hi everyone this is Peter Beal and I
just want to put together the first of
what will be a number of short videos on
the topic of modern art and by modern
art I'm really referring to probably
most specifically are the dates from
about 1860 onwards definitely a good
there are a few good markers one is the
invention of photography 1839 I think
that's a good real basic inaugural date
um some others might include the
post-revolutionary period Europe 1848
post-civil war in America 1865
franco-prussian war late 1870s I'd say
you can definitely mark modern art as
being well underway probably I don't
know pick a date 1863 and Monet's Asian
air and so forth anyway so basically
late 19th century and so that's what
we're gonna be focusing on the you know
on the class focusing on the class until
probably moving forward until about I
would say 1990 or so I haven't decided
exactly when to to cut things off but
definitely well into the 20th century so
this this short video is basically on
the topic of art history and modern art
um I spend a lot of my time introducing
students to the study of the visual arts
and one of the most important things to
sort of get underway is what art history
is kind of what it isn't and in this
particular video we're gonna need to
think about that a little bit more depth
because of the specific and unique
aspects of modern art as opposed to say
prehistoric art or classic era art
greco-roman art
or medieval and all of these are big
generalizations but but I think that
there they serve to designate a type
part that's very different from the
kinds of art we begin to see in the
visual arts especially of Europe in the
later 19th century so just to begin when
we think about art history and here's an
example of a of a piece that's almost
universally studied for any course it's
going to deal with the Italian
Renaissance so this is a very famous
fresco part of a cycle of fresco
decorations in a church in Florence and
Santa Maria del Carmen II and the name
of the of this particular portion of the
fresco cycle is the called the tribute
money and it is part of a series of
scenes dedicated to the basically the
life of st. Peter if you're studying
Renaissance art it's a very important
kind of landmark in terms of an approach
to art that focuses on art being a kind
of window into the visual the visual
world visual phenomena that you know in
the mo that we perceive the way that we
see the world the idea in the 15th
century that a piece of art was
successful to the degree that it did
mirror observable visual experience this
is it this is a new thing and it's one
that's going to be developed with a
considerable enthusiasm through the 15th
16th 17th and through the 18th centuries
in other words it's a kind of paradigm
or approach that's seen as particularly
and valuable scholars that look at this
kind of art say again that I don't know
the early middle 15th century
pretty consistently note a number of
phenomena that you know help explain why
this priority existed
um there's a little doubt when you look
at the piece that the emphasis is on a
believable pictorial
space a focus on plausible human actors
within that pictorial space doing
important things the sort of
contemporary to this our writer Lam
Battista Alberti writes in his work on
painting about the so called astoria IST
ori a is a painting that and he's
focusing primarily on painting it could
apply to sculpture for instance as well
but this is a painting that conveys a
serious moral message and it does it in
a kind of wants a pre-programmed but
certainly adhering to certain
well-defined characteristics and
especially important is going to be the
ability to convey important moral
decisions through narrative so if you
think about painting or large part
Italian art a Florentine art in the
middle say the 15th century Leonardo da
Vinci for instance born 1450 - if you
look at art from this period those are
big priorities the behavior of light the
depiction of nature the believable
representation of space the plausible
depiction of the human form and
especially with a focus on gesture
expression the sort of clarity of
purpose and function is really quite
important and as I said this is a
priority of many many artists and art
movements in Europe really right up
until well into the 19th century and
even you could argue about our
historians are interested in how things
change and why they change and so for
instance someone's studying the work of
massage you might start asking some
questions as to why suddenly patrons
people who pay for art found this type
of art interesting or valuable or you
know important and especially in a
public context although this painting
isn't particularly public in terms of
its setting there are many many other
temporary works of art that distributes
sim or display I should say similar
attitudes and tactics and use similar
strategy so it's clear that this was a
public this is a strategy favored by the
public and favored by patrons so if we
go from this is kind of an abrupt
speeding up of the process here but if
we go from 1425 27 thereabouts to 1872
and Claude Monet's famous impression
sunrise we can see that a number of
important things have changed we could
superficially know that this is an easel
painting on canvas painted in what's
called plenary which means in the
outdoors it's a painting that has no
discernible narrative that you know a
casual observer could could locate it is
indeed a landscape or to be more precise
and marine painting a type of category
of art that was particularly popular
with the Dutch it's probably some degree
to which Dutch marine art and really
lots of other examples genre still life
landscape influenced French artist
Claude Monet may well have been
influenced by earlier Dutch artist but
he's disregarded a kind of traditional
mode of representing nature and with
extremely obvious brushstrokes sort of
scraping into the paint distributing
with a palette knife or the handle of a
brush smearing it with a towel or
fingers as you can see in the upper left
the overall effect is not one of
specificity in detail and precision in
the sense that masaccio creates his art
but instead is intended to evoke a very
evanescent or ephemeral impression of a
scene in front of in front of a viewer
and the important thing here is to
understand and this is I think
particularly important thinking about
the relationship
this type of painting to photography the
idea is not to get of a super precise
photographic rendering of it but instead
a more psychological impression that is
to say it leaves the viewer with an
evocation of a moment
that is one of you could even argue a
conglomeration of moments that it's not
a single fixed crystallized
mathematically calculable moment in the
sense that the Masaccio is so how do we
get here and that's it I think an
important sort of springboard for
thinking about Modern Art as opposed to
early modern art or or earlier one of
the most important aspects of modern art
to keep in mind as we go forward and one
of the reasons for this change is the
sense of self reflectivity the idea that
the artist isn't merely depicting
subjects or trying to persuade viewers
as to the rightness of a moral action or
situation but that the artist reflects
constantly on art that's going to be an
important thing so Monet is basically
taking apart the means by which one
makes it painting stripping it down to a
bare minimum of time bare minimum
technology dispensing with the
traditional precise delineations and
modeling that is associated with more
academic renderings of the subject now
if we look at Edouard Manet's Bartha
fully bearshare
which is getting on I think toward the
end of the impressionist movement
MANET is a fascinating artist in lots of
ways and one of them is in the way in
which is self reflectivity seems to move
in all directions at once and all
directions at once is a kind of good way
beginning to think about this particular
piece right here it utilizes some of the
techniques that we're familiar with from
the Impressionists and in particular it
uses patchy pure color the sense of he's
basically evoking rather than
delineating precisely
all kinds of forms particularly in the
background it depicts everyday
occurrences in contemporary life that
one might if you were an inhabitant of
Paris in 1880 to be able to see simply
by walking down the street and into a
nightclub or theater
Manny's genius is not though just in
deconstructing pictorial precision in a
kind of academic mode but also in
commenting on the ways in which art and
everyday life intersect and indeed in
the ways that visuality in everyday life
are being to change in its own time so a
good example of how this is working is
the fact that the background of this
particular piece remember we talked
about artists window has been
transformed into a mirror okay so it's
not a Vista into an infinitely distant
perspective in the sense that Masaccio
has it instead the perspective is of a
scene behind us and this is kind of
interesting i if we put it in relation
to the primary a figure in the painting
who's staring at us and of course this
is a barmaid this is somebody who's
ready to serve whoever asks her for
these you know beverages and fruit and
things like that and that raises another
interesting question about what is it
that we buy in a sense and and we can do
it in the material commercial sense we
can do it in the accepting and learning
the you know the premises the idea of
the painter and the painting there are
lots of ways in which we can talk about
buying MANET presents us with a painting
of surfaces and reflections and at the
same time presents us I think
particularly in the way that he evokes
the expression of the young woman behind
the bar a kind of profound emptiness and
absence in all of these of the sort of
brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections
and colors and forms so this is another
form of reflectivity a reflection that
is to say and literally in this case
that is to say when we look at our we
don't necessarily get what it is we're
seeing that maybe the solidity and the
kind of almost philosophical integrity
that somebody like al Verity would have
been have been interested in his
painting is seen by MANET is an
impossibility that we're never going to
get the thing that we think we're going
to get and so we're forever having to
keep this a little bit maybe a lot bit
at a distance and we're a lot like the
top had a gentleman in the upper right
asking for something and some people
have speculated that he might even be
asking for the attention of the young
woman herself
perhaps in a sexual sense we're asking
for these things these consumer goods
and all their dizzying variety and the
distractions of a Parisian nightclub you
can see for instance the the feet of a
trapeze artist in the upper laughter
this kind of thing but that it's always
at a distance it's never going to be in
depth is you know we're simply seeing
reflection and a contemporary artist I
think today would simply go to Las Vegas
or any metropolitan entertainment area
and discover precisely the same thing
and point those those phenomena out to
us in the next talk I'll look a little
bit more in depth at some directions in
modern art and how that how that idea of
reflection and commentary and art
continues
