List of 50 slides, semester 2

Francisco de Goya, 1800, Charles IV of Spain and His Family, oil on canvas.

Francisco de Goya, 1777 – 78, From Los Caprichos, No. 43, ‘The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters’, Etching.  

Francisco de Goya, 1814, The Third of May, 1808, oil on canvas

Theodor Gericault, 1818 - 19, The Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas

Eugene Delacroix, 1830, Liberty Crossing the Barricades, oil on canvas

JMW Turner, 1842, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, oil on canvas

Caspar David Friedrich, 1818, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, Oil on canvas

Rosa Bonheur, 1849, Ploughing in the Nivernais, oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, 1854 The Meeting or "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet", oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, 1849, The Stone Breakers

Honore Daumier, c. 1850-53, The Burden oil on canvas

Jean-François Millet, 1857, The Gleaners, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1863, Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1865, Olympia

Claude Monet, 1877, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack Thaw, Sunset

Francois Rude, 1833–36, Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, Chérence stone

Rodin, 1894, The Burghers of Calais, Bronze

Camille Claudel, 1893, The Waltz, bronze

Edgar Degas, late 19th C, Woman in a tub (bronze cast after Degas’ death from wax original)

Utamaro, 1790, Mother and Sleepy Child, Colour woodblock print

Hokusai, 1831, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from 12 views of Mount Fuji (series)

Felix Valloton, 1894, Le Bain, Woodblock print

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, 1892, Reine de Joie, Colour Lithograph, poster

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, 1894, Chocolat Dancing in the Achilles Bar, Pencil and gouache on paper

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, 1896, Woman Lying on Her Back, oil on cardboard

Edgar Degas, 1876 – 77, Café Concert at Les Ambassadeurs, Pastel on paper

Edgar Degas, 1879 - 80, Waiting, Monotype

Edgar Degas, 1886 , The Tub, Pastel

Mary Cassatt, 1893, The Child’s Bath, Drypoint and aquatint

Mary Cassatt, 1880, A woman in black at the Opera, Oil on canvas

William Morris, 1874, (left) Design for Acanthus wallpaper, pencil and watercolour on paper (right) Acanthus wallpaper, Blockprint on paper

Victor Horta, 1893-1894 , Tassel House stairway, Brussels

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1901, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Oval Room, near Glasgow

Edward Colonna and Alexandre Bigot, ca. 1899, Pitcher, Stoneware, grès flammé, with silver mounts

Aubrey Beardsley, 1893, The Peacock Dress, ink on paper

Edvard Munch, 1896, Jealousy, Lithograph

Georges Seurat, 1889, Study for The Chahut, oil on canvas

Emile Bernard, 1888 , Self-portrait with portrait of Gauguin, dedicated to Vincent van Gogh.

Paul Gauguin, 1888, Vision after the Sermon, oil on canvas

Paul Gauguin, 1892, The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch, oil on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, L’Arlisienne, Oil on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, Ink and wash on paper

Vincent van Gogh, 1889, Starry Night, Drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper

Paul Cezanne , 1887, Still Life with a Plate of Cherries, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne, 1890, Still Life with Basket, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1902, Mont Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1900 , Bibemus Quarry, Oil on canvas

Pablo Picasso, 1908, Factory at Horta de Hebro, Oil on canvas

 

 

Semester 2 lecture 8

Today is an introduction to Visual Culture which is a field of study concerned with the production, circulation and consumption of visual images in everyday life and how those impact on the subjectivity of people. Subjectivity has to do with the way that we experience ourselves and our lives; the term refers to the fact that who we are, or who we understand ourselves to be, is shaped by many forces that are exterior to ourselves – social forces, cultural forces, institutional forces.

For most people life is mediated through images  - our environment is saturated with visual imagery that communicates messages of one kind or another, most of which are urging us to consume; images have become part of a culture of near-compulsory consumption.

So, visual culture is a study of the visual in the broad sense of that word as a place where meanings are both made and contested. It is a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and visualizations, rather than through texts and words.  

In order to understand that process of making and contesting meaning through images, there are two ideas in particular that you need to grasp. The first is representation, something that we have touched on before. Representation implies a system of meaning making based on rules and conventions specific to a culture or society.

Representation is often made up of three levels of meaning.

1.     Denotative meaning – literal descriptive meaning

2.     Connotative meaning  - cultural and historical context lead to other readings and interpretations

The myth of the image – the hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings that are in reality specific to particular groups of people, are presented as though they were universal and ‘given’. Myth allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear to be denotative.

Rooney; The denotation of the image above are, Caucasian male, red paint over the face and across his chest, arms and mouth wide open, small eyes, and mascular and well built body.

While the connotations of this image are, the red paint across the chest and face symbolise England football club’s logo. The red paint itself symbolised blood (England blood), bravery, strong, anger and passion. Wayne Rooney’s body gesture shows that he is strong and undefeatable and his passion for the team he plays. His muscular and well built body connotes that he is fit and athletic (indeed a well known football player in fact one of the best.)

The soldier is in a corner made of brick with his gun drawn and he is facing something out of the frame. The image is part of a series of photos that Griffiths took in Northern Ireland, which served as a citizen resource at the time, going beyond being advertisement or entertainment.

Images are still able to create emotion, document the feelings of a decade, and show power. The man in the photo may not have been a shooter in the Bloody Sunday killings but he is still a representation of the tension, pain, and disdain of that era.

We are not necessarily entirely passive in this process. As a species we can and do resist this shaping of our subjectivity. Sometimes we contest very openly in a visual way, as in the Punk movement for example, and sometimes we do it more covertly through slightly illegal activity or practices that are not considered socially acceptable. In both of those cases I have used examples of dress; clothing is a visual communicative language as well as a practical form of bodily protection.  

“Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch”depicts three young boys smoking cigars in the early 1900’s, and was taken by Lewis Hine in 1910. These children in the photograph were assuming the positions of adults, and have the responsibility of supporting their families. Hine captures the reality of kids being forced to take on parental roles to survive. “Lewis Hine shocked a nation with images of child exploitation in packing plants, glass factories and cotton mills-at this at a time when child labor was widely accepted as a natural part of life” (Linfield 15).  In 1900 about 1.7 million kids under the age of 15 were working in factories that had dangerous conditions Many families considered it normal and even encouraged their kids to take on jobs at such a young age. Families were struggling and needed all the income possible regardless of the hazards and damage it did to the kids. It wasn’t until 1973 that the Child Labor Laws were passed in the United States restricting children under the age of 16 to work.

On one hand we see the object of the photograph, the two dimensional surface, the various degrees of lights and darks that make up the forms, and the material of the print itself. On the other hand we see the various messages or feelings being conveyed through the smug expression on the boys’ faces, their obvious attitudes and the idea that these three boys appear to have lived a life of independence and hard work, free from the confines of education and parental control, and that these boys are decision-makers and responsible US citizens contributing to their community as newsies.

The architects of 9/11 seem to have planned the event with the understanding that the real battlefield is actually the mediascape. 9/11 was an image-event, generating images as weapons of Shock and Awe for dissemination through the media. There is a consciousness of generating images as a form of capital to circulate in the social imaginary.

This brings us to the second idea that you need to grasp in relation to visual culture and that is spectatorship. This term implies many aspects and ways of looking – the gaze, the look, the glance, the practice of looking, surveillance and visual pleasure.

The Society of the Spectacle was a film and book written in the 1970’s by a French artist Guy Debord. He was a very early critic of the process by which people are fed so many images that they can no longer distinguish between the literal meanings, the suggested meanings and the hidden meanings of images. Images take the place of meaningful social and political relations in Debord’s critique; the free circulation of images masks an increasing lack of freedom for people.

The Abu Ghraib torture images emerged 3 years after 9/11. The fact that these actions of torture were set up as images – even with the soldiers posing – indicates the extent to which spectatorship and the circulation of the image has penetrated into every corner of human relations.

These images of brutality become normalised through their circulation in this way, which can produce a kind of numbness. In that context it’s worth looking at this fashion campaign by Steven Meisel - State of Emergency.

Denotation?

Connotation?

Myth of the image – what is being normalised?

Sexualisation of brutality. Myth: violence is sexy and women actually like it!!!!!

Today images shift from one context to another, which produces a change in the meaning of the image. This means that the visual image is not a stable entity, but has a changing relationship to exterior reality at any given moment. This means that people can use the spectacle as a site of resistance, which is known as culture jamming, also based on a technique first suggested by Debord to appropriate and change the meaning of images.

Culture jamming is the act of transforming existing mass media messages, using the original medium's communication method to produce a critical view. It is a form of public activism which is generally in opposition to commercialism, and the vectors of corporate image. The aim of culture jamming is to create a contrast between corporate image and the realities of the corporation.

Sometimes culture jamming consists of making spoofs out of corporate or political advertisements, refiguring logos, print ads, billboards, websites and photos.

slide list lecture 7

Three-dimensional Euclidean space.

One point perspective

3-d model of Hyperbolic Space

Euclidean football

Hyperbolic football

Edwin Abbott, 1884 , Flatland, a novel

Paul Cezanne, 1865, Still Life with Bread and Eggs, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne, 1875 - 77 , Still Life with apples, Oil on canvas

Cezanne, 1884, Still Life with Soup Tureen, oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1887, Still Life with a Plate of Cherries, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1890, Still Life with Bottle of Rum Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne,1890-94, Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, Oil on canvas

Cezanne, 1890-94, Still Life with Apples, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne, 1890, Still Life with Basket, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1894 , Fruit Bowl, Pitcher and Fruit, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1895 , Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1878 Portrait of Madame Cezanne, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1894-1895 , Woman in a Green Hat (Madame Cezanne), Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1892 , The Cardplayers, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1895, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne , 1902, Mont Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne, 1904 - 06 , Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves Oil on canvas, 66 x 81.5 cm

Paul Cezanne , 1901-06 , Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves , Pencil and watercolor,

Paul Cezanne, 1899, Mont St. Victoire, watercolour

Paul Cezanne , 1900 , Trees by the Water, watercolour

Paul Cezanne, 1905. Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the Black Chateau,

Paul Cezanne , 1900 , Bibemus Quarry, Oil on canvas

Georges Braque, 1908 , Aquaduct at L’Estaque, Oil on canvas

Pablo Picasso, 1908 , Factory at Horta de Hebro, Oil on canvas

Picasso, 1896, Self Portrait with Uncombed Hair Oil on canvas

Picasso, 1896, Portrait of Aunt Pepa,

Picasso, 1897, Science and Charity, oil on canvas

Picasso, 1899, Lola, Charcoal and chalk on paper

Picasso, 1900, Self Portrait, Charcoal on paper

Picasso, 1900, Spanish Couple in Front of Inn

Picasso, 1900, Fairground,

Picasso, 1901, Crossing the Seine on the upper deck, oil on canvas

Picasso, 1901, Red Skirt , Pastel on paper

Picasso, 1900, Pierrot and Colombina

Picasso, 1900, The Embrace

Picasso, 1901, Self Portrait with Cloak

Fabric of spacetime as described by Einstein, the warping of which produces gravity

Semester 2 Lecture 7

As human beings we have a very particular architecture for perceiving the world. We have the commonly agreed five senses, although any of you who were in my reading group last semester might remember that some cultures say that there are 11 different senses. We also have a capacity for thought which means that we are able to imagine far more than we can actually perceive. We do this imagining in various ways – through images, stories, poems, philosophy but also through mathematics which is an abstract language for describing things that exist beyond what we can perceive.

You know that for a time people believed that the world was flat because it looks flat. Pythagoras, an ancient Greek mathematician had already proposed that the earth must be round in the 6th C BC, but that was not widely accepted until the 15^th C. We don’t perceive the world as curved, but we know it in our minds. Our experience of space in general is similar; the way that we perceive space is different from the way that science and technology tell us that space actually is. We are going to spend a few minutes talking about space and geometry for reasons that I hope will become clear in the second half of the lecture.

Geometry literally means the measure of the earth. It is a branch of mathematics developed by the Ancient Greeks, concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. Euclid was of the most influential of the Ancient Greek geometers. He developed theories to describe the basis of physical space –the point, the line, the plane, right angles and parallel lines. In Euclid's time, there was no clear distinction between physical space, the kind of space that we experience around us what we might also call intuitive space, and geometrical space. Euclid’s descriptions of space using the point, the line and the plane produced a very ordered and regular space, harmonious, logical, predictable. It was this kind of space that was rediscovered in the Renaissance. In addition to using geometry to represent that space, as in one-point perspective, mathematicians and geometers used geometry to map and chart the surface of the planet.

 

In the late 18th and early 19th-century the concept of space as a logical, ordered, predictable entity underwent a radical transformation, based partly on the discovery that space over large distances is curved rather than straight. This is too complex mathematically for me to understand or explain properly, but to cut a long story short, one of Euclid’s ideas that parallel lines always run alongside each other without ever touching is a problem when space is curved. At the beginning of the 19th C two alternatives to Euclidean space were accepted; the first is called hyberbolic space, which is always expanding, and the send is called elliptical space which is always folding inwards. These are called non-Euclidean spaces, and they suggest the possible existence of multiple dimensional worlds and perspectives in which things might look very different.

At first this transformed idea of space was limited to the mathematics community, but gradually it filtered out into the culture at large, with significant effects on art in particular. For example, in 1884 Edwin Abbott wrote a satirical novel entitled Flatland. It is written from the point of view of a two-dimensional being and the complexities that arise when it encounters a third dimension. Although the book was really a social critique about the hierarchy of Victorian culture, it also contributed to the popular understanding of multiple dimensions.

This brings us to the work of the Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne a French painter who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order. Although he was influenced by the Impressionists, Cezanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship.

 

When he first arrived in Paris in the 1860’s, he studied traditional academic painting, with a traditional use of light and shade and muted colour. However, as soon as he was exposed to the work of the impressionists, everything changed. He met Camille Pissaro in 1872, who introduced him to the notion of plein-air painting, that is painting directly out of doors, and immediately Cezanne shifted from dark tones to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland and rural villages. Under Pissarro's tutelage, and within a very short time, Cezanne developed his characteristic repetitive and exploratory brushstrokes, using planes of colour to build up complex forms. This was both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. He studied his subjects intently, often working very slowly over months or even years on a canvas, struggling to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

In his still-life paintings from the mid-1870s, Cézanne rejected the contrasts of light and shadow of his earlier years and adopted the a refined system of color scales placed next to one another developed by the Impressionists. He became a master of building forms completely from color and creating scenes with distorted perspectival space.

Though he considered the study of nature essential to painting, he nevertheless opposed many aspects of the Impressionist aesthetic. He epitomized the reaction against it when he declared: ‘I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.’ He believed that colour and form were inseparable, so he tried to emphasize structure and solidity in his work, features he thought neglected by Impressionism.

 

Cézanne wanted to capture all the complexities that an eye observes, so his paintings are the result of prolonged meditation in front of nature, not of instantaneous recording of its fleeting effects.. He wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective". By ignoring the laws of classical perspective, allowing each object to be independent within the space of the picture, his works represented an illogical space which the viewing public and critics found hard to accept. For many years his work was not well received critically, as it seemed clumsy and awkward. However, we can see this work in terms of non-Euclidean space and the breakdown of single-point perspective, or we can also look at it in terms of the cinematic, images that shift and change over time. Cèzanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cèzanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting."

 

He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style" as he once said. A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions.

During the late 1870s and '80s Cezanne drifted away from the Impressionists and spent much of his time in his childhood home in the south of France. He inherited his father's wealth and became financially independent, but he remained quite isolated socially.

From 1882, Cézanne executed a substantial number of landscapes, concentrating on pictorial problems of creating depth. He used an organized system of layers to construct a series of horizontal planes, which build dimension and draw the viewer into the landscape.

Until the end of his life he received little public success and was repeatedly rejected by the Paris Salon. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, a Paris art dealer, arranged a show of Cezanne's works and by the time of his death in 1906 he had attained the status of a legendary figure.

One of his most famous quotes is “to treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point.” This quote is supposed to have been the basis for the title Cubism which was adopted by Braque and Picasso later.

The 20th century began with a veritable explosion of scientific and technological discoveries.  During its first decade alone, the telegraph was invented, airplanes made their first successful flights, Henry Ford started mass-producing automobiles, and Albert Einstein formulated his theories of relativity. This was a mathematical equation that proved that time and space are relative, not fixed, and even more than this, that time and space are continuations of each other. Although we experience time and space as separate things, Einstein demonstrated the existence of spacetime. Space, rather than being a big emptiness with some matter zooming around in it, is actually a complex fabric of distortions and vibrations.

 

 

 

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 6

Georges Seurat, 1889 Study for The Chahut, oil on canvas

Emile Bernard, 1886, Boy sitting in the grass, oil on canvas, 40 x 33 cm,

Emile Bernard, 1892, Pont-Aven, oil on canvas

Emile Bernard, 1888, Self-portrait with portrait of Gauguin, dedicated to Vincent van Gogh.

Emile Bernard, 1888, Breton Women in the Meadow, oil on canvas

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Breton Women and Children (after Bernard), watercolour,

Paul Gauguin, 1888, Vision after the Sermon, oil on canvas

Gauguin, 1889, Christ in the Garden of Olives, oil on canvas

Paul Gauguin, 1889, The Yellow Christ, oil on canvas

Paul Gauguin, 1895, Self-portrait

Paul Gauguin, 1889, Jug in the form of a head (self-portrait), Glazed ceramic

Paul Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x 27 cm

Paul Gauguin, c1895, Maurka, Polychromed wood

Paul Gauguin, ca.1891-1893, Tehura (Teha'amana), polychromed pua wood H. 22.2 cm.

Gauguin, 1897-1898, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gauguin, 1892, Aha oe feii? (What! Are You Jealous?) oil on coarse canvas

Gauguin, 1892, The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch, oil on canvas

Sir John Tenniel, 1882, Parnell’s Monster

Artist unknown, 1799, Erin go Bray

Sir John Tenniel, 1870, The Irish Tempest

Pear’s Soap Ad, 1890’s

Pears’ Soap Ad, 1884

Saartje Baartman, C 1911?

Artist unknown, 1819, Illustration of Sartje Baartman from Illustrated History of Mammals

‘Ota Benga, a human exhibit, in 1906. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.’ A sign outside the primate house at the Bronx Zoo, September 1906.

Paul Gauguin, 1892, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), Oil on coarse canvas

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of Gauguin

Van Gogh, 1888, L’Arlisienne

Paul Gauguin, 1888, Mme Ginoux,

Van Gogh, 1880, Miners, Cuesmes, Belgium

Van Gogh, 1880, The Angelus,

Van Gogh, 1882, Woman pulling carrots. Charcoal and pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1882, Woman Digging, Charcoal and pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1883, Churchyard in the rain, Charcoal and chalk on paper

Van Gogh, 1886-87, Feet (Paris), Pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1887, Double Bass Player (Paris), pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1887, Portrait of Père Tanguy, Charcoal on paper

Van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of Patience Escalier, Pen and ink on paper

Van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin,

Van Gogh, 1888, Field with Houses under a Sky with Sun Disk, Arles

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Starry Night, Drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper

Vincent van Gogh, 1889, Starry Night, Drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper

Van Gogh, 1889, Enclosed Wheat Field with Reaper, Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1890 , Sower in Enclosed Field in the Rain , Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1889 , Olive Trees in a Mountain Landscape, Saint-Rémy, Pen and wash

Van Gogh, 1889 , Pine Trees in Front of the Wall of the Asylum , Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1889 , Women Picking Olives , (Saint-Rémy),

Van Gogh, 1890 , Woman Stooping in front of Trees , Saint-Rémy or Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh, 1890 , Wheat Field with a Stack of Wheat or Hay , Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh, : June-July, 1890 , Women Working in Wheat Field, Auvers-sur-Oise

Edvard Munch, 1886, Separation,

Semester 2, Lecture 6

We looked at the way that the Renaissance both reflected and shaped a changing view of reality. Impressionism represents the same kind of momentous shift in seeing and understanding the world. Particularly in the arts it made an irreversible difference; after-impressionism art was never the same. Towards the end of the 19^th C, from the 1880’s onwards, artists moved quickly beyond Impressionism’s commitment to what could be observed by the eye. These artists represented not only what they observed, but what they felt, setting painting free to deal with internal as well as external realities. The first generation of these artists included Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon, and Matisse and Picasso.

We call this period Post-Impressionism, although it’s important to point out that the term post-impressionism was devised much later as an umbrella terms for a range of very different artistic styles and approaches. What the artists that we call post-impressionist had in common was that they experimented with new subjects and techniques, moving art closer and closer to abstraction.

There are a number of different branches within PI. We have already looked at Expressionism in the work of Edvard Munch. Over the course of the next two lectures we are going to look at other PI in terms of the various concerns that they had. These concerns developed as recognisable styles which proliferated in Europe in the pre-war period.

The main characteristics of Post-Impressionism are;

1.    An acceptance of the artificiality of the picture and what it might represent

2.    The abandonment of one-point perspective

3.    A belief in colour as emotional/aesthetic carrier of meaning, almost independent of form and composition.

The first break with Impressionism was not entirely a rejection of Impressionist principles. The Neo-Impressionists, whom we have looked at, formalised the idea of optical mixing and turned it into a kind of science, applying the colours as regular dots, independent of the surface that they were supposed to be portraying. In Seurat’s work every surface receives the same treatment. The method has become more important than the subject, or we might say that the style becomes the real subject of the work.

Emile Bernard began as a Neo-Imp, but he became disillusioned with this approach, and abandoned it to “allow ideas to dominate the technique of painting” as he said later. He destroyed nearly all his Neo-Impressionist work and left Paris for Brittany, an area that was still fairly untouched by the effects of Modernity. This reflected a kind of nostalgic longing for ‘the primitive’ – the idea of society untainted by urban civilization and its values.  Bernard established himself in a village known as Pont-Aven, and experimented with rustic, archaic subjects and anti naturalistic techniques  until he reached a simplified style of bold outline and flat colour which he called Cloisonnism.

This name comes from a stained glass technique. The areas of colour in glass are joined together by black lead wire, so the paintings that this style refers to take the form of areas of flat colour surrounded by dark outline. Bernard is most famous for the fact that Gauguin and van Gogh travelled to Pont Aven and adopted his style. It was Gauguin who really mastered the style. In addition to areas of single colors separated by heavy black outlines, Gauguin abandoned classical perspective and eliminated subtle gradations of color which were two of the most characteristic principles of painting since the Renaissance. The way in which colours are separated and isolated reflects an interest in visual discontinuity that is characteristic of Modernism.

Vision after the Sermon is essentially an image of something not seen.  It is the record of something imagined and interpreted into visual metaphors.  At first glance, it might seem to represent both an outward and an inner experience –the priest and the peasants and their recollection of the sermon they have just heard (on Jacob  wrestling and angel) but the vision is a double one, the religious vision of the Breton woman and the artists imaginary vision of them and the power of the faith that moves them.

“Given this ever present riddle: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? What is our ideal, natural, rational destiny? And under what conditions can it be accomplished? or what is the law, what are the rules for accomplishing it in its individual and humanitarian meaning?”

Gauguin, like many other artists in the period, wanted to escape what they saw as the alienating effects of Modernism as they saw it, and so they went in search of places and cultures that were untouched by the. These days we call this Primitivism, meaning a European cultural elite discovering the art of other cultures like Africa, Micronesia, and the Native Americas. The artists often mistakenly saw these cultures as simpler, more immediate, more authentic than modern European culture.  Fascinated and intrigued by the newness, the wildness as they saw it and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places, artists who employed primitivism emulated some of the aesthetics of those cultures resulting in for example exaggerated body proportions, animal totems, geometric designs and stark colour contrasts.

From our perspective, we recognise that Primitivism arises out of a colonial mindset, in which the Europeans often approach these other cultures with a sense of superiority and entitlement. Gauguin's paintings and prints present a view of Tahiti as an earthly Arcadia of free love, gentle climate, and naked nymphs. However, it is clear from his work and from the fact that he acquired a number of teenage brides, that his idea of the primitive included a desire for more sexual freedom than was available in 19th-century Europe.

Gauguin believed he was celebrating Tahitian society and defending the Tahitians against European colonialism. However, feminist and postcolonial critics remind us that Gauguin saw this society strictly from the male European point of view. His work, like that of many of the Primitives, is a "dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal". Although Gauguin believed he was celebrating and defending the Tahitians, to the extent that he allegedly saw them as less developed, he participated in the outlook of his time and  so contirubted to the mindset that allowed the West to exploit and dominate other nations in its own interests.

The period that we are looking at, roughly 1830 – WW1 was a period of intense colonial expansion by European countries. Europeans in the period that we have been looking at viewed themselves as more highly evolved than other peoples of the world which allowed them to colonise at will. Colonialism always used racist principles to justify itself. The ‘natives’ could not be trusted to govern themselves or manage their own affairs. 

Paradigm; A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

By the 19^th C, a scientific paradigm was well established in Europe. Everything was being measured, weighed up, catalogued, scrutinised, taken apart and studied. A number of pseudo-sciences grew up in this period. Pseudoscience takes the form of claims, beliefs or practices which are presented as scientific, but do not adhere to a valid scientific method. They are often characterised by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims. They often set out to confirm a pre-existing idea, rather than setting out to discover something.

One of the pseudo-sciences that dominated in the 19^th C was scientific racism. Racism is often founded on skin colour, but not always as 19^th C attitudes to the Irish show. Racism works on the idea that some ‘races’, defined according to variable criteria, are less evolved than others. A number of pseudoscientific approaches were developed at this time to prove the claim of racial superiority. The methods that they developed included physical anthropology, anthropometry and craniometry. These methods supported the classification of human populations into physically discrete races asserted to be superior or inferior.

Craniometry and cranioscopy asserted that the size and shape of the skull related to the level of evolution that a ‘race of people’ had attained. This technique was also used to show that the poor, the insane and the criminal were lower forms of life.

A similar technique was anthropometry, in which the physique of non-European peoples was measured in this way. Anthropometry linked to  biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.” 

These kind of techniques led to Eugenics, a social philosophy that advocated the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive eugenics), and reduced reproduction of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics). The question about who would decide what were positive or negative genetic traits was of course not debated, as it was assumed that European ‘scientists’ would be able to decide that in an impartial way. Eugenics was a technique that was dear to the Nazi heart, and they used a great deal of Scientific Racism in their anti-Jewish propaganda.

The horror that some Europeans felt about the native body was matched by a kind of equal fascination, and throughout the 19^th C non-Europeans were routinely the subject of so-called scientific exhibitions, carnivals and international fairs that purported to explore racial diversity and ethnicity.

Saartjie Baartman, also known as Sarah Baartman, was one of the Khoi people of South Africa, known in the 19^th C as Hottentots. Women of the Khoi people generally have particularly large buttocks; when Baartman was barely in her 20s, she was sold to London by an enterprising Scottish doctor named Alexander Dunlop. She spent four years in Britain being exhibited, where her treatment caught the attention of British abolitionists, who tried to rescue her. She claimed that she had come to London on her own accord, and later after Dunlop's death she traveled to Paris amusing  onlookers who frequented the Palais-Royal until this kind of exhibit lost its appeal. She lived on in poverty and died in Paris of illness in December 1815. After her death, a professor of anatomy dissected her body and preserved and displayed her remains. For more than a century and a half, visitors to the "Museum of Man" in Paris could view her brain and skeleton. However in 2002, at the request of Nelson Mandela, her remains were returned to South Africa and buried. 

Throughout the 19^th C at the series of World Fairs such as those held in Crystal Palace, in Paris, in Brussels and even in Chicago a bit later, non-European people were placed on exhibit, many grouped by skin color from the darkest to the lightest, or "lowest" to the "highest" on an evolutionary scale. These “expositions” were a major factor in perpetuating the idea that African, Asian, and Natives were inferior to Europeans and white Americans.

This is Ota Benga,  Congolese pygmy who was taken from Africa and put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other primates. A prominent Eugenicist persuaded the director of the zoo to put Benga in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan and a parrot, and labeled him The Missing Link, suggesting that in evolutionary terms Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.The display triggered protests from the city's clergymen and members of the Black community, but the public reportedly flocked to see it.

Both Gauguin and van Gogh were inspired by a similar quest to recover the sincerity and purity of simple, unspoilt people as they saw it - Gauguin of went native in search of this quest, Van Gogh travelled endlessly moving from the cold flat lands of Holland to the sunny hills of Provence. 

Van Gogh was a mentally unstable character, with a deeply religious nature. He spent a number of years working as a pastor to a community of miners in Belgium; he would make sketches of them. It was there in 1880 that he decided he wanted to be an artist.

From 1883 – 86 he lived in Antwerp, where he made many many studies of peasants at work in potato fields. These works really show the influence of Realism, and the attempt to capture the toil of the working poor. These sketches led to his first major painted work, The Potato Eaters, but an artist friend criticised this and recommended that he look at Millais.

He remained almost entirely self-taught, but after arriving in Paris in 1886 he took life drawing classes and some painting classes where he met Emile Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec. His brother had a gallery in Paris, so he was familiar with the work of the Impressionists, and was on personal terms with many of them.

In 1888 he left Paris and moved to the South of France. He invited Gauguin with whom he had struck up a friendship to visit him there, and they worked together there for 8 months. However, they fell out and after Gauguin left van Gogh had one of his disabilitating breakdowns.

In May 1889 he committed himself to an asylum at St. Remy. had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy. This is visible in many of the works that he did in this period.

We discussed how Munch experienced something akin to the landscape screaming at him. Van Gogh had a very ecstatic experience of landscape, as though he could see the forces behind the appearance of things that kept things animate. Van Gogh also experienced great torment and personal anguish, but it was expressed in a quite different way.

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 5

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

19th C Botanical illustrations ;

John James Audobon, Birds of America

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1901, House for an Art Lover, Ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1901, House for an Art Lover, Ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, East Façade, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, East Façade, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Oval Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Oval Room and Hall, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Hall and Dining Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, near Glasgow

Aubrey Beardsley, 1893 The Peacock Dress, ink on paper

Aubrey Beardsley, 1893 The Black Cape, ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1895 , Salome and John, ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 , J'ai baisé ta bouche lokanaan , ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 , How Sir Tristram drank of the Love Drink, illustration

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 Isolde, Colour illustration from The Yellow Book

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 The Slippers of Cinderella, Indian ink and wash illustration from The Yellow Book

Aubrey Beardsley,1896, Incipit Vita Nova, Block print

Harry Clarke, 1923 , Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Edvard Munch, 1894-5, Puberty, Oil on canvas 151.5 x 110 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895, Anxiety, Colour woodcut

Edvard Munch, 1896, Death in the Sickroom, Lithograph 40 x 54 cm

Edvard Munch, 1896, By the Deathbed, Lithograph, 39.7 x 50 cm

Edvard Munch, 1891, Melancholy

Edvard Munch, 1896, Melancholy, Woodcut 41 x 41.5 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895, Jealousy, Oil on canvas 67 x 100 cm.2 cm

Edvard Munch, 1896, Jealousy, Lithograph 46.5 x 56.5 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895-1902, Vampire, Colour Woodcut

Edvard Munch, 1896 , Man’s Head in Women’s Hair, Colour Woodcut, 54.6 x 38 cm

Edvard Munch, 1920 , Girls on the Bridge, Woodcut and Lithograph 50 x 43 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895 The Scream, Lithograph 35.5 x 25.4 cm

Edvard Munch, 1893? The Scream, oil on cardboard 35.5 x 25.4 cm