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IcerocketJoin Robert Rosenblum, co-curator of 20th century art at the Guggenheim Museum, as he lectures in conjunction with the 2006 Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibition: European paintings from the Caroline Marmon Fesler collection, which occured March 10-June 4, 2006. Not the best video quality, but filled with great content.
Good evening everyone. Please welcome Robert Rosenblum as a participant.
I don't know if I can live up to the very warm personal and generous introduction. Well, I will start by saying good evening
especially to our benefactors, double good evening to her. I have to say that I am totally delighted
to have this particular opportunity to give this particular lecture because it's not really like the kind of lecture you usually
asked to give. I mean generally it's about a theme or about a big show or about a particular artist and in this case
I was asked to do something; I think, in fact, I have never given before in terms of lecture namely just to talk about a handful of extraordinary paintings
that may or may not be related to each other. They just happened to be there perfect choices by someone whom
I've learned more about this evening, Ms. Fesler who had just an astonishing eye, especially when I realized that so many of these works had been acquired
in the 40s. In any rate, I don't know if I am counting right, I think there are 8 pictures that I am going to talk about and even though
I will try to talk about them in terms of their individual character, there will also I realize the something
that will unite them various themes; one of them having to do, I guess we should dim the lights.
Thank you. One of them having to do with, you know, the __________ face character of history, the way things look
both backwards and forwards. I couldn't help noting and this would be true if anybody who has taken basic history of art course
that there are 3 sensational paintings here from the 1880s that almost provide a kind of validity
of the origins of modern art. I am just wondering can the van Gogh be focused a little better, may be I can do it from here but I...
Ya, that seems preferable and the traditions of writing the catechism
of modern art always locate this huge sea change in the 1880s as establishing
the foundations for freedoms to come. The word that was coined a long time ago to characterize
this change in these artists was post-impressionism and that implied something chronological and the chronological
period was in fact the 1880s. So that, oops......just in terms..... oh thank you!
so just in terms of the unexpected coherence of the group, we have 3 absolute perfect demonstrations
of what happened in the 80s that seemed to lead to the 20th century. The way to look at this van Gogh
or the ways to look at this van Gogh are multiple. One of the things that startled me when I saw just an hour or so ago
was the fact that the surface was so unbelievably crusty and rigid, almost look like something that had been baked in pigment
and this is something that one constantly forgets in terms of color of reproductions which were all saturated with, that's the texture,
the actual sense, the 3 dimensional sense of the pigment that seems to be oozing and baked, that this is part of the experience
of the picture so that when I look at the slide over here, it looks particularly blank and dead but we are all used
to looking at slides and we somehow subluminally add in the case of van Gogh that extraordinary surface.
I said a few moments ago that the general way to look at these pictures of the 80s was to look at them as pioneers of very
strange things to come, so that in looking at this painting of a peasant, ravishing, and
rude natural setting in the south of France, one would begin to think of branches of its tree that lead to more extreme,
the best word would be abstract expressions in early 20th century art. I show you as an example a painting by one the cart carrying Fauves
these so called wild beasts who exhibited in 1905, this is a painting by Maurice de Vlaminck and one feels just in terms
of Darwinian evolution that this is a natural inevitable consequence of the experience of the painting by
van Gogh. The colors become, if possible, even more intense so that you have the feeling of a rainbow spectrum
of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and steadily van Gogh spoke a great deal when he wrote about this picture
about specifically the contrast of purple and yellow complementary colors in this painting, the same kind of thing
that Seurat thought about, but in any case this seems to be a consequence, a necessary sequel to the
innovations of van Gogh that in general was the way in which he and other post-impressionists like Seurat,
Cezanne, Gauguin of the 1880s that is the way they will locate it in terms of the history of art,
but things change, thank goodness, it would be terrible if art history didn't keep changing just as it would be terrible
if we as human beings didn't keep changing and one.... Oh... I've got,
one of the ways in which these artists have changed over the last decades is that
instead of always looking forwards they began to look backwards to 19th century Presidents
so that these days in studying a paining like this one by van Gogh one might be interested in his own
passionate concern with artists of the mid 19th century both in France and in his native Holland
who were concerned with anonymous workers on the field peasants sowing weed as in the case of the ultra-famous
painting by Millet on the right. We have learned for example that van Gogh not only was passionate about this
mid 19th century French artist but he actually made copies after his work and I say this just to indicate
that there are other genealogical tables that can offer foundations for van Gogh's art.
The study of the 19th century began to turn up artists who were barely heard of 40-50 years ago
and one of them who is very topical especially in terms of the art of van Gogh is the British artist Samuel Palmer.
The reason he is topical is that he is having a first major retrospective here in this country now to be seen
at the metropolitan museum, but in very strange and probably accidental ways, questions of affinity
rather than actual influence, many of these passionate visions of Samuel Palmer who is usually classified
as a disciple of William Blake many of these visions have that sense of a kind of high visionary experience of nature
which has to do not only with here, we or as the British would say corn or cornfield but with the ecstasy
of the crescent moon and the star images that are again familiar to the study of van Gogh,
so that just to begin my comments this evening a painting like this seems both to look forwards to the most adventurous
distortions in shape and color in 20th century art as well as to look backwards to a kind of art before nature
and a kind of sanctification of these 3 cases, the Millet, the Palmer, and the van Gogh of the single peasant
who somehow represents a natural organic being rooted to the earth.
The most famous..., well that's not true, the equally famous post-impressionist whose art
matured in the 1880s as did van Gogh in that very short life span of his is of course Paul Cezanne
and I show you here on the right the painting that I didn't see in the collection but you hear it, know it
that it has been in the fabulous show in just seen in Washington about Cezanne in Provence. In any case, this is another picture
that comes from this decade of the 1880s in which artists
began to reconstruct what they saw in strange distorted private ways that had to do
not with a communal style which was the case with the impressionists, you know the way the impressionists would paint the same thing
so that you could hardly at times tell the difference between a Renoir and a Monet but in the case of Cezanne or van Gogh
we have unique, very strong individuals who create a private cosmos that looks like nothing else in the world.
There has been a great deal of research on the particular sites in the south of France that Cezanne painted
just as in the case of the van Gogh, one could probably pinpoint the exact spot around __________ in which that picture was painted.
Here in any case there is a contribution to that kind of documentation, a farm house in Provence
which offers a clone to the painting by Cezanne. One of the things of course that was so
admired in the painting by Cezanne from the point of view of the 20th century was the fact that he looked at something like this,
of course it was in color and not in black and white and then transformed it exactly as he felt sometimes
nodding in the direction of the empirical fact like the character of the placement of the windows of the smoky blue atmosphere
of the mountain range beyond that led to the famous __________ but otherwise he would expand
and contract what he saw at his will in order to make the picture look as though it was, one might almost say a breathing
living organic thing. This is a marvelous kind of transformation which becomes perhaps not so apparent
when I projected this side, I realized how dreary, gray and blurry it was but forget about the documentation,
look at the painting by Cezanne and he will see this extraordinary way in which this artist almost for the first time
and not quite like anybody before or during or after would do something like take this house and make it look
as though it was, shall we say simultaneously expanding and contracting sort of heaving in connection
with well for one thing the Earth below which seems to push it up a little bit, then there is the roof above which too our surprise
suddenly seems to link with the mountain range behind which in fact must be miles away as we can see
in the comparative photograph so that there is this extraordinary sense of disparate things, the house, the grass, the road,
the mountains, the sky that are completely different places that suddenly begin to fuse like a living fabric
and in order to do this the farms have to be distorted so that if one can talk about a picture
having almost an organic life that is seeming, to be breathing, to be moving, to be connecting with adjacent things
here something that Cezanne has done. Once again, the picture at least for many generations of art historians
seem to point to the future, its role was that of a great grandparent a kind of BC profit
to the AD world of the early 20th century and in particular a painting like the Fesler, Cezanne on the right
could be used as an example of what inspired some of the most daring adventures of the early 20th century
namely the invention of cubism in the hands of Picasso and Braque. Here on the left is a classic
early cubist Braque of 1908, and you can see how many lessons he extrapolated from the painting of Cezanne.
I mentioned before this extraordinary way in which near and far and middle ground in the Cezanne become
compressed as well as simultaneously expand into the distance and this kind of density, this kind of compression
of near and far reaches almost a breaking point in the case of the early Georges Braque on the left. It's still like the Cezanne
as that character of natural colors, the earthy colors of the houses, the green of the forest,
the bark of the tree, but it also is moving into something that seems totally unreal so that the relatively
livable farm house in the Cezanne turns into something that seems like a geometric ideal something in fact
that is cubic, hence the nick name cubism, but something which as you notice has lost all the windows so that these buildings
almost look like those little buildings that you have in a monopoly set, they are abstract ideal forms.
Here is Pablo Picasso, 1908, taking cues also from Cezanne and stripping the complexities
of things seen as they still remain in an almost documentary form in the Cezanne into something that seems to be stripped
bare to some sort of platonic ideal. I mentioned before that as in the case of the Van Gogh
pictures of this vintage tended to be seen as prophecies, but again as in the case of the Van Gogh,
these pictures have started to look backwards as well, so that I was very pleased to see that in the group of pictures,
I am talking about this evening, there was an early painting by Quatrro from part of the world, Southern France, Provence,
not that far from Cezanne territory and that is this early Quatrro of __________. It's interesting to see
that there are many of the same features, geographical and pictorial that you have in the Cezanne.
The contrast of the ocher color of the buildings vis-a-vis the green of the grass, the trees, and the foreground,
and the grey blue hays of the mountains beyond, so that here earlier in the 19th century,
we already have a great French artist responding to this neck of the woods and producing similar results,
although needless to say, one could look at it both ways that is on the one hand how there is continuity here
and on the other hand how Cezanne really ruptures a tradition of landscape and unleashes all kinds of new possibilities,
some would say daemons for the history of modern art. Here just to thicken the stew
is another kind of looking backwards from the work of Cezanne which has to do with the fact that he was after all a
regional painter, he came from Aix-en-Provence, and that was where he was firmly rooted, so that it becomes fascinating
to look at other regional painters from the earlier 19th century who painted similar themes.
This is just a very obscure artist, his name is __________ who painted the Pont du Gard, the Roman antiquity
in Provence, and you can see something of this sense of a kind of architectural firmness buildings
by man on earth that is again a continued into the world of Cezanne. You know, other earlier
late 18th century French paintings seem also to herald what Cezanne would do much later.
Here is a painting by a major French landscape artist of the late 18th century __________, this is not Provence
but a view of Rome and that kind of __________ between architecture and nature, the contrast
and the fusions of these simple geometric forms made by man and the green that bursts through it
and the haze of the sky above, this is something that is part of the genealogical table of this artist.
It is very hard I must say in the case of Seurat the third of the post-impressionist artists
whose work of the 1880s is so brilliantly represented here. It is very hard to think of prototypes for him
and so far as he is aggressively in the 1880s an artist who wants to embrace, shall we say
everything to do with the industrial revolution and everything to do with the new world of science and engineering.
Those passions of his are perfectly exemplified in his late, I was about to say, landscape but
there is no land there. I was about to say seascape, but it doesn't really look like any seascapes you have seen before.
It really looks like a completely artificial complex, a nautical fantasy which was real on the channel coast of France.
There is the pure cylinder of a lighthouse on the left and most astonishing in the foreground
just think of the dirt road in front of the Cezanne, well here it is.. is this asphalt path perfectly new,
perfectly clean, perfectly tuned to a world of engineering
and rebuilding a completely artificial complex, in this case a nautical complex so that the picture
has absolutely the flavor of the whole new world of building of modular parts
that pertain especially to the 1880s just think of the Eiffel Tower or think of the fact that.... fact of the same time
in this decade, both the Panama and the Suez canals were being built. These extraordinary intrusions of feats of engineering
into old fashioned nature. I am showing you on the right a slide that Ellen happily supplied me with;
this is a preparatory study for the painting that you have here and you can see how among other things Seurat's
instinct was become more and more impersonal in terms of the application of paint and in terms of the clarity,
the crispness of the geometry in the image, so that one might say was the equivalent
of an engineer in paint. I would call your attention for example to the way in which the cylindrical form
of the lighthouse over there is repeated in diminutive aspect in the bollards that go along the coast,
the edge of the asphalt road. Again as in the case of the Cezanne,
we feel that the traditions of western perspective are being challenged. They certainly are in the case of the Cezanne
in which the most extreme distance and the most extreme foreground keep joining forces and then separate
and in the same way in the Seurat that great parabolic sweep of the asphalt road tends to leave you right
in the front of the picture connecting with the horizon so that there is this funny sense of vast distance behind,
but then in turn, it is brought up front into this silhouetted pattern. As you know, Seurat like van Gogh
died at a terribly premature age. In the case of Seurat,
he was born in 59 and he died just a year after this painting in 1991 and one can very often
have the fantasy, I've often had it about both Seurat and van Gogh, had they lived a normal life span of what on earth
would their pictures have looked like 50 years later. I am not quite sure about van Gogh but I did for this evening stock,
have a thought about Seurat which I will show you in a moment. I began by talking about the way
this seems so totally artificial and that is a point that can be further confirmed by looking at Seurat's earlier work.
Here is a very small picture, a little landscape with a very blocky geometric house related to
the Cezanne farmhouse that we looked at, but as you can see, he is still working within the world of nature
and so far as the picture is vibrantly green, however, is a color that seems to have been
totally expunged from Seurat's pallet at the end of his decade of painting so that the
very synonym of nature chlorophyll is completely absent from this picture, one of the things that gives you this
totally unreal character. I am showing you again just another straw in the wind, an early, again an early
sketch by Seurat which shows a farmer, farm scene, rather like van Gogh's but as you can see
the posts here are aligned in this absolutely regular... beep beep beep.. rhythm that in terms of looking at the young work
of an artist as prophecy of his mature work is a perfect preview of these things to come,
but I said before I wondered of what Seurat might have looked like had he lived, say to be 80 years old
and may be he would have looked like this, a painting by the American Ralston Crawford of the Whitestone bridge
which as you see is again another him to engineering as clean and as immaculate as precise as Seurat tried to be
in the 1880s.
The very opposite of Seurat, again the pictures on the left seem to be somewhat unfocused, I don't know,
hm.....if you can do something.....
Although....
that's fine, anyway... this is already unfocused picture than the original as in the slide projection and it is of course this
exquisite we are, a seamstress at work at her table which is very characteristic
in subject and in style of many works by this precious master works of the 1890s, he in
biographical terms lived in a world that had to do was swatches of cloth, those textiles with fabrics that
was the vocation of the women in his family and there on the right is a painting that spells this out,
a domestic interior, very claustrophobic in which we have these slices, pieces of cloth
all over the place so that you can hardly tell the difference between wallpaper and dress and actual fabrics that are laid out
to be sewed together or displayed. This painting on the right, approximately the same date as the picture in the Fesler collection
comes by the way from Smith College and I learned that Ellen Lee is in __________ so that it is very appropriate
to my remarks this evening. In any case, the painting by Vuillard are these paintings by Vuillard
are very very curious in so far as they perhaps up the anti in terms of making
the scene visible world disappear, but they both do it in a very hide and seek way
so that when we look at these pictures on the one hand, they tend to fuse into a kind of flat and gorgeous fabric
something like the equivalent of the Harris __________, some very very fibrous clothing and on the other hand,
every now and then we begin to realize that there are very real things there, there are real people, there are real swatches of cloth,
there is real wallpaper, there is a window and a tilt so that it has the quality of the specific of actually
recording the objects in a domestic interior. In a way what we are looking at here
is a kind of pictorial camouflage which is a delicious sort of game to play looking at these pictures in a peek-a-boo
hide and seek way so that we suddenly discover what we might not even realize that there is actually a human figure,
the seamstress in the painting on the left where then there is that strange man, almost like a spook who suddenly appears,
his body totally flattened in the middle of the wall. Again, this is the kind of
picture that seems to have been located firmly in the late 19th century but as time passes,
connections forwards and backwards keep being made and one of the things that has recently
fascinated me is the relationship of an artist like Vuillard in the 1890s to many of the more
seemingly radical innovations of early 20th century artists like Picasso and Braque. I show you here
just to elucidate that point one of Picasso's many pasted papers collage
__________ of the high years of cubism and this particular fascination with making
flat decorative patterns that very often come from snippets of wallpaper as is the case here
this is something that seems to me to have a kind of affinity with the images of Vuillard
and his fellow Nabi, Bonnard in the 1890s, but there is even more towards than that
and I mentioned before the effect of camouflage which incidentally was invented just this time
in the work of Vuillard that marvelous and teasing sense that you are looking at something totally legible
just a pattern or a fabric or a labyrinth of light and then low and behold something that you can cling to
just for a moment seeps through. This is very much the effect we have in some of the most difficult and legible paintings
of the high years of cubism. I show you this most famous example at MoMA, the picture that is called,
you can read it below, as a surrogate title Ma Jolie, but in a way although this is very different clearly from Vuillard
it also represents a kind of continuity, the depiction of something that was actually seen perceived,
this is a woman holding some kind of stringed instrument, but then that turns into a kind of high __________ mirage
or an intricate texture, so that the initial stimulus keeps disappearing, but then teasingly reappearing
every now and then. The late 19th century, especially under the aegis of what was called symbolism, loved to suggest
rather than spell out things so that we look at a picture like this as if it were more of a whisper than a clear
loud statement and that quality of murmurs of suggestions of something visible that is disappearing
and reappearing is one of the major characteristics of the cubist relationship between what they see
and what they paint, I will say more about that in a minute. I particularly choose the MoMA
painting on the right not only because it's camouflage quality relates I would say to you the world of Vuillard
in 1890s, but because of the painted inscription at the bottom of this very very strange and difficult image of a woman,
it says as you can read, Ma Jolie, a longtime ago and that was a very longtime ago when I was first learning
about the difficult moments in 20th century art, people paid very little attention to the words that were inscribed
in the paintings by Picasso and Braque, but more and more these became enigmas to be solved
and one of the words or a pair of words Ma Jolie that kept appearing in the words of Picasso,
well the riddle of that was solved, oh... about half a century ago and characteristically for Picasso
in a very very complicated way. Ma Jolie is a very simple French term means "my pretty one"
and that is not unusual except for the fact that it also has and this is pure Picasso more than one meaning.
For one thing, it was his personal private name for his then girlfriend.... oops
sorry, whose name was Eva Gouel, not very often photographed, but here is a kind of
ghostly photograph of her, so that was his pet name for her,
but it was also the name of a popular song of the period, a musical song of pre-war Paris.
I am walking down memory lane long time ago, I once spoke to a Frenchman who actually knew the verse of the song
and sang a bit of it to be, it was something like "Oh Jolie Ma Jolie mon coeur te dit bonjour"
so that it almost had for that generation of the early 20th century the character of say a song by the Beatles,
it was very very famous so that it was a reference to a song that everybody knew as well as a reference
to Picasso's girlfriend and in fact most extraordinarily because Picasso's love life always entered into his art,
he wrote this phrase Ma Jolie again and again and again during the period in which he was involved who is Eva Gouel
who died prematurely in the heyday of cubism, but she appears again just before her death in fact
in the painting here in the, well... in the Fesler Collection. There it is on top Ma Jolie and again it is even more ambiguous
here because it is not only his girlfriend but it seems also like the inscription on a sheet of music
there the three lines of what should be a five line score on the page of music and this incidentally rhymes
with the three strings of the violin, interesting to note because Picasso is a musician and always changes things
of that instead of 5 lines for the music score, he puts down 3 and instead of 4 strings for the violin
he uses 3 so that these rhyme in a new connection. There are other words here as well which seem to offer
a kind of alphabet __________ scramble, you have __________, but it comes out as __________ that is the name of the daily newspaper
and there is bass, the brand of an __________ that would be seen on a cafe table like this.
As I mentioned Picasso like some lovesick boy
who inscribes the name of his beloved on a tree kept including Ma Jolie in his paintings,
one might almost say camouflage them like a secret love for Eva and in another case
he actually inscribed __________ Eva, I love Eva
very very small so that these were like little love letters, little voles of his affection to his then girlfriend
and here is another example of that inscription and painting of 1914 in which it almost has the blazing quality
of a something on a theater __________ Ma Jolie loud and bold as opposed to secretive
in the case of the 2 pictures I just showed you. Studies of Picasso keep unveiling one after another,
one mystery after another and I was utterly delighted to look at this painting and realize that it contained
a musical instrument that was always misidentified in terms of discussions of well the objects in the cubist art.
I am talking about this thing, the instrument that you see on a slant in the middle of the picture
__________
and this is an instrument that turns up frequently on the table-tops of Picasso as well as of Braque,
but in the literature at least some time ago, the person who described what was in a cubist still life
would always fudge off of this and usually say that it was a clarinet. I sometimes thought that may be it was an oboe
because of the fact that it has a double reed;
but whatever, it was clearly some kind of woodwind. It turns up occasionally and low and behold
it turns out that it is neither a clarinet nor an oboe, it is something more folkloric and ethnic
that comes from Catalonia where Picasso spent a good deal of his youth in the 1890s
becoming Pablo Picasso. This instrument is called "the tenora" and it is very very common in Catalonia,
it is played by villagers, they have, in the city, concerts of people playing the tenora.
Here is a slide of the __________ that it comes in all shapes and sizes. Picasso had one and for him
it was a kind of souvenir of his south of the Pyrenees origins and it turns up again and again in his pictures
as well as, I will show you in a moment, those by Braque. I might add before I forget that the
the grain of wood on this instrument is marvelously represented by Picasso, who actually, I believe
combed the paint the way he once combed hair on a picture. He took an actual comb and went through
a patch of pigment that represented hair and here he made the mark of the wood grain on the brown paint, so this is a part of his repertory of tricks.
At any rate, you have here in Indianapolis an example of a tenora which also appears
as I mentioned in the work of Braque. Here it is in a __________, that's the museum of modern art
and I am happy to say that this picture used to be titled "the clarinet". It was always called that
in many books you will see that on the caption, but we now know that this is the same instrument the Catalan woodwind,
the tenora with the cylindrical body and the double reed, so that is another problem in cubist redemnification
that has been solved.
Speaking of Braque, I of course want to include here this lighter painting by Braque
and this has prompted me to think about other changes in our interpretation of art of the 20th century,
Namely... shifting evaluations about good, better, and best. In the middle of the 20th century
probably right through the third quarter of the 20th century cubism and the more difficult aspects of it
as represented by Picasso and Braque was generally considered to be the highest point, the highest achievement
in the evolution of artists who started as cubists and that would go for Picasso as well as for Braque
and there was in fact a slight turning away from lighter work which presumably was not as adventurous,
was not as lustier, not as demanding as the excitement and the frequent illegibility of cubist art like the
one on the right or like the Picasso in the Fesler Collection so that if one had to choose between these two paintings
probably the knee-jerk reflex would be to say that the cubist work was better because it was youthful,
more adventurous, etc., but as history passes or time passes as the history changes so do our
perceptions of works of art and now more and more the later less youthful, more mature
sometimes senior aspects of long life 20th century artists seem to be as fascinating
as accessible as the thrilling innovative works of their junior years, so it is
that instead of looking at Braque like this in terms of its not having the excitement of the original innovations
of cubism it can be looked at in terms of other kinds of pleasures which have to do with
among other things, the introduction of these very sumptuous colors, the combinations of yellow and purple
which would have been out of balance in the early cubist work, people liked it because it was monastic in quality,
tended to sensor any colors out of it, but here we have again the pleasure of looking at the yellows
and the greens and the apples and the grapes and the contrast of the wallpaper behind which not incidentally
may remind you of the patterns that you find in say the work of Vuillard. At any rate, these later works
by revolutionary, initially revolutionary artists have come more and more to the fore in recent years
so that we look at them not as if they were belated sort of senile efforts
of artists who were thrilling in their youths but fascinating or beautiful works of art in their own right
that is something that I have thought about when confronted with the __________ in the Fesler Collection,
a long time ago the response usually would have been that the best __________ or the early ones
and especially those that seem to be marked by the character of cubism, so that I show you here this early
__________ 12 13 19 12 13A typical __________ on the roof which would have been
assumed just because it has so many of the corky jigsaw puzzle patterns
that you have in cubism as well as the relatively __________ pallet which in the case of __________ colorist
only permits yellow, but the painting in the Fesler Collection which I had never consciously laid eyes on before
is a fabulous and gorgeous work. If you like blue horses,
there is one and it is marvelous to see after Franz Marc painted horses blue before the first World War
that these species have survived, I thought it was endangered but there it is and another thing although this doesn't have that
interlocking Swiss Watch network of flat planes of cubism, it has this breathless rush of space
something that __________ did at the beginning of his career, but revived here something that makes the __________of this sort of secular
holy family of Egypt with the Harlequin and the naked baby and the Russian woman
with her babushka, all of this has extraordinary drama and __________ and I particularly love, the free floating candle
somewhere in this icy Russian climate. Speaking of artists
whose later work was ignored or in this case actually revived.... reviled,
although the loss would be revived, there is __________ DeCarrico whose work again
is represented here in the last of these paintings that I will talk about this evening namely this one on the left.
As you can see, it is not alone as an image, but relates to earlier paintings by DeCarrico
like the one on the right of, I think 1914, which has many
of the same components namely that absolutely scary lifeless statue of the
__________ absolutely dry __________ atmosphere for everything is being baked in the noonday sun,
so that this is the first version of that dream where as this is a later version, later variation of that DeCarrico
made on ideas that he materialized and painted in his youth.
There was a great deal of hostility to the evolution of the DeCarrico's career namely he was an artist
who had as a young artist an absolutely brilliant beginning, painting pictures like the one on the right
that were unique memorable and that cast a long important shadow on the evolution
of fantastic paintings __________ in particular in the 1920s and 30s, but then DeCarrico
began to do so many things that were unthinkable in terms of the proper history of modern art
for one thing he reverted to painting in a more conservative classical way, but much worse,
completely violating the tradition of originality invasion in 20th centaury art.
He began to copy his own earlier works as well as as this case here to make variations upon them,
so that he was really being in a way nostalgic respective looking at his youth and re-experiencing it.
That is the case in the painting in the Fesler collection in which you have so many of the ingredients of earlier DeCarricos
that strange not living, not dead statue of that strange shadow that comes from some other monuments that we can't see.
Again the renaissance arcade but with these weird windows that are all shuttered, you can't really see it in the slide, but the windows there
are also all shuttered, which is not only about the heat but one feels that this is a cemetery that there is nothing live in it
and that of course includes the weird vista of the railway train with the smoke coming out of it
except for the fact that we know that it cannot move an inch because this is all absolutely frozen in time.
As I mentioned, this kind of later variation by DeCarrico on his own earlier works
and often not just variation but repetition was thought to be
a kind of copout, here was a great modern artist who went on painting in the teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s,
and just kept imitating himself and he was so to say exposed in a
famous illustration in a MoMA DeCarrico catalogue in which this early classic of 1917,
the disquieting muses was reproduced in three 3 x 6 = 18 different variations that he made of the picture,
some almost identical between the years 1940 and 1970.
This of course was considered by some to be totally shocking that an artist would sell out that way,
but as a matter of fact, as I said at the beginning, things change, taste changes, history changes things,
and it just so happened that at exactly the same time that some people of an older generation were horrified by the way in which DeCarrico would repeat himself,
sometimes almost clones, sometimes variations, it was exactly that time that younger artists and I am speaking of them
Andy Warhol were fascinated by precisely this phenomenon so that Warhol in the early 1980s looked at DeCarrico
and you remember how Warhol liked to repeat Campbell soup cans
and like to repeat Marilyn Monroe's, he was fascinated by exactly this aspect of DeCarrico that was scorned
by an older modernist generation. So, it was that he made single and multiple variations
upon DeCarrico paintings. Here is a drawing inspired by this whole series and here is another variation
on DeCarrico in which in terms of a new generation artists working in the second half of the 19th century
Warhol's world, he is fascinated by exactly the same thing and DeCarrico that was so repellent
to earlier scholars. Here is Andy Warhol doing a multiple that is prompted by DeCarrico's,
shall we say prophecy of Warhol's own fascination with mass production. This is a very surprising turn of events
and I will leave you with this in the hope that in the future, the Fesler pictures as well as the entire history of art
will look very different from the way it does today. Thank you very much!
Such interesting commentary; the described themes/character of the paintings in this collection help me appreciate each. Rosenblum offered much insight and encourages me to seek out these paintings.
blah!
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