stated quote If I could paint better pictures for never having learnt to read,
I would gladly blot out of my life the little education I possess.
One of the illuminated capitals at the start of a chapter imagines an artist
child holding a palette basically the size of his body before a massive canvas.
The scale of his painting tool suggest that these devices lead his acts of
painting visible in swirls and childlike doodles on the surface of the canvas.
The child steps forward as though he could. Walk straight into the space of the picture and the child overall in these conversations is registering
a form of resistance to artistic prototypes and tradition by symbolising an untrained eye.
In 1991, the US critic Maria Taylor Blue Velt summed up the goal of artistic temperaments in the New York magazine.
The book via quotes The artist is the child who becomes more and more of a child as the years go on.
Re situated in this discourse, if articulating a knowing version of the child's perspective was a central goal of modernism, Cassatt realises it.
Gone is the model of the baby nestled comfortably in French motherhood, also evoked in the Dish Decisions 1865 mural of Picardy in Amy,
in which Judith Barter links with the Mirror for that sunflower while pooh.
These babies suckle and sleep because that child is alert's upright, independent and engaged.
And the placement of the flower directly over the mother figures breast seems a witty comment on Pulis's rendition of France as artistic motherhood,
because that's paintings also connect with psychological currents emerging in the 1880s,
which offered new ideas about the subjectivity and creative potential of the child, as well as how child parent relationships operate in adolescence.
The idea of the child as a dutiful extension of parents or a miniature adults
was supplanted by that of the child as a unique individual with an independent,
imaginative life. G Stanley Hall spearheaded an effort to better understand the capacity of the child as an innately self-aware individual.
Powell and other U.S. psychologists, in particular,
declared a greater internal capability and emotional independence even for young children than Europeans,
and prescribes the role of motherhood to encourage opportunities for children self-assertion to develop their imaginative faculties.
In the period after Darwin's theory of evolution were published, childhood took on a greater significance as an agent of human progress.
As Carolyn Steedman has explored,
the American evolutionary theorist John Fisk argued that extended infancy was actually the centre of human development.
Quote It is babyhood that has made man what he is.
Fisk declared in 1889, he characterised childhood as a period of plasticity,
describing moulding and shaping of the forms of the child on the interior,
as well as their exterior growth, while Cassatt drew from traditional iconography and her use of mother and child subjects.
She highlights the artificiality of the painted image with those spatial inconsistencies dappled brushwork,
elongated limb and the thick impasto on the children's faces in the process of building these non-metallic fictions.
She emphasises the plasticity of the child because that's dense and textured.
Brushwork creates a sense of visual dynamism,
and though the child's form is caught in the process of becoming evolving and separating from the parent figure.
Discovering the presence of its own subjective minds in this way.
Aesthetic formation unfolds with subject formation.
Cassatt literally says this relationship, as Matthews has observed by frequently displaying unfinished work.
A close corollary to custards,
mirror and the layers of reflection and refraction within is Henry James's portrayal of his child protagonist in what Maisie knew of 1897,
which imagines the child's perspective intuitive and complex beyond the language to convey thoughts and feelings.
Anticipating Sigmund Freud interest in children's quote, receiving and reproducing impressions,
James offers and I quote from what Maisie knew of register of impressions to explore Maisie's interior self.
Her quote small expanding consciousness in which she comprehends more than she can
articulate about the convoluted sexual relationships of her divorced parents.
Maisie self awareness belies her age and develops the idea quote of an inner self.
Midway through the novel, James announces Maisie's ironic possession of a quote innocence so saturated with knowledge.
Twice in the novel,
James use the metaphor of being flattened against a pane of glass to register the meeting between Maisie's consciousness and the world.
James describes quote, The sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's mean supports the long habit.
From the first of seeing herself in discussion, it gave her often an odd air of being present at her history.
In a separate a manner as if she could get only get it experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass,
Maisie peers out at the world from her newly self-reflexive,
subjective position, feeling quote henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard windowpane of the sweet shop of knowledge.
Croissants, children are constructed in similar terms to James's formulation,
pressed and flattened at the edge between interiority and exterior pretty as some scholars, including Griselda Pollock, has have observed,
Carson's paintings seem to anticipate shock collections later concept of the mirror stage in psychoanalytic theory,
in which the child recognises their reflection in the mirror and discovers that the dynamic image is separate from the South.
This spark of subjectivity at in the terms,
the quote threshold of the visual world and operating spatially marks a fragmented self because that's mirror builds out that fragmentation,
literally passing the child's body across these three different modes of display.
None of them are real frames of mirror and of chair only echo and a frame around the picture, all evoking a shifting relation allergy.
If James is, Maisie has a gap between experience and language because that's dynamic.
Structures build a visual language to bridge that because that's practise is particular but not entirely unique.
Other U.S. women artists working in France and sending paintings abroad also explored these kinds of discourses of child psychology and independence.
In Cecilia Boar's Lead Danielle Edgerton, France, which she sent to Paris in 1887 as her first salon submission,
the boys scrutinising gaze from his mother's lap is focussed out of the picture plane, breaking the intimacy between them.
The French, the paintings French title, which for Beau was, quote, never translatable or to be spoken in English.
But if we were to, you would roughly be.
The last days of childhood implies a sense of mourning for the mother as the child ages ages beyond their past intimacies.
The art historian Nina Auerbach argues that the painting quote does everything to separate its subjects.
There is nothing universal about this dynamic pair,
nor do mother and child corroborates in a circle of repose in a photograph taken just before the painting travelled to Paris.
Vogue posed beside it.
But with the mother figure oddly cropped out of the frame as though she just placed that figure or identified herself more with the child as both,
acknowledge the viewer.
Ellen Amet Rand, another US artist working in Paris in the late 1890s, used her Half-Brother Grenville Hunter as a model for her paintings,
whether a drawing in a shared sketchbook which she bought at a Paris art supply store that renders the
child in three dimensions as he pressure presses his back against an imaginary wall and in particular,
his face merging with white heightening and a shadow behind his head or in her many larger paintings in oil,
Rand probes the brooding psychology of Hunter's inner life.
Born in 1892 and residents in London near their cousin Henry, James Hunter and Rand on visits from France, we're connected with James.
While he was writing what Maisie knew and ongoing dramas of their mother also resonate in James's novel.
For more on Rand's, please check out a newly published, edited volume by Alexis Boylan.
In a period in which women artists were often infantilized and encouraged to take
up the iconography of mother and child as though it were somehow natural to them,
Cassatt, Bow and Rand all take up the motif.
But de naturalise it as they chart squirming sassy, oversized, complex figures in experimental compositions which do not acquiesce to models.
Because that's paintings resonates with the tensions between emulation and independence in the discourse that
declared American artists the children of French models as Cleese and Kevin Sharp and Adrian Richardson have argued,
because that's transnational position meant that her participation in the French art world was by no means assured.
She ratcheted up this iconography as these dynamics shift.
And so while she participates in four of the impressionist exhibitions between 1879 and 1886, everything changes by the end of the 1880s.
The group punts clever, with which Cassatt had long been affiliated, retitled itself in 1890 one lap dance clubs of Marseilles,
excluding her and other expatriate members from an exhibition only about three months before.
And Cassatt had been building a major print project for that show when she found out that she would be excluded from it.
French exhibition spaces increasingly close to themselves to foreign artists publishing pamphlets complaining about an invasion of U.S. artists,
in particular into a saturated art world. The same anxieties about French artistic legacy that shaped boogaloo as motherland
are operational here because that was excluded from the centennial exhibition
of French art in the Paris Expo in nineteen hundred because of her nationality
and also from a retrospective of Impressionism in London in Nineteen Oh five.
She was omitted from win for Doo Doo Hearst and Theodore Dollface books on the history of Impressionist painters in the same period.
Suggestively, French critics labelled her consistently as both a quote painter of childhood and as an American
painter in ways that featured Ben has shown dissociate her from the history of French Impressionism.
At the same time, interest for Carson's paintings increased in the United States,
while Cassatt may have explored the restive child as an artistic statement of her independence.
U.S. critics increasingly appropriated these visual effects for national ends.
By 1910, American critics like Clara McChesney declared the quote direct and spontaneous delineation of facades brushwork
as evidence of her quote Americanism instead of linking her stylistic approach with French Impressionism.
U.S. reviewers insisted that that brushwork, fittingly coupled with those independent children, signified.
And here again, I quote American self-sufficiency and assertiveness.
This became all the more apparent when several of her mother child paintings
hung on a single line in the 1915 suffrage exhibition at Nola's in New York.
And I'm grateful to my Oxford, Ph.D., students research assistants Alex Sullivan for compiling,
for me clear images of all of those paintings on the wall in the image that I just showed you.
Carson's assertion of childhood independence in her paintings is suggestive at a time
when her role in the transnational history of modernism and American art were in flux.
To revisit this psychoanalytic frame that I mentioned before,
if we read not only the child within its paintings as discovering its subjective self through the other of its reflection,
can we also read paintings of parental figures and children by other U.S. artists in Paris as indicative of a collective cultural mirror stage?
In other words,
if we extrapolate from the personal to the collective and apply psychoanalysis to the wide cultural practise of U.S. art study in Paris,
do these paintings enact US artists seeing themselves as distinct from the French
model representing the burgeoning autonomy of the child from Tanner to Cassatt?
Bow to Brand opens out these possibilities of acknowledging debts to French art practise and seeking to surpass them.
Following Pollock's model of the gambit charting reference, deference and difference that I mentioned at the first lecture.
Yet, they also underscore its problems and paradoxes because the United States was not
only a post-colonial use discovering itself through this French mirrored refraction.
It was also a colonialist entity in its settler colonial projects across the continents and in the adoption of overseas colonies from 1898.
So playing the child in Europe deflected this colonial reality as part of a discourse in, as Daniel Moi puts it, quotes.
How to hide an empire. Some European observers did sound alarm bells increasingly across the late 19th century.
In 1881, a French. Been warned, his contemporaries, to quote, beware the Americans, people who always grow and grow.
Cartoons of this period by Granz Hamilton and Louis Dalrymple after the war of 1898 notably inverts the trope of Americans as children.
So resonance we played in France on the cover of Judge in June 19, 1898,
a befuddled Uncle Sam holds out a screaming black child with an ID tag reading Philippines.
The caption adds Information wanted quoting Uncle Sam. Now that I've got it, what am I going to do with it?
Seven months later, Puck merged these colonial slayers, together with an image of a schoolroom managed by Uncle Sam.
A misbehaving Indian is segregated at the back of the school room while a black figure washes the windows.
The mostly white children sit reading in the back, and the new unruly colonial children are scrutinised in the foreground.
A caricature of a Chinese student waits at the door.
In this inversion, from playing the child in Europe, cartoons magnify Uncle Sam as the icon of the United States.
Relationally to the unruly child. These images,
mark the fungibility of the metaphor of the child and suggests the ways in which Americans in
this period selectively adopted or dismissed the symbol with an empire stretching 10000 miles.
As one cartoon boldly announced by 1991 in Paris,
the American Register reported that the United States speedy growth from a quote Baby Nation to a power of the First Class
would surprise Europeans if we introduce this complex and fraught Baby Nation to this shifting transnational artistic context.
What of that's babies who proliferate and multiply as she paints them repeatedly and as they grow and grow before our very eyes?
Does imperialism lurk beneath and around these children when we ourselves press our noses up
against the hard windowpane of the sweets shop of knowledge as we interrogate these pictures?
As with the other tropes of paradoxical U.S. innocence in Paris, I've explored on this lecture series.
Whichever parts of these cultural structures of childhood these artists intercepted their representations were anything but innocence.
Thank you for your attention, and I invite Alister writes back to talk through some of this material with me.
Wonderful. So thank you so much, Emily. Another fantastic, fantastically interesting talk,
especially caught by that opening out at the end into the question of the way in
which the state is presented as its parent to new new holdings and so forth.
I mean, really complicates the question of the child who who is the child who plays the child?
What is it? What's at stake in playing the child? So I thought that was really interesting.
I wanted to come back to an earlier moment in the in the tool.
I'm going to permit myself to ask a question or committing myself to ask a question at the start,
but I would remind people that they can type questions into the YouTube Live and they
will appear on my screen and I will do my best to to to translate them for Emily.
So when you started out, we were looking to blast you the music lesson, I think it is,
and that the model seemed to be if you are being a child means having a master or having a parent, having someone who's teaching you.
And then there's the other model which is having a child.
Being a child means not having any training and that that's the kind of beauty of it, that you're innocent,
that you see the eye, you see the world with innocent eyes, the eyes of a child and so forth.
And that's a common trope going all the way through in the 19th century in France.
As you said, Baudelaire, when he talks about guys in the painter of modern life, he he drew like a barbarian, like a child.
Yeah. And I think, you know, I think for Baudelaire, that's kind of a good thing.
I mean, it might sound like it's not, but it's, you know,
it's about a kind of innocent eye not painting what you've been trying to paint but seeing for yourself.
So childish innocent eye. And it goes all the way through to Matisse in the middle of the 20th century.
They're still saying basically the same thing. So we have these two models.
And I think I maybe have two questions about that or two part question.
One is it is that I mean, it looked like from your talk.
But is there a tendency for people who are doing the academic training to very much conceive
of and paint images of children as being tutored versus people who who are so like Cassatt,
who is very well aware that following academic training may not be the thing that she wants to do if she's going to be an exciting artist,
doing pictures that sanitised childhood is kind of resistance to or turning away from, as you argued very compellingly, the mother said.
That's the first part to the question Is there a difference between academically inclined American artists and.
Less academically inclined American artists in Paris, and the second part is.
There's something kind of interesting about saying that you're not going to be trained
and you're going to be like a child in the untutored since the second untutored sense,
which is that that's equally following a very well established prototype laid out by French writers and artists.
I mean, also people in other countries. So is there ever a kind of sense of self-consciousness in as you've been looking at these
people that claiming to be a child with innocent eyes is itself a very old kind of trope?
And you've been you kind of can say that because you've heard other people.
Saying it, yeah, sorry, that was a very long question, but to kind of two parts within it?
No, it's great and I took notes, so I'm back with you on both.
So, yeah, so in general, I do think that we can kind of lump categories of kind of academic approaches featuring this kind of
dutiful relationship and more modernist approaches pushing back and kind of experimenting with psychology.
But I also think that there is not a strict progression from one to the other in time.
Both of these practises are kind of happening simultaneously. And I do think that there are objects that are kind of intervening in both.
And I think the Tanner painting does some of that work where The Apprentice
is tied with the master but also has some kind of independence and autonomy.
And so there are objects like that that feature a kind of middle ground.
And then in response to your second question,
I was thinking about this funny comment that Oscar Wilde makes about how Americans are particularly inclined to
give you the benefit of their inexperience in the ways that they offer to either make art or kind of circulate.
And I think he's thinking about about the Wild West shows travelling in England and in France as part of kind of the source,
the context around which he says that. But I think there is a really interesting slippage in which the notion of this
kind of a naive and childish experience that has a kind of anti modernist thread,
as you point out, that is circulating throughout the French are art criticism of the 19th century gets kind of refigure
and taken up in a way that implies that there is a limit to what French artists can achieve.
In that vein, because of the kind of layers of tradition that are kind of inescapable in some of these motherhood paintings that I that I showed.
And so I think there is an idea that these artists are achieving something new by their position ality.
But I do think that that claim to can be troubled as another paradox of these, these practises, they're all kind of knowing and savvy and witty,
sometimes in ways that absolutely belie their very possibility of what they say they're trying to achieve.
Not interesting. Thank you so much. If it is, I mean, it's equally true, of course.
A French artist, you know, when Matisse says I want to see with the eyes of a child in 1954,
whenever it is, you know, that's also it's as tight a trope for him.
I mean, more so than it is for American artists in Paris in the late 19th century.
Yeah. Well, I have other questions, but we have a story where you going?
I was just going to follow up on one thing, which is that there's actually five chapters in this book,
and I have presented four of them in the terror lectures.
But the fifth is about this kind of trope of wishing that one had been born blind and then suddenly gaining
it to be able to see what the world could look like fresh and deeply tied to this kind of childhood trope.
But what I'm interested in in that other material is to U.S. artists who are working in Paris,
one a sculptor and one an abstract Peter Morgan Russell, who was in Paris in the teens.
And what's interesting about both the sculptor George Great Bernard and this abstract painter is that
they both make claims that their art is not necessarily coming from the position of having seen a new,
but that the art itself actually represents what the organ of the eye could see when it was first kind of created.
And so I think about those claims as a kind of extension of like a kind of one upping of those claims of innocent vision that are no less paradoxical.
But I think deeply interesting. Fascinating. So we're inviting you back next week to give that chapter based on that chapter.
We'll figure something out. So we have a comment in the chat box from Jessica.
It's not really a question, but a comment that you might want to respond to,
which is she's making a very good point, which is that this idea of seeing with a child eyes goes back.
I mean, in some ways goes back to even earlier formulations of the artist as a child genius that is already present in the story.
She doesn't say, but I think there's the is it shimmer good someone comes across as human boy, is it right?
Yes, I think it is somebody who's watching a boy comes across Kyoto, something like that anyway, and he's just out there in the woods as a child.
Drawing something or carving a piece of wood, I forget exactly the details of the story, but yes.
So there's a long history. As you mentioned, Carol Van Amanda also is another writer in which this trope appears.
I don't know if you have anything to say that is so interesting. Yeah, I know it is a really interesting point and thank you, Jessica.
I'm going to briefly share my screen again.
There were a couple of comparisons that I didn't include, but I think are instructive in this kind of vein.
Thinking about some of the hazards gambits,
this is a comparison that I've seen in a few articles related to Cassatt and thinking about her response to courage you in a
painting that is in the National Gallery and the ways in which there is this kind of like spatial compositional engagements.
But then Cassatt also is kind of extending and adapting from that source material.
And so I do think it's it's possible that these artists also have read their Vasari and that Kazaa is
thinking about to this kind of trope of the child as a kind of mantra in earlier contexts as well.
And I think that for that and then also this comparison, which appears in Judith Barters project about Mary Cassatt,
Modern Woman Cassatt actually bought this painting on the left by right around the time that she was making the mirror.
And so we can see her if we think about Griselda Pollock's kind of ideas, the gambits making these references to old master pictures.
And to your point, Jessica playing with the kind of visual strategies that artists in the period too may have been projecting,
but then kind of adapting and upending, especially with the kind of surface texture that Cassatt employs as she kind of
absorbs the models so fully that they're almost invisible in the final paintings.
You know, it's it's an amazing comparison. And then when you say that she actually bought the book and then it suddenly comes to light?
Yeah, it's interesting. In the book, it's Venus looking in the mirror, which is, you know, that's another kind of very conventional trope.
But and the child is not looking in the mirror, the child is holding the mirror or the young figure, the putty or whatever it is.
Whereas Cassatt flips that around and it's the kid.
Well, it's the kid that is the kid whose face we see in the mirror, which I suppose means the kid looking at us too.
Yes, exactly. It seems a little bit ambiguous whether the child is looking at themselves or at us,
and it's kind of both, I think, you know, what's the classic painterly problem, right?
Pictorial problem? If you want to show someone looking at themselves in a mirror, then you can't see unless you are aligned with them.
You can't see that reflection. Yeah. So they have to paint fudge it.
So we have another question here, and this is from Raimi, and they would like to hear more about the child adult trope in US imperial
imagery and how familiar they say with the dynamic in cartoons and caricatures.
But does it also appear in all? Yeah.
Again, not at the turn. At the turn of the century is what they would like to do.
Not great. Thank you so much, Raimi. That's a great question.
And indeed, there's no dearth of caricatures and cartoons that are imagining the newly held US colonies after 1898 as the new children of Uncle Sam.
And it's a question that I've been thinking about a lot as I've been working on this chapter,
trying to think about whether there is a kind of media specificity, whether in the space of fine arts.
We can also find these dynamics. And I think that the jury is still out on that question.
I haven't found any particular examples that that directly play out that relationship.
But there are so many images that are running through my head of kind of French colonial murals at world's fairs,
for instance, that are some that have sometimes been shown at the Cabron.
Lee, where I think there is a kind of use of the child as a way to reaffirm French authority over a colonised subjects.
And so I think it would require one to look more at the kind of declarations of like Chicago in 1893, for instance,
or the 1915 Panama Pacific to see if some of the murals on display kind of play with allegory in ways that inflect that relationship.
I think that would be the most likely bet in the kind of fine art context for a more overt use of that of those racist tropes.
You know, it's interesting, but it does have, you know, one of the great things about hearing someone talk about American life in France.
This is kind of the great payoff of the terror in many ways is that it makes one reflect differently
on what makes me reflect differently on things that I thought I already knew a lot about,
which is fragile. And so this is, I mean,
listening to Dan was making me reflect on the very frequent rhetoric of the French state that West
African colonies are his children and that it has a kind of parental responsibility towards.
It might have to be stern, it might have to be strict, but it's, you know, it's going to help its children grow up.
And I'm sure I mean, nothing's coming to mind immediately,
but I'm sure there are images that have to make that West African colonies as children trope explicit in that.
So I don't remember the name of the exhibition, but there was a great exhibition at the Cape Lea about kind of the the colonised
body that had some murals from fairs that I think play out of that rhetoric.
Exactly. And I was just going to share my screen again quickly in the back of that cartoon.
There is a kind of text on the wall that gets at this same kind of idea that it's a kind of governing without consent
as a kind of stepping stone to self-governance that needs to be taught through the paradoxical colonial presence.
And so I think that kind of. Hierarchy building is probably adopted in many ways from the French rhetoric that you're describing, too.
And that one of the ways in which the United States is trying to articulate its space on the global stage is to have this paternal relationship,
and that's their kind of evidence of their maturation, I think, you know.
Thinking about the turtle, I'm going to permit myself one last question.
Well, that's kind of I mean, it may be one that is unanswerable in a few minutes or even possibly at all.
I was struck by the the bureau image and then before it, the dummy of the of the of the motherland.
And of course, it matters that in French laboratories. Feminine.
Right? Yeah. Different in Germany that their fatherland is is is masculine.
And I wonder if there's something to be figured out about the way in which I don't know.
France, as parent for American artists, is also gendered.
Mm hmm. But I mean, I don't quite know how one will begin to think that through.
No, I think that's really an interesting point because it's interesting when you see like those photographs of Bugha Hollande, his in the academy,
Julianne, and he's basically the France mother lands, which he paints as female, that he's playing as this kind of French master.
And so there is, I think, something to a thread to follow there about the kind of identifications of gender
roles for the French Masters and how that informs the kind of relationship,
especially as transitions are happening in gender politics,
in study and between the kind of Italians that are split by gender or the exclusion of women from the equal up until 1897.
That I think, yeah, it presents some complexities.
And I guess to I would link it back to the debates about the population in France as well,
that this kind of like gender bending even across the arts is does that become implicated in these larger anxieties?
Yeah, totally fascinating. The rich question, thank you.
No, no, no, thank you.
So I think we we're about out of time, so we're going to have to draw it to a close, I'm afraid, but thank you to people who sent in questions.
We're sorry. We haven't been able to answer them all. But we are out of time. In closing,
I would like to thank the Terra Foundation again for making all of this possible with their generous support of the visiting professorship.
And I'd like to thank Coach also for making this possible, and I think all this digital stuff works so effectively and efficiently.
It's not easy to to do, but most of all, of course,
I would like to thank Emily again for what has been an incredibly stimulating and thought-provoking lecture today,
but also the whole series has been kind of fantastic and revealing.
And as I say, as a French someone who works a lot on France in this period,
I've learnt so much about the stuff that I look at, as well as the stuff that you look at.
So I think you've really shown that we can't think about these things separately.
So this is part of a kind of whole ecosystem that interacts with multiple parts, interact and very interesting continuously in very interesting ways.
So thank you again for sharing this. This works with us.
Thanks again to the audience for listening. It's been great having you with us and good night.