Thursday, April 4 Video
We were delighted to welcome back Dr. Irina Stotland Thursday evening for this enriching presentation on The Pleasures of Pattern: Pierre Bonnard and the Nabis. Thank you to everyone who joined in and A BIG THANK YOU to Dr. Stotland for offering such an engaging discussion and overview of these artists and their works which allowed us to glimpse an intimate look at these “snapshots” of domestic interiors and gardens, etc., through patterns, color and rich textures, pets included; and provide an understanding of this short-lived but impactful art movement centered around symbolism and the decorative arts.
Thursday, April 4 Video
We were delighted to welcome back Dr. Irina Stotland Thursday evening for this enriching presentation on The Pleasures of Pattern: Pierre Bonnard and the Nabis. Thank you to everyone who joined in and A BIG THANK YOU to Dr. Stotland for offering such an engaging discussion and overview of these artists and their works which allowed us to glimpse an intimate look at these “snapshots” of domestic interiors and gardens, etc., through patterns, color and rich textures, pets included; and provide an understanding of this short-lived but impactful art movement centered around symbolism and the decorative arts.
hello everybody thank you for joining our Zoom today um I I can’t wait to hear from Dr aren stotland but I’ll get to her in just a moment a couple of reminders one more day is left on the colorist show which is at the the Mansion right now I hope it’s it’s the mansion’s open tomorrow I think it is um but if you haven’t seen it you should coming you know right after that we’ll install next week is the gaitherburg Camera Club so we’re going from photos to or going from paintings with lots of colors to photos with lots of colors and of course when that show comes down it’ll be our member spring members jured show uh we had another huge turnout of of entries close to 200 they’re with the judge right now and uh we’ll be hearing back from her soon and we’ll let um those that were accepted um you know know that they were accepted of course uh it’s got a lot of of entries and there’s only so much room in the Mansion good and bad the good thing is that we have lots and lots of of work to choose from and that usually results in a wonderful show um the the tough part about it is is not every U piece that’s entered can you know find its place it’s it’s the judge’s Vision uh what what prevails so um that’s that’s just a short couple of announcements I’d now like to introduce uh Dr Arena stotland and we’re so glad to have her she’s been a friend to Rockville Art League she presents usually in September which has become kind of a tradition she’s judged a show for us once um but when I heard that uh a bonard exhibit was going up at the Phillips um I immediately reached out to Dr stotland because Lisa and I had taken a class with her on L Nabis I don’t know if I said that right but um which of course bonard was one of the primary members we’ll hear more about that in a moment um Dr stotland um got her PhD in art history from Brun Moore her uh interest and Specialty is post impressionism and she’s published a number of articles about Paul Goan and others but she’s famous for her Goan uh expertise uh and as I mentioned before she’s also taught a course on BL nais um again it’s her talk is timely because bonard is on display at the Phillips and I think we’re so lucky to have her so without further Ado Dr Arena stotland thank you uh thank you I’m gonna start sharing the lecture and then um wait uh oh I can share can I share yes you can there you go you got it okay let me hide this whoops sorry Patrick me all everybody can hear me see me seeing is probably more important so um yes we are going to ask everybody to mute themselves and then I’m going to give you chunk of information portion of the lecture and then I’m going to say let’s discuss this or do you have any questions so please hold your questions until I open it up for discussion just in the interest of time management okay every so no technical difficulties as of yet correct okay you see it on the screen it’s looking good okay so today I have about an hour and 10 minutes um to talk about the Nai Ori um you don’t pronounce the s in French so um the at the end so I I we I titled it pleasures of pattern because we will talk about the decorative surface effect that the Nai recognized by it’s basically how you identify painting as a Nai um and we I’ve centered it on Pierre bonard but I wanted to talk about other people that worked with him um some of them more closely aligned than others so you’re going to see four artists today and maybe some extraneous pictures so the Nai uh comes from an Arabic word that they picked out um which means a prophet and they describ themselves as the ancient prophets that rejuvenated Israel nobody was particularly humble in the group as as you can see so who are they the na were a group of students that met at this private Art Academy in Paris the academy Julian um and they formed this sort of semi secret chat they would be on Twitter now but it was the 19th century said it was in real life um they had their own sort of code words and every member had a nickname that I’m going to um explain for you um the the objective was to basically revolutionize art so they formed the group in the late 1880s they had their first exhibit in 1889 under the title of the impressionist and synthesis Group which included Paul Goan who was their main source of inspiration but 10 years later because the the Nai is a very shortlived group and it’s a very shortlived style even though it’s was very impactful so just 10 years later in 1899 the movement the group split into two you had the mystics and the intimist and the mystics like Paul serier or uh Maurice Deni preferred the subject their preferred subject matter were spiritual Mysteries or the sort of symbolist take on Christian Theology and they had very bright colors uh but fairly simple compositions so they called the mystics and another camp where we can find bonard and his friend vard they images were darker and they were not um interested in any sort of mystical imaginary subject matter but rather in the observation of the world but in a subjective sort of take on reality they’re less concerned with figure and much more concerned with the surface effect um so their subject matter is very very ordinary they painted the middle class interior but it’s always imbued with the sense of mystery so there is they’re called the intimist because it’s all about the sort of the familial ties or the friendships within within these Interiors but there is the they incredibly Psych logically complex because it’s a sort of a an image of Human Relationships or underlying conflicts in this very sort of stable boura world that they give us so the last exhibition that the Nai had was in 1900 so right at the beginning of the 20th century um so how did they Define themselves they actually Define themselves in opposition to the previous avanguard movement which was the impressionism um and as Bernard said the profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves everything is contained in the beauty which means the Impressionists were not concerned with the emotions they were not concerned with the individual psyche that is the that’s the realm of the post impressionist of which Nai are a part um impressionist observed reality and gave us the optical reality of the light right that was the metaphor for modernity the post impressionist and the Nai in particular were focused on the hidden on the secret on the subconscious sort of reality of Humanity um and they the emotion and the conveyance of that secretive world for them was done should be done through the formal mean means so the emotions as he says um convey through the lines and the colors through the beauty through the formal elements so it’s not it’s a completely different aesthetic objective than the impressionist ones one and it’s um not to reflect not to depict nature but to convey Sensations that that nature provokes in you in an individual so it’s a sub a subjective take on nature and to be decorative and uh because it’s a group there there is a range of styles in that group that all fall under the same aesthetic objective and they also uh besides for challenge ing the whole premise of what art is they also challenged this idea of the hierarchy of the medium so they used the wide range of medium or oil paintings screens mural and very sort of Applied things which we would be called craft Modern Art decorative Arts like they designed wallpaper tapestries China um textiles and even Furniture which none of which I’m going to show you which is going to concentrate on painting so I need to start when we talk about the Nai I need to start with the introduction of a person who basically um invented the style and that is Paul suier there he is each member of the Nai had a truly truly glorious facial something as we’ll see um so he is he comes from a very well-off family his father is very successful perfumer um and he goes to a very good school where he has he gets a degree in philosophy and Science and then he decides to become an artist and he joins the Julian Academy um where he makes friends with all the other artists who looking to in innovate and revolutionize in 1888 he has this pivotal meeting he travels to the south of France to ponton and he meets Paul Goan there Paul Goan and Emil Bernard who have just invented this movement of symbolism which flattens the shapes which uses very strong black outlines which uses really saturated unmodeled flat color and so see rer abandons impression style and abandons any sort of pretend to three-dimensionality in art and starts to work in that style in that more abstract style um and we’re going to talk about a particular painting next that uh he makes with Goan in ponton in 1895 siru actually joins uh a Benedictine Monastery in Germany and the artist monks who work there um explain to him their philosophy of the Divine laws of beauty it’s not actually their philosophy it’s this uh platonic idea of beauty and divine Beauty mean meaning Perfection so they see it as being hidden in nature and only select fuse which are the artists can see that beauty so it’s a sort of a spiritual definition of what art is of what an artist is so his nickname in the Nai group is the Nabi with a shining beard um and he is a Mystic just like Deni um and The Shining beard is full of mysticism and you know wisdom he his sources of influence are there’s a range ancient Egyptian art the Italian Primitives the Middle Ages specifically the tapestries um and he sees decorative art specifically as Timeless because it survives for a time so when CIA is in pontan he paints this painting which is the original title is the Avon River at the bo deore um this is a dors museum and he when he is painting it he’s painting it in a group of the followers of Goan and Goan starts sort of proling to them and he says and that’s a very famous quote by Goan he asked them how do you see these trees they yellow so put some yellow the shadow it’s rather blue painted with pure ultramarine those red leaves put Vermillion so that is that quote encapsulates this idea that your concept of reality takes presidence over the conventional idea of reality or or even of what you know that color to be your perception in that moment is more truthful than that color in a neutral light because it’s truthful in that particular moment to you so it’s subjectivity over conventionality and over observation it’s based on observation but it it comes from within rather than from without so art to the POS impressionism and to the na is not an imitation of the visible it’s not about reproducing reality it is about conveying the emotions of the art who is observing reality or they call them Sensations and the choice of of the form the choice of the color that the artist deems appropriate to convey that particular emotion so you are free to liberate your color from a descriptive function it can symbolize your emotion instead so you can use pure s at at flat color you can flatten the shapes because it’s not an illusionistic shape it’s sort of your feeling about the shape okay so that’s a from which I sort of now just Des he says three form and color from the traditional emotions and spiritual truths so he clo in the sort of mystical language of the Quest for authenticity which is going inward for them so he brings this painting to his friends at the Academy Julian and they look at it and they name it the Talisman it becomes the emblem the Talisman of the movement um and as Maurice Den will say would say thus we were presented for the first time in a form that was Paradox and Unforgettable the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order and that is Denise definition of a painting that no matter what no matter how illusionistic anybody can get or naturalistic it will still be a flat surface covered with colors artificially assembled by an artist this acknowledgment of the truth of the medium which starts out this whole move towards abstraction and you know sort of Jackson Pollock is going to become an epam there um so this is an example of what cusia produces he produces these Mystic scenes so what is happening in the 19th century that mysticism becomes fashionable um you have this is is in any society when you have in the western Society I should say when you have a jump in the Industrial Development when new technology is invented when everything becomes modern all of the sudden there is conventionally typically without an exception a sort of an opposing Force to it emotionally opposing Force to it and people sort of is try to escape this modernization this industrialization as they did in the 19th century and they start to do sances spiritual sances or they start to believe in hypnotism or mesmerism as they called it then or there are all of these sort of all of the sudden there are lots of people seeing ghosts or there are Miracles that happen um it’s it’s sort of a balancing social mechanism I guess that we have so there is symbolist literature there is symbolist music there is symbolist theater that is all interested in the mysticism so this is the incantation or the sacred wood from 1891 um and it has to do with cusia ending up in Britany just like Goan did and Britany is this um area in France that is seen as very backward is very it is a rural area but because it’s the 19th century any sort of area that is perceived as outside of the modernization of France will therefore be perceived as more authentic so there’s this very factually there’s this very rich Celtic Pagan um tradition in Britany that that’s been preserved within Christianity so that becomes the focus of CIA paintings of many of his paintings this sort of Mystic spirituality you wouldn’t necessarily um recognize it as Christian but it’s a melt of both Breton Legends the religion you know the Pagan Traditions all of this together so there we have this um magical forest at night you can see that it’s the night because of the sky in the distance that’s this deep purple and then you have these two deep purple dresses and these absolutely non-naturalistic colored bright red verticals of the trees and three Bretton women which in 19th century view would recognize as Britton because they’re wearing the traditional Britton dress um and they are in the middle of this Forest as druid presses and doing some sort of a ritual some sort of an incantation over the fire there she is holding her very elongated hand over the Flames um we don’t know what is happening and we’re not supposed to understand what is happening because it’s a mystery so but you do have this incredibly joyful I think coloristic decorative surface it he you could take this and make it into a tapestry or into a mosaic or into a stained glass you can repeat it on a wallpaper there is this acknowledgment of flatness it’s not supposed to fool you into believing that this is real this is this very um Mosaic like tapestry like decorative surface a pattern um a pattern of complimentary colors red and green or purple and yellow the the colors that produce the greatest perceived Luminosity um of their contrast so that is what Mystics are doing um let me open this up a little bit do you have any questions about the introduction or serier before we move on to DIN and then to bonard Sarah aren any idea how large this painting is that’s on the screen right now it is so it’s 91 and a half CM so you have to divide it by 2.2 so about I don’t know 38 in it’s not humongous but it’s not it’s not a real small painting either so that’s interesting right we’re going to see some very large paintings just in the in a minute um this is so there is no sort they they make whatever they want there is no set preference really for anything they make smaller paintings and larger ones and they huge murals um as well um one last question I’m sorry but sometimes the word decorative for artists who consider themselves fine artists is like a dirty word yes that is precisely yes that’s precisely what they’re trying to destroy that hierarchy okay okay all right so what they’re saying is Art should be decorative High art should be decorative and it should be applied and sort of useful yes Ellen you unmuted you have to unmute yourself okay um you mentioned that the artists would choose colors that they felt Express their reaction or emotional reaction to what they’re seeing do you know how they categorized those colors or how they determined What colors would be at colors What colors would be sad Colors oh well I mean that there is a sort of a conventional language of color especially in the 19th century um and it it it would be I think it’s still unded by a person who has a western background so red is for passion right green is for spring and sort of Rejuvenation that is for mourning or an almond of some sort so um there’s another post impressionist artist who said when everybody knows that the line of a whipping Willow is sad how do we know it’s sad because it’s going downward so it’s not really that complicated just sort of a conventional cultural iconography I would say you know this is Peter the Green in the Florest floor is very weird you know it’s it’s doesn’t look like any green or grass or Forest I’ve ever seen because it’s not supposed to it’s not supposed to describe or create an illusion that is naturalistic it is supposed to be sort of a subjective perception yeah um so so the color is liberated from its descriptive function to put it in their complicated language you know it definitely works it almost looks more like smoke than you know what than anything right like clouds sort of yeah clouds acid green clouds yes how did the public react to these Wild colors and um you know non repesent public it depended on which right right it depends on which part of the public you would I guess you would ask right the post impressionist obviously had the fans the crowd uh but even the most famous of them like Goan or van go were not financially successful until later until I would say the beginning of the 20th century so this was truly a shocking avanguard moment okay let me move on to the next artist so this is still uh a Mystic this is Maurice Den um and he is from a workingclass family and he um since the very early age he was very much interested in religion a deeply spiritual person um and he had he he his degree was in philosophy as you can see all of these people are very well educated uh very well read man old man so he joins the studies of the Julian Academy then passes the entrance exam to the highest institution uh the Fine Arts Academy of France and Paris and his sources of inspiration are besides for Raphael are also the Italian Primitives as this is what they’re known as we wouldn’t call them Primitives now so franel belli um these sorts of artists in 89 again Goan pops up in his life he sees an exposition of Goan a private exhibition and he says that it shook him he says in place of Windows opening on nature like the Impressionists these were surfaces which were solidly decorative powerfully colorful B bordered with brutal Strokes partitioned um so again this sort of denial of illusionism the acknowledgment of what the painting is in it’s a surface with the pigment on it it’s a flat surface so he is truly a mystical artist he but unlike serier he is a Christian artist and he sees his paintings as a celebration of the Divine so his nickname was the Nai of the beautiful icons and this is sort of things a sort of thing that he produced um again this is a Britany l Escape close to a 12th century medal Chateau a castle in Britney and he described this land as the land where you prayed so this is landscape with green cheese from 1893 and as you can see it’s fairly Sim similar in terms of its aesthetic choices to what we’ve seen with cuser this very strong decorative patterning of the surface um it is it’s one of my favorite paintings to to to make it personal I think just the the the way that he develops color is um absolutely glorious this sort of opaque chalky green and pink and the the golden yellow of the trees in the background and this expanse of the Cloudy Sky um so again this is structured on the contrast of the very strong verticals the trees which we sort of starting to see the foliage of and one very strong horizontal which is a border here you can sort of see the fence over the border and then you have these cloaked women in you know in in hooded pink robes moving towards the fence and one woman um who seems to be kneeling and then you can make out the figure of an Angel over there can you see it with the wings um and he is contrast that he’s made visible really by contrast because he silhouetted against the this orangey gold clouds of the trees which then become the clouds of the sky and the sort of lapis Laz laula coming um coming through so if you spend some time in front of this painting you’ll see that this is Christian iconograph graphy but yet again it’s happening in these Briton Woods in these Pagan druidic forests very ancient ones um everything is flattened everything is simplified a very restricted range of color and it packs a punch I would say do you have any questions about Maurice Den so these two DIN and CIA are my examples of of the Mystic group within the nabbi okay so moving on to the next Camp these are the intimist so there’s nothing mystical there I mean outwardly mystical there’s still Mysteries nothing religious um and so this is the focal point of this talk this is Pierre bonard um he comes from a very well off family in a very socially important family his father is a senior official at the ministry of War so this is a sophisticated family um he gets a degree in Classics and his father wants to for him to become a lawyer so he studies to be a lawyer and then takes the law exam and fails it at which point he decides to become an artist and he well he never wanted to be a lawyer really so he started studying at the Julian Academy in 188 and then he is accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts during which time he has the same year he has his first commercial success he produces a poster that which I’m going to show you and the same year he joins the Nai the Nai he um exhibits with the Society of the Independent Artists not of the official salon and he is incredibly influenced not just by Goan but by Japanese artist that becomes quite fashionable in France Hokusai he exhibits with the Nai two times and um when they split into two groups he finds himself on the other side of Maurice den and suia who basically are the founding fathers of the group uh so him and Bernard are the intimist so because he’s so impacted he so much under the sway of the Japanese or his nickname in the group is the very Japanese Nai um and he looks at painting as a sort of a formal exploration a formal experiment he basically treats color as a language as as a music um there are rhythms and dialogues between you know within his painting between color and line so what how do you recognize Bernard does it’s going to be a domestic interior or it’s going to be a familial group in the garden um you will have very very intense color areas color patches um and it’s going to be close values of color so it’s not going to be a huge range of them um he is ABS so obsessed with with the tones that he produces that he keeps retouching his paintings sometimes years later there’s even an instance where him and vard go to a museum where his painting has already been installed and he convinces weard to distract the music Museum guards because he wants to retouch the painting that’s already hanging on the museum wall um so he’s a little OCD about his colors he never paints things while you know from from life he always Paints the memory which is as anti- impressionist as you can get he’s not painting to capture a specific light he is painting to capture his emotion his and his memory is that much more distilled in terms of what he felt in front of the painting so he says I have all my subjects to hand I go back and look at them I take notes then I go home and before I start painting I reflect I dream it’s a very subjective process um and he admits that it’s anti- impressionist he says we were trying to go further further than the Imp impressionist and the naturalist impressions of color after all art is not nature so there is again I’m overemphasizing it but this is important this is what post impressionism is Art is a subjective artificial construction to them it’s not an illusion of nature uh he has a very interesting way of working he’ll hang up canvas rolls um uncut and he’ll paint he’ll work on several of these canvases together and then he’ll cut them after he completes the painting sometimes cutting off certain sort of cropping them um to to his liking so I’m going to show you one of his posters but he is one of the people who again revolutionizes the genre after you know he works concurrently with tulus lre who’s really The Genius of lithograph during this Chanel but bonard is you know not not not that shabby either so this is what what is a lithographic poster in the 19th century it’s an ad it’s a it’s a very it’s a utilitarian printed uh cheaply printed mass-produced poster that for something for a brand so this is for France champagne and we see this very pretty girl as a focal point um well actually the focal point is is is the the bubbly and it is the bubbles that are at the center of the composition composition conceptually and um geometrically and pictorially so he wins this General design poster competition um and produces this posture and from that point on he’s well known he he’s known as as the winner um and this allows him to convince his parents that he can be an artist he doesn’t need to study law um so if you look at the poster you you already see the decorative patterning of the surface this very strong contouring and of course it is necessary in this lithography it’s just four colors that is possible could be less as here it’s just two colors and then the print the the cardboard the paper left bare um you have to have a strong line because the poster needs to be visible from a distance it’s basted on the walls of the houses so that line that curval linear line is the pattern it becomes its own pattern and it creates the sort of dynamic the twirling Dynamic um in in the pictorial field so the line of her shoulders and her arm lead our eye to the glass of champagne she tilts her head and leans tries to lean out of the posture so that’s another Dynamic there um and the shape of her arm over here very anatomically incorrect elbow is an echo of the sea so the sea for champagne is very much indicated to us as well the C here and the glass over here um so the shape of the bubbles the waterfall of the bubbles is basically the shape of her hair so there’s all this movement there’s all this all all this Thro the flirtiness it’s a very and it’s a very effective posture um it packs a punch I think did you have any questions about the poster before we move on to the paintings by Bono or comments he was just like in his early 20s when he did this correct he yes in 1891 he was very young so and of course posters this is printed in 1891 he he makes it originally in 89 posters can be reprinted in quantities Okay so his paintings um so I broke this down by subject so this is one of my favorite by bonard this is Twilight or the game of cqu from 1892 and this is one of his earliest works and this is his family’s garden and his family in that garden and it’s part of that sort of group of painting where he gives us parks and Gardens he gives us figures in nature in bettered than nature so the subject matter of these green Urban environment is a very impress it’s a it’s a subject that Impressionists really love these are new spaces since Paris has been modernized um you have now Urban parks and you know some houses do have Gardens so this idea of taking pleasure in nature um is here tied with taking pleasure in the familial ties um so there is his father with a green beard there’s his sister with the dog um and his brother-in-law over here and you can barely see there’s another woman over here who’s turned her face away from us and then you have some girls in white dresses dancing in the background you again you can’t really identify them so there is a sort of a a lining up freeze effect in the foreground and a much more Dynamic background a really cluttered foreground left and a fairly open Dynamic background right and of course our eye goes directly into the background because there’s a path for us it’s made for us to enter there this group is thinking about the croquet over here you start looking you sort of start to see the croquet mallets and the balls on the ground and there is one over here by the what is it called a Thicket I think in C um but the most important thing here is of course the pattern and it’s not just the pattern of the patches of color that he uses that he constructs there it’s like a jigo puzzle but it is also the pattern on the Fabrics that camouflages the body they almost disappear into the darkness into the Shaded Darkness under the trees so the pattern clothing and the pictorial surface as a patterned hold constructs this incredible decorative hold this incredible decorative Unity um this is again parks and Gardens but in a different format so this was he they also bonard and vard loved these this medium in this format of a decorative screen so sometimes you would have separated panels that you would hang on the walls on different walls in the same room usually and sometimes this would be a screen standing together so this is women in the garden this is glue paint over charcoal pencil chalk on paper then that is attached to Canvas uh and again these are women from his family the ones that we can his sister and his cousin specifically in the first two um and this is about this is also sort of a factor of that philosophy of integrating all art erasing this hierarchy between fine High art and decorative art um so posters is one is one way of doing this elevating the status of a poster to high art or a scream right which is a very utilitarian object and he says our generation always was searching for connections between art and life so this is exactly like the Arts and Crafts movement the idea of art as bringing Beauty into the ordinary environment and of course it is very much influenced by the Japanese decorative art by the Japanese screens and interesting enough enough just like the Japanese screens you have to read it from right to left now if you start to read it from right to left you’ll notice that the seasons change there is The Fall season then there is the summer season then there is the spring and this looks to be like falling snow of course she’s wearing a dress so it’s not super specific but it is the Four Seasons so it’s you know the screen is is a sequential evolutionary not evolutionary calendar cycle women in the gardens are still there and it is incredibly beautiful it is incredibly decorative it again you have this pattern a different pattern for each screen and then you have patterns within patterns and and he is absolutely obsessed with this with the with the pattern on clothes they become part of the overall sort of obfuscation of the body the body is not as important as the pattern that the body makes with it outline and with the pattern that clo clothes the body and he does love his dogs and cats you see a lot of them in bonard so this was conceived as a single screen and then he divided into four panels it was of course easier to exhibit that way um this is just wanted to sort of do a sub you know another category even though it could fall under the the parks and Gardens sometimes the fashionable women of Paris the parisians just wanted to show you how fashion played you know the textile patterning became a focal point for Bernard so the dressing gwn the checkered blouse and women with the dog and the checkered blouse of course has a cat over here highly un hygienically touching the food on her plate so how do you distinguish between a figure and a background or a figure and its surroundings in bonard you don’t distinguish um by an outline you distinguish by a change in pattern I hope you can see it there’s this wonderful checkd pattern and then there is this solid not there stations there but much more solid uh flat red and that is how we’re able to read this the color is very close as I was saying the tonal values are very close in bonard so there is this obfuscation there is this illusion of the body but you can tell the difference um here so there is a very very funny quote from Bernard that I wanted to bring in he says when my attention is directed toward men I see only gross caricatures I never feel so with women I always find the means to isolate a few Elements which satisfy me as a painter it’s not that men are uglier than women they are only so in my imagination so this is sort of the opposite of misogyny but I think whether or not he realizes that he’s talking about fashion and he’s talking about the much more diverse feminine fashion because the male costume the middle of of a middle class the costume of a middle class man in the 19th century is black and white it’s not interesting you can see the men here the three well two men and a woman in a brown cloak and then the women allow him to Revel in this pattern uh the clothes that they’re wearing there are PKA dots on her scarf there checkering on her dress um this has sort of tality of blue all over um so this is his sister and his cousin they’re playing with the dog and they’re completely absorbed in the activity and not paying attention to the people coming behind them um the checkered pattern he actually borrowed from Chinese prints became fashionable to wear because it was again another Asian influence so is he focusing on the people not so much as he’s focusing on the geometry of the pattern and the color and light that sort of illuminates and hides parts of of what is happening here very flat very strongly outlined very simplified a claustrophobic compressed space which allows him to construct it as a Lego as a jigo puzzle um and of course the dog in the front do you have any questions about this this the the post the decorative screen for the parisians nobody has any questions I think it’s so interesting that he he makes no attempt to have the Contours of the pattern follow the body like on the the girl with the the dog on the right there yeah um it’s like it’s the same check pattern and and there’s very little change in the in the lines of the pattern to conform with her body shape yes I think that’s so interesting the pattern is much more important than being truthful to the anatomy you’re right Ellen you had a question uh yeah sort of similar observation that is um his drawing of the figure is often very distorted um to mirror other uh patterns and shapes his arms are curved in odd ways and the shoulders are off and I almost wondered did he just never learn to draw the figure or do you think he’s trying to just integrate the figure into this pattern scheme that he’s come up with so the artist that I’m talking about are they know very well what they’re doing they’re very intentional about this they they all been trained how to draw the body they’ve taken life model classes this is very much on purpose and the elongation of the deformation of the body is intentionally done to heighten this decorative nature to this to to create this decorative surface the body has to fit in not it’s not that the pictorial sort of logic revolves around the body it is that the body needs to conform to whatever decorative surface he envisioned for the painting so he’ll stretch it or he’ll shorten it or he’ll deform it on purpose absolutely on purpose yeah that makes sense and he’s always trying to mirror another shape too with what he does when he distorts it’s interesting to see how he distorts the body yes okay any say did you have a question well I guess I was just I’m I’m looking at his use of space and depth which um of course the oppression is used a lot of atmosphere and and that kind of perspective so in the woman women with the dog he he kind of has a piece in the front which is a very um kind of abstracted flower three flowers and the dog they they’re they’re the you know the foreground and so I I don’t know he really cared that much about depth but he ends up with depth in this painting because of scale and um other things but it’s it’s not done with color I guess is what I would say it’s it’s just shape so there’s okay so there you absolutely correct so he is not there is no linear perspective which gives you well there is a little bit um objects in the distance are smaller than right in the foreground so that gives you sort of a hint that there is a space enough to fit all of these people and there’s also layering of shape that also creates the suggestion of death right because the dog has to be in front of the people who are in front yeah you read it layer one layer two and but but we don’t have the classical linear construction or we don’t have the atmospheric perspective where things get cooler as they move away from us because again the intention is to flatten yeah the intention is not to create an illusion of reality with the illusion of depth the intention the objective is to create a decorative surface it’s not that they can do it it’s just the aesthetic objective is different right it’s interesting oh I hope so all right um domestic Interiors so this is again this is by still by bonard this is one of his first intimus scenes 1891 uh and this titled intimacy um and it’s a much darker painting because it’s inside and there is probably some sort of a light artificial light source here so this is almost this is becoming less and less legible you have to spend more and more time sort of parsing the the things that we see in order to decipher them it becomes sort of a code um it’s a very cluttered congested space um the color areas within the flattened pictorial field no longer necessarily describe the objects meaning the color here exists independently of what it is supposed to describe so you might have let me explain this so you can recognize this as a hand that is holding a cigarette and yet the way that he constructs this hand is from these very abstract patches of color it is as close to obstruction to obstruction as you can get without going fully abstract there is no longer really fingers it’s just a sort of a misshapen it’s a memory of a hand as he would put it rather than anything else so less decorative and more abstract more conceptual in his representation so objects sort of dissolve and then they reappear they merge it it’s it looks sort of mysterious right it looks Timeless in the way so who looking at here so this is his brother-in-law this is he’s a musician a composer CLA Tas he’s wearing this thick house coat and a hat for some reason he’s smoking a pipe um in the Shadow with her sort of three quter with her shoulder to us and we see her profile and the hand with the cigarette that’s Bernard sister claude’s wife and then where is bonard because it’s obviously his house this is bonard that’s is his hand with another clay pipe um and this is a purple hand talking about going against the naturalistic trend so again not descriptive but conceptual now the most sort of important thing here is how the spirals of smoke create the space right what the impression is we’re talking about the envelope is what mon called it then envelope of light um and color here we’re talking about the smoke and color so there is the cigarette and the two clay pipes and there is smoke coming out of them and then they it Blends what looks like a wallpaper until you notice that there is that there’s smoke sort of cutting through the wallpaper you you can sort of tell that this is smoke because it’s floating against the frame so the smoke becomes the wallpaper the wallpaper becomes the smoke it’s all very nebulous very ambiguous very atmospheric right so these arabesques create the air oh the smoke in in inside the womb so there’s a very famous poem during this time by a symbolist writer Stefan Mal who says our whole soul is expressed when we slowly exhale wings of smoke abolished into other rings so this is truly the soul this is if you take the this is a rift on Mal’s poem this is a portrait of his family of the soul of his family done through the smoke that they exhaling um another intimus painting this is coffee or another title is afternoon tea I don’t know how I guess there’s a scholarly discussion about what they’re drinking um this this is when Bonar says I float between intim mism and decoration one does not reformulate yourself I would posit that he doesn’t float between them it’s one and the same it’s decorative and intimate so this is really very a Vanguard at the moment um it’s it it’s still the focal point is the pattern but it’s no longer even a pattern on a human body it is on a table it is an inanimate pattern that becomes Central to this composition to this horizontally arranged composition um so we are the viewer or the artist we are sited at the same table we just sit at opposite of the people that we sort of catching a glimpse of um the color is incredibly bright and Incredibly sort of jarring in its contrast which makes it the brighter so you have the blue the blue in whatever is hanging on on that wall a tapestry or a painting there’s a lot of blue in there looks impressionistic to me the blue dress and all the Shadows are blue you can see it here on the the serving dish of the cup or the pot on the table there is this in congruent shadow of the chair that the dog is sitting on falling like a separate object onto the wall um you have this incredibly bright yellow of that dress with the orange hat um and of course the the most expense expensive patch of color is the red and white tablecloth that’s upset by this black serving platter which is which you know black is not a color it’s where color dies but here it becomes the most visible patch of color because it’s the darkest so he’s doing the opposite of what we usually do making the brightest part latest um and then you have this interesting device of framing the painting you have the frame of that painting which is exactly as the frame of our painting for whatever that is a Dr papy or a decorative frame that’s painted over it’s hard to see um so it’s this moment in time this domestic moment in time again incredibly intimate incredibly quiet and the people who are either missing their the face to look at us or are turned away from us and completely absorbed by whatever they’re doing in this case by the dog and even the dog is absorbed by looking at the tablecloth nobody’s paying attention to us and so that absorption creates this separate perfect domestic World in which we’re sort of peeping uh we’re not included in their little connection did you have any questions about this or comments just that they’re very permissive with their pet the table yikes well the dog at least is not in the food the dog doesn’t have its paw in the food that’s true yeah so um so just sort of a personal comment the make me I think the happiest is a viewer there is something about that world that perfect sort of Joyful juicy colored world even if it’s have you seen this one in person by any chance uh it’s at the tape I don’t remember seeing it okay it’s interesting okay well this is at the exhibit here in Washington I don’t know I don’t have the list for the for exhibit sorry I I remember it uh sure was it there oh you see okay it was I remember seeing it as well it is in in the exhibit okay you help us with the woman’s uh hand on the right see a little glass there and what what’s next to what what are those things next to her hand okay so it’s no it’s no more legible to me than it is to you this looks like a glass and this looks like a larger glass so I don’t know what this is this might be a cover for this maybe it’s a jar but it looks transparent because we see the tablecloth it’s barely I don’t know what this is I always thought this is a shadow but I don’t know what the green thing is you should look at it if you go into the exhibition come back and tell us what it is okay the nudes how would the Nai do the nudes the intimist Nai so it’s a very very intimate nude so this is later and I didn’t know if whether to include it or not because it’s outside of the dates of the na it’s from 1925 but I just wanted to show you that he sticks with this aesthetic of a pattern so this is um new and the bath from 1925 uh oil on canvas and the you see there are two bodies in this painting and one of them is nude uh this is his partner Mara um and they lived together since 1893 they married that year the Year of the painting and she figures in over 300 of his works so she becomes a model for him so Martha had a chronic throat infection and what was suggested to her as a remedy is frequent baths so she there are these recurring numerous bad scenes that bonard does that include her so again this is a very modern image uh he is modernizing a conventional genre of a horizontal female nude which we’ve seen over and over and over since the time of the Venetian Renaissance and of course Tian champion and popularize that but we don’t see the whole body here we see the bottom half of the body mostly the legs um and so that creates a vertical that leads our eye into the painting oops but the strongest vertical is of course the rim of the bath that leads us into this into the depth there’s more depth here and yet you have this very strong geometric structure the painting is bisected by The Rim in the center here and you know I would say 3/4 towards the back by the horizontal line of the bath then you have another bsection the two lines of the rug that Echo the two lines of the bath and of course where the porcelain bath is glaming and this white is an impressionistic white actually it’s a white that contains all the colors the pink and the blue and the yellow if you look at it closely um and the rug is much flatter as rugs are and much more simplified in terms of color it’s no longer tonal exploration but this very jarring contrast of orangish yellow and orangish and red and blue and a little bit of green very Vivid pattern um Floral Pattern um so this there is another figure which I mentioned over here it’s a standing figure he’s wearing a rope this is actually bonard and he’s cropped his head off just like he did of the nude and about the half of the body uh remains outside of the canvas so when you crop the figures you make the space appear smaller right because the effect that you’re creating is that they couldn’t fit into the Canvas even though the canvas might be oversized so there is it creates it conveys an effect of intimacy and again it it creates this sort of um effect of us being a Peeping to viewer right how else would we catch a glimpse of somebody in the bath so we are somewhere by the head of the bath standing because we’re looking down at the body in it okay do you have any questions about anything by bonard or the SN nope okay so the last artist I’m going to talk about is a friend of Bonar is another intimist like Bonar and his name is Edward vyar he is a son of a naval Captain who dies fairly um early on and a s a sress his mother is a sinstress and uh that has the most important influence on his style so this is not a wealthy family it’s not a well of family he wins a scholarship to Lum and where he studies Ric and art and he started by copying Michelangelo his and other classical sculpture sculptur he applies to the Academy of Fine Arts twice and he gets in there on a second try so he’s persistent about receiving this very um rigorous artistic education and then he studies with a very traditional artist by the name of Jean Leon jro who is an academic artist who who likes these sort of exotic subjects of Herms and odelis and lions but very bright um very sort of pattern oriented painting painter as well he is in the military for a short time then he joins the Nai his first exhib exhibition is with the Nai and in 1892 he produces his very famous um panels apartment panels which he calls apartment frescos that we’re going to look at so he says that you cannot look at painting as reproducing nature he says we need to look at a painting as a set of relations that are definitely detached from any idea of naturalism a form or a color exists only in relation to another form does not exist on its own we can only conceive of the relation so what is he talking about he’s talking about not reproducing the object but focusing on the relationships between the objects which is again this is a fact you know an aspect of obstruction this sort of uh approach so his nickname is the Nai zaaf because of his military service they there is a regiment called the ZF regiment um and we will see lots of domestic scenes lots of images of an interior self that is absorbed and alienated from the world and we’re also going to see really large scale screams and murals um and just like with Bernard pattern is more important than the body so these are his very popular and often commissioned decorative panels so this one the public gardens from 1894 he produces for very famous um publisher avangard art and literature publisher 30d newon nanson I’m sorry so there are four groups of these panels that that are produced for that specific apartment and are supposed to go on four specific walls so each wall will have a composition and when you’re in the room you have this narrative the story about the public gardens again the public garden is an absolute novelty that is a Modern urban space that did not exist before so this is all about the now the moment um so this is girl playing the questioning the nursaid um the the conversation no wait this is the conversation this is the red parasol then you have the prominade and the first steps the two school boys and under the trees so the problem with these panels is that they’ve all gotten separated and ended up in various separately in various museums so when I’m and not all of them have been published together so these you know whatever the panels I’m showing to you together should match in terms of color but museums take their pictures in different lighting so sometimes there is a variation but the you know the color is a little off um because the picture was taken in a private collection this is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston so this is the prominade and this is the first steps so you have two influences here one from the impressionism in the subject matter which is modern naturalistic um contemporary Urban space that’s an impressionistic subject matter open air City Park the effects of the sun on the ground the sort of speckling of the Sand by the Light um the the trees and the sky sort of creating this very pleasant landscape and the second influence is from the Japanese screams that is the that is the inspiration for that aesthetic object in an apartment um the it’s all the compositions are asymmetrical they decentered there’s no focal point really uh it seems to be an arbitrary cropped image a snapshot um and another very non- impressionistic thing is the technique the way that he layers color creates this impasto which could be seen as impressionistic except it’s not about capturing the effect of light but about creating a texture it’s very mat and it’s very muted unlike what you see in impressionist painting um and this idea of the dots of color which you have another posst impressionist like in the poist movement is actually an inspiration from his visit to the museum that houses wonderful medieval tapestries in Paris museun so he is looking at his paintings like a Craftsman would look at the tapestry he’s weaving things together and there is this repetition of a building block of a of a spot of color un Blended individual dots of color like a strand of color in the tapestry so that makes the surface much flatter this repetition the sort of mechanized repetition here um um so this is another differently lit photograph the two school boys which is in Belgium and under the trees which is in the Cleveland Museum of Art so if you can just imagine all of these panels you walk into the room and all of the walls have these huge panels they’re fairly big the um so they’re about 100 Ines long I mean tall so you have this natural backdrop to your ordinary daily life and it creates this sort of an effect of a garden in an interior and then if you look closely at the figures in these paintings you will start to notice that there are no man There It Is Just Women and Children because that is what how gendered the spaces are in 19th century repair us um and to add on to this the women never show us their faces they’re either far away or they are sort of crouching on benches or they’re turning away or they’re hiding their face under their parasols so it’s this sort of hidden World hidden feminine world that is happening in a public garden which is probably a commentary or a reflection on the 19th century uh middle class gendered reality so the interior of the room with these panels becomes a microcosm of the outside world and the domestic interior becomes the same as the psychological interiority of these women right so you’re in the intimate space of your own room and then you’re in the intimate space inside of your own head but again this patterned surface the flatness of the Mosaic um is what the Nai are all about do you have any questions about the decorative panels before we move on nope okay so the last batch of paintings are these Interiors with the dress maker so as you remember um his mother is a sress and she Tak makes her work home they live in a in a series of small apartments so vard is surrounded by Fabric and the color and pattern of fabric is really what he paints and what he loves to paint and so he produces a serious of these dress maker shops which is based on his mother’s way of working one of which is this the flower dress from 1891 this is in sa Pao in Brazil and again you have this very small interior very confining and you have the figures that are absorbed in whatever it is they are doing and it is his family his grandmother his mother and his sister Marie um and her dress we don’t see Marie doesn’t have a face neither really do his grandmother mother but Marie’s dress becomes the focus of the painting and it is featured twice in the painting because there’s a large mirror on the back wall um but what that mirror also does it it further makes the spatial relationships ambiguous um it’s not there’s sort of this confusing doubling of the figure in the mirror and she’s much too small in it that shouldn’t be the case there um so the space is made up of areas of color and not just the areas of color but the areas of different pattern so you have the flowery the floral wallpaper then you have the floral dress then you have the solid Brown over here you have the white and pink marble perhaps of the ledge this sort of muted greenish orish fabric that they’re working with a little bit of orange over here but they’re patches of pattern and color you put them together and click into this puzzle um there is no difference here between an inanimate object and the human body the hierarchy has been destroyed we bodies people don’t have faces we see them from the side even when we see them from the front they don’t have any features there um what is dominant what is more important are the inanimate patterns on the fabrics and these patterns become become alive this is the most animated patch in the whole of the composition so this is another painting um the last painting I’m going to show you in this lecture um this is the sudor this is the Smith college Museum of Art um and in 1893 it’s a fairly it’s a fairly small painting it’s about 14 inches I think 13 inches even um and this is clear clearly I think encapsulates what the Nai intimus are all about this the pleasures of the pattern um that I titled the lecture with so here he there’s again his mother and his sister Marie and they’re working on something something in the workshop that sewing or ironing as it appears and then uh Marie’s fiance who is another Nai painter interrupts their work by walking in the floral pattern really overwhelms any sort of architecture so even the door is covered in a floral pattern and he interupts not just their work but the pattern it seem it seems to change behind his back as he’s walking in he has destroyed it he’s Disturbed this inner intimate moment um the floral dress that Marie is wearing Echoes the wallpaper and also Echoes the blooming tree outside the white flowers on the on the black branches is an echo of that black dress or burgundy dress with the white flowers on it so what you also we have here is the destruction or the Erasure of the distinction between the organic and the man-made the floral textile and the tree which makes the flowers they grow there so the figures are locked into these patterns um they have the pattern of their surroundings which is the pattern of their life to put it metaphorically um it it you know that that patterning is reiterated through space it is repeated through space which is basically what their work is this the series of repetitive movements which strips them of the individuality which makes their faces unimportant it is their job it is their work the process the repetition that becomes important here and so they merge with the space um each family member is inhabits his own or her own separate World um the the couple is interacting with each other and even in that interaction the Suter seems to be absorbed by something inside his head by his thoughts rather than by his fiance so there is this very cozy intimate pretty in Domesticity and this very complicated set of relationships uh of drama underlying it okay so this is it for the lecture do you have any questions about anything any questions about who are yes I I had a quick one um when I look at this painting particularly I I think of Gustaf Clint was he a contemporary of these or did he come later and was influenced by the Nai he is later um and you are right there is this sort of over cluttered surface right that we have in climp as well he in CL is very much um concentrating on patterning so it’s a it’s a similar aesthetic I I think it’s a very similar aesthetic um that you have here except that Clint will give us fantasy and mythology and he’ll use real gold so he is um much more removed from reality than the than varar or bonard he’s not interested in the in the ordinary do do you think they would have seen each other’s work or or or Clint would have seen work of the nais I think so I think he would have seen it I don’t know I don’t know enough about Clint but they’re close enough an age and Vienna had all of these exhibitions by the French artists at the time so I think so it’s a that’s a a very interesting question to which I don’t have an answer it’s a first for me an interesting question thank you no your questions are interesting don’t put me any any other questions about any of the naid that we covered today actually I keep thinking about how you were talking about bonard um painting on the rolls and then cutting them yeah yeah so like I was like the bath one there yeah or or or that one like do you think that he had painted more and then he cut that out yes I read that he did that sometimes so is it wrapped around a stretcher so he’d have to cut a little larger I mean it’s just just interesting I actually I don’t think that was stretched ah it what I read and okay so I might be wrong but from what I read it was a canvas roll and the the sort of the Roll was lying on the floor while he was painting it so I don’t can you stretch it while it’s still sort of a roll no it would have to be when you’re done but you’d have to leave enough to put around the edge right I yeah yeah I was also curious about this but I found this one sort of piece of information and I and uh that’s all I I got I didn’t do further research into that but I think it was um from how and just sort how was described was sort of hanging on the wall un stretched and it pulled on the floor and he would paint and then he would cut interesting yeah because you can imagine that there was more to this yes a larger sort of covered victorial area and he would work on several canvases at the same time which I don’t understand how works but the impressionist did something similar Monae when he was working on his haast Stacks um would move from canvas to Canvas because for for him it was about capturing a specific light so each canvas captured a specific light so he moved 5 minutes you know between but it’s a completely different objective here so it’s just perhaps a little bit of ADHD will diagnose well AR can um there’s a huge advantage to cropping like this because he could create tension on these edges of the painting um after the fact um so e you either stretch the canvas before you start working or you put it on a Surface um afterwards and if you’re going to stretch it you better yeah you better have some extra to wrap around the frame yeah but um it it lets you make decisions differently and I I suspect he enjoyed that yeah but I’m less sort of fascinated by this than by him working on several canvases at the same time right that that I don’t I can’t I can’t sort of conceive of that changing your focus that quickly or sort of not concentrating at all I don’t know maybe it’s more than automated sort of process in your head so do you think you have an idea of who the na are yes absolutely and who the who Bonar is as an artist okay but because that’s the that’s my objective I don’t expect you to remember the titles of the date but I want you to understand who he was and what okay so as somebody once said the point of art history of an art historian is to explain expl to you why a thing looks like that so hopefully why why do they make these aesthetic choices because each aesthetic objective has a philosophy behind it and hopefully I have explained their sort of philosophy to you and what they were striving uh for the and why it looks the way it does I do have one more question were either of these artists successful in their own lifetime I mean like monetarily monily so the Nai some of them were because they’ve lived well let’s see when did vard die I mean Bernard let’s see okay so he lived until 1947 so he he’s lived through World War I World War II he’s lived through um this sort of splintering of artistic movement um and he and they’ve changed I’m just showing you the the part the period of the career where they wore the Nai the na only lasted for 10 years and that some of them remained within the athetic and some of them didn’t um and then as they said we got overtaken by cubism before we said everything we wanted to say meaning people switched the Cub became the Vanguard movement and then you have surrealism so it was this very per trial time so yes I’m sorry I want an attention yes some of them I mean they were they lived as professional artist and they supported themselves in bonard and vard were successful and D even before them because one of his one of the biggest supporters was a very very wealthy Russian guy so Den traveled to Moscow and painted things for the you know to decorate his Mansion was was it the same um Russian guy that that collected matiz yes marov yes I can’t believe you remember that yes he was supporting all sorts of avanguard um French artist and Ma is right there the FES are sort of coming up also a shortlived movement but a very important one and he he was a neighbor of Monae and Monae would come over and look at his paintings and he would go look at Monae’s um paintings and and um and I think he was good friends with matis Berard yeah matis or mon H bonard okay you said Monae and I was like who was friends with mon Monae was was Bard’s neighbor Monae was bonard neighbor yes and he would come he would come his studio and he would go to his Studio yes so no they were not just because they challenged the sort of the aesthetic didn’t mean they hated each other sometimes it does like Picasso and matis did not get along or Pico and Del nobody got along with Del because you mentioned that they were professional artists and he lived a very long life yeah do you know if he evolved to go into cubism or surrealism or try to keep so the B he didn’t the B is one of his later works so this is what he would look like as a later artist 1925 well I mean it’s it’s later he died in 47 but this is he’s still doing sort of nesque sort of things as you can see here are are there any other questions I mean oh um Arena you’ve been very generous with your time um I am completely free I can answer all the questions you have do you have any questions no did I explain everything perfectly okay you usually do thank okay and thank you so much for for speaking with us again is there another question there or am I interrupting someone I can’t see the chat because I hid the the panel but please speak up I had a question yes given uh their idea of color representing a spiritual element and uh their interest in pattern and flatness that they still all have um images of real life their paintings uh and didn’t just go to abstraction right as you can see they stay tied to the world yeah you the recognizable things in all of these paintings they’ve never they haven’t quite jump that that last sort of hurdle right it’s not P obstruction we would describe this as abstracted some somewhat um and the color I I don’t I just want to sort of make this clear the color doesn’t have the spiritual element the color is a vehicle of emotion the first group of the na that we talked about the mystics theyed spir sort of subjects you know spirituality and mysticism but yeah you wouldn’t call them abstract painters they still you know a body is a body it’s a recognize able it’s done from observation from the memory of the of the observation a dog is a dog right you can recognize uh everything so they’re looking at things it’s just they’re not uh wed to creating an illusion of things they they want to create they want to convey a subjective perception Irina I have a question yes well as a child I always loved his paintings because of the little dogs in all the paintings and so do you know what the history of of that is the history of the dog what do you me like was it the famous dog or was just their family no I don’t know do I’m just I’m just curious very few other artists had these little dogs in all their paintings they are they are artists even you know in Renaissance it’s so it’s interesting the dogs I I remember at some point I got sort of curious about this because in older paintings and Renaissance paintings you have breeds that we don’t have anymore so I just I read about this that the dogs that don’t look like any of the dogs you can meet here I think it’s just it’s a choice because what he’s trying to what what is he giving us he’s giving us this Domesticity so for him Mystic includes his dogs or a cat um you know a cigarette it’s it’s whatever it’s it’s where it’s this sort of warm intimate world and that obviously a personal choice for him um to include dogs which we appreciate yeah okay well one of the fabulous things about this picture is that it’s a tablecloth that’s the um the highlight of the picture in a certain sense right that’s exactly what it is that’s the just like in some of his other pictures the gowns that the women were wearing are so fabulous right because the point is the pattern the pattern the the surface the decorative surface and you do this here it’s done with this expanse of a tablecloth okay um thank you listening unless you have any more questions Reena I I’m gonna go ahead and and and cut us off right now you’ve been so generous with your time and um sharing this knowledge of this time period in these artists thank you so very much thank you we will definitely be having you back again because uh we love it every time you’re you’re you present to us so thank you so very much I’m going to go ahead and end the recording and uh and for everyone that was on the zoom today thank you for joining in thank you so much everybody too thank you thank you very very much