Renaissance through Modern Art History Lecture, 2021 Spring Arts Festival

Part three of the High Renaissance in Northern Europe, or as the lectures are titled, Northern Renaissance Art and Architecture, the Netherlands, part three, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. And this is the first of the paintings by Pieter Bruegel. One of the characteristics that we're seeing develop increasingly in Netherlandish as well as Northern European painting, particularly in Netherlandish painting, is the storytelling and sometimes humorous storytelling, foibles of everyday life, genre painting, a humanistic interest in the activities of everybody's lives. This is a wonderful painting full of over a hundred proverbs, proverbial expressions illustrated that would have all been instantly recognizable to his contemporary audience. Now, we don't recognize them all today, so I have included on the next page an explanation of just a few of the many, many parables that are whimsically and humorously illustrated by Pieter Bruegel. Unfortunately, the image that I used before I marked it up like this, I used this image and didn't realize that until after I had done all the marking that the image here is cropped a little bit from the larger image that I have, which shows a little bit more over on this side. But you can see how very humorously Bruegel has depicted all kinds of sayings that are moral parables, reminders to people, you know, remember, live this way. One up in the corner that I didn't mention, for example, these tiny figures up in the corner, three blind men leading each other into a ditch, the blind leading the blind will fall into the ditch, and there are others. So you can read about Bruegel's work, his genre painting work, and read about this particular painting in your textbook and on this slide where I've included, as I said, a number of explanations that are not in your textbook, and there are plenty more. And I just wanted to touch briefly on this painting by Bruegel as well. This might be the first landscape painting that we have, or the first winter landscape painting that we have in Western Europe, completely winter landscape painting. Note some of the characteristics that are similar to what was developing in Italy in Southern Europe. There is atmospheric perspective, this is a vast landscape vista, and you can see how there is also linear perspective to the extent that forms get progressively smaller and smaller and smaller. And now, as opposed to the early Northern painting that we looked at at the very beginning of the semester, it is a regular progression. It's very close to the way we actually observe nature. So the effect of the development of linear perspective in Italy in the early 15th century, in 1402, are fully realized and understood now by Northern painters. Wow, there's a lot for us to cover, and it doesn't seem to be enough time to tell you all that I want to share with you about this art. So what I'm going to do is let you... I'm not going to duplicate what you can read in your textbook for the most part. I'm simply going to direct you to the important ways to tie everything together with the larger context of American, European, and global culture in the post-World War II period. Beginning with Alberto Giacometti's Pointing Man. Now, I have reversed the image that's in your textbook. As far as I know, somehow the image, the way they printed it in your textbook, is actually reversed. It's not just seen from the other side, but it's printed backward, as far as I know. Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor. You can read about the story of his career and his work in your textbook. Basically, after his brief experience with the Surrealists in the 1930s in Paris, he left and went back to Switzerland because he endeavored... He wanted very much to create sculptures that would be pared down to the basic essential expression of the human condition. And he very literally did this by working away and working away until the sculptures that he cast in bronze are these emaciated looking cyphers, remnants of human figures. Now, Giacometti was good friends with the existentialist French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Giacometti claimed adamantly that his art was not existentialist. However, even his good friend Sartre could not help but read what he was expressing in those terms. To introduce you to the ideas of existentialism, if you're not familiar with them, and your textbook discusses them. But I've included a quote, one quote that I actually memorized when I was a teenager studying existentialism in my French class. But it has stuck with me, and it really seems to sum up the basic philosophy of existentialism. Man is nothing but what he makes of himself. Existentialism gained popularity in the aftermath of World War II, because once again, just like the Dada that erupted simultaneously in various places throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War I as a result of widespread disillusionment among artists and intellectuals, existentialism emerged as people were seriously questioning their traditional systems of faith and belief. Jean-Paul Sartre's theories of existentialism essentially can be summed up. Before you're born, you don't exist. And then you are thrown into the world as a new thing. You live your life, and as this quote says, through what you do while you live your life, you create your essence, your soul, if you want to speak in religious terms. You create yourself and who and what you are. And then when you die, that's the end. You're done. Seems like a very, very barren, very stark way of looking at reality. But this appealed to numerous intellectuals who were suffering disillusionment and renewed their questioning of existence after the experience of World War II. Now, I have way oversimplified the writings and the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre. Giacometti's art, his tall sculptures seem to express that human condition being pared down to the basic essence, hoping to discover that something is there. Now, that's my expressive, evocative reading of what these sculptures express. You need to add the information from your textbook to what I've told you to fully understand the impact of Giacometti's art. In a similar way, Francis Bacon, a British artist who had spent some time growing up in Catholic Ireland, but his father was a government official. He was a Protestant. He was raised as a Protestant. Bacon was also homosexual. He was a member of a prestigious aristocratic high society family with a family heritage and lineage. And being gay at that time in Europe, in the early part of the 20th century, posed certain difficult problems. I won't go extensively into Francis Bacon's whole life history. It's very interesting if you want to read it. But let's talk about this particular painting. The sources for this very gripping and very difficult expressive painting are numerous. Bacon was fascinated with butcher shops. He used to frequent butcher shops and look at the carcasses hanging there. So the flayed carcasses we see behind this umbrella covered grimacing figure are derived from his fascination with slaughterhouses. This strange contraption that this figure seems to be seated within somehow actually reflects some early designs that Bacon himself had come up with when he was studying to be an interior designer, a designer of modernistic furniture. There are many other references here. As your textbook explains, even references to the then Prime Minister of England, Neville Chamberlain. I'm not going to go into them all. You can read your textbook. But in general terms, this is an anguished expression of an individual who was experiencing, had experienced the brutality and the chaos in society. Modernism in the Aftermath of World War II, Part 2. Arshile Gorky was born in Turkish, Armenia, a Christian in Islamic Turkey. In the early years of the 20th century, when the Armenian Christians in Turkey were suffering persecution that ultimately led to genocide and the tragic death march, his father had left to go to the United States when he was about four years old. And at the age of 15, his mother died in his arms in a very tragic life story. And unfortunately, Gorky's entire life continued with some bright spots, but basically on a very tragic trajectory. Nevertheless, he ultimately made his way to the United States. And he never gave up his desire to be a professional artist, a painter. When he got to New York, he became friends with a number of younger Americans who would become the abstract expressionists of the New York school. Now, as your book says, Gorky's form of abstract expressionism, abstract expressive painting, seems to bridge the biomorphic abstraction of Joan Miró. And these young artists in New York in the 1940s were directly influenced by European surrealist émigrés, artists who had left Europe during the 1930s and into the early 40s and relocated across the Atlantic to New York to avoid the disasters of World War II. So the coming together of the European surrealists with the younger American artists was a major influence on this development of a new style known as abstract expressionism. And Gorky was absolutely part of that. His work also shows his debt to the paintings of Vasily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso, to a lesser extent, in some of the forms. He acknowledged an artistic debt to all of these artists. This is the garden in Sochi. We know about Sochi today, a resort town today in Russia, located in Russia, because of the recent Olympic Games. Gorky picked that, in his title, he picked that resort town. But the garden to which he actually refers in this painting is the Garden of Wish Fulfillment, back home in his no longer existent native, you know, his birthplace in Turkish Armenia, in a small village known as Khorkum. I'll let you read about that and the meaning of that and the iconography of the Garden of Wish Fulfillment in your textbook. Gorky committed suicide, tragically, after breaking his neck in an accident and suffering a studio fire that destroyed all of his work. But in the short period of time that he worked with the other abstract expressionists, he committed suicide in 1947, I'm sorry, 1948. But in that short period of time, his art and his painting was very influential on this younger generation of artists. Now, I'm going to pause here. I'm going to stop this and start a new video lecture to talk about modernism, formalism, and really sink our teeth into the theories of Clement Greenberg. Modernism after World War II, Part Three. Clement Greenberg and Modernist Formalism. As you can read in this slide, and this is also included, these notes of mine are included on your PDF that corresponds to this lecture. Clement Greenberg, who has already been mentioned several times in your textbook and in this course in my lectures. Clement Greenberg, an American critic who got his start as a Marxist cultural critic writing for The Nation, the left-leaning magazine in the 1930s. Greenberg, who loved abstract painting, formulated a theory of modernism in visual art that culminated in the 1950s and 60s in his promotion and support and championing of the work of the artist that Gorky was associated with, Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, and the artists of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, about whose work we're going to talk in the next couple of lectures. So I want you to read what the textbook says, but also see my explanation, how Greenberg, in his effort to demonstrate that abstract painting was critically important to American and world culture, he tried to formulate a theory, and this was based on Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment defense of the discipline of philosophy, titled A Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant, when challenged by other Enlightenment figures, scientists and mathematicians and other intellectuals who were championing empirical knowledge and positivism as a result of the Enlightenment, they looked at Immanuel Kant and said, so what's the use of philosophy? It doesn't give us observable concrete evidence. And so what Kant did was he took the methodologies of philosophy and used them to interrogate the discipline of philosophy itself. He turned philosophy on itself, to purge philosophy of every kind of thing that could be accomplished by other disciplines of learning and liberal arts. And in the end, Immanuel Kant was left with questions that empirical sciences could not answer. Enlightenment knowledge could not answer. Only philosophy could provide the answer to these questions. Well, following that model, what Greenberg sought to do was take painting, in the case of his famous essay, Modernist Painting, take painting, for example, and purge painting of elements that can be provided from other media and other types of artistic expression. So all that's left are aesthetic experiences and values that can only be provided by painting. And in this way, painting will justify its own existence, if that makes any sense. Okay, there's a lot more that I could tell you about Clement Greenberg, but this is very important to understand. So focusing only on things that pertain to painting limits you to a discussion of the form of the painting itself. And that's why we call this formalism or modernist formalism. Sometimes the term formalist abstraction is used. That's how these words are used to define this last gasp of modernism, at least in the context of our brief survey of the history of Western art in the Renaissance.