Toulouse-Lautrec: Between Degas and Picasso

thank you so much for joining us today and please join me in welcoming our speaker Claude [Applause] so thank you for the introduction thank you for the invitation and thank you everyone for coming so when I was invited to speak about Toulouse Lautrec I really wasn't quite sure what my topic would be and as I was trying to dig through my memory banks and come up with a topic that might be suitable for a lecture I thought about this painting this is a very unambitious unassuming painting by Picasso maybe around 1900 1901 that inaugurates the blue period now why was I thinking about this painting I was because if you look at the figure to the left-hand side who is washing herself in a tub that is immediately reminiscent of the work of Dougal who obviously had its significant impact on Picasso not only throughout his early years but throughout a great deal of his career this same configuration influence Toulouse low tech and we find that this kind of symbiotic relationship is something that lasts through even the entirety of the Casas career until 1944 and if you look at the background of this painting here you have a reference to a poster by Toulouse voltage so this small unassuming unpretentious painting becomes a kind of locus through which we can close the circle in terms of the relationship between these three Titans of 19th and 20th century art and I thought that this might be there for a suitable subject to look at low-tech in terms of his relationship to his predecessor in the gap and successor Picasso now you might think to have one image such as this to provide a panoply through which we can look at the relationship of all these artists has got to be a one-off it's got to be an isolated distant incident there can't be anything that that might play the similar kind of role well if you look at this image another look back of 1897 again something unassuming a scene of everyday life a woman who is cutting up fish to sell a very bizarre image to the extent that what we see on the left-hand side seems completely horse what is going on at the right and it might be some imaginary seeing the connection to what is taking place from the right hand side remaining somewhat completely ambiguous so the same kind of odd relationship occurs did he expect that the right hand side of the image looks very similar to these long dresses by Durga although we are dealing with laundry rather than fish you can see that the body language is strikingly similar and the edge of the table has the same kind of perspectival recession going back to the other part of the painting what's on the left-hand side this is strikingly like this very late Picasso of 1955 of don quixote and sancho panza so i thought maybe i was on to something and that perhaps the interrelationship between pieces we artists and closing the circle might again be a suitable topic of course I could have chosen something else something I discovered there I didn't know about this I'm still I started preparing for this lecture that there's a rock band called to do smoked leg I have to confess I haven't heard their music from their appearance I don't think it's quite the thing that's up my alley but even so I could also have tried to these explore the relationship between low-tech and popular culture and this is a poster for a film that John Huston directed in the 50s based on the life of low tech and shows if they then as here as you can see in the leading role I saw the film again just the other day with my wife I'm sorry to say we really didn't like it very much somehow it hasn't aged very well but that's just my opinion you should go and make up your own lines but the popularity of low tech is not something we could really sneeze at from teakettles two bags two socks you can find his images on pretty much everything his life has also been the subject of comic books mostly in France such as this one and you can see that blood cake is always surrounded by the ladies of Nam act with the usual lifting up of the skirt that is so typical of the images that he produced so that he has seeped into the popular culture in a manner that even many of us would not anticipate and here the Avengers I think this is Scarlett Johansson and replacing that we live in this poster of late 90s so I could have explored all of this if I would have had as this a t-shirt behind us I would have had nothing to lose but that's just not my specialty so let's move on to something a little bit more serious here are three self-portraits by the artists in question and of course self portraiture is a long lasting tradition in our history where the artist looks at his or her reflection in the mirror thinks about who they are what is their function in culture and society and how do they represent themselves that they represent themselves as types do they represent themselves as individuals these are questions that we often ask these early self-portraits by these three artists are striking to the extent that they engage in very little idealization and the artist portrays very few props in order to tell us who they are it seems that the looking or the perception of the face is quite often the most immediate most powerful element I'm also struck by how little finish exists in all three paintings and how they're all monochromatic this interest in the self this interesting physiognomies also led these three artists to a fascination with caricature and this is fascinating to the extent that it allows a kind of bridge between high art and lords popular culture and something that is more highbrow and this fascination with caricature is important to the extent that it allows certain aspects of a person's character or is Yagami of their face to emerge very rapid and in very sharp relief and caricature is especially interesting in our case because it is something to which these artists subjected their own image to themselves so we have a self portrait by the gap the self portrait by low-tech and a self portrait by Picasso this betrays the degree to which these artists in are interested in investigating their own features through caricature the very rapid way of exaggerating features and despite this exaggeration it nonetheless reveals something fundamental about the face and it application of character this is something of course that is not unique to these artists Dhoni and Hogarth was fastened they were fascinated with caricature as well so this is something that also intersects a broader context of the history of art but if we look at our particular artists the artists that I decided to focus on today this is a very striking image it's called prettiman or physiognomies and that do got executed in the 1880s looking at criminals and the assumption in the 19th century was that well maybe you can say something of somebody's character on the basis of the topography of their face I don't know if you are fans of the masterpiece series Victoria but you may know that the young Prince Albert is misbehaving and they are bringing him to a specialist who comes up with a skull a representation of the human face with all of the different aspects of the character of human beings located in special locations of the stuff and he's very upset with this he breaks the skull but this is something that was very much believe him at the time endorse as a point of view an attack was a kind of a mutual or equal opportunity offender shall we say here he represents in this image of a trial everyone through this particular letter so it's not just the accused it's also the lawyers it's also the judges it's also the military everyone is subjected to this kind of mode of representation that owes a great deal to caricature if you look at these images also biotech you can see that he's taking that initial image by dugong and pushing it to an extreme representations of individual characters characters that exist on the stage are seen through this particular lens the exaggeration of the physiognomies refused the darker side of the human character and Picasso did this as well he had many acquaintances actors than he even subjected himself as we see in this self-portrait on the right-hand side to this mode of physiognomy exploration which is remarkably exaggerated I shall say also as another point that will create a link between these three artists that the representation of character is not only revealed through the typography of the face features the exaggeration of expression but also through the looseness of execution as if the artist realizes that he can express his state of emotion not just in the topic but also in the way he paints the implication being that every person somehow paints differently just as every person has a different handwriting and so our character can be conveyed through that particular conduit and no differently than through the subject another intriguing link between these three artists is not just his young nummy but body language and here are three representations again Lugano Tech and Picasso of beggar's of old women in a very dire state of distress and you can see how the evocation of this distress is not simply in terms of the poverty of the setting and in terms of the facial expression but also the body language look at how they're completely compressed into this very very small area and how the artist employs very very much the same kind of pose in order to convey the emotion of the downtrodden the marginalized the individuals who are somehow separate from society this is an intriguing comparison as well between knotek and picasso not simply because the artist is focusing on the downtrodden of the marginal marginalize as I've said before but again look at the execution how the rapidity of the handling the way in which the crayon or the pencil is applied so rapidly adds to the degree and level of agitation I also found this comparison to be quite compelling in terms of the street urchin on the left-hand side by the tank and the seller of tomatoes by Picasso look at the importance of silhouette the importance of outline the rapidity of the handling and here because low-tech is very much interested in commercial publication in making illustrations for books there's an interconnection between writing and image which Picasso also seems to explore Alabama tomate meaning here the beautiful tomatoes come and buy the beautiful tomatoes for me this focused on the working class in and the body language is also expressed in this kind of polarity between let's Duga and not affect also represent laundry service and here is the body at work the body taking up the head load shifting the body in the other direction the artist is paying very very close attention to how the body behaves in everyday situations where a particular burden is imposed on the figure and here on the right hand side note leg picks up the same subject but obviously now the laundry has probably already been delivered the lady is going back to the cleaners in order to pick up some more so that the effect of the shifting of weight is completely in a sense given way to something that is more relaxed somehow less urgent but in both cases here again we have the artist looking at the working class looking at body language looking half of the body behaves under certain conditions I found image on the right hand side by low-tech also to be kind of composite here is a woman before a landscape and you can see factories with billowing smoke in the background she wears an umbrella she carries an umbrella we see her from behind and I thought to myself gee this reminds me of something and it reminded me actually of two images which probably low-tech combined in order to create his own dog asthmatic Assad at the Louvre were again she's leaning on a umbrella against the idea of body language figure seen from the back and the billowing smokes from the factory very unusual a set of images but nonetheless something that look I could have looked at very carefully what binds both artists again is this idea of expressing emotion through an economy of means very very narrow range of color and yet you can see the hand on the chin or the lowered shoulders and that the Cassidy hound figure all represent a sense of melancholia a sense of alienation a sense of despondency we see this also through seeded women that are slightly more aristocratic and we spoke a moment ago about execution and you can see the rapidity the sketch-like execution on the left you see this again picked up on the right hand side and again two seated women you can't do a great deal with the body that is seated but the collapsing the compression of that body in this particular stance gives you again an impression that the artist is interested in alienation and solitude how the figure in a sense is divorced from any kind of backdrop or activity here's another striking similarity between low-tech and Picasso they hand to the chin in both images is strikingly similar the engagement with the spectator and again the very rapid execution the strokes in the background that are as evocative of psychology and emotion as anything else this image by the gap is also quite striking it always bless you a disturb me to the extent that this figure is not just in the corner he not only has his hands in his pockets you can see how the facial expression seems again a very very acute again a very reflective of some kind of agitated mental state but maybe it's the mannequin in the lower right hand side and this figure is an artist since he is pallid and his brushes in four as if he is somehow disconnected from them but this white shirt also reminded me perhaps of what the insane patients are wrapped in when they're tucked away somewhere and I thought of this image by the title of fou meaning the madman a striking similarity between this interest in insanity in individuals who are somehow again away from the mainstream and many artists empathize would be insane especially when their arts were criticized for being crazy for being insane for being completely outside the mainstream and a kind of identification sometimes occurred between artists and the insane and again to close the parentheses between our three artists Picasso and Loco the madman was also fascinated with this same topic now going from the insane to the cafe and may appear a bit of a chump but we will see that this interest in his Yagami this interest in body language this interest in alienation is again something that runs through many other images that we will be looking at here is the gasps and absent a couple represented in a cafe here is absent a very narcotic addictive drink in that was eventually outlawed because of the ravages that it seemed to have imposed on late nineteenth century culture there's a bit of like the crack cocaine of the period but you can see how body language physiognomies again employed in this particular instance in order to express the sense of alienation if two individuals who seem to be of the images of society brought together in this we know that we don't know who they are if they have any relationship to one another the artist brings them together physically but it's almost as if they were worlds apart psychologically look at this image biotech again the glass of absinthe is very clearly indicated on the right hand side as it is on the left but also pay attention to the way in which the artist has created this tilting or table tilted towards our space in such a way to separate the figure from the spectator this kind of compositional device is typical Durga and was picked up that I wrote back very carefully this is another instance by low-tech again of two individuals meeting in a cafe but what right will be struck behind in this image is how they seem to look away from each other and this reminded me of this image by the gaff again this is not a public space it's not a cafe it's two individuals inside an interior the title is probably not the one of that dunya gave to the piece sulking but it's appropriate in the extent that it gives you a sense of what the relationship between the two figures are so body language is young to me all of these are employed by the artists in order to get the particular point across gesture is also important and here you have individuals who look at one another who engage one another this may be the high brow individuals with prostitutes prostitution was a very very widespread phenomenon in this period and we'll talk about it a little bit in greater detail in a moment but look at this gesture and this gesture by the gap this is a figure who is saying well how much did he pay you she asked and she said no more than this pointing to the space between her teeth so gesture again as important an element as physiognomies the body language it occurs again in note a la beavers here or so the painting is sometimes called the hangover and we spoke a while ago about execution and look at the looseness of these particular touches that are surrounding this figure she's in a belated obviously and maybe this could be low-tax own attempt to create a visual analog to a sense where everything is in flux everything is in motion there is no stability maybe he's not simply focusing on gesture and body language and physiognomy but also employing touch execution in order to give you a sense of what it might be like to be made narrated in this particular case not a forgetting our friend Picasso again you can see that he is fascinated with the same topic again the absent a drinker again the very same gesture of the hand to the chin again this interest in caricature and again the looseness of the execution and just to put yet another image in this particular fabric one which is even closer to caricature so you can see how all of these things in a sense reinforce one another the idea of the alienated figure added are the importance and the frequency of drink as an accompaniment to this particular subject is something that is very very poignant in the blue period that occurs over and over again whether these are anonymous figures next to their alcoholic drink a woman on a table or even Picasso's on friends such as machines test on the right hand side and again we have gesture physiognomies body language all of these things reinforce one another I can't help but bring this image in as well because we started this subsection of this section they're talking about gesture and look at the hands the way the hands create a wonderful ballet here all of this incomplete this connection to the drink in the foreground versus the way in which the human figures come close together but again though although they are physically in proximity psychologically or emotionally they may as well be worlds apart we are now going to move on to another category the stage by the way I should perhaps say the spirit of full disclosure that for the sake of clarity I divided this lecture into several topics like body language is yogge maybe the cafe the stage etc but there will be considerable overlap between them so there will be connections these categories are somewhat arbitrary and I think helpful but by the same token don't think of them as absolute and one of the things for which of course Aditya is most famous is his representations of ballerinas but it's fascinating to see the extent to which body language again is an important element and how he's interested in how the ballerina caves before the performance and how the ballerina in a sense could be excuse me could be one ballerina and in a succession of movements or maybe different ballerina so we're not sure if it's one in ballerina or different ballerinas whether it's a one in different moments in time or a succession of progression the same thing happens to real tack you can see that this is the tube that was a big 19 and here we find all the ballerinas here this is popular can-can dancers rather than ballerinas but just as we saw that somehow there are two 2's merge into a single unit again making it difficult to know where one leaves off and the other begins a low-tech employs very much the same strategy and what is of course prominent here are the legs which were never shown in quite this manner before which was extremely shocking but even so you can see how the skirts merged together in a kind of homogeneous mass this is something that Picasso picks up on again himself the same is true here on the left-hand side the inclusion of lettering is also get back to that later in the lecture is also direct correlation to low-tax employment of the poster as an advertising form and here we find it in Picasso on the right hand side this fascination with the can-can dancer the exposure of the legs and again the looseness of execution that we saw in the previous work in this piece in particular that where as fascinating is again the merger of the skirts something that we saw in the gap something that we saw in Picasso something that Picasso picks up on as well here's a detail of another note right piece to show how the facial features in Picasso's images are strikingly like those of look like just a few years prior to his own execution this is another intriguing comparison this is Chyna veal on the left-hand side biotech and a study of a dancer by Picasso on the right and here the point of intersection is the extent to which the skirt takes on a life of its own it's like an abstracted Phoebus shape that is in with a phenomenal degree of energy so it's almost as if you have the dancer on the one hand and you have this independent force this independent form that almost has a will of its own and we find that Picasso again seems to recreate the same kind of effect although I tend to think of this also is very close to a pallid shape as if the creativity of the dancer is connected to his own creativity as an artist of course in terms of the dance we spoke about the guy being very famous for his representations of ballerinas discipline the remarkable training that is required to take a human body and impose this kind of pattern upon it is something that runs throughout his production the lifting of the hand of the feet in this particular manner but this image on the rock on the left hand side is rather intriguing it strikes a kind of odd note in the gods in the extent that the features are almost the kind of caricature and the body type seems to be slightly different at what would what one would expect from a ballerina and it seems somewhat reminiscent of this image by the tag here you have the kicking feet but somehow there's almost a sense of making fun of the ballerina too just as you are respecting the degree of control and discipline that she's imposing on her own body now I thought about the cow so and Picasso also has an image of a ballerina kicking her feet although this is more of a historical representation of Salome but he also had this kind of interest in caricature and making fun of the ballerina and we'll talk more about moment I thought this was a striking correlation between the representation of the ballerina on the left hand side very very rapid and the economy of means that is employed by no type on the right going back to the stage and looking at how these three artists are going to represent the idea of the performance one of the things that strikes us immediately about yoga is how he places us in the midst of the public and it uses color and a spatial disjunction to differentiate the stage and it's artifice from our own location in the realm of the public this occurs in knotek also at the circus again you have a differentiation between the foreground and the background army with other performers what is the dis what is the connection between the background and the foreground and Picasso does this as well representing the stage from a distance placing us in the midst of either the public or other performance were not exactly sure so what these three artists are doing is basically linking at the artifice of the performance and shifting our perspective we go from the stage to the public and to a particular space where we see both at the same time this fascination for example with the public is immediately discernible in this comparison between the guy on the left and of course built by contrite and visitors at the MFA my think of course obnoticus at very famous image that you all know very well but that's about 10 years after the gas on the left-hand side so the idea of looking the idea of perception is very intriguing here and so is the idea of let's say the public also going to the theatre also going to a performance for themselves to be seen and look at this really dramatic way in which Picasso has lifted his own image from a low tech by the way Picasso is very famous is saying a good artists borrow great artists steal and as far as thieves are concerned that Picasso is up there with the best of them so look at again the employment of caricature and body language strikingly similar in both images the very perspective and the use of the noise again and its differentiation from space as a dramatic sort of diagonal in both cases and again look at the rapidity of the execution the looseness which which the artist creates the work as if to also exacerbate our sense of immediacy we have a sense that were there that we are in we are looking at this particular scene with a great deal of authenticity and transparency here is another intriguing comparison the way in which Picasso was fascinated with spectatorship and he in fact probably was the closer participant in the theater than any of the other artists were discussing to the extent that he also designed sets for Diageo lev and we'll talk more about that in a moment now one of the other fascinating things about the theater about performance about the stage is the invention of these new artificial lights gas lighting or even electricity which creates very very dramatic disfiguration and discoloration of the face as it is lit from below this is something that obviously interested a gaff it's something that's picked up by low tech and it is something which also helps us explain if you look at this image one of the early ones that I showed you many people were completely dumbstruck by these three forms and for thinking that perhaps low tech was fascinated with anticipating abstraction but if you look at their reappearance in the background and if you look at other images such as these by the way it's obvious that these represent lamps but that they're not abstract shapes at all only that look like in a sense very concisely with the great economy of means managed to represent them in this manner we find that lighting again distorts are the representations of human figures this is the image which obviously displays this to great effect I wanted to also pay attention to these figures in the background this is low-tech depicting himself with a friend of his you can see how similar this is to this double portrait of himself and a friend by picasso and even you can find this image by picasso again highly indebted to the one by the lake on the right hand side I had no place to put in these images so I shoved them in here I found this as an excuse but the real point I wanted to make before I so limit li interrupted myself was the distortion that we had seen in the previous images that again is picked up in this particular painting of like at the Moulin Rouge and again this image that we saw by Picasso again you can see the distortion of this under underlining distorting the features of the figures and changing their coloration to something highly artificial this is an intriguing image also because you can see much of this under lighting here and now we see the stage from the vantage point of the performers so these artists are exploring again multiple multi perspectives they put you in the context of the of the public they put you in the context of the performers this is the gap again no track does this many many times and again these particular abstracts forms and give you an indication of what those shapes actually represent that they're obviously lights and we find Picasso involved in the same situation the pulling of the curtain is a theme that we occurs many times we'll see that in a moment and again looking at the performance from the vantage point of the performer this is another manifestation that is quite intriguing in this period the Catholic on say so now we're back to this idea of looking at the stage through the perspective of the public and how to isolate a number of figures from the mass what we have is the artist using these from diagonals against verticals and horizontals and identifying a particular couple for us as the spectator to focus on you can see this in low-tech as well there's a mass in the background there's an isolation of several figures in the foreground and again this dramatic diagonal and horizontal against which the artist is constructing his particular space we find this in Picasso again again one particular very very dramatic horizontal one diagonal sets of individual set in the foreground as opposed to this mass in the background so the individual versus the group the geometric construction all of these are particular points that are the great fascination to all of the artists one of the things that is also quite significant and this began with Duga is to take a very very odd vantage point here we are looking for two men we're looking at Miss Lala from below here we're looking at ballet dancers from above this radical cropping of this figure is again another point that these artists will go to as a model so looking at things from above looking at things from below the different kind of orientation point we find this in the track as well we're looking at this figure from below we are looking at these trapeze artists from below as well I mentioned that Picasso designed sets for jagganath this is one example this is for Pulcinella set to music by Stravinsky incidentally in case you're interested and we have again a representation of the public now within the set of what takes place on stage so that blurring of what belongs to the performer what belongs to the public and which part of the stage are we in is again blurred but the point I wanted to make is again seeing things from a low perspective and the distortion of perspective that takes place as a result here are other images by Picasso again you are looking at thing from above here's a performance that left-hand-side 1901 and 1960 so Picasso was fascinated with these disjunctions in perspective throughout the entirety of his career this is a fascinating image to the extent that the spatial disjunction now is occurring by means of being corporations of the heads of these double basses so again the artist represents a schism in space and the intrusion into that space of something that belongs elsewhere we find that low-tech picks up on this immediately again it's something that occurs very very frequently in dugong we're in the midst of the public space we're looking at the performance and this particular project intervenes between them here's another image by the God which does the same thing and which is of course the very inspiration for this image biotype on the right hand side picasso does this to the yin here is the double bass picked up from the tag who picked it up from the gong by the way both of these artists are not represent or neither of these artists are representing anything realistic to the extent that if any of you go to the symphony you know that the double basses are to the right side with the cellos not to the left-hand side as they are depicted here all of which suggests that despite their look of realism these works always artificial and highly contrived speaking of contrived and artificial and this is probably a stretch on my part but I like the juxtaposition of the musical instrument and the sheet music which Picasso did later during his synthetic cuba's phase and which may have the connection with Tech or maybe not we had mentioned a radical cropping that the God likes to engage in very early on and we find that these ballerinas rehearsing are all striking the same pose and as we try to make sense of it we then realize that this foot doesn't belong to any of the ballerinas here it actually belongs to a ballerina that exists somewhere in our space this very radical form of cropping it was very very revolutionary at the time and some people attributed it to the invention of photography but in fact you don't find in photography such a radical cropping of anatomy in this manner and for this reason maybe low-tech looked at the gap very much with this intu in mind when he created this version of ballet dancers with the hands he lurched out of nowhere just as these feet of the ballerina that we had seen in the last work what's also fascinating about the stage and again something that unites all of these figures is the way they're interested in the acknowledgement of the spectator or to the spectator of the performer at the end of the performance the implication is that there is an acknowledgement here of the artists of the performance itself when the willing suspension of disbelief is basically eliminated and the the performer now says I acknowledge the public acknowledge that you are here and what you saw was a performance and nothing else and here is event in Bay doing precisely the same thing acknowledging King the applause from the spectator and here we find Picasso doing exactly that so this is an intriguing connection again between them between these three artists in the extent that the artifice of the performance is something that they bring to the fore if we go back to this image again I was interested in the way in which the artist is making us look at the performance from the vantage point of the performer look at this figure here who is basically following along with the text in order to it in case an actor forgets their lines that they can give them the little heads up and here you have the same thing in no type and you have the same thing in Picasso so again these three artists seem to be very very much fascinated with the same kind of topic the same kind of acknowledgement and the dispelling of the illusion if you will so that we can say there's a kind of drawing of the curtain back to see what takes place and as a theme in terms of our interesting body language throwing the curtain back relates to God to no tank and even to Picasso yet again I'm also fascinated by this particular the comparison to the extent that low-tech represents a figure with very very few touches with makeup and then he represents him taking the makeup away I don't know if you saw the film the Cabaret that came out late 70s there's a fantastic scene where Liza Minnelli is about to go on stage and her expression is extremely serious and she just snaps into a smile the curtain opens and she goes on stage which demonstrates again what happens behind the scenes and how the artist changes the performer in order to engage in the performance and just as we saw drawing the curtain being important things this occurs here as well and we don't know in this pickup so figure whether he's behind the scenes where he's in whether he's in his own dressing room all of this is ambiguous and so behind the scenes is an important element as well look at this on the left hand side we'll type on the right hand side again it's not performance but it is a figure fixing her tutu same thing occurs on the right hand side and the artist is interested in that voyeuristic point of view let's look at what happens not when the figure is performing but when the figure is preparing for the performance this is another fascinating representation doog on the left leg on the right the body language that is struck by the performer behind the scenes again you see that the discipline of the body of imposing it kind of pattern upon the the body's natural proclivity to move is something that is still there even while the dancer is wrestling and a point I also would like to draw your attention to is the background how the artist employs let's say the brown of the paper to create an entire ambiance here's another fascinating representation of what happens behind the scenes the two clowns sharing a moment of intimacy in the tank and and that for Picasso as well that these people have an emotional life behind what we see behind the curtain and this is meant to be represented as well this is fascinating to the extent that the mother is an important figure behind the scenes that she helps the dancers fix their costumes you find this in the gap you find this in no type also that the mother is someone that accompanies the poor dancer while she has to await the results of an examination she shares the anxiety she shares the nervousness and yet again these two figures are very close physically but they also are worlds apart psychologically did the extent that it is one who has to perform and the other one has to wait and again look at the pose she is no longer performing and yet the imposition of the logic the structure the artifice of the ballet pose still remains upon her as it does in these two figures biotech meaning even while they're at rest the dancers strike the same pose where does performance leave off and the natural propensity of the body that come in this is another figure now by Picasso you can see the compression of the body that we have mentioned earlier the sense of anxiety and alienation is also something that pertains to performers look at this particular comparison the anticipation of going onstage now how do you prepare yourself how do you prepare your body how do you prepare your emotional state before you go and do your performance this is something that these artists share asked us again the even more a mundane gestures of fixing year to to of fixing an article of clothing rather than the actual performance on stage it is those more mundane particular incidents that the artist adores Picasso eventually married a dancer olga in the 1920s when he was very much involved with a buddy who's with jackie Lev and so the idea of performance and we her so is also something of interest to him and you can see this go back to the God on multiple occasions again the artist is rehearsing look at the poses of the feet very strikingly similar between both images but if you think back to that particular comparison I introduced earlier that there's an interest in caricature they're also an interesting ridiculing the performer you can see this in this set of images again where the body tying and the facial features are not exactly what one would expect from ballerinas even though this tension between performance and rest the natural body versus the body in a sense a compressed into this artificial state of the ballet is another dichotomy that think also shares as well the circus was very important to both artists again you can see the performers backstage preparing this is something that we find in the gap all the time this is again the idea of looking backstage from that particular area we see something that we're not normally privy to this is a fascinating image how the two in a sense give you the perspective of the bounce to go in the stage from the sidelines this is just remarkable how closely both artists are taking the same perspective and vantage point and here what is fascinating of course is how the body gets contorted what do the performers do they are on a trapeze the innocence hang upside down and we find that Picasso loves all of these elements themselves hanging upside down hanging from a trapeze and again walking in this tightrope you have to see the or think about the degree to which someone like no Ted who as you probably know from his biography was very fragile physically could not do very much he must have greatly admired these performers who were able to push their body to the limit no less than the ballet dancers and how this exaggerated their physiognomy and their their body type so that parts of their muscles were highly developed other parts were not and again this fascination occurs with Picasso too by the way many people went to entertainment spots in France at this time entertainment was extremely popular that whether it's the stage whether it's the circus whether it's the ballet whether it's the the cafe can say all of these things were basically extremely popular with many members of the permission populace at this time this may be another stretch on my part but this of course but you can see this acrobat doesn't have the torso as perhaps being another synthesis of these images so the legs from back the arm is going downwards the face and also trust in an uncomfortable position it seems as though the costs of synthesized these elements from low-tech and created another variation on the Acrobat this is another fascinating image from my perspective to the extent that it's a representation of the surface and you can see that the horse and the the viscera or the the figure is taming the horse are all permeated in very much the same manner of course Picasso pushes this to an extreme and we sing on the baton and the D string here creating the entire piece out of a single line so you can see the line here creates this entire figure and the horse is also created by one continuous line and you're wondering well what could this be he cheated Lobo represents milk egg gives you the perfect clue it represents the ringing of the surface itself so another way of connecting both the images we spoke about the degree to which the rotate must have been intrigued with feats of physical prowess the women who ride horses sidesaddle with very very little protection is something that he focused on a great deal in his illustrations of the surface and Picasso did as well see the same kind of theme but there is something that Devon lines that Picasso from low tech in that there is a sense of rigidity a sense of discipline a sense of almost oppression in the text images of the circus and I will come up with the particular rationale for this in a moment but before I get to that I want to pay attention for us to pay attention to this image or again I'm going to have two horses on the left-hand side in two figures and we have two figures on the Picasso image as well and I would like to think that somehow Picasso was drawing an attention and his part our attention from the highly developed representation of the horse's head versus the Emperor background that he was towing upon attack when he did this very same image but he decided to quit for some reason somewhere in the middle so this particular this particular theme runs throughout the cosmos career even some five years before his death he still represents the woman on a horse as a incident an example of physical progress to the extreme now if the cops though then both had looked at the surface performed for their physical skill they also hoped that the performer one of the vantage point of Tara pitcher that in mentioned the moment ago to the extent that there's a certain silliness to the surface to the way in which this particular theater is trying to make the dog perform and the dog seems to have a mind of its own perhaps unwilling to participate in the spectacle find that no techniques up on this immediately and that kind of silliness is exemplified not only by the elephant that is obviously ill suited to the particular that stool upon where we sit but also this Dalton what do you want me to do this mainly through looking individual trying to make the dog do something which the dog is unwilling to do so there's almost less in the representation of the climbers of the server performance by three cables there's longer leash praises the physical promise of the performers and the mother in which in a sense makes them look ridiculous there's another low-tech fear this is a duo climbs pratik and Checotah a male duo of white and black performers and you can see the degree to which again this figure looks completely ridiculous and this was something there Picasso noticed as well look at how this video completely oversized on a horse draws attention to the in which the surface is not only something to be pleased but also something to be ridiculed in these artists and we can go back to don't eat that sugar not here look at how this image of the cloud is caricature taken to an extreme and we find this again we pick up so in this figure of the clouds later in his career with this extremely phallic nose so again this bifurcation actually believed a tripartite distinction it's done just better the castle and will take place the physical prowess of plant or sometimes ridicule them they also see them as tragic figures here we find an intriguing a correlation between a meaning by nuga the Harlequin and Columbine two circus performers where the minimum animal the Harlequin is usually a trickster and a very very clever performer here he's in a sense in the position of the supplicant yearning for the affections of the lady who seems to be uninterested in him completely this is exacerbated on the right hand side where the figure of the clown is practically praying to complete so there now we have a more tragic more melancholic representation of the planner and in fact often in a sense like to trace out this image of the clown can almost be seen as a self-portrait precisely because this figure looks not just Spanish but looks like a dwarf so this would be a kind of displaced self-portrait on the tax part we can say the same about the council whose representation of Harlequins and cables again lasts throughout his career but this image is especially intriguing because it represents him as a Harlequin next to a woman with whom he had an affair across the suicide of the friend of his so there's a dramatic connection in the council's work with the Harlequin and melancholia and maybe with a part of the Queen in the death all the villages and is to say that the representation of the clown is remarkable in ecstasy and in finality in the work of these three artists this is another fascinating image by Picasso because again it represents the strongman we've seen before and it represents the lady on the horse and this is a self-portrait by Picasso and he was also very sure in stature as ceremonies for us to defeat himself also as a fourth also as a cloud also as somebody a very short stature and if we go back to this image biotech look at how close it is to this image by Picasso again we have the neutrality between the supplicant cloud and the beautiful woman who basically has no interest in him and is in effect drawing attention to how small he is and how in effect he will never win her affection so here we have another connection between those back at the castle and again both of them love to dress up both of them like to dress up as flowers as we see in this image and the planet becomes again an object of ridicule in this particular image and the clown with the red nose seems to be completely besotted with this figure as is this Imperial Picasso of the woman who will take no attention to him this image my Picasso is also reviewing to the extent that the figure the dwarf is the artist himself if this analogy was not persuasive before it is here now because the artist is basic in the cloud and the cloud is Marcus so when we think of these figures this is basically that is connected between both eight years in picasa animal tech now I had mentioned before that there was a certain melancholy in the export of these services well and one should perhaps put these images in context to be extent that low-tech suffering from syphilis he also suffers from anxiety depression and was committed to an asylum by his family but his addiction to alcohol exacerbated all of these problems and to prove that he was saying actually ok executed all of these images of the circus from memory to show his doctors that actually he was well enough to be released but you can see in an image such as this that he is in a sense force to do this for a particular purpose and that he empathizes the circus performer and look at the dichotomy between the way in which these horses are remarkably elegant and yet disappear without problem that a colleague were going back to this interest in his nominee and body language that we get mentioned before and this could be no techno self forced to represent these images in order to prove his sanity to doctors and using the circus performer as again the kind of suffering itself if we look at this image it's always striking that somehow double language is this a clown with the horse they are they representing something funny something clumsy or is there something more serious you this image reminds me of these images of death horses by the member or images by Picasso where the horse in the context of the bullfight is basically disemboweled by the boat and of course we know that the space variable in Nica and in the sketches for that painting where the horse becomes in effect the surrogate for the Spanish people were disappointed by Franco so when we look at this image and as I was thinking about this lecture I came across this piece biotech very unusual in kind of illustration for total Makia meaning the bullfight it's probably only image in his entire production that you use with this topic and includes a skulls head which of course is extremely important see in the castle again something very many of you who knew that this connection would occur but going back to this image again we are drawn to this correlation and don't want to give the unity in what look that is quite a debate is this something fun is this something serious this is something and traumatic or is it simply a celebration of the service so speaking about horses the horses are topics that were very close to the hearts of both will tank and Picasso and in fact they're very very first images that we know are Delta forces this is a child's drawing biotech and again you can see representations of horses and the statement by the cow so although only in fact the subjects are different in that as we said earlier Picasso is more interested in the bullfight and will take us more interested in carriages and horse race this comparison is fascinating to the extent that the bank also did this childlike representation much later in his life and so did the castle so this interest in the child was very very radical for two artists who are working now as adults and Picasso very famously said that one Queen in his life and worked very hard to unlearn everything that you've been taught whether he wanted to in a sense to all my child again of course horses have a more serious quality the horses stay knowing the gap again we find the signal tank the horse as there we find individual animal extremely sensitive be Bradley in order to perform to the highest possible degree and like a ballerina the horse has to be under control natural propensity toward movement has to trained so that all of its sound during all the ways animalistic trades have to discipline in order for the horse to perform in a particular manner so again we got a peg to adapt a little deck you can see how remarkably similar that their particular studies are this is another fascinating image that comparison I cheated by making sure that the background horizon with line up because I always tend to think of the preparation if the horses are now the horses are preparing for motion preparing for the race and this is the full engagement that we see on the right hand side so this particular comparison I think is instructive to the extent that developers fascinating with the preparation before the race rather than race itself we can look at these paintings for hours it's all sorts of connections look at this for example line and one body of the horse beats with the other look at how we have an interconnection between different elements of blowing up perfectly I love how this line meets under the line of the sleeve and we meet some of the line of the coat in creating the perfect Junction this happens in okay also you can see how this line meets up this line this creates a perfect triangle and again the edge of the chin needs some of the horizon line and meets up to the collar of this date but again we can spend hours looking at and finding out although this composition alignment but the point I want to make is how both artists interested in the preparation before the race rather than the race itself we see this again in this representation might look out we spoke about the horizontals and the diagonals and cancellation of the individual versus the group this occurs in this painting this occurs again in this particular domain and what is fascinating except on this - but because the moves forwards development of the university wants to leave the specific time he picks up on a body language takes up propose but it moves away from the human now to something a little bit outside of time in the place I found this - making comparison - between the didactic also and even if the glue gas somehow is again distinctly grounded into the idea of the horse face this is something that moves in completely different Picasso does this on numerous occasions the EndNote Bank is putting the horse back to the stable back to the paddock here we have the more abstract representation even though this is labeled the circus the specificity of the performers costumes I think are now moving into another level and I think more important than anything is this comparison where again we are now I didn't have to keep this violet rising perfectly without my having to do anything but what is striking is how the particular context of the image on the left units to something as I said more abstract or universal if we know where these people are going if we know basically the context in which they are fulfilling your purpose we don't know that at the council winner is the only going where is the horse going and look at this completely desert-like landscape it seems to demonstrate that somehow there's a greater sense of alienation and melancholy in the castle we see this and these are not horses these are dogs but again we can see that the figure on the left is obviously aristocrat a young boy in a sailor suit with his dog versus a very very poor figure on the right hand side so we look at this connection again I seem to have mistaken the amount of time I am did to represent you to represent the connections between these three figures of the meters very good let me go very quickly behind the last section of the representations of three years in contacts million years Dada and not whether to get the fashionable lady and gentleman in this particular case a sense of informality these figures that receive active effect also and also a sense of melancholy the downtrodden seated figure the class hands we see this in the gospel - so the fashionable gentleman that has a certain sense of control but there's also a sense of melancholy and isolation as well this is a disturbing side to these years as well the oversized pompous gentleman full of makeup again the red lipstick on both cases is a connection to them but if we think about also the representations of women in the background demonstrates that there's an almond relationship between men and women in this period some think that all three artists will be interested we go back here to the stage but the point I want to make is that this figure of the man in the background seems to suggest that there's a relationship of power between men and women that the upper classmen and the lower classical languages representative as the dancer somehow create a relationship will be similar to be told which is and it is in some other representation which depict the body language in the physiology in a manner that is hard or direct look at the way these men have corner these women that those or ballerinas have nowhere to go and they're under pressure to succumb to the advances of these particular figures look at how again of the human million years are much dominant work totaling than the females in years and if it is in a sense subtle in the gap it's much more obvious in representations of rotate as we see on the right-hand side that the employment of this gesture is almost one of extreme violence and we find the same representation in the console again the man with the top hat is a self-portrait surrounded by naked figures and I might end with this particular image which is extremely satirical that managed to pass the beauty that walks past and here not the males are themselves rather than again no less ridiculous sarcastically [Applause] [Applause] [Music] circus performers dancers joy there's a sadness there's a sense of alienation and darkness all these figures I haven't seen kind of well that raises a point as to whether that particular term by the book is really quite accurate it's more a label than anything else just as whether it's a we say the Dark Ages we say Renaissance and we think that one particular label encapsulate hundreds of years and basically labels and fixes a descriptor to opinion that has remarkable complexity they're poor they were rich they're happy they're sad people as so those particular labels these artificial and against I have to say that this was a period or so these people design in France to the extent that this let's say between the franco-prussian war that world war one was a period of lanes technological breakthroughs and was also - to all the dark ages is nothing more than a gross over generalization and these artists they constantly particularly was the poorest of the three in terms of is in terms of early to permaculture and this is why the gas paintings are just about ballerinas they're really missing the entire planet it's not of course only about the unity of control and discipline and the the difficulty feed the ballerina but it's also those relationships the power between men women were very sensitive to this in the new era but these sort of issues of black ice flowers type of space and they were very very CUTE indisputable in fact in the literature at the time you have about three minutes that come from the lower classes and that in order to sustain the existence sugar that to sustain themselves so this was something that was part of an entire food that was explored at great depth not just by artists writers as well again to use the cliche space again what you see is not yet but also I just as a follow up to your to your question and also in regard to something that I got to mention how the service performer is in many respects of the surrogate for the artists so the partisan way and the authority speakers they saw their mother struggles in them and the idea of control let's say that we have a natural proclivity to as human beings but the ballet or the circus imposes very sweet should decently and in artists on the back Artie natural propensity to that we seen his art itself because art has to look spontaneous but it is extremely controlled it's extremely control my favorite quote of the entire Mississippi are actually coming together but he said that there was nothing spontaneous about my work that the work that the accretion of the work of art and artists as much premeditation and forethought as the perpetration I like Jackson Pollock - Lisa expecting diamond is abstract [Music] when we think of the performer what do you think of the ballet master you can see the gas saying my heart is the same thing it has to look as though it's executed on the fly but don't thank the Texan you do down deducted no attention to him well that was a bit of a shock when when the Impressionist asked him we do exhibit with us he said he did exhibit with the laser when they asked him when you go and paint outdoors with us said no art is not a sport so he had a bigger than detached quality about him it was not always easy to be in touch on a personal level but it's obvious that no tech knew about him inside by the time that Picasso came on the scene I don't think he had any personal access to that would have been impossible he may have crossed no hang on I don't know many documented instances of their meanings and by that time the tag was pretty much that's life so I think they have [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 48,356

Keywords: Toulouse-Lautrec, french art, european art, art history, modernism, course, lecture, degas, picasso

Id: f399l3ot12Y

Length: 79min 27sec (4767 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019