Learning to See: Visual Fundamentals

please join me to welcome our speaker Jonathan Ritter Thank You Kristen and thank you all for coming today on this sounds like I'm gonna be like Jimi Hendrix okay thanks for coming on this on this gorgeous day to hear we talk about visual fundamentals as part of this course learning to see now learning to see is a course that I actually teach at Boston University and it's really a course about enhancing your ability to see and we're surrounded by visual things all the time every day think about looking at your computer screen or at your phone but we're mostly getting is information and it's really easy to overlook the visual richness that's out there and I really pitched this course to people who are often I mean people who have taken art history enjoy it but also to people who've never had exposure to it especially people from who were headed for the medical field or engineering or even management but it's a it's a course that really is in many ways not in art history course I told the students that they'll get pieces of our history and you'll get some today too I mean I'm an art historian and so it's hard for me not to do art history but I'm gonna show you things that I would never show anyone in one of my regular art history courses well the first thing I want to show you actually see if I go here are the illustrations to a children's book by someone named this fine Bonnie I and it was published in 1995 it's called zoom and what you want to do here is just look closely and I'm gonna move the slides by fairly rapidly and see if you can figure out what's going on because it's really about taking a new look thinking about thinking outside of the box and maybe getting the big picture so what do we have here it looks a little bit like an abstract painting or something like that but it's really part of a rooster so there's a lot of things there well this may look like an awful lot of Christmas decorations my son went to Georgia Tech and so one time when I was visiting he and his then fiancee now his wife took me to Buckhead which is a kind of affluent suburb of Atlanta and because they knew that this at this house every year at Christmastime they go all out and what why would I be showing you something like this well for one thing it may look like really bad taste to you but artisan the eye of the beholder and the other thing is that if you look at these things well it seems like absolute excess but they all have something in common they're all inflatable in other words a decision has been made here a kind of a restriction of possibilities a limitation as it were and if you think about this as as art well it's sort of stretching the term but there clearly was a kind of necessity a kind of an intensity about the collecting of these things and collecting is one of the things that we'll be talking about in a future in a future lecture but there is something about art but not just art collecting but art making which seems to be that we're hardwired for it's a little bit like sports and music and religion you know if you try to repress it it comes out in another form and this is a pretty interesting form but this idea of limitation is something that you really need in a work of art it otherwise it's a little bit like having a tennis game without a net or without rules it gets boring really fast and limitation can be an exciting thing actually I mean think about black and white photos I'll show you some today it doesn't mean that they're any worse than color photos are not as interesting they it's a certain kind of limitation that can actually make something exciting or think about when artists get older that you know they begin to sometimes lose the ability to see as clearly or to use their hands as without shaking and so you have somebody like a Monet or a digger or a Cezanne who clearly had serious eye problems we know that but that doesn't mean that their later work is any worse in their earlier work it was a limitation that in some ways could make things very exciting maybe we wouldn't have the waterlilies otherwise well we talk about art and you know we talk about media think about painting sculpting drawing but there's a lot of different ways that people can make art and here's a rather imaginative one this is by an artist named Deborah Sperber called after the Mona Lisa won 2005 and you may not be able to see it very clearly but there's a kind of acrylic or glass ball here and there is a sort of postage stamp-sized image of the Mona Lisa well it's taking in that image from what you have behind it which are a whole bunch of spools of thread that have been hung on beaded chains and it's the Mona Lisa upside down sort of in giant pixels it's kind of a remarkable kind of conception and if you think about it in relation to the Mona Lisa and this is something again that we'll talk about in one of the future lectures I mean the Mona Lisa of course is an absolute superstar you know when you go to the Louvre they have signs everywhere too large ryokan you know the Mona Lisa and if you want to go in that room you have to kind of stand like this you know with the bulletproof glass and all the barriers and you wonder you know what is going on here why are these people crowding into this room and not looking at anything else around them you know word there's the Madonna of the rocks for example not too far away but art often has to do in fact it seems to always have to do in some ways with except maybe in the you know the earliest dawn of mankind with other art with imitation so this is really art that really has to do with something that already exists and is very famous now one of the things that I like to do at the beginning of this course is to talk about things that we see everyday things that don't get noticed so it's really a class that I call noticing and what I'm going to show you are some things that are very easy to overlook for example this utility cap here for water you know what's the big deal well somebody or maybe more than one person took a lot of trouble to design this thing to think about the letters their placement think about how you have basically a symmetrical word here all you know pivoting on the tee and how the tee is integrated or relates very clearly to this grid pattern the sort of circular grid pattern and you begin to realize that there actually is something maybe worth looking at well that's what I'm sorry whoever designed these manhole covers in Budapest thought they thought this would be a good occasion for bringing some part into your life they really are pretty remarkable we don't have anything quite like that in Boston but we do have things like this which seem to be just completely accidental like this manhole cover that somehow with this grid pattern and then these letters they're just kind of floating around I thought made a really interesting head rose a really interesting relationship here to these bricks so this sort of unfinished work this is out you know over by the B you fit rec center where they've been building a bicycle path for eternity so or it's been going on for eternity that is but anyway things like that or something like this where you have it's basically you know the outside of a restaurant where you have one of those little patio enclosures and I thought it made a kind of interesting comparison to this painting this is actually by a Hungarian painter who taught at the Bauhaus lászló moholy-nagy it's a painting called a 2 from 1924 that in some ways and clearly this is completely accidental nobody arranged this thing to make it look like a painting but in some ways in thinking about this I was reminded of something that Oscar Wilde said which was that nature imitates art meaning that we don't see things in nature often I mean this isn't really nature you could say it's it's something that's very much artificial or man-made but we somehow don't see things there unless we've seen them in art for example the way that when you go out in the snow in the afternoon and you see that the shadows are blue will you especially notice that because you've seen paintings by Monet we'll see one of those later on and so that really becomes a kind of a whole area for discovery and very ordinary things can take on a really unusual aspect if they're seen with an artistic eye so this pepper by Edward Weston when I show it to my class generally I don't include the label because I want to see if they can figure out what it is and it often somebody always guesses that it's a pepper but there always are a few people who aren't quite sure what it is it looks kind of like a flexed muscle or something like that but partly from the point of view and that's point of view is something we'll be talking about but also the remarkable lighting it has something to do with scale which we'll talk about as well with this lighting which really creates this extraordinary object I mean it suddenly becomes dramatic I mean what could be less dramatic than a vegetable but somehow it manages to do that and so the first thing I really want to talk about with this visual fundamentals lecture and in some ways what I'm also thinking about here is if you ever have taken a course in design like the courses I had to take when I was in college I mean it was part of the art history major but I really love these courses where you study things like you know light and shade and color and composition what the fundamental the most fundamental of the fundamentals in some ways is light you know we can't see without light the whole idea of you know making sense of things visually we don't see without light and sometimes if we get our coordinates mixed up things can be very disconcerting in regard to light so this is a painting by the Belgian surrealist fna mcpeet called the Empire of light - from in it's quite late it's much really after most of surrealism happened it's really a movement mostly the 2018 1920s and 30s but in this painting here something very strange is going on I mean Magritte loves to put things together that don't belong together you know there's the famous one with a piper it says this is not a pipe you know that kind of thing so in this one it's nighttime and daily end day at the same time which is really kind of remarkable one of the things that happens at night or in the evening is that you can see here is that bowl of the the values or the tones the lights and darks get very close to each other so it gets to be very difficult to distinguish things that's one of the reasons why you know when you're driving you have to be extra careful at Twilight I mean not to mention at night you know to not you know for pedestrians and bicyclists because every you know things just don't have that kind of definition you can also have light become the medium itself in many ways and some of you may remember that it was quite a few years ago I guess I kind of lose time I mean when I started losing my hair I sort of lost that sense of you know how long ago things happen along the forgetting everyone's names and things like that but this worked by Tim Noble and sue Webster called real life is rubbish I was really puzzled when I first saw it because the first thing I noticed well I saw these shadows because there was a light projecting and then I saw these this rubbish these piles of sort of these constructions have sort of fastened together pieces of wood a can of brass oh I mean what are all these things and then you realize that they actually are the images that the silhouettes are actually being projected with the light hitting those things it's a little bit like going like this and making a dog but considerably more complicated a kind of self-portrait as it were in light and dark and if you go up into the the galleries upstairs the the the galleries that have to do with the Dutch Republic from the 17th century you'll see this remarkable painting by Rembrandt which I've really used as sort of the poster child of this whole lecture series an artist in his studio now if you know the painting you'll know that it's actually quite small it's really a very small painting but when you see it on the screen like this you would never guess that because it has a sense of what we could call monumentality it has an incredible presence and that presence really has to do with the handling of light and shade this very subtle kind of transitioning from light to dark that Rembrandt is so famous for I mean he creates these sort of magical scenes that have to do with light and dark so that the painter who really seems rather small in some ways compared to the painting on the easel is he's just it seems to be almost in awe of the light that's emanating from this canvas which is really quite remarkable so that even though the setting is very humble you can see cracks in the plaster these sort of rough floorboards the whole thing takes on an exalted aspect is if you're in the presence of something sacred and there's also something about that 17th century Dutch Republic that had artists you know the gameís artists that were acutely sensitive to changes in light and shade and of course the whole ability to convey that in paint was in some ways is not completely possible without oil paints and it was in the North especially in the area that we now call Belgium that we really you know the northern Europe that we really got the invention of oil paint in the 15th century so you know with oil of course you can get these very very subtle kinds of changes oil dries very slowly and you think you can get effects well I certainly couldn't but Ramona but Vermeer could like this which is really magical and maybe one of the things that makes this painting so magical is the way that she is looking at us but we are drawn to look at her in detail in this kind of extraordinary richness in terms of changing light and shade the kinds of transitions over here by her shoulder or the turban or her face art which are done very very subtly very carefully there also is in this painting a full play with reflection which is another aspect of light and dark so you have the the sort of triple reflections here of the famous pearl earring but also her lips and her eyes which that reflection really giving you a very different kind of light experience than the clothes the more sort of matte clothes clothing that you see around her so this kind of effect it also has to do with contrast the fact that we're looking at something that's illuminated against something that's very dark and of course that kind of contrast really sets the we could say it sets her into relief it really brings salience to her and that's a really a very typical convention in portraiture that you have the face illuminated but then you have the background dark in order to bring out this quality and so that we're really talking about something this sort of play of light and dark that's we sometimes use this Italian term chiaroscuro sort of white dark alternation that we have here another term for it is modeling when we talk about modeling and light the shade because when you have in that suggests something three-dimensional because when you have something moving in a kind of a slow transition like this it suggests three dimensions there's something about the way that we're our brains work that we see it that way but it really is a convention and I remember once reading in a book called I think it's called art in nature by Joyce Carrie who was a British novelist of the 20th century and he also painted and he talks about a situation where he showed a portrait just a kind of standard portrait nothing special to someone who I think was actually from either from India or for in any case had never really seen a lot of Western portraits and the response of the person that he showed the portrait to was well that's very nice but why is half of her face dirty which is kind of interesting because it really suggests that what we're seeing is a convention now when we talk about light and dark which are is this sort of basic fundamental building block we're talking about value and there are really two technical terms for value or there's for light and dark one of them is value and the other one is tone and they really mean the same thing the only difference is that you can only use value as a noun tone you can use as a noun or you can make it an adjective by saying tonal but they really have to do with dark and light and what I'm showing you here is a scale of values so what what you have here is that you're moving from white to black with all of these intermediaries steps so it's a little bit like a musical scale but instead of doremi you have a white gray gray or gray or you know black and one of the things that I have the students do in the early part of this course is to make try to make a scale like this just using you know like a number two pencil and rubbing and it's the whole point is that it's actually quite difficult because if you make the squares too close well then they just blend together if you make them if you make too abrupt a jump well then the whole thing breaks and it doesn't really work and an artist like a Rembrandt or Vermeer I mean these were absolute masters at this kind of careful slow use of the of the value of the value scale now one of the things about values you know this is very different but what we'll see which what we call hue and that's the term the technical term for what we we usually call it color so red is a hue blue is a hue yellows a hue and values you know this goes back to what I said about limitations it used to be you know when we had TVs you know when I was a kid of course they were all black-and-white TVs and you had your darkness or lightness switch and that just would give you values and if you remember like the kind of cartoon what is being produced around that time say go back to I don't know the the 50s or 60s you get something like Fantasia and that's a very bright colorful thing it's full of hues but it was done in the period when people were very aware of value so that it has all these scenes with torches with shadows you don't get that anymore in cartoons they're all about hue in other words they're all like you know violets and reds and yellows but there was something about or think about those Hitchcock films with shadows or Humphrey Bogart films that's you would never want to get rid of those black and white thinks that's why I've always thought that colorizing films is an act of vandalism you know because it completely takes that away well one of the things that we'll be seeing in the in next week's lecture it's called that's gonna be called it's all relative we're gonna be learning about some things that are relative and value or tone is also relative in other words if you see something that's dark next to something you know if you see something light next to something dark it might seem lighter and vice-versa and this is an interesting demonstration of that so what we have here it looks kind of like an H that's been stretched out and you can see behind it there is a kind of value scale so that here you know going from light gradually into dark and when you look at this thing it's a kind of optical illusion it looks like this part of the H is lighter than this part doesn't it look darker but it's not it's all the same you're really just seeing something that in terms of you know a relationship to what you're seeing in the back it actually changes now there are some useful terms when we're talking about value this is a wonderful photograph it's a photograph of a little construction with feathers that have been put into a white box it's a little hard to see in the slide but there's a little sort of this a white box like a frame around it it's by an artist named Catherine Aling feathers number 22 from 1984 and this really shows you in the kind of gradation of light and dark it's a good example of what we call local values so local values are there's a kind of directness there in other words what you would see under regular lighting of a kind of medium lighting you would get this kind of contrast between light and dark and there's something really special about it's a little ways reminds me a little of a yin and a yang you know the way the things sort of wrap around like that and it's just this you know and this is something by made by someone who really knew how to see I mean you know how often do we see feathers but you know putting it together in this way really is kind of remarkable now if that's if those are local values in other words darks and lights that are seen under you know somewhat you know everyday or not extreme conditions this is what we call interpretive value now this is a famous photograph by the American photographer Edward Steichen called Rhoda the thinker and here is Rodin himself and it's very much an image of genius the idea of Rhoda looking at the thinker which is really it's really him I mean he is the thinker he's thinking about the thinker and of course if you go out to the doll which was the the town where Rodin had his studio and there's actually two Rodin museums in France there's the famous one but I'm sure many of you have been to in Paris which is really magnificent and there's another one which I have to admit I've never been to in the doll which is sort of half way out Tavares I apparently have to be very careful of the opening hours but in any case that's where he's buried I next to his wife and the thinker is there you know overlooking him and of course the thinker is one of his most famous sculptures so here is the thinker and then behind here in plaster is the monument to Victor Hugo which I don't think was ever completed in its you know in the in its final form and Victor Hugo of course was this absolutely monumental genius I mean Jean Cocteau put it very well when he said Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo and you know behind him and you know this kind of cloudy it's like ectoplasm or something behind Rodin who cuts this sharp silhouette and you think about how value or light and dark is being treated in this photograph in lots of different ways it's a great variety from the sort of flat black that you see here and then maybe here as well to the the reflections on the statue and then this kind of ghostly ectoplasm like Victor Hugo that you see in the back now of course Steichen was a part of a movement photography that we call pictorialism photo photographers from around the turn of the century who wanted to give their photographs a kind of arty quality so that it's not just a mechanical tool a way of remembering things but rather a work of art in itself and that was always especially in the 19th century at least that was an issue surrounding photography is it really art this really really shows somebody who wanted to believe that but one of the ways that they're doing this is by looking at the world as it were through a kind of scrim a kind of a screen that makes everything have this really extraordinary quality now right here in the museum you can see these two portraits which together really tell us something about the handling of light and dark of modeling in different times and with different artists so on the Left we have this really striking portrait of victim you all who of course from the early 1860s and the home of course was mayonnaise favorite model she I'm sure you many of you know Olympia that she posed for Olympia she's also the woman with the guitar coming out of the cafe that you can see in the same gallery upstairs she is the woman in the luncheon on the grass I mean she really was in a lot of mayonnaise most famous paintings but here just simply a kind of bus lane excuse me portrait and what I'm comparing it with is a remarkable early work by Velazquez it's of a poet his name was Louie de góngora the ER Gautier from 1622 he doesn't look like a very nice man I certainly would you know and there's something about that nose it looks like you know maybe somebody gave him a good punch when he was younger but there's something very hard-bitten about it but remarkably specific and this is one of the qualities of what we could call 17th century Spanish realism and I'm thinking of you know very much of someone like Velazquez or a zurbarán or Rivera it's not just that it's realistic but it's specific it's a specific nose it is something that he really has gotten to know all of this and you know the idea of realism as warts-and-all you know here you have this sort of birthmark over here but the way that light and dark is handled is very very different in the two paintings so to bring out the all of those sort of features that sort of craggy features of this face Velazquez is very powerfully modeled it there are these strong darks there are strong lights but the transition between them in many ways is something that really tells you it's gradual enough that it tells you that this is powerfully three-dimensional when you're looking at the men a the the contrast between the illumination of her face here and then the side of her face here is rather abrupt and what that tends to do is that it flattens out and then a like that kind of flat look I mean for one thing he admired a flatness in Japanese prints and he didn't really want to fool your eye into thinking that this was a really 3-dimensional face that's what much more conventional artists did who were tended to be much more sentimental artists who he would see with their works hanging in the cell all the you know the official exhibition that they had in Paris and so there's a real difference here what you get in this Velazquez is a in a sense a more complete use of that value scale of tone so going the whole gamut from very dark to very light and you can see also that in the background he alternates the really dark side on the left that goes with the illumination here on his on his right are left and then over here you know the lighter going with the dark and of course just like the that stretched out H that I showed you that's really gonna throw the whole thing into relief where is victory in mio hall it's a much flatter kind of thing it's a much more two-dimensional thing in fact the painter Gustave Courbet who really in many ways painted much more like this when he saw mayonnaise painting of Olympia he said why it's the Queen of Spades stepped out of the bath meaning that it was flat as a plain card there also is a kind of flatness of emotional expression here in other words you don't really get that much sense of inner life with MANET I like to you know he was a great still-life painter and I like to think that in MANET the humans are still life objects as well it's kind of still life with human whereas in Velasquez there really is a sense here in some ways of inner life to the point where I would say he doesn't look like a very pleasant fellow you'd never get that kind of thing from and they also notice the stripes you know they'd go along with this court you know this necklace the cord around her neck but those stripes in some ways are a play on the kind of shadow that you would in a more traditional painting you would get along the edges this is the kind of thing that mayonnaise sometimes does to sort of kill the shadow I mean I'm sure many of you know that famous painting of the boy playing a5 well if you go to the trousers to the spot where you have the most shadow you have a black stripe on the pants it's what just kills the it's a curious kind of thing now these are now jumping back to the 17th century first a painting on the left by Vermeer so in northern you know painting from the Dutch Republic on the Left called the art of painting in Vienna the kusa story shows museum and then over here an Italian Baroque and early Italian Baroque painting by Caravaggio of the conversion of st. Paul I'm sure some of you know these two they're they're very famous paintings and you know there's a lot that could be said about these - I mean North versus South they you know things like that but I'm really thinking about them especially in this context in terms of light when you're looking at the Vermeer I mean just like that girl with the Pearl Earring there's something very magical about that lighting it has something very gentle and subtle about it but you can tell that even though there's a curtain here and the curtain blocks the window or wherever the light is coming from you can easily imagine that behind that curtain there must be a window which is shedding light in this way so you could say it's a painting that has natural lighting the lighting in the Caravaggio is completely unnatural it's miraculous the whole idea is that a miracle is taking place a kind of out-of-body experience in ecstasy on the part of saint paul you know who originally is Saul and he's going on his way to Damascus with the intention of persecuting Christians but he has this vision and then he becomes Saint Paul and what Caravaggio is doing here and this is very typical so much to the point that we call this kind of lighting Caravaggio iting it's a kind of extreme use of chiaroscuro where you have a boldly illuminated figures at least boldly illuminated in patches and then very dark impenetrable darkness in the back thick darkness and this does a couple of things for one thing it really heightens the sense of miraculousness because how can you possibly have this kind of lighting well I guess you could have a very intense torch over here but it just doesn't seem to work the way that we know that light and dark works in the way that's safe there Vermeer functions it's also a painting which because of its miraculousness is really intended to incite your piety I mean this is the kind of thing where it's very much what we could call a Counter Reformation image that is that it's a painting which was done sometime after the Protestant Reformation started you know with Luther and the idea here is it really is intended to be a powerfully persuasive thing it's like you think you're gonna be a Protestant I don't think so we're gonna show you this and not only does it engage you and this is something that we'll see we talk about sculpture as well and not only does it engage you in terms of the light and the dark and the sense of realism I mean this was one of the things that I think astonished people at the time with Caravaggio that you could have something that was so startling ly realistic so you could have kind of ordinary types here like this man who looks like he's a groom for the horse or something like that or a servant with that wrinkled forehead that kind of thing was really astonishing but it also was gonna grab you because of the foreshortening of the figure and this is something that we'll talk about later foreshortening has to do with seeing things in three dimensions when they tend to be perpendicular to what we call the picture plane and we'll see this in a moment and it's the kind of situation that when you're you know having those irritating 3d glasses in a movie the things that feel like they're gonna jump out at you you know that are that's a kind of those for short and things so my arm is now for short and even you're looking at it much less so when you see it like that well that kind of that sort of aggressive engagement of the of the viewer really brings us into a very baroque kind of space and we'll talk about this more later in many ways the Vermeer is really operating even though it's a baroque painting is really operating according to that Renaissance idea that the painting is a window that you're kind of looking through window whirs in the Caravaggio it's as if it's a door and the whole thing is coming out at you in this very aggressive way now foreshortening is something that we can also associate with great draftsmanship great drawing like this for example this sheet of studies by Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel and what the reason why I wanted to show you a couple of different varieties of drawing I mean drawing is a kind of medium which has to do with you could say a way of making art which has to do with light and dark in many ways I mean it is a and not only in terms of the way that it's modeled that is you know the shading along the limbs here but so the way that the what we call the exterior contours are handled so if you look at this arm you'll notice that as we get near the elbow it gets much thinner or lighter you could say that the weight of the line the weight of the exterior contour is changing and that gives you a lot of information about the solidity of the the volume the mass of the arm in other words just by changing that line and somebody like Michelangelo is a great you know one of the the greatest of all time great master of this and I like to think about the ability to change those exterior contours is being analogous to the fingers of a great pianist like a Lang Lang or a you know a cellist like yo-yo ma you know that somehow that pressure changing can change the whole thing such that you can listen to two recordings by very competent musicians who are all following the right notes but one of them is different one of them is somehow much more special and it has in part something to do with that sort of magical ability to do that now this kind of drawing which is really has to do with these very firm exterior contour on the one hand and then this subtle modeling the skier oscura the italians gave that a special name does nu and that tradition of Italian what we could call central Italian drawing when I say central Italy we're talking about say Rome and Florence that's the tradition of Nicole Angelo Raphael Leonardo da Vinci that's in many ways what came to be called drawing I mean that sort of becomes the normative kind of drawing that you are taught say in an art school and one of the reasons why that came to be is that in the 16th century the French King Francis the first photo op MEA brought a whole group of these Italians including Leonardo da Vinci who supposedly died in his arms he brought them to France to fall down below to his palace and they they perpetuated or established this tradition of drawing in France and that's the reason why I say in the in the 18th and 19th centuries France was the place to go to study drawing I mean to the point where people from all over the world went there I mean it's a little bit like with sports how certain countries have certain sports I mean if you want to study basketball obviously you come to the United States but if it's equestrian sports maybe you'll go to England you know they're gonna have the best coaches and the best tradition and somehow France becomes the place to do drawing but this isn't the only way to draw and to work with light and shade here's a remarkable self-portrait with pencil by the German expressionist kathe Kollwitz from 1933 and you can see right away that it looks nothing like the Michelangelo it really has a completely different way of thinking about light and dark and thinking about contour I mean there's relative you know the contours themselves are more suggested than is firmly in size like we saw with the nickel Angelo it also has a very expressive quality we call Kathy Cola it's an expressionist I mean someone who really heightens the emotional expression of things Jen through some kind of distortion through exaggerations this one in this case not so distorted it really doesn't seem that in fact it seems quite realistic but which does have this very expressive use of the chalk here and one of the things I love about this drawing is that on the one hand it shows her drawing it's a self-portrait after all with pencil but it also shows the marks of her drawing in other words she's drawing this portrait about drawing in a way that you can really have the sense of the hand moving with the chalk as she as she actually created this work it's also it also has a certain kind of economy that is getting the most out of the least an economy is another topic I want to talk about we can turn to Rembrandt to this famous drawing of a sleeping girl to really see a wonderful example of economy so when we're talking about economy and art excuse me mm-hmm it's a little bit like talking about economy with money I mean with economy with money how do you get the most for your dollar you know how do you get your most for your money and with art it's how can you do the most things with the least amount of marks or color or whatever and that's what Rembrandt does here I mean it really is done sort of miraculously with really relatively few strokes of it looks like maybe a reed pen or a brush and he really creates this a very persuasive image of this sleeping figure I mean even in you know very economically shading in just a little bit of the back that suggests perhaps that it's dark while he's sleeping leaving a lot of it just blank paper but the pay that blankness takes on a shape quality really experience that not just as emptiness but as part of the sleeping the part of the sleeping figure notice also how he varies the emphasis the weight again it's a little bit like I showed you with the Michelangelo veering the weight of those strokes of the marks that he makes here on the paper and that really tells us a lot so that for example he wants to give us some extra emphasis to the shoulder here by making this darker and you know it really is it's a really astonishing kind of thing well here's another way of dealing with the economy and I'm sorry this is a little bit cut off here there's actually another leg this by a this graphic artist should gaya Fukuda excuse me cold legs of different genders and you can see if you follow this thing that you're the different genders this is the male way this is the female leg down here but it's extremely economical because it's almost like an optical illusion because the same contours the exterior contours for each leg is used for the other leg as well and so it's a really clever thing there's another concept that comes into play here and it has to do with negative space so we talked about we're talking about shapes here and negative space is the space around the shape or it's everywhere that you don't really see this the solid thing that's being represented but in this case there really is no negative space because the negative space becomes positive space it becomes positive shape that is and it's a really clever kind of play with that concept so in a way you don't really get to negative space until the two ends of the image you know up here you can say well the the soles of the shoes are surrounded here by negative space or the shoals the soles of the the shoes here by this dark negative space but it's a what you can see is that this artist has really made the negative space have a positive shaped quality and this is something that a lot of great artists do Matisse for example he does those wonderful cutouts you know shapes on paper you could you know look at the white look at the white paper as well as the blue nude or whatever he has on there and you'll see that it has a very positive kind of quality there's another way of dealing with the economy and I couldn't resist bringing this because of course the contemporary show downstairs and not only is it a very economical image because of these simple shapes and of course this was a style that Toulouse Lautrec really made his name with around 1893 with the poster of Jana real you know the can-can dancer that somehow these were perfectly adopted too you know those kiosks that they have in Paris those things that look kind of like cylinders with little rooves or like a little umbrella things because these posters like this one for our st boule would be plastered on these curved surfaces and they'd be perfect for taking in the information as you went by as you were walking or maybe going by in a carriage that's very direct and to to get something like that that's so immediately apprehensible you hat or comprehended you have to have a certain kind of simplification a certain kind of economy but there's something else as well it has to do with these trademark pieces of clothing the red scarf the black cloak the black hat the walking stick these are the trademarks of the person himself and this is a little bit like you know later on in the 1960s when Andy Warhol does images of Marilyn Monroe and you know does the eye makeup and the lips so the lips become a kind of economical trademark of Marilyn Monroe to the point where he just did a whole lot of lips nothing else that's something that you could see going on here and in some ways that there's a similarity because both Warhol and Toulouse Lautrec were interested in celebrities in popular entertainment Beeler culture there's also the the economical effect of having the words here be very close to the background so or the face very close to the background in a way that really it's very legible and at the same time very economical of course you have this very strong contrast as well of the black and the red you know picked up again here where the black of the hat which is really very striking and in terms of shapes you know notice the the kind of cousin shapes of the hair and the scarf and then this fold or this hem of the cape I mean they there's a sort of family of shapes here well another concept I want to talk about is scale this may be a little surprising because it seems like such an ordinary image a photograph by Mark Cohen taken in August of 1970 simply called dog but of course one of the things that's a little bit unsettling about this photograph is how incredibly big that dog looks like it's kind of the dog that ate Chicago but you know it really has to do for one thing with point of view and that's something that we'll be getting back to that we'll be getting back to a little bit later scale of course isn't the same as size scale does involve size but it's a relationship between one thing of one size and something of another like the scale of a map you have the size of the United States out there and then you have the size of your map and there's a relationship and when we're looking at works of art the reference that we have is ourselves you know the saw our own size that we're looking at it or in this case the reference is to the houses and the car so the dog really looms up in relation to those two things and so this is a good example of a photographer who knows how to see you know a photographer who in a sense has absorbed the the lessons of learning see who can see something that's very very ordinary I mean what could be more ordinary than this but seen from an unusual point of view that creates the scale disparities or this very startling kind of scale it really becomes kind of magical and of course one of the things about photography of course is that involves sometimes these very direct choices about something that if you described it would sound very very simple but that choice in itself and of course you can do other things you can crop you can change the focus the depth of field you can change the lights and the darks and all of that those are choices as well but in this case of course having to do in part with with scale now scale in terms of relationships can also have some very interesting aspects if we're talking about religious art and in this particular case we have by enfin Ike another landish painter so working in the area that's now Belgium back in the 15th century did this wonderful painting of the Madonna holding the Christ child in a Gothic church it's all very meticulously painted you know using tiny brushes incredibly patient working out the whole thing very carefully and the the idea that the madonna is standing in a church and she's this tall because you can imagine this church you know maybe a person would be like down here or something like that that really goes along with a very traditional way of thinking about representing the madonna in other words in religious pain christian paintings you know going back centuries you can make something bigger like the Madonna or the Christ child in accord with their importance and their holiness so in other words size or relative size really denotes importance and sacredness and so that's what you're dealing with here the idea that the Madonna would be in this church there's also the metaphor of light coming the windows that an art historian Millard Mies of famously talked about as a metaphor for the virginity of the virgin in other words the light can go through the window and not damage the window and can you know illuminate the virgin in this way now that all sounds pretty standard but if you actually go to Berlin to the gemalto gallery and look at this painting you realize that it's this big it's a little tiny thing it's a little jewel so in in other words this gigantic version is actually tiny so that the you know the scale relationship here that's so startling also has this aspect of being you know being really amazing in the sense that we are looking at something that's so incredibly tiny now what that also reminds us is that an artist like you on fun Ike was very familiar with manuscript illumination and manuscript illumination tends to be very small I mean if you go to the cloisters in New York you can see the little hours of Jean dev for a little tiny book with little tiny figures that is a kind of preciousness that we have there but it's a painting then you know say a painting on wood that is you know has some of those some of those qualities so we're really talking about something that's very tiny but what if we look at something that's big so this is a work by Claes Oldenburg and koji van Bruggen called spoon bridge and cherry which is in Minneapolis in this park and you can see it's really useful that we have some figures in the photograph the figures give us the sense of give us the sense of scale and you can see that it's an absolutely enormous thing it's a really huge thing and very playful I mean very playful just as is the giant clothespin in Philadelphia now it's kind of interesting that in the Philadelphia Museum you have the famous statue by Ron koozie the kiss which I think that he must have thinking about when he did the clothespin it's kind of a giant clothespin Brancusi and I also wanted to show you this to suggest that some aspects because I wanted to talk a little bit about sculpture and some aspects about sculpture in this case a kind of compact mass it's an example of what we call direct carving when things have been carved away from the block directly by the artist as opposed to say the work of Rodin and Broncos II had started and working in his studio early on where it was done the carving was done by assistants I mean they're very different and Rodin was a modeler he really worked in soft you know and clay a very different kind of conception but this idea of mass of solidity of volume which is we often think of what sculpture can also be subverted and this is of course is up in the American the art of the Americas wing this a delightful cow by Alexander Calder that doesn't really have it's a sculpture but it's a sculpture and wire it's what we call a space drawing it's a kind of drawing in space and of course he includes the cow poop but it's a kind of negation in many ways of the solidity the kind of three dimensionality that you traditionally get in sculpture now sculptors can work with space and some very creative ways I mean that's one another is the way that Picasso really invented assembled sculpture assemblage and it was a really monumental event in the history of art when he made things like the guitar in other words it's made by addition not subtraction if you think about I mean certainly clay can and you can add things to it but if you're working in stone you're really subtracting this is addition and you could use any kind of material but it also is a work that really has relatively little solid mass it's mostly about articulating space space comes in in a different way in this work by Richard Serra it's extremely minimal I wouldn't really call him a minimalist simply because minimalism tends to not be quite as dramatic as this this is dramatic and well it's being drawn up dramatised is the weight of this heavy metal that's just one piece sitting on another I mean this is kind of dangerous you don't really want people getting too close to this but the other thing I wanted to show you and you know it's it's a little bit like a prime number you know you can't take it down any further it's just sort of weight but it also in these you know these heavy materials but it also interacts with space in a very interesting way the way that it incorporates the corner here into the work and this idea of a sculpture interacting with space can be done in a very aggressive way I mean the the Sarah is has a real macho quality but check this out this giant X which was put up in the Corcoran Gallery in 1967 by Ronald Vlad Bladen it looks a little bit like a jumping jack or something but it is absolutely dominating this space I mean it also makes an interesting kind of scale relationship with the whole thing or a work like this by Judy faff called 3d and it is very 3d that is it's a sculpture that you literally walk into so it becomes a kind of three-dimensional work which and because of the color it really has some of the aspect of a of a painting that you're walking into even though it's sculpture well another area that I want to get into since we've been talking about space is is that and what I wanted to show you this for a moment this really witty of frontispiece by william Hogarth who had a great sense of humor to a book called Kirby's perspective so it's a kind of a frontispiece to a kind of textbook on how to do perspective how to do space and the more you look at this thing you realize it's absolutely crazy that this man on a hillside is having his pipe lit by a woman with a candle here the man over here is shooting the bridge the everything is backwards the cattle get bigger as they move away from you the floor here is completely backwards in terms of the way that perspective would go and of course the fishing rod over here I mean there's even more things the giant bird and the tree and things like that all of these things completely impossible from the point of view of traditional perspective now perspective which was really one-point perspective in this case was something that was invented in the Italian Renaissance in Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi and I'll show you the kind of construction that he used if the effect is basically if you had a picture frame and you were looking down a railroad track this is what you would call the picture plane and then the point where it looks like the tracks beat and disappear that is what we call the vanishing point and of course it's just a convention you know that it's not it's like the Flat Earth thing it's not really flat just like the train tracks aren't really coming together but it looks that way now this is an actual perspective construction from the Renaissance and you can see how it uses a human as the sort of scale you know the kind of standard here and the top of the man's head here becomes where the vanishing point is and you know it's a it's something that's kind of ingenious that just like a lot of other things in the Renaissance our sort of mind-boggling that somebody came up with this but it was a way of convincingly you know took showing you how close to put say the floor tiles and the way that it affected art and this is of course in the it can really be seen with this comparison this painting by Masaccio of the madonna and child and then a much earlier painting that really predates the discovery of perspective by Chamorro hm of the way was the teacher of Giotto so that's really quite a bit earlier than this and notice how you know and this is a good example of the giant virgin that I talked about the little prophets down here very different in size and something that is similar here the giant virgin with the little angels but notice how the throne here looks like a real throne how it really goes into space and the little mandolins here one goes into space and one comes out the whole thing is really fun thinkable without this discovery of perspective and what we have here this is a painting which really shows the full blown the full blooming of this discovery of perspective this is what we could call a work from the high Renaissance by Raphael the school of athens and it's so persuasive not only in terms of the floor here but also even the sort of running spiral if you didn't actually if you don't actually visit those rooms and the vatican to see this you wouldn't know that this is an illusion this is actually flat but it really looks like it's going into space and the whole thing has a kind of harmonious Ness that really goes along with the high mindedness of the image the idea of a dialog here between Plato and Aristotle and that spaciousness is so different from the claustrophobia so this is an Italian a Southern image this is a northern image by Hieronymus Bosch the carrying of the cross where we have Christ hemmed in on all sides by these grotesque figures and there is this terrifying sense here of claustrophobia but you can also get the opposite you can get agoraphobic which is the fear of open spaces like in monks terrifying image the scream where all of nature seems to be sort of warped in a kind of terrifying moment of anxiety there also are spaces that are dream spaces and that's a kind of metaphor that we get in surrealism say that movement that I mentioned earlier of the 1920s and 30s Salvador Dali is a great master of the dream space as in this persistence of memory the shadows the modeling is all done very traditionally but the space doesn't really make any sense and of course the things that have brought together don't make any sense at all so it becomes a kind of space of dream the whole painting is only about this big so you can imagine it sort of inside your head a dream postcard as it were you can also have you know and here again connected to surrealism a dream space that's made of three dimensionally like this wonderful construction by Joseph Cornell the American really very idiosyncratic artist who created these kind of little portable dream spaces here with things you know that he found and little bits and pieces of things and there also is for example here this is a traditional tokonoma alcove in a private home in Japan the idea of a little space of peace and contemplation a very different kind of thing the sort of thing that you might find in a Japanese home now another concept and this really brings together a lot of the other concepts that I've been talking about is composition so composition is just the way that things are arranged how they come together and in this painting by Diego Rivera called flower day it was a great favorite of Jackson Pollock because he grew up he's from he was from Wyoming but he really grew up in LA and that's where this painting was he liked to look at this one it's very symmetrical and that really gives it a sense of solemnity and gravity and if you want to see something that's asymmetrical just go up in the galleries and look at the wonderful carriage at the races by de God you know which really has most of the action as it were crowded here into the lower right corner and that also has this and it really gives you this sense of something perhaps seen on the wing it also has another aspect which is cropping the way that things are cut off to create these really interesting shapes that make it look almost like something seen through a camera viewfinder and of course this one which was seen through a camera viewfinder weg and smiths si plan from World War two it really gives you a sense of how dramatic cropping can be how it can really create a pretty spectacular sort of effect you also have these chance things or seems that things that seem to be chants that have to do in part with point of view like this photograph by Henry already car chambers saw of this bicycle going by and there's something about the relationship of the path of that bicycle with the line of the staircase that is really captivating or something seen from above like this work by Janet Cummings good called floorshow where the cats you know seen from above have this two-dimensional quality where they sort of look like puzzle pieces and that idea of seeing things from onion because we're really talking about point of view here from unusual points of view you can see also in this painting by Mary Cassatt where we're looking up here in the Blue Room the whole thing takes a kind of surprising sort of compositional aspect it's really having to do with the point of view this is something that we have very much in the work of to God as well well I wanted to talk a little bit about color or hue and I wanted to make the point right away that when we see colors in paint we're talking about reflected pigments okay and when you have them all coming together the three primaries the red yellow and blue they the intersection of all of these things is really black or some kind of dark brown that's really what you might expect things get very muddy when you get them all together but if you have whites like for example this red blue and green light you get really if there are refracted pigments you get them all come together and they make white which is really a surprising thing there's so it's really a metaphorical thing the idea of temperature in color and you know it's pretty straightforward that this is cool and this is hot and hot colors tend to come forward more than others and if you go up into the modern I think it may be up right now the contemporary wing sorry it's a little bit blurry here but you can see this painting by Ellsworth Kelly and Kelly is a great color Meister he's a great balancer of colors so you have the shape here it all seems very direct and simple this trapezoid because the the color the red is much smaller than the blue it really helps create a kind of balance if you had it the other way really just wouldn't work I mean the the red would just dominate in a way that's very different if you go over in the room that has the moon a grain stacks you'll see another kind of you'll see a type of color that we could call atmospheric or ambient where it seems to be a kind of dissolve a dissolving of color in the in the atmosphere and the colors here are very very intense and that's even the case when we have a winter scene with the blue and I talked about the blue shadows before and that concept of intensity and this is another technical term we also call it saturation or chroma it has to do with the purity of the color so here we have two opposites or complementary x' yellow and violet and if we start blending them together the center one where it gets to be the most blended is dull and whereas the in there complete purity and this is just a showing you how you can have values in color too you know moving if you keep if you add white or you add black it takes away from the purity of the hue but this idea of intensity it's the sort of thing that really gets brought out when say Monet paints outside he paints on plein air and so it brings out these bright colors complementary colors reds and greens and these really are what you could call the local colors that is the color of the thing itself as opposed to what he shows you in the atmospheric color where things tend to blur and blot and become very atmospheric now this is these colors the Reds and the greens are the Blues they're very high intensity here's an example of low intensity this Russian painting by Isaac Levitt an above eternal piece and there is the sense here that somehow the colors themselves are peaceful in other words there's something expressive about the color that has to do with that lower that sense of lower intensity now color can be also a something that's very much part of composition so getting back to composition and that's something you can see in this famous really terrific painting it's one of these things that you see so many times it used to be part of it was on the you know the hundred franc bill you know back when they had francs before the euro but when you see it in person it really is just it's just a marvelous thing Liberty leading the people from 1830 by du Lacroix and what you have here is a kind of triumph of Liberty I mean she's wearing the Phrygian cap that's the cap that was worn by liberated slaves in ancient Rome carrying the French flag that the tri-colored flag which up to this point before 1830 and that was the flag of the revolution the flag of Napoleon's armies but between those times between the fall of Napoleon and 1830 that flag was banned because the Kings had come back and they wanted their white flag with little ease so it's really a triumph and so the colors of red white and blue are very important here and they radiate throughout the painting in other words the whole color gamut of the painting really has to do with blue white and red and the with a composition of course it's a great pyramid where the Liberty holding that flag makes all of the bloodshed that you see there worthwhile because it's coming up to this great meaning to this great crescendo of Liberty so color can be very much part of a expressive aspect of a painting it can also be symbolic for example upstairs the famous a slave ship by Turner where he's really trying to bring out the horror the cruelty of these of the slaves thrown overboard the ill slaves so that the captain hoping that he could collect insurance money as because they were baggage considered baggage you know horrible thing it's based on a real story but also on a poem from the an 18th century poem but the typhoon that's coming on because the whole title is much longer than the slave ship it has to do with tie this tie includes this reference to a typhoon the blood-red of the sky it really has this sense of something that corresponds with the terrible deed that's taking place and here is a here is a detail and of course Turner I mean Turner wasn't very good at painting figures he was great though at painting atmosphere and color and moisture and things like that and he really gives us a sense of that here the another aspect when we talk about a colorist and Turner is definitely a colorist as was Monet or delaqua we often are talking not just about their use of hue that is their use of color but their handling the idea of leaving physical paint on the canvas like you see here with looks like it was working with a palette knife well finally I want to talk about two very different ways of using color expressively by two artists they knew each other they were really they weren't great friends they're kind of friendly rivals they respected each other's work but they were really as different as night and day that's Picasso and Matisse in this painting the weeping woman which is really a postscript to Guernica the great painting of 1937 it really has color being used you could say it's a very expressive use of color these very sharp contrasts of the red and the blue for example going along with the angularity of the figure this figure you know biting her handkerchief the ahta tears like little beads coming out of the eyes it's all very angular but in some ways the color even though it's not really realistic it's being used in a way as local colors that you could imagine a hat that's actually blue and red now with Matisse it's something altogether different you can't imagine this is not local color at all you can't imagine someone who really has a stripe of green and a stripe of lavender on her nose I mean that's really how it gets its name the green stripe and of course Matisse never would have done something as disturbing as either this or Guernica Matisse wanted to were a kind of art that would be like an easy-chair for every mental worker that showed the joy that he took in life and in this case the joy that he takes in looking at his wife and the way that color is being used here in some ways is even is much more radical than what Picasso is doing I mean the Picasso is a incredibly powerful painting but Matisse who looks more kind of well it seems like it maybe it's not so you know fireworks and all of that is actually in some ways much more radical because what he's doing here is he's taking the idea of light and shade and which is value and he's translating it into hue in other words it would be completely conventional if the half of her face was a litmus darker those are lights and darks say if you had flesh color that was lighter flesh color that was darker but what if instead of dark light you have green pink that kind of counterpoint is still gonna you're still going to be able to read that as a face it's going to be much flatter but it's also going to be much more vibrant so that the stripe of lavender here is really like a stripe of lightness but now translate it into hue and so that the whole thing takes on this kind of radiant expressive quality but a very different kind of expression you know you could say that they're both expressionistic or expressionist paintings but very very different kind of aspect and this is just one of the things one of the remarkable things that can be done with color and next time we'll be looking at some of the picking up some of the other leads that I mentioned this time and I hope you can join us then Thanks if if anybody if anybody has a question if anyone has any questions I can try to answer them we have the other side of the room so people do have questions there's a microphone over here just raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question thank you so much can you hear me will you be talking in your next two classes about the relationship of the display of these items specifically some of those three-dimensional sculptures the big X or the jumping jack for example in the card room that's that's a really good question I think I will be doing that when we when I actually teach the course the students have to do a paper the the first paper they do that's exactly based on that where they have to go to I think it's the gallery in the art of the Americans wing you know the one where they have the guitars and the sort of art deco stuff and they have to just talk not really about the art itself but about the display about the you know even everything from the the lighting the kinds of cases you know is it something you can walk around and how does that display relate to things like the scale the size of the things you know is it something that you really want to look you know like that yann fun Ike that I showed you you know it's you can really get close to it it's in behind glass but you can really get you know you wouldn't want to have that up on a wall that's you know you wouldn't really be able to see so that's a really good question and those kinds of decisions which are really curatorial decisions they really suggest that curators really also really not have to know how to see and think about you know the art that they're showing that way and it's something that also in merchandise you know one of the things that I also do is I have the students go to Crate & Barrel and look at how things are shown there you know the colors the lighting and they choose you know they're very careful there the stores the individual stores don't have that much choice I think the you know the the Central Committee you know sort of decides how they're gonna show things and you know that can be a really interesting part of you know visual experience so anyone else have a question yes I just wanted to ask you what you can say about the origin of Kairos guru is it Caravaggio's it Italy or is it Northern Europe there I've read conflicting stories about that you know that's a really good question I mean they're both in I tend to associate it more with Italy simply because of the name you know the word but in northern Europe they were doing it as well I guess the and after you know I don't really know that's a really good question I mean it's it's one of these things that it's who knows I mean it could have been happening at the same place at the same time I mean that's the kind of I mean in the in different places rather at the same time that happens in the history of art sometimes I mean in around 1962 Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein discovered they were both painting comic books you know they didn't know that the other one was doing it but the time was right just like in the say the 1860s when Monet was going outside and painting other people were doing that it's just sort of like the time had come and I guess with Kyra scre oh I mean in both cases in both the north and in Italy what you really had was a push to make art more lifelike it was a way of making these religious stories come to life and the the light and dark treatment the cure is here oh it was a kind of fundamental way to make things look more lifelike as opposed to safe just flat you know in medieval art which tends to be much flatter and of course the discovery of perspective that technology went along also it was a way of making things more accessible lifelike I mean you know you can go back to you know Dante you know writing the inferno the the Divine Comedy in Italian you know it's it's a as opposed to in Latin you know it's a way of making me mean that's part of what the Renaissance the Renaissance was about but I mean the whole thing is you know it's why do these things happen you know what is it that brought you know Raphael and Michelangelo and Leonardo all these people working at the same time it's ultimately a mystery I mean we can come up with things that have to do with patronage and you know religion and things like that but you know ultimately it's a kind of delightful mystery no does anyone else have I have a I have a book that has that discusses color and value and it's got a very interesting picture of Monet's impression sunrise which has like a Sun in the middle right and if you take a black-and-white photo of that the Sun disappears mmm basically has made the Sun basically you know the same value as what's surrounding it exactly yeah that's a really interesting thing and when you make things very close in value and Monet often does that it acts as a kind of visual glue it holds the whole thing together and that's something that landscape painters you know going back to the 17th century and beyond they they knew that as well the thing that's really different is with Monet is he's using this hue contrast in a way that's so powerful and you know the way that you can really understand if an artist is really relying on hue rather than value is exactly that kind of effect if you take you know the question is if you make a black and white photo of it how much do you lose so for example Matisse you know it were Rothko it would look like wet cotton or something it just wouldn't do anything for you or a Monet I mean we're so lucky now that we can have these digital images it used to be that in our history books most things if not everything were in black and white really spoiled the way it is now but that's that's a really good point I think we might have time for one more does anyone have a another question all right thank you so much for coming today and thank you Tom yeah thank you [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 17,167

Rating: 4.8959537 out of 5

Keywords: lecture, course, art, art history, art appreciation, art museum, fine art

Id: fszXLO6fURY

Length: 86min 21sec (5181 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019