Lecture 9Outline of Last LectureI) Post-ImpressionismA) Seurat1) A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande JatteeB) Gauguin1) Where do we come from? Where are we? Where are we going? (1897)2) The Vision After the Sermon; Jacob Wrestling with an Angel (1888)3) The Yellow Christ (1889)4) Self Portrait (Les Miserables), (1888)5) Spirit of the Dead Watching, (1892)6) Exotic Eve (1890)7) The Loss of Virginity (1890-1891)8) The Birth of Christ (1896)9) La Orana Maria10) Mahana No Atua (Day of God)C) Gustave Moreau, The Apparition (1876)D) Odilon Redon, Cyclops (1895-1900)E) Van Gough1) Self-Portrait (To my Friend Paul Gauguin) (1888)a) Compare to Portrait of Zola, Manet, (1867)Outline of Current LectureI) Continuing with Gauguin’s Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897)A) emphasis of the bodyB) spiritual dimensionC) The reading of this paintingII) 2 major challenges to the foundational languages and ideas of the artistic traditionA) language of mimesisB) language based upon the bodyIII) GauguinA) Self-Portrait (as St. John the Baptist) (1889)B) Self-Portrait with Idol (1893)IV) Vincent Van GoghA) Self-Portrait (1889)B) The Shoes with Laces (1886- 1888)C) The Potato Eaters (1885)D) The Night Café (1888)E) Van Gogh’s Chair (1888)F) Gauguin’s Chair (1888)G) The Irises (1889)H) Starry Night (1889)I) Harvesting Wheat in Alpilles Plain, Arles (1888)J) The Sower (1888- 1889)K) Wheatfield with Rising Sun (1889)L) Resurrection of LazaurusM) The Sower (with Setting Sun) (1888)N) Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)O) Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and a Pipe (1889)P) Sunflowers (1888)Q) Sunflowers (1887)V) Paul CézanneA) Self-Portrait (1873- 1875)B) Uncle Dominique (1866)C) The Abduction (1867)D) House of the Hanged Man (1872- 1873)E) The Bridge at Maincy (1879-1880)Current LectureVI) Continuing with Gauguin’s Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897)A) major statement piece1) positions itself before the viewer as a series of questions2) positions itself before us as a painting that has centrally returned to the body and figurationB) primitivismC) freeze formatD) emphasis of the body1) female figures almost entirely dominate the canvas (as well as Gauguin’s entire Tahitian body of work)2) gesture of thought in the female body, as opposed to the connection between thought and male-ness in the Western traditionE) spiritual dimension1) moving away from the empirical version of the world, to a vision of the world2) breaking the mimetic bond of color to real things3) vision of fantasy or dreama) figuration of the Garden of EdenF) The reading of this painting1) Right to left?a) Something of a life-cycle; from birth to deathb) Against the grain of typical narrative paintings (in Western tradition)2) Left to right?a) From old to young, death to birth; against the grain of life-history3) Confronting the western viewer with an enigma that cannot be solvedVII) 2 major challenges to the foundational languages and ideas of the artistic traditionA) language of mimesis: art should be the mirror or copy of nature1) this breaks down in the post-impressionist tradition2) break from natural/mimetic color; freeing of color and making it almost arbitraryB) language based upon the body: classicism is the language modernism displaces or challenges1) at his point in the story, we return to the bodya) figuration is challenged in impressionismb) the body returns in post-impressionismi) relationships to the social world; drives; fantasies; challenge to values, morals, and social viewsVIII) GauguinA) Self-Portrait (as St. John the Baptist) (1889)1) Engaging with spiritual themes (apples, snakes, and a halo)2) Title of the portrait is important to the reading3) The head is bathed in lightB) Self-Portrait with Idol (1893)1) Portrayal with a martyr figure, imagined primitive idol object2) He is thinking before us, the typical “thinking” gestureIX) Vincent Van GoghA) Self-Portrait (1889)1) 3-quarter portrait2) intensity of gaze which meets the viewer’s gazea) the gaze is echoed with the background of non-mimetic pattern, this pattern continues through Van Gogh’s clothingi) this very idea of identity and self-hood has been opened up to the space around himb) the very air around him has become animated with and energy and an intensityB) The Shoes with Laces (1886- 1888)1) Peasants’ shoes; an emblem of work and of labor2) Are then Van Gogh’s shoes? Another self-portrait?3) They appear to be two of the same side of the foot, not a pair at allC) The Potato Eaters (1885)1) They are eating a platter of boiled potatoes with black coffee2) His art is associated with the peasant and the farmer3) Intense plays of light across faces and forms; yet everything is about darknessa) It doesn’t glow into the light but presses into the darkness and shadow4) Compare to Rembrandt Self Portrait (1658) and Slaughtered Ox (1655) and Self-Portrait as an Old Mana) Van Gogh emerges as an heir to the self-portraiture of Rembrandt and a modernist artist to rival that traditionb) Tenebrism: extreme carascuroD) The Night Café (1888)1) Color fills in zones bounded by linesa) Intense contrastsb) The glow of the gas lights and brush strokes to represent the emergence of lightc) Colors move towards the arbitrary, away from the mimetic through the use of excess2) Painting of contemporary spaces of entertainment (a very modernist subject)3) We are confronted by the gaze of a figure (ghostlike)4) A diagonal leads deep into the spacea) Floorboards rush towards usb) Flatness and vertigo exist at once in the compositionE) Van Gogh’s Chair (1888)1) Objects as expressions of a subject; moving from inanimate to the animate nature of these objects2) Oblique lines are everywhere3) The tiles on the floor align themselves with the flatness of the canvas4) Obliquely positioned and very simple in it’s design5) Glowing with light that seems to come from the inside (like a sun)6) Extinguished pipeF) Gauguin’s Chair (1888)1) Background is flattened out, mimicking Gauguin’s play with horizons and backgrounds2) The colors are muted3) Fancy chair centered and on the planara) Ornate, curvilinear4) Gauguin’s chair has no source of light, the entire composition is full of light5) Candles and a gas lamp, indoor light as opposed to sunlighta) Erect and vital candleG) The Irises (1889)1) He is the painter of nature, the products of light playing across natural forms2) Raw pigment and color that has