Broadcasting Modernism

MIT Architecture Broadcasting Modernism 4.602 Modern Art and Mass Culture History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC) Spring 2018

Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Uchill (HTC) Teaching Assistants: Courtney Lesoon and Caroline Murphy (HTC) Writing Advisor: Louise Harrison Lepera (Comparative Media Studies/Writing)

Selected Projects: Mati Alemayehu ’19 Mathematics with Computer Science/Course 18-C Alyssa Li ’20 Mechanical Engineering/Course 2-A Dani White, ’20 Electrical Engineering and Comptuer Science/Course 6-2 Stephanie Yuen ’20 Mathematics with Computer Science/Course 18-C

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4.602 Modern Art and Mass Culture is an introduction to theories of modernism and postmodernism and their related forms (roughly eighteenth-century to present) in art and culture. The course focuses on how artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to critique both and examines visual art in a range of genres, from painting to design objects and “relational aesthetics.” Works of art are viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, television, fashion, “primitive” art, propaganda, and networks on the internet.

Broadcasting Modernism Podcasts & Scripts Communication Intensive subjects in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CI-H) require at least 20 pages of writing divided among a number of assignments, at least one of which is to be revised and resubmitted. CI-H subjects offer students substantial opportunity for oral as well as written expression, through presentations to classmates and teachers. For this CI-H subject, students were given the option to write scripts and make recordings in podcast formats. Why a podcast? Podcasts have exploded in popularity over the past five years. A large segment of the podcast market consists of programs geared toward disseminating knowledge about a range of complex topics in an easily-digestible, comprehensible, and entertaining journalistic storytelling format. An important feature of humanities training, and central to this course, is the honing of communication skills, and in addition to being able to write clearly about the course content, it is useful to be able to articulately present on these (and other) concepts. A fluid, engaging conversation will demonstrate that students have carefully read about and sufficiently mastered the concepts and issues pertaining to the topic prompt.

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Assignment 1: Defining Modernism Write a five-page podcast script—as the take-home portion of the midterm exam—on the question of “defining modernism.” Looking at three different artworks explored in the course lectures and recitation discussions, describe and compare how artists created modern art in reaction to modernization and modern life. You should combine the skills of formal analysis you explored in Paper #1 with the analytical reading skills that you have been practicing during your weekly homework assignments. As always, properly credit your source research using footnotes following the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). There are many approaches you can take to discuss and engage with this topic. It can be structured as a monologue or a dialogue (with an imaginary interlocutor). Think about how you might script your podcast—a sonic, audible medium—in effective ways. What is the argument that you are making? How can you tell this story while bringing in critical alternative voices—for instance, could you verbally “act” as an artist or art critic from our course, or read out important quotations from art history? Could ambient sounds in a museum setting add interesting context? What other ways can your medium be utilized to serve your argument? (Note: since the deliverable is a podcast script, indicate any sound effects, tonal differences, or aural contexts as written stage directions.) Rather than dealing with abstractions or speculations, you must select a specific lens with which you’ll approach your topic, and determine specific examples to support your claims. Think about successful historical, cultural, and news podcasts you might listen to (think NPR programs, such as Planet Money or Hidden Brain; Ottoman History Podcast; 99% Invisible; Lexicon Valley; In Our Time; and other similar programs)—these podcasts engage broad, complex topics in a focused and concise manner by introducing and building arguments through short, compelling stories. Case studies serve as anchors for discussion of a larger constellation of issues pertaining to a given topic. Don’t lose sight of your medium: your central challenge with this assignment is to develop an intelligent discussion about a topic, in a manner that a non-expert can understand and learn from.

Mati Alemayehu, The Experience of Modernization — Page 4

Alyssa Li, Defining Modernism through Depictions of Prostitution — Page 8

Dani White, Defining Modernism: Edith Davis, Carl Miller, Paul Price — Page 12

Assignment 2: A Work of Art in its Exhibition Context The focus of this assignment an examination of a work of art on view in the context of one of following exhibitions: Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (ICA Boston), or Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1955 (MIT List Visual Arts Center). You may also write about an artwork encountered during our field trip to MASS MoCA. Your paper should:

• clearly discuss the artwork, including how it was made • situate that work in the historical context of its production and reception (with particular attention to the work’s relation to popular culture, mass media, mass culture, commodity, spectacle, and other formations appropriate to the time the work was made), and on that basis: • evaluate its role within the argument articulated by the exhibition, and: • argue for its relation (resistance or affirmation) to theories of modernism or postmodernism

The Writing Advisor is available if you need help. Additionally, you are strongly encouraged to use the peer review system outlined by Sylvan Barnet in Writing About Art and/or the peer review rubrics distributed during recitation.

Stephanie Yuen, Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing 422 — Page 17

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Mati Alemayehu The Experience of Modernization

Luke: Hi everyone! It’s another beautiful day in Montpelier and today on Lectures with Luke we’re speaking with Professor Bolzano Weierstrass on the topic of “Modernism”, is that right professor? Weierstrass: Indeed. In particular, we will show through three notable modernist works that modernism at its core is the depiction of one’s contemporaries and the realities of everyday life. Luke: That’s so counterintuitive, you would think that modernism had to do with science and the advancement of technology in those periods. Weierstrass: Ah, the advancement of technology – say the development of steam engines for example – would be modernization, which is often featured in modernist works though it is not necessarily the main topic. We will also discuss it at length with modernism as it is often confused. Luke: Great! What’s the first piece we’re considering? Weierstrass: The first piece is Daumier’s Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834, depicting a slain man in his nightclothes surrounded by his dead family, it probably isn’t happiest image I could have led off with. Luke: Yeah that’s definitely one of the more somber pieces we’ve had on this podcast. Daumier liked painting the poor a lot though, right? Like in The Third Class Carriage, for example? Weierstrass: That’s exactly right! In fact, part of his and contemporary painters such as Courbet’s modernist styles was the depiction of common folk. Works such as The Third-Class Carriage and Courbet’s The Stonebreakers are similar in their empathetic feelings for the working class but set against these two Rue Transnonain is noticeably - cold. It is, however, unquestionably a modern work. Baudelaire, an influential writer on the topic of modernity, claimed that ‘modernity’ is the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” art that can only be produced by depicting one’s own time.1 This lithograph is almost documentary in that sense. With the 4

Honoré Daumier, Rue Transonian, 15 Avril 1834.

full date in its title, it’s not hard to match this picture up with the April Riots that occurred in 1834 Paris. The man in the painting was one of twelve killed that night by government troops for striking.2 By choosing to paint scenes such as these instead of the often-mythological depictions of the Romantic period, Daumier shows that he is a Realist, and a modernist. Furthermore, the use of lithography indicates the effects that modernization had on Daumier’s and other painters’ works. Reproducible images such as this were much more accessible to the masses than the Salon oil paintings. Luke: What an awful scene. Weierstrass: Indeed. Though the image largely avoids any emotional touches, one could argue that Daumier’s use of foreshortening to diminish the man’s figure gives away his political leanings. Looking at the man’s diminished frame the viewer feels pity for him. Luke: Are the other ones happier? Weierstrass: [laughs] I think you’ll like the next ones better. This one is my personal favorite an 1877 oil on canvas called by Gustave Caillebotte aptly titled Paris Street; Rainy Day.

Luke: Do we know where the two figures were headed?

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877.

Weierstrass: The subject of the painting is typical of Impressionists in this period, a street bustling with modern life, with two figures strolling prominently in the foreground. As Baudelaire writes in The Painter of Modern Life (1863), “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, (…) we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself (…) reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.” How fitting then that the subject of the painting are two flâneur – strollers on the streets of Paris. Technically speaking, what I love about this painting is its treatment of the mundane. The lines of the sparkling pavement lead the viewers’ eyes through the crowd to what appears to be an apartment building, towering over the boulevard. The blending of colors on the street mimics the distorted, shimmering reflections one would see on a wet road. Furthermore, the choice of complimentary reds and greens on the buildings in the foreground as well as the vibrant yellow of the buildings in the background really set them off from the overcast skies. By using such vibrant hues, Caillebotte compels the observer to appreciate the apartment building itself as more than just a backdrop, but as something beautiful in its own right. Luke: Who are the two figures in front? Weierstrass: The beauty is that it doesn’t matter! It’s an ode to everyday life, and by anonymizing its subjects it becomes that much more universal.

Weierstrass: I’m afraid not, in fact, they may not be going anywhere at all. At this time in Paris a growing number of people were entering the middle class. Those with the luxury of disposable time and income took up leisure activities such as strolling, bathing, and visiting cafés, all of which became the subjects of modern painters who viewed them. Note that the only woman in the image is closely escorted by a man. Janet Wolff in “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity”, speaks at length on the exclusion of women within modernist work.3 As the men enjoyed more and more of what the public had to offer, societal norms often required that women stay home and tend to children or household chores. Thus, the collection of paintings we now see as the beginning of ‘modernist painting’ is actually decidedly biased towards men, as men were the ones free to go out and do as they please as well as the ones free to go out and paint as they please. Luke: I get the feeling that women are still present in these paintings though, and not always with men like in this one either! Degas for example painted tons of scenes with women in public. Weierstrass: While it’s certainly true that there are paintings with women in them, when not accompanied by a man they are often assumed to be prostitutes or widows. Luke: One could say the same thing about the lower-class being excluded from these works, no? The first picture you presented seems to suggest so if the workers were on strike. Weierstrass: Of course, class plays a role as well in representation. Though successful painters in this period almost all had formal training – a privilege for middle and upper-class families – many of them do however attempt to communicate the plight of the laborer. Gustave Courbet for instance dedicates much of his work to the common folk, and even goes so far as to paint himself in dirtied and disheveled clothes in The Desperate Man as if to say, “I am one of you guys, I know your pain,” even though he was a pretty wealthy man himself.2 But I digress – it’s time for our last painting.

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Luke: Wow, is that a woman? Weierstrass: Only part of one. This work is called Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio or Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. The influence of photography is evident at first glance. In the 1880s, a few decades before this painting was finished in 1912, Etienne-Jules Marey invented the chronophotographic gun.4

Weierstrass: One could actually argue that Futurism is modernism to a fault. In The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Fillipio Tommaso Marinetti exclaims “Mythology and Mystic Ideal are defeated at last!”5 Over the course of a few pages, he rejoices in “the beauty of speed” and struggle, while violently asserting we dispose of old works, paintings, and even people and rejoice in advances in art, science and technology. By the end of the manifesto he argues that the current generation of Futurists too should be disposed of and replaced when the time comes by newer – and thus better – artists. Luke: That’s unnecessarily intense.

Giacomo Balla, Dinamismo di un Cane al Giunzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), 1912.

Luke: That sounds somewhat violent. Weierstrass: Not at all actually! The device was intended to capture successive shots of animals in motion. The Horse in Motion for instance is one of the most famous pieces made using a similar technique. What’s different here though is, whereas chronophotographic images are often viewed in a series, each representing one image in time, Balla has them stacked the slightly different images together so that the dog and the woman seem to have several extra pairs of legs. This, the blurring of the silhouettes, and the background composed entirely of parallel diagonal lines give the painting a sense of speed, appropriate for a Futurist work. Luke: Futurists don’t really sound like painters. How are they modernist if they concern themselves with the future?

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Weierstrass: That’s the toned-down version. It’s intense but it emphasizes an important point about modernism. The experience of modernization, being able to witness the invention and proliferation of airplanes, cars, photographs, and so on, drove artists to new and interesting modes of painting. What all three of these works share is a view of the everyday life to which they’ve grown accustomed, accented by industrial and technological advancements that continuously change it. Turning away from the Romantic era oil paints of mythological figures and allegories, the modernist painting finds an appreciation for what we – the collective – have, while making few attempts to hide what we lack.

Notes

Bibliography

1 Charles Baudelaire “The Painter of Modern Life.” In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2004): 37-42.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).

2 Rebecca Uchill, “Realisms and Revolutions.” Lecture, Cambridge, February 20, 2018.

Lubbock, Tom. “Great Works: Dynamism of A Dog on a Leash (1912) Giacomo Balla.” The Independent. September 03, 2009. Accessed March 19, 2018. https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/ great-works-dynamism-of-a-dog-on-a-leash-1912-giacomo-balla-1781174.html.

3 Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1995): 34-47. 4 Tom Lubbock, “Great Works: Dynamism of A Dog on a Leash (1912) Giacomo Balla,” The Independent, September 03, 2009. Accessed March 19, 2018, https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/ great-works-dynamism-of-a-dog-on-a-leash-1912-giacomo-balla-1781174.html. 5 Filippio Tomasso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 146-49.

Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso. “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Uchill, Rebecca Kate. “Realisms and Revolutions.” Lecture, Cambridge, February 20, 2018. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

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Alyssa Li Depictions of Prostitution

Alyssa Li (AL): Welcome to fourSixOhTwo, the program that brings you interesting, accessible, art history conversation. I am your host Alyssa Li. Today we are talking about the depiction of prostitutes in modern art, as a way of learning about and defining modernism. Shirley Green (SG): Prostitutes? Does that really say anything about modern art except that guys still liked looking at nude women back then? AL: *laughs* I can see why you might be confused. Often, when people think of modernist painting, they picture depictions of the middle class bustling about cities and at leisure, or beautiful Impressionist nature scenes. SG: Yeah! Like Monet’s Water Lilies. AL: Well Shirley Green, that’s who I’m talking to now, by the way, she’s our guest of the week and a seventeen-year old from Utica, New York. To us nowadays, these scenes are fairly normal or just viewed as beautiful art. We’re used to looking at modern paintings even though people of the time would have viewed them as unexpected, daring new ways of representing the world. Modernist artists were constantly innovating and experimenting. So, looking at paintings of prostitutes is a surprisingly great way to understand modern art, since we can still understand how they were daring and avant-garde. SG: I’m still a little skeptical, but okay. AL: Don’t worry: it’ll make sense soon! Before we jump into talking about the representation of prostitutes, let’s get some background about what modernism is. Modernism was a broad movement in art and literature that took place roughly from the 1850s through 1960s. It was a reaction to huge shifts in social and economic conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution, which was one among other defining aspects of modernity. This era also involved the development and growth of urban life, transportation, consumerism, photography, mass communication, and public entertainment. Modern 8

art rebelled against established modes of painting since they were deemed unfit to represent this new world. As for the state of prostitution at the time… Jason Farago (JF): We now think of prostitutes as one of the most disfavoured categories of the social order, to be talked about in disgust when we talk about it at all. But in the Paris of the late 19th century, prostitution was a central part of daily life.1 AL: (That’s Jason Farago, art critic for the New York Times.) JF: Artists and writers, in particular, were absorbed by prostitutes and courtesans of all classes. The courtesan Apollonie Sabatier – known to her fans as ‘La Présidente’ – turned her home into a sort of bourgeois salon, frequented by Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Flaubert, and especially Charles Baudelaire, for whom she served as a muse for hire.2 SG: No wonder modernist paintings featured prostitutes! AL: It’s certainly less of a surprise knowing how integrated prostitutes were in the daily lives of men. However, the fact that they were represented in painting was itself very novel and therefore modernist. Modern artists wanted to represent aspects of contemporary urban life, which included prostitution, as opposed to religious or mythological scenes. Their nude women were contemporary individuals who lived in the margins of society instead of the upper-class courtesans and mythical nude figures that had long been portrayed in art. AL: One such depiction is Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia, which shows a contemporary French woman reclining nude in bed. What do you think? SG: It’s honestly kind-of...ugly. Everything looks really flat and unrealistic. AL: Yes, that’s on purpose! The loose brushwork and unfinished quality is a modernist rejection of classi-

prostitutes sitting in a public café, trading stories and relaxing.6

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_ Google_Art_Project_3.jpg.

cal technique. Manet does not attempt to hide the fact that painting is a representation or idealize the nude. As our friend Jason Farago would say: JF: It stripped away all the mythological baggage that made images of prostitutes acceptable in the world of fine art.3 AL: Can you imagine how people reacted to it? SG: I bet they thought it was scandalous. AL: Yeah, critics hated it... T.J. Clark (TJC): The hand is shamelessly flexed, it is improper, it is in the form of a toad, it is dirty, it is in a state of contraction.4 AL: (That’s TJ Clark, British art historian and writer, illustrating how critics of the day responded to Olympia.) TJC: [The hand] comes to stand for the way Olympia’s whole body is disobedient: the hand is the sign of the unyielding, the unrelaxed, the too-definite where indefiniteness is the rule, the non-supine, the concealment which declares itself as such: the ‘unfeminine’, in short.5 AL: All in all, Manet’s Olympia boldly rejected the conventions of the female nude and is considered an early example of modernist painting. Fourteen years later, in 1877, Edgar Degas again represented prostitutes with his painting, Women on a Café Terrace in the Evening. This painting depicts four

Edgar Degas, Women on a Cafe Terrace in the Evening, 1877, drawing, pastel, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France. http://www. the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=4937.

SG: How can you tell that they are prostitutes? AL: The figures’ ornamental hats, makeup, and dresses are characteristic of contemporary prostitutes. If you look closely, you can see that the woman on the right is wearing a corset with transparent material over her bust.7 Also, even in the late nineteenth century, ‘respectable’ women did not go alone to cafés or restaurants.8 SG: Okay, I see it now. And how is this modernist? It doesn’t seem very experimental. AL: Though this painting may seem fairly conventional, it still plays with a lot of experimentation and characteristics of modern art. The visible brushstrokes and blurriness are part of what is called a painterly quality. They add a sense of light and movement which modernist painters used to reflect the fast pace of urban life and capture a moment in time. The vibrantly colored hat ornaments and angular composition are also experimental departures from the classical style. AL: If you didn’t entirely buy the experimental nature of Degas’s painting, you’ll certainly be able to identify it in Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It depicts five nude prostitutes in a brothel and is an early demonstration of cubism. Could you describe what you see?

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SG: Huh, that’s really interesting! AL: I’m so glad you think so, and that’s actually the last of our pieces for today! Do you think you could sum up what you learned? SG: Umm sure. So, ultimately modernism was a movement caused by changing social conditions in nineteenth century Europe. Through paintings of prostitutes, we can identify modernist characteristics in painting, like the rejection of traditional subject matter and conventions, the painterly style, and the use of motifs from other cultures. Sound about right? AL: Perfect. Thanks for joining us Shirley. AL: To wrap things up: My name is Alyssa Li and you’ve been listening to fourSixOhTwo. Tune in next week, when we’ll be moving onto a discussion of Surrealism and learning how it relates to fetishes. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas. Place: Museum of Modern Art, New York. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4c/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon.jpg.

SG: Oh wow, yeah. Picasso is really experimenting with perspective here. It completely tears apart the female nude and replaces their figures with all these flat, angular shapes. And are the women wearing masks? AL: Yes, those are African masks. Another characteristic of modernity was a growing fascination with other, ‘exotic’ cultures. France had colonies throughout Africa and the Near and Far East, and many artists critiqued French colonial policy. However… Patricia Leighton: The modernists did not extend this social criticism to a radical critique of the reductive view of Africans that was promoted for colonial justification. Instead, they embraced a deeply romanticized view of African culture and … [their] method was to critique civilization by embracing an imagined “primitiveness” of Africans whose “authenticity” they opposed to a “decadent” West.9 AL: (That was Patricia Leighten, a professor of art history at Duke.) AL: So Leighten argues that modernist painters appropriated aspects of these exotic cultures as another means of experimentation and developing authentic modernist expression, even though they might just seem racist and reductive today. 10

Notes

Bibliography

1 Jason Farago, “Courtesans and Street Walkers: Prostitutes in Art,” BBC, 2015.

Clark, T.J. “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865,” Screen, v. 21, n. 1 (Spring 1980): 18-41; in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, edited by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris. London: Phaidon, 1992.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 T.J. Clark, Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865, London: Phaidon, 1992, 108.

Clayson, H. Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era. Texts & Documents. Getty Research Institute, 2003. https://books.google.com/ books?id=OL1DAgAAQBAJ.

5 Ibid. 6 Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, Getty Research Institute, 2003, 107. 7 Ibid, 108. 8 Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1990, 40. 9 Patricia Leighten, The White Peril and L’Art Nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism, 2014, 610.

Farago, Jason. “Courtesans and Street Walkers: Prostitutes in Art.” BBC, September 10, 2015. http://www.bbc. com/culture/story/20150910-courtesans-and-street-walkers-prostitutes-in-art. Leighten, Patricia. “The White Peril and L’Art Nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (2014): 609–30. Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1990.

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Dani White Edith Davis, Carl Miller, Paul Price

Note: This script is structured with a host interviewing three experts on each of the selected paintings: Edith Davis, Carl Miller, and Paul Price. Gentle background music playing. Host: If you asked most people for the meaning of the word “modern,” you’d probably get some vague answers involving a particular period of time—it must have happened within the last five years, the last ten, or maybe even twenty—and some nods to recent technology. (Cell phone ringtones playing softly in background.) Perhaps cellphones are the epitome of modernity because they only rose to prominence within the past few decades, or maybe pop culture icons like Lada Gaga and Kanye West are more representative of “modern” times. (Fade in and out “Applause” by Lady Gaga.) Although today we associate many positive feelings with “modern” as a word, it hasn’t always been that way; Raymond Williams points out in “When Was Modernism” that at one time “modern” was use pejoratively.1 All of this is to say that it can be quite difficult to tease out the meaning of the word “modern”: it generally refers to what’s new and what’s current, but which new developments are included in the “modern” umbrella (and how old something is before it’s no longer “modern”) is a judgement call. When we refer to “modern art,” the term is more specific than the nebulous popular definition. “Modern art” and “modernism” refer to art of a specific artistic movement and its history. Williams also points out that how we choose when modernism starts and ends is still subjective, but we still apply more stringent definition than the everyday use of the word “modern.” 2 A few characteristics unite artworks from this era, and today we’ll be exploring them through three different examples of “modern art.” (Cut to) Edith Davis: As a photographer myself, I find Place de la Concorde interesting because it goes against many of my own natural instincts about composition, yet Degas so intentionally worked them in. 12

Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde, 1875, oil on canvas, 78.4 x 117.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum. https://www.arthermitage. org/Edgar-Degas/Place-de-la-Concorde.html.

Narrator (in studio): This is Edith Davis, who specializes in the interactions between painting and photography. Today she’ll be telling us about the painting Place de La Concorde, painted in 1875 by Edgar Degas.3 Temporally, it falls within the period of modernity, but it also serves as a good stylistic example of the movement. Narrator (in conversation with Davis): In your opinion, what makes this a “modern” painting? Davis: Well, for me first thing that comes to mind is the composition. In many earlier paintings, figures are fully portrayed and not cut off, and the viewer’s eye is provided a clear path. Think of David’s Oath of the Horatii. Narrator (in studio): Oath of the Horatii is a painting by Jacques-Louis David. Although it may have some of its own modern qualities, Davis’s point here is how it contrasts to the modern qualities in Place de la Concorde. Davis (continuing): The stark lighting, the lines of the arms and swords, the groupings provided by the arches, the vanishing point of the tiles—it all tells you where to look. But in Place de la Concorde,

Davis: Well, a common trait among modernist paintings is this trend away from optical fidelity. Degas is not trying to trick you into believing the painting is a window or real object like a trompe-l’oeil painting; he uses flat colors and painterly brushwork. Narrator: I see, I see. So there are many technical aspects of the painting that contribute to its status as “modern art.”

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of Horatii, 1785, oil on canvas, 10.8 x 13.9 ft. Louvre Museum, Paris. https://www.louvre.fr/en/ oeuvre-notices/oath-horatii.

many of these traditional visual cues aren’t present. The horizon line is higher than we expect. The man and the children face different directions, and the man on the left is cut through the middle. (Camera shutter noises play.) These sorts of choices would be how we would argue that Degas was influenced by photography: these accidental cutoffs and careless compositions are what we see in today’s photos, especially those taken by smartphones. But we also associate them with modern paintings, since modernism developed contemporaneously with photography. Narrator: But that interpretation isn’t shared by everyone, right? Davis: No, of course some scholars have laid out some good counterpoints. The one that comes to mind for me is by Kirk Varnedoe. He argues that actually, because photography’s processing speedwas so slow—and also still steeped in the visual tradition of the older styles of paintings—this casual style we associate with photography now wasn’t really present in photos of the time.4 This interferes with the argument that Degas would have seen photos in the style of Place de La Concorde and be influenced by them. Narrator: Say I agree with Varnedoe and I don’t like your argument about the cropping and composition. Is there anything else that makes this a modernist painting?

Davis: Right. And, well, one other aspect of the painting that makes it modern is simply the choice of subject. (City bustle plays in the background). In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire writes about how the modern painter should act as a flâneur —a man who wanders through the city, anonymous in the crowd—and that his paintings should reflect what a flâneur would see.5 Place de La Concorde could certainly be from the viewpoint of such a flâneur. Narrator (in studio): So as Davis just explained to us, many modern paintings reflect the modernization of technology and the changing industrialized society that their creators worked in. The next work we’ll hear about also represents modernism in both its style and content, and we’ll hear from Carl Miller on the subject. Carl Miller: My name is Carl Miller, and I’m here to tell you about Claude Monet’s paint Pond of Water Lilies, painted at Giverny in 1899. Narrator (to Miller): Thanks for the introduction. I’d like to pose to you a similar question to what I asked Edith Davis: why is this a modernist painting? Miller: To me, there are three key characteristics that make this a modern painting: the painterly style, its classification as an Impressionist work, and its Japanese influence. Narrator: Okay, let’s unpack these. Davis also mentioned that this self-aware brushwork is a modern characteristic. Miller: Right, and this connects to my other points, but in light of both new methods to accurately capture perfect renderings—that is, photographs—and imported art from Japan, which had a much more abstracted style, modernist artists often showed their brushwork as part of their art. When accurate photographs are available, the painter has to

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all these isms show the splintering in artistic styles that arose during modernity. Narrator: Before moving on, could you tell our listeners just a little bit more about what each of those movements? That’s quite the list you’ve just given us. Miller: Oh, of course. Post-Impressionism, not surprisingly, was a movement that followed impressionism. Its artists pushed the boundaries further in terms of showing brushstrokes and depicting their subjects abstractly. Surrealist artworks show nonsensical, dreamlike scenes, but often depicted these subjects with more optically realistically than impressionists treated their subjects, if that makes sense. And, let’s see…futurism. Futurist art focused on the concept of progress. Many of the works portray movement in a unique way. But anyway, my intention was not so much to dive into all these other movements, but more to emphasize how there are many art movements that make up modernism. Narrator: Got it. And what about your third point, about Japanese influences?

Claude Monet, Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, 1899, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 29 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/29.100.113/.

reconsider what the purpose of their painting is, and what they add that the camera does not. One thing they can do is embrace painting as a medium. You can see this in Pond of Water Lilies: the strokes of paint are visible, and the forms of the water lilies and other plants are indistinct, blending together. Narrator: Why do you distinguish that from Impressionism? Isn’t that a key detail of what makes a work Impressionist? Narrator (back in the studio): Quick explanation: Impressionism was an artistic movement in the late nineteenth-century, centered in France, whose artists tried to capture just an impression of the scene it depicted, not the exact view a camera would see. Its paintings often involved has visible brushstrokes, like Monet’s Pond of Water Lilies. Its artists also focused more specifically on portraying light and bright colors. Miller (continuing): What I was trying to get at is that many of the “isms” fall under modernism. Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism— 14

Miller: Ah. Well, during this time a lot of Japanese art was making its way to Europe. We know that Monet would have seen these works. Virginia Spate goes into more detail on this in Monet and Japan, but Monet was certainly a fan of these new imports.6 You can see this influence in his use of color and his choice subjects like water lilies or a Japanese bridge. Narrator (in studio): Next I spoke with art historian Paul Price and told him about some of the qualities we’ve already covered in our previous two paintings. He’s going to tell us about a work by Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907. (Cut to) Paul Price: Yeah, this work definitely shows many of those qualities. It’s even more abstract than the Impressionist works and it also has an ism involved, cubism. Narrator: What would you have to add to our growing definition of modernism with regard to Picasso’s work here? Price: Hmm. What’s really interesting about this painting is how it relates to current events at the time. Patricia Leighten gets into some of it in “The White Peril and L’Art Nègre”: Europeans were expanding their colonial presence, especially in Africa,

Narrator (in studio; calming background music starts): So we’ve seen here a variety of ways of viewing modernism, modernity, and modern art. Of course, just like how defining the modern today can be difficult, it would be impossible to capture everything essential about “the modern” in a single podcast, but hopefully today we’ve done an alright job of giving you a glimpse of what defines modern art.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 8 ft x 7 ft 8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. https://www. moma.org/collection/works/79766.

and many of the abuses they committed provoked European artists.7 They wanted to react against their society’s racism and colonialism, but they did so in a problematic way, romanticizing this primitive idea of African peoples in a fairly reductive manner. In this way, Picasso may have been trying to reaffirm this idea that other cultures as more authentic or more genuine. These ideas generally fall under the umbrella of “primitivism”: seeing other cultures as more true but also backwards and “primitive.” He combines these idea—the honesty of the female nude and primitivist views about other cultures—using the African masks the figures on the right wear. But clearly this presents a problematic viewpoint in that it views the African cultures he draws from as untouched and frozen in time, and he still is complicit in the colonial project when he goes to a museum and sees these works that were stolen from the countries where they were created. So, this is in the same vein as what Miller told you about the Monet, but perhaps more transparent in its problems. These views—which fall under Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism and are based on a presumption of Western superiority over Asia—were unfortunately part of the modern viewpoint of the time, and I think you’d have to include them in your definition of modern art if you really want the complete picture. 15

Notes

Bibliography

1 Jason Farago, “Courtesans and Street Walkers: Prostitutes in Art,” BBC, 2015. 2 Ibid.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life (1863),” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004): 37–41.

3 “Place De La Concorde - Edgar Degas.” Hermitage Museum. Accessed March 18, 2018. https://www.arthermitage.org/Edgar-Degas/Place-de-la-Concorde.html.

David, Jacques-Louis. The Oath of Horatii, 1785, oil on canvas, 10.8 x 13.9 ft. Louvre Museum, Paris. https://www. louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/oath-horatii.

4 Kirk Varnedoe, “The Artifice of Candor: Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered,” Art in America 68 :1 (1980): 66–8, anthologized in Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, edited by Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986): 99–124.

Degas, Edgar. Place de la Concorde, 1875, oil on canvas, 78.4 x 117.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum. https://www. arthermitage.org/Edgar-Degas/Place-de-la-Concorde. html.

5 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life (1863),” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004): 37–41. 6 Virginia Spate et al., “Introduction,” “Modern Life. Modern Vision,” and “The Forces of Nature,” in Monet and Japan (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2001): 2–35. 7 Patricia Leighton, “The White Peril and l’Art Negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 609–30.

Leighton, Patricia. “The White Peril and l’Art Negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 609–30. Monet, Claude. Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, 1899, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 29 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/worksof-art/29.100.113/. Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 8 ft x 7 ft 8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79766. Spate, Virginia et al., “Introduction,” “Modern Life. Modern Vision,” and “The Forces of Nature,” in Monet and Japan (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2001): 2–35. State Hermitage Museum, March 18, 2018, https://www. arthermitage.org/Edgar-Degas/Place-de-la-Concorde. html. Varnedoe, Kirk. “The Artifice of Candor: Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered,” Art in America 68 :1 (1980): 66–8, anthologized in Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, edited by Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986): 99–124. Williams, Raymond. “When Was Modernism?” in Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds. Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 23–27.

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Stephanie Yuen A Deeper Look into Modernism and Postmodernism

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 422, November 1984, Color Ink Wash. MASS MoCA. https://massmoca.org/event/walldrawing422/

Listen to Stephanie Yuen’s podcast via SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-930366596/transitioning-from-modernism-to-postmodernism

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture Broadcasting Modernism 4.602 Modern Art and Mass Culture History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC) Spring 2018