Revisiting the Fesler Collection

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Learn more about this New York Museum
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Robert Rosenblum, art historian
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Learn more about Caroline Marmon Fessler
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Join 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.

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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00:00:00 Good evening everyone. Please welcome Robert Rosenblum as a participant.

00:00:15 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

00:00:26 especially to our benefactors, double good evening to her. I have to say that I am totally delighted

00:00:36 to have this particular opportunity to give this particular lecture because it's not really like the kind of lecture you usually

00:00:46 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

00:00:56 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

00:01:08 that may or may not be related to each other. They just happened to be there perfect choices by someone whom

00:01:18 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

00:01:29 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

00:01:39 I will try to talk about them in terms of their individual character, there will also I realize the something

00:01:50 that will unite them various themes; one of them having to do, I guess we should dim the lights.

00:02:02 Thank you. One of them having to do with, you know, the __________ face character of history, the way things look

00:02:12 both backwards and forwards. I couldn't help noting and this would be true if anybody who has taken basic history of art course

00:02:24 that there are 3 sensational paintings here from the 1880s that almost provide a kind of validity

00:02:34 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...

00:02:49 Ya, that seems preferable and the traditions of writing the catechism

00:02:59 of modern art always locate this huge sea change in the 1880s as establishing

00:03:09 the foundations for freedoms to come. The word that was coined a long time ago to characterize

00:03:19 this change in these artists was post-impressionism and that implied something chronological and the chronological

00:03:30 period was in fact the 1880s. So that, oops......just in terms..... oh thank you!

00:03:42 so just in terms of the unexpected coherence of the group, we have 3 absolute perfect demonstrations

00:03:54 of what happened in the 80s that seemed to lead to the 20th century. The way to look at this van Gogh

00:04:04 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

00:04:15 was the fact that the surface was so unbelievably crusty and rigid, almost look like something that had been baked in pigment

00:04:26 and this is something that one constantly forgets in terms of color of reproductions which were all saturated with, that's the texture,

00:04:37 the actual sense, the 3 dimensional sense of the pigment that seems to be oozing and baked, that this is part of the experience

00:04:47 of the picture so that when I look at the slide over here, it looks particularly blank and dead but we are all used

00:04:58 to looking at slides and we somehow subluminally add in the case of van Gogh that extraordinary surface.

00:05:07 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

00:05:18 strange things to come, so that in looking at this painting of a peasant, ravishing, and

00:05:29 rude natural setting in the south of France, one would begin to think of branches of its tree that lead to more extreme,

00:05:41 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

00:05:52 these so called wild beasts who exhibited in 1905, this is a painting by Maurice de Vlaminck and one feels just in terms

00:06:02 of Darwinian evolution that this is a natural inevitable consequence of the experience of the painting by

00:06:12 van Gogh. The colors become, if possible, even more intense so that you have the feeling of a rainbow spectrum

00:06:22 of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and steadily van Gogh spoke a great deal when he wrote about this picture

00:06:32 about specifically the contrast of purple and yellow complementary colors in this painting, the same kind of thing

00:06:41 that Seurat thought about, but in any case this seems to be a consequence, a necessary sequel to the

00:06:52 innovations of van Gogh that in general was the way in which he and other post-impressionists like Seurat,

00:07:03 Cezanne, Gauguin of the 1880s that is the way they will locate it in terms of the history of art,

00:07:13 but things change, thank goodness, it would be terrible if art history didn't keep changing just as it would be terrible

00:07:22 if we as human beings didn't keep changing and one.... Oh... I've got,

00:07:31 one of the ways in which these artists have changed over the last decades is that

00:07:40 instead of always looking forwards they began to look backwards to 19th century Presidents

00:07:50 so that these days in studying a paining like this one by van Gogh one might be interested in his own

00:08:01 passionate concern with artists of the mid 19th century both in France and in his native Holland

00:08:11 who were concerned with anonymous workers on the field peasants sowing weed as in the case of the ultra-famous

00:08:22 painting by Millet on the right. We have learned for example that van Gogh not only was passionate about this

00:08:31 mid 19th century French artist but he actually made copies after his work and I say this just to indicate

00:08:41 that there are other genealogical tables that can offer foundations for van Gogh's art.

00:08:52 The study of the 19th century began to turn up artists who were barely heard of 40-50 years ago

00:09:03 and one of them who is very topical especially in terms of the art of van Gogh is the British artist Samuel Palmer.

00:09:13 The reason he is topical is that he is having a first major retrospective here in this country now to be seen

00:09:23 at the metropolitan museum, but in very strange and probably accidental ways, questions of affinity

00:09:33 rather than actual influence, many of these passionate visions of Samuel Palmer who is usually classified

00:09:44 as a disciple of William Blake many of these visions have that sense of a kind of high visionary experience of nature

00:09:55 which has to do not only with here, we or as the British would say corn or cornfield but with the ecstasy

00:10:06 of the crescent moon and the star images that are again familiar to the study of van Gogh,

00:10:16 so that just to begin my comments this evening a painting like this seems both to look forwards to the most adventurous

00:10:27 distortions in shape and color in 20th century art as well as to look backwards to a kind of art before nature

00:10:38 and a kind of sanctification of these 3 cases, the Millet, the Palmer, and the van Gogh of the single peasant

00:10:49 who somehow represents a natural organic being rooted to the earth.

00:10:58 The most famous..., well that's not true, the equally famous post-impressionist whose art

00:11:10 matured in the 1880s as did van Gogh in that very short life span of his is of course Paul Cezanne

00:11:21 and I show you here on the right the painting that I didn't see in the collection but you hear it, know it

00:11:30 that it has been in the fabulous show in just seen in Washington about Cezanne in Provence. In any case, this is another picture

00:11:43 that comes from this decade of the 1880s in which artists

00:11:53 began to reconstruct what they saw in strange distorted private ways that had to do

00:12:03 not with a communal style which was the case with the impressionists, you know the way the impressionists would paint the same thing

00:12:12 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

00:12:22 we have unique, very strong individuals who create a private cosmos that looks like nothing else in the world.

00:12:34 There has been a great deal of research on the particular sites in the south of France that Cezanne painted

00:12:45 just as in the case of the van Gogh, one could probably pinpoint the exact spot around __________ in which that picture was painted.

00:12:57 Here in any case there is a contribution to that kind of documentation, a farm house in Provence

00:13:09 which offers a clone to the painting by Cezanne. One of the things of course that was so

00:13:20 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,

00:13:31 of course it was in color and not in black and white and then transformed it exactly as he felt sometimes

00:13:43 nodding in the direction of the empirical fact like the character of the placement of the windows of the smoky blue atmosphere

00:13:54 of the mountain range beyond that led to the famous __________ but otherwise he would expand

00:14:04 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

00:14:16 living organic thing. This is a marvelous kind of transformation which becomes perhaps not so apparent

00:14:28 when I projected this side, I realized how dreary, gray and blurry it was but forget about the documentation,

00:14:38 look at the painting by Cezanne and he will see this extraordinary way in which this artist almost for the first time

00:14:49 and not quite like anybody before or during or after would do something like take this house and make it look

00:14:59 as though it was, shall we say simultaneously expanding and contracting sort of heaving in connection

00:15:09 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

00:15:21 suddenly seems to link with the mountain range behind which in fact must be miles away as we can see

00:15:32 in the comparative photograph so that there is this extraordinary sense of disparate things, the house, the grass, the road,

00:15:43 the mountains, the sky that are completely different places that suddenly begin to fuse like a living fabric

00:15:53 and in order to do this the farms have to be distorted so that if one can talk about a picture

00:16:04 having almost an organic life that is seeming, to be breathing, to be moving, to be connecting with adjacent things

00:16:16 here something that Cezanne has done. Once again, the picture at least for many generations of art historians

00:16:29 seem to point to the future, its role was that of a great grandparent a kind of BC profit

00:16:39 to the AD world of the early 20th century and in particular a painting like the Fesler, Cezanne on the right

00:16:51 could be used as an example of what inspired some of the most daring adventures of the early 20th century

00:17:02 namely the invention of cubism in the hands of Picasso and Braque. Here on the left is a classic

00:17:13 early cubist Braque of 1908, and you can see how many lessons he extrapolated from the painting of Cezanne.

00:17:23 I mentioned before this extraordinary way in which near and far and middle ground in the Cezanne become

00:17:33 compressed as well as simultaneously expand into the distance and this kind of density, this kind of compression

00:17:45 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

00:17:57 as that character of natural colors, the earthy colors of the houses, the green of the forest,

00:18:07 the bark of the tree, but it also is moving into something that seems totally unreal so that the relatively

00:18:18 livable farm house in the Cezanne turns into something that seems like a geometric ideal something in fact

00:18:29 that is cubic, hence the nick name cubism, but something which as you notice has lost all the windows so that these buildings

00:18:40 almost look like those little buildings that you have in a monopoly set, they are abstract ideal forms.

00:18:51 Here is Pablo Picasso, 1908, taking cues also from Cezanne and stripping the complexities

00:19:03 of things seen as they still remain in an almost documentary form in the Cezanne into something that seems to be stripped

00:19:13 bare to some sort of platonic ideal. I mentioned before that as in the case of the Van Gogh

00:19:25 pictures of this vintage tended to be seen as prophecies, but again as in the case of the Van Gogh,

00:19:35 these pictures have started to look backwards as well, so that I was very pleased to see that in the group of pictures,

00:19:47 I am talking about this evening, there was an early painting by Quatrro from part of the world, Southern France, Provence,

00:19:58 not that far from Cezanne territory and that is this early Quatrro of __________. It's interesting to see

00:20:09 that there are many of the same features, geographical and pictorial that you have in the Cezanne.

00:20:19 The contrast of the ocher color of the buildings vis-a-vis the green of the grass, the trees, and the foreground,

00:20:30 and the grey blue hays of the mountains beyond, so that here earlier in the 19th century,

00:20:40 we already have a great French artist responding to this neck of the woods and producing similar results,

00:20:51 although needless to say, one could look at it both ways that is on the one hand how there is continuity here

00:21:01 and on the other hand how Cezanne really ruptures a tradition of landscape and unleashes all kinds of new possibilities,

00:21:13 some would say daemons for the history of modern art. Here just to thicken the stew

00:21:25 is another kind of looking backwards from the work of Cezanne which has to do with the fact that he was after all a

00:21:36 regional painter, he came from Aix-en-Provence, and that was where he was firmly rooted, so that it becomes fascinating

00:21:46 to look at other regional painters from the earlier 19th century who painted similar themes.

00:21:56 This is just a very obscure artist, his name is __________ who painted the Pont du Gard, the Roman antiquity

00:22:07 in Provence, and you can see something of this sense of a kind of architectural firmness buildings

00:22:17 by man on earth that is again a continued into the world of Cezanne. You know, other earlier

00:22:29 late 18th century French paintings seem also to herald what Cezanne would do much later.

00:22:39 Here is a painting by a major French landscape artist of the late 18th century __________, this is not Provence

00:22:50 but a view of Rome and that kind of __________ between architecture and nature, the contrast

00:22:59 and the fusions of these simple geometric forms made by man and the green that bursts through it

00:23:09 and the haze of the sky above, this is something that is part of the genealogical table of this artist.

00:23:25 It is very hard I must say in the case of Seurat the third of the post-impressionist artists

00:23:36 whose work of the 1880s is so brilliantly represented here. It is very hard to think of prototypes for him

00:23:47 and so far as he is aggressively in the 1880s an artist who wants to embrace, shall we say

00:23:57 everything to do with the industrial revolution and everything to do with the new world of science and engineering.

00:24:07 Those passions of his are perfectly exemplified in his late, I was about to say, landscape but

00:24:18 there is no land there. I was about to say seascape, but it doesn't really look like any seascapes you have seen before.

00:24:28 It really looks like a completely artificial complex, a nautical fantasy which was real on the channel coast of France.

00:24:40 There is the pure cylinder of a lighthouse on the left and most astonishing in the foreground

00:24:50 just think of the dirt road in front of the Cezanne, well here it is.. is this asphalt path perfectly new,

00:25:05 perfectly clean, perfectly tuned to a world of engineering

00:25:14 and rebuilding a completely artificial complex, in this case a nautical complex so that the picture

00:25:26 has absolutely the flavor of the whole new world of building of modular parts

00:25:36 that pertain especially to the 1880s just think of the Eiffel Tower or think of the fact that.... fact of the same time

00:25:47 in this decade, both the Panama and the Suez canals were being built. These extraordinary intrusions of feats of engineering

00:25:59 into old fashioned nature. I am showing you on the right a slide that Ellen happily supplied me with;

00:26:09 this is a preparatory study for the painting that you have here and you can see how among other things Seurat's

00:26:20 instinct was become more and more impersonal in terms of the application of paint and in terms of the clarity,

00:26:30 the crispness of the geometry in the image, so that one might say was the equivalent

00:26:41 of an engineer in paint. I would call your attention for example to the way in which the cylindrical form

00:26:52 of the lighthouse over there is repeated in diminutive aspect in the bollards that go along the coast,

00:27:03 the edge of the asphalt road. Again as in the case of the Cezanne,

00:27:14 we feel that the traditions of western perspective are being challenged. They certainly are in the case of the Cezanne

00:27:26 in which the most extreme distance and the most extreme foreground keep joining forces and then separate

00:27:35 and in the same way in the Seurat that great parabolic sweep of the asphalt road tends to leave you right

00:27:46 in the front of the picture connecting with the horizon so that there is this funny sense of vast distance behind,

00:27:56 but then in turn, it is brought up front into this silhouetted pattern. As you know, Seurat like van Gogh

00:28:08 died at a terribly premature age. In the case of Seurat,

00:28:19 he was born in 59 and he died just a year after this painting in 1991 and one can very often

00:28:30 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

00:28:40 would their pictures have looked like 50 years later. I am not quite sure about van Gogh but I did for this evening stock,

00:28:52 have a thought about Seurat which I will show you in a moment. I began by talking about the way

00:29:03 this seems so totally artificial and that is a point that can be further confirmed by looking at Seurat's earlier work.

00:29:16 Here is a very small picture, a little landscape with a very blocky geometric house related to

00:29:28 the Cezanne farmhouse that we looked at, but as you can see, he is still working within the world of nature

00:29:38 and so far as the picture is vibrantly green, however, is a color that seems to have been

00:29:49 totally expunged from Seurat's pallet at the end of his decade of painting so that the

00:29:59 very synonym of nature chlorophyll is completely absent from this picture, one of the things that gives you this

00:30:09 totally unreal character. I am showing you again just another straw in the wind, an early, again an early

00:30:19 sketch by Seurat which shows a farmer, farm scene, rather like van Gogh's but as you can see

00:30:31 the posts here are aligned in this absolutely regular... beep beep beep.. rhythm that in terms of looking at the young work

00:30:41 of an artist as prophecy of his mature work is a perfect preview of these things to come,

00:30:51 but I said before I wondered of what Seurat might have looked like had he lived, say to be 80 years old

00:31:00 and may be he would have looked like this, a painting by the American Ralston Crawford of the Whitestone bridge

00:31:12 which as you see is again another him to engineering as clean and as immaculate as precise as Seurat tried to be

00:31:24 in the 1880s.

00:31:33 The very opposite of Seurat, again the pictures on the left seem to be somewhat unfocused, I don't know,

00:31:42 hm.....if you can do something.....

00:31:48 Although....

00:31:59 that's fine, anyway... this is already unfocused picture than the original as in the slide projection and it is of course this

00:32:09 exquisite we are, a seamstress at work at her table which is very characteristic

00:32:20 in subject and in style of many works by this precious master works of the 1890s, he in

00:32:31 biographical terms lived in a world that had to do was swatches of cloth, those textiles with fabrics that

00:32:42 was the vocation of the women in his family and there on the right is a painting that spells this out,

00:32:53 a domestic interior, very claustrophobic in which we have these slices, pieces of cloth

00:33:03 all over the place so that you can hardly tell the difference between wallpaper and dress and actual fabrics that are laid out

00:33:14 to be sewed together or displayed. This painting on the right, approximately the same date as the picture in the Fesler collection

00:33:24 comes by the way from Smith College and I learned that Ellen Lee is in __________ so that it is very appropriate

00:33:37 to my remarks this evening. In any case, the painting by Vuillard are these paintings by Vuillard

00:33:49 are very very curious in so far as they perhaps up the anti in terms of making

00:34:00 the scene visible world disappear, but they both do it in a very hide and seek way

00:34:09 so that when we look at these pictures on the one hand, they tend to fuse into a kind of flat and gorgeous fabric

00:34:21 something like the equivalent of the Harris __________, some very very fibrous clothing and on the other hand,

00:34:32 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,

00:34:42 there is real wallpaper, there is a window and a tilt so that it has the quality of the specific of actually

00:34:53 recording the objects in a domestic interior. In a way what we are looking at here

00:35:02 is a kind of pictorial camouflage which is a delicious sort of game to play looking at these pictures in a peek-a-boo

00:35:14 hide and seek way so that we suddenly discover what we might not even realize that there is actually a human figure,

00:35:24 the seamstress in the painting on the left where then there is that strange man, almost like a spook who suddenly appears,

00:35:34 his body totally flattened in the middle of the wall. Again, this is the kind of

00:35:45 picture that seems to have been located firmly in the late 19th century but as time passes,

00:35:56 connections forwards and backwards keep being made and one of the things that has recently

00:36:05 fascinated me is the relationship of an artist like Vuillard in the 1890s to many of the more

00:36:16 seemingly radical innovations of early 20th century artists like Picasso and Braque. I show you here

00:36:27 just to elucidate that point one of Picasso's many pasted papers collage

00:36:39 __________ of the high years of cubism and this particular fascination with making

00:36:49 flat decorative patterns that very often come from snippets of wallpaper as is the case here

00:36:59 this is something that seems to me to have a kind of affinity with the images of Vuillard

00:37:08 and his fellow Nabi, Bonnard in the 1890s, but there is even more towards than that

00:37:19 and I mentioned before the effect of camouflage which incidentally was invented just this time

00:37:29 in the work of Vuillard that marvelous and teasing sense that you are looking at something totally legible

00:37:40 just a pattern or a fabric or a labyrinth of light and then low and behold something that you can cling to

00:37:51 just for a moment seeps through. This is very much the effect we have in some of the most difficult and legible paintings

00:38:04 of the high years of cubism. I show you this most famous example at MoMA, the picture that is called,

00:38:15 you can read it below, as a surrogate title Ma Jolie, but in a way although this is very different clearly from Vuillard

00:38:26 it also represents a kind of continuity, the depiction of something that was actually seen perceived,

00:38:36 this is a woman holding some kind of stringed instrument, but then that turns into a kind of high __________ mirage

00:38:48 or an intricate texture, so that the initial stimulus keeps disappearing, but then teasingly reappearing

00:39:00 every now and then. The late 19th century, especially under the aegis of what was called symbolism, loved to suggest

00:39:11 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

00:39:21 loud statement and that quality of murmurs of suggestions of something visible that is disappearing

00:39:31 and reappearing is one of the major characteristics of the cubist relationship between what they see

00:39:41 and what they paint, I will say more about that in a minute. I particularly choose the MoMA

00:39:53 painting on the right not only because it's camouflage quality relates I would say to you the world of Vuillard

00:40:05 in 1890s, but because of the painted inscription at the bottom of this very very strange and difficult image of a woman,

00:40:19 it says as you can read, Ma Jolie, a longtime ago and that was a very longtime ago when I was first learning

00:40:30 about the difficult moments in 20th century art, people paid very little attention to the words that were inscribed

00:40:42 in the paintings by Picasso and Braque, but more and more these became enigmas to be solved

00:40:52 and one of the words or a pair of words Ma Jolie that kept appearing in the words of Picasso,

00:41:04 well the riddle of that was solved, oh... about half a century ago and characteristically for Picasso

00:41:13 in a very very complicated way. Ma Jolie is a very simple French term means "my pretty one"

00:41:25 and that is not unusual except for the fact that it also has and this is pure Picasso more than one meaning.

00:41:39 For one thing, it was his personal private name for his then girlfriend.... oops

00:41:50 sorry, whose name was Eva Gouel, not very often photographed, but here is a kind of

00:42:01 ghostly photograph of her, so that was his pet name for her,

00:42:09 but it was also the name of a popular song of the period, a musical song of pre-war Paris.

00:42:23 I am walking down memory lane long time ago, I once spoke to a Frenchman who actually knew the verse of the song

00:42:34 and sang a bit of it to be, it was something like "Oh Jolie Ma Jolie mon coeur te dit bonjour"

00:42:42 so that it almost had for that generation of the early 20th century the character of say a song by the Beatles,

00:42:52 it was very very famous so that it was a reference to a song that everybody knew as well as a reference

00:43:04 to Picasso's girlfriend and in fact most extraordinarily because Picasso's love life always entered into his art,

00:43:16 he wrote this phrase Ma Jolie again and again and again during the period in which he was involved who is Eva Gouel

00:43:28 who died prematurely in the heyday of cubism, but she appears again just before her death in fact

00:43:41 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

00:43:53 here because it is not only his girlfriend but it seems also like the inscription on a sheet of music

00:44:08 there the three lines of what should be a five line score on the page of music and this incidentally rhymes

00:44:20 with the three strings of the violin, interesting to note because Picasso is a musician and always changes things

00:44:32 of that instead of 5 lines for the music score, he puts down 3 and instead of 4 strings for the violin

00:44:40 he uses 3 so that these rhyme in a new connection. There are other words here as well which seem to offer

00:44:52 a kind of alphabet __________ scramble, you have __________, but it comes out as __________ that is the name of the daily newspaper

00:45:05 and there is bass, the brand of an __________ that would be seen on a cafe table like this.

00:45:14 As I mentioned Picasso like some lovesick boy

00:45:24 who inscribes the name of his beloved on a tree kept including Ma Jolie in his paintings,

00:45:43 one might almost say camouflage them like a secret love for Eva and in another case

00:45:54 he actually inscribed __________ Eva, I love Eva

00:46:07 very very small so that these were like little love letters, little voles of his affection to his then girlfriend

00:46:26 and here is another example of that inscription and painting of 1914 in which it almost has the blazing quality

00:46:38 of a something on a theater __________ Ma Jolie loud and bold as opposed to secretive

00:46:48 in the case of the 2 pictures I just showed you. Studies of Picasso keep unveiling one after another,

00:46:59 one mystery after another and I was utterly delighted to look at this painting and realize that it contained

00:47:11 a musical instrument that was always misidentified in terms of discussions of well the objects in the cubist art.

00:47:24 I am talking about this thing, the instrument that you see on a slant in the middle of the picture

00:47:40 __________

00:47:47 and this is an instrument that turns up frequently on the table-tops of Picasso as well as of Braque,

00:48:01 but in the literature at least some time ago, the person who described what was in a cubist still life

00:48:12 would always fudge off of this and usually say that it was a clarinet. I sometimes thought that may be it was an oboe

00:48:24 because of the fact that it has a double reed;

00:48:33 but whatever, it was clearly some kind of woodwind. It turns up occasionally and low and behold

00:48:44 it turns out that it is neither a clarinet nor an oboe, it is something more folkloric and ethnic

00:48:54 that comes from Catalonia where Picasso spent a good deal of his youth in the 1890s

00:49:05 becoming Pablo Picasso. This instrument is called "the tenora" and it is very very common in Catalonia,

00:49:18 it is played by villagers, they have, in the city, concerts of people playing the tenora.

00:49:28 Here is a slide of the __________ that it comes in all shapes and sizes. Picasso had one and for him

00:49:40 it was a kind of souvenir of his south of the Pyrenees origins and it turns up again and again in his pictures

00:49:51 as well as, I will show you in a moment, those by Braque. I might add before I forget that the

00:50:03 the grain of wood on this instrument is marvelously represented by Picasso, who actually, I believe

00:50:14 combed the paint the way he once combed hair on a picture. He took an actual comb and went through

00:50:25 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.

00:50:42 At any rate, you have here in Indianapolis an example of a tenora which also appears

00:50:53 as I mentioned in the work of Braque. Here it is in a __________, that's the museum of modern art

00:51:05 and I am happy to say that this picture used to be titled "the clarinet". It was always called that

00:51:14 in many books you will see that on the caption, but we now know that this is the same instrument the Catalan woodwind,

00:51:27 the tenora with the cylindrical body and the double reed, so that is another problem in cubist redemnification

00:51:39 that has been solved.

00:51:44 Speaking of Braque, I of course want to include here this lighter painting by Braque

00:51:55 and this has prompted me to think about other changes in our interpretation of art of the 20th century,

00:52:11 Namely... shifting evaluations about good, better, and best. In the middle of the 20th century

00:52:22 probably right through the third quarter of the 20th century cubism and the more difficult aspects of it

00:52:32 as represented by Picasso and Braque was generally considered to be the highest point, the highest achievement

00:52:43 in the evolution of artists who started as cubists and that would go for Picasso as well as for Braque

00:52:53 and there was in fact a slight turning away from lighter work which presumably was not as adventurous,

00:53:05 was not as lustier, not as demanding as the excitement and the frequent illegibility of cubist art like the

00:53:16 one on the right or like the Picasso in the Fesler Collection so that if one had to choose between these two paintings

00:53:27 probably the knee-jerk reflex would be to say that the cubist work was better because it was youthful,

00:53:37 more adventurous, etc., but as history passes or time passes as the history changes so do our

00:53:47 perceptions of works of art and now more and more the later less youthful, more mature

00:53:58 sometimes senior aspects of long life 20th century artists seem to be as fascinating

00:54:07 as accessible as the thrilling innovative works of their junior years, so it is

00:54:17 that instead of looking at Braque like this in terms of its not having the excitement of the original innovations

00:54:28 of cubism it can be looked at in terms of other kinds of pleasures which have to do with

00:54:37 among other things, the introduction of these very sumptuous colors, the combinations of yellow and purple

00:54:47 which would have been out of balance in the early cubist work, people liked it because it was monastic in quality,

00:54:57 tended to sensor any colors out of it, but here we have again the pleasure of looking at the yellows

00:55:07 and the greens and the apples and the grapes and the contrast of the wallpaper behind which not incidentally

00:55:18 may remind you of the patterns that you find in say the work of Vuillard. At any rate, these later works

00:55:32 by revolutionary, initially revolutionary artists have come more and more to the fore in recent years

00:55:44 so that we look at them not as if they were belated sort of senile efforts

00:55:54 of artists who were thrilling in their youths but fascinating or beautiful works of art in their own right

00:56:06 that is something that I have thought about when confronted with the __________ in the Fesler Collection,

00:56:16 a long time ago the response usually would have been that the best __________ or the early ones

00:56:26 and especially those that seem to be marked by the character of cubism, so that I show you here this early

00:56:37 __________ 12 13 19 12 13A typical __________ on the roof which would have been

00:56:47 assumed just because it has so many of the corky jigsaw puzzle patterns

00:56:57 that you have in cubism as well as the relatively __________ pallet which in the case of __________ colorist

00:57:09 only permits yellow, but the painting in the Fesler Collection which I had never consciously laid eyes on before

00:57:21 is a fabulous and gorgeous work. If you like blue horses,

00:57:28 there is one and it is marvelous to see after Franz Marc painted horses blue before the first World War

00:57:40 that these species have survived, I thought it was endangered but there it is and another thing although this doesn't have that

00:57:51 interlocking Swiss Watch network of flat planes of cubism, it has this breathless rush of space

00:58:01 something that __________ did at the beginning of his career, but revived here something that makes the __________of this sort of secular

00:58:12 holy family of Egypt with the Harlequin and the naked baby and the Russian woman

00:58:23 with her babushka, all of this has extraordinary drama and __________ and I particularly love, the free floating candle

00:58:34 somewhere in this icy Russian climate. Speaking of artists

00:58:46 whose later work was ignored or in this case actually revived.... reviled,

00:58:56 although the loss would be revived, there is __________ DeCarrico whose work again

00:59:07 is represented here in the last of these paintings that I will talk about this evening namely this one on the left.

00:59:18 As you can see, it is not alone as an image, but relates to earlier paintings by DeCarrico

00:59:30 like the one on the right of, I think 1914, which has many

00:59:40 of the same components namely that absolutely scary lifeless statue of the

00:59:50 __________ absolutely dry __________ atmosphere for everything is being baked in the noonday sun,

01:00:04 so that this is the first version of that dream where as this is a later version, later variation of that DeCarrico

01:00:17 made on ideas that he materialized and painted in his youth.

01:00:25 There was a great deal of hostility to the evolution of the DeCarrico's career namely he was an artist

01:00:35 who had as a young artist an absolutely brilliant beginning, painting pictures like the one on the right

01:00:45 that were unique memorable and that cast a long important shadow on the evolution

01:00:53 of fantastic paintings __________ in particular in the 1920s and 30s, but then DeCarrico

01:01:04 began to do so many things that were unthinkable in terms of the proper history of modern art

01:01:12 for one thing he reverted to painting in a more conservative classical way, but much worse,

01:01:23 completely violating the tradition of originality invasion in 20th centaury art.

01:01:32 He began to copy his own earlier works as well as as this case here to make variations upon them,

01:01:43 so that he was really being in a way nostalgic respective looking at his youth and re-experiencing it.

01:01:55 That is the case in the painting in the Fesler collection in which you have so many of the ingredients of earlier DeCarricos

01:02:06 that strange not living, not dead statue of that strange shadow that comes from some other monuments that we can't see.

01:02:22 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

01:02:34 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

01:02:45 and that of course includes the weird vista of the railway train with the smoke coming out of it

01:02:55 except for the fact that we know that it cannot move an inch because this is all absolutely frozen in time.

01:03:06 As I mentioned, this kind of later variation by DeCarrico on his own earlier works

01:03:17 and often not just variation but repetition was thought to be

01:03:28 a kind of copout, here was a great modern artist who went on painting in the teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s,

01:03:39 and just kept imitating himself and he was so to say exposed in a

01:03:50 famous illustration in a MoMA DeCarrico catalogue in which this early classic of 1917,

01:04:01 the disquieting muses was reproduced in three 3 x 6 = 18 different variations that he made of the picture,

01:04:12 some almost identical between the years 1940 and 1970.

01:04:22 This of course was considered by some to be totally shocking that an artist would sell out that way,

01:04:35 but as a matter of fact, as I said at the beginning, things change, taste changes, history changes things,

01:04:45 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,

01:04:59 sometimes almost clones, sometimes variations, it was exactly that time that younger artists and I am speaking of them

01:05:11 Andy Warhol were fascinated by precisely this phenomenon so that Warhol in the early 1980s looked at DeCarrico

01:05:25 and you remember how Warhol liked to repeat Campbell soup cans

01:05:31 and like to repeat Marilyn Monroe's, he was fascinated by exactly this aspect of DeCarrico that was scorned

01:05:43 by an older modernist generation. So, it was that he made single and multiple variations

01:05:54 upon DeCarrico paintings. Here is a drawing inspired by this whole series and here is another variation

01:06:07 on DeCarrico in which in terms of a new generation artists working in the second half of the 19th century

01:06:19 Warhol's world, he is fascinated by exactly the same thing and DeCarrico that was so repellent

01:06:30 to earlier scholars. Here is Andy Warhol doing a multiple that is prompted by DeCarrico's,

01:06:43 shall we say prophecy of Warhol's own fascination with mass production. This is a very surprising turn of events

01:06:55 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

01:07:06 will look very different from the way it does today. Thank you very much!