Well good afternoon everyone, I'm Jock Reynolds the
Henry J Heins
second director of the Yale Art
Gallery and delighted to have so many of you back here today for what's going to be a wonderful lecture the fourth and the
Beginning series of our John Walsh lectures, and I'm the wonderful fund that many of you helped endow honoring John and the great lectures
He's given here over many years to have had that started this year with the director of the Rijksmuseum kicking it off with
Larry Kanter, then talking about a
Wonderful Frangelico to then have Paul old won't you come and speak about Vince?
Scully as he did and now we have a returning alumna and our wonderful
friend Ann Temkin
And I want you to know that Ann started her career in the arts as an undergraduate at Harvard
University where she studied art history
But she had a keen interest in modern art and knew that if she was going to further that the next university
She really shouldn't need attend as Yale, and so she came here to do her
graduate work
And we were just talking about how fortunate was for her that she came at a time when she could study with two fantastic
professors
Robert Herbert Bob Herbert we used to call Bob at Robert Herbert who was the professor of art here and also Anne Hanson both great
Art historians and being the first woman professor to be tenured at Yale Bob by the way he had just finished
We were just saying the great
catalog of a resume of the Society and a name collection of Modern Art
Which was given to Yale during World War one and that founding collection of American and European artists?
Along with MoMA's founding collections were really the two great modern collections brought into
America and shown by artists or by young curators at MoMA from the night from
1922 MoMA's founding 29 onward so to this very day
This is a place and also in New York where you want to come and see early major masterpieces of European and American art
Now and then after leaving the L went to work his mama at MoMA for a while was an acting curator
And then later she went down to the Philadelphia Museum of Art
And I'm trying to remember now you had a curator ship down there
I think you were the Muriel and Phillip Behrman curator of modern contemporary art and during that time. I saw some most fantastic Barnett Newman
Retrospective great shows by Alice Neel and artist Lee we all venerate and then Anne came back to MoMA
I believe was it 2004 and she is now the
Marie-josée and Henry Kravitz chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art
The first woman to ever hold that position and she's done some fantastic shows
I hope many of you saw her show she just did Picasso sculpture
2015 the first retrospective of Robert Gilbert the heart is not a metaphor
2014 and
Jasper Johns wonderful show regrets that was also in 2014
I don't know how you're doing all these many shows while you're also building the collection, but Ann's also a devoted teacher lecture
She's done a lot to bring on many of the younger curators
and interns some of whom come from Yale to work and at moments that were delighted when our
Students who work with us and exhibitions and internships have the kind of experience
You've had an of coming from a great teaching Museum to learn from the best in the business so here
She is she's gonna talk today about
Yale's modern
Masterpieces and some of the works that inspired her as a student so welcome and Timken pleased with our. Thanks to have you back
Good afternoon everybody, thank you very much for being here and having me this talk is
Going as I was
Preparing it. I realize going to make me look like
Everything in my life was very tightly organized and fits together so beautifully
And I'm just sort of putting a disclaimer. It's not it's not as neat as it's gonna look
But the way this talk is constructed it all started and was inevitably following from the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street
and
An alternative title for the talk really could have been first steps
because that is what I feel like I had here and
with this painting in particular it was
It brought about for me an aha moment
In terms of what I wanted to do with my life
Because this was a painting that was I don't remember if it was assigned to me or I chose it
For writing an entry in a book that would be called
selections from the Yale art gallery that was edited by Alan szostak who was then the director and
We had to basically write probably you know 700 words on a painting and
So I thought that I was a real big shot because I was going to be
published in this very what turned out to be extremely handsome book and
said about writing about this painting and
talking about
What it looked like basically? That's what these two paragraphs were but the aha moment came when I
Read my two paragraphs out loud because for those of you
Who are writers?
You know that everything you write you have to read out loud because it
Just then you know how to fix it when you hear it as opposed to just see it on the page so I was reading
It to my roommate on Bishop Street. Who was a medical student?
But a very sensitive to art medical student
And she just sort of lit up and said you know oh now
I really love this painting which I thought was sort of you know
incomprehensible before and so the feeling of pleasure I had that Wow
I just in this five minutes made Linda like this painting, and I thought yeah, I could do that for the rest of my life
And I kind of did
So the
Very many things that involved
Picasso through the years
kept this
particular picture in my mind but
Most recently as Jacque said two years ago or two and a half now
We did do this really big Picasso sculpture show at MoMA and that was
one of the great joys of my career
So far in that Picasso sculpture was something that people didn't really know
Nearly as well as his paintings because for the most part. He didn't like to sell those
During his life. He saw them more as
friends for himself and
He kept very crowded homes and whenever he filled up a home
he moved on to a new one and kept the old one she had no storage problems and
He just kept um these things close to him and so really
Even though museums tried to have retrospectives and tried in fact by them. He was always very
Reluctant, so this was just the second big Picasso sculpture show in history after one about fifty years ago also
MoMA and
The pleasure of getting into him closely
In mediums like plaster as you see here, which we're just much more private
was really one of the great experiences of my life and
I think that in this painting
What I learned mostly by having to write that two paragraphs
I took into the sculpture, and I took into everything else that I do which
Maybe sounds like it's a weird thing for an art historian to be saying is
something you need to do, but it was looking at the painting and
I can't tell you how many times people have said to me
You know it's really something you really look at art
Or something like that as if well I guess our historians don't always
look at art, but
So I'm not a rocket scientist
But I do know that if you want to talk about a painting or a sculpture and anything if you look at it
It's going to tell you
What you need to say so we'll just do that for a minute with this one
I think one of the things you notice is Picasso's
economy
That he makes certain things stand in for other things
So in this case it's a son with his mother and the son
belongs to Picasso's made in nez
This is during World War two and if you
Happen to know Picasso stayed in Paris during World War two when the Nazis had overtaken the city
and he was absolutely of the ilk of artists who they would have called degenerate and
Who we can we don't really know the story now, but there has to be some explanation of why he was not
Arrested during that period most every other artist either was an exile who came to the US or South America or somewhere else
or
went down to the South of France like Matisse, but Picasso chose to stay there and when he
Was there was living in his studio? He moved out of his very?
fancy apartment on the right bank
now I could do a 1-hour digression just on this because it's so interesting but the Nazis moved their headquarters for
What was it called the Jewish
Like situation or some weird word like that
Next door to him because they took over
The residents of his dealer Paul Rosenberg, this is on the Rue La Boheme power
They made the dealer who went then to Brazil move out
Confiscated his whole gallery
inventory and moved in and
Picasso being very bright realized that living next door to this Nazi office was probably dumb so he
moved to the left bank and stayed in the studio he had on the Rue de grande Auguste an
Which was big enough to be a studio, but it wasn't big enough really for
Somebody used to a pretty grand style of living at that point to both live and work
But that's what he did for three years, and I think you see that in this painting
You wouldn't know all that just by looking at this painting
But the way in which the mother and son fill the entire canvas with almost no border gives you such a sense
I think of the claustrophobia that he was genuinely
Experiencing and the sense of not only claustrophobia, but maybe almost hard to breathe
Conditions when you see this very bull ish
Face I'm a little boy right with the kind of a snout ish nose, and the eyes that are so askew
It's wonderful for me because on the one hand it's an absolutely realistic picture of a little kid trying to walk
And it's actually sort of hilarious for the viewer, but for the kid
It's dead serious how am I going to do this and you see how his head?
Is the same as it takes the place of the?
breast of his mother so they're still very United his Brett her breast is his head as
You look at that painting, and yet, then if you go down to his waist
you see that the geometry is such that the feet come back and forward and kind of out and
Independent from his mother so in the plane of this one canvas you have the kid who's still
At one with a mom as a three-year-old of two year old would be
But you also have this kind of crazy attempt very
Helter-skelter at walking toward you away from the picture and ultimately away from the mother
Had to start with this
As Jack said when I came here really I was more experienced in 19th century painting
from my work at Harvard where 20th century painting was okay, but not really an emphasis and
okay, and
I
was very very fortunate to have as instructors in Hanson and Bob Herbert and
Yale and an art gallery where
Masterpieces that are
unparalleled were here on the walls and were very much part of the way both Ann and Bob taught and
The thing that I wanted to say about the night cafe is really
Something that I thought so often about over all these years
that oftentimes when there is an artist like van Gogh who is such an
icon and even a cliché of
Commercialised mythologized excess
Nevertheless with Van Gogh
he deserves it and
Every time I see this painting and I think about the way in which those lights become these almost
Animated living things so real art real lights aren't even living right?
They're just lights, but this is like a double extension of life into something
Not only that's inanimate, but that is as a painted work inanimate
But you could swear that that they're somehow as live we're actually more alive than the occupants of that
cafe
To the point of Van Gogh really being worth it
This is an unbelievable slide for MoMA where there aren't like 50 people in front of starry night
And I don't my sent my assistant down
to get it we we had just opened and people hadn't really come in, but I'm curious to know if
at Yale
There is that same situation where this painting just has a magic and it's not for the wrong
Reasons is the point I want to make I mean you can also talk about the incredible
foreshortening in that
Wooden floor you can talk about that mysterious clock at top. There's a
seeming straightforwardness to this portrayal of a very low
Ordinary kind of place in a little town, and yet as you look
At it. You can't help even in a subject. That's less
Cosmic than a starry night to feel that that what van Gogh is portraying here are certain existential questions
That a hundred and whatever years later are still as vital
So then we'll get to the to the socio Tianna neem which is really the heart of the 20th century collection
Here at MoMA and the heart of most of my work during my years here
this painting by Duchamp tomb is only one of
the dozens of work that Katherine Dreyer owned
And the many by Duchamp, but I wanted to show it because this is one she commissioned
From him, and I probably for this audience. I don't have to go into the whole story of how do SH
Not really partnered with this German lady who would have been a very unlikely
Partner for him were you to look at the two of them?
But in doing so with man-ray and other artists did in fact develop this idea of the first
Museum of Modern Art
the soceity anonym which is a French term that's kind of the equivalent to what we would use as ink I NC period
Um was what they called it, but they subtitled it the Museum of Modern Art
So you would know what it was they were about and it was set up in a brownstone that was just a block from
MoMA this my MoMA's current
location and
started in the early 20s
Developing a number of exhibitions and more importantly this unbelievable
collection of treasures that is the heart of the collection here and tomb was actually a work that
Katherine Dreyer had
Duchamp make for her library above her bookcase and that explains, it's weird orientation
And I forgot to bring a slide of it in situ where it was for many years
But what it is is actually a little catalog resume of his work?
until then you know about the famous bicycle wheel
multiple probably that you see the big shadow of the bicycle wheel on the left and the shadow of another
ready-made the hat rack
Just about at the center
And then already made that only appears in this painting literally as already made because do you see the pointing hand?
That was made by a sign painter who do Sean commissioned to add it to
This painting when he was done with his own work
So something that today would seem
Sort of ordinary or acceptable interesting then what are you getting this commercial sign painter to do something in your art work?
Other works all by him
in the picture that has a lot to do with the ideas of measurement and the ideas obviously of perception and
Dimensionality and what you can't tell so well in the slide is that what is there at the center is a bottle brush kind of?
Thing on a wire coming out and protruding from the painting so again looking ahead 50 or more years
To when artists would attach something that would protrude
from what would seem to be a two-dimensional painting and
For dushant who give her this with pretty much no explanation
except for this really kind of nervy title which is
short for the french expression we're
Told to married which is like you bore me
So is it you Katherine Dreyer interested in my art. Is it you my art, which I now don't make anymore
Whole lots of possible answers to that question
but this this is one of the works that continues to generate lots of responses from artists and
I
Just wanted to quickly detour to say that Katherine Dreyer herself was really a good painter
And this is a painting that Abbey Rockefeller
bought for MoMA in nineteen 49 just a few years before Catherine dryer died and
in fact the year the abbey died
Catherine dryer
At that point was not an incredibly supportive of women artists
patron for the reason that I think other women patrons at that time weren't like Peggy Guggenheim
Same story any number of early collectors who you could think of it was just not even
Something
Remotely able to be conceived by them. I think one of the really interesting things a hundred years later is to imagine
If these people had thought oh
I could not only use my power as a smart and rich woman to support male artists
But if I had also been able to imagine doing that for women making art what this collection
Might have looked like but nonetheless she herself
figured that she had the
Ability to make paintings and she made this painting that I love in that we often put in the galleries in MoMA
But I do want to
mention
just because
Jacques mentioned this whole thing about women at Yale coming up next yearís and a half century of women being admitted and so forth
so I
started at MoMA
For the second time in
2004 and we were installing the new Taniguchi building at that time
installing the collection all over from scratch having been closed for three years and
I wanted to put this up and
I wasn't the boss then and I was told no it's not good enough
This was not a good enough painting, and I don't think it was all that it wasn't a good enough painting
It was that Catherine dryer wasn't famous as a painter
And this wasn't an icon that had always been in the moment history books, but I'm happy to say that now it is
It's on view. It'll be in our highlights book. That's coming out next year. Etc. Etc etc
Um
So I basically just followed Catherine dryer around then
I made this stop at MoMA after leaving the art
history program here and
Then went Philadelphia at the end of the 80s where the large class resided because
It had gone to various places including by the way in the mid 40s MoMA
But dushawn MoMA had a little misunderstood. They didn't love each other perfectly at that time, so he didn't want it to stay there and
ultimately after a lot of
consideration of various museums and collections around the country
It was decided that the majority of his work
Which belonged to the Ahrens Berg's in Los Angeles would end up at Philly and so he said I want Catherine
Dreyer's the large glass to also go to Philadelphia, and this is one of the
You know you could count on one hand most influential works in the 20th century having been a painting on glass
That was very much about what you see through a work of art
Or what a work of art leaves room for you to see as
Opposed to what the work itself shows you although that was a lot of important things there as well
But also here. We are in the deshaun gallery at the Museum of Modern Art today and
The small glass as it's known which is called to be looked at
Is from Catherine dryer and then the thing with the window
At the far rear right with the blue would pane and the black covered leather
Squares is also from Catherine dryer
it's called fresh widowed a
pun on the French window, which the work is
a little small miniature model of the French like French doors and
Fresh widowed of course because widows at that time put black
Sheeting on their windows when they were in mourning
so thanks to Catherine dryer a pretty robust gallery at MoMA even though we lost the large glass to Philadelphia and
Tomb stays here in New Haven, but I do want to use this opportunity to thank Jacque Reynolds and the staff here once again
Because I did an exhibition in New York City in 2008 called color chart
reinventing color
1952 today that was an incredibly
indebted to do Shawn show that talked about the idea as
Of color as a ready-made and my theory for the show was that in
the prior centuries to the 20th century
when we thought about color we thought about nature right we thought about pigment and we thought about the blue sky and
we thought about
The paint's that our ground from pigment and that somewhere in the 20th century
That that perception of color shifted to a factory-made color
concept where color charts from Benjamin Moore or whomever became your
barometer
instead of beautiful piles of raw pigments
Or even tubes of paint and that when you think of the history of 20th century art of artists using
color swatches if you know for example Gerhard Richter's color chart paintings
The whole way that an artist's life
changed by having ready-made color
Instead of color that like on a palette you had to mix for every single tone. You wanted to achieve for one of your paintings
Was a really
enormous shift in our practice that I wanted to say also made a difference in then what an artist wanted to paint and
So this painting opened the show oh, there's a richter color chart
This painting opened the show because there of course was Duchamp
oops end of lecture
How do I go back well there was you saw them with all those swatches of color
Right in tomb and certainly the first person to make swatches of color unless one of you lets me know that you found something earlier
in
1918 as part of an actual painting and
Then Brian koozie would be another figure
Here he is at the Yale art gallery bequest of Catherine dryer once again
With a fantastic yellow marble bird and this marble bird
Was a favorite when I was here, and I don't think I really thought about it in those terms yet
But now when I look at this what I realize is that what Brancusi did when he talked as he always did about simplicity?
In his work. He was actually being very
Deceptive and sort of leading you off the trail
Because yes, you could argue that there is simplicity
In the way that the form of a bird and a particular bird you can think of
Is
Captured in this smoothly attenuated piece of marble
The sculpture is not just that piece of yellow marble this sculpture is the limestone
zigzag piece under it
and
the two
cylinders and the oak
pedestal in between and
for me, I think the
Key of Brancusi as a sculptor is that?
interlocking
connection of
opposites or of things that don't go together like rough hewn wood and beautifully polished marble or
Ziggurat forms and
ovals and
Cylinders and the idea of Brancusi as the most complex
sculptor of the 20th century rather than the most simple
started to interest me and then there we are in Philadelphia where
America's greatest collection in fact the world's great collection outside of Bren koozies own
Studio which was left to the Museum of Modern Art the Pompidou Center in Paris?
So here I went to
Philadelphia and found lots of bran koozies in this beautiful Chapel like space. That's part of that museum there and
then in 1995
I really did have the great privilege of working on a retrospective exhibition
Of brain koozie sculpture that brought together things from Paris in Philadelphia
and all the way around the world and another great loan from Yale of that yellow bird and
Sort of was able to put this theory into
Action not just by the way the complexity of an individual sculpture
was made up of parts of different materials and
textures and colors
But the way that Brancusi worked and lived with all of his sculpture in his studio was really
At its most special when you had seven or eight sculptures or 20 or 50
Sculptures living together and having their tops and their bottoms
speaking across
One another to each other making this conversation between shapes and between forms, and I think that
That is as
interesting for sculpture that followed as
What is what you may know as the kind of most famous thing besides Brancusi other than his simplicity?
Is the fact that he did away with the pedestal by making those wood pedestals himself?
until then you thought of a sculpture you it was something you put on a pedestal if it wasn't a full-size thing or if it
Was a full-size thing you still had to make a little
Pedestal for it out of stone or out of marble out of wood even and he said
20th century that's old-fashioned a
Sculpture is a living being it doesn't need to be placed on something part of that sculpture itself
Will be that which it supports it on the floor so that was a big challenge
For this exhibition because you cannot put these things on well now let me go see if you did here at Yale right now
But you shouldn't put them directly on the floor because then somebody could walk into it with their baby stroller or whatever
But we wanted to respect that floor enos or the need of the floor of those pedestals
So what we came up with was instead of one pedestal um
Per object to make these kind of islands that would make these little communities of sculpture
And hopefully make you not think so much
about the fact that we had intervened between the floor and the sculpture and instead have sort of made them a community instead of
Something that was on a plinth
So with Brancusi Mondrian the other exemplar of early 20th century abstraction Baron koozie and sculpture and
Mondrian in painting
And I think I wanted to show you this slide because even for people who love Mondrian. I think the lozenge
that's at the Yale art gallery is a particular challenge for people because usually with Mondrian you have the red yellow and blue and
Here you have one that's black and white but also most radically you have a painting. That's in the form of a lozenge
rather than in the form of a square
And you have a Mondrian made frame to surround it
So just like Brancusi instead of wanting his painting to kind of be put in the world
By the collector or the curator in some other
Frame or base. He took care of that and he made these white frames that
recessed
From behind the painting and sort of pushed the painting into the world and when you think ahead to be painters of shaped
canvases like Bob Mangold or like Ellsworth Kelly or like so many others in fact from Yale the
20th century
Beginning moment of those could be argued on the one hand with the Russian avant-garde, but with the other hand
very much, so these lozenge paintings of
Mondrian who of course you can find one at MoMA and one at the Philadelphia Museum even though
There's just a handful of them in existence
But I think the collectors at those well the one at MoMA came dryer as well
But the Gallatin another collector who gave his works to Philadelphia
There was something about these very avant-garde eyes like catherine dryers for whom that lozenge as the most radical and of what?
Mondrian was doing you seen the one in Philadelphia with just that little triangle of purple or dark blue at the lower left
And here at the bottom of MoMA is a little bit grayer
Gives you some idea of the inflection that
he gave to these and
At the Yale art gallery
This painting I think in particular
Maybe the most beautiful one because of the absolute minimal
Quality to today's eyes a hundred years later of those black lines that don't even
Intersect on the left and then on the right just have that one cross that has absolutely nothing to do with
A kind of grid like regularity, but instead is completely asymmetric and kind of off
point
So I don't know why this one was one of my favorite paintings, I think it was because
the
Idea of abstraction being born in
1913
This is probably a retrospective explanation, so I'll change that I don't know why it was one of my favorite, but today I
realize
That the year of 1913 was probably the most important year in
The first half of the 20th century insofar as art. Goes and
one of my great regrets is that I proposed and didn't get to do at MoMA a
19-13 show for
2013 because that would have been one great show
But the schedule didn't work out that way
But basically what happened the year before World War 1 started is that painters from all over the globe?
kind of got lit on fire
by
each other and
In this case it's Malevich going to Paris and seeing the Cubist work of Braque and Picasso
But however giving it a kind of Russian twist and knowing that
He couldn't just be a Picasso or brach imitator
He had to do something that had resonance for the Russians, and the knife-grinder is a topic of a kind of village
That Malevich would have come from and would have been thinking would give his
Work a Russian locality and of course what's wonderful about this work of art as in so many
From that very minute of abstraction is he's choosing a subject that itself
embodies
The
development of abstraction by its own
Iconography so for example Picasso and Braque would do a still-life with a fan because an open fan
Would seem like something that was cubist even though it was a realistic depiction of what an open fan looks like right
but the forum is coming apart and so when you have a knife grinder having this spinning wheel
Like do Sean's bicycle wheel of 1913 and the knife getting
kind of
What's the word?
sharpened but like vibrating on on the wheel
you almost have
Malevich teaching himself how to be an abstraction ax
Sticking a subject in which making a realistic depiction of vibration gives him an abstract language and of course
It's much more complicated than that what he's doing with his shapes and his colors, and his Trading's and his volumes here is quite
beyond explanation
But you do have the sense of movement you have the sense of futurist movement if he had been Italian
This would have certainly been in the first futurist exhibition and what you see is this
Almost feeling of explosion that would have just been
Emblematic of
the euphoria that all of the artists shared at that moment of realizing that you know
Maybe the 20th century did really start in 1900. Maybe it really started or at least was off and running in
1913
and
Just to show you also
Here at the Museum of Modern Art. We have what happened next for Malevich
He really just paused very quickly in this let me absorb Picasso
Let me absorb cubism and futurism and then within a couple of years was off with the invention of his own ISM, which he called
suprematism
Because art is for a supreme being very very mystical
attitude that Malevich had and
Yet always, still a little bit with that
technological
Utopianism that he had like the picture in the middle is called the flying airplane
So even though it just seems like these shapes and space he he was not making a difference between
Utopianism and modern technology he was actually seeing those two things as wedded together
And then you see at the far left where he got by two years later
1919 with white on white
the very very
Controversy causing and still today quite a many cartoon
drawing
Painting that was literally a white shape on a white background for him the ultimate depiction of the supreme
Mysticism of painting but really kind of an awesomely far cry within five years from this to that
So I had to put in a Matisse it's interesting that there's
Not a whole lot of Matisse at the Yale art gallery
It would be interesting to know a little bit more about why Katherine Dreyer or maybe Duchenne are working with her
Wasn't the biggest Matisse person?
You may know that he that Duchamp
subsequent much later in 1951
married
the ex-wife of
Matisse's son Pierre the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse
His wife was teeny Matisse who became teeny Duchamp a few years later
So do shine Matisse are very in twined to say the least
But there isn't there isn't a lotta Matisse in' in the dryer collection, but this very early work of his from
1906 is a beauty, and I think what I love about it is its connection to Matisse's past and
Matisse's future, and you see it's with a plaster figure
Which every art student had to sculpt when they were in academic training?
And I'm just to give you one example of that. There's say Zhaan's
Still life with plaster cupid of a decade earlier
But it also looked forward to what Matisse would be doing just in five years with the red studio
The painting at MoMA that is this absolute miracle of a portrait of the room in which he worked
that's utterly flat and
The story of the red studio is that this is a painting that was pretty?
realistic with a floor and a background that were the color of his real floor and the colors of his real wall and
At the eleventh hour he went back over and painted the whole thing a flat red to
Completely rid of any depth or any realism and when he put in that red
He just worked around what he had painted that were the contents of the studio
So there actually negatively thereby just being worked around um
Coming out at you with this inventory of paintings that were there in his studio at the moment. He painted this
including that plate
In the lower left, which we actually have that exact plate in the MoMA collection which is very fun
but this idea of inventory and
Sort of having his whole life be his studio is something that recurs throughout
Matisse's art and really is already there in an amazing way in this 1906 picture where you have
the little plaster figurine and the bowl and the melon and the lemon and this incredible texture of
Tablecloth and window behind it
He's already here in a very close-up kind of way making the subject of his art at the world of his art
Almost like if you know his famous paintings with goldfish swimming in fish bowls
It's almost like a fishbowl approach to
Subject matter
For him and so I think Yale is very lucky to have that very early example
of that
And
Then we're skipping ahead almost two decades
With one of the paintings that if I recall correctly Bob Herbert especially liked its Miro a surrealist a Spanish surrealist
In 1924 this painting was made the year that Andre Breton published the surrealist revolution
Almanac and manifesto and
Declaring that all of that connection to reality
That was in brewing that was in Picasso that was in Matisse was no longer
Enough for art and that the Surrealists really wanted to
Somersault into the world instead of dream the world of fantasy and the world of make-believe
But one of the very important parts of this painting was it's one of the earliest works in the century to introduce lettering
into the picture plane so here you have the wonderful ah
from that mustachioed man, and then the who
from
Maybe him as well or maybe someone sort of off-screen
but you have writing and
painting
marrying each other and coming very close
to
making a vocabulary
That would become I think very essential to the second half of the 20th century where that kind of
emptiness if you think for example of a Rothko
Not with any of the fun of the Miro
But that sense that a canvas could almost be empty in a very different way from in the white-on-white Malevich
But here as a place of dream as a pace a place of play
and with these just little notations these almost calligraphic strokes being enough to say this is a finished work of art and
That would be something that Catherine Dreyer and dushashana and man-ray finding when it was made would again have been
choosing one of the most radical
mirros because there it was this exact period 24 25 26 that he was this empty and
Came this close to making paintings that were really just almost empty space
except for these puffs of
imagery and of words
And
Miro actually is one of the most important figures as you go on
Directly to our shel Gorky one of the Abstract Expressionists in the Catherine Ordway
collection and this is one of his most important paintings made the year before he died the
Betrothal is one of a series of three works with this theme, and you see that Miro kind of washi
Background, but one of the things that I wanted to mention about both work E
And Miro that I remember studying here is that neither of them is?
the improvised
composition that you might think that
For both of these painters, and I don't know if work. He knew that Miro was this kind of painter
I would say probably not because I don't think there was this level of scholarship on the on Miro by the
1940s
It made gridded studies for these paintings that
Absolutely spelled out where every little dreamy slash or dot
Would go and they made many of these in notebooks, so
even though their goal first for Miro as a kind of card-carrying surrealist and later for Gorky as a
New York
Practitioner of
All over painting that was supposed to be about the moment when you think for example of a Jackson Pollock drip painting
there is this idea of
Very rehearsed spontaneity
And the idea of the spontaneity is what comes across and yet
We know that not only were these studies saying that he knew what marks he was gonna. Make there are really very very
Significant stories behind these paintings and the betrothal is one like that all of them for Gore
He goes back to his childhood in Armenia and thinking of specific moments in his own autobiography
Even though no one would ever really know that
Looking at this this. Also is an important painting in that it dares like the Miro
I think to be a painting that doesn't
Project at you
but asks you to come into a kind of interior space with it and part of that is that very almost watercolor II
Thin surface that it uses, which you can even tell in the slide
But when you're in its presence you realize wow this is a painting
That's almost evaporating in front of me, and if I don't get in there with it and get my head into its space. It's
It's it is going to evaporate so we're a little bit along the lines of the large glass
I think with Duchamp where a painting isn't like it would have been in the century before
Something just for you to look at but something that you need to
step into
Psychologically, and then I wanted to end actually talking about the plaster of
Giacometti
the hands holding the void
Because I think this is one of the great sculptures of the 20th century
and it's a plaster which for many many years and probably even when I was in school here a
plaster would have been thinking would be have have been thought of as a
study and
as a preparatory work for the cast bronze
Which would be the real sculpture, but as you noticed in that photograph that I made of the?
installation of the Picasso sculpture show at MoMA of a room of plasters
What's happened over the last couple of decades is that we've put a real value?
Plasters because those are we're the artists hand
Hands were actually involved in the work once. It's a bronze. It's an anonymous
Caster in a foundry who's actually determining the surface and of course with consultation from the artist on the patina and so forth
But with the plaster, that's what?
Giacometti touched and that is what Giacometti
Miraculously somehow
I don't know how this all worked got to New York because plasters are very
Fragile to transport even today and to have done that a hundred years ago
Would have been a great challenge with a work. That's as
Spiteri thin as the sides of this one are
But I think I find in part this work so moving is because it comes at the end of what's called
Giacometti surrealist period
when he was making things that were still pretty recognizable as
Very primitive izing but full of figures
Here in
1934 he puts this female in a kind of cage
both from the board that's in front of her shins and
from the poles that are behind her arms and and her torso and
Then of course holding what holding something empty?
But this is his last sculpture of that moment and then there's almost a decade where he just stops
and
It has to do with the onset of war it has to do with the whole world about to kind of turn upside down
Bringing us back to that that moment of first steps
but this is the work of a man who knew that he was out of gas and
He was out of gas for almost a decade and then of course got back to work in the 1940s
almost
instantly with the
very very thin
wiry
female figures that made his name and that we kind of
identify as jackal Nettie's today, but I think the
Pathos in this work which obviously when he made it
He didn't know that it would be that long again before he made a really major
work of any kind
Comes through in it and I think what it proves to me
Something that I like to think about a lot
Oftentimes a work of art that an artist makes is a lot smarter than the artist
The work knows even when the artist doesn't
So with that I'll stop, and I'm glad to take questions from the audience about this or anything else
Yes
What's your process when you were grouping the Brancusi sculptures on their islands? Oh?
That was yeah, that was really hard
But I think the principle that we used was the most variety
So I think there were something like a dozen
platforms throughout the space
it was probably like a 15,000 square foot show and
We wanted each one almost to serve as its own show so if someone came and just saw that one
island they would still get the feeling so it like we didn't have one island with ten Birds or
One island with ten
Mademoiselle Pagani heads and
instead wanted to show the
Intermarriage of all these things, but it was a general chronological flow like a regular
retrospective and took you from the beginnings of Chris's career when he still looked like Rodin to
The very end where he got very big and the bird in space for example Yale's
Became something that was even oh at least twice as big
So, thank you for that very interesting lecture
I have a question for you going back to your first
700 words
These were paintings and sculpture that you saw at the beginning of your career and now when you look at them again
Do you see them differently?
Well I'll tell you I was scared I thought I for this talk I should go back and read that thing
In this lecture and I was kind of scared too because I thought I'd probably be really embarrassed
And I am a little embarrassed about but I wasn't terribly embarrassed
Um but um I
Don't think I do see them differently I
Can't think I probably could think if I had a longer time to think of an example. How something just changed for me
because of course looking at a work of art has much more to do with your
headspace a
given moment than
necessarily what you're looking at but I but I may be
Just the quick answer to your question is sort of the amazing thing is how?
these masterpieces just keep being so much themselves and
It's a nun. I sort of did it as a provocative term yells modern mark masterpieces cuz that's an out of fashion word right now
but I'm I'm kind of of that old school that you know Shakespeare with Shakespeare and Beethoven was Beethoven and
these works
Yeah are great forever, but I'll probably think tomorrow of a good answer to your question
Thanks um I've been curious about something you said
Very near the beginning of the lecture about Picasso is staying in Paris during the war yeah
and I wondered if it has been suggested that I
mean there was anything nefarious about that was he being protected by I don't know Franco or
Or whatever?
It has been suggested
Because it seems so defying
Probability that they wouldn't have come after him
But no one has been able to prove as of yet anything like that
Okay, thank you
Going back to the start of your lecture talking about the night cafe
What what do you think is in the night cafe and?
Obviously in starry night that makes it just so hypnotic
You have to answer that with the way that
Van Gogh makes his marks I think
Because plenty of people could do that subject matter and it's it the answer isn't the subject matter. I think it's fair to say
Probably some of you and this audience have painted a starry night, and it's fine. Maybe nice, but it's not the starry night and
I think it has to do with his
immense
Genius as a painter that the way these strokes of paint
are
infused with
some kind of
Soul with some kind that he manages to convert an emotional soulful
State of being
Into these marks that are obviously mechanically made by a hand with color
Color that was then natural pigment on a palette
And the combination of the way he uses color and the way he uses marks
to
Make as you say I think just a magnetic
kind of
object that
Has no peer
Kind of half-baked answer, but I don't think these are things you can explain so well
Thank you for the
Visual and audio treat. It was wonderful to hear you and to see your slides
I'd like to ask about the rehearsed spontaneity that you mentioned in Miro and in Gorky a few years ago you had an exhibit at?
MoMA on Miro, I think that was from the 20s 40s
and you showed how he would sometimes tear pages out of a phone book or out of a magazine with an ad in it and
Maybe draw just the top of it
So you portrayed him at that time as being sort of whimsical?
Because if it were a bird you might just draw the beak not the rest of the bird if it were a telephone pole he
Might draw just one wire. Could you say a little bit more please about that whimsical ad and the spontaneity and the rehearsed spontaneity?
yes, so at the the
Show at MoMA that you're talking about a few years ago. It was I don't I'm
Trying to remember the name of it was done by my colleague Ann Tomlin and it was something like
Challenged to painting or anti
defying painting maybe which was
the name of the title of an article
Written about Miro at that time this period of the late 20s and the early 30s
Was this kind of departure for Miro of what he had been doing before so?
This this summersault picture would be from that classical surrealist moment that in a way was very well-behaved
Compared to what was happening in the early 30s with the kind of thing that you were talking about with
Working for example with collage which he didn't do before and so I think
He did get more
Free a bit and a little
Angrier with with those paintings as the end of the 30s came around
I mean these paintings in this show at MoMA were from the same point as
Giacometti made hands holding the void you know the world war ii started at the end of the 30s
but by the beginning of the 30s
these
Artists subconsciously or their works of our new trouble ahead
and that's very clear in this mero of the early 30s, and I think there is more of an almost angst and
Therefore ad hoc genuinely ad hoc nature to to what he was doing in those years
Thank you everyone, thanks so much I
Just want I just want to again say what a real privilege it was for both, John Walsh and me that the first for
John Walsh lectures were delivered first by taco Tibbets then by Larry Kanter
Then by Paul Goldberger to end it with you here today, and it's one of our dispose Distinguished Alumnus. That's just been terrific
Thank you so much for making the time to be with us today
Those of you who signed up to do closed looking at first steps with Ann she is gonna go upstairs in front of that painting
And you'll spend some long time just looking the way you did many years ago at it with Bob and Ann thank you everybody
