[MUSIC]
Imagine we're standing in one of the caves in Lascaux in France. We're surrounded by amazing drawings of
human figures, and animals, and abstract signs. Many of them in mineral pigments, and some of them even etched into the stone. There's a figure of a bull that's almost 17 feet in length.
There are animals standing with crossed legs, which give us just a little bit of a hint of a deeper space, or something like perspective. These paintings were done nearly 20,000 years ago. And we can't really know why, or who did them. But when we look at them, we feel a sense of connection to our deep human past.
And that connection is around the desire to make stories visible; the desire to make sense of life through
drawing and other forms of representation; and the desire to create a connection to the world around us by giving images of that world back to our fellow human beings-- and making sure that they become a part of
history, as well.
And we're back to a painting we've seen already once before. Jacques-Louis David's 'Intervention of the
Sabine Women', from 1799. We've talked about its complexity. We talked about the weight of
human figures. Now I want to talk a little bit about the circumstances of the making of the painting, and about the story that it tells. The painting picks up from an earlier painting by Poussin called, 'The Rape of the Sabine Women', and it tells the story of the founding of Rome, but it tells it as a story of reconciliation between two warring groups-- the Romans and the Sabines-- who just so happen to be husbands and
fathers of the same women.
And we see them just as they are about to go to war. And we see a woman, one of the daughters and wives, intervening between the men, asking them to stop and make peace instead.
This is basically a great painting about reconciliation.
It's a great story of the founding of a nation.
But it's a story that's told through a
family perspective,
a perspective of various sides of
a family coming together despite their differences.
David conceives of this painting while he's actually in
prison for his involvement in the Reign of
Terror--
that's the most radical and bloody period
of the French Revolution.
There, he's visited
by his estranged wife, who happens to
support the monarchy
and is pretty upset about David's
revolutionary tendencies.
And likewise, so is David, because
the reprisals for
those involved in the Reign of Terror were the most severe.
Robespierre, the leader of that
period had already been put to death.
And David was really afraid that he was going to be
put to death, as well.
So he embarks on this painting that will take him four years to make.
And it's a four-year-long apology to his country
for his involvement in that revolutionary moment,
and to his wife for his
involvement in that moment, as well.
And it's kind of amazing to think of your husband making a four year apology to you.
So I think those of us who are married might stop
and pause and think about the enormity of that for just a moment.
It's a very public painting, again, on a monumental scale,
that manages to make a sort of bridge between
the ancient past, the past of Roman
history, and
the present moment-- the moment of the French Revolution.
And makes it in a grand and public way,
using the language of neoclassicism-- with
the kind of heroic,
robust figures-- nudity used as the language of classicism,
as well. But also as a private story, as well.
A story of a family reconciliation, and also a
story, most notably, in which women take a
primary role.
Well, David's painting works for him.
It makes a splash, as a painting, and it convinces the new government that he's no
longer a threat.
It's avidly viewed by paying customers at the
Louvre until 1805, and David himself goes
from being a painter of the revolution to
a painter of empire. And he does some really amazing
paintings of Emperor Napoleon in the early part of the 19th century.
So, we're looking at a moment where artists of
ambition had the job of giving public images back to that public, that
created a connection between the historical past and the contemporary moment.
And we're looking at David as a
really amazing practitioner of what gets called, in
the lexicon of the Academy of Fine Arts--
the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris-- history
painting.
That is to say, paintings done on a monumental scale
that have complex compositions
with multiple figures, often nude, and they
take a great deal
of time and materials to make, it's worth saying-- that four-
year-long apology-- and also a great deal of
fluency in drawing.
One apprentices and learns to draw the male nude
over a period of years in order to get to
this level of expertise.
So, these paintings were largely supported
by the state, and the
ability to to make such a painting
depended partly on all
the things that we think about artists having. You know, a
certain kind of gift for art, a certain
dedication to their craft,
but also an access to a certain form of education.
So, one of the questions
that will preoccupy us for the rest of today's lecture is, who has access to the
stories and the skills, the time and
materials
it takes to make a history painting? And I
found myself thinking about this again when I
first came to CalArts because at my previous
school, San Francisco Art Institute, which has quite
a good painting department, anatomy and figure drawing
was taught in the painting school.
And at Cal Arts, anatomy and figure drawing
is taught in the animation program,
and the School of Visual Arts is-- there are many painters there-- but is largely
invested in developing conceptual skills, and it's the
animation program that is really invested in developing
anything approaching the kind of fluency of treatment of the figure that you see
in David's work.
So, we're going to make another big historical
leap-- so stay with me-- from David's
<i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>, to
Picasso's
major monumental mural painting, <i>Guernica</i>, from 1937.
This work is 25 and a half feet long and more than 11 and a half feet high. It
was shown to the public for the first time in July, 1937 in a Spanish Republic's
pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, and it is also a story
that uses Picasso's very individualized
and stylized language
of motifs and form to tell a very
contemporary story.
Earlier that year, in 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War,
the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by air raid-- saturation
bombed by German military planes, helped
out by a few Italian
military planes.
And it was really the first saturation
bombing in history, and one of the
first
moments when an act of war was carried out against a wholly civilian
population in modern history. And it opened up an era
of people being afraid for their lives
in times
of war, irrespective of whether they're soldiers and
in the military, or civilians and
supposedly safe
at home, that in many ways lasts until this day.
So, Picasso painted this particular
painting
out of a great feeling of urgency.
He manages to complete the whole work in about
five weeks, to be in the Spanish Republic's
pavilion. And
it is often regarded as one of the most
quintessential statements of an artist being able to mobilize their
own personal pictorial language in the service of public storytelling,
public memory-making, public expression, in 20th century art.
Picasso's <i>Guernica</i> demonstrates its profound affinity with
the tradition of history painting, even in its
modern iconography and its modern pictorial structure.
But it's worth saying that Picasso
actually had access to that
tradition, in part, because he had classical training as a young artist.
His father worked at the art school in Barcelona,
and Picasso was introduced to
classical drawing, and demonstrated
incredible fluency in it from a very early age.
At the same time, it's worth thinking about
who did not have access to this kind of
training, and what that meant in terms
of the kinds of stories that could be
told.
So, I show you this photograph by Thomas Eakins.
It's a photograph of the women's modelling class
at the Pennsylvania Academy Studio, in
about 1882.
And what you see is the women's drawing class, obviously,
and they're not drawing
from the heroic male nude.
They're not drawing from a living nude model, they are
drawing from a cow. And that was
because, at the time, it was thought to be
really inappropriate and lacking
propriety for women to be
exposed to the male nude in public, and
to be drawing from the nude in general.
That seems really antiquated now,
but it had real consequences for women artists in the 19th century.
So when we look at a work like Rosa Bonheur's <i>The Horse Fair</i>, from 1853 to
1855, we should be understanding it as more than just a painting of animals.
Rosa Bonheur was a major figure in 19th-century French art.
She was active throughout the
mid-to-late 19th century,
and she had all the ambitions of a history
painter. And we can see that in, actually, the
compositional organization of this
painting, the complex intertwining of
figures, the heightened sense of emotional drama and urgency.
But we're in everyday life in Paris. We're
not in ancient Rome or ancient Greece.
And we are seeing an artist who did not
have access to classical training, because it simply
wasn't possible or appropriate for women to do so,
and yet had looked very, very carefully at the history of
heroic painting, and tried to take it on in her own terms.
It took a great deal of doing on her part, we should say.
She learned figure drawing on the hoof.
She went to the slaughter houses and to
the horse training yards in order to study the
animals from life.
She spent a great deal of time trying to develop a fluency in organizing complex
forms through animal models. She had to actually petition the Parisian police
to be able to wear pants to go to work in such places as
slaughterhouses and horse yards, where women weren't
supposed to be, in the first place,
but women in large and cumbersome crinoline
dresses, as it was fashionable to wear in the mid-19th century,
would have really had a hard time doing any kind of artistic work.
In all sorts of ways, the history of art in the 20th century--
and the 21st century, for that matter-- is a history of greater and
greater questioning of access to
vocabulary and tools and times and
materials, of what kinds of stories can be
told and who will tell them, of how we
relate to our past and how we relate to our present.
Judy Chicago's <i>The Dinner Party</i> is one example of a
pointed questioning of the
conventions of history painting.
When we turn to something like the work we're going to end with today--
Maya Lin's <i>Vietnam Veterans Memorial,</i> from
1982--
we see an incredibly powerful solution to the
challenge to create a work that functions effectively as a site of collective memory
in the absence of collective consensus on
what one's feelings about that memory should be.
It's worth stating, for all of us, and
especially those
of us who might have not have been born then,
that the 1960s and '70s and '80s, in the United States and elsewhere, were a time
of great conflict and cultural
upheaval.
Linn's decision to create a monument
through rigorously abstract forms that
substitute, for a narrative story, the
simple recitation of the names of
those who died in the Vietnam war, created incredible controversy, at the
time, because it rejected the language of a sort of classical
heroicism. And at the same time, it has proven to be
one of the most effective sites for
collective memory in American history.
People go everyday to the wall to find
the names of family and friends, and to remember,
just for a moment, that past and what they lost as a result of that past.
But it stands not only as a place of
reconciliation-- and we started off talking
about conflict and reconciliation--
but as a sight of permanent contestation over the language of expression.
Because when we look at the monument that's
sited right next to it,
Fredrick Hart's <i>The Three Soldiers,</i> from
1984, we see a question posed, permanently,
about the appropriate language for
remembering
and representation of important moments of history,
important moments of collective memory,
and important moments in national
identity.
Should the language be abstract?
Should it be representational?
Should it gesture towards the language of
the heroic body and the classical past?
Or should it find new forms to
address the contemporary circumstances of
history and memory?
These questions are irresolvable.
But they're questions that we'll continue
to think
about in the rest of this week's lectures.
[MUSIC]
Imagine we're standing in one of the caves in Lascaux in France. We're surrounded by amazing drawings of
human figures, and animals, and abstract signs. Many of them in mineral pigments, and some of them even etched into the stone. There's a figure of a bull that's almost 17 feet in length.
There are animals standing with crossed legs, which give us just a little bit of a hint of a deeper space, or something like perspective. These paintings were done nearly 20,000 years ago. And we can't really know why, or who did them. But when we look at them, we feel a sense of connection to our deep human past.
And that connection is around the desire to make stories visible; the desire to make sense of life through
drawing and other forms of representation; and the desire to create a connection to the world around us by giving images of that world back to our fellow human beings-- and making sure that they become a part of
history, as well.
And we're back to a painting we've seen already once before. Jacques-Louis David's 'Intervention of the
Sabine Women', from 1799. We've talked about its complexity. We talked about the weight of
human figures. Now I want to talk a little bit about the circumstances of the making of the painting, and about the story that it tells. The painting picks up from an earlier painting by Poussin called, 'The Rape of the Sabine Women', and it tells the story of the founding of Rome, but it tells it as a story of reconciliation between two warring groups-- the Romans and the Sabines-- who just so happen to be husbands and
fathers of the same women.
And we see them just as they are about to go to war. And we see a woman, one of the daughters and wives, intervening between the men, asking them to stop and make peace instead.
This is basically a great painting about reconciliation.
It's a great story of the founding of a nation.
But it's a story that's told through a
family perspective,
a perspective of various sides of
a family coming together despite their differences.
David conceives of this painting while he's actually in
prison for his involvement in the Reign of
Terror--
that's the most radical and bloody period
of the French Revolution.
There, he's visited
by his estranged wife, who happens to
support the monarchy
and is pretty upset about David's
revolutionary tendencies.
And likewise, so is David, because
the reprisals for
those involved in the Reign of Terror were the most severe.
Robespierre, the leader of that
period had already been put to death.
And David was really afraid that he was going to be
put to death, as well.
So he embarks on this painting that will take him four years to make.
And it's a four-year-long apology to his country
for his involvement in that revolutionary moment,
and to his wife for his
involvement in that moment, as well.
And it's kind of amazing to think of your husband making a four year apology to you.
So I think those of us who are married might stop
and pause and think about the enormity of that for just a moment.
It's a very public painting, again, on a monumental scale,
that manages to make a sort of bridge between
the ancient past, the past of Roman
history, and
the present moment-- the moment of the French Revolution.
And makes it in a grand and public way,
using the language of neoclassicism-- with
the kind of heroic,
robust figures-- nudity used as the language of classicism,
as well. But also as a private story, as well.
A story of a family reconciliation, and also a
story, most notably, in which women take a
primary role.
Well, David's painting works for him.
It makes a splash, as a painting, and it convinces the new government that he's no
longer a threat.
It's avidly viewed by paying customers at the
Louvre until 1805, and David himself goes
from being a painter of the revolution to
a painter of empire. And he does some really amazing
paintings of Emperor Napoleon in the early part of the 19th century.
So, we're looking at a moment where artists of
ambition had the job of giving public images back to that public, that
created a connection between the historical past and the contemporary moment.
And we're looking at David as a
really amazing practitioner of what gets called, in
the lexicon of the Academy of Fine Arts--
the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris-- history
painting.
That is to say, paintings done on a monumental scale
that have complex compositions
with multiple figures, often nude, and they
take a great deal
of time and materials to make, it's worth saying-- that four-
year-long apology-- and also a great deal of
fluency in drawing.
One apprentices and learns to draw the male nude
over a period of years in order to get to
this level of expertise.
So, these paintings were largely supported
by the state, and the
ability to to make such a painting
depended partly on all
the things that we think about artists having. You know, a
certain kind of gift for art, a certain
dedication to their craft,
but also an access to a certain form of education.
So, one of the questions
that will preoccupy us for the rest of today's lecture is, who has access to the
stories and the skills, the time and
materials
it takes to make a history painting? And I
found myself thinking about this again when I
first came to CalArts because at my previous
school, San Francisco Art Institute, which has quite
a good painting department, anatomy and figure drawing
was taught in the painting school.
And at Cal Arts, anatomy and figure drawing
is taught in the animation program,
and the School of Visual Arts is-- there are many painters there-- but is largely
invested in developing conceptual skills, and it's the
animation program that is really invested in developing
anything approaching the kind of fluency of treatment of the figure that you see
in David's work.
So, we're going to make another big historical
leap-- so stay with me-- from David's
<i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>, to
Picasso's
major monumental mural painting, <i>Guernica</i>, from 1937.
This work is 25 and a half feet long and more than 11 and a half feet high. It
was shown to the public for the first time in July, 1937 in a Spanish Republic's
pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, and it is also a story
that uses Picasso's very individualized
and stylized language
of motifs and form to tell a very
contemporary story.
Earlier that year, in 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War,
the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by air raid-- saturation
bombed by German military planes, helped
out by a few Italian
military planes.
And it was really the first saturation
bombing in history, and one of the
first
moments when an act of war was carried out against a wholly civilian
population in modern history. And it opened up an era
of people being afraid for their lives
in times
of war, irrespective of whether they're soldiers and
in the military, or civilians and
supposedly safe
at home, that in many ways lasts until this day.
So, Picasso painted this particular
painting
out of a great feeling of urgency.
He manages to complete the whole work in about
five weeks, to be in the Spanish Republic's
pavilion. And
it is often regarded as one of the most
quintessential statements of an artist being able to mobilize their
own personal pictorial language in the service of public storytelling,
public memory-making, public expression, in 20th century art.
Picasso's <i>Guernica</i> demonstrates its profound affinity with
the tradition of history painting, even in its
modern iconography and its modern pictorial structure.
But it's worth saying that Picasso
actually had access to that
tradition, in part, because he had classical training as a young artist.
His father worked at the art school in Barcelona,
and Picasso was introduced to
classical drawing, and demonstrated
incredible fluency in it from a very early age.
At the same time, it's worth thinking about
who did not have access to this kind of
training, and what that meant in terms
of the kinds of stories that could be
told.
So, I show you this photograph by Thomas Eakins.
It's a photograph of the women's modelling class
at the Pennsylvania Academy Studio, in
about 1882.
And what you see is the women's drawing class, obviously,
and they're not drawing
from the heroic male nude.
They're not drawing from a living nude model, they are
drawing from a cow. And that was
because, at the time, it was thought to be
really inappropriate and lacking
propriety for women to be
exposed to the male nude in public, and
to be drawing from the nude in general.
That seems really antiquated now,
but it had real consequences for women artists in the 19th century.
So when we look at a work like Rosa Bonheur's <i>The Horse Fair</i>, from 1853 to
1855, we should be understanding it as more than just a painting of animals.
Rosa Bonheur was a major figure in 19th-century French art.
She was active throughout the
mid-to-late 19th century,
and she had all the ambitions of a history
painter. And we can see that in, actually, the
compositional organization of this
painting, the complex intertwining of
figures, the heightened sense of emotional drama and urgency.
But we're in everyday life in Paris. We're
not in ancient Rome or ancient Greece.
And we are seeing an artist who did not
have access to classical training, because it simply
wasn't possible or appropriate for women to do so,
and yet had looked very, very carefully at the history of
heroic painting, and tried to take it on in her own terms.
It took a great deal of doing on her part, we should say.
She learned figure drawing on the hoof.
She went to the slaughter houses and to
the horse training yards in order to study the
animals from life.
She spent a great deal of time trying to develop a fluency in organizing complex
forms through animal models. She had to actually petition the Parisian police
to be able to wear pants to go to work in such places as
slaughterhouses and horse yards, where women weren't
supposed to be, in the first place,
but women in large and cumbersome crinoline
dresses, as it was fashionable to wear in the mid-19th century,
would have really had a hard time doing any kind of artistic work.
In all sorts of ways, the history of art in the 20th century--
and the 21st century, for that matter-- is a history of greater and
greater questioning of access to
vocabulary and tools and times and
materials, of what kinds of stories can be
told and who will tell them, of how we
relate to our past and how we relate to our present.
Judy Chicago's <i>The Dinner Party</i> is one example of a
pointed questioning of the
conventions of history painting.
When we turn to something like the work we're going to end with today--
Maya Lin's <i>Vietnam Veterans Memorial,</i> from
1982--
we see an incredibly powerful solution to the
challenge to create a work that functions effectively as a site of collective memory
in the absence of collective consensus on
what one's feelings about that memory should be.
It's worth stating, for all of us, and
especially those
of us who might have not have been born then,
that the 1960s and '70s and '80s, in the United States and elsewhere, were a time
of great conflict and cultural
upheaval.
Linn's decision to create a monument
through rigorously abstract forms that
substitute, for a narrative story, the
simple recitation of the names of
those who died in the Vietnam war, created incredible controversy, at the
time, because it rejected the language of a sort of classical
heroicism. And at the same time, it has proven to be
one of the most effective sites for
collective memory in American history.
People go everyday to the wall to find
the names of family and friends, and to remember,
just for a moment, that past and what they lost as a result of that past.
But it stands not only as a place of
reconciliation-- and we started off talking
about conflict and reconciliation--
but as a sight of permanent contestation over the language of expression.
Because when we look at the monument that's
sited right next to it,
Fredrick Hart's <i>The Three Soldiers,</i> from
1984, we see a question posed, permanently,
about the appropriate language for
remembering
and representation of important moments of history,
important moments of collective memory,
and important moments in national
identity.
Should the language be abstract?
Should it be representational?
Should it gesture towards the language of
the heroic body and the classical past?
Or should it find new forms to
address the contemporary circumstances of
history and memory?
These questions are irresolvable.
But they're questions that we'll continue
to think
about in the rest of this week's lectures.
[MUSIC]