Patrick Bade
Early American Modernism

Patrick Bade - Early American Modernism

- So, well, wish me luck because this is my first attempt to give a lecture with my new internet connection, and it looks promising so far. So, let’s keep our fingers crossed. So, tonight I’m going to look at the development of American art between two Epoch-making exhibitions. The first Impressionist show that took place in Paris in 1874, and the Armoury show that took place in New York in 1913. And the first artist I want to talk about is Mary Cassatt. She was born in Pennsylvania in a suburb of Pittsburgh in 1844. Pennsylvania it seems to have played an inordinately important role. I’m not quite sure where that would be. Maybe some people can give me some clues to that. She was born into a fairly wealthy, very cultivated family, liberal, because against with some parental misgivings they allowed her to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy, which was an unconventional thing for a woman to do at the time. She was a student alongside Thomas Eakins. And in 1866, ahead of him, but actually around the same time as Winslow Homer, she headed off to Paris with her mother as a chaperone. And again, like Eakins she enrolled in the studio of Jean-Leon Gerome who that was the most prestigious studio of Paris to train in, but unlike Eakins she was not happy, she did not like his teaching and she really didn’t like his art either. So, she went to the Louvre, and it was actually the study of the old masters, a particularly Spanish painting I would say, that inspired her, and she learned from that. Well, she had to go back to America, of course, in the Franco-Prussian War 1870 to 71, but she returned to Paris in the 70s, a very exciting time of new developments in French art with the birth of Impressionism.

And for her, really, the key encounter was with Degas and his art. She saw his art first, was absolutely transfixed by it, and she described it, her meeting with Degas, as really a life-changing experience, perhaps the most important encounter of her life. And they had a long, intense, maybe slightly, well, no, certainly rather spiky relationship from time to time, as these two images testify. The left is a portrait by Degas of Mary Cassatt that he gave to her. She absolutely hated it. And I mean, she didn’t destroy it, thank goodness, but she certainly wasn’t keen to show it to anybody in her lifetime. And on the right-hand side is a Degas pastel of which actually shows her in the Louvre seen from behind, and rather maliciously he used to tell people that he made this to show the ignorance of women before great art. In fact, I think he respected her, oddly enough, Degas, who made these terrible misogynistic comments all through his life, but he was much more appreciative of women artists than almost any other great artist of his time. He, well, he was a great admirer, of course, of Bette Morisot as well, and was later a supporter of Suzanne Valadon and a mentor to her. Maybe you can sense what the trouble was with this portrait when you make this comparison, because this is a self-portrait by Mary Cassatt on the right-hand side, wearing in fact what seems to be exactly the same get-up that she’s wearing for her portrait by Degas.

And of course, I think Degas really has caught her. She was quite a fierce, quite a tough character. And that comes across strongly, I would say, in Degas’ portrait. And once again, we can compare Mary Cassatt by Degas on the left with another self-portrait that she made on the right-hand side. So, that was 1875. As I said, the first Impressionist show had taken place the previous year, 1874. The young artists of the Impressionist group, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, found themselves excluded from the salon, and really as a measure of desperation actually, they set up a group show in a photographer’s studio in the Rue Le Pelletier and that, of course, every art history student knows that date, 1874, it’s one of those key dates in the early history of modern art. It was not actually a success at the time. It wasn’t that well visited, got terrible reviews, and they sold very few pictures. Mary Cassatt took part in the later impressionist shows. She was introduced by Degas to the group. And the painting you can see of a poppy field on the right-hand side, I think one could really, one could describe that, yes, that is an Impressionist painting. And it has a very obvious debt to the very famous Monet poppy field, which was in the second Impressionist show in 1876. Now, of course, it’s one of the most loved and familiar paintings in the world, at Grace’s hospital wards and dentist’s waiting room, it’s thought to be a soothing image. It’s difficult to imagine now how provocative it seemed, and how difficult it was for people in the 1870s. But yes, so Impressionism is certainly momentarily an influence on Mary Cassatt, but if you see a somewhat later, a mature picture like this, I wouldn’t really describe this as an Impressionist picture.

For a start, I don’t think it’s painted on the spot, out of doors. This is definitely a studio picture. And she’s not concerned with light atmosphere. She’s not using loose, broken brushwork. Her approach here is very linear. And in this, of course, she is following Degas rather than Monet, or Sisley, or Pissarro. And to some extent, of course, she’s also influenced by Degas’s subject matter and his approach to it. But here we notice differences, partly inevitable, because of gender, the difference in gender. The toilette was one of Degas’s greatest innovations, these, what he called his keyhole nudes, where they have a slightly voyeuristic element to them. It’s as though you’re looking through the keyhole into a bathroom and you’re watching a woman unaware that she’s unaware of being observed while she’s going up, you know, she’s combing her hair, drying herself, washing herself or whatever. And there are dozens and dozens of these. It’s a long series that he did over many, many years. And he himself, he said he’s interested in woman as a human animal. He said, he once said, or perhaps I’ve gone too far in this direction of treating a woman as though she’s a cat or an animal. So, he’s not really interested in any of these women as individuals. Whereas if you look at the Mary Cassatt in the middle, this girl, not especially beautiful, certainly not presented as sexy, but she’s very individualised. You see her facial features, and they’re quite sharply individualised and described. And there’s a kind of human interest here in her as a human being that Degas almost never shows in his depictions of women. Mary Cassatt was, I think one can say, a feminist, although that term didn’t really exist at the time. She, throughout her life. She fought for women’s suffrage. She fought for equality of the sexes. She had a very powerful mother who encouraged her in this.

This is her portrait of her mother. I think one sensed straight away that this is a very strong woman. And the picture makes a statement. Here is a woman reading a newspaper, Le Figaro. So, this was really not something that women were supposed to do. This was a man’s realm to be interested in politics and current affairs and so on. So, this is, as I said, I think this is a very clear and strong statement that Mary Cassatt is making. And I show you two contemporary pictures, the Fatamonis a few years earlier. It’s called The Breakfast. Monet has, this is his family, his wife Camille, his son, and they’re having what looks like a wonderful breakfast, brioche, and wonderful bread and eggs and jam and so on, and even wine bottle on the table. But Monet has clearly been out probably painting a sunrise somewhere and you see the newspaper it’s Le Figaro, you can read it again, but it’s neatly folded. None of the women in his family are going to dare to open that newspaper and read it, at least before the maître, before the master, has come in and had his breakfast and read his newspaper. And the caillebotte on the right-hand side, where there’s a very clear differentiation of gender roles, isn’t there? The man reads the newspaper and the woman daydreams looking out of the window. So, Mary Cassatt never married, and she never had children, but this was, as a woman, this was her world. Her relatives, who of course had children, she couldn’t partake in all the things that Manet and Degas did. She couldn’t go out to cafes, she couldn’t go around alone in the streets observing the street life, she certainly couldn’t go to nightclubs or brothels or any of those things. No, her world was a domestic one, even though she was not herself married or a mother. And I think this is a remarkable picture of a rather truculent looking little girl and her pet, but it’s wonderful. It’s such an extraordinary, bold composition.

The viewpoint, the very strong asymmetry, you can detect not only the influence of photography in this, it’s a sort of snapshot kind of composition, but also of course, the all-pervasive influence of Japanese woodcut prints, which fascinated Mary Cassatt as they did everybody else. And when you see that, I think she’s a wonderful, wonderful artist and consistently good. The last time I saw a big show of hers in Paris, I was in trance, but even though, you know, the domestic subject matter was not in itself particularly appealing to me, her work is so, it never tails off. I mean, most of the other impressionists, I’d say, Bette Morisot, Sisley, Pizarro for a long time, they tailed off. I don’t think she did. I think she remains consistently strong, but maybe her most original and remarkable achievement was a set of coloured prints, aquatints, drypoint aquatints, which again certainly show that she has carefully studied Japanese woodcut prints with a very strong contours, the flattening of forms, the lack of modelling of the forms. Although, of course, the technique is very, very different from that of the woodcut print. So Mary Cassatt was important, not just because she was a very good artist, but she was connected with wealthy East Coast American art lovers, particularly the Havemeyer family, and she persuaded them to take an interest in the new Impressionist artists, particularly Degas, and the fact that the Metropolitan Museum in New York has such a fantastic collection of Degas is down to the Havemeyers who donated their collection to the Met.

Now the other person who acted as an important intermediary between the Impressionists and American artists, and American collectors was John Singer Sargent. He was, I suppose you could say he came from a rather similar background. His parents could have stepped out of a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton. They were moderately wealthy, very cultivated, very cosmopolitan, and like lots of wealthy Americans, or like Gertrude and Leo Stein a bit later, they decided that they could lead a more interesting life if they came to Europe. And so, Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. He actually never went to America till he was an adult, and never spent any length of time there till towards the end of his life. So, he was a thoroughly cosmopolitan person, perfectly fluent in Italian, French, and English. So, by the time that he wanted to study art, Paris was the inevitable place to go. And he came at a very propitious time. He arrived in Paris in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist show. I don’t think it’s known that he actually went to that show. And certainly there’s no trace of its influence in his art of that time. We’ve got the Monet Impression Sunrise on the left-hand side, which was the most notorious and contentious painting in the show, and that gave its name to the movement, Impressionism, because its title was Impression Sunrise.

So, the painting on the right-hand side by Sargent dates from 1874. And it’s a plein air painting and I think it’s like an Impressionist painting. It’s certainly painted in the open air, on the spot, directly from life, and the brushwork has a freedom and a looseness that might make you think of Impressionism, but, of course, the palette of colours is very different, it’s much more restricted, and the silvery greens and greys, and so on are closer to the art of Corot than they are to that of Monet. So, when he arrived in 1874, he must have looked around at all the leading masters. What you had to do in those days was to sign up to study in the studio of one of the masters. Live models would be provided, and the education largely consisted of drawing from the nude, and the master might come round once a week, and he would correct your work and offer advice. Well, he certainly would have been very aware of Jerome and Bonin, and Ugerl. They were the most prestigious, the most prestigious, they were the masters that most American young artists signed up with. But he clearly thought, no, that’s not for me, that’s not the direction I want to go to. So, he applied to an artist called Carolus Durand, who was a very fashionable and very successful portrait painter, and I shall be talking more about him shortly when I look at the Gilded Age portraits in a week or two. But so, although he was very, very successful, Carolus Duran was very open to new tendencies in French art. He was very friendly for instance with Manet, and these two images make an interesting comparison because you’ve got Carolus Duran with his flashy moustache, and beard on the right hand side painted by Manet, Edouard Manet, and on the left you have Manet painted by Carolus Duran, and just as bold, just as free, just as modern and fresh looking.

So, Carolus Duran, as I said, he was open to all of that, but he clearly made a career decision that he, for his exhibited work, he was going to paint in a rather slicker, more conventional, more fashionable style. And actually, of course, Sargent would make the same decision. There’s a real dichotomy in his work between the things he sent to the Salon and the Royal Academy, and the commission portraits of wealthy people, and the things he did for his private satisfaction. So, he became very friendly with Manet and painted this. This is a painting by Sargent of Monet painting a landscape in the open air. And you can see, of course, that the style of Sargent’s painting is very, very influenced by Manet indeed. Would you hear before I tell you the answer, which one of these is by Monet, and which one is by Sargent? I think you do actually need to pause for a minute to look carefully before it does, I think, eventually become evident that it’s Monet on the left-hand side and Sargent on the right. And here again, here it’s rather more obvious, I suppose, that it’s Monet on the right, but you can see Sargent using a very, it’s a somewhat slicker, somewhat smoother, somewhat more conventional style, but a very similar palette of colour to Monet. So, it’s partly through Sargent’s influence and intervention that Americans began to collect money.

And in the 1890s, Americans, American collectors and American artists fell completely under the spell of money. This was particularly, I would say, after the exhibition of the series, for instance, the Haystacks, the Poplars, and above all, the sensational sell-out success in 1894 of the Rouen Cathedrals. So, Monet’s prices rose, he was selling very well, and that enabled him to buy his farmhouse at Giverny and create his famous gardens that became his principal subject matter for the last quarter century of his life. Well, such was the reputation of Monet that there was a constant pilgrimage of young American artists to Giverny, a whole colony of American artists developed there. And this was actually not altogether pleasing to Monet. In fact, he became so seriously irritated that at one point he even considered moving because every time Monet painted a haystack, or a tree or whatever there would be a queue of young American artists wanting to paint the same subject, and that was aggravating to him. On one occasion a young American with a lot of chutzpah took one of his paintings to Monet and said, Mertre, what do you think of my painting? And Monet said, well, yes, why do you paint the colours like that? And he said, oh, Mertre, I see them like that. Monet replied very sharply, no, no, I see them like that. He realised he was just being imitated. And that’s what I think we have here, with an artist called John Leslie Breck on the right-hand side, clearly doing a Monet with his paystax, but doing it, I think, in a somewhat pedestrian and uninspired way. Now these American impressionists, the Giverny school, they’re attractive, but it is derivative and often it’s a kind of decorative, sweetened, I would say, somewhat chocolate boxy version of Impressionism. It became very, very popular and very successful at around 1900 and up to the First World War. This is an artist called Carl Andersen.

This is Frederick Carl Friesacker, who was born in 1874, so he was actually born in the year of the first impressionist show, but at his height. This is very, very kind of a belle epoque, very charming pictures sort of thing, you know, you could live with very easily, I think, hanging over your your mantelpiece. And this again is Friesecker. And what you see, these artists, they remind me of another famous Bonne Maude of Duker, who resented the way that more successful and academic artists borrowed elements from the Impressionists because this is essentially a complete, just an academic nude that’s dressed up in Impressionist colour, and palette, and brushwork. And Degas said, oh, they pick our pockets, but they shoot us was what he said. And here is, I mean, you can see what I mean. This is a typical salon nude, slightly sort of softcore pornographic, erotic nude, very conventionally drawn with the excuse of being a mythological subject. But in three seconds, I said, it’s just sort of modernising that recipe. And this is these, I must say, I find these hilarious, actually. These are so chocolate boxy. This is an artist called William de Leftwich Dodge and you know that he’s really busting a gut to please a bourgeois public with its, you know, on the right-hand side seems to be a nun floating around Monet’s garden in Giverny. Now, there’s a grittier version of impressionism with Charles Hassan, despite his rather Arabic sounding name, he was actually of very traditional Anglo-Saxon stock, could trace his family right back to early English immigrants to America.

He’s born in 1859, and he follows a pattern that we’ve seen already with Aekins and with Winslow Homer, and we’ll see it again with later artists, that he starts off his career as working in illustration for illustrated magazines and then conceives the ambition to become a more serious painter. And in 1883, he went off on his grand tour of Europe, visiting London, where he was very influenced by Turner, and of course, landing up in Paris. But, and then he goes back, and his first mature paintings are urban scenes in Boston. The title of “This is Rainy Day in Boston.” It’s a fine painting but there’s nothing, this is 1885 and there’s nothing in it that suggests that he’s really very familiar with Impressionism, although there is, of course, quite a similarity with the famous Caillebotte rainy day picture, which dates from a few years earlier. Maybe he saw it, maybe he didn’t, or maybe it’s just common sources. There’s a very photographic element in both these two pictures. And apart from Caillebotte, there are plenty of other artists in Paris doing this kind of thing in the late 70s and the early 80s. This is Giuseppe De Nittis on the right-hand side. So, he then goes to Paris in 1886, and he takes a studio on the Place Pigalle. That’s very near to my flat in Paris, there are these streets, the Boulevard de Clichy, and so on, where there are many, many artist studios. If you go along that in a bus or you walk along, you’ll see that all the buildings, or many of the buildings on the south side of the street, will be a big studio window at the top, facing north. And he took one of these studios that had previously been occupied by Renoir, and he later claimed that he actually at this point, 86, he didn’t really know anything about either Renoir or Impressionism, but there were a few canvases just abandoned, left behind by Renoir in the studio.

And this was really his first taste of Impressionism. And he embraces it. And this coastal scene shows very, very clear evidence of the study of Monet. There is a Monet top right for comparison. The weave of broken brushwork, the very fresh palette of colours, and there’s quite a time gap between these two. This is the Monet on the right-hand side of the Rue Saint-Denis dating from the 1870s, and this New York scene by Childe Hassam on the left is actually in the early 20th century, so it’s a good, actually a good generation later. And here again we see a New York scene through a blizzard. Remember how the Impressions, of course, are totally obsessed with weather, and they like weather conditions, rain, frost, snow and so on, where reality is transformed. We get to a very distinctive, very American group of artists with the so-called Ashcan School, round about 1900 up to the First World War. This is George Luks, L-U-K-S, born in 1867. He came from, his background was, his parents were immigrants from, his father was from Poland, his mother was from Bavaria. And I’m not sure if they’re, if they’re, they were Jewish or not, but he liked painting the grittier side of New York, and this for instance, this is, of course, the old Jewish quarter of New York, this is Hester Street, a slightly caricatural approach to the Jewish population but I think affectionate, I certainly don’t sense any sense of anti-Semitism in this image. And this is John Sloan.

Now this style of the so-called Ashcan school, it’s quite bold. It’s not indebted to Impressionism, doesn’t use an Impressionist palette at all. The palette of these pictures is more often than not quite sombre, but the brushwork is extremely bold. So if there is a French precedent, I think it’s Manet, and you can see that this is an artist who really likes what the French call the matiere of paint, the substance of paint, even in this image I think you can see how luscious and juicy the paint is, and in this one too, Sloane of Maxoli’s Bar. This is William Glackens, who is slightly older, and he’s also painting New York scenes. I think this is Central Park, but not necessarily so working class and gritty. You can see this is obviously a middle-class bourgeois public, as is this one of Central Park, but stylistic, many things in common. This again is William Glackens. But I think the most powerful, I really like all of these artists, I think they’re absolutely terrific, the Ashcan School, and it’s something really American, you know, it’s not just a one imitation of the French avant-garde, as many of those Giverny American artists are. This has got a wonderfully distinctive American flavour to it. This is George Bellows, and he called this picture Cliff Dwellers, and it shows the tenements of the lowest east side, some bustling anteap of humanity. And again, this is George Bellows, a really, really terrific, powerful artist, at least at this, for a good 10 years, I would say, leading up to the First World War.

He’s working on a very, very high level indeed. Also, like Eakins, very interested in sports, and he was an admirer of Eakins. So, he does a number of images, both paintings and graphic art of boxing. This extraordinarily powerful image is of the excavations for the building of the Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York. And this is called the Lone Tenement. He reminds me a little bit actually of an Italian artist who’s one of my favourites, Sironi. It’s the poet, the melancholy poetry of the rather grim big city, which I think he comes across very strongly. And also this is a completely coincidental similarity, but this is Alexander Trauner’s drawing for the lone tenement of for the opening scene of the Jean Gabin film, Le Jour sur l'oeuvre, and it’s much later, this is 1930s, but and I think it’s very unlikely he knew George Bellows, but he’s responding to this melancholy poetry of seemingly very ugly parts of modern cities. This picture, I’m very thrilled, has actually quite recently, I think it was about two years ago, been acquired by the National Gallery in London. So that’s, I think, the National Gallery’s first important American picture. Now, there are two artists I want to talk about very briefly who don’t really fit in to any kind of pattern. And this is Albert Pinkham Ryder. He’s actually an artist of an older generation. He’s born in 1847 and he is really difficult to find what he is. He’s certainly not Impressionist, not remotely influenced by Impressionism. These are paintings not painted from life. They’re not a transcription of life. They are painted from imagination. And if you want to fit them in with an international art movement, you could see them as Symbolists with a capital S, you know, you could relate them to artists like Audion Redon, but I think it’s unlikely he knew them. I think this is a parallel development.

Again, this is by Albert Pinkham Ryder, and this one where he seems to be almost punning on his name with a rider who, with a scythe, who seems to be a kind of a death figure. And another artist, relatively older, this is Maurice Prendergast, 1858. He’s born, dies in 1924, who’s a highly individual, very distinctive. Again, where do you, if you want to place this art historically, it’s not impressionist, it’s post-impressionist really. It’s certainly not a direct transcription of reality. And it has a flat decorative quality. And he has this rather distinctive way of applying the colour almost as a kind of mosaic. So, this brings me to the great international exhibition of modern art at the Armoury in New York in 1913. So, there was a lot of curiosity about what was going on in Europe. It’s a very dynamic, very exciting time. Particularly in Paris, you can say Fauvism, 1905, Picasso’s Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, and then the explosion of Cubism and all the ramifications of Cubism, that European art was changing more rapidly, and more radically in that 10 years up to the First World War than it had ever done before, and arguably ever since. And the reverberations of this were reaching America through people like Gertrude, and Leo Stein, who they went to Paris in 1903, and they were amongst the very first people in the world to respond to Matisse and Picasso and Cubism.

And Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein, they had a kind of a salon. Every Saturday night, they would receive people who wanted to come and look at their art. It became a kind of pilgrimage really for young art lovers and artists going to Paris, was to visit Gertrude and Leo Stein and see their Matisses and their Picassos. So, this show was absolutely enormous. I mean the armoury is an absolutely gargantuan building. And so, it was certainly the most comprehensive survey of early modern art that had taken place up to that time. And you can see the names here at the bottom, but it goes back as far as Ingres and Delacroix, it takes in Degas, Cézanne, Redon, Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, and so on and so on, right up to Picasso and Matisse. This is what it looked like. See this vast kind of warehouse space. Here’s another view of it. It travelled on to Chicago and Boston, so it was certainly great. Many people would have seen it. And unlike the first impression of this show in 1874, which I suppose reached a tiny, tiny audience, this reached an enormous audience because it was so controversial and it got enormous amounts of coverage in the press, often very hostile coverage. Of course, in London, three years earlier, we had had the post-impressionist show organised by Roger Fry, which had a, which brought about a similar reaction, was a kind of shock for the English public, who are much more conservative actually than the Americans at this time. So, you know, for in 1910, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin were deeply shocking and disturbing to the English. I think they, of course, the Armoury show was much, much more radical than the post-impressionist show in London. And you can see the kind of headlines it got, samples of freak art at Insurgent Exhibition in New York, and lots of ha-ha, very funny jokes with parodies of what was in the show.

So, this man was really the guiding spirit. He’s called Walter Pach. It’s so interesting, really, how it was assimilated Jews again and again, who were the, they were, if it’s not an inappropriate thing, the yeast in the bread. They were the movers, the shakers, the influencers. And he was one of those people who had gone to Europe, he’d gone to Paris, and he’d found his way to Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein, and he attended their Saturday evenings, and they introduced him to the leading avant-garde artists in Paris. So, I’m just going to finish now by going through some of the works of art that were in the show, the Armoury Show of 1913. As I said, it went right back to Ingres and Delacroix. Delacroix, seen by many as a kind of father to modern art, because of his expressive use of colour and his dynamic and expressive brushwork, of course, a key influence on Van Gogh and Seurat, and Cézanne, of course. This Donny was in the show, and you can imagine it must have greatly appealed to the artists of the Ashcan School. Whistler’s mother, but already actually at which was acquired by the French state. It’s now in the Orsay in Paris. So, that would have been the first important American artist to be represented in the show. Monet, inevitably, by Giverny, by this time already very familiar to the Americans, as I explained. Cezanne, less so. He died in 1906.

And he, of course, it was Cézanne who was the first love of Gertrude, and Leo Stein. It was Bernard Berenson who met them, I think, in London and said, oh, there is this very exciting artist that people are getting really interested in, called Cezanne, and they sent, he sent, Gertrude and Leo to the dealer Abouazvola, and that Cezanne was one of their first important art purchases were works by Cezanne. Gauguin, the Steins also owned work by Gauguin. This picture, preparation for the festival, it’s now in the National Gallery in London. It was actually Gauguin in the London show, the post-impression show, who had the most influence, and was probably most easily assimilated by the young English artists. But as I said, by 1913 in New York, things had moved on quite radically. This was a very late Van Gogh that was in the show with this highly charged, expressive brushwork that was leading directly into expressionism. Now, this was one of the key works in the show that caused, it was one of the two or three works that caused really major scandal, was denounced both on artistic and moral grounds. This is Matisse’s blue nude, which had been bought directly from the artist by Gertrude and Leo Stein. And it caused such outrage that demonstrators burnt it in effigy.

They burnt a copy of it. This wonderful Matisse, the Red Studio, now one of the great treasures of MoMA in New York. Now this was a picture, as late as the 1940s, it was offered to the Tate Gallery in London and they wanted to buy it, But there was such a fuss in the English press that was whipped up by the dreadful Alfred Munnings, who was President of the Royal Academy at the time, who denounced the Tate for using public money to buy such a dreadful work of art and that Tate lost their nerve, sadly, sadly. We don’t, I don’t think, we certainly don’t have a Matisse in Britain of this period and this quality, sadly, because of that loss. So, Walter Pach, well obviously Paris was the Mecca, but he was aware that there were interesting things happening in other places too, so he went to Germany, to Berlin, and there he would have encountered the art of Munch, so this painting Vampire from the Freeze of Life, that was also in the show, and more radical still, the young Brucke expressionist artist Ernst Kirchner. So, this is very prescient and really, really amazingly cutting edge for the period, as is this. This may have been, as far as painting is concerned, the most radical picture in the show. The Munich Blue Rider artist Wassily Kandinsky. But the biggest publicity, the biggest scandal, was around the cubist artist cubism, 1913, which comes out of Picasso’s Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is 1907, and cubism born 1908 to 1909, the first phase of cubism, analytical cubism, and then by 1912-13, when the Armoury Show took place, Cubism had already moved on to the, it’s the so-called synthetic phase. So, Walter Pach went, Picasso already was the kind of king of the avant-garde in Paris with a huge reputation and greatly respected. So, Walter Pach, no doubt introduced by Gertrude Stein, went to see him and he said, who are the artists I need to look at?

Who are the artists we should include in the show? And so, Picasso scribbled down these names, Juan Gris, Metsange, Glais, Leger, Delonais, and so on. And they were all represented in the show. So cubism, of course, the humorists and the caricaturists got a lot of mileage out of Cubism, as you can see, and probably this, apart from the blue nude, the other painting that got an enormous amount of coverage was seen as an outrageous provocation was Duchamp’s nude descending a staircase, much caricatured and denounced by moralists in America. And here is Picasso. In fact, this is an analytical cube, an early cubist Picasso. This must date from around 1909, and Robert Deloney who is already moving into abstraction, this was in the show. Sculpture, the show also included a lot of sculpture, this is Antoine Bourdelle’s Hercules, which dates from 1909, very influential work. And Brancusi also caused a lot of puzzlement. In fact, he even had trouble importing his work into America at this time, because the law had been changed to allow contemporary art to be imported into America without paying import tax. But the customs looked at this and they said, this isn’t a work of art, this is scrap metal. And they wanted to tax it accordingly. So, it was very difficult for him to even get his work into the country. His wonderfully playful and outrageous take on Rodin’s Kiss. And Jacob Epstein, of course, a New York-born American artist but living in London at the time, he sent his rock drill. Now, as far as American artists were concerned, they were represented in the show, but I suppose there was the only artist you could really describe as cutting edge in the way that the ones I’ve just been looking at are is Marston Hartley, who had been in Europe, he’d spent time in Berlin, he also was in Paris, he was also a guest of Gertrude and Leo Stein. This is a work which one would describe as expressionist and showing the influence of Fauvism, but also of German expressionism. But by 1912, 1913, he’d moved on to his own very personal version of Cubism, and this is a work, actually a work of the following year, by Marston Hartney, it’s of 1914. Right, so going to open up and see what people have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Where is the largest collection of Mary Cassatt?

A: Well, there are quite a few. One of the largest I know, of course, is the Orsay. They have a wonderful collection of her work in Paris. But I imagine in America, there must be equally large or larger collections. The Metropolitan Museum must have lots of her work. She’s very prolific. So, I would think that most major American museums would have work by Mary Cassatt.

Q: Why was it called the Ashcan School?

A: Because it deals with, you know, nitty gritty, dirty street life. So, it’s, I don’t know who invented the term and it wasn’t, I think, widely used at the time while they were painting. I hope you’ll mention Frank Duvenet. I know because I really don’t know the name, but I don’t really know anything about him. Sorry about that.

What else? Well, Sargent had very wide sympathies, I must say. He was a very open-minded artist. Arthur B. Davis, yes. Yes, he was, I suppose, the organiser, but I think the man who actually was the contact with the artists was Walter Pach. And there’s nothing wrong with being an Archaeological Puedo-Chaván, who was certainly a very important influence on many of the artists who were shown. Thank you, Ron, very much. Thank you. Thank you, Diane.

Yeah, I know. What can one do? One needs to just live one’s life as best one can. I will. I’m hoping to do a talk on on Edward Hopper after Christmas. And thank you, Cheryl. I’m glad, Nikki, that you like the Ashcan School. I mean, because I, as I said, there’s only one painting of the Ashcan School on show in London, and I would love to see a really good exhibition. I couldn’t possibly do, Rita, I couldn’t do Inuit art because I know what it looks like, but I don’t really know anything about it. You need to have a more specialist lecture on that subject.

Right, thank you all very, very much indeed, and I’ll be back with Gilded Age portraits on Sunday.