PART 1: READINGS
T. J. Clark: “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of ‘Olympia’ in 1865”
 Olympia encountered two sets of discourses in 1865, which produced the hostile reaction to
the painting: the discourse on Woman/Nude/Prostitute and the discourse of aesthetic
judgment in the Second Empire.
 Discourse on Woman/Nude/Prostitute
 Olympia disturbed the normal relations between prostitution and femininity.
 Olympia disobeyed the conventions of the nude by showing an unyielding, tense
female body
 Discourse on aesthetic judgment
 Olympia evoke Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), the canonical example of the nude,
because of a similar arrangement
 Olympia seemed to be a travesty of Titian
 Mass of critical confusion and outrage at Olympia
 Even Ravenel, who understood the Baudelarian implications of Olympia, remained
perplexed and still could not ‘read’ the painting’s significance.
 Olympia, for the viewers in 1865, did not possess a sexual identity, for she mixed decorum
and disgrace in an uncomfortable way in which neither dominated.
 Question of access and address
 Canonical nude: invites viewer’s gaze, body is accessible
 Realist nude: refusal to be seen
 Olympia does neither
 ‘Incorrectness’ in the drawing of the body
 Body outlined in with dark edges
 But other parts lacked definition: her right break, the nipple, the far forearm, torso
 Handling of hair and hairlessness
 The hand hides hair, which is not supposed to be on a nude
 Trace of hair in the armpit
 Shock of auburn hair that is hard to see against brown background
 Conclusion: Olympia’s purpose is “to show us the artifice of this familiar repertoire of
modern life, and call in question the forms in which the city contrives its own appearance”
(15).
Abigail Solomon-Godeau–Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of the Primitivist
Modernism
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The main idea is the relationship between the myth of Gauguin’s work and the myth of
Gauguin’s life. The embrace of the primitive and the celebration of artistic originality are
both animated by Gauguin’s privileged access to that which is primordially internal. Thus,
the journey out is really a journey in.
Gauguin’s primitivism involves racial and sexual fantasies as well as notions of power,
both colonial and patriarchal.
Brittany is presented as Gauguin’s initial encounter with cultural Otherness. Bretonism
supplies a vision of an unchanging rural world, populated by obliquely religious women
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and children, a locus of nature, and femininity and spirituality. Men are absent from
Bretonism just as they are absent from the 19th-century discourse on prostitution.
Gauguin’s quest for the primitive becomes increasingly sexualized (e.g., his Eves). Is
primitivism conflated with feminism? Is primitivism a gendered discourse?
Gauguin describes Tahiti as “tropics/ecstasy/amorousness/native.” Gauguin had issues
with the race (black, white, or yellow?) and gender (androgynous) of the Polynesians
(Maori).
There is a darker side to the primitivist desire, one implicated by fantasies of imaginary
and even sometimes real knowledge, power, and rape (e.g., Gauguin’s quote).
Gauguin’s representation of Tahitian culture is inauthentic.
o By the time Gauguin started painting, indigenous religion had been eradicated by
and the handicrafts, barkcloth production, and art of tattoo and music had
succumbed to the interdiction of the missionaries or the penetration of European
products.
o The bright-colored cloth of the clothing, bedding, and curtains that Gauguin
depicted was of European design and manufacture.
o Gauguin never assimilated the native culture or learned to speak the language.
The Polynesian titles he gave to most of his Tahitian works were either colonial
pidgin or grammatically incorrect.
o Everything Gauguin knew about Tahitian theology was from his 13-year-old
mistress Tehe’amana.
The image of the savage and the image of the woman are similarly structured in the
project of representing the Other’s body. In the Polynesian pictures as in the Breton work,
images of men are rare and otherwise feminized.
Gauguin plagiarized other artists as well as photographs. Gauguin’s “unsettling and
savory mingling of barbarian splendor, Catholic liturgy, Hindu meditation, Gothic
imagery, and obscure and subtle symbolism.” Gauguin’s work as “the art of a sailor,
picked up here and there.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) from Letters on Cezanne
Summary: These letters are written by Rilke to his wife, Clara Westhoff. As secretary to Rodin,
Rilke visited an exhibition of Cezanne’s work often and became more and more interested in the
paintings. His analysis began somewhat shallowly, but showed increasing depth through the
letters.
Notes:
- Cezanne’s paintings show reality: all the objects appear in real colors
- Tells his wife about Cezanne’s history
- Cezanne changed from bohemian to intense workaholic
- He strove for realism, which he saw in the Venetian masters in the Louvre
- He described Cezanne’s painting technique
-Started in the dark center of an object and expanded using colors
- There was a conflict between the looking at reality and appropriating it
- He explains that it takes a long time to understand Cezanne’s work
- He describes the educative nature of Cezanne’s work
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- The truthfulness of the colors
- The pictures represent nature broken down
After looking at Cezanne’s work, Rilke can no longer think of nature as a huge,
overpowering force
Cezanne’s painting are devoid of emotion: they simply represent
- These paintings do now show whether Cezanne loved/hated the objects
- They are truly real images of nature
Rilke gives a detailed description of Cezanne’s painting of a red armchair
- He describes the color with immense detail and accuracy
- All the colors used in the armchair give the viewer a feeling of red
- Colors get their role in response to the surrounding, neighboring colors
Reading: Linda Nochlin’s “Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses”
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Seurat’s Poseuses takes the genre of the nude to a new level where Seurat advances
Manet’s depiction of the nude in Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe (representing the nude in nature)
and the nude in Olympia (representing the naked prostitute) to his own contemporary
interpretation of the nudes in Poseuses who represent “nothing but the models they are”
He doesn’t take the traditional route of showing the nude as natural, mystical and
timeless and by doing so Seurat rejects the body politics of the past
Seurat shows the nudes as contemporary urban working women: “In their literal and not
very glamorous status as working models standing around waiting to pose within the selfreferential world of the artist’s studio, they serve to body forth—literally embody—the
central issue of art and art-making itself at the end of the 19th century: the relation
between the artist and his subjects and, ultimately, between the artist and his public”
The nudes are not erotic or scandalous in their implied relationship with the artist as in
many modernized portrayals of the nude, rather the nude women are “professional, even
blasé posers, not terrified novices; their thin, unseductive bodies are matter-of-factly
stripped for work”
Seurat plays with traditional portrayals of the nude and uses these allusions, like of the
Three Graces, to create “visual demystification” of the nude by exposing the “banal act of
posing itself, not the traditional elevated mythological topic”
Seurat’s own paintings, especially Grande Jatte, are used to show the “real” versus the
“artificial” of the paintings within the painting.
Seurat is preoccupied with clothing and fashion and gives them “a surprising, even
disturbing vitality”
Seurat’s scientific use of color creates a “perceptual field [that] is extraordinarily
dynamic and depends upon the viewer for its organization and intelligibility”
“The Poseuses sticks with the urban workaday world, with science and the culture of
commodity, in which both artist and model—and the work of art itself—participate: and
this world is our own inheritance”
Solomon-Godeau on Gauguin
Solomon-Godeau tells us that Gauguin’s project had as its basis a positively constructed
myth; nowhere is this clearer than in his paintings of Brittany, which represent a defunct lifestyle,
the appeal of which had become central to the regions burgeoning tourist economy. Taken
together with his paintings from Polynesia, these form the content of Gauguin’s mythology, in
which, Godeau argues, “one leaves home to discover one’s real self…the object from ‘out there’
enables the expression of what is thought to be ‘in there’ (120).” The central question of
Godeau’s piece is one of origins; “Is it the historic Gauguin that so perfectly incarnates this
mythology, or is it the mythology that so perfectly incarnates Gauguin? Did Gauguin produce
the discourse, or did the discourse produce him (120)?” Godeau finds a possible ‘origin’ in what
is certainly one of primitivism’s most important elements, what he refers to as the “dense
interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power (120).” In support of this contention, she
initially points to the absence of male figures in Gauguin’s paintings of Brittany, which she
attributes to his “fantasmic construction of a purely feminized geography (123).” Godeau goes
on to trace the manner in which Gauguin’s “quest for the primitive becomes progressively
sexualized;” the linking of natural or Edenic culture to the sexual, and eventually its formulation,
as Godeau puts it, in the equation “tropics/ecstasy/amorousness/native.” There is, inevitably, a
darker side to this formulation, evinced by the rape fantasies which find expression in Gauguin’s
own writings. Gauguin’s relationship, at the age of 50, with a native girl of 13, forms the
centerpiece of Godeau’s argument for the importance of the ‘interweave’ of sexuality and power
in primitivist thought.
The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art
Hal Foster
-Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is a “primal scene of modern primitivism,” in
which Picasso transcribes the “other” of primitive cultures (the African masks) onto the “other”
of women prostitutes, a gesture which exposes the primal nature of his own machismo culture,
and questions the subjective dominance the modern artist holds over all things foreign from him.
-Foster uses the questions raised in Les Desmoiselles to address the exhibition, “Primitivism in
the 20th Century: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” at the MOMA, where African objects
were presented alongside modern primitivist paintings, in order to show the direct correlation of
aesthetic influence. Foster thinks this show, in many ways, suppresses the ideas that Les
Desmoiselles raised. Foster says that because the show de-contextualizes both the African
objects from their original purposes and the modern paintings from their conceptual agenda,
viewing the two together gets reduced to visual “affinities,” making it ambiguous as to how the
two are really supposed to relate.
-Comparison of Grebo Mask with Construction of Guitar (1912): the juxtaposition is meant to
point out that the eyes of the mask and the hole in the guitar protrude similarly, and seeing the
mask gave Picasso the idea for the guitar. However, Foster argues that they are similar only in
how they differ from the Western realist tradition.
-Foster wants to know what modern art’s responsibility to tribal art is. Tribal art is initially
ritualistic, therapeutic, decorative, etc…what happens to these “magical” properties when their
forms are applied to modern art? There is a danger that when modern art appropriates these
tribal forms for its avant-garde agenda, it results in a dominating relationship, in which all these
forms are codified into Western cultural discourse, and no longer retain their tribal specificity or
serve their original purpose.
-To say that Western art “discovered” and elevated African objects to art status is condescending
and insensitive, and repeats the very idea of colonization within art historical discourse. MOMA
has had a history of perpetuating this ideology.
-Modern artists were subverting their cultural traditions by making Western art something
“other,” and benefited from the influence of tribal forms. Still, modern art was inescapably an
aesthetic commodity while the tribal objects were part of a separate, ritualistic/symbolic
exchange value system.
-Foster goes into a post-modern examination of the “other,” which is very different from what it
was in the early 20th century. This Western construct of other can be further critically
disassembled within the present day global community.
Cézanne’s Doubt by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The title refers to Cézanne’s nature as well as the character of his painting as seen
through the eyes of his critics. Cezanne was depressed, maltempered, reclusive, and otherwise
lived a pained existence. Merleau-Ponty discusses the relationship between the artists life and
the artists painting, declaring that one cannot take a strict deterministic view and say that
Cezanne’s life situation created his art, but one cannot deny that there is a connection.
Cezanne’s doubt can be seen in the contrasting ideas he presents in his paintings. He
takes the impressionist way of painting the way nature catches our eyes, but eventually moves on,
taking the impressionist view of nature as a model but also focusing on the object (the
impressionists and divisionists deconstructed the object). Cezanne paints the lived perspective,
which is what is actually perceived by the eye, rather than the geometric or photographic truth of
an object or scene. Cezanne also tries to capture the entire nature of an object in his painting,
combining, sight, touch, and even smell according to him, into his canvass. He tries to find the
essence of a scene, the motif, which embodies it, and then paints the scene as a whole. MerleauPonty ends the article with a comparison to Leonardo de Vinci, to illustrate that the artist’s work
is influenced by his life, and though the work cannot be understood solely from an artist’s life, it
does tell us a lot.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”
Marinetti was a symbolist poet before he rejected symbolism in favor of dynamism and speed,
which became the core of the futurist movement. Futurism attempted to place Italian art in the
forefronf of the European avant-garde. The manifesto was published in Le Figaro in February
1909. The manifesto was written by Marinetti and his friends, the oldest of whom was thirty.
The manifesto:
 Calls for the love of danger and fearlessness
 Intends to exalt aggression into literature, which has been immobile and dormant.
 Affirms that the world has been enriched by the beauty of speed
 Hymns the man at the wheel (at movement)
 “Except in struggle there is no more beauty. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack
on unknown forces”
 “Why should we look back when what we want is to break the mysterious doors of the
Impossible! “
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“We will glorify war, patriotism and scorn for women”
“We will destroy the museums, libraries and academies of every kind”
The futurists want to see the world free of its antiquities. They establish their movement in
Italy, where “museums cover (the country) like graveyards”. They believe that “admiring an old
picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn”. Worship of the past is
exhausting. They want to be thrown by the younger generation into the wastebasket when their
time comes (just like they are doing to the older generation). They believe that “art can be
nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in a World of its Mechanical Reproduction”
Marx portrayed capitalism as a force that will eventually bring to its own demise. (Art, in
turn, is leading to its own destruction).
While art has always been reproducible (e.g replicas), mechanical reproduction of a work
of art represents something new. But even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art cannot
replicate the existence of this work in its original time and space; the authenticity of a work
cannot be reproduced. The authority of the object is compromised when it is reproduced. At the
same time, reproduction allows the work to be exhibited outside its natural environment, e.g. a
choral production can be heard in someone’s room, rather than in the auditorium.
One may argue that by replacing the original with multiple copies, the object produced is
reactivated. But this liquidates historical tradition and cultural heritage, processes that are
associated with contemporary mass movement, that happen in particular in the case of films.
Walter argues that the ‘aura’ of a work tends to disappear with reproduction and mass
culture in contemporary life. He explains that humans seek to bring physically closer to them
works of art and therefore accept reproduction.
Walter argues that the aura of a work of art is inseparable from its ritual function. He also
argues that the uniqueness of a work of art is imbedded in its tradition, namely, in the context in
which this work of art physically stood throughout time (for example, a statue of Venus first
stood among the Greeks, then among the clerics of the middle ages etc). But reproduction led
to a serious crisis in the arts. The art became a theology of itself, “the art for the sake of
art”. Thus mechanical reproduction emancipated the work of art from its dependence on
ritual. Art, argues Walter, hence moves on to be based on another practice: politics.
Today, argues Walter, the absolute emphasis on the exhibition value (rather than the cult
value) of a work of art changes completely the work of art and its artistic function.
Mechanical reproduction of art has changed the reaction of the masses toward art.
Our reaction toward a Picasso painting becomes similar to our reaction to a Chaplin movie; this
change has great social significance. The greater the decrease of in the social significance of a
work of art, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The
conventional is critically enjoyed, and the innovative is criticized with aversion.
The crisis of the painting, like the crisis of the film, started when paintings began to be
viewed by large publics (the masses) in the 19th century. Walter argues that painting ought not to
become a collective experience. The collective reception of painting occurred due to
reproduction. The masses were not prepared for collective reception, and were reactionary to
certain paintings (such as surrealist paintings).
Walter argues that the new art of film reflects the masses’ desire for distraction, rather
than concentration (moving images instead of staring at a painting quietly with oneself). That
who concentrated is absorbed by the work of art; that who is distracted absorbs the work of art.
Hence in film, the public is an absent-minded examiner (Walter is highly critical of films).
The result of Fascism (which emerges from proletarianization and modernization of man)
is the introduction of aesthetics into politics. But the system of Fascism (mobilizing everyone yet
leaving everyone’s property intact) can only be achieved through war. The Maniefsto of the
Futurists reinforces that.
The Futurists’ opting for war shows that society is not ready for technological
advancement. Mankind (unfortunately) reached a state in which considers its own destruction as
an aesthetic pleasure.
Griselda Pollock
"Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity"
• Pollock claims that the reason for which the artists canonized as the initiators of modern art
are men is that modernist art history sponsors a selective tradition which perceives modernism as
a particular and exclusive gendered set of practices (male-oriented, of course).
• Many modernist works (Olympia, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, among others) rely on the
existence of a male spectator in order to fully transmit their significance. Their implications of a
masculine viewer/consumer are only to be fully grasped and felt by, literally, a masculine
consumer. Pollock states the impossibility of a woman relating to these paintings, which were
made by a tradition of men for other men to understand. They are a projection of men's desires
and concerns. Where, then, is the feminine voice?
• Thus, the territory of modernism is often a way of dealing with masculine sexuality and its
sign, the female body. This is because the social constructions of sexual roles and differences
determined, in great part, how and what men and women painted. Art history and practice are
structured, thus, in the context of gendered power relations.
• Pollock focuses on the work of two 19th century woman artists: Berthe Morisot (1841-96)
and Mary Cassatt (1844-1926).
• The spaces represented in their work are, most often, domestic spaces, since the range of
places they could include in their paintings was closed to them, while more open to their male
colleagues, who could move around more freely through the city. There are some public spaces
represented, but these are always the spaces of bourgeois recreation, or Society. Scenes of labor
are also included, especially those involving childcare.
• Cassatt and Morisot has close contact with modernist artists such as Degas and Manet, among
whom play with spatial structures in painting was a very common practice. Their constant
contact with these ideas may have conditioned their predisposition to explore spatial ambiguities
and metaphors.
• Morisot often performs the juxtaposition of two spatial systems, often divided by some other
spatial device, such as a balcony, etc. These respective spaces are defined by Pollock as the
spaces of masculinity and femininity, in terms of what social spaces were open to men and
women, and what relation a man or a woman has to that space and its occupants. Also, in many
of her paintings, the perspective makes it seem as though the painter were part of the scene,
placing the viewer in the same position of spatial ambiguity.
• In Cassatt's work, the conventions of geometric perspective are disarticulated. Replacing this
is a type of phenomenological space, represented according to the way it is experienced by a
combination of touch, texture, and sight. The space, and the objects within it, is represented in
terms of a subjective hierarchy of values personal to the artist. Thus, the painting becomes very
susceptible to ideological and historical, subjective inflections.
• The subject of the "modernist gaze", or viewpoint, is also touched on by Pollock and,
according to her is a problematic that is represented in some women's paintings. The concept of
spaces of modernity as spaces of sexual exchange also pervades their paintings. She uses, for
instance, the example of Cassatt's At the Opera to discuss the problematic of the male gaze, and
women artists' reactions to it. In the painting, a woman sits at the opera, actively gazing
(at who knows what?) through opera glasses. A man in the farther end of the balcony is also
gazing through opera glasses, but at the woman. The viewer of the painting is a sort of mirror
image to the man/gazer, as he could also be staring at the woman from an opposite position. But
the woman is also the owner of her own gaze, she is staring actively as well, and the small
amount of objectification she receives works only to the purpose of mocking the spectator in his
potentially voyeuristic gaze.
Paul Signac: From Eugène Delacroix to Neo Impressionism (Feb 7)
- Delacroix’ legacy: Delacroix innovated art by exploring the laws of color—he showed the
“moral influence of color,” used optical blending, advanced the necessity to limit the use of the
dark and dull colors, exemplified a scientific approach to art, and developed a keen eye for the
harmony of painting—his works demonstrate greater brightness and luminosity than achieved
ever before, even though his successors eventually perfected this art
- Neo Impressionism (or chromoluminarism)
o technique: unlike Impressionistic method which was based on “instinct and the instantaneous,”
the Neo-Impressionist technique was rooted in “reflection and the permanent”—their technique
is precise, scientific, and rigorous and hopes to achieve harmony—they advanced separation
(divisionism) as a new technique (consisting of breaking color into tiny, but regular dots that,
seen from a distance, form an image)
o color: like the Impressionists, they only used pure colors, but they didn’t like mixing colors on
the palette except for contiguous colors (as in the chromatic circle)—by optically blending pure
colors, they created a much greater variety of colors on the canvas than the Impressionists before
them
o main artists: Georges Seurat, Paul Signac
PART 2: IDs
*Slide 1: Gustave Courbet -- Portrait of Charles Baudelaire 1848*
-Baudelaire: influential writer of the time, beginning of modernism
-what does it mean to be a modern person?
-subject under condition of modernity
-poetry as dialectical movement; how can one be modern? Purpose of
poetry; that which is lost
-poet of crisis of modernity w/ Haussmannization, how to be modern
*Slide 2: Edouard Manet -- Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé 1876*
-friend of Manet, devotion to painting, one of 3 influential writers of
beginnings of modernism
-attempt to make language medium outside of vernacular, purification of
language, self-referentiality of language
-self-reflexivity
-language has meaning in itself
*Slide 3: Edouard Manet -- Portrait of Émile Zola 1867*
-historian, depicts modern experience
-doesn't focus on language, but should be used to record history
-insists that writer's task is to depict modern life
-against Mallarmé
*Slide 4: Gustave Courbet -- Stonebreakers 1849*
-represents newly emerging class
-realist
-workers portrayed as heroes, like classical gods
-huge painting w/ exactitude of depiction (every detail as important)
Slide 5
Edouard Manet - Absinthe Drinker, 1859
The first painting Manet submitted to the Salon, the Absinthe Drinker, which caused a scandal at
the time, was promptly rejected. A figure of Baudelarian intensity, the Absinthe Drinker was a
double devalorization because Manet inserted a bohemian lowlife into a high art portrait and
because the absinthe drinker, a petty bourgeois subject who had clearly failed (and who was
considered the latter day equivalent of a heroin user) was presented as a hero. The disjointed
elements, including the shadow of the bottle going in the opposite direction, the left foot and the
right foot are seemingly reversed, the shadow of the drinker resembles a Spanish woman from
Mantilla, all indicate Manet’s deliberate attempt to play with the order of representation and
what is representable.
Slide 6
Edouard Manet – Guitar Player, 1860
The Guitar Player codifies the principles that Manet broke in the Absinthe Drinker: in this
painting, the guitar is strung for a left-hand player but is played with the right hand, the shoes,
the cigarette butt and the onion and pitcher on the ground, all suggest that these are studio props.
Manet’s first foray into the Hispanicizing of painting, the painting encompasses his infatuation
with Spain.
Slide 7
Edouard Manet – Street Singer (Victorine Meurent), 1862
The Street Singer is a pastiche because the subject is clearly a member of the underclass wearing
high-class garb. Critics argue that the painting failed because of these contradictions in
references and the position of the eyebrows that reach all the way down to her nose. The
petticoat reveals the construction of the painting because it is so flat.
Slide 8
Manet – Victorine Meurent as Espada, 1862
There are no female matadors in Spain, not then or now. There is discontinuity between the
female at the center of the painting acting like she killed the bull and the small figure of the male
matador actually killing the bull. Additionally, the audience is directly implicated by Meurent’s
gaze, and the aggressive painting of the cape elicits questions of how cloth should be painted
(should it look like cloth or like paint)? The painter can no longer assume audience participation
in creating an illusion.
Slide 9
Manet – Old Musician, 1862
The painting depicts the lumpen proletariat and portrays the displaced people as heroes of
modern life as Baudelaire argues how they should be perceived. The figures portrayed include:
the wandering Jew (silhouette on the right), the absinthe drinker (Manet quotes himself in
opposition to his critics), the gypsy musician (depicted after a photograph), and 2 gypsy children
(quotes from Murilllo and Velasquez.) Manet’s work mixes Spanish with French juxtapositions.
10. Edouard Manet – Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862 – In this painting, Manet represents
a typical spot of bourgeois recreation. He draws parallels with Velazquez's "Le petit cavalier",
depicting himself in Velázquez' stead (playing with the historical process of acquiring identity).
Many of the Modernists are also depicted, such as Baudelaire, Baron Taylor, Charlefeleurie
(romantic writer who resurrected folk culture), and Offenbach. He represents the foolishness and
superficiality of bourgeois culture and ritual. The two children in the front can be seen as
fashion victims; their wide and uncomfortable skirts do not permit for movement.
11. Edouard Manet - Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass), 1863
– The painting was very controversial in its time, making it to the Salon des Refusées. It jumbles
all genres (still life, landscape, portrait, nude). Even in the still life he shows different seasons
together. As usual, he is establishing a discourse with the woodcut of "The judgment of Paris"
by Marcantonio Raimondi, where a group of three nudes sits in the same position. The two men
are Manet's brother and a friend. Manet dismantles and disfigures the nude, making it look
"flat". The way it is painted is all but seductive; it is, plainly, paint, not an illusionary
representation of a body. In this way Manet plays with representation. Also, the gaze of the
nude is aggressive, unnerving, directed towards the viewer as if objectifying him. It is an
artificial setup that mixed artificial studio props with a landscape, nude with dressed subjects.
There is also a play with conventional geometric perspective, as the nude in the background
seems closer than she should be, giving the painting a seeming "flatness" characteristic of Manet.
This can, on a simpler level, be read as a statement on prostitution.
12. Alexandre Cabanel - Birth of Venus, 1863 – Manet's Olympia seems to establish a
discourse with this painting. It is a painting meant to create voyeuristic illusionism. The nude is
helpless, subjected to the masculine gaze that objectifies her. She covers her eyes and
stares away so that the viewer does not feel uncomfortable engaging in voyeurism, and she is
more easily subjected. He also contorts the body, making it more vulnerable to the viewer's
gaze. It is a transhistorical, escapist experience, mythological. Illusion characteristic of
academic painting. Cupids as libidinal projections.
13. Edouard Manet - Olympia, 1863 – Manet is rebelling against the linguistic form, the genre,
of the nude. Olympia is a Parisian prostitute, receiving flowers from a customer who just left or
is about to enter (many of the prostitutes of the time used such mythological names). Travesty of
using the black servant – originally black servants were used to add orientalism in harem scenes,
while here she is merely used as a servant, dressed up in very western clothes. Titian's "Venus
de Urbino" inspired the painting. Manet copies the position of the hand but makes it more
aggressive and assertive, interposing the "flatness" of the body. The nude is looking down at us,
reciprocating the spectatorial gaze. He is reversing the genre. The black cat replaces the dog in
Titian, as a symbol of sexuality vs. loyalty, etc. The linear division in the center of the painting
is meant to dismantle visual illusion, flatten out the painting. Instability of class, many critics
call her the "coal miner's daughter". She is outlined with heavy contour lines; by doing this
Manet emphasizes the constructive nature of painting. The question of economic exchange – a
system of beauty being contaminated by a system of economic exchange. Manet gives her a
piece of jewelry identified as belonging to his mother. Angular body – she loses her
role as sexual object.
14. Georges Seurat - Bathers at Asniéres, 1883-4 – Seurat's most important early painting.
Nature and subject at a point of deep discomfort, removal from the space of painterly culture.
Asnieres was polluted, a sewage, people would bathe their dogs there; this shows us the irony of
a pastoral scene. A picture of alienation, a rising class that has not yet found its identity, he
shows classical culture in the abject condition of modern life.
15. Georges Seurat - Les poseuses (The Models) [large], 1888 – Seurat's display of female
figures totally desexualizes them. They pose simply for the purpose of painting; they are clearly
hired professional models. Fashion objects displace nature. The still life becomes a structure of
the inorganic, the constellation of fashion objects. "Grande Jatte" can be seen in the background,
perhaps this adds to the problem of representation, and perception of reality and illusion.
Dismantling of voyeurism, playing with construction and representation.
Painting 16: Les poseuses (The Models), by Georges Seurat, 1888
This painting probes into one of the central themes of the 19th century, namely that of the female
nude. As Linda Nochlin points out, Seurat portrays the female nude no longer in a timeless and
natural fashion, associated with nature as in classical paintings. Rather, he depicts typical
working class women serving as paid models in his studio (underlines by the title), which puts
art-making as well as the position of women in society to the forefront of his concerns.
Interestingly enough, he does not victimize women as others have done but simply portrays them
in an ordinary fashion (“a feat of visual demystification” as Nochlin puts it).
Painting 17: Woman Sewing (The Artist’s Mother), by Georges Seurat, 1883
This drawing by Seurat alludes to art of the past such as the Vermeer’s Lacemaker (in the pose
and conception of light). The theme of sewing and her concentrated pose suggest the image of a
domestic matron, while also giving a sense of order, tranquility and content to evoke the
supportive atmosphere of Seurat’s home.
Painting 18: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat, 18846
Typical for Neo-Impressionism, this painting features an outdoor scene and leisure activities of
the urban middle class. The Island of La Grande Jatte was known as a middle-class location,
underscoring the importance of class identity for Seurat. Note the mix of people in the painting,
including the soldier in the back, the nurse, the isolate working class figure, etc. Needless to say,
this painting is also a supreme example of Seurat’s scientific approach to painting, demonstrated
by intense preparatory work and the divisionist technique.
Painting 19: Olympia, by Jules Cheret, 1892
Cheret’s colorful lithographs and posters served as inspiration for Seurat, who, in his early years,
became interested in popular art with subjects such as the cabarets, theaters, and circuses of late
19th c Paris. Cheret’s use of the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue) might have also
impacted Seurat in his development of a scientific theory of color and art.
Painting 20: Hope, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1872
This Symbolist painting portrays a nude in a somewhat idealized fashion that could be linked to
the antique tradition. Age and class of the nude are difficult to assess, underscoring the ambition
to depict the ideal. The painting was completed under the impact of the Franco-Prussian War of
1870-71, the devastating defeat of which contextualizes the desolation of the landscape and the
retreat into the ideal by the painter.
21. Georges Seurat’s “Study for Les Poseuses” 1887: This painting helps end the genre of the
nude by destroying the notion of innocence, nature and purity. The nude woman represents labor,
not sexuality, as the nude is painted without emotion in Seurat’s own studio. In the finished
version of “Les Poseuses”, it is unclear if this nude is one of three models, or if she is all three
figures in different positions.
22. Georges Seurat’s “Le Chahut” 1890: This painting represents a cabaret scene that was a large
part of Parisian leisure culture. The performers’ dance of liberating gestures is incredibly sexual
and used to entertain disgusting men (i.e. the pig snouted man in the corner), not to entertain
themselves. This image of working class life and leisure halls shows the social trial between
work and capital of the late 1800s.
23. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Divan Japonais” 1892-3: This scene takes place in the same or
similar setting to Seurat’s “Le Chahut” and also represents the same bizarre nature of the
Parisian leisure culture. The painting is an advertisement that animates the inanimate to create
images that are almost grotesque. Toulouse-Lautrec uses fashionable Japanese wood cuts and
well as these cartoonish exaggerations to make this advertisement more radical (even more
radical than Seurat).
24. Georges Seurat’s “The Circus” 1890-1: This painting continues with Seurat’s critical and
confused feelings towards the Parisian leisure culture of this time and the overlaps between art
and entertainment. The circus scene which he depicts appears to be frozen or arrested in time in a
very unnatural way that makes it feel as if it’s part of a larger game. All the circus performers
look inhuman and scary, especially the clown whose eyes are hidden and whose face and neck
are white while his arms are normal skin color.
25. Vincent van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait (dedicated to Gauguin)” 1888: This painting, which
resides in the Fogg Art Museum, is van Gogh’s present to his good friend Gauguin. The intense
color in the background of van Gogh’s self portrait suggests that the paint itself and color are as,
or more, important as the figure, in this case the artist. This painting marks a shift in the purpose
of self-portraits while also raising the question of what is it to be a painter. Van Gogh doesn’t try
to make the painting look realistic or depict the true texture of skin; instead he purposefully uses
larger strokes to show that paint is what is on the canvas and is creating the image.
*NOTE: Seurat’s use of divisionism as well as his scientific color theory can be discussed in all
of his paintings.
#26: Vincent Van Gogh–Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, 1888
 The return to the portrait genre after Seurat.
 Van Gogh’s subject is the lowest level of the everyman rather than a “hierarchical
structure” or “figure of domination.”
 Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh worked as a lay preacher who sought to spread the
message of Christianity to the exploited working class.
#27: Vincent Van Gogh–Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887
 Another example in which the subject is the anti-hero.
 The figure is surrounded by Japanese woodcuts, which shows the importance of the “cult
of all things Japanese” in the formation of symbolism.
 Although color is no longer bonded to its object and fails to reflect reality, it gains a value
in its own right. Japanese woodcuts reject chromatic differentiation in favor of deeply
saturated fields of color.
#28: Paul Gauguin–Self-Portrait: Les Misérables (Dedicated to Van Gogh), 1888
 Also draws on the cult of Japan and the symbolist aesthetic.
 The motif of flowers is so naturalistically painted that we do not read them as flat paper
but as an animate entrance into a dream state
 Gauguin is painting within the space of dreams and supernatural projections, which is
similar to Van Gogh but different from Seurat and Cezanne.
#29: Paul Gauguin–The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1880
 An example of primitivism in that the painting shows women exiting a church, a preindustrial experience.
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Local traditions, such as dress, become iconographical elements that determine
Gauguin’s breakthrough as an artist.
Is the “Vision” a result of self-deception, fraud, or a deliberate claim of access to the
space of the primitive?
There is a Japanese influence in the flatness of space, the diagonal division of the canvas
by the tree, and the opacity of the synthetic paint.
Color becomes the domain of the unconscious as opposed to scientific theory.
#30: Paul Gauguin–Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau), 1892
 The painting represents Gauguin’s encounter with primitive Tahitian culture (perhaps this
is one of his mistresses).
 Another example of the role of color and authenticity in Gauguin’s paintings.
31. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, Paul Gauguin, 1897
This is Gauguin’s epic painting chronicling his Tahiti experience. The painting is a large,
horizontally constructed composition, a pastiche of “primitive” style. The painting shows a
utopian reconciliation of man within nature and allegorizes the stages of life.
32. Portrait of the Artist’s Father, Paul Cezanne, 1866
Cezanne paints his conservative bourgeois father with slapdash disrespect, and even inserts a
leftist newspaper into his father’s hands. The painting epitomizes Cezanne’s artistic reaction
against his repressed upbringing.
33. Dejeuner Sur L’Herb, Paul Cezanne, 1870
Expressionistic, grotesque, and illegible, Cezanne transfers an “otherness” similar to one that
Gauguin sought in the natives onto a French bourgeois family scenario. This painting works at
disassembling the myth of French culture as an extension of Greco-Roman antiquity.
34. A Modern Olympia, Paul Cezanne, 1874
Cezanne comments on and negates Manet’s controversial work by inserting himself, the artist,
into the composition of the painting. He is the first to articulate the split process of painting as
both an act of alienation and gratification.
35. Black Clock, Paul Cezanne, 1869-70
Objects in this still life have a heavy, sculptural quality that emphasizes the correlation between
the painting and the table: both are surfaces for display. The extreme foregrounding of the conch
shell as sexual reference and the faceless clock both emphasize the threat of temporal experience
to painterly gratification.
#36: Paul Cézanne - Great Bathers, 1900-5
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Female nude is no longer beautiful
Overcoming the conception of sexes and love
o Complexity of his conception of the body – penis head on the left, right – not
clearly female – androgynous concept
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 Freudian ideal of unconsciousness
What are the conditions of representation of the subject in nature?
o Bodies and surroundings are similarly toned
o Historical space no longer allows access to the natural
#37: Henri Matisse - Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904-5
Matisse tries to integrate the subject into a subject in space of natural bliss. His work is
neoimpressionist in that he tries to emulate Seurat’s divisionsism, but is unable to capture
Seurat’s optical mixture, which give the impression of continuity, leaving his painting fractured.
#38: Henri Matisse - Le bonheur de vivre (Joy of Life), 1905-6
Matisse paints a new type of pastoral landscape, with perpetually open spaces, lacking definition
and restraint. He uses color to create an autonomous dream space and pairs it with
unconventional representations of the body seeming to lack vertebrae, which creates a break
from reality. It is dehistoricized, deconventionalized, and grotesque view of bliss outside of the
traditional space.
#39: Paul Cézanne - Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899
Cezanne makes the subject part of the painterly process and is integrated into the space within
which he is contained. Cezanne is unwilling to obey the code of representation, but prefers to
present an expression of the subject rather than a physiognomic likeness.
#40: Pablo Picasso - Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1909-10
An example of analytical cubism, the subject can be seen beneath the multiple perpectival
fragments layered upon each other. The subject must be reconstructed by the mind as Picasso
hides the outline of the figure, so that he can examine the structure of form itself.
46. 1907 Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon
This is a seminal work of early Cubism Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel, in the
Avignon Street of Barcelona. There are also African and Iberian influences through the depicted
masks and figures. The masked figure was derived from African tribal masks with green stripes
and sharp edges.
An influential explanation of the wide ranging characteristics of the painting posits that the
variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the
viewer. The five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other.
Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of
their glare. The earliest sketches of the work actually feature two men inside the brothel, one a
sailor and the other a medical student (often depicted holding either a book or a skull). A trace of
their presence at a table in the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the
canvas. The viewer, it has been argued, comes to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the
gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the
autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history
with women. A world of meanings then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation
on the danger of sex, the, to a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention, "trauma of the gaze", and
the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.
47. 1911 Braque, The Portuguese
It is in the Cubist style. The first of Braque’s paintings that use stenciled letters which
emphasizes its two-dimensional character. The letters D and BAL (the D must be the last letter
of the word GRAND) help to convey a 'cafe' atmosphere. The artist makes the spectator
conscious of the canvas, panel or paper as a material object capable of receiving and supporting
other objects.
48. 1911 Picasso, Ma Jolie
A painting in the style of Analytical Cubism, depicting a woman with a guitar. Analytic Cubists
"analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the twodimensional picture plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a
monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ocher. Instead of an emphasis on
colour, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the
natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic
similarities.
49. 1912 Braque, Still Life with Fruit Dish
Braque rejected a purely optical mode of representation and sought to establish a new kind of
“tactile” relationship between the spectator and his works of art. After a series of monochromatic
landscapes, Braque turned to still lifes, associating this genre with the depiction of objects that
are within reach of the hand. He called it tactile space, manual space. He felt he could touch the
thing he sees. Spectator must reach out to them through a materialized experience of space. The
artist used sand to establish raised relief on the highlighted area of each grape.
50. 1912 Picasso, Scallops (Notre Avenir Est Dans L’Air)
A painting in the style of Synthetic Cubism. Here, the defining characteristic was collage, a
technique never before used in fine art; Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912) is the first
example. This new method allowed Picasso to play with the bits and pieces of modern life, the
handbills and the newspapers and other such detritus of the metropolis, which had never before
been satisfactorily incorporated into the visual arts.
51. “Song of Love”, Giorgio De Chirico, 1914.
This pittura metafisica (metaphysical picture) reveals De Chirico as an anti-modernist who
juxtaposes history and memory (the head of Apollo) alongside a grotesquely domesticated glove
and the blue horizon line, suggesting that modernism and memory cannot be separated from each
other.
52. “First Disc”, Robert Delaunay, 1912.
While reminding us of Seurat’s technique of divisionism, Delaunay departs from Cubism into an
art of abstraction. Abstraction is meant to be a purifying operation by allowing the painter to
create a tabula rasa (a blank page), thus allowing the painter to depict a disc that is opaque and
closed to past artistic traditions (this is one interpreation which Prof. Buchloh suggested).
53. “Still Life with Chair Caning”, Pablo Picasso, 1912
The wax and the grid, two of the lowest materials in the food chain of materials; the rope
framing the oval picture that reminds us of a sailor’s souvenir; the incomplete word “journal”;
and the viewless painting in which the tableau (table) is the basis of the painting – all serve as an
assault on our fine arts taste, which Picasso practices in the context of his cubist quest.
54. “Ecce Peur”, Medrado Rosso, 1906-7
In this physionomically light sculpture, Rosso declares, “This is the boy”, thus suggesting that
the object is part of the movement with which it was created. The theme of movement will
become central in the Futurist movement.