1 00:00:26,730 --> 00:00:35,660 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the fourth and final lecture series of four terror lectures in American art. 2 00:00:35,660 --> 00:00:41,600 This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration, 3 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:49,310 understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for both national and international audiences. 4 00:00:49,310 --> 00:00:54,590 In collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College, 5 00:00:54,590 --> 00:00:59,710 the foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art. 6 00:00:59,710 --> 00:01:05,000 This year, the terror visiting professor is Emily C. Burns. 7 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:11,940 My name is Jeff Bachem, and I'm head of the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford. 8 00:01:11,940 --> 00:01:20,820 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. 9 00:01:20,820 --> 00:01:27,100 One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 10 00:01:27,100 --> 00:01:31,390 Throughout this evening's lecture, this evening's lecture, if you have any questions, 11 00:01:31,390 --> 00:01:40,160 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. 12 00:01:40,160 --> 00:01:45,650 We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and moderated by my colleague, Alister Wright, 13 00:01:45,650 --> 00:01:53,980 an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and affiliated with St. John's College here at Oxford. 14 00:01:53,980 --> 00:01:58,780 Elsa writes research focuses primarily on European modernism. 15 00:01:58,780 --> 00:02:07,330 His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. 16 00:02:07,330 --> 00:02:13,910 More recently, he curated an exhibition of Paul Gurgaon's prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. 17 00:02:13,910 --> 00:02:18,020 The accompanying catalogue, Gurgaon's Paradise, remembered the No. 18 00:02:18,020 --> 00:02:26,930 One, No Prince examined the role played by reproduction in Gergen's understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. 19 00:02:26,930 --> 00:02:33,110 Alister has since published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, 20 00:02:33,110 --> 00:02:42,230 Burlington Magazine Gazette, The Bazaar Art Forum, 19th century art worldwide and in various edited volumes. 21 00:02:42,230 --> 00:02:48,080 It's my absolute pleasure to welcome Alice to this evening and now Alice to handle the proceedings to you. 22 00:02:48,080 --> 00:02:52,550 Thank you. All right. Thank you, Jeff. 23 00:02:52,550 --> 00:03:02,000 It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce Speaker Emily Burns for the fourth and final in her series of terror lectures in American art. 24 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:06,590 Emily is an associate professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar 25 00:03:06,590 --> 00:03:12,500 of transnational transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 26 00:03:12,500 --> 00:03:19,610 Amongst her many significant publications are her 2018 book Transnational Frontiers The American West in France, 27 00:03:19,610 --> 00:03:29,780 published with University of Oklahoma Press and a forthcoming Rutledge anthology entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts, 28 00:03:29,780 --> 00:03:33,500 co-edited with Alice M. Rudy Price. 29 00:03:33,500 --> 00:03:41,060 This year, she is the Terra Foundation for American Art visiting professor in the Department of History of Art here in Oxford, 30 00:03:41,060 --> 00:03:45,840 but she has been making a hugely positive and important contribution, both as a teacher. 31 00:03:45,840 --> 00:03:52,400 My students are delighted to have her here and is a very highly appreciated colleague, amongst other things. 32 00:03:52,400 --> 00:03:59,780 She has been greatly enriching the research culture of the department, not least through her work on her soon to be completed book manuscript, 33 00:03:59,780 --> 00:04:05,930 conforming innocence, cultural relatedness and US art in fantasy at Club Paris. 34 00:04:05,930 --> 00:04:16,280 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. 35 00:04:16,280 --> 00:04:28,980 Thank you so much, Alastair and Jeff. 36 00:04:28,980 --> 00:04:33,120 And you did. All right, I'll start again. Thank you so much, 37 00:04:33,120 --> 00:04:38,970 Alastair and Jeff and all of my colleagues and students here at the University of Oxford 38 00:04:38,970 --> 00:04:44,250 for making what is a tricky time to be a visiting professor abroad so fulfilling. 39 00:04:44,250 --> 00:04:49,470 I also think the Terra Foundation for supporting this professorship, 40 00:04:49,470 --> 00:05:01,460 as well as my church colleagues, especially Liz, Holly and Kristina, for managing the online series. 41 00:05:01,460 --> 00:05:09,680 In 1998, Mary Cassatt included the Mirror in a solo exhibition after Andrew Wall's Paris Galleries. 42 00:05:09,680 --> 00:05:16,370 The composition uses two mirrors to layer and refract figures of a woman and a child. 43 00:05:16,370 --> 00:05:26,150 A synchrony in bright, contrasting colours juxtaposes the woman's yellow dress with a large sunflower over her breast pink upholstery, 44 00:05:26,150 --> 00:05:31,610 peeking through around the folds of that dress and a mint green chair frame, 45 00:05:31,610 --> 00:05:37,970 which bleeds into the matching green frame of the mirror without any ground line. 46 00:05:37,970 --> 00:05:44,150 The chair is tilted at an awkward angle from which the figures teeter forward. 47 00:05:44,150 --> 00:05:47,210 In this uneasy, irregular space, 48 00:05:47,210 --> 00:05:57,440 the child with bulbous belly is uncomfortably placed astride the mother's knee as she adjusts the child's position by its shoulder, 49 00:05:57,440 --> 00:06:02,750 proximity and distance between the mirror on the wall are complicated by the scale 50 00:06:02,750 --> 00:06:08,570 of the chair and the relative to munition of the figures in that back reflection. 51 00:06:08,570 --> 00:06:15,150 While the mother figure appears twice, the child appears thrice. 52 00:06:15,150 --> 00:06:20,640 In painted body painted wall mirror and in the handheld mirror held by both mother and 53 00:06:20,640 --> 00:06:26,950 child as the mothers gaze deflects our attention back to the child's handheld reflection. 54 00:06:26,950 --> 00:06:36,720 She's relegated to the background as the child's active gaze engages itself and the viewer already thick with texture. 55 00:06:36,720 --> 00:06:42,480 The painting is most layered with busy and dense brush strokes on that mirror round roundel, 56 00:06:42,480 --> 00:06:50,730 as though this elements becomes the fulcrum externalising the interior layers of the child through the face. 57 00:06:50,730 --> 00:06:58,420 These strokes fracture further this already past self through the multiple reflections. 58 00:06:58,420 --> 00:07:06,820 This painting is one of hundreds of mother child scenes that Cassatt made between the 1880s and the early 20th century in the period, 59 00:07:06,820 --> 00:07:15,220 and often still today because that is claimed as an iconic and sentimental painter of this feminine iconography. 60 00:07:15,220 --> 00:07:21,580 Yet critics in the period did not always see her paintings in this way. 61 00:07:21,580 --> 00:07:29,590 In 1881, Albert Wolfe noted occasional quote deformed and monstrous corners in her paintings. 62 00:07:29,590 --> 00:07:39,910 In 1892, the French critic shortly noted that her quote baby's gesticulate with exquisite uncertainty and clumsiness. 63 00:07:39,910 --> 00:07:50,320 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. 64 00:07:50,320 --> 00:07:59,050 The critic elaborated, And I quote again in harmonious masses of uncomplimentary colour are brought side by side and shock. 65 00:07:59,050 --> 00:08:09,860 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. 66 00:08:09,860 --> 00:08:15,200 Looking at the Mirror, the art historian Rebecca Gardell has recently reiterated this tension, 67 00:08:15,200 --> 00:08:20,660 some critics observed between the subject matter and the rough and textured surface, 68 00:08:20,660 --> 00:08:28,820 which Fidel reads as a quote skirmish with the sentimental as the artist concedes to it in her subject matter. 69 00:08:28,820 --> 00:08:32,120 Yet lashes at it with her brush. 70 00:08:32,120 --> 00:08:39,890 Other scholars, especially Hollis Gleason, have pressed on the awkwardness of the parent child relations in consorts paintings, 71 00:08:39,890 --> 00:08:46,640 especially in the scale distortions between the gangly and sometimes even gigantic toddlers, 72 00:08:46,640 --> 00:08:57,770 and the parental figures whom, as Nancy M. Matthews has observed, increasingly become pedestals for the more dynamic and layered children. 73 00:08:57,770 --> 00:09:00,710 Gleason reads these visual tensions as indicative. 74 00:09:00,710 --> 00:09:08,630 Of course, that's perpetual struggle to paint the nude form within socially acceptable conditions and more importantly, 75 00:09:08,630 --> 00:09:18,980 for our purposes today as quote indices of her dilemma as a voluntary exile with hybrid and contested cultural nationality. 76 00:09:18,980 --> 00:09:22,220 Not quite French, though she lived in France for most of her life, 77 00:09:22,220 --> 00:09:29,060 where she exhibited in the last four of the eight impressionist exhibitions in Paris and not quite American. 78 00:09:29,060 --> 00:09:38,630 Due to that, expatriation, corset occupies a fraught transnational space increasingly characterised by uneasy belonging 79 00:09:38,630 --> 00:09:44,480 rather than mere maternal affection or symbiotic absorption between mother and child. 80 00:09:44,480 --> 00:09:53,450 Many of kickstarts paintings speak to other cultural conversations, and in this lecture, I propose to supplement Mathews read on cassettes, 81 00:09:53,450 --> 00:10:00,290 modern madonnas and Claassens read on her voluntary exile with another lens through 82 00:10:00,290 --> 00:10:05,720 which to understand cassettes complex and often uneasy mother child relations. 83 00:10:05,720 --> 00:10:10,040 And that is the transnational dialogue between France and the United States, 84 00:10:10,040 --> 00:10:17,480 in which France was often declared the artistic mother of U.S. artists who were figured as children, 85 00:10:17,480 --> 00:10:21,860 as scholars working on representations of children in the United States and France. 86 00:10:21,860 --> 00:10:29,630 In this period, including Barbara de Galati, Greg Thomas, Robin Bernstein and Anna Green, amongst others, 87 00:10:29,630 --> 00:10:39,200 have shown meanings associated with childhood were fluid and shaped in dialogue with use, a symbol for deference in academic training. 88 00:10:39,200 --> 00:10:46,190 A modernist icon of independence. A reference to white innocence to structure racial difference. 89 00:10:46,190 --> 00:10:50,060 And a psychological foil for adulthood. 90 00:10:50,060 --> 00:10:57,230 The implications of Castparts precocious and layered children might be understood in dialogue with the wider spectrum 91 00:10:57,230 --> 00:11:05,780 of possibilities explored by many U.S. artists working and exhibiting in Paris in both academic and modernist contexts, 92 00:11:05,780 --> 00:11:08,030 including Edwin Blanchfield and Henry, 93 00:11:08,030 --> 00:11:17,480 also a tenor amongst other women artists who took up the motif of the child, including Cecilia Boo and Ellen Emmett Rand, 94 00:11:17,480 --> 00:11:26,270 taking Cassatt as a fractal in the larger kaleidoscope of paintings of adult child relationships made by U.S. artists in Paris. 95 00:11:26,270 --> 00:11:34,580 This talk explores the anxious terrain in which the child signalled deference and independence in turns in dialogue with narratives 96 00:11:34,580 --> 00:11:45,200 of French influence on US arts and in dialogue with modern psychology in ways that are also linked with French and US colonialism. 97 00:11:45,200 --> 00:11:51,740 In 1900, the critic Richard Whiting defined nations in terms of human generations, noting quote, 98 00:11:51,740 --> 00:11:57,590 The ages of nations might be fixed by correspondence with the ages of individual man. 99 00:11:57,590 --> 00:12:02,930 And of course, in his estimation, France was old and the United States young. 100 00:12:02,930 --> 00:12:08,210 As literary historian Malcolm Bradbury has argued of the founder Sierra Club and quote, 101 00:12:08,210 --> 00:12:12,800 Oedipal formation between the United States and Europe was based on measuring 102 00:12:12,800 --> 00:12:18,830 out the way the child differed from the parent or the new world from the old. 103 00:12:18,830 --> 00:12:26,480 If the American, if America was the newborn child of history, Europe was the presumed parents. 104 00:12:26,480 --> 00:12:35,060 Many art critics used this foil to highlight French artistic and cultural superiority by figuring France the quote mother of the arts. 105 00:12:35,060 --> 00:12:40,100 According to one critic and the United States as a dependent child. 106 00:12:40,100 --> 00:12:46,700 French critic and Chenault wrote in 1867 about the role of the Universal Exposition in Paris in 107 00:12:46,700 --> 00:12:54,410 educating quote nations still in their infancy to extract precious fruit from the lessons of Europe. 108 00:12:54,410 --> 00:12:58,400 In 1890, Rudolph Giuliani, the founder of the academy Julien, 109 00:12:58,400 --> 00:13:08,300 where many U.S. artists studied to find the Franco American artistic relationship as follows The American school is an offshoot of our own. 110 00:13:08,300 --> 00:13:11,940 It was born. And baptised in Paris. 111 00:13:11,940 --> 00:13:20,880 And in spite of or perhaps because of all of the awards given to us artists in Paris, at the Expo in nineteen hundred, 112 00:13:20,880 --> 00:13:26,760 the French critic lay on place scoffed that U.S. artists were still as infants wearing large, 113 00:13:26,760 --> 00:13:34,470 which are diapers who exhibited quoting from him only excessive submission before their masters. 114 00:13:34,470 --> 00:13:44,850 This discourse of France as artistic motherland reverberates in paintings like William Bigelow's 1883 Alma Perrins or the Motherland, 115 00:13:44,850 --> 00:13:54,060 in which nine sturdy children compete for the mother's breasts and gaze fondly at her as she stoically stares at the viewer. 116 00:13:54,060 --> 00:13:57,240 In a period in which U.S. artist journals and letters abound, 117 00:13:57,240 --> 00:14:03,630 with comments about their French teachers referring to them as children and listings in the salon catalogues 118 00:14:03,630 --> 00:14:10,410 emphasising a lineage of art study by publishing the name of the teacher alongside the name of the pupil. 119 00:14:10,410 --> 00:14:19,050 Hugo's painting allegories as French artistic centrality, one of the most avidly collected painters by U.S. patrons. 120 00:14:19,050 --> 00:14:26,640 The year before, the artist had become a full faculty member at the Academy's through the end photographs of boogaloo, 121 00:14:26,640 --> 00:14:30,480 seated at the centre, surrounded by his male and female students, 122 00:14:30,480 --> 00:14:45,290 implying what a contemporary described as his quote entirely paternal role for his young students, whom one critic described as embryo painters. 123 00:14:45,290 --> 00:14:50,660 In 1883, the same year as Booker was, painting was installed at the salon. 124 00:14:50,660 --> 00:15:02,030 The French critic Arthur S. Chirac reminded his readers that international artists quote, all too equal degrees sucked art from French breasts. 125 00:15:02,030 --> 00:15:05,420 Chirac presented an image of France as artistic mother. 126 00:15:05,420 --> 00:15:12,560 The rest of the world her children inculcated in the arms of the French Academy and scholars have observed the 127 00:15:12,560 --> 00:15:20,750 nationalistic tone in the central figures deep blue and white clothing with red flowers added to the wheat wreath, 128 00:15:20,750 --> 00:15:27,200 and I realised the colour is a little bit off. It looks like her robe is black, but it's actually a deep blue. 129 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:33,260 Building on Republican imagery like Honoré Adams's midcentury allegory of the French Republic, 130 00:15:33,260 --> 00:15:38,810 Bulgaria's strong triangular composition evokes stability and centrality. 131 00:15:38,810 --> 00:15:48,740 Yeah, it's such steadiness and permanence hides French anxieties in this period after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. 132 00:15:48,740 --> 00:15:54,500 One art historian has suggested that the stormy mountains background in the painting 133 00:15:54,500 --> 00:16:00,650 refers to Alsace and the home to French territories that were annexed during the war. 134 00:16:00,650 --> 00:16:09,020 After that, crushing defeats and with many discussions of declining birth rates, France's civilisation was feared to be on the wane. 135 00:16:09,020 --> 00:16:19,250 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. 136 00:16:19,250 --> 00:16:26,150 Death rates exceeded birth rates in France annually, inciting a repopulation movement. 137 00:16:26,150 --> 00:16:27,230 In this context, 138 00:16:27,230 --> 00:16:35,810 we might read pictures that celebrate France as cultural motherland as an absorption of anxieties about the declining French populace. 139 00:16:35,810 --> 00:16:41,600 Even if French power were on the wane, it remains the cultural superior. 140 00:16:41,600 --> 00:16:49,820 Further, Google are very skin tone between white and beige and olive flesh across the children in his painting, 141 00:16:49,820 --> 00:16:57,980 offering racial markers that build ideas of difference absorbed into that French state in the context of concurrence, 142 00:16:57,980 --> 00:17:02,900 French imperial projects underway in North Africa and Southeast Asia, 143 00:17:02,900 --> 00:17:08,940 the French motherland underscored the growth of French population through colonialism. 144 00:17:08,940 --> 00:17:16,550 Hugo's painting implies that if the country were in question within the nation state through the spread of arts and colonialism, 145 00:17:16,550 --> 00:17:19,970 French culture could still grow. 146 00:17:19,970 --> 00:17:30,080 Some U.S. artists renderings of parent child relationships intercepts these complex discourses of art nation and imperial networks. 147 00:17:30,080 --> 00:17:36,260 Academic painter Edwin Blast Fields approach typified in the music lesson of 1880 marks 148 00:17:36,260 --> 00:17:43,250 a dutiful child in homage to the emulated relationship between French and U.S. painting. 149 00:17:43,250 --> 00:17:54,890 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. 150 00:17:54,890 --> 00:17:58,730 The painting portrays a statuesque woman in Greco-Roman garb, 151 00:17:58,730 --> 00:18:09,050 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. 152 00:18:09,050 --> 00:18:16,160 The classical white children are simultaneously endearing and bumbling in their attempts to master their craft, 153 00:18:16,160 --> 00:18:20,510 echoing what Blanchfield described as his artistic parentage. 154 00:18:20,510 --> 00:18:29,840 He recalled his 1867 experience studying painting with Boehner, using the metaphor of a horse and child, both deferential creatures. 155 00:18:29,840 --> 00:18:37,250 Quote We trotted along wearing blinders, not turning our eyes from side to side, but fixing them on the master. 156 00:18:37,250 --> 00:18:45,980 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. 157 00:18:45,980 --> 00:18:53,030 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, 158 00:18:53,030 --> 00:18:58,330 and this also played in Rugova's painting as well. 159 00:18:58,330 --> 00:19:06,220 And Last Fields painting, I kind of graphically, stylistically and metaphorically allegories is learning and the experience of being taught. 160 00:19:06,220 --> 00:19:12,490 His classical subject matter is appropriate for his adoption of the conventions of academic visual language, 161 00:19:12,490 --> 00:19:18,060 which emphasised instruction and emulation of established artistic authorities. 162 00:19:18,060 --> 00:19:26,080 Blanchfield carefully exhibits his academic lessons with his brushwork, his colour choices and his compositional construction. 163 00:19:26,080 --> 00:19:28,990 He broadcasts his skill in modelling the human body, 164 00:19:28,990 --> 00:19:36,730 particularly with the boy in the foreground for whom the brush strokes mind the play of light across the contours of his back. 165 00:19:36,730 --> 00:19:40,420 His technique is modelled with a smooth a surface. 166 00:19:40,420 --> 00:19:49,930 In the tradition of Boehner, who slightly later four steps indicates his own academic practise with another motif that highlights parentage, 167 00:19:49,930 --> 00:19:55,570 Flash signed his painting at lower left with the date and the word Paris label 168 00:19:55,570 --> 00:20:00,190 frequently appended to paintings made by U.S. artists in France in this period. 169 00:20:00,190 --> 00:20:02,950 But Blanchfield didn't show this painting in Paris. 170 00:20:02,950 --> 00:20:11,770 Rather, he exhibited it in 1880 in Boston and Philadelphia as an ideal display of the Fruits of art study in Paris, 171 00:20:11,770 --> 00:20:16,480 as he was moving back to the United States to undertake academic instruction, 172 00:20:16,480 --> 00:20:23,680 perpetuating ideas of the United States as heir to Western civilisation by quoting Greco-Roman subjects. 173 00:20:23,680 --> 00:20:32,390 And indeed, this iconography framed much of Field's practise as he transitioned in the role between people and instructor. 174 00:20:32,390 --> 00:20:35,810 The truth of Old Europe, crowned by young America, 175 00:20:35,810 --> 00:20:44,000 circulated widely and dubbed in Anna Junkies 1898 photographic portrait of her partner Rosa Bonheur. 176 00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:50,630 Yet some U.S. artists increasingly toyed with their models of deference to French tradition. 177 00:20:50,630 --> 00:20:58,160 Three of Henry, also a Tanners first major compositions produced or exhibited in Paris in the early 1890s, 178 00:20:58,160 --> 00:21:06,470 all engaged the theme of the lesson as a symbol of the diffusion of cultural knowledge in music and craft production. 179 00:21:06,470 --> 00:21:16,520 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, 180 00:21:16,520 --> 00:21:20,300 and there's a distant spectre of a child watching. 181 00:21:20,300 --> 00:21:32,240 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. 182 00:21:32,240 --> 00:21:36,680 Tanner's banjo lesson also takes up the notion of tutelage here, 183 00:21:36,680 --> 00:21:45,380 with familial intergenerational tones begun before the banjo lesson and completed after it's the young Sybil 184 00:21:45,380 --> 00:21:51,650 maker depicts an apprentice learning to make wooden shoes commonly produced in family workshops in Brittany, 185 00:21:51,650 --> 00:21:56,000 where it was shown in the salon of 1895. 186 00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:04,790 While Albert Bone has interpreted these lesson paintings through the transmission of skills in an African-American context, 187 00:22:04,790 --> 00:22:10,730 in dialogue with the ideas of Booker T. Washington and in his attempts to redefine 188 00:22:10,730 --> 00:22:15,830 more typically denigrating representations of banjo playing in minstrelsy, 189 00:22:15,830 --> 00:22:21,140 Tanner's paintings have not yet been placed in a transnational dialogue with the French academic 190 00:22:21,140 --> 00:22:27,470 system with which Tanner was actively in dialogue in the early 1890s since he arrived in Paris, 191 00:22:27,470 --> 00:22:34,820 where he studied with genial charm Jean Joseph, Benjamin Johnson and Jean Paul Jones. 192 00:22:34,820 --> 00:22:39,020 I think all three of the paintings, and especially the young cigar maker, 193 00:22:39,020 --> 00:22:46,100 are weighing in and moderating similar questions about tutelage that inflect splash fields the music lesson. 194 00:22:46,100 --> 00:22:53,390 In some ways, the painting imagines the same, almost controlling deference from apprentice to master. 195 00:22:53,390 --> 00:23:02,330 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. 196 00:23:02,330 --> 00:23:08,210 The placement of the father figure in the background positions his own action, which you can see here, 197 00:23:08,210 --> 00:23:16,910 and I will go forward to a detail to appear almost to be sculpting the same shoes with which the boy struggles. 198 00:23:16,910 --> 00:23:23,000 And you can see that visual relationship here between the axe and the shoes in the foreground. 199 00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:29,150 In this way, a heavy handed instructor carefully moulds the work of the novice. 200 00:23:29,150 --> 00:23:34,220 Tanner's academic handling is apparent throughout the painting in building up 201 00:23:34,220 --> 00:23:41,480 glazes with touches of impasto in the spirals of wood scattered around the floor. 202 00:23:41,480 --> 00:23:48,980 On the other hand, an especially compared with Blanche Field's dutiful students, Tanner's apprentice is the focal point. 203 00:23:48,980 --> 00:23:58,850 The instructor relegated to the background, his squash and pastel studies, which you see here, highlight the solitary effort of the boy's labour. 204 00:23:58,850 --> 00:24:03,290 His motion, emphasised by the hatch marks that mimic his directed force. 205 00:24:03,290 --> 00:24:12,590 Also present in the sketches is a mother figure who can see her here and back here and her back to the viewer, 206 00:24:12,590 --> 00:24:22,040 and she's erased altogether in the exhibited painting. In tracing Tanner's relationship with African-American genre scenes of the period, 207 00:24:22,040 --> 00:24:28,490 Dewey Mosby and Albert Boehm have suggested that The Apprentice represents a black or mixed race figure, 208 00:24:28,490 --> 00:24:33,050 noting in particular the structure of his nose and lips. 209 00:24:33,050 --> 00:24:42,470 I agree that the rendering is suggestive and ambiguous, and racial markers also represented differently across the sketches. 210 00:24:42,470 --> 00:24:48,320 This more visible differentiation across those sketches merged together in the exhibited 211 00:24:48,320 --> 00:24:54,740 version suggests that the artist is building an amalgamation of racial signifiers and effect, 212 00:24:54,740 --> 00:25:03,620 which serves to universalise that figure, as Alan Braddock argues about Tanner's quote Ambiguous racial construction of Christ. 213 00:25:03,620 --> 00:25:09,740 Just a few years later, such a melding of signifiers suggests Tanner's critiques of race, 214 00:25:09,740 --> 00:25:15,080 and here I'm quoting again from Braddock as an epistemological category. 215 00:25:15,080 --> 00:25:21,950 In this way, the divisions amongst Booker was raised. Children perhaps become adapted into a single figure, 216 00:25:21,950 --> 00:25:30,140 an icon of the diverse art student body working in fantastical Paris, while the young sable maker was shown at the salon. 217 00:25:30,140 --> 00:25:32,730 French critics did not comment. On the painting, 218 00:25:32,730 --> 00:25:42,570 and US critics seem to map narratives of the pupils discarded simple attempts all over the floor as indicative of the painter's phase. 219 00:25:42,570 --> 00:25:49,260 Helen Cole emphasised it as part of Tanner's path to an incipient individual practise. 220 00:25:49,260 --> 00:25:55,380 The New York Times concurred that the painting still reveals quote traces of academic lessons, 221 00:25:55,380 --> 00:26:00,960 but Tanner would soon outgrow these kinds of claims concurrent with Black Fields and 222 00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:06,780 Tanner's paintings of lessons and dynamic debates about emulation and innovation. 223 00:26:06,780 --> 00:26:13,770 Cassatt made statements of her own spirit of independence and defiance of structures and institutional practises. 224 00:26:13,770 --> 00:26:17,340 For instance, in the painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 225 00:26:17,340 --> 00:26:26,070 which was exhibited in the fifth impressionist exhibition in 1879, the seated girl overwhelming an oversized chair. 226 00:26:26,070 --> 00:26:35,940 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. 227 00:26:35,940 --> 00:26:45,030 The painting defied the academic language that Blanchfield idolised, but Carson's painting was not immune to the politics of influence. 228 00:26:45,030 --> 00:26:50,310 The painting also established her complicated artistic relationship with her French contemporaries, 229 00:26:50,310 --> 00:26:54,840 including Edgar Dagar, whom she said helped to paint the background. 230 00:26:54,840 --> 00:27:02,310 Some critics read their artistic relationship as a master pupil connexion akin to bona and blast fields, 231 00:27:02,310 --> 00:27:08,040 because that meant that spent much of her the rest of her career denying the influence of dagga. 232 00:27:08,040 --> 00:27:17,760 And, as Matthews has shown, turned increasingly to mother and child compositions as a move away from shared iconography and as a sustained, 233 00:27:17,760 --> 00:27:24,390 mature art practise for the rest of her career, she played with figure ground relationships, 234 00:27:24,390 --> 00:27:35,940 the fictions of space moderating between naturalistic renderings of awkward gangly toddlers and stylised figurines of renaissance and baroque models. 235 00:27:35,940 --> 00:27:43,140 In many of the mother child paintings, the limbs of the child seem overgrown in relation to the scale of the mother. 236 00:27:43,140 --> 00:27:48,510 These visual effects are enhanced by the placement of the disjointed figures pressed up to 237 00:27:48,510 --> 00:27:55,170 the front of the picture plane with radically diagonal compositional elements behind them. 238 00:27:55,170 --> 00:28:04,830 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. 239 00:28:04,830 --> 00:28:12,510 Gustav Corb had included two child muses in the artist's studio from 1855, one positioned at centre, 240 00:28:12,510 --> 00:28:17,670 looking up at the artist and another sprawled at the right of the composition on the floor, 241 00:28:17,670 --> 00:28:23,850 on top of a large sheet of paper making a schematic drawing of a figure Charles 242 00:28:23,850 --> 00:28:28,920 Baudelaire declared in his 1863 discussion of the painter of modern life. 243 00:28:28,920 --> 00:28:34,740 That's quote genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will. 244 00:28:34,740 --> 00:28:39,000 But for Baudelaire, it was an adapted and volitional childhood. 245 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:48,960 He continued to describe a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood capacities and power of analysis. 246 00:28:48,960 --> 00:28:56,220 A cartoon in Harper's in 1885 joked about the lengths artists might go to adapt the child's perspective. 247 00:28:56,220 --> 00:29:04,770 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? 248 00:29:04,770 --> 00:29:10,770 As he reaches towards his table of materials where a child watches in paint in the second image, 249 00:29:10,770 --> 00:29:16,380 the painter has scooped up that child top of the table and starts rubbing the boy's head against 250 00:29:16,380 --> 00:29:22,410 the canvas while looking up to the sky as though channelling the artist's the child's energy. 251 00:29:22,410 --> 00:29:30,660 This representation literally rises, but also marks the idea of de skilling and the mantra of the child's perspective. 252 00:29:30,660 --> 00:29:37,950 Some proponents of the child as an icon for fresh vision warned of studying academic practise too closely. 253 00:29:37,950 --> 00:29:45,030 In the ambassadors, Henry James described the fate of Little Dylan as an art students quote study had been fatal to him, 254 00:29:45,030 --> 00:29:50,190 and his productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew. 255 00:29:50,190 --> 00:29:56,880 In Blanche Howard's 1884 novel Gwenn, about American artists in Brittany, the main character, 256 00:29:56,880 --> 00:30:03,150 Hammer similarly stated quote If I could paint better pictures for never having learnt to read, 257 00:30:03,150 --> 00:30:08,130 I would gladly blot out of my life the little education I possess. 258 00:30:08,130 --> 00:30:12,840 One of the illuminated capitals at the start of a chapter imagines an artist 259 00:30:12,840 --> 00:30:18,810 child holding a palette basically the size of his body before a massive canvas. 260 00:30:18,810 --> 00:30:22,980 The scale of his painting tool suggest that these devices lead his acts of 261 00:30:22,980 --> 00:30:28,710 painting visible in swirls and childlike doodles on the surface of the canvas. 262 00:30:28,710 --> 00:30:38,250 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 263 00:30:38,250 --> 00:30:45,030 a form of resistance to artistic prototypes and tradition by symbolising an untrained eye. 264 00:30:45,030 --> 00:30:52,290 In 1991, the US critic Maria Taylor Blue Velt summed up the goal of artistic temperaments in the New York magazine. 265 00:30:52,290 --> 00:31:00,540 The book via quotes The artist is the child who becomes more and more of a child as the years go on. 266 00:31:00,540 --> 00:31:10,710 Re situated in this discourse, if articulating a knowing version of the child's perspective was a central goal of modernism, Cassatt realises it. 267 00:31:10,710 --> 00:31:20,880 Gone is the model of the baby nestled comfortably in French motherhood, also evoked in the Dish Decisions 1865 mural of Picardy in Amy, 268 00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:26,910 in which Judith Barter links with the Mirror for that sunflower while pooh. 269 00:31:26,910 --> 00:31:34,020 These babies suckle and sleep because that child is alert's upright, independent and engaged. 270 00:31:34,020 --> 00:31:45,060 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, 271 00:31:45,060 --> 00:31:49,950 because that's paintings also connect with psychological currents emerging in the 1880s, 272 00:31:49,950 --> 00:32:00,330 which offered new ideas about the subjectivity and creative potential of the child, as well as how child parent relationships operate in adolescence. 273 00:32:00,330 --> 00:32:05,820 The idea of the child as a dutiful extension of parents or a miniature adults 274 00:32:05,820 --> 00:32:11,280 was supplanted by that of the child as a unique individual with an independent, 275 00:32:11,280 --> 00:32:21,200 imaginative life. G Stanley Hall spearheaded an effort to better understand the capacity of the child as an innately self-aware individual. 276 00:32:21,200 --> 00:32:24,450 Powell and other U.S. psychologists, in particular, 277 00:32:24,450 --> 00:32:31,920 declared a greater internal capability and emotional independence even for young children than Europeans, 278 00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:41,220 and prescribes the role of motherhood to encourage opportunities for children self-assertion to develop their imaginative faculties. 279 00:32:41,220 --> 00:32:49,650 In the period after Darwin's theory of evolution were published, childhood took on a greater significance as an agent of human progress. 280 00:32:49,650 --> 00:32:52,680 As Carolyn Steedman has explored, 281 00:32:52,680 --> 00:33:00,150 the American evolutionary theorist John Fisk argued that extended infancy was actually the centre of human development. 282 00:33:00,150 --> 00:33:03,780 Quote It is babyhood that has made man what he is. 283 00:33:03,780 --> 00:33:11,340 Fisk declared in 1889, he characterised childhood as a period of plasticity, 284 00:33:11,340 --> 00:33:16,740 describing moulding and shaping of the forms of the child on the interior, 285 00:33:16,740 --> 00:33:24,300 as well as their exterior growth, while Cassatt drew from traditional iconography and her use of mother and child subjects. 286 00:33:24,300 --> 00:33:31,500 She highlights the artificiality of the painted image with those spatial inconsistencies dappled brushwork, 287 00:33:31,500 --> 00:33:39,870 elongated limb and the thick impasto on the children's faces in the process of building these non-metallic fictions. 288 00:33:39,870 --> 00:33:45,780 She emphasises the plasticity of the child because that's dense and textured. 289 00:33:45,780 --> 00:33:48,840 Brushwork creates a sense of visual dynamism, 290 00:33:48,840 --> 00:33:55,770 and though the child's form is caught in the process of becoming evolving and separating from the parent figure. 291 00:33:55,770 --> 00:34:00,240 Discovering the presence of its own subjective minds in this way. 292 00:34:00,240 --> 00:34:05,160 Aesthetic formation unfolds with subject formation. 293 00:34:05,160 --> 00:34:12,660 Cassatt literally says this relationship, as Matthews has observed by frequently displaying unfinished work. 294 00:34:12,660 --> 00:34:14,520 A close corollary to custards, 295 00:34:14,520 --> 00:34:25,110 mirror and the layers of reflection and refraction within is Henry James's portrayal of his child protagonist in what Maisie knew of 1897, 296 00:34:25,110 --> 00:34:33,060 which imagines the child's perspective intuitive and complex beyond the language to convey thoughts and feelings. 297 00:34:33,060 --> 00:34:39,570 Anticipating Sigmund Freud interest in children's quote, receiving and reproducing impressions, 298 00:34:39,570 --> 00:34:47,190 James offers and I quote from what Maisie knew of register of impressions to explore Maisie's interior self. 299 00:34:47,190 --> 00:34:52,620 Her quote small expanding consciousness in which she comprehends more than she can 300 00:34:52,620 --> 00:34:58,410 articulate about the convoluted sexual relationships of her divorced parents. 301 00:34:58,410 --> 00:35:05,400 Maisie self awareness belies her age and develops the idea quote of an inner self. 302 00:35:05,400 --> 00:35:13,470 Midway through the novel, James announces Maisie's ironic possession of a quote innocence so saturated with knowledge. 303 00:35:13,470 --> 00:35:14,820 Twice in the novel, 304 00:35:14,820 --> 00:35:23,790 James use the metaphor of being flattened against a pane of glass to register the meeting between Maisie's consciousness and the world. 305 00:35:23,790 --> 00:35:30,900 James describes quote, The sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's mean supports the long habit. 306 00:35:30,900 --> 00:35:38,970 From the first of seeing herself in discussion, it gave her often an odd air of being present at her history. 307 00:35:38,970 --> 00:35:47,790 In a separate a manner as if she could get only get it experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass, 308 00:35:47,790 --> 00:35:51,510 Maisie peers out at the world from her newly self-reflexive, 309 00:35:51,510 --> 00:36:01,440 subjective position, feeling quote henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard windowpane of the sweet shop of knowledge. 310 00:36:01,440 --> 00:36:06,180 Croissants, children are constructed in similar terms to James's formulation, 311 00:36:06,180 --> 00:36:16,140 pressed and flattened at the edge between interiority and exterior pretty as some scholars, including Griselda Pollock, has have observed, 312 00:36:16,140 --> 00:36:23,400 Carson's paintings seem to anticipate shock collections later concept of the mirror stage in psychoanalytic theory, 313 00:36:23,400 --> 00:36:31,260 in which the child recognises their reflection in the mirror and discovers that the dynamic image is separate from the South. 314 00:36:31,260 --> 00:36:35,520 This spark of subjectivity at in the terms, 315 00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:45,630 the quote threshold of the visual world and operating spatially marks a fragmented self because that's mirror builds out that fragmentation, 316 00:36:45,630 --> 00:36:50,190 literally passing the child's body across these three different modes of display. 317 00:36:50,190 --> 00:37:00,690 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. 318 00:37:00,690 --> 00:37:05,310 If James is, Maisie has a gap between experience and language because that's dynamic. 319 00:37:05,310 --> 00:37:13,830 Structures build a visual language to bridge that because that's practise is particular but not entirely unique. 320 00:37:13,830 --> 00:37:23,160 Other U.S. women artists working in France and sending paintings abroad also explored these kinds of discourses of child psychology and independence. 321 00:37:23,160 --> 00:37:31,590 In Cecilia Boar's Lead Danielle Edgerton, France, which she sent to Paris in 1887 as her first salon submission, 322 00:37:31,590 --> 00:37:39,870 the boys scrutinising gaze from his mother's lap is focussed out of the picture plane, breaking the intimacy between them. 323 00:37:39,870 --> 00:37:46,410 The French, the paintings French title, which for Beau was, quote, never translatable or to be spoken in English. 324 00:37:46,410 --> 00:37:48,570 But if we were to, you would roughly be. 325 00:37:48,570 --> 00:37:59,100 The last days of childhood implies a sense of mourning for the mother as the child ages ages beyond their past intimacies. 326 00:37:59,100 --> 00:38:06,000 The art historian Nina Auerbach argues that the painting quote does everything to separate its subjects. 327 00:38:06,000 --> 00:38:09,480 There is nothing universal about this dynamic pair, 328 00:38:09,480 --> 00:38:18,540 nor do mother and child corroborates in a circle of repose in a photograph taken just before the painting travelled to Paris. 329 00:38:18,540 --> 00:38:20,220 Vogue posed beside it. 330 00:38:20,220 --> 00:38:28,830 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, 331 00:38:28,830 --> 00:38:31,970 acknowledge the viewer. 332 00:38:31,970 --> 00:38:41,210 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, 333 00:38:41,210 --> 00:38:47,210 whether a drawing in a shared sketchbook which she bought at a Paris art supply store that renders the 334 00:38:47,210 --> 00:38:54,500 child in three dimensions as he pressure presses his back against an imaginary wall and in particular, 335 00:38:54,500 --> 00:39:02,780 his face merging with white heightening and a shadow behind his head or in her many larger paintings in oil, 336 00:39:02,780 --> 00:39:07,310 Rand probes the brooding psychology of Hunter's inner life. 337 00:39:07,310 --> 00:39:16,850 Born in 1892 and residents in London near their cousin Henry, James Hunter and Rand on visits from France, we're connected with James. 338 00:39:16,850 --> 00:39:24,650 While he was writing what Maisie knew and ongoing dramas of their mother also resonate in James's novel. 339 00:39:24,650 --> 00:39:31,250 For more on Rand's, please check out a newly published, edited volume by Alexis Boylan. 340 00:39:31,250 --> 00:39:36,200 In a period in which women artists were often infantilized and encouraged to take 341 00:39:36,200 --> 00:39:41,270 up the iconography of mother and child as though it were somehow natural to them, 342 00:39:41,270 --> 00:39:44,720 Cassatt, Bow and Rand all take up the motif. 343 00:39:44,720 --> 00:39:56,810 But de naturalise it as they chart squirming sassy, oversized, complex figures in experimental compositions which do not acquiesce to models. 344 00:39:56,810 --> 00:40:03,260 Because that's paintings resonates with the tensions between emulation and independence in the discourse that 345 00:40:03,260 --> 00:40:11,240 declared American artists the children of French models as Cleese and Kevin Sharp and Adrian Richardson have argued, 346 00:40:11,240 --> 00:40:18,560 because that's transnational position meant that her participation in the French art world was by no means assured. 347 00:40:18,560 --> 00:40:23,180 She ratcheted up this iconography as these dynamics shift. 348 00:40:23,180 --> 00:40:33,350 And so while she participates in four of the impressionist exhibitions between 1879 and 1886, everything changes by the end of the 1880s. 349 00:40:33,350 --> 00:40:42,530 The group punts clever, with which Cassatt had long been affiliated, retitled itself in 1890 one lap dance clubs of Marseilles, 350 00:40:42,530 --> 00:40:48,290 excluding her and other expatriate members from an exhibition only about three months before. 351 00:40:48,290 --> 00:40:55,280 And Cassatt had been building a major print project for that show when she found out that she would be excluded from it. 352 00:40:55,280 --> 00:41:03,230 French exhibition spaces increasingly close to themselves to foreign artists publishing pamphlets complaining about an invasion of U.S. artists, 353 00:41:03,230 --> 00:41:12,080 in particular into a saturated art world. The same anxieties about French artistic legacy that shaped boogaloo as motherland 354 00:41:12,080 --> 00:41:16,700 are operational here because that was excluded from the centennial exhibition 355 00:41:16,700 --> 00:41:21,320 of French art in the Paris Expo in nineteen hundred because of her nationality 356 00:41:21,320 --> 00:41:26,180 and also from a retrospective of Impressionism in London in Nineteen Oh five. 357 00:41:26,180 --> 00:41:35,120 She was omitted from win for Doo Doo Hearst and Theodore Dollface books on the history of Impressionist painters in the same period. 358 00:41:35,120 --> 00:41:41,630 Suggestively, French critics labelled her consistently as both a quote painter of childhood and as an American 359 00:41:41,630 --> 00:41:48,770 painter in ways that featured Ben has shown dissociate her from the history of French Impressionism. 360 00:41:48,770 --> 00:41:53,510 At the same time, interest for Carson's paintings increased in the United States, 361 00:41:53,510 --> 00:41:59,240 while Cassatt may have explored the restive child as an artistic statement of her independence. 362 00:41:59,240 --> 00:42:04,430 U.S. critics increasingly appropriated these visual effects for national ends. 363 00:42:04,430 --> 00:42:13,010 By 1910, American critics like Clara McChesney declared the quote direct and spontaneous delineation of facades brushwork 364 00:42:13,010 --> 00:42:20,540 as evidence of her quote Americanism instead of linking her stylistic approach with French Impressionism. 365 00:42:20,540 --> 00:42:27,110 U.S. reviewers insisted that that brushwork, fittingly coupled with those independent children, signified. 366 00:42:27,110 --> 00:42:32,090 And here again, I quote American self-sufficiency and assertiveness. 367 00:42:32,090 --> 00:42:36,800 This became all the more apparent when several of her mother child paintings 368 00:42:36,800 --> 00:42:43,340 hung on a single line in the 1915 suffrage exhibition at Nola's in New York. 369 00:42:43,340 --> 00:42:50,720 And I'm grateful to my Oxford, Ph.D., students research assistants Alex Sullivan for compiling, 370 00:42:50,720 --> 00:42:58,730 for me clear images of all of those paintings on the wall in the image that I just showed you. 371 00:42:58,730 --> 00:43:04,130 Carson's assertion of childhood independence in her paintings is suggestive at a time 372 00:43:04,130 --> 00:43:11,870 when her role in the transnational history of modernism and American art were in flux. 373 00:43:11,870 --> 00:43:16,400 To revisit this psychoanalytic frame that I mentioned before, 374 00:43:16,400 --> 00:43:25,520 if we read not only the child within its paintings as discovering its subjective self through the other of its reflection, 375 00:43:25,520 --> 00:43:35,990 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? 376 00:43:35,990 --> 00:43:36,800 In other words, 377 00:43:36,800 --> 00:43:45,560 if we extrapolate from the personal to the collective and apply psychoanalysis to the wide cultural practise of U.S. art study in Paris, 378 00:43:45,560 --> 00:43:51,290 do these paintings enact US artists seeing themselves as distinct from the French 379 00:43:51,290 --> 00:43:57,080 model representing the burgeoning autonomy of the child from Tanner to Cassatt? 380 00:43:57,080 --> 00:44:05,150 Bow to Brand opens out these possibilities of acknowledging debts to French art practise and seeking to surpass them. 381 00:44:05,150 --> 00:44:13,820 Following Pollock's model of the gambit charting reference, deference and difference that I mentioned at the first lecture. 382 00:44:13,820 --> 00:44:18,710 Yet, they also underscore its problems and paradoxes because the United States was not 383 00:44:18,710 --> 00:44:24,710 only a post-colonial use discovering itself through this French mirrored refraction. 384 00:44:24,710 --> 00:44:36,320 It was also a colonialist entity in its settler colonial projects across the continents and in the adoption of overseas colonies from 1898. 385 00:44:36,320 --> 00:44:45,920 So playing the child in Europe deflected this colonial reality as part of a discourse in, as Daniel Moi puts it, quotes. 386 00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:54,260 How to hide an empire. Some European observers did sound alarm bells increasingly across the late 19th century. 387 00:44:54,260 --> 00:45:03,080 In 1881, a French. Been warned, his contemporaries, to quote, beware the Americans, people who always grow and grow. 388 00:45:03,080 --> 00:45:13,490 Cartoons of this period by Granz Hamilton and Louis Dalrymple after the war of 1898 notably inverts the trope of Americans as children. 389 00:45:13,490 --> 00:45:19,670 So resonance we played in France on the cover of Judge in June 19, 1898, 390 00:45:19,670 --> 00:45:26,960 a befuddled Uncle Sam holds out a screaming black child with an ID tag reading Philippines. 391 00:45:26,960 --> 00:45:34,160 The caption adds Information wanted quoting Uncle Sam. Now that I've got it, what am I going to do with it? 392 00:45:34,160 --> 00:45:41,750 Seven months later, Puck merged these colonial slayers, together with an image of a schoolroom managed by Uncle Sam. 393 00:45:41,750 --> 00:45:49,160 A misbehaving Indian is segregated at the back of the school room while a black figure washes the windows. 394 00:45:49,160 --> 00:45:57,620 The mostly white children sit reading in the back, and the new unruly colonial children are scrutinised in the foreground. 395 00:45:57,620 --> 00:46:01,220 A caricature of a Chinese student waits at the door. 396 00:46:01,220 --> 00:46:08,870 In this inversion, from playing the child in Europe, cartoons magnify Uncle Sam as the icon of the United States. 397 00:46:08,870 --> 00:46:14,060 Relationally to the unruly child. These images, 398 00:46:14,060 --> 00:46:19,100 mark the fungibility of the metaphor of the child and suggests the ways in which Americans in 399 00:46:19,100 --> 00:46:26,300 this period selectively adopted or dismissed the symbol with an empire stretching 10000 miles. 400 00:46:26,300 --> 00:46:30,530 As one cartoon boldly announced by 1991 in Paris, 401 00:46:30,530 --> 00:46:39,020 the American Register reported that the United States speedy growth from a quote Baby Nation to a power of the First Class 402 00:46:39,020 --> 00:46:50,000 would surprise Europeans if we introduce this complex and fraught Baby Nation to this shifting transnational artistic context. 403 00:46:50,000 --> 00:46:59,780 What of that's babies who proliferate and multiply as she paints them repeatedly and as they grow and grow before our very eyes? 404 00:46:59,780 --> 00:47:06,050 Does imperialism lurk beneath and around these children when we ourselves press our noses up 405 00:47:06,050 --> 00:47:12,710 against the hard windowpane of the sweets shop of knowledge as we interrogate these pictures? 406 00:47:12,710 --> 00:47:18,590 As with the other tropes of paradoxical U.S. innocence in Paris, I've explored on this lecture series. 407 00:47:18,590 --> 00:47:27,650 Whichever parts of these cultural structures of childhood these artists intercepted their representations were anything but innocence. 408 00:47:27,650 --> 00:47:39,960 Thank you for your attention, and I invite Alister writes back to talk through some of this material with me. 409 00:47:39,960 --> 00:47:48,990 Wonderful. So thank you so much, Emily. Another fantastic, fantastically interesting talk, 410 00:47:48,990 --> 00:47:54,180 especially caught by that opening out at the end into the question of the way in 411 00:47:54,180 --> 00:47:59,400 which the state is presented as its parent to new new holdings and so forth. 412 00:47:59,400 --> 00:48:04,200 I mean, really complicates the question of the child who who is the child who plays the child? 413 00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:08,700 What is it? What's at stake in playing the child? So I thought that was really interesting. 414 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:14,190 I wanted to come back to an earlier moment in the in the tool. 415 00:48:14,190 --> 00:48:19,770 I'm going to permit myself to ask a question or committing myself to ask a question at the start, 416 00:48:19,770 --> 00:48:26,190 but I would remind people that they can type questions into the YouTube Live and they 417 00:48:26,190 --> 00:48:32,870 will appear on my screen and I will do my best to to to translate them for Emily. 418 00:48:32,870 --> 00:48:39,210 So when you started out, we were looking to blast you the music lesson, I think it is, 419 00:48:39,210 --> 00:48:46,680 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. 420 00:48:46,680 --> 00:48:49,710 And then there's the other model which is having a child. 421 00:48:49,710 --> 00:48:54,750 Being a child means not having any training and that that's the kind of beauty of it, that you're innocent, 422 00:48:54,750 --> 00:48:59,160 that you see the eye, you see the world with innocent eyes, the eyes of a child and so forth. 423 00:48:59,160 --> 00:49:03,270 And that's a common trope going all the way through in the 19th century in France. 424 00:49:03,270 --> 00:49:10,950 As you said, Baudelaire, when he talks about guys in the painter of modern life, he he drew like a barbarian, like a child. 425 00:49:10,950 --> 00:49:14,910 Yeah. And I think, you know, I think for Baudelaire, that's kind of a good thing. 426 00:49:14,910 --> 00:49:16,500 I mean, it might sound like it's not, but it's, you know, 427 00:49:16,500 --> 00:49:23,980 it's about a kind of innocent eye not painting what you've been trying to paint but seeing for yourself. 428 00:49:23,980 --> 00:49:27,900 So childish innocent eye. And it goes all the way through to Matisse in the middle of the 20th century. 429 00:49:27,900 --> 00:49:32,200 They're still saying basically the same thing. So we have these two models. 430 00:49:32,200 --> 00:49:36,720 And I think I maybe have two questions about that or two part question. 431 00:49:36,720 --> 00:49:41,010 One is it is that I mean, it looked like from your talk. 432 00:49:41,010 --> 00:49:46,560 But is there a tendency for people who are doing the academic training to very much conceive 433 00:49:46,560 --> 00:49:54,960 of and paint images of children as being tutored versus people who who are so like Cassatt, 434 00:49:54,960 --> 00:50:03,870 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, 435 00:50:03,870 --> 00:50:13,280 doing pictures that sanitised childhood is kind of resistance to or turning away from, as you argued very compellingly, the mother said. 436 00:50:13,280 --> 00:50:21,400 That's the first part to the question Is there a difference between academically inclined American artists and. 437 00:50:21,400 --> 00:50:29,020 Less academically inclined American artists in Paris, and the second part is. 438 00:50:29,020 --> 00:50:34,570 There's something kind of interesting about saying that you're not going to be trained 439 00:50:34,570 --> 00:50:39,040 and you're going to be like a child in the untutored since the second untutored sense, 440 00:50:39,040 --> 00:50:47,290 which is that that's equally following a very well established prototype laid out by French writers and artists. 441 00:50:47,290 --> 00:50:54,850 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 442 00:50:54,850 --> 00:51:02,710 people that claiming to be a child with innocent eyes is itself a very old kind of trope? 443 00:51:02,710 --> 00:51:07,420 And you've been you kind of can say that because you've heard other people. 444 00:51:07,420 --> 00:51:12,760 Saying it, yeah, sorry, that was a very long question, but to kind of two parts within it? 445 00:51:12,760 --> 00:51:17,860 No, it's great and I took notes, so I'm back with you on both. 446 00:51:17,860 --> 00:51:26,770 So, yeah, so in general, I do think that we can kind of lump categories of kind of academic approaches featuring this kind of 447 00:51:26,770 --> 00:51:34,150 dutiful relationship and more modernist approaches pushing back and kind of experimenting with psychology. 448 00:51:34,150 --> 00:51:40,930 But I also think that there is not a strict progression from one to the other in time. 449 00:51:40,930 --> 00:51:48,310 Both of these practises are kind of happening simultaneously. And I do think that there are objects that are kind of intervening in both. 450 00:51:48,310 --> 00:51:52,480 And I think the Tanner painting does some of that work where The Apprentice 451 00:51:52,480 --> 00:51:57,370 is tied with the master but also has some kind of independence and autonomy. 452 00:51:57,370 --> 00:52:03,010 And so there are objects like that that feature a kind of middle ground. 453 00:52:03,010 --> 00:52:06,190 And then in response to your second question, 454 00:52:06,190 --> 00:52:14,260 I was thinking about this funny comment that Oscar Wilde makes about how Americans are particularly inclined to 455 00:52:14,260 --> 00:52:22,690 give you the benefit of their inexperience in the ways that they offer to either make art or kind of circulate. 456 00:52:22,690 --> 00:52:30,820 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, 457 00:52:30,820 --> 00:52:37,960 the context around which he says that. But I think there is a really interesting slippage in which the notion of this 458 00:52:37,960 --> 00:52:44,380 kind of a naive and childish experience that has a kind of anti modernist thread, 459 00:52:44,380 --> 00:52:53,750 as you point out, that is circulating throughout the French are art criticism of the 19th century gets kind of refigure 460 00:52:53,750 --> 00:53:00,310 and taken up in a way that implies that there is a limit to what French artists can achieve. 461 00:53:00,310 --> 00:53:10,690 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. 462 00:53:10,690 --> 00:53:17,590 And so I think there is an idea that these artists are achieving something new by their position ality. 463 00:53:17,590 --> 00:53:29,290 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, 464 00:53:29,290 --> 00:53:36,410 sometimes in ways that absolutely belie their very possibility of what they say they're trying to achieve. 465 00:53:36,410 --> 00:53:40,120 Not interesting. Thank you so much. If it is, I mean, it's equally true, of course. 466 00:53:40,120 --> 00:53:44,560 A French artist, you know, when Matisse says I want to see with the eyes of a child in 1954, 467 00:53:44,560 --> 00:53:48,910 whenever it is, you know, that's also it's as tight a trope for him. 468 00:53:48,910 --> 00:53:54,620 I mean, more so than it is for American artists in Paris in the late 19th century. 469 00:53:54,620 --> 00:53:57,850 Yeah. Well, I have other questions, but we have a story where you going? 470 00:53:57,850 --> 00:54:02,020 I was just going to follow up on one thing, which is that there's actually five chapters in this book, 471 00:54:02,020 --> 00:54:04,420 and I have presented four of them in the terror lectures. 472 00:54:04,420 --> 00:54:12,430 But the fifth is about this kind of trope of wishing that one had been born blind and then suddenly gaining 473 00:54:12,430 --> 00:54:20,530 it to be able to see what the world could look like fresh and deeply tied to this kind of childhood trope. 474 00:54:20,530 --> 00:54:26,500 But what I'm interested in in that other material is to U.S. artists who are working in Paris, 475 00:54:26,500 --> 00:54:32,950 one a sculptor and one an abstract Peter Morgan Russell, who was in Paris in the teens. 476 00:54:32,950 --> 00:54:38,740 And what's interesting about both the sculptor George Great Bernard and this abstract painter is that 477 00:54:38,740 --> 00:54:45,400 they both make claims that their art is not necessarily coming from the position of having seen a new, 478 00:54:45,400 --> 00:54:54,100 but that the art itself actually represents what the organ of the eye could see when it was first kind of created. 479 00:54:54,100 --> 00:55:04,840 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. 480 00:55:04,840 --> 00:55:12,730 But I think deeply interesting. Fascinating. So we're inviting you back next week to give that chapter based on that chapter. 481 00:55:12,730 --> 00:55:19,760 We'll figure something out. So we have a comment in the chat box from Jessica. 482 00:55:19,760 --> 00:55:23,830 It's not really a question, but a comment that you might want to respond to, 483 00:55:23,830 --> 00:55:31,030 which is she's making a very good point, which is that this idea of seeing with a child eyes goes back. 484 00:55:31,030 --> 00:55:39,550 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. 485 00:55:39,550 --> 00:55:45,190 She doesn't say, but I think there's the is it shimmer good someone comes across as human boy, is it right? 486 00:55:45,190 --> 00:55:52,540 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. 487 00:55:52,540 --> 00:55:57,790 Drawing something or carving a piece of wood, I forget exactly the details of the story, but yes. 488 00:55:57,790 --> 00:56:07,080 So there's a long history. As you mentioned, Carol Van Amanda also is another writer in which this trope appears. 489 00:56:07,080 --> 00:56:13,980 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. 490 00:56:13,980 --> 00:56:15,990 I'm going to briefly share my screen again. 491 00:56:15,990 --> 00:56:21,450 There were a couple of comparisons that I didn't include, but I think are instructive in this kind of vein. 492 00:56:21,450 --> 00:56:25,380 Thinking about some of the hazards gambits, 493 00:56:25,380 --> 00:56:37,080 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 494 00:56:37,080 --> 00:56:44,610 painting that is in the National Gallery and the ways in which there is this kind of like spatial compositional engagements. 495 00:56:44,610 --> 00:56:49,650 But then Cassatt also is kind of extending and adapting from that source material. 496 00:56:49,650 --> 00:56:56,550 And so I do think it's it's possible that these artists also have read their Vasari and that Kazaa is 497 00:56:56,550 --> 00:57:06,300 thinking about to this kind of trope of the child as a kind of mantra in earlier contexts as well. 498 00:57:06,300 --> 00:57:14,130 And I think that for that and then also this comparison, which appears in Judith Barters project about Mary Cassatt, 499 00:57:14,130 --> 00:57:22,480 Modern Woman Cassatt actually bought this painting on the left by right around the time that she was making the mirror. 500 00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:32,850 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. 501 00:57:32,850 --> 00:57:42,570 And to your point, Jessica playing with the kind of visual strategies that artists in the period too may have been projecting, 502 00:57:42,570 --> 00:57:51,300 but then kind of adapting and upending, especially with the kind of surface texture that Cassatt employs as she kind of 503 00:57:51,300 --> 00:57:58,770 absorbs the models so fully that they're almost invisible in the final paintings. 504 00:57:58,770 --> 00:58:07,190 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? 505 00:58:07,190 --> 00:58:15,090 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. 506 00:58:15,090 --> 00:58:22,290 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. 507 00:58:22,290 --> 00:58:25,800 Whereas Cassatt flips that around and it's the kid. 508 00:58:25,800 --> 00:58:32,580 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. 509 00:58:32,580 --> 00:58:37,290 Yes, exactly. It seems a little bit ambiguous whether the child is looking at themselves or at us, 510 00:58:37,290 --> 00:58:42,270 and it's kind of both, I think, you know, what's the classic painterly problem, right? 511 00:58:42,270 --> 00:58:47,580 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. 512 00:58:47,580 --> 00:58:52,530 You can't see that reflection. Yeah. So they have to paint fudge it. 513 00:58:52,530 --> 00:59:03,390 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 514 00:59:03,390 --> 00:59:08,070 imagery and how familiar they say with the dynamic in cartoons and caricatures. 515 00:59:08,070 --> 00:59:12,510 But does it also appear in all? Yeah. 516 00:59:12,510 --> 00:59:16,480 Again, not at the turn. At the turn of the century is what they would like to do. 517 00:59:16,480 --> 00:59:20,130 Not great. Thank you so much, Raimi. That's a great question. 518 00:59:20,130 --> 00:59:34,170 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. 519 00:59:34,170 --> 00:59:38,550 And it's a question that I've been thinking about a lot as I've been working on this chapter, 520 00:59:38,550 --> 00:59:46,050 trying to think about whether there is a kind of media specificity, whether in the space of fine arts. 521 00:59:46,050 --> 00:59:53,220 We can also find these dynamics. And I think that the jury is still out on that question. 522 00:59:53,220 --> 00:59:59,310 I haven't found any particular examples that that directly play out that relationship. 523 00:59:59,310 --> 01:00:06,300 But there are so many images that are running through my head of kind of French colonial murals at world's fairs, 524 01:00:06,300 --> 01:00:09,270 for instance, that are some that have sometimes been shown at the Cabron. 525 01:00:09,270 --> 01:00:21,660 Lee, where I think there is a kind of use of the child as a way to reaffirm French authority over a colonised subjects. 526 01:00:21,660 --> 01:00:29,520 And so I think it would require one to look more at the kind of declarations of like Chicago in 1893, for instance, 527 01:00:29,520 --> 01:00:40,260 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. 528 01:00:40,260 --> 01:00:50,290 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. 529 01:00:50,290 --> 01:00:57,710 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. 530 01:00:57,710 --> 01:01:04,540 This is kind of the great payoff of the terror in many ways is that it makes one reflect differently 531 01:01:04,540 --> 01:01:08,410 on what makes me reflect differently on things that I thought I already knew a lot about, 532 01:01:08,410 --> 01:01:12,610 which is fragile. And so this is, I mean, 533 01:01:12,610 --> 01:01:19,600 listening to Dan was making me reflect on the very frequent rhetoric of the French state that West 534 01:01:19,600 --> 01:01:25,270 African colonies are his children and that it has a kind of parental responsibility towards. 535 01:01:25,270 --> 01:01:32,380 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. 536 01:01:32,380 --> 01:01:35,800 And I'm sure I mean, nothing's coming to mind immediately, 537 01:01:35,800 --> 01:01:44,920 but I'm sure there are images that have to make that West African colonies as children trope explicit in that. 538 01:01:44,920 --> 01:01:52,840 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 539 01:01:52,840 --> 01:01:58,330 body that had some murals from fairs that I think play out of that rhetoric. 540 01:01:58,330 --> 01:02:05,170 Exactly. And I was just going to share my screen again quickly in the back of that cartoon. 541 01:02:05,170 --> 01:02:16,090 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 542 01:02:16,090 --> 01:02:26,710 as a kind of stepping stone to self-governance that needs to be taught through the paradoxical colonial presence. 543 01:02:26,710 --> 01:02:38,850 And so I think that kind of. Hierarchy building is probably adopted in many ways from the French rhetoric that you're describing, too. 544 01:02:38,850 --> 01:02:48,630 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, 545 01:02:48,630 --> 01:02:54,090 and that's their kind of evidence of their maturation, I think, you know. 546 01:02:54,090 --> 01:02:58,820 Thinking about the turtle, I'm going to permit myself one last question. 547 01:02:58,820 --> 01:03:04,470 Well, that's kind of I mean, it may be one that is unanswerable in a few minutes or even possibly at all. 548 01:03:04,470 --> 01:03:13,350 I was struck by the the bureau image and then before it, the dummy of the of the of the motherland. 549 01:03:13,350 --> 01:03:18,330 And of course, it matters that in French laboratories. Feminine. 550 01:03:18,330 --> 01:03:24,840 Right? Yeah. Different in Germany that their fatherland is is is masculine. 551 01:03:24,840 --> 01:03:31,890 And I wonder if there's something to be figured out about the way in which I don't know. 552 01:03:31,890 --> 01:03:36,570 France, as parent for American artists, is also gendered. 553 01:03:36,570 --> 01:03:42,060 Mm hmm. But I mean, I don't quite know how one will begin to think that through. 554 01:03:42,060 --> 01:03:49,110 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, 555 01:03:49,110 --> 01:03:56,640 Julianne, and he's basically the France mother lands, which he paints as female, that he's playing as this kind of French master. 556 01:03:56,640 --> 01:04:05,910 And so there is, I think, something to a thread to follow there about the kind of identifications of gender 557 01:04:05,910 --> 01:04:12,390 roles for the French Masters and how that informs the kind of relationship, 558 01:04:12,390 --> 01:04:16,290 especially as transitions are happening in gender politics, 559 01:04:16,290 --> 01:04:26,490 in study and between the kind of Italians that are split by gender or the exclusion of women from the equal up until 1897. 560 01:04:26,490 --> 01:04:31,710 That I think, yeah, it presents some complexities. 561 01:04:31,710 --> 01:04:39,150 And I guess to I would link it back to the debates about the population in France as well, 562 01:04:39,150 --> 01:04:47,430 that this kind of like gender bending even across the arts is does that become implicated in these larger anxieties? 563 01:04:47,430 --> 01:04:51,060 Yeah, totally fascinating. The rich question, thank you. 564 01:04:51,060 --> 01:04:53,520 No, no, no, thank you. 565 01:04:53,520 --> 01:05:03,690 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. 566 01:05:03,690 --> 01:05:07,500 We're sorry. We haven't been able to answer them all. But we are out of time. In closing, 567 01:05:07,500 --> 01:05:14,310 I would like to thank the Terra Foundation again for making all of this possible with their generous support of the visiting professorship. 568 01:05:14,310 --> 01:05:22,740 And I'd like to thank Coach also for making this possible, and I think all this digital stuff works so effectively and efficiently. 569 01:05:22,740 --> 01:05:26,580 It's not easy to to do, but most of all, of course, 570 01:05:26,580 --> 01:05:33,030 I would like to thank Emily again for what has been an incredibly stimulating and thought-provoking lecture today, 571 01:05:33,030 --> 01:05:37,890 but also the whole series has been kind of fantastic and revealing. 572 01:05:37,890 --> 01:05:42,540 And as I say, as a French someone who works a lot on France in this period, 573 01:05:42,540 --> 01:05:47,830 I've learnt so much about the stuff that I look at, as well as the stuff that you look at. 574 01:05:47,830 --> 01:05:51,750 So I think you've really shown that we can't think about these things separately. 575 01:05:51,750 --> 01:06:01,290 So this is part of a kind of whole ecosystem that interacts with multiple parts, interact and very interesting continuously in very interesting ways. 576 01:06:01,290 --> 01:06:05,580 So thank you again for sharing this. This works with us. 577 01:06:05,580 --> 01:06:50,016 Thanks again to the audience for listening. It's been great having you with us and good night.