Impressionism Across Fields
Impressionism is 150 years old. The art of the “plein air”, whose anniversary we are celebrating, remains highly relevant today as it raises issues—related to territory and environment, time and climate, or to the dialogue between the arts—that echoes our changing world.
Looking at Impressionist painting in 2024 means putting into perspective our present that is riddled with questionings – around ecology, gender, plural identities and the digital- in a way that inevitably shapes our gaze and enriches the understanding of this movement born in 1874.
This international symposium is part of the Université Paris Nanterre research program on impressionism supported by its Foundation partnership with the Contrat de destination Normandie – Paris – Ile-de- France. It is co-organized with the Musée d’Orsay, and held in connection with the exhibition Paris 1874 – Inventing Impressionism.
The conference will provide the opportunity to assess the current state of research on Impressionism, its history and historiography, at the crossroads of multiple fields. Through eight thematic sessions, which cover the movement in all of its historical, geographical and artistic depth, it will also highlight the dynamism of research and the diversity of interest generated by Impressionism today. Thanks to a dialogue between worldwide scholars from various backgrounds, it is intended to explore emerging approaches.
e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e for being with us today for the second [Music] day conference we are here at the M for the exhibition 1874 Paris invent impressionism as well as the immersive experience that some of you have already tried and visit it this morning so unlike what is written on the screen this session does not finish at 11: a.m. but uh rather at 12:30 for those of you who were not here yesterday we have artist students of the Emil Co school which is a drawing school in Leon and they are going to draw our discussions and our different speakers we will be able to see their work and I encourage you to check out the work they’ve done this year because they are here today because of a onee part partnership with their school and they worked on the theme of impressionism all throughout this year and how impressionism has an impact on today’s work in for our artists so you can have a look at their work in the museum and tomorrow as well for the night of museums so do not hesitate to go and have a look and now we’re going to start our session from exhibition to the medium exhibition for those of you who had written our press release we opened our doors very wide for these three days of conferences but there is a theme that we mentioned in our communication we really wanted this theme to be a part of our program which is the question of exhibitions why did we want to keep this theme well because this conference is linked to two exhibitions as I just mentioned one at the Muse D for the 150th anniversary of impressionism and as a research program among the University of we got in contact with the M with this conference project because we had in mind this 150th anniversary and we metri and and Robins are two curators for this exhibition and they told us about their project and they told us how they wanted to brainstorm about this exhibition that would be the Pinnacle of their work for this exhibition and to talk about all of the different types of exhibition because exhibitions have been studied in art history it’s the point when an artist or a group of artists such as was the case in 1874 presents their present their work to the public of course it’s very important because artists their friends uh collections sellers um take part in these exhibition and artists show their work and show their status in the world of art at a given point of course they are presenting their latest pieces of Art and they want to hear the the feedback of um collections in the past few years art historians have been thinking about exhibitions through social and economic aspects and they want to understand this as a means of expression or a medium as we put it in the title medium for an artist to show their work in a given ecosystem but the exhibition and the ones taking place at the M right now are also a point in time in art history because they show a vision a por of VI narration on their objects we can have a look at the different exhibition exhibitions on impressionism that have taken place throughout the time and as Paul per said yesterday in his opening of the conference we could look at the different exhibitions or changes between themes in the different Hallmark exhibitions that had impressionism as a theme such as the Centenary exhibition in in 1974 so 100 years after the Advent of impressionism they reflect art history of the time and they also allow us to have a different Vision that can only take place when people come and visit museums and see works of art so today we have four speakers two of them are by my side and they will both take the floor and then we will have a discussion and then our other two speakers will come up on stage so with these two first speakers we’re going to look at these different approaches and we’re going to travel through the the medium used by artists for exhibitions for a point when artists meet and are faced with more materialistic and down toe matters such as selling their art and we will see that exhibitions are also a way to narrate their work and an historiographic object and I am now going to give the floor to our first Speaker Isabel we are delighted to welcome her she is an associate professor and research director at the University of Le and she dedicated or work to Turner Jones and she just published book entitled exhibits exhibiting ourselves Ed and as a mediator of his art so we are at the heart of these questions about exhibitions with Isabelle and she’s going to tell us about a wonderful project to reconstitute a Whistler exhibition that reflects the experience that you have undergone here at the M I am sure that this will give way to many discussions thank you very much for inviting me to take part in this conference which a very dense program I would like to tell you about Mr wiler’s exhibition the first um exhibition of Jen M wiler’s works of art it opens in June 1874 so a few weeks after the first impressionist exhibition he’s used to giving exhibits um in France and in England and he was invited to that exhibition by duga but he chose to exhibit his work alone in London rather than here in Paris so the title of my work also mentions the modeling of this exhibit which is new and unheard of before my resarch lab has helped me in this work and so has the Federation of visual science and culture research I got a lot of help regarding modeling and I could actually take part in the uh virtual reconstitution of that exhibit so first of all I would like to show you how this is a Pioneer exhibition because it is a turning point not only in this artist’s career but also in the history of exhibitions because of the material um innovations that that took place there and also to show the first results of this modeling to assess a few critical challenges of a 3D virtual modeling of an exhibit at the time when these virtual right now virtual mediation exhibits uh becoming more and more common and sometimes we feel here that uh we don’t show all of the different aspects of this work and we need to be methodical and and cautious first of all the research context let me tell about the research context this communication is part of a book that I published in 2023 which meant to sh light on the fact that Whistler and were the Vanguard of the artistic scene in Paris and London at the time are fully aware of how important it is to to create new exhibition modalities to raise awareness among their fellow citizens about their art and it’s completely different to what is presented in institutions at the time so their [Music] their the attention that they give to their fr and the principles that they’ve used started practices that are still underway to this day Mr whistler’s exhibition shows a 100 works of art and it’s particularly interesting it’s a challenge it would be a challenge to show all of these different works of art virtually but the point is to study how this modeling can help to assess the um relevance of the principles used by the article by the artist rather when exhibiting his art and the reality of implementing this exhibition so before even thinking about a virtual exhibit in a conventional research project we looked for uh sources dating back to this area the gallery was a street that is seen as the region of the clubhouses of the Gentry it’s only a few hundred meters near St James Palace and many art galleries unfortunately this building was bombarded in the second world war and there are no archives dating back to this area to visualize the the building there are no photographies or drawing so we only found this map um this insurance plan of London and this is the only document that we found to find out the sizes of rooms the building materials and so and we found that right after the entrance people would enter right away in a hall which was probably quite big um 72 square meters and then we had the exhibition Hall that it was slightly bigger 76,000 76 square meters but as commentator said the volume and the space for the exhibition was probably appeared probably bigger because there was at five meter of heights in that building so this was quite Majestic so to identify the works we used the catalog that the artists showed even wer often changed the names the titles of his works and Associated them to different creations and there are some of them that are very vague for instance Blue Wave there are two um works that are entitled Blue Wave but still more than three4 of the works that were represented them were identified with certainty of course we paid particular attention to the 70 times the exhibit was mentioned in different press articles at the time 40 to announce that this exhibition would take place and 20 of the 30 more longer articles show about tell us about the different materials used in the exhibition and chosen by the artists but there are also contradictory testimonies that remind us how we are all subjective when visiting an exhibition which makes it more complicated to modelize this exhibition we have statements made under oath there’s a memorandum of agreement between the gallery owner and Whistler this took place in January 1874 it’s one of the first Clues proving that wler wanted to present his works in the long term because he has a one-year lease for this gallery and is going to take two months of Works to prepare the space for his exhibition there’s an affidavit that shows the different steps that took place before and during the exhibition so before even talking about the results of my research and to talk about this modeling let me talk about the context in which Whistler decides to present his work both in France and in the in England institutions are still very strict in how artists are allowed to present their Works a few days before the opening of the exhibition the personal exhibition of w journalist LS the um the the fact that a landscape of Mr whistlers was used and hanged over the lofty door of the South room where no human eye can see it so there are many quotes of people criticizing the the way the exhibit took place and in particular the ones to the the fact that Whistler is giving this exhibit in this in this area so in the fall of 19 1872 he sends a letter to the Secretary of the Society of French artists to ask him to remove his works from the gallery and to put them in the Whistler Gallery a few weeks later he says tell me if my works are hanged above my gallery this suggests that he got involved in how the space was set up and in the year 1873 there are works by man and many other artists along his the pleasure with which we feel which we feel on visiting this exhibition is due to two circumstances the High character of most of the pictures contained in the sober aspect of the gallery where the very frames and fittings have been considered with a View to a homogeneous effect but it’s difficult to know how much withler was involved in this so the 20 people who criticize the materialistic aspects of the exhibition underline these many different unique choices that have been made and we made sure that we did the same in our virtual exhibition so we noticed that the walls have elaborated colors rather than the green and red walls in conventional exhibits there is a nice color to the room a lot of light it’s rather gray gray and pink according to Aid the affid so this technique strikes us because rather than using a single color on the walls there are nuances that reflect the subtle colors in uh wiler’s work and even in his are used in the exhibition The Works are above one another so below the big oil paintings they are in um there are prints and Below drawings and the O paintings are at I level but with these different overlapping works and we restituted it with the same size it is likely that they were actually quite close to the ground which can be surprising but we’ve seen it in other private galleries as well authors also mentioned that there’s a there’s something new in the distance between works as well this is not the way it was done previously if we compare this exhibition by Whistler to the other exhibition between 63 and 65 um we see that there’s there are fewer works if we test the visual effect with our modeling we can confirm that aside from the size of the room there’s indeed a lot of space between Works which is in line with the principles of the artist there’s an harmonious transition between the work and its environment and journalists show that the artist is ambitious other than the portrait of Mrs leand and the portrait of Miss Mrs Lewis H the oil paintings presented are no longer in their original frames as for the drawings they are in simple frames with different gold nuances for the modeling we decided to put them in frames that could have been the ones used at the time according to several sources it is not easy for researchers to do that because we don’t like to speculate on what was used but this Choice shows how difficult it is to imagine the exhibition as it was at the time without thinking about the works of art in a frame that they’ve had for a very long time this was shown in 187 notice the lighting and its specificities the penel remind us that wlim adapts the previous volum to this exhibition the paintings are 75 cm below the window of the gallery and the light on only shows the paintings and everything in the valarium is in the shade this is what the person in charge of modeling tried to replicate commentators also agree on the fact that the the furniture was very refined and that there are accessories that are very refined China Parc Lan flowers blue yellow Calas and another person also explains that the sofas and chairs have subtle curves and they are nicely spaced in the the room these works and the colors on the wall are in line with the yellow carpet Whistler also seem to be suggesting to visitors that they could replicate this in their own homes and this is what he tries to do with this scen that we can see here and people might have been sensible to this Innovation and if people some people mention that it looks like an artist’s Workshop but others thinks that it looks like a home they’re trying to make it a curiosity cabinet but they don’t want to strike the vision of visitors too much one of them says in his in his text in English that it a in French probably this intuition that pushes them to name it symph in paal people look at the overall impression rather than one single work the gallery and its content are perfectly harmonious it’s a symphony in PA Mo in that is very detailed Whistler Associates music to his work but also to the overall atmosphere of the room we understand that it’s both trying to push for reflection around the exhibition being a work of art itself and it encourages people to see this experience as a work of art the specificities of this exhibition modalities are in line with his um art a beautiful picture should be shown beautifully he said so clearly this innovative ideas are highly critic ized the exhibition caused a scandal in London defying public opinion in this way was still understandable in Paris where Corb and man had met with some opposition but in London this was a new approach another example mman claims that a Pioneer exhibition it was the first time in London anyone had ventured to show that a picture exhibition could be beautifully arranged the principles that he tried out in this exhibition such as the coordinated colors the lining and space between paintings will be replicated in in future projects even for private projects such as the P peacock room in 1883 he invites his friends to take place take part in the exhibition his arangement is in white and yellow and his two next exhibitions are also going to use the same principles so the Symphonies and the musical titles that he gives to his picture Works prove that he he has this aesthetic intention to highlight its formal qualities before their subject per se he this proves that his idea are coherent he is determined to show these different principles his um fellow citizens at the time regardless of their vision of his work enjoyed taking part in an unprecedented exhibition an audacious and bold experience says one person or for the very latest Arts people consider that this exhibition is a piece of art in itself and the reconstitution the virtual reconstitution of this exhibition shows that this artist is looking at all of the different dimensions of the space as for the use of virtual tools to show this exhibition we’ve had different feedbacks people want to have this visual summary in this virtual exhibition it requires a lot of research and people are well aware of this but for 3D reconstitution of exhibitions it is similar to other exhibitions that are always controversial when we restore works of art or exhibitions as for the differences here are several of them so digital restitution requires a wide array of skills it requires a long time of research we have to interpret the results Engineers have to interpret the results and sometimes they disagree with the different partners regardless of the discipline and and methodical work of other partners in this project bre when it’s not a 3D reconstitution there are Technical and Financial limitations that means that this research has to take place at a given time whereas virtual reconstitution can continue onward for an infinite amount of time we can look at the different theories and we can always backtrack which makes this update of research very very easy and this experimental aspect is very interesting in our work as we’ve seen for frames for instance and it’s easy to think of the specific point in using this type of tools when in comparative studies in 1921 it was not exaggerated to say that any artistic exhibition organized in Europe today is very inspiring for Whistler and a century later we have this restitution that will also be criticized we can exhibit whistler’s work but also other artists Works in this way so here is a short excerpt of the modeling for technical reasons today it is filmed of course but this should be made accessible with um virtual reality uh headsets with tablets and so on which allow us to see different point of views in this exhibition and to focus on one point or another allow me to finish this presentation by two different comments first of all this modeling is not magical for instance for a few works of art that I struggle to identify with certainty I wanted to see if it could allow me to check these theories and that it was the right piece of art because of its size and and and the way it was exhibited but I’m not I’m still unsure about some of these pieces of work as an art historian I also have to pay attention to the people who are cautious about virtual Technologies because the the aesthetic experience of works of art differs and of course this needs to be at the heart of our research both in terms of documents and in history so regardless of the limitations of this exhibition I am delighted to have been able to share the first results of this study with [Applause] you thank you Isabelle for this very interesting presentation which Parks back to the immersive experience that was carried out here at the m as we just said previously we will leave the questions for the end and it’s a great pleasure for me to welcome Christian hum who is director of the research center um beler Institute he used to be at the G Research Institute in Los Angeles and he carried out many um projects of research projects especially in London on London on the European art Market he studied art history at the University of Vienna and also in Paris he has a great lengthy career we’re very happy to welcome him here and he will be presenting giving a presentation on the money series and how they ended up on the Art Market around the 1900s we’re listening to everybody here uh in the auditorium of the O and virtually uh on line thanks also to the organizers of this uh fabulous conference for including me uh because I’m not so much a specialist on impressionism I hope you won’t notice during the winter months of is that working yeah during the winter months of 1890 91 the now 50-year-old Claude mon worked on his artistically most radical conceptually most rigorous and commercially most successful creations of his career to date after breaking with his fellow painters and traveling extensively in the 1880s Monae began the exploration of the theme in a series of 25 works that would put the impressionist uh landscape painting on the previous of the previous decades on a new footing the grain Stacks in the rural surroundings of shibani Monet found ideal condition for his fundamental Research into light color and form he was clearly not interested in a romanticized depiction of peasant labor like Shan FR Mi or wincent Fango but rather in a formal experiment dedicated to subtle changes of light the subject matter became less and less important the artistic means gained more autonomy and the color took on an almost abstract quality this line of argument Mon’s role as a forerunner of abstraction has been suff sufficiently covered in the literature and needs no f collaboration more interesting especially in the context of our conference section is the fact that mon presented 15 of the grain Stacks as an ensemble in the gallery gallery of Paul dur Ruel between May 4 and 16 1891 and I there is no uh view of this exhibition that’s why I’m having here Renoir exhibition on the wall however he not only made success ful use of private distributions and S Sales Channels with his series I argue he resolved for modernism the tension between increasing demand for artistic originality and repetition of a theme for the sake of effective product branding it was the first time that mon had exhibited so many views of the same subject in a Solo show which somewhat irritated viewers who had never before seen such a uniformity in one place place even his fellow painter Kami pisaro initially saw only the danger of commercial mass production weeks before the opening he wrote to his son quote he that means a friend told me that mon would have a solo Exhibition at the of nothing but grain Stacks the clerk of buso bodon said that all collectors only want grain Stacks I don’t know how Monet can bear to be forced into this repetition these are the terrible effects of success qu end when pisaro finally saw the paintings installed together he was full of admiration as if the novelty of a series based on a single motive had suddenly overcome his reservations the aim here is not to provide a reconstruction of Mon’s Exhibition at tanuel as I said there are no known installation phot photos of the series eyewitness accounts do not give us an account an an accurate idea of what the exhibitions looked like what is clear however is that the way in which mon series were presented did not suggest a chronological sequence of day times or Seasons despite the efforts of some commentators to read such an unfolding logic into the arrangement of the paintings as the American art historian John clean argued in his fundamental essay on the dispersal of the modernist series the specifics of display are less important than the fact of presentation as an ensemble in a commercial Gallery in a commercial context and the relationship between the ephemeral unity and the ultimate dissolution mon was Keen to Showcase his series as a cohesive uh accomplishment his insistence on a solo show for the grain Stacks rather than including them into a group exhibition highlights his ambition to carve out the distinct Market presence and to assert his individuality Monae aimed for visual consistency among all paintings in the series particularly those on display focusing on uniform surface treatment nevertheless once this shortlived exhibitions concluded uh he often felt compelled to individualize some works modifying them to enhance their Standalone appeal given their eventual dis uh isolated given their eventual isolated Des Destiny was Paramount over the brief uh Collective display the concept of and design of paintings and ensembles has of course a long uh tradition a series or a cycle rather was typically a commissioned work with the unity of the series determined in in advance the patron was uh of course concerned with ensuring that the paintings could be permanently presented as an ensemble and the traditional means of maintaining Unity is the theme each of the painting is in each of the painting is part of a larger logic such that the meaning of the individual Works reinforce each other if a single scene from the life of Maria deichi as painted by M here were isolated from its 20 companions it would undoubtedly still be interesting however as an expression of the artist conceptual skills and as a contribution to an elaborate uh instrument of propaganda it would lose value this is no longer the case with mon series uh which is why following pisaro they appear to be more in the tradition of repeti since since the Renaissance uh most great Masters and their workshops have repeatedly reproduced their most highly sought after Works however as they were not exactly copies there were were not what we would call replicas today prior to the age of mechanical reproduction the concept of an exact replica was not uh really uh known and thus artists frequently repeat it but rarely replicated their early work herad David’s virgin and child with the milk soup created for private devotion so not for the public display of course is known to exist in at least seven versions with slight variations between each painting the presence of a pounced under drawing leads experts to conclude that all of the works originated from the same cartoon as they exhibit similar Dimensions poses facial features and drapery fults despite the fact that all versions derive from the same prototype there is a somewhat varied approach in both execution and subtle shifts of meaning it is likely that this was carried out at a time when streamlined and accelerated production was employed for marketing purposes in the history of art cost cutting techniques and productivity increasing processes are typically employed in work sold on an anonymous Market in his essay the influence of economic factors on style Michael montias introduced the distinction between process and product Innovation into scholarship on 17th century Dutch art according to montias product Innovation introduces a completely novel commodity whereas process Innovation reduces the cost of turning out an existing one in the cont text of art he concedes two types of in the two types of innovation cannot be kept as distinct as an industry since cost cutting process Innovation frequently Alters the appearance of the product the technique of tonal landscape painting as exemplified by Yan van hoyan and others reached its peak in the 1640s resulting in a considerable reduction in prices compared to those of their predecessors the cost of a painting was primarily determined by the expenditure of Labor nevertheless from the perspective of collectors the product of this abbreviated technique were not regarded as inferior substitutes for top quality a perception that has been observed in the case of Serial Works produced by apprentices jouren and other Workshop assistants in contrast to the tonal School of landscape painting har David and other artists of the new school fine Kat of course uh and other artists of the new School of Fine painting who employed a slow and meticulous technique occupied a more expensive Niche on the market the common denominator uniting all insistences of repetition since the renesance is that they were undertaken in order to meet a demand or at least an anticipated demand what did change in the course of the 19th century was the increased public visibility of Art in 1889 Leon benedit observed quote exhibitions appear simultaneously from all directions and follow one another in the same premises with such rapidity that the days of a man who in remission of his sins had vowed to visit them all would be spent running from morning through night quote end as art historian Patricia manard has P persuasively argued in her articles on copies variations and replicas in the 19th century the Advent of a gallery system with exhibitions as a primary marketing device has made repetitions or multiple R Renditions of the same image highly problematic the practice did not cease to exist as a result of this but it became associated with commercial connotations and was subsequently concealed Gustaf Cor was compelled to misrepresent the number of versions and the sequences sequence of his beautiful Irish woman referring to each of them as the original in the middle of the 19th century with rapid industrialization and invention of Photography the theoretical basis of modernism was laid artists were now expected to produce unique and original paintings each and every time yet often they could only sell repetitions of their best works commercial galleries capitalized on derivatives of successful compositions in his Memoirs Paul durel noted that for an extended period The Firm Gil company exclusively purchased paintings for the purpose of acquiring their reproduction rights this generated a significant portion of the re revenues uh with the original paintings initially been put into the Vault this business model of uh these mid-century galleries was based uh on the concept of reproduction goil employed teams of copyists to produce of the shell subjects that would would sell Shan Leo sheram uh the quintessential Kil artist made several versions of his highly successful painting The Duel after the masquerad the one in Chante shown at the S Salon of 1857 was the basis for the prince issued in various techniques various sizes and also on various price Levels by the dealers Gil in Paris and Gard gamber in London as we get closer uh to the 20th century artists are increasingly Keen to distinguish between their copies and their Originals Sheron for instance wrote to Kil that he had deliberately varied the repetition that the dealer had commissioned of his painting The Prisoner quote this copy will be made as you ask smaller than the original and probably I’ll add or substract something so that it’s clear that you have the original in addition I will put the date 1863 on it to make it later than the painting which I will sign 1861 quote end although cherom is not generally considered a modernist uh the values he implicit implicitly accepts in this context that a copy is distinct from an original and that chronological priority is to be respected are consistent with modernist principles in a paper published in business history Economist Geral Geraldine David Kim osterink and me analyzed the inventory strategy of Gil buso valon the stock books held at the GTI Research Institute covered the sale of more than 25,000 works of art for the period 1860 to 1914 it turned out that rapidity to sell was a key element in the dealer strategy the median number of days in inventory is just 78 days if paintings were in stock longer than two months the selling price went down steeply uh or went steeply downhill kupil was extremely risk averse this would certainly be a different story in the case of Duran Ruel who tried to monopolize un certain eras and keep them them in storage for many years initially also for lack of uh a market yet the economically desirable Supply Monopoly leads to Greater control over the conditions under which demand can be created the dealer Char selm on the other hand focused an entire publicity Machinery on one large scale painting by mial liuni Christ before pilot in the 10 years exclusive contract signed 1878 the painter committed himself to create at the convenient point in time a composition of considerable dimensions and content for which monachi in addition to the price sidm P him for the work was entitled to shares from the entrance fees of the exhibition in large cities as well as royalties from reproductions so again multiple Revenue sources in a mere two months approximately 200,000 visitors made the pilgrimage to the gallery sedel in Paris to view the painting and it has been estimated that a million people saw Christ before pilot during its subsequent three-year tour to Budapest Vienna War Berlin Stockholm Brussels Amsterdam Liverpool Manchester leads and glasow eventually it also uh went to the US but all together was a six years uh Enterprise it is not completely clear however whether the large composition was intended to be sold or whether it was to serve essentially as an advertisement to enhance the value of other smaller works on which sadm had virtually a monopoly New York Railroad magnet William Henry vanderbild visited the theatrical display of Christ before pilot in s Meers Paris Gallery what he brought home to his Fifth Avenue mantion though was the small sha painting the two families a completely different product regarded simply from an economic angle one question occurs does it make sense to Focus entire publicity system on one isolated item in trade to be sure uh the artist received more International attention than he possibly could at the salon exposure and visibility crucial factors for the distribution of artworks were were clearly improved but what about the homogeneity of products feature that enhances successful marketing the the theatrical exhibition of individual paint uh pictures evolved out of the salon with their isolation and consecration of singular Master pieces for the success of big speculative ventures in modern painting a reorientation of the market around the buying and selling of individual painters instead of individual paintings was an economic necessity and as a consequence the promotion of signature Styles instead of signature work Works what Nicholas green called dealing in temperaments became a central part of commercial practice in the art world after the 1889 Universal exhibition we see a flurry of onean shows in private galleries often with with cataloges and uh Duran Ruel institutionalized them another Trend to create narrative was the retrospective uh which in addition to providing a view of an artist’s career Al also conveyed a development Dimension de developmental dimension in which the most recent production took on a teleological role the 1903 impressionism Exhibition at the Vienna session eventually historicized the avangard or impressionism one critic recognized a sudden weather change only a short time short time before he noted the young revolutionaries of art wanted to be original geniuses who ceased uh who created a new form of art based entirely on nature but now they seem to be making great efforts to establish an ancestors Gallery in order to create a v vital connection with the important highly praised movement of movements of the past so uh historicizing daang God was also an exhibition practice um like in the Suess secession pisaro uh who had originally been so dismissive of mon serus himself created uh at least 11 series of over 300 canvases in the last eight years of his life these paintings which were produced for individual sale not for exhibitions as an ensemble stand on the threshold of the early practice of repetition and Mon Mon series durel knew which motives would sell and he advertised or he had advised pisaro to produce several works of these motivs from the boulevar MRA to the TU to the P Earth uh in 1897 I mean in 1897 pisaro wrote uh his son sh quote dur liked the small ones I did very much he advised me to do some boulevards but larger of course and he meant the boulevar MRA series The unease uh that pisaro and others felt about the consequences of Mon’s repetition of his motives in series may be due to the fact that it was not entirely clear what kind of achievement the painting represented was it process or product Innovation the suggestion that Monet might be involved in some sort of mass production contains the idea that the artist had found a more efficient way of producing what he was already doing rather than creating something new in other words his paintings were a product that was already in sufficient demand that a great number of them would find buyers more efficient production would result in higher return on the artist’s investment of time and creativity and yet the individual paintings were beautiful there were expressions of an individual aesthetic as pisaro would acknowledge and they were all distinctly different from one another within the context of their motivic Unity I’m not s suggesting that mon series represent a simple and straightforward marketing strategy s such a presentation also clearly fulfilled Mon’s artistic Ambitions when his grain Stacks were exhibited at durel in 1891 Mon and hisa did not have to ask themselves whether the paintings would be sold or not but to whom and on what terms the exhibition was not absolutely necessary for the sale as demand exceeded Supply in fact 10 of the 15 grain Stacks were already reserved the dealer had bought eight himself collectors mainly American competed for a limited Supply the most popular places were the sun uh the most popular pieces were the sunsets on the part of collectors the psychology of owning a unique object with familial relationships to others may also be uh have been a factor uh to uh not to underestimate mon supporter the journalist and politician George kimasu was also concerned with permanence for the ran Cathedral series he wished Monet the appearance of a millionaire who as he put it would understand if only vaguely the significance of the 20 Cathedrals hanging side by side and say I’ll buy the whole lot but this illustrous person would have made such a purchase on block he continued uh as is us is usually only the case with stocks it would put even the RO child’s profession to shame this crudeness of the stock metaphor and the reference of the prominent banking family are of course ambivalent but they reveal the comp complex of Mon’s Enterprise both as a Creator and as an agent of his own reputation gasur regretted that the Ruan Cathedral paintings were dispersed because he believed that together they would constitute Monet’s Legacy after hoping in vain for a private pattern he therefore asked the president of the Republic Felix for to buy the cathedrals for the nation yet his proposal to nationalize Mon’s private Enterprise was both premature and misguided for both durel and mon the freedom to sell the individual Works in a series to selected clients was of the utmost importance it was not in the interest of the dealer or the artist to con concentrate Supply to a single source of demand Mon’s official Legacy came in his own time years later in the form of a gift to the state namely uh the water lies paintings that were never for sale and which would be permanently displayed on the gently curving walls of the orangery thank [Applause] you beautiful presentation this is Raising many questions and this idea of eity and point paintings I have many questions myself but I would be able to ask them a little bit later so now I would like to ask in the room maybe we already have microphones if there is someone who would like to ask a question I cannot see you can you please uh light up the room here are the microphones maybe someone in the room has a question Natasha Belinda belind Thon Belinda Thompson I would like to talk to Isabelle it is surprising to see the paperworks so low uh in the exhibition were their comments from from the from the visitors on this first for the modeling we had placed the works a little bit higher up and most reviews mentioned that these drawings were close to the ground people said that uh the the imprints were at I level and at the same time other reviews validated the fact or confirmed the fact that was close to the ground and this is why I compared the different images in the Turner Gallery where indeed this is something that was quite common in private exhibitions according to the visual testimonies that we have so the paintings were hanged on the wall that’s not something that we have information on uh we say that they’re close to the skirting but it doesn’t say whether they were hung or maybe not all of them but there’s this visual Rhythm that Whistler used for other exhibition between the vertical and horizontal works so it’s a theory what I thought was interesting as well was that um it’s not the most natural way to show paintings but it’s something that could be done I had a question which was close to that of my colleague what surprised me as well is the decorative T tables behind uh this paintings and these prints is this a theory as well is this something that was thought through uh this is shown in the affidavit this is why we have both documents we don’t always have um these documents this is a document that we have where we have the the colors used the sizes the spacing so we show that there are 20 paintings in the gallery there’s in material for 20 paintings and we have these colored uh edging and nuances that really look like a music uh sheet we can see it this way but it’s not the way it’s described it’s not documented as such and so my question was based on the surprising effect are there other known examples in exhibitions I was very surprised because I think that it’s it’s something that I’ve never even seen in my culture this type of representation or is this something that is uh new and that maybe shocked the public as well so the fact that it’s close to the ground I think that really this is something that happened for reasons that we can perfectly understand in private galleries um at Merchants because they didn’t have enough space to hang the pain things all the time so these are reasonable motives to put them on the ground but in a in an exhibition Gallery is it’s difficult to say more than what we’ve presented here with choices that we’ve made and the the point in this virtual reproduction is that we can backtrack so if in these 72 articles that I found in the Press only 20 of them mention the way Works were exhibited but if looking elsewhere I find another possibility we could adapt our exhibition which is what I find interesting in the virtual reproduction because we always have new theories and there are things that intuitively we think that may it would be logical for um Arts Works to be at a given level but Jer who here today we really based our on what we found and if we didn’t have information we didn’t go any further other questions we have a question by an Robbins thank you very much Isabelle we can see the stock and incredible contrast between uh the June 1874 exhibition and the first impressionist exhibition that we are showing here um and it’s tempting to wonder which one of these principles wiler would have imposed if he had chosen to take part uh in the exhibition of the anonymous Society who invited them in April 1874 and once again in light of the choices made that are so different I was wondering if some of the artists in the group such as sisay who went to London right after the first exhibition impressionist exh exhibitions with four do we have information telling us whether or not he attended the exhibition and and and see and whether he saw the the paintings hanged that way hanging that way so this is the time as early as 1872 Whistler and du started to spend time together and these uh artist networks that show their art we have a lot of testimonies by piso for a later exhibition where he asks Lu his son Whistler stole the idea of yellow walls because indeed there’s this idea of spacing The Works talks about it in 1870 in the Paris Journal in the name of many colleagues he would like to suggest a distance of between 30 and 40 cm between works of art so there are already ideas that are mentioned by duga and Whistler as well and in private exhibitions and this is what I was trying to show with this exhibition of the Society of French artists but we could mention others where artists would attend one after the other in this exhibition of April 1873 by the Society of French artists we had the um Daka tribute by FR where we saw whistler’s portrait that had a Central Central stage so there are exchanges discussions between artists whose main conviction is that we need to think of new ways to present their art because Arts is no longer in line with the traditional ways and that could potentially be bought in in in private exhibitions so to get back to the presentation of Prince is also a question that we we raised with Sylvia as we were working on on how these uh prints would be hanging on the walls for the first um impressionist exhibition because of the many different prints that were owned by the anonymous Society we wondered how these 32 prints by Rock and also that of L and asri how could they have all been exhibited because there was not enough space so that’s another point that we’ve not solved and it would be interesting it would it’s would be interesting to see your theory so I’ve not shown you everything here but you’ve seen this 76 square meter room so rather small and you might have seen on the original plan that there’s a small room behind the gallery so in exhibitions later on after Whistler died and there were other exhibitions in Paris and in Boston in 1905 we had presentation of Prince by Whistler in a room where there were only prints by Whistler so we wondered if part of the prints were not in that small room that we can see in the plan there’s no lighting there’s no source of light in that room so these are theories and of course what is lacking in in the reproduction and that’s why I’m saying it’s still underway and I really want us to finish this it’s all of the um labels that will allow us to uh explain why we’ve made these choices so the information bubbles there are very useful ways and systems to do that and of course we would like to have the source of this information so that visitors and Spectators whether they are experts or not to have visibility on the research in real time as well because all of this can evolve over time I give the floor to julan for for a question thank you so on Whistler stuff sorry you mentioned the space between works on the wall but what about the the space between the wall and visitors so the distance necessary to enjoy these works of art it’s something that we mentioned yesterday and that is very important do do we find it in the Press how do you take this into account we did not take it into account you might have noticed that we have Silhouettes that look like a bodybuilder they don’t really look like a 19th century Museum visitor it’s something that we are going to change as well because this is a bit surprising but the point was only to give a scale but we don’t have information regarding that distance but what’s interesting in this reproduction is to see that it’s quite a small room but it’s quite High and we know that a lot of people attended the exhibition so when we see it there it’s a bit like the M when it’s closed but we know that there were a lot of visitors but there’s no information the size of the room and its surface also determines the the distance I don’t have any documents on that very well thank you very much I have a question which is linked to both your your questions it’s um the way you take into account the markets in Mon and whistler’s approach because here you highlight the way in which they presented works of art you explain that it’s a retrospection m exhibition is not a retrospection it’s uh it’s it’s his current works that he exhibits we know that mon is really careful to the stenography of his work the way paint paintings are hanging to show that there’s Unicity and that they are all connected and I would like to see how the market is taken into account by artists maybe Chan as well I’m not sure what I really can answer this question but what I have uh noticed if uh one would uh look uh compare uh different cities to uh how they deal with exhibitions and are trying to find a Unity uh in an exhibition uh I saw it the like say the Vienna session that tried in a to do it in a very visual way sometimes and sometimes like for the impressionist show uh putting in a teleological uh narrative and uh at any rate you have to overcome this isolated idea of an artwork and put things into relationship I uh don’t really know whether there are the uh sources uh there in the correspondence between durel and mon how they went after it but it’s interesting that uh they would not really uh look uh for uh a succession of daylight or uh Seasons uh but rather unite them uh in a formal way with pisaro is that piso’s career and that of mon did not evolve in the same way at all and pisaro in his exchanges with he pushes him to produce for the market and you’ve shown this strong link of mon with the market when at this time he doesn’t need it anymore well artists always need to sell their artworks but he reached a certain status you he already sells many of his works and still he wants to um meet the demand of collections on the market and to produce what will be a success and maybe that will be the last answer to this question I’ll be very brief I think that this is really a part of the artistic strategies implemented by artists to become known beyond the borders because he negotiates between Paris and London he’s not going to present the same Works in Paris and in London because the public is not the same and it’s really a choice the chose to have personal exhibitions to also uh be the one producing the the posters um so he sees these exhibitions as a whole and to really stand out on the market and Whistler who who was born in the US is well aware of the potential Market success and it’s also what he’s seeking and let me just finish on this but he is and he was he he gives arguments and documents and he always does everything he can to create a debate in the Press he reacts uh he publishes cataloges with the review of paintings uh so that it creates a reaction so he really Masters the means of communication quite early on and this is where you talk about marketing uh and Christian was talking marketing rather and sometimes as as art historian we find it shocking but in the case of both of these artists it’s very uh striking so thank you very much for your presentations and this discussion we’re going to continue directly with our next two speakers M and Elis can you please come up on stage as they settle on stage I will start by introducing our third speaker this morning Mar thank you for being here with us you are a temporary lecturer and research assistant at the University p you have a PhD in contemporan art history and in particular the participation of France and French art at the ven BNL and her presentation today is going to be in line with this because thanks to her we are going to take an interest in better understand impressionism at the Venice good morning everyone and I would like to thank the [Music] organizers and all of the speakers taking part in this fascinating conference so I am going to take you through the lake from the creation of the Venice BNL in 1895 and 1930s the Venice B just as a reminder was created in 1895 and it had several goals first of all a economic recovery of Venice the ideas to sell works of art it’s for an artistic renewal as well it’s created to train people to modernity and and European Arts um in Venice and to boost tourism to show that Vena has a place in the um art sector in Italy and this is as well for an economic purpose as for impressionism in Italy Italians are not really in contact with question at first this is mainly done through reviews and in that sense two personalities play a significant part and I’m going to tell you about them in this presentation vior and UGI if we look at impressionism as exhibited at the Venice BNL the definition the movement is quite flexible and what is included under this name is is not exactly [Music] clear Alexis Clark and Francis describe it in particular also gives a definition of impressionism so there are many works of or as for French art exhibited we have uh critiques curators that highlight the Legacy impressionism that is wiser than that of the pioneers and and great names of impressionism so let me give you a few highlights of this impressionism according to most famous represent representative at the BNL before the 194 and then I will tell you about the specificities of these exhibitions in the 1930s Venice exhibition is not well liked among French artists those who receive invitations that are sent by the secretary general of the exhibition do so based on joanni bini’s advice because he is the link between Italy and the Paris scene so he these are artists that are well established that would rather go to the which is contemporan and that is very successful and they sell many works of art there and it’s it’s been proven that it’s already established and successful FAO sends an invitation to mon for instance who is recommended by bini as an artist which is not as official and thus interesting to show this renewal of Art and in spite of this invitation mon is not going to take part he’s not sending anything to the 1895 in general impressionism is going to struggle up until the 1903 there are only four works of art by mon that are exhibited one by and one by and these three artists are the only one representing the group at that time at the Venice B nonetheless their participation is highly requested by the Italians and in particular by Victorio P who says that out of all of the revolutions that took place over the previous Century in French painting the two most important ARS according to him the movement of impressionist and so we have to wait until 1897 to have two paintings by CL Monet he is harassed by and he turns to Duru to choose the painting that are going to be sent there and and how they will be sent to Venice so there are two paintings that are going to be exhibited in the Q room of the main Pavilion a former one and a more recent one according to the directives that were given by the artist J and also to be in line with the wishes of the organizers of the B to receive recent faigs so we have the 51 catalogs that you can see on screen [Music] uh the V View and a more recent painting a spring landscape which is part of the particular collection that was done after the series of the cathedrals with two pop trees at the entrance of a wood next to a uh lake so it’s it’s similar to the pop series but it’s it’s not a part of it so this ipation is not satisfactory according to the chall VOR says we were hoping that the committee would manage to obtain works from the Impressionists and enough of them so that the visitors of these second Venice exhibition could finally have a clear idea and an exact idea of the audacious innovations that this group of painters came up with that are these groups of of painters are criticized and give way to so many debate fortunately uh they only provided secondary paintings and it does not allow us to assess one of the most interesting attempts to renew pictures so there are two other pieces of Arts that were associated to this collection the next year in 1899 federo still hopes that mon is going to send more paintings to him he says I’m in Paris I visited your Exhibition at the jorgey gallery what a wonderful group of of works so much fness freshness poetry so much light would you like to please send us your beautiful cathedrals next year it would be a Triumph for you and for your art and for us it would be the most delicious intellectual enjoyment so this dates back to the summer of 1898 and mon AG on one condition he wants to be sure that he can sell his Arts at a good price and fro cannot guarantee that he will sell his art of course so mon does not send his paintings so no mon in 1899 similar failures with the guy that same year and in 1901 with renoa he will have to wait until 1903 to have a more substantial impressionist exhibition from Venice and the organizers are not going to turn to artists but they’re going to get in touch directly with Janu to finally manage to exhibit impressionist arts in so the negotiations with the merchant are going to be successful this time so is going to land six works of art which is the first impressionist group Exhibition at the B and is going to be commandeered by to choose the paintings that will be at the Venice in Paris so there are two paintings by Mon and there are two paintings by pesaro the TR Gardens on a spring morning a a work by Renoir and one by so the two mon one as the and the sen river bank which is also a particular collection and afternoon sun in the winter also a part of a particular collection for hir we have this work of art and we also have this work of art by Alfred CIS as you can see on [Music] screen so the bther BYO and the Gest of wi in May morning critic are satisfied uh the French school is given a beautiful room we have a group of works of art by Impressionists which is a significant collection Mon and Triumph there unlike in the previous exhibitions people forget their prejudices when they visit this exhibition and the criticism subsides when people see this exhibition this is the point of view of the French because the Italians explains that the exhibition is not is not sufficient to update and educate his fellow citizens the artistic practices of these young artists are not sufficiently understood there’s a small group of impressionist that stir the Curiosity of all of the people who are interested in comparan art history but they don’t manage to understand it none of these works of art is sufficiently significant to give an exact idea of what was and the the impressionate school and what the impressionate school tried to be in [Music] 195 is in charge of organizing the exhibition with and in a room the stenography which is an unusual room as you can see on this Photograph that was published inora they were looking for something very homey decorative highly decorative and this is something that divides divides Italian Critics on on this subject but as far as the ex exhibition of the works are concerned some of them are up here on the screen we still don’t have um you know the approval of the Italian organization and I’m quote p uh starting to be bothered on Cross we could try start try for once and for all to have in Italy as well an exhibition for the all Chosen and representative of the avangard of French impress who from man and and and and sis to kot andto Moro to maret who are presented in a much varied way than what One Believes generally rather than each time being getting loans from eight or 10 paintings that are 10 or 20 years old these cannot give our audience a precise and full picture of what the movement was and wanted to be this out movement in the following year maybe uh taking on board this report uh refuses or advises against inviting impress and he writes to Leon Benedict and that year he’s in charge of organizing the French section and I quote allow me only to suspend these invitations for experience has shown that if we cannot exhibit an important group of their works such as money and the cyc of the cathedral then the audience is not sufficiently interested in these eminent artists however over in in those years the B is no longer the only channel to show and highlight and get known this um impressionist um painting thread to the public and and the knowledge um not just through reviews is something that is starting to happen and so this subject is then dealt with by a group of florence-based intellectuals around the V which is an avard or Trailblazer Journal which is run by arichi with others with platti among others they set up an exhibition the first Italian exhibition on impressionism and this at the Lum Lum club and this in 1910 and this exhibition is a Ral to the banial and shows Impressionists in the years before the first world war and it was also a way of them of taking a more modern stance than the venes spaniel that is slightly sort of conservative in terms of exhibition and the way of exhibiting and through the celebrity it has acquired it is also often um deemed to be very or too conservative so there is this Florence based initiative that becomes very important to bring these impressionist painters to the light to the Italians and also there are other people who are setting taking a stance in relation to impressionism and the failed encounter at the Bal and so the uh Rome exhibition International exibition of 1911 announces a major retrospective and in fact it ends up only being a small room and the critics of there once again disappointed and then at the c r Roman in 1913 where an exhibition major exhibition is deemed to be always going to be organized a retrospective contemporary retrospective to exhibit impression impressionism in its wider in a wider scale on a wider scale and that provides also shows matis in 1913 and 14 critics are very mixed on various occasions uh there are there are sort of merchant there’s there’s there terms their terms mentioned are painting small paintings or p and uh commercial painting uh and Commercial impress impressionism in 1910 though however another retrospective is organized under the management of Leon Benedict and it’s organized specifically for the retrospective by Yugo oti four retrospectives Renoir cor alred and and this is um and organizes this renoa exhibition sets up a different uh critic for um between the trial in the catalog to introduce renoir’s painting and the more personal articles that are written about it in the corer deer let me make quote some of the thoughts that were written down about renoir’s art M and you’ll see very quickly that they’re not the same as the one that introduced Reno uh paintings in the catalogs I quote landscapes in hono don’t have much value they’re empty gray and and that you need to forget them in order to admire impressionist paintings that of mon and pararo those are the ones you need to use as yard sticks the ones that were exhibited by mon in 1903 for and same as for the way P thought of it who says that renoa is the most Diversified abundant and unequal painter the value of renoir’s painting is only only resides in its impressionist in the impressionist period which is therefore restricted on the scale of the production and he has he pushes back as historic The Works that uh were painted approximately 30 Years Ago by this um ancient old Master however all of the uh other periods are absent from Venice there are a few very contemporary works of art that are representative of previous changes after the 1893 change and you have um this young lady with the um flow basket which is very close to a painting in 1898 and Renoir reproduces it and then there’s a young girl with a head scarf an orange head scarf a pel of um of of 1895 and young lady in white 1901 and the watering can a private collector’s painting 1898 which shows the sort of um that period of of the painting of rir in Venice or show in Venice so p and dedicate this to rir and forget all of his other paintings but other critics reject this whole work all of these works of art um there’s a very negative Vision presented by um one of the critics and for mangoni the the exhibition puts things back in their place and I quote P’s works if they have any value only have an historic value and they certainly do not deserve the Honors that were attributed to them in Venice how alongside this in France the ran of renoa has fallen down to the mediocre level that it should have been in despite a few sort of Hardcore supporters who are not in good faith we there end of quote we have a more nuanced vision from some critics uh who talk about um being disappointed his name so I quote name so dear for let us hope for much wider more interesting collection and he explains his disappointment by the medoc quality of exhibition I quote Intrepid French impressionist the mustra this year is not giving him or you know is not giving him um or paying him the homage homage that it should be the exhibition however is very important for a whole new generation of critics among them Roberto longi and arango suichi now before we end up in the 1920s allow me to come back to the issue ofilion all of the works that have been showed are exhibited in the central Pavilion of the exhibition the first Pavilions National Pavilions um start up in Venice in 1907 and France has a pavilion dedicated from 1912 onwards it’s a pavilion that’s built up on initiative of the Italian organizers as opposed to many more all of the other nations this Pavilion is not uh down to the initiative itself of the um organizing Committee of the question country in question it is a global way of sh esteem and honor to National schools and in fact impressionism and the great representatives are not exhibited in the pavil in this pavion at the end of the first period with uh the break uh that happened during the first world war critics really uh call for a consequent a major con MRA in Venice and it’s a way for them of opposing themselves to the closing and conservative n aspect or C in the banal now defending French impressionism and this requirement to mediate is a way of training up modern critics to this new uh wave and the reference to impressionism before the war is quite equivocal in fact in its object first of all because we there is a division between the very strict historic definition and a far more uh Supple um you know definition of it that englobes encompasses the historic movement and the uh various impressionist influences um so all of the independent and mundane um aspects as well and this reference is quite um equivocal because it’s um confronted by various critics p and so on and also the new generation of art historians such as Venturi or longi voro P associated with the organization from 2019 12 is to become the secretary of the Bal from 1920 and he offers an opening or suggests an opening program program from modernity mod modernism and he uh the roots are found in French impressionism so from 1915 he has a great he is very active in mediating for impressionism through these different reviews and he takes on Char of these exhibitions from 1920 onwards but this in quite a surprising way apart from a major szan retrospective in 1920 he dedicates the French sections to the review of contemporary inherit Legacy of impressionism and really doesn’t show truly what the movement uh uh the movement itself doesn’t exhibit it but what is interesting is that impressionism becomes a very divided um value in terms of the critics same with the idea of modernity in the French way or modernism in the French way this modernism is actually put into question in among the critics there are two critic two vein two veins of thought among the critics that come to light drawn to the FL by two major important people in the artistic uh era life uh between the wars margetti and Antonio Marie on the other on the other the side from the 1920s uh there’s quite a nationalistic um critic not exclusive non exclusive and uh it values or valorizes French art and at the beginning of the 20s she the critic decries um the um and says that there is Injustice and inequality in this program why would we show French contemporary artists she says even while we’re um finding it difficult to get young Italian artists to be to be showed to be to exhibit however anono Marie and we’ll see this and talk about him he sees a true danger in this in for Italian art in promoting the French um artists and the their um art form so how is this French art form brought to the for and promoted in the 1920s there will be two works of art by money in 192 2 12 drawings by duar in 1924 that are not identified and one drawing of hir in the same year a woman sitting in um ink red ink um and in 1926 four works of art by dugga that then that brings to the four and crystallizes some of the tension in 1926 P had announced actually in 1925 had announced that he would set up a major man duga and Gan retrospective exhibition but in the end he only a is able to have four works of art by du a set that has been re recently discovered and that was conserved or preserved in a private collection by the napolitan family um and alongside and joanni bought by the Society of the friends of the L in 1932 we have the double p portrait of of duga and his niece that an American Joseph strony who’s an associate of the vinin gall in York buys following the Bal and then the fourth piece in the batch is a drawing that’s called portrait any portrait to provide more scientific value to this exhibition P requests a loan of the family portrait with the family acquired by the m in 1918 has an agreement in principle that he uses and that leads to more tension about the efforts or about the fact that France does not to um um give way uh or give to anything um in favor of Italy this is a very difficult memory for the organizers the organizers of the exhibitions in the 1930s tried to somewhat muffle or hide this organizers Antonio Mar for ital and L Ur for France and they try to set up different strategies their opposing strategies actually and to Mar in the 1930s sought to um sort of muffle really and put out of action the French model from Madan that P had tried to um instore St in the 1920s we tried to Pro provide a classification of impressionism in order to bring out the frenchness and to accentuate the possibilities to talk about it not not with this idea of you know Italian uh with this Italian angle that was very much promoted in the 1930s but with this Latin angle which is one they choose because they are trying to link up or make France and Italy closer the retrospective in of mon work of works of art is something that happens in 1932 and it takes over um takes the place of the first request by the Italians who wanted a retrospective of mon that’s not possible because of the exhibition um being uh placed in and mon is presented in this uh historicized way and for this is the impressionist he represents the U impressionist moment as a founding moment but something that is totally closed and finished but he demonstrates and tries to demonstrate try how this Legacy sort of trickles down to the Contemporary um U to Contemporary Art and this is how this is well perceived by critics marangoni for example draws parallels between Doan exhibited in the French Pavilion and the intimate and generous intim int the at the base of impressionism and I quote that he finds in Mon’s art works of art as promised in 1934 the B welcomes the money retrospective not just an artistic exhibition Justified on this point but it’s pushing back the promise that was made two years previously and this is the terms used in the um in the discussion and therefore making it something apolitical the cost of this exhibition is very high and the Comm and the curator has to appeal to the French society for expansion and artistic exchange to obtain more money in order to ensure the works of art that are going to be exhibited this is the exhaustive list of the works of art exhibited in 1934 in 1936 the way of getting their own back following b um following that front this this occasion happens and the commission the curator sorry agree on this retrospective exhibition of duar works and organized around the t uh painting and this is a list of um paintings and that’s how the exhibition is organized and um opens up the dialogue around uh this portrait this bit and it opens the dialog to Du being a sort of Pilgrim to in Italy finish with the last retrospective organiz exhibition organized in 1938 dedicated to Rono it’s a classic penitence as as quoted and it provides a classical or provides an view on classical on classism and is very much linked the French tradition through impressionism which in od’s words um is linked to um material aspects this exhibition is um made difficult because of the political situation and that’s when the only personal comment that odar allows himself to make uh when we look at all of the documentation is that um it’s because the exhibition happens a few days after the anelos and he says to his uh colleague in England he says people don’t like uh people who who uh don’t um abide by contracts and who Annex um things that belong to their neighbor but I do wish to hope that I will reach a small result now to conclude this exhibition of the great Masters the four Great Masters is linked to and also this desire to push forward the French tradition and only tradition um is also down to Marin and uh and his program to minimize French influence on the um the Art Market at the time thank you very much thank you very much for this major rospective it sets a lot of questions on how the exhibition is defined and how it’s across the borders and it’s also linked to questions of nationalism when we move forward in time and without further Ado we further Ado we’ll be listening to our last speaker of the morning El she is a graduate in musicology history and history of art the University of Paris Paris University and she is now preparing for the competition for The Institute of National Heritage and we’re going to listen to her talk about the exhibition of 1974 thank you very much I’d like to thank you and also thank very warmly the organizers of the Symposium very enriching and I’m going to talk about piece of work that I’m carrying out on historiography and the history of exhibitions that deal with impressionism in the 20th century we’re celebrating today the 150 years of what we called after what we call the first impressionist exhibition and several events are planned for this purpose on this occasion in France and the communication topic brings up 50 years back into to 1974 to really think about the different exhibitions that were set up in order to celebrate the 100 Years of the date re uh chosen as the birth of impressionism I was able to list 22 exhibitions organized precisely or just for this exhibition 12 in France five in Paris and the others took place in Belgium Switzerland and the United Kingdom or England in United States Canada Brazil um and Japan I’m not going to make comments about all of them it wouldn’t make much sense but I’m going to be talking about highlighting the different visions of the history of impressionism that this micro historiographical a corpus is concentrate concentrates in this year 1974 through the research on cataloges and archives of the events tension appears in the different ways in which impressionism is understood and defined and the modernist narrative heroic Narrative of the history of the mov as written in museums and works such as John rewards which is used as a reference reveal to be fragmented broken and widened by the discussions and do ments and text produced at the exhibition themselves the exhibition presented at the Grand B from September to November called C Centenary anniversary of the impression of impressionism is the one that shows the best in 1974 this vision of impressionism as a heroic Vanguard that values what the organizers called the Genius in each artist I would from the beginning like to outline the main lines it corresponds to a paradigm According to which the intentions of other exhibition are set the result of collaboration between the Museum of the LA and the M Museum in New York where it will go in December in a very different format this Centenary uh shows 40 works of art from these two collections mainly the press release insists on the fact that the exhibition is not a retrospective of the movement or a work of exhibition of the work carried out in 1974 the main challenge was to bring together the most significant work the most prestigious ones of these artists and I’ll try to communicate this and these were of course painted during the most difficult period of their life which can be called an heroic one now next to each other there are nine works by D eight paintings by mon six by renoa six by man and a few fewer represented maybe one work szan and a behind this is to choose and reduce number with a metonymic iconic Corpus for the idea of impressionism an idea of impressionism that is particularly the one that the M wrote about since and has done since the 1940s especially in the Annex in the G which is dedicated to impressionism and has been since 1947 in fact indeed the Centenary of impressionism is the work of Elena dear who was the curator of this impressionist and the main text of the catalog of the exhibition of 1974 is a text that is written in 1939 by hone we one of the designers of the museum Mar Ward showed and demonstrated how the insulation of painting impressionist painting in this Gallery Annex the took part in a deoration of the movement separate from the other collections in the Lou and separated from the works of the past contemporaries academics and the followup in modern art and the result is Impressionism that is simplified and with n problems that is more down to biography and documented technique of each painter than a study of the phenomenon as a whole the angle that other exhibitions organized in 1974 builds enables us to see that this vision is rethought at different on different scales and according to varied Ambitions the chronological limitations and Geographic and Technical and design ones of the movement are put on the sidelines and Rec considered in according to the way in which these different structures wish to have them and were able to exhibit them during the celebrations tend in histography which is crystallized and appears more clearly is linked to the cas of context and uh of impressionism in the in same line as other discourse in Europe and in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s several exhibitions in 1974 insist on the fact that the impressionist period was not just impressionist simultaneously to the Centenary exhibition in the there’s also the exhibition of the museum there’s also one in the mour it’s included in the official program of the movement to celebrate this movement directed by and put set up by the M it brings together paintings that are testimonial to the official art of the time the leaflet introducing the exhibition says that the works and I quote by and many other artists often forgotten now is one that the impressionist could see at the m in the year itself of their first uh group exhibition end of the quote a sort of counter painter painting to the Centenary the exhibition offers for a period of one month to be able to observe in the two wings of the impressionist Works faced with works that represent the salon paintings that are directly comp contemporary to however these two events preserve the dichotomy that was established between a painting as seen as modern and what the SoCal academic painting and the inferior hierarchy of the first remains alive R strengthening specially novelty and the Breakthrough character this subject of exp exhibition is not isolated in 1974 and other words to review the Forgotten Works interested in the salon and who was the heart historian at the Columbia University wrote an Arts magine in the same year that one can say from the exhibitions of the the exhibitions of the C that rather apis they are anti- impressionist he means by this one of the historiographic wayss celebrated since the 60s and that would be privileged more priv 1970 is that of the salon Revival and the rehabilitation of the academic paintings the exhibition the impressionist in the salon in Los Angeles and 1974 coordinated by the University of California shows this idea and proposes in its catalog scientific trials that aim at reconstituting the social and historic dimension of the creation during the impressionist years in a close perspective but a different one the compal exhibition transforms of the metropolitanism manifestation in entitled The impressionist Epoch this title was changed by curators that like the idea of an impressionist era rather than an in impressionist movement the exhibition is much wider than its French version many rooms complete the works of art shared with Paris and a room is dedicated to the uh Salon paintings the the goal of the exhibition is to show the development of impressionism as a phenomenon um among a wider emble John Russell writes in the New York Times that room after room visitors who try to understand impressionism will discover the Pioneers impressionism its contemporan its enemies and the children and grandchildren of impressionism it’s part of a more complex and longer um generation and it changes the vision depending on the cultural institutions that organize it we also see that the matter of sources and um signs appearing before impressionism is studied the idea of a re tionary technique by imprism is in John House’s catalog at the for the exhibition in London the Royal Academy of Arts impressionism its Masters its precursors and its Masters in France and Britain John house finished his thesis on Mon two years later and he says in his introduction that if we examine the pictural Innovations of Impressionists in an isolated way each of one each one of them is anticipated by prior prior generations of artists and he demonstrates this with Arts exhibited the way in which the impressionist touch or color has been shown by previous English painters such as con other events such as the birth of impressionism in 1874 at the Fine Arts Galler bordeau inist the origins of it the movement and its precursors and the works of art for the most part come from this Gallery in this exhibition so there are new conceptual units in this exhibition to try to show that this movement is part of a wider chronology and part of a longer movement the historiographic ambition of the organizers of these events might be by is by the fact that it is easier to obtain a painting from a fmer era before impressionism but this also shows that there’s new interest given to the areas of impressionism so not only the the time limitations but the geographical borders of this movement they are trying to show that impressionism is not only from Paris and I think that the participation of smaller structures plays A Part here the Centenary is a an opportunity for Town museums to Value their Regional Landscapes or areas that that have played a part in the history of the movement to the east of France and Char’s personality who is a painter and a agricultural industrial is shown in much smaller exhibitions locally either public or private exhibitions the B Museum also wants to shed light on this Regional impressionism that they consider to be to be Pioneer in this movement in Lauren they also want to show the Len impressionism the Fine Arts Museum director wrote a document regarding several personalities of the region including shom who took part in the impressionist movement as painters organizers or um deers they also highlight the part played by association of friends of the museums that have shed light on the work of mon and huno in the 1870s and 1880s Landscapes such as that of Nai or the countryside around it are are very widespread in this movement and including at the Academy of n so they’re trying to show the history of local painters that are not as well known and that also are also part of the impressionist movement because of the techniques used or the fact that they are painted outside but also the impression given by impressionism of new areas new new places as said from the history of impressionism the gallery of find outs of Bordeaux is trying to shed light on the richness of regional museums that they consider are not famous enough this is a political argument andn chat director of the museums of France at the time mentions that this is paternalistic and that there’s that the capital is condescending when organizing exhibitions the curator of the museum uses its Network and and friendships to obtain 74 paintings from out of the 130 that come from different regions of friends she says that outside of the capital small towns and people who are passionate about the impressionism movement make sure that there’s a word collection also several people outside of France were requested to land paintings but it was often impossible because it was too expensive to ensure the paintings in the M Museum could not bear this cost the centralism of this movement is also shown also seen by the Press remaining in this idea of changing the the geographical area where impressionism take place the Rio Museum of Fine Arts and several Canadian museums also celebrate the impressionist paintings in their collection here you can see Brazilian and Canadian artists whose technique and Aesthetics are close to impressionism impressionism would thus be a style and about Aesthetics rather than a historically and geographically limited movement and they have a wider definition of impressionism the history of impressionism is not um constricted to Paris it’s in different geographical areas and its cultural diversity is also much wider than we might think all of this shows us that impressionism is plural in its chronology geography but also in its in its principles themselves we see in these different exhibitions that the 1974 Centenary is also the opportunity to show that it is difficult or even impossible to Define impressionism this shows the different contradictions within the movement the variety of techniques and support are shown by the different prints and Ceramics exhibited for prints the catalog of the National Library provided by Michelle L shows that there’s a incompatibility between the landscape impressionism with um colors and this black and white art if we look at the 50 year that is shown in this exhibition which is entitled impressionist and it shows that it starts with Romanticism up until Art the impressionist movement is part of a much more complex movement bu shows it in the catalog on the impressionate ceramic Prince organized by the Association of friends of the museum he says that it is precisely in exhibitions of prints such as the ones organized in 1874 79 and 18 so the historical ones and the contemporarian phases of that we can question more clearly the domination of this fake concept impression impressionism Jean Paul bu is a art historian he is a specialist of FIS B he was a painter a printer and he took part in the exhibitions of the group so this historian said in the Gaz de that the letters sent to that artist sent to one another allow us to have a sociological analysis of of this movement in the catalog in the 1874 exhibition he says that this artist is a late romantic a japanes and he produces works of art that can be opposed depending on the medium that he uses he is both an anti- impressionist in his Prince and an impressionist in his Ceramics so this is a case that is that does not that cannot be locked in a box and that show us the differences in the impressionist movement in 1974 the question of determining who or who hasn’t exhibited works of art in the original exhibition and this shows that there is no one Nest to the grp the 1974 exhibition is also part of the conceived by El de in a room next to the one on the sary in The Grand in that room which is supposed to reproduce the shanada exhibition they are showing unknown artists whose works very greatly the exhibition are produced on biographic information bubbles such as and that you can see here so here you can can see these different panels and to the left you can see monz so for each exhibitor so he’s not one of the ones who is not well known but it’s the only one for which we have a bigger picture of his label so with the Arts that were part of the catalog in 1874 a review of his art at the time and a biography the definition of impressionism as a social group that we could tackle from the study of this exhibition is far from the one that we see in the neighboring Galleries and even in that selection of paintings that are supposed to be as the most defining of the movement but still the definition of impressionism is not uh is not a consensus the Press considers that the works of our chosen do not represent the impressionism movement in particular the Arts of duga so they question which painter is a part of the movement or not in New York the curators of the Metropolitan would like to prevent this problem of definition to explain why they changed the title of their exhibition for the Centenary of impressionism they write to the direction of the um Museum in France they consider that man and du are included whereas they are not impressionist in the New York version Thomas Hing the director of the museum says that impressionism is an umbrella term that is ever changing and very diverse and it can embrace all of the different trends of painting between the years 1860 and 1880 in 70 he says that just like any label in art history it is not satisfactory for him this exhibition inst stands to show the diversity and even the lack of cohesion within the group which is a historical truth that we tend to forget over the years because we try to Define impressionism as strictly as we l did it in 1874 when the label was unfortunately given to the group as a whole the definition of impressionism as a homogeneous group is debatable and it was already the case in 1974 during the Centenary and to conclude looking at all of these temporary exhibitions regardless of their reach their nature allows us to see different historiographical paradigms rather they are stabilized being renewed or new this shows us that first of all 1974 is the opportunity to take a step back on the history of impressionism and The Way It Was Written until now the positivistic and evental evental history shows us that there are different methods as well there are other methods that pay more attention to the social structural and cultural ways of studying art history the definition of impressionism is already being questioned at the time and it will continue to be questioned in the 1980s the Centenary and its exhibition shows that there are different ways to conceive the movement and they contain the breeding ground for new methodological content and to find different ways to see and show the paintings of the 19th century thank you very much El for this fascinating presentation which once again reflects everything that was done that year and and this year for the 150th anniversary an exhibition is a narration and it might have evolved the definition of the movement is not as much of a question today or we raise it differently but we already had many different approaches and initiatives at the time including all of this question of the regional impressionism which is also what we took into account here in because we lend many of our paintings to Regional museums we don’t have much time but we can take a few questions so if there are people in the room who would like to ask our speakers a question I don’t know if there’s a microphone in the room yet here’s a question by Christoph Charles I would like to fact to the previous speaker I was surprised to see that in the debates between Italy and France they never mentioned the makoli movement some of them were uh precursors of Impressionists and some of these painters were in touch with with the painters in France including zand and this was never mentioned in this um quarrel that you describe or is it something retrospective that we are mentioning because I’ve found more recent documents where they talk about this link between both movements yes absolute absolutely the question of um the the paternity of landscape painting crystalizes whether impressionism is main voice of modernity at the beginning of that new century there are people in Italy who question whether impressionism was uh the first movement to do that and it is relayed by proxy because Leon Benedict is going to consider that the Italian divisionism is of impressionism and they completely leave aside the Maki whereas in speeches that we hear in the 1930s the validity of French impressionism is more debatable especially because it’s a political discourse and it’s not only in light of moli but rather because of a more I reference to Italian art in general however in parallel to this change of references between the m and the more classical Italian art there’s a whole movement of the ento Italian movement not only of thei in light of the modernity that is shown as exclusively French in the 1910 exhibition in Florence the French Impressionists are going to be presented and they make no reference to the moli however organizes an exhibition of moso who which is the first personal exhibition of this uh ital artists in Italy a question by B I would like to talk about the 1974 exhibition you’ve shown that there was a document room or a documentary room for the Impressions did they do this as well for the exhibition on the Luxembourg Museum and are there pictures of that exhibition in the archives that you’ve looked at because these uh pictures that you’re showing are are extremely rare we have very few documents on on exhibitions as such which is what what you’ve shown is extremely precious but we wish there was we had the same thing for for other exhibitions so I’ve had a look at the national archives for the Luxembourg Museum exhibitions but there were no pictures in in the files that I found however for the the Centenary of impressionism exhibition there are pictures for the documentary retrospective and the exhibition rooms but not for the Luxembourg Museum do you have a plan yes was the plan of the Luxembourg Museum no no I don’t have it either so the archive show that there’s a different Vision because we’ve kept what we considered important because I’m sure that plans were made Exhibition at the Luxemburg Museum there are the research was carried out and it’s contradictory when we could still talk about it with je L indeed a lot of work was done to look for paintings this is how it started but let’s not forget that we’re in 1974 and that’s very important because this is the m the beginning of the m so having a 19th century Museum in this station and it’s going to end up giving us a presentation of impressionist and non- impressionist in the same place and this double exhibition showed that I visited them when I was a boy and we would enter the grand p through that’s why I wish you had the plans so from what I remember we entered through the Luxembourg Museum where there wasn’t anyone so that we would not have to get in line for the impressionist exhibition which was like a Blockbuster movie today you could take two you could take a double tiet and this showed also the vision of these paintings that we had at the time so any document would be useful but apparently you don’t have it any I think it’s in the private archives of the curators in charge of this exhibition so it’s not necessarily accessible but I think that there are documents out there and this is a very interesting testimony because in the Press we often hear that when they talk about the exhibition of the reberg museum they say that the visitors of the impressionist exhibition uh are lost and they’re confused and and they end up in the Luxembourg Museum instead of the impressionist one it was at the at the stairs so towards the sh the sh entrance to the left you had the impressionist exhibition and to the right you had the Luxembourg Museum exhibition but I was very young back then when I saw that but there are probably other curators that are older than me and that remember it but it would be great for you to have it because apparently there are missing archives well uh we make a call to obtain them it’s wonderful to work on an exhibition that is 50 years old rather than the exhibition that leads back to 150 years ago is that we’re on YouTube so we can we might have testimonies live on these exhibitions um I had a quick question on the number of visitors do you know how many people saw these exhibitions and and and uh do people did people love impressionism back then as much as they do today or so the grandal exhibition there [Music] were 500 and 5,000 visitors a little bit more so it’s a huge exhibition for the time and at the Metropolitan they welcomed more than 430,000 visitors the Luxenberg Museum I don’t know but it was a big exhibition in terms of the number of visitors and also there was a lot of communication around it and have you looked at this the the adverts the posters the press as we do today is it something that was already done back then that was common yes I don’t have the exact data but we SE in the archives that there were adverts that there were posters at the TR in specific places um it was more to the right Bank of the sand but I I couldn’t tell you exactly but yes it was it was already some something that they communicated about quite widely this shows one thing is that in 1974 impressionism is already what de describes in an article he said it’s the this cash flow machine and it’s also one of the explanations to this defraction of the word impressionism which provides added value which has a symbolic value that attracts a lot of people and we like to add it to the title of an exhibition everyone wants a share of impressionism and this defraction of impressionism is is very clear in 1874 it’s this um 1974 and it’s the same in 2024 I have to conclude but maybe in 50 years there will be a new Edie that will work on impressionism in 2024 but I’ll give the floor to felis just a really quick comment because I see that are technicians are is it the start of these serial exhibitions are there other examples before 1974 of such a topic that’s going to be um covered at National and international levels on impressionism before 1974 not only on impressionism in general in the history of exhibitions you mentioned a topic which is going to have an Eco I suggest that we continue this conversation outside the room and this afternoon when we will have other breaks thank you for your attention we will come back here at 230 for the session on paper impressionism thank you very much e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e hello once again and thank you for coming back to listen to this afternoon session I’d first of all like to thank the organizer for allowing me to moderate this session the subject will be very interesting paper impressionism or impressionism on paper it’s a subject that we will talk about not just because of the Engravings but also the use of the impressionism word as an adjective beyond the field of painting to introduce this session I wanted to talk about an article that I read during my thesis research a while ago now and it was a survey carried out by an art critic and writer IM monis published in June uh 1901 in the review and it was a piece of research on impressionism and sculpture and the person in question was questioning artists and collectors to ask if you could put in on the work of the qualification of impressionism austo and were considered as impressionist sculptors because there was an analogy between the tormented surface and not smooth base of the uh of the sculptures and the impressionist touch why am I talking about this because it doesn’t have anything to do with prints or photography or lithography well because for me it’s investigation and the title is slightly absurd but also quite um quite intriguing and it shows how the belly po the painting squashes all the other forms of Art and it’s quite paradoxical because modern artists have often fought academic and Academia to free painting from the trustees ship of literature and this inquest investigation its formulation and I’m saying this here because the questions along brings the definition of Modern Art in general to that of a picture or picture pictural impressionism and in the question addressed to to these people is linked to budir with who had very little credit uh um or gave little very little credit to sculpture budir was also very strict with photography and we’ll talk about this a bit later if you wish and only saw in SC photograph the servant of the Fine Arts that could only have as an ambition to be more than what engraving and stenography are in to literature that was in 1959 1859 it shows how Modern Art and the discussions on Art Modern Art uh refer to uh painting and this is what made it even more complicated to recognize photography as an art form in itself and the second aspect that really led me to question things is that we have the impression that we’re seeing at the end of the century a return to the into the Past after the uh the writings of on the borders of art of poetry and art well it was essential for European uh Romantics to set the question and one of the questions in this report and the responses to the for the of the art critics is the specificity of the medium which is then reformulated in the 20th century by gber and it’s interesting as artists say because for example the scul with whom we see that he’s slightly bother annoyed when he answers Clarice he says that I think that painting and sculpture as such different means to highlight a piece of beauty that each artist is actually going to discover that they are not organ trure that they are not Rivals and what I see in this answer and what is not listened and heard by clar is that each technique medium and support has its own ways and each artist uses it in their own way and with their own means and the response of jul is interesting because it’s quite symptomatic of the Defiance of artists for in terms of how they uh describe and qualify their art and in fact this question of Ed is very of little interest toed because he says and I quote my response to your question is simple colon no restriction so we can see in his response that for artists it’s not really a question that is said because in their creative process there’s a form of fluidness and moving from one uh material to another or support to another and these qualifications and classifications are not essential though for artists and if if they aren’t for them and they and that’s what I wanted to bring your to your attention they are for the discourse that is carried around their art they’re important for art critics of the time who are trying to find a direction for French art around the 1900s and they’re also true so for the for history of art for ordering discussions and to situate them in a historic uh um uh context through the use of language so it comes back to some of the questions that we’re going to be looking at today and uh links through or link to the communication and the presentations of some people we’ve invited today we’re delighted to have you we have Hollis clayon professor ameritus of art history of Northwestern art a world world-renowned art historian she works on French 19 century art history and her first book was published in 1991 called it was called painted L prostitution in French art in the impressionist era and then it was followed by other pieces of research that were just as ambitious for examp example in 2002 Paris and despair art an everyday life Under Siege under the siege of Paris there’s also a piece of work with Andre dski is Paris still the capital of the 19th century and also in 19 2019 a beautiful book on illum illuminated Paris essay on Art and lighting at the Bello and since then she’s been working on a project around the Eiffel Tower called the dark side of the Eiffel Tower as uh and we hope to be able to read it very soon alongside her we have Ashley dun who’s curator at the department of FR drawings and prints at the MOMA museum in New York where she’s in charge of dra drawings prints and Illustrated uh books of the 19th century she’s she has uh she’s a she graduated from Northwestern and in 2019 she held a thesis on uh Printing and uh art in Paris from 1850 to 1880 and very recently she worked on various exhibitions on and also she took part in this beautiful man exhibition that was organized at the M last year and finally I’ll introduce this gentleman just next to me you have jul for with whom we are going to listen to the Contemporary photographic printing Prince of impressionism and the links between photography and impressionism and J is charge of research and scientific uh development of collections at bu Museum and he’s a PhD in history and a doctor in history and he specializes in pictoral art and photography around the turn of the 20th century in 2016 he published a book on Rober dehi the photographer victorial photographer Rober dehi and also was in charge of a uh catalog for an exhibition called visions of artists uh victorial photography I’m going to leave the floor now to Hol clayon who suggests she talks she she talk about impressionist printing prints and then we’ll listen to Ashley D but what will be interesting is that we’ll be able to listen to this discussion between these two eminent Specialists of impressionist prints and they’ll be talking about this and I’ll leave you the floor if you wish thank you yes thank you so very much to all the organizers of this conference I’m very uh pleased to have been included so our Noble um chair told you that I had done a lot of work on artificial illumination and I feel as though I’m being punished for having been so preoccupied we need to have lights that are that intense shining on us non stop I was going to begin my remarks by telling telling you that early this morning I felt as though I was a person of reasonable intelligence but then I went through the virtual reality experience of the exhibition and I am worried that my mind is empty and so virtual reality emptied brain and intense lights let’s see how this goes okay okay before plunging into a discussion of specific spefic practices and issues I want to make a few conceptual or I guess you might say methodological points and my Point of Departure is this brief quotation from wter Benyamin the difference between technology and Magic is a thoroughly historic historical variable Benjamin’s technology magic seesaw tilts uh dramatically often toward technology when when print making is discussed why well aren’t prints the artworks par Excellence defined by specific and often plenty R Technologies of production in the case of technically especially technically complex prints the Tilt can certainly be pronounced let’s take a look at this particularly demanding work by um Mary Cassat a a combination at Ing and aquent from 1879 it it it reminds us what the fundamental questions are that arise are materials merely materials when it comes to complex prints or are they transcended and translated into something else appr propo of this print in my characteristically discreet way I won’t name names um but this um which happens to belong to the museum at my University it was in an exhibition I think curated by no anyway um and a lot of let’s call them heavyweight National print curators happen to be paying a visit to the exhibition one day and I was so glad because they would of course explain the the actual um techniques and technologies that Mary casat employed and I wish a photographer had been there because everybody stood there like this I mean which is to say this is an a very complicated print it yes it’s etching and aquatint but the way in which they’re combined um to this day is very difficult to reckon with so what’s my point I’m going to use a statement from Amelia Jones to further my point um in this important piece she published in 2013 Arts materiality is depending on the context both accepted in art history and perennial disavowed yes this statement was made prior to the now very robust material turn in which um we are all engulfed um case in point of course this extraordinary International Congress is about to open um uh next month here in France um but even though it was uh uttered more than 10 years ago it’s still very much to the point and it seems to me the benefit of Amelia Jones perspective is that I’m not so sure that when it comes to technically complex prints the materiality ever um is disavowed and this of course goes directly to something that we’ve already um encountered in discussion uh today um namely the way in which um prints um even if they’re uh produced by fashioned by invented by um the card carrying leading um Marquee members of the impress iist Community they are nonetheless somehow seen to be uh of lesser importance than yes um than paintings one more uh one more text to get the ball rolling what Alfred gel has to say here the Enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form art is a separate kind of technical activity only only carries further through a kind of involution the enchantment which is imminent in all kinds of techical activity so Gil reminds us contrary to my opening Benyamin dependent point that the complexities of print making can occasionally wait the Benyamin seesaw in the direction of magic so these are some of the things that for me are at stake um in a discussion of these matters okay so now I’m going to try to bring some of these concerns to bear on a brief account of some of the leading impressionist uh print makers which also might be taken to be an oxymoron in in some circles but here we go so you know here here’s a you know a marvelous pair of a cassad and a duga cassad and Dua as almost all of you know of course made radically inventive in talio prints side by side for several years starting in 1879 phelix bmon and Kami pizo um were also frequently involved my view is has been for quite a while that their exceptional works on paper deserve full membership in the orbit of the painting of Modern Life when the designation painting is not applied literally a more inclusive category results a grouping that delineates a multi media modernist Enterprise without a medium hierarchy there are right aesthetic material ideological and historical reasons for revamping the reach of this uh uh well-known classification first used capaciously of course by charl bodair uh in his formulation the painter of Modern Life um coined in 1860 to denote a set of attitudes Visual and otherwise toward Urban modernity so I want to argue strenuously that Cassat and dug’s achievements and I mean uh pizo and Brock moan could be joining them on the screen but just to to focus in here that um these achievements in the graphic arts demand inclusion my discussion today fully exceeds to that desideratum because remapping the borders of 19th century French modernism is logical overdue and some somewhat unexpectedly it turns out in sync with debates underway today um in the specialized Out World the specialized uh sphere of print circles and it it’s fascinating to discover here let’s have a look at another duga um casad pair and it I think it’s interesting to discover that the discussions that are going on today are also surfaced among impressionist print Scholars earlier in the the 1980s and 90s um the name Jean Paul Buon has been um broached today that’s a good thing um another thing that he did in a publication in 1989 was to persuasively criticize the tendency to sequester prints from paintings and many histories of impressionism it’s it’s exciting for me to see how many prints are included in the current exhibition um uh in uh hanging over there in the museum anyway uh he he said including major accounts of the eight impressionist exhibitions um uh where they of course appeared intermingled with paintings buo noted acerbically that critics who responded to those Parisian shows at the time were very very far from considering the prints on display a minor and negligible Annex also in the 9s the um Rick brel Nicole minder and of course Michelle Malo entered the discussion brel in line with Buon insisted loudly that the era of the long list of late 19th century pan gra simply cannot be understood without reference to their prince minder and Milow address specific traits of period Prince especially etchings minder aligned the prejudice against Prince this I think this is a pretty important Point align the prejudice against Prince Visa V paintings with their comparative visual severity quote the exclusion or indifference regarding the print was and still is essentially due to the qualities of the medium the austerity of black and white and the lack of prestige attached to works on paper end quote and I would add they tend to be kind of small okay malo’s brief on behalf of the print making practices of kasat and dugga and pizaro was also um medium Centric building on his transformative scholarship of the mid90s he argued in 200 and5 that their work reversed the connotations of an arsenal of techniques still widely devoted at the time right to reproduction and hence the popular status of print making is frivolous by placing them in the service of aesthetic uh Innovation Peter parshall um eminent historian of early modern European art including uh Prince extended the pmic um by an influential piece that he published in 2015 by challenging curators to rethink the routine sequestration of Prince and their staffs in museums urging all historians of post-medieval art to make the history of Prince an essential part of that history he aligns this is really surprising he aligns still current practice of sequestration with various theoretical predecessors but most powerfully for the purposes of this discussion he aligns it with the Circa 1939 interventions of of all people Clement Greenberg quote Greenberg encouraged a retreat into self-containment and in so doing he also provided a theoretical underg guarding for the separation of curatorial responsibilities I that’s Peter doubt anyone turned his criticism as a justification for something that was more or less set by the time he was writing nonetheless one can legitimately claim Greenberg’s formalism as theoretical support for this division of art history even though as far as I am aware he never wrote a word about a print the practice of art history should ultimately be one of reintegration not parceling out end quote so My Embrace and elevation of casat and Dugas Prince is thus located at a point of convergence I think of multiple historiographic threads here let’s put here a quartet of Cassat and too prints on the screen it’s certainly necessary even urgent at exactly the stage in my remarks um to add um uh something from uh Sarah leisa’s path breaking path breaking 2018 catalog Innovative Impressions in her essay she reminds us from the from the 1860s a quality that was understood to define the the etching medium was improvisation as well as it being defined as a direct expression of artistic inspiration and then for me her key sentence quote by the time the impressionist artists organized their group the medium of etching had already been defined as embodying values that they broadly embraced in their work now appropo of Mary Cassat um the extremely fertile period of her first sustained exertions in print makers uh in printmaking began in the spring of 1879 if sorry if if my reading falters it’s because of that virtual reality experience it’s not my fault okay um she this is when she began to collaborate right with duap Zago brm and um she obtained results that completely stunned the members of that little um group that were really um the print um veteran experts namely dugga and Brock Mond her dive into the world of etching was of course um occasioned by wanting to prepare work for that um Pro projected joint Enterprise the journal um Elan um the projected failed collaborative Journal of original prints here’s Brock Moon’s um draft cover uh for the uh the the the planned journal and it’s so exciting that this very drawing yes was just acquired um for the Department of prints and drawings at the Met um uh Ashley uh sitting over there had quite a lot to do with that brilliant acquisition anyway in planning this journal I think this is important for us to understand the artists believe that they could somehow have their cake and eat it too despite the fact that the techniques that the impressionist print makers favored were those least favorable um to reproduction dry point aquatint and soft ground etching as Malo put it starkly lour Elan could not survive such a contradiction the fa failure of luu Elan signaled the death of a dream in which art Faithfully served by industry would survive reproduction without being definitively altered end quote indeed according to every account we shall uh we shall never be quite clear what printing process they hope to employ the prince made no concessions let’s just look at a another cassad the prince made no consession concessions to publishing qua mechanical reproducibility they were instead in the same aesthetic category as pastels and wash drawings according to Peter parall another thing to put into the pile of issues by the second half of the 19th century etchings were the defining art of privacy a status that furthers our awareness of the contradictory nature of the project Ed journal and which dovetails suggestively with cat’s frequent selection of the spaces and themes of the domestic interior in her graphic work okay the magazine failed but Cassat Dugas and piso’s prints intended for the journal were seen in public after all by being shown at the fifth uh independent exhibition in 1880 I’m fascinated by the fact that turned out to be particularly notable because no Prince appeared in the 1881 exhibition and in 1882 a lot of you know this dugga and his friends including Cassat were absent from the show and Barbara Stern Shapiro reminds us that the inclusion of multiple states of the same print in the 1880 show some of which were signed and annotated possibly marked the first time that print makers exhibited trial Impressions they are certainly Splendid vestiges of an unsuccessful Enterprise and they raise essential questions about what kind of print making um what was um for these devotees of imediatly and light what matters here is that in such Works original Prince the great oxymoron of the great of the late 19th century became unique works of art rather like drawings I’m showing you a very out of focus slide I’m sorry that’s not fair to Brock M um but it reminds us that uh he he he apparently unlike anyway you just heard what I had to say about when duash showed his stories but he showed um one drawing and four intalio in 79 and then a a collection in 1880 that had never been individual identified uh pizaro um showed prints not entirely identified they were anadra of Oort in uh 1880 I’m showing you one of those from the Harvard collection on the screen now okay what print making must have also offered the artist linked by the day and night project was the benefit and risk of surprise in talio printmaker makers know well okay if you’ll forgive me guess whose hands whose hand that is in talo print makers know well that you do not know exactly what you’ll get when you peel The Damp paper away from the Inked copper on the Press bed the effects transferred from plate to paper via ink Under Pressure are not completely predictable obviously I know something about that um intalo work adds uncertainty and risk to an aesthetic Arsenal oriented toward recording aspects of the visible world the intalio print was a medium in which Optics and aesthetic translation converge to generate unprecedented tonal surprise and complexity the unpr the unpredictability of print making was itself the trait as well as the presenting condition of a kind of impressionism in an expanded sense in painting let’s let’s get rid of my hand here let’s go back to Bizarro why I say this in painting every additional stroke erased what lay beneath the newest impression always destroyed the prior printed marks prints work in a cognate albeit reversed way plates can be altered to Define different states that are often that are often accretions and furthermore each inking and printing creates a different impression the practice of this kind of print making is as far from an art of replication as Can Be Imagined the multiplicity of intalo print making in particular right allowed for diversity and variety that actually outstripped I think the parallel structural capacity of painting whereas prints can have multiple States and almost always produce changed impressions in order for paintings to inscribe multiple responses or aesthetic ideas they have to be done in a series they there have to be more than one canvas the multiplicity of the print evoked here points in the direction of the print qualifying yes you know I was going to say this as the or impression object and then uh one of the things that was very much under discussion by uh you know by the middle of the 1870s was the question of the issue of inking who did it and how did they do it and what were the effects the whole question of what Ludovic Lupi um uh really coined namely monotype type inking um what what that actually does in terms of the Integrity this the the the the the the preservation the homogeneity of the worked Matrix yeah this is something it’s not as self-important as it seems these are a couple of my my recent my recent Chrysler Building um etching that I just happened to show six different inkings and you can see how you can get what might appear to be six um completely different prints depending on the handling of the inking um I’ve learned a lot from Laurel Garber the curator at the Philadelphia Museum about this um so I’ve already suggested the fundamental mutability of the print Matrix um but combined with Divergent inking you can see the way in which variety proliferates But Here Comes an issue that I haven’t even U mentioned which was so important in these years of the 19th century I mean whose labor was cons the most consequential the etcher the inor or the printer as as most of you know those were not necessarily indeed almost never were the same person um uh print makers almost always had a printer and didn’t print them themselves and you you might even boil the question down to something more fundamental what what actually constituted the appearance of the prce the etched line or the ink applied to the line um I I’m getting to my final Point don’t worry but um something that I find interesting here look the what’s interesting is the the pointer Works um here this is um a you know a great uh impression of one americat um uh dry point in aquatense from 18991 and I was very interested by the nature of her signature on the print I think you can see it here am par and Miss La he’s that’s that’s her printer so she she she she’s she acknowledges that she’s not the primary maker uh she acknowledges that there’s another uh specialist laborer involved so I know my final Point such a big point for us to wrestle with is is defining the labor of print making who turned the Press who who aligned the plates what kind of authorship is this whoops not yet here oh I have to do it this way okay no God we don’t want to see that again yes this is this um remarkable uh set of um different um Impressions and inkings of Mary Cassat in the Omnibus this is in the National Gallery um so you know you look at these and you think I don’t know how does anyone do scholarship on these things but if the print if I’m even marginally correct if the print deserves to be considered the or impressionist object who made it does the Embrace of my proposed elevation of the impressionist print require a completely revised definition of authorship as I already predicted the um formidably clever Ludovic Lup um had uh an answer for that start for God’s sake start inking your own plates and do it as variously as you possibly can um he was the one who was perhaps the most Vivid vocal and loud and energetic um partisan of monotype inking you can see two completely different Inked versions of the exactly the same worked plate um and in in so doing leque inscribed or reinscribed the antalo print maker as the solo author of The etched artwork um in so far as in his case etching um and inking and indeed most in most cases printing were carried out by the same individual so I’m going to stop there um with my um with my list of issues and I thank you for your kind attention [Applause] very much we are now going to listen to actually done and then you can start having a conversation so we’re ready Ashley good afternoon everyone I would like to thank the organizer of this conference for inviting me and giving me the chance to give you this presentation I’m going to continue in the spring of 1874 the art the artists Felix Bron ludic leik JPI dtis Leon OT and H Ru exhibited etchings and a lithograph along with the drawings paintings and sculpture by fellow members of the societ anter ETC by including some of these in the current exhibition Paris 1874 inventing impressionism reminds the public and Specialists alike that impressionism at its outset involved more than just painting indeed prints were included in all but one of the eight impressionist exhibitions the first exhibition included some 40 odd prints a representative sampling of which I include here these graphic Works certainly contributed to The Eclectic aesthetic of the exhibition that is described uh wonderfully by an Robins in the 2024 catalog beyond their eclectic character though I wonder what did these Works tell us about impressionism about the role of printmaking in the movement and about the nature of impressionist prints these are the questions I will explore briefly today in reflecting on the projects that manifested around the centenery of the impressionist moment uh which we heard wonderfully um earlier this morning from Elise uh but which spanned 1974 to 1986 Jean Paul Buon lamented that remained La the poor relation of painting he noted of course the exception that was Michelle malo’s 1974 Landmark Exhibition at the bibl national titled Leist to this day Boon’s 1989 article is the only expansive historiography published on the subject and Malo scholarship continues to be the essential reference his 1994 volume Leist published two years later in English is is foundational in tracing an expansive history of the topic in 2010 the bibliotech nasal Revisited the subject again with an exhibition in K it is striking striking and unlikely um uh coincidence that the three covers here uh each present a work by one of the three preeminent impressionist print makers pisaro duga and Cassat as we’ve just heard from Holly clayon the mutual exploration of print making techniques among these three was integral to their artistic practices and produced some of the most radical works of their respective of there has been Rich scholarship on the print making activities of the so-called Core group of impressionist print makers primarily in monographic contexts and occasionally excitingly in combination with one another in addition to BU Malo and clayon I must call out the work of Barbara Shapiro Nicole minder Richard brel Sarah leas Kimberly Jones and Valerie stal given Holly focus on that trium today I will I will turn my attention to artists whose status as Impressionists is perhaps less certain I’d like to begin with a look at the printmakers who exhibited in the 1874 exhibition one of the outcomes in attending to impressionist primming is a shift in the balance of key contributors and the figure who emerges most strongly in the galleries today and from a historic perspective is phelix brm who exhibited more Works in that first exhibition than any other artist in any media as Malo has so succinctly described BR M’s participation in 1874 represented a Manifesto A retrospective and a program for the future a group of portrait prints featured key figures both practitioners and critical Advocates of the etching Revival with these Works brma hearkens back to the 19 to the 1850s and early 60s when artistic and Commercial interests in ET coalesced with the founding of the soci aquati the discourse of the etching Revival articulated many of the aesthetic priorities later associated with impressionist painting in emphasizing the medium’s immediacy and capacity to register the artist subjectivity in 1874 bra mul uh also showed seven Landscapes including two in Dry Point uh such as this one from 1858 and it was in the context of impressionist print making that dry point which involves drawing or inscribing directly on the copper plate without the use of acid came to be practiced and appreciated as an autonomous technique rather than an aid to others side by side in another frame BR mole displayed two impressions of what was by then likely his best known print arasmus after Hine significantly Bron featured two states of the print the first and definitive states of 10 and here’s another of the ways the artist modeled the program for the future as we’ve heard six years later the group who collaborated on L lanui duga casat pasaro and rafaeli showed multiple states of their prints in the fifth exhibition this innovation of impressionist print making endowing each state of the print with the status of an exhibit work in its own right has tremendous implications for the temporalities we associate with impressionism at large and more on this to come another of bra Mall’s frames featured six etched copies or interpretations of works by other artists including his notably unfinished plate after Turner’s rain Steam and speed brall had already received criticism for the unfinished appearance of Prince that he’ exhibited in the salon of 1870 Philip berti wrote elabor so the exhibition in 1874 provided BR Mo with a venue for showing a work he proudly identified as unfinished I argue that etching has profound contributions to make to the discourse around finish and the unfinished in studies of impressionism this goes beyond the Aesthetics of a sketch to the fundamentally open-ended nature of the medium the etching plate both maintains the potential for Change and simultaneously tracks its transformation Through The Impressions made of each state in this uh quick review of brch mol’s submissions we can see that so many seeds are already there in 1874 and bral’s future contributions uh in bral’s future contributions we see them come to full fruition in 1879 he exhibited unu D which took many of the energetic and Atmospheric ingredients of his print after Turner and applied them to an original view of the prian landscape in 1879 he also showed oand a composition he devised to print in color using multiple plates with these two Impressions you can see the variation achieved on at the level of inking on the subject of Inc the next contributor Ludovic leque is a major player as we’ve heard although we might not guess it from the 1874 submissions leque showed two etchings after works by the analer L Goan portraits of dogs named Cesar and Jupiter again dating from over a decade earlier as well as a dim interior where a monk-like figure descends the stairs it is in the dark Rich tones of this latter work that hints of the inkinesss that hints at the inkinesss work to come in the second impressionist exhibition leque exhibited Canal on L Deon and although we can’t be sure exactly which print it was the one here from the Lucas collection in Baltimore is one possibility The Selective wiping of the ink on the plate before printing produces the atmosphere of the scene and the Luminosity of the Moon in particular uh especially when you compare it with an impression that has not had the same treatment here on the right leque is one of the print makers whose work Durante described in acknowledging that the new painting was a multimedia Enterprise new and want to be free in this movement the prints use these different processes and each plate changes the light is different and it’s an ingenious use of the ink at the printing time that allows for these changes has described as I’ve always found the English translation of mobile etching to fall short of conveying this its significance variable etching comes closer um and I would propose as an alternative unfixed etching which I think emphasizes the intended uncoupling of the etched plate from the singular image leque took his this creative inking to its logical conclusion in producing what we now call a monotype his own description for it in the 1876 exhibition catalog was although he claimed the method as his own in his Memoir that same year he was certainly not the the first nor only artists to practice it at this time and on these early contestations we can look forward to Daniel Canter’s forthcoming dissertation which aims to present a more complete history of the monotype in the 19th century and I also want to cite Laurel garber’s social history of etching which highlights the central role of the printer austo lra in debates around around inking and the emergence of monotype leque is credited though with introducing the technique to his friend dugga uh who as Eugenia Perry Harris Jonas SP and Jody have shown really pushes it to a whole another level uh at the third exhibition in 1877 duash showed his dis and I’ll return to the subject of Inc uh but first just a quick run through the remaining prints that were on view in 1874 dua’s dear friend arri ruar showed two Untitled Chings ru’s etched work is not well cataloged and I struggled to find even a contemporaneous example to show you um this one is from a portfolio published a few years later and it just gives you some idea of his work in the technique another friend of Dua dtis is a welcome new addition to the Corpus of graphic Works shown in 1874 based on a review suggesting that etchings were among his Works exhibited under the broad heading of AUD defam uh Kimberly Jones proposed this print of the dancer oo Goen as the likeliest candidate indeed dtis joined the soci in 1874 and Kadar published this print that year Den Dua and a third friend Marcel deban were involved together in print making Endeavors around this time as these two Dry Point portraits of Dua seen from slightly different angles by dtis and deut test De is another of the print makers described by deutan joined the impressionist for the second exhibition in 1876 his drypoint portraits offer us a glimpse of the social world of the impressionist Circle but his work is rarely incorporated into discussions of the movement one final print maker who was present in 1874 but whose submission remains a mystery is Leon otan and it’s a great shame that no Trace has been found because very significantly his was the only lithograph ex included in that exhibition OT is responsible for the of Forgotten inclusion of lithographers in the name of the society notably when we shorten the already already unwieldy title of so an Etc the ETC masks only one term that of lithograph um and no traces of lithographs by otan have been found but their presence is important because the Revival of of artistic interest in lithography was still in its infancy at this date um and Manny was really at the Forefront in this guard notably pasaro had tried his hand at lithography for the first time in 1874 but did not exhibit Prince that year the submission of two lithographs by alons lro in 1876 is the only other instance of this medium appearing in the impressionist exhibitions as far as we know described only as pesage they have not been precisely identified so I present one possibility here the subject of impressionist lithography is a Frau one for reasons I cannot elaborate now but perhaps we can get into during the discussion as the current exhibition emphasizes if we are examining impressionist activities in Paris in 1874 we have to look beyond the soci anonim to appreciate the full their full scope and that is true for printmaking as well among those who exhibited at the salon of that year was HRI gerar gar is a fascinating artist whose contributions deserve more attention than time allows today but he’s important to highlight in this context particularly for his experimental inking color trials and monotypes malo’s term for a number of print makers who were never officially affiliated with the Impressionists but who produced works that certainly share their concerns at the time is para impressionist another of these is Felix buo whose interest in ephemeral atmospheric effects is immediately apparent in a work such as the squalet tril of 1874 in 1876 the editor of the print Journal Paro Fort described as belonging to the best of the impressionist school as I’ve argued elsewhere bu’s prints of Paris are unparalleled in emphasizing their mutability as well as the simultaneity of urban experience so what is the common ground what is impressionist PR making Buon suggests that the common denominator is experimentation with process uh which would seem to take us in a greenbergian direction for a definition Holly clayon argues convincingly that it is both the unpredictability and multiplicity of print making that points in the direction of the print qualifying as the UR impressionist object and I describe this as mutability and although it certainly is certainly explored in earlier periods of print history the impressionist print makers insist upon it to an unprecedented degree in articulating what it was that impressionism achieved overall Andre jrai writes in his 2021 volume that uh it instated a quote deep-seated instability in into the process of making and viewing art he continues it throws any preconceived ideas about what starting and finishing meant generally into question it tends to interrogate the duration of any undertaking and I find that nowhere more evident than in the realm of impressionist printmaking thank you [Applause] thank you very [Music] much I think you had planned on having a conversation on this topic togetherit so uh I have been uh uh I I have been uh entrusted with the opening of the dialogue and um listening to Ashley’s wonderful intervention and reviewing mine um you know the thing that that I don’t know uh Ashley the thing that I mean there many things that we say that that are that resonate that are quite similar but one of the things that that I just sort of mentioned um in passing in my talk that now sort of jars back into view is the point that is she Nicole minder not minder minder I don’t know anyway but that that point that she made so long ago that one of the strongest reasons that Prince somehow remain in the dare I use the metaphor of the shadow of um painting is because of what she called their visual severity the the mono the the preponderantly monoch um tonalities of them and you know they’re on paper and they’re relatively small size and I’m wondering that you know among the the many of course compelling um suggestions that you and I made for the reconsideration ation of the possibilities for immediacy and unfinish and surprise and so forth um that are offered by especially in talio print making are they because of those visual characteristics destined to be seen as lesser Enterprises um I don’t know um or or do I mean I mean you’re you’re you’re you’re the print curator um do you I mean does um um or or even you know to think about Peter parshall’s you know somewhat um no I mean he really meant it I mean he really thinks that print collections should not be separated out from collections of other media in es you know in museums um I mean in some ways he’s on the same page with um he he wants to overtake the the sort of the the diminution of the aesthetic and other kinds of value of the prince I don’t know what I mean what might you want to say on that sort of complicated subject well it’s certainly true that in the context of impressionism color uh is very significant um part of um the movement and so um that would seem to you know almost immediately um put Prince uh aside um and uh and yet of course I agree with Peter parall about the necessity of integrating them uh into the story and um you know you laid out so many reasons why this is um this is difficult uh just in terms of the comprehension of the technology um and you know even to to to Specialists that the the level of um experimentation at this moment um makes it even difficult for people very accustomed to looking closely at these things to understand exactly how they were made um and then of course there are also um museological difficulties that come into play um with uh um exhibition context in terms of um lighting which although that is improving that’s right too that the fragility among other things right you have the issue of duration um as well as um as lighting uh conditions and that I think is increasingly overcome with the use of LED lights um today in exhibitions but in permanent collection galleries it’s still an issue because of the prioritization of daylight uh for paintings um makes it virtually impossible to um permanently include prints among um among displays and I was thinking too because of your impressively comprehensive presentation of um so many different um so many different prints um exhibited in the independent shows by such a wide array of artists whereas I sort of old school I I just sort of stuck to what we we have for um decades considered to be those the primary impressionist print makers um uh I just wonder if if if we tilt toward I don’t know do do we tilt toward a more Capa capacious all embracing enumeration and attent enumeration of and attention to the wide range of intalio Prince that were in the independent exhibitions should we get out of the habit of only doing what I did you know the big the big three or the big four um and does that make a difference to the values the qualities the characteristics that are so striking about these prints um I don’t know get I mean really to see to see that inventory that you took of what a wide range of prints appeared yet and indeed it’s quite eye openening to see the huge number of prints that appear in the 1874 um the anniversary show that’s up now um I don’t know I’m really I’m I’m really sort of in a in a cleft stick about this about whether we really need to stick to the innovation of dugga pizaro uh kasat and maybe Brock M um or whether we should look at the huge range I mean um I I think it makes it more interesting to look at the the broad spectrum um you know definitely it um makes a chronological adjustment if we look at the earlier works by bra mul for example um you know that dry point landscape from 1858 which I think one could describe as an impressionist print um you know based on its extreme U minimalism of you know letting the the reserve of the paper and the The Unfinished um look uh is so prominent um and and then also the the uh looking Beyond just just etching to other media as well this the idea that there might that we might consider um lithography right um and then if we look at the the full scope of the exhibitions um we even get to Wood engraving by uh 86 um with Lucian pesaro’s um prints um so I think it does help to mix things up a bit yeah and the other thing that seems to me to be lurking you know is the possibility that yes I have to say it that continuing to use the term impressionism is throwing everything into a procrustean bed that we’re never going to be able to get out of when you see the huge array of you know possibil for originality and surprise and multiple Technologies and improvisation and rapidity and all that you know to keep asking the question about H but do they really is it really does it qualify to but you know to be called impressionist you know that that that can be a rather um I don’t know what this is this is a metaphor I can’t quite you know you know that one ends up sort of trapping oneself in maybe in a not very productive Ive set of questions um I agree with that and that’s why I I do like this this phrase you coined of the the printmaking of modern life because I think it is more capacious um it allows us to consider um you know I would put someone like Charles Mariel in right in the mix um and uh right and and and and you’re the one who introduced you know the the the what did let’s see can we make lithography into the elephant in the room to use an old American metaphor um that once we start talking talking about the use of lithography in this Corpus then that changes a lot of our understanding about you know those idios syncretic rer complicated Technologies and and also the quality of the mark and and so on yeah so and it goes to your point about authorship too and uh you know it’s even more the case with lithography that the printer is essential and you know has to make the chemical interventions on the the stone or the zinc and so carry this thing around yeah um although the the um um the the transfer papers that were increasingly um used in this period made that um less cumbersome um but still it’s a um if we’re thinking about the the the more greenbergian direction of uh a medium investigating itself um then it’s harder for uh an artist um who is not a professional lithographer to um to do that on one’s own it’s also I mean if anyone um is or might be or remains interested in the um the class struggle have you heard of it um uh there’s also this debate that goes on and on between and amongst these print makers about whether or not it’s it’s it’s necessary whether it’s either technically or socially or politically necessary to constantly have recourse to Artisan worker print printers rather than learning to do it yourself you know um so the way in which there was this um you know long longl lasting division of labor is also something that sits right in the middle of the discussion about this in a way that of course is not in the middle of a discussion of whether you know modernist painting absolutely yeah um you something that that Laurel garbers work addresses so so interestingly um that this this debate was very much alive of of whether the the pan should also be the the printer um and this uh you know also comes to um you know evolves to into the monotype um which um is I I’ll make a small correction about the um the exhibition of of dugga Prince because he did include monotypes um if yeah I learned that from you today because the old literature says he didn’t do it until 1880 but obviously he showed monotypes earlier in 77 and um and and and later um and and if we look at at at doga’s Corpus um ultimately the monotypes really dominate in terms of quantity um I think he made uh some 60 odd etchings but 400 or so monotypes um so that seems to have been uh the uh his print making practice um preference um which makes the exhibition question maybe a little um less of a concern we should we should ask our um the president um when you think we should when you when you think we should uh stop dialoguing and let our colleague present his paper and then ask and then present have a chance to hear some questions from the audience yes [Music] um I think we can probably go back to this discussion after we’ve listened to J presentation about photography because I think there’ll be cross positions or links uh during the presentation that will write arise during the presentation on photography let’s listen to jul and then we’ll talk about it later with our speakers and with our public if we still have time to do so after the presentation thank you good afternoon and hello to everyone and same as everyone I would like to members of the science committee and the organization team because they invite and i’ would like to thank them for inviting me to take part in this very interesting Symposium and a few special word for Sig men it was during a symposium in 2008 at the enss that I started working on the links between pictorialism and uh impressionism and i’ would like to make the most of this to tell you that the elements I’m going to talk about today are the result of my thesis my work that’s why we will not refer to uh authors as my colleagues have done my distinguished colleagues may have done this presentation has as an object to talk about the special moment in photography pictorialism and the research on the links between this movement and impressionism I designed this presentation as a demonstration through example I therefore will look at links in order to widen the area or Spectrum usually taken into account for pictorialism I want to show you that truth is elsewhere and we just need to find out where this elsewhere is and we’ll see that we’ll go very far from impressionism because we will even go as far as Mars that was just to get you interested so you would stay now regarding the formalized aspect of and of Aesthetics and production heart historians and photography have already always linked pictorialism with painting and also more specifically with impressionism and as we’ll see these links based on Impressions uh to not be uh to have preconceived ideas are neced in the light of facts and the true history of pictorialism and as paan was saying so right yesterday when he introduced everything he W question whether the huge popularity and celebrity of impression is not led to Prejudice on certain other areas has become more of an eclipse I would say now let’s look at what pictorialism actually means and what the limits and outlines of it are let me Define very quickly the uh challenges and the features of of it now pictorialism it’s a photographic current born in the United in England in 1890 50 years after the beginning of Photography in 1839 it’s the first International movement in the history of photography it spreads in namely in Europe and the United States and Beyond it’s a current that claims the artistic potential of Photography pictorialism means artistic photography I’ll talk about this and it’s a current started and run mainly by amateur photographers who do not live from the trade of photographies and the sale of them that’s an essential element that I won’t necessarily talk about today but this idea of being an amateur photographer is very important however I hope that you will be convinced of this following this presentation pictorialism is not a movement that that uh drags photography up to the same level as Fine Arts or the movement that tries to imitate painting in photography or a photographic impressionism or at least not only and even far from it let’s begin this is a very representative example of pictorialism in photography you’ll see on you can see on the left a positive negative on glass uh picture as recorded by the camera and on right this is a draw from the negative that shows the result that was designed by the photographer this uh SL plate was from a system a chroma chromatograph B chromated um uh um PL and on on the left you have a mechanical um recording on the right an artistic uh representation now to uh complete or add to this to pictorialism I would like to say that to defend and promote their ideas pictorialists meet up in societies and clubs the photography photog the club photographers in Paris and they organize a an International Trade Fair for photography at the photo Club in Paris designed on the same system as painting salons the first one is in 1984 1995 in Jorge bti gallery 1895 and 1896 sorry and this is a direct connection that can be drawn with impressionism and you can note in that there’s 1874 The Impressions n inada 1894 the pictorialist in J Josh the pictorialist broadcast their ideas through publishing of several reviews and works and they are CR also critiques of their Expo exhibitions and we can say this to finish off and you can see this here that pictorialism is a retrospective termin term generalized by historians but then used not used after 1900s they talked about artistic photography or art photography and they did not say they were pictorialists but they were artist photographers given the circumstances that bring us here together today we’re going to look at French pictorialism that was called at the time the French School of artistic photography however in order to underline the fact that the question of links between pism and painting concerns all countries I’m going to show you very quickly a few links brought taken from the English and American schools first of all this first example shows the major example by um on Whistler of on the Anglo sax pictorialist and I won’t develop but the examples show this for themselves and then a few examples that show the link between pictorialism in the United States and some temporary painting in the country here Clarence white who deals with this composition and subject dealt three years before by William Merit Chase and my research also draw many links between John White Alexander and the photographies of the photo session School the American School of artistic School run by AR Alfred SAS here Edward Sten here George cely with several compositions inspired from Alexander for whom he of whom he admir The Works in the Boston Museum because he lived in Massachusetts finally apart from these links with references to the ultra contemporary National ones and you see this through the dates as the previous uh works I would like to bring your attention to other sources of influence among others these uh Japanese etchings such as London Bridge of Alvin L Coburn in 1984 now let’s come back to the French situation to begin with I’m not I cannot not talk about um something in pictorialism that is the adopting of the vocabulary of art nvo for all of the editorial Productions in the movement coverage covers of books and reviews and Salon leaflets with commerative medals uh actually drafted and crafted afterwards this is in France but also in other countries in Europe and this is how the cover sheet cover of the portfolio of art photographic art is a creation of Al mus just an example that’s one you have in the center here preliminary remark links us up to the link of pictorialism French pictorialism with the Fine Arts let’s look at the uh thehi he the head of the school in France with his his camid conu with one of the main theor which was of course very useful in 1896 deashi signs the the uh the forerun of the P log for the exhibition in Paris at the in the sh in that year this preface preface is a Manifesto and finishes with a point of attention that pictorialist remind us of and says quote we are not going to fight with painting or with etchings or lithography therefore it’s not no point in squashing us as was done under the names of rebron Van djk Russo or milet our aims are much more modest we’re simply trying to show to the public in instead of topographic documents portraits of actresses or pictures of speed reproductions of nature of which interest we hope will only be down to the composition the delighting and the tone and the fair relation of values and personal sentiment that the author will have put in it we are not claiming the title of artist the public uh youth to works of art will be able to discerned by themselves if we are able to reach that Merit and be and we Merit it we are asking for a patient examination today impartial CRI criticism and we are asking you to especially to forget the process journe you see the result now as rather than doing just the opposite of what Dei asked and I’d like to apologize for this let me show you this parallel not to squash the last in the name of Rembrant but to show you with this example that the former great art great Masters were one of the main sources of inspiration for the French and foreign pictorialist in this case of doesi the 18th century in France was also an important reference at least for a few years between 1895 and 1900 approximately and this is translated by The Chosen subjects women children nudes and the way they’re dealt with doesi privileged a red pigment to give these pictures a chroma sort of red shalk aspect and let’s signal in the same years the frames chosen for these um drafts for these um for these etchings the which refer back to the art of the 18th century and then there are the contemporaries as I already showed you in the Anglo-Saxon countries and this is where we find the biggest number of direct references or obvious affinities let’s St for to start with with Charles chaplain in 1890 doesi was then 30 and he works on the workshop in his Studio the poses with these bi chrom chromatic um fies in 1891 these are qualified as Jean Chaplan showing that the reference was therefore obvious for the public which today is not actually absolutely not the case just a a strong study of dei’s work reveal his evident admiration for professor at Academy julan a school that photographer had dreamed of integrating and going to study in when he was young his father who was one of the most important bankers at the time had no doubt put his veto or opposed this project and she mind in the 1890s might have gone as a Dante to the Le studio with one of his closest friends being the actual um student of it in 1898 in an article for the British media Dei declared and I quote I have the pleasure of being intimate with most of the uh most celebrated painters in part and some of them have accepted the unenviable duty of being part of the jury during the uh trade sh the the show the photography show this shows a revelation and a frustration Dei frustration because Dei in some of his articles or many of his articles never claimed he had autistic uh knowledge and he didn’t give any information about who he was actually in touch with and the painter he frequented my Revelations uh is re re reveals things because it pushes us to look at the members of the jury it may have seen obvious but it wasn’t done before us as was to be expected the list was essential to better understand the um references of the French pictorialist and that’s how we discovered new affinities and I’m going to go through this in quickly before we move on to uh impressionism and look at it one look at them one by one first of all jom by far the most famous painter in the list you’ve seen who was president of the jury until his death in in 1904 who signs signed the Cog cover sheet of the first edition of the photography Salon in Paris in 1914 and then the next one in 1895 then FR flang whose wife was member of the phot club of Paris at the exhibitions during which the exhibitions she exhibited and a portrait of her husband and one of Jerome in 1903 who know is known for his Breton scen a ReliOn that was dear to DHI who made lots of pictures there and it show and I also like to mention that roberi had um a painting painted by the painter lugu sculptor of which The Works have very interesting areas of commonality with thei I’m not showing it’s not what I’m showing you here but namely the first communion which is very close to the communion painting of Dei you just saw and it’s s a marble uh sculpture that hu had exhibited at uh at the 1893 exhibition then we have Ed one of the close friends of Dei and I have the proof of this whose links with the photo Club of Paris were very in great numbers and we owe them among others the cover of the catalog of 1895 he also painted a portrait of the wife of Dei that he exhibited at the salon in 1896 this a proof of the close links uniting the photography to pictorialism ridi was influenced by the latter as we can see the Sleep war in 1897 the subject is taken from studies on artificial light carried out by Conant and then hereri from 1894 and they’re exposed at the photo Club in Paris in 1895 96 and 197 97 and I’d like to tell you also that josi would also then go move on to other works of art of a woman under a lamp as well in her uh interior in the in the inside of her house just to close this um comment linked to the direct references of thei and the friendships we can also identify these artistic links through portraits taken of his Studio Neighbors laar in the 18th because Rober mashi had rented a painter Studio during his career as a pictorial photographer he was very close to leonit whose son Charles was part of the Mist movement from 1910 and charl me was a student of demesia actually now what is the situation about the links between French pictorialism and impressionism in his essay on uh photography as and art published originally in 1897 the critic l said that artist photographers have I quote found the audaciousness of the uh artists and the desire for an hole that lacks in impressionism he says that the impressionist uh butterfly situ or behavior is prescribed and you can see uh it’s that it’s based on what you have up here on the screen now why are we so tempted to link the pictorialist um pictorialism to impressionism is it relevant well I’ve confronted this if it with because this magp this shows very many differences and Sim similarities and differences yesi is interested in the same light effects the Shadows on the snow but could one imagine something more different in terms of effect and color and impression as a whole from one to the other and we’ll see in reality whether there is a link with impressionism or whether it’s in the uh etchings that we can find this and so we can link with but you could also look at this picture uh or this photography and Link it to by and um mentioned in the same year in photo magazine by an editorialist oralist in of the magazine in’s work the most famous link with impressionism is the series of dancers in the in the backstage compared uh with du and it’s the only when the critics of the day compare them to Impressionists however despite as opposed to the illustrious painter Dei does not is not taking his interest in the movement of the bodies and they’re not really dancers but they’re models these in fact the dancers were very much invogue in painters in the 1900s and the numerous creations of D on this topic H back to or among others another example here with this wonderful with the topic showing and the composition obviously but we could also link it to works such as one by Edgar mag or am B who who was at the academ as well in fact and then we have a last last example with this sort of ghostly view of H very legi can be compared to this painting by Char Freson who was the brother of imid fron the photographer who had a link with the photo Club De and this view of byi which could be linked also to this wonderful frish even more legitimate actually when you know the common recurrent homage paid by frish to D and in fact the only reference that’s Direct that’s developed and agreed in impressionism in’s writings is in this work process of Art in photography co-written with K published in 1906 the by so theing by P I’ll quot as an example of what is the interpretation with the subject of the chapter within which this paragraph is and I quote is written compare the wonderful with a photog documentary photographies of the same place that we have all taken look at the exaggeration that’s designed in contrast and their shops and their uh and their headings hidden in the shadows and only the the facade is simplified and you can only have see the lights and this is you can only see in the decorative lines that are accentuated to and sacrifice the all of the detail and this is what the artist has chosen to do in his composition the motive is identical to what we have photographed but pisaro has interpreted it and in fact you do understand this link and this closeness when you look at the different views of H carried out and photographed by doesi who was also very much uh linked to nomy however and here again it’s very interesting to note that D’s Creations are actually much more linked to Maxim theer or the engraver who has more contemporary references uh than uh the uh industrial uh views that Dei liked in 1860 before the birth of pictorialism of course irresistibly lead us back to the impressionist the smoke of the factories is something that he privileged which was something we talked about yesterday and was we were reminded of however the truth is once again elsewhere here since Dei himself links several of his industrial landscape not to impressionism but to Fantastic or fantasy literature and he talks about a view of the uh crane on the kav he calls it the Martians as a conclusion I would say this I’ll say I’ll give you two very re revealing examples very different they’re among the most direct relations that you can establish between pictorialism and impressionism the first is the famous collection of the baron Jean batist fur who owned over 67 mon 67 mon 63 mon 58 37 piz and 16 Works among them we have works of art the dance class Le the poppy and the lunch onass however had a sonce born in 1862 dead in 19 1915 he was a painter and his research showed us that he was one of the closest friends of DHI throughout his life and you can see here a do double portrait photograph byi and very rare a painting representing a photographer at work and this iser who is uh who is revealing one of his photographies in his workshop and it’s very rare to actually see one of these representations it’s a monograph and it’s especially in big format because it’s probably a wet pastel of about a meter in height in the 1890s morce was living at home with his parents 522 B man which means that Dei had Direct ass and privileged access to one of the biggest impressionist collections of the time he could at leisure if he wished draw inspiration from these works of art among these works of art we had the who that remained in the F collection from 1874 to 1906 before joining the collection of another major collector Anon B who collected impressionist paintings and works of art and this leads us to our second and last example Anon person was an amateur passionate photographer very involved in the Paris photography scene he prepared for the Sal of photography of 1902 and 1904 and exhibited in 1903 a painting of pisaro that you have here uh he was right close to pisaro and he also exhibited the photo Club of Harris exhibition the same painting of these um of these Hast Stacks but person is also marel known today by for the remarkable use that he made of the autochrome plate it’s the fir first color um commercialized by the F in 1907 first color photography this access to color enables him to dedicate his production to the photographs of light and atmosphere in the same line as impressionist going back all as far as recreating us here works from his personal collection with the pro the autochrome process you could say that the case of personas unique in respect is an example of the links linking pictorialism with impressionism the pur counter example of the sources of pictorialist uh inspiration these are mainly out of uh impressionism out of the center of impressionism and back toi let’s say what a Critic told said about him in 1906 what differentiates Mr Dei among all of the photograph artists is that he sees quote unquote he sees them as he sees it painting but what painting well that’s the question that I wanted to answer today thank you very [Applause] much thank you very much uh to our speakers now before we leave the floor for questions I I’m sure there are some once again I would like to first of all before we do that well I would like to thank you for these presentations that were very interest I found it very interesting this two Tempo sort of dis presentation you both of you talked about experiments carried out by modern artists uh with a form an old medium engraving or etching on wood and on copper that’s mostly something that happened in the Renaissance period and then just after these are forms of art or media that moved into the academy in the 17th century and they were recognized by the Edict of with and we also have the example of the re interpretation of an artist that uses an very modern technique the technique that is also revolution in the 19th century that’s photography and uh and there also uh is in the era of very modern source of iny for example were not recognized and it’s a shame actually because we don’t actually know them that well today because they were rejected uh in the histography they were under valued let’s say and it’s interesting because it reminds us that no technique is modern in itself and no neither is any subject of uh of Art and it’s always good to remind us of this and it’s good because it shows us that there is this impressionist bias and there’s this requirement to widen the focus and that was why it was very interesting to hear uh about photographers today and I really enjoyed and like the term rology that you used uh Hollis today by being in this angle of reintegration rather than parceling which I think corresponds very well to your approaches all three of you actually uh in terms of History culture and social intermedia intermedium we’ve not talked about types of objects that you really uh are very interested in what is linked to popular image imagery but I think your three presentations I encourage us to really link up all of these different mediums and all of these different uh images without creating a hierarchy between these different representations so I have some questions but I will leave the floor now to the to the to the to the people in the audience will’ll answer questions during 5 to 10 minutes unless you have any comments to make maybe thank you very much I wanted to ask about um prints in the impressionist exhibitions but I wonder if we know um how buyers approached them did buyers were they for sale did any buyers buy prints from the impressionist exhibitions did they choose could they buy alternative Impressions but especially I wonder if um collectors um framed and displayed them in new ways impressionist paintings were a new kind of painting impressionist prints were also a new kind of print making so rather than I don’t know albums or traditional frames I wonder if we know anything about how people were Framing and displaying prints buying them and then framing thank you I can say something short and then defer to you a very short statement for me and then I would course defer to Ashley who knows about this you know I’m old school I do production I don’t do reception but um uh one of the things that we’ve learned um thanks to a number of um you know interventions by print uh experts over the last decade or so is that never mind the actual quality the actual aesthetic of the print you know it was very very rare for prints to be framed and hung they were they were in dosier they were in albums that’s the way they were preserved that’s the way they were observed they would be shown to Friends by flipping through albums and so forth so the the whole question about framing um I think is is is is not your main to this particular moment but Ashley can talk about collecting well um thank you for that question I I it’s a good one and I don’t have a good answer for you about the um the you know commercial side the whether um the prints shown in the impressionist exhibitions found buyers from their um display there um but in terms of the question of framing it’s it’s interesting to see specified in the cataloges these groups that were framed together yes right um and it’s uh you know in in terms of kind of competing with uh other media um it would have made quite an impact I think if we imagine the prints by bra mul that are all you know hung singly in a row um to have been on mass you know eight in in one frame um actually would have given them some you know heft on the wall um and so that’s so sorry for Whistler for Whistler I suppose it was important as we saw before for how how they were framed that was interesting very interesting to learn this morning I suppose buyers bought it framed for for a case like Whistler very possible another another issue uh thank you all for the for the talks in the panel I just want to uh add something sort of going in the same direction direction of Ashley and Holly’s interventions go back to the comment about painting and print and where you said Ashley said well yes color is important to impressionism and if we end on that note though the ground is seated to painting and of course David’s paintings have color but he’s not an impressionist right so it’s there’s a question of of of principles maybe rather than obdurate medium that counts the most it would have to do with ephemerality unfixed and the rest that uh maybe would help us see a lot more things uh broadly and incisively and not uh fall back on the media hierarchies any thoughts just very small response Todd thank you very much for that are you then um might I conclude that you are proposing that it’s high time that we we sort of not removed but somehow diminished the Criterion of color um from the the the sort of the register of evaluative criteria or so you’re saying that you don’t need to be using diverse colors in order to actually um be completely on top of um incompletion spontaneity unfinish and so forth yeah so Ashley I agree with you Todd um yes I mean I think the you know the the point is that you know one can look at uh the iconography the composition um in a similar way with a print and a painting but really um to ask what it is that prints contribute to impressionism that we don’t see perhaps in painting um is really you know this this question of of of a multiplicity of states of um of inking of of a temporality that is um ephemeral and diffuse and um and in a way that is different from painting maybe we should use modernism instead of impressionism that’s a topic for another that’s another week yeah I I yeah um hi thank you all I’m here um I have a question for Mrs clayon please so you talked about Mary casset and her edging printed by Lua Mr laa so I’m a specialist of loua who was also an etcher as well as famous for his article um I was wondering if you knew who Mr laa was uh when was the edging done and all the Jazz please well it as it thank you for your question um as it turns out um the the the piece that I showed on which there was the the double um uh notation of authorship was an aquant dry and dry point I mean it’s a color aquant with dry point is actually the the linearity is dry pointed so I mean that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a printer but I mean it just happened not to be in talio because that’s when she it’s a long long story why that ended up being uh the go-to uh technology as of about 1890 but yes those who really know about cat’s practice know a great deal about that printer um and uh I and in fact uh this very in fact Ashley can answer your question better than I can but just to make the case that it’s it’s a color aquatinted dry point for what it’s worth yet um the you asked about date and so those are from 1894 no later n anyway yeah after 1890 um but there is a very exciting uh Cassat exhibition that has just opened yesterday in Philadelphia that um will have a wonderful um catalog that um we’ve we mentioned Laurel Garber uh who will um undoubtedly um address that topic um to one another it was fascinating I have a question that is linked to both the topics it’s the um catalog that are Illustrated [Music] um withing andard was also the printer of the Gaz so there’s also that question of developing a way of interpreting the impressionist painting through the use of prints and etching but it’s not the um medium of etching of impressionist but they play with it so I think that it’s an interesting topic that might it’s more of a comment that I’m making actually and I think it’s worth taking this into account and the other point I want to reind you of is that with the selling of etching there was the Martin exhibition in 1863 as well so these galleries presented both the um print and the painting so it was a bit of the opposite of what took place in 1874 and the last Point regarding exhibition Philip ber is the critic of prince in the Gaz de but the prince rooms were desertic uh there was no one there and he was talking about these morning hangings in these um rooms and he said that the print frames that are presented in the exhibition are really a way of a very new and different way to present prints and that changes a bit what haris was saying the print artists we can see all of the different steps in the relation to painting so there’s something really new in this um in these music so this might be the question the part played by the reproduction of these etching sorry it was a a long comment but I was really inspired by all your presentations thank you SE it’s very interesting and it’s very important we have a question by Mar oh I had an answer does it work okay I just wanted to add something because I’ve had to make choices when choosing what I was going to tell you about I did not talk about the use the very important use of Helo prints uh to communicate about their pictorialist pictures and is photography and arts which was published in 1879 we can see that [Music] the gra that are also displayed at J so they’re interested in prints and in reproductions uh very high quality with beautiful hell you grab yours so I just wanted to add this but thank you sigin yeah no I wanted to um Circle back to the uh comment that Todd made the question that Holly sort of jumped into and um just the kind of the the main takeaway I think of the exhibition project that we have done Paris 1874 and that the research team struggled with these last years uh which is certainly further compelled by your presentations all three of you which is the degree to which impressionism and I thought we could throw it open to this Brain Trust of people in this room is just not really working for us as a term it is very clearly and from its beginning is it’s a Market driven term I mean from donon rell’s uh involvement with the movement it’s Market driven now in terms of exhibitions Acquisitions the way that museums organize their work the kinds of dealers that we deal with in terms of public attention um I mean if you can just get impressionism into the title of your exhibition you will have attendance but it is not working for art historians so I thought yeah maybe we can come up with something else can we do that I mean it’s really it’s eclipse is the rather violent term that that julan used I mean it’s really it’s really problematic so what what are we going to do all together what can we do constantly bear has an answer yes yes just to make things a little bit more complicated you didn’t talk about man in any of your presentations whereas Michelle M really gave him a lot of light and this is where we hear a lot about photography and there’s someone else that you didn’t mention something else which is the reproduction or interpretation print and both Mon and have used uh printers to reproduce their work so I think that it makes the situation even more complicated but it also allows to create a link between prints and their overall environment at the time and not a individual practice of each of the artists thank you there’s always a problem with the the word gra in French because as you well know don’t labels in museums that things get translated as engraving when it should just be print or Pluto etching so yes so that that’s another terminological problem for this whole area of study yeah I just wanted to come back to the color and black and white issue because Whistler did say that he was doing black and white in etchings lithographs that he intended to evoke color and the black and white is a way to create the sensation of color in the viewer’s mind and I would suggest on this issue of the naming of impressionism that we perhaps have to recognize the the blurring of boundaries going on there between impressionism and symbolism and I do think color and black and white are actually one and the same thing in the minds of some of these late 19th century people taking photographs or or making black and white works so I’m being a bit um contradictory here but I do think color is actually at the same center of the black and white medium because it’s trying to be something that will be you know multicolored in the mind of the viewer so see clear well you’re right Claire that the there is in the um in all in much of the writing about Prince that you know even pre preceding this period the um a discussion of of color as an element even in black and white prints um but the extent to which that is meant to translate into sort of an optical color in for the viewer uh I’m less sure to to respond somewhat frivolously when you suddenly you you use the word blur I thought yes you’re about to propose an alternative to impressionism that we should henceforth speak of Arts of the blur but like that’s not really what you were proposing all right hell presentations I was fascinated by your presentation on pictorialism I don’t have a question I was not looking at pictures I was looking at Prince um would like to get back to the first questions regarding the collectioner uh prints this morning we saw that when mon prints a series of cathedrals or Hy Stacks he doesn’t sell them all at once because it’s a bit like what he does with the cathedral it’s a bit like what artists do with print with the first state second state third state which is a different state and an original one up until there’s no more on um on his plate so I’m no expert but I know that pisaro did not sell his um Prints but he did this as an experiment because he wanted to try all different techniques but are there collections that uh print colle collection that tried to get all of the different states of the same print or do they only buy one state and not the others do they only buy the first one or other others that are interested in the entire process of the same press I don’t know if I’m making myself clear well I in um exactly at this moment um Philip berti you know coins the the term LA Pro um and so for you know amateur and collectors of this period um you know they sought um they sought off in early Impressions there was an idea that the earlier uh print was taken from the plate um it had you know was somehow better quality um and uh certainly you do find uh collectors who have multiple States um and that is something that is very much of interest that sort of activity of comparing different states H yes was a collector of impressionist paintings also collected prints and he made he made a donation to the m and to the National Library and he also gave do laa paintings and not only impressionist paintings and he was looking to have different states indeed such such as uh for La you have the first states which are the ones that are um pressed when the um plate hasn’t been damaged by the Press yet one more thing regarding this in 1897 B wrote a document on States and he says we should first collect the first state and the last state he says what should be collected and then there the case you’ve shown the a fund that was thoroughly studied but there are many different states that are part of this fund and now we have reason cataloges where we name all of the different states and this is precisely done so that collectors can choose the states that they want find several ones and so on but the research it’s still underway for for collectors as you say we don’t really know for these um for these works thank you very much thank you again for your fascinating presentations we’re going to close this session because there’s another one coming up on material so we’re going to take a short break a 10minute break and we will resume at 4:30 thank you very much e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e spe e e spe so um so good good afternoon I’m an Robbins I’m curator of paintings here at Muse dors and just a a word to say that we will be holding this session uh in English even though none of us here uh are actually uh Native so bear with us uh so maybe a few uh a word of introduction to this uh to to this second part of the afternoon so exactly 10 years ago in 2014 The Muse dors was holding its first ever Symposium on the subject of conservation entitled conserve prot restor and this uh event highlighted and presented important conservation projects which had been recently accomplished on works from The Collection or projects about to be launched such as the major treatment of of of Corb atellier dantra of 1854 55 which of course has since long been completed so now a decade a Whole Decade later in 2024 we could actually hold a similar event with hardly any changes to its uh to to to the structure of its program because again we could emphasize a significant conservation projects recently completed on the collection and announce the forthcoming conservation of U of other Monumental kbet Landmark namely an or of 1849 and 50 which has been a project which has which has been publicly announced um last month and uh which will start later this year thanks to the funding of Bank of America so the the the musor say daily activities as is the case of course in other museums uh do gener generate a constant flow of conservation activities uh of course aiming toh to ensure the preservation of its collection and uh activities which all confront us uh on a daily basis with the materiality of the artworks uh in its care uh so technical examinations and scientific uh uh analysis undertaken by conservators or by scientists as part of our conservation or Rich research project and here we are working with with Scientists from SF thear France uh whose expertise we we rely on so this projects uh very much illuminate deepen and sharpen um um our understanding of these uh artworks in crucial ways they shed light on the process and content of of their making and then talking of impressionist Works given uh the um the Striking materiality of the impressionist medium this provides vital Clues especially when interlaced with the study of uh documentary sources of all kinds so the two Communications that uh will follow focus on artist materials uh and and there are research there both research projects uh which uh both involved uh the examination uh for instance of colen and um and manufact facturers archives U um we’ll go next to to to to to Dr Fabian rupen with a paper on sesan’s choice and use of of of of paper and U and What U um it entails uh in in terms of an improved knowledge of his uh of of his drawings uh based on scientific analysis of of his materials but to start with we will propose a presentation on zinc white arguably the he to least known of all white pigments uh the properties and use of which uh including an impressionist paintings have recently been very recently been examined uh as part of a PhD uh recently completed by uh Dr nicoleta Paladino so Dr nicoleta Paladino first studies materials engineering uh in Italy and in Sweden and and has really just literally just completed a PhD at University Paris and at the SF thech restoration M France and her thesis concerns the physicochemical characterization of Z quite then dran salvon is conservation scientist at sedf within the painting group uh and she holds a PHD in physical chemistry from the cmf uh um on the subject of fangos painting materials with a focus on white paints and I’m going to join them for this talk which takes the form of a dialogue so uh first of all I should say that the Muse dors has been following uh really accompanying uh this project on zqu for several years now uh with our former um colleague Emanuel kri who was previously here associate deputy director of collections at Muse dors and he’s is now director of cultural programs and of the museum at the BNF uh at the bibl national the France and and uh he had initiated this collaboration and that the Muse dors was was delighted to have facilitated aspects of Dr Paladino’s research by allowing X xrf examination so xrf x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to be performed on no less than 49 paintings from the Muse dores collection back in uh 2022 uh and uh this uh in view of detecting and analyzing the presence of Zin white in that selection of works from our collection and it’s an operation that took place here uh in C2 in our galleries both in our Galleries and in storage and uh also at SF itself where we had two of our of two important uh early impressionist works from the uh from from the collection was sampled and analyzed last year as part of of your project nicoleta so before we launch into the the subject maybe I could uh start by uh by asking the most naive question what was the trigger for this project and for your interest uh in Zin white why study Zin white why should we be interested so of course uh so first of all whites have a key role in painting so they are used the as white as is they can be used in color mixes they are used in in grounds and zinc white is particular because it was developed in a specific time frame so from the we we know that it was developed and started used really from the second half of the 19th century until the second half of the 20th century more or less and it has some specific properties such as a lower covering power uh translucency that make make it prone to be used for to be mixed with with colors and to provide more Luminosity such as we can admire in this painting by by crer and uh it is also a a pigment that uh that dries slower compared to lead white for example uh and it it is also a pigment that is very reactive so it can provoke some condition issues in uh in paintings so all of these reasons make it interesting to know better the the pigment to to then go and uh and also provide more insights on the conservation uh of artworks based on the on the knowledge on the materiality of the pigment by itself so from this uh my PhD project uh started in 2020 in 2020 and uh it was the first uh systematic research on zinc white ases So based on the physiochemical properties of the pigment and its variability and also on the extent of use of the pigment uh in in artworks and also the modality of use uh in different uh artists in in the the whole time frame of use of zinc white uh the Corpus of analysis consisted in a corpus of artist materials Bas of zinc white Artis materials so such as ancient paint tubes or pigment powders but also a corpus of artworks as an was mentioning mentioning earlier and we use the method we used as a methodology so analytical techniques that we commonly use in Heritage science but also methodologies that we developed adoc for the project and I also just wanted to mention that we also try to develop a new a proposed a protocol for the non-invasive identification of Zin white and we will see later on why it is so important to to to say that now and um I don’t know if I get technical issue here oh maybe maybe right direction okay so may maybe even without an image yes just just to recap maybe what might be useful is for you to give us an overview of the um uh the main white pigments that uh were in use in a developed in the history of oil paint yeah yeah so from since the Antiquity it it was lead white the white par exellence in uh in paintings but uh since it was it had the the the pro the problem of being toxic at the end of the 18th centuries uh in in France some researchers starting to find to look for alternatives to to Red White and two chemists proposed the use of zinc oxide which is the chemical compound that that composes Zin zinc white uh as a as a pigment however it is only and in 1834 so after 50 years or more that the pigment is first commercialized at at first for water colors it was called the Chinese white and was commercialized in the UK by Winsor and Newton and it is only at the half of the 19th century that the pigment starts to be used in in oil paint because always in France another an inventor developed a method for the large scale production of zinc white and was also able to find a dryer specific to for a specific use in in oil paint that allowed so the the the use of the pigment in oil uh the the pigment Zin white can still be found today is still commercialized and it is used also in combination with titanium white which is the third main white pigment and the most common nowadays this pigment in fact was developed in the 1920s and uh it really starting to to take uh the the place the scene in the 1960s 1970s with the rise of acrylics since it was interacting U Better compared to to Zin so zinc white slowly uh declined the use of zinc white slowly declined also for for this reason but uh so now maybe we should also go back to the focus of this uh of this conference so I wanted to ask an instead which is the why is our white so important among impressionist well so of course one of the uh uh specificities of the uh uh impressionist palette if it is its characteristic it’s striking uh brightness and its extensive use of whites uh as you can see here whether to describe a cloth fashion uh Linen in paintings of of Interiors of Modern Life and Leisure or uh in uh in in landscape to achieve effects of passing clouds of snow or of um foam um um as you can see here in a uh in this selection of paintings from our own collection some of which have been closely studied and researched as part of of recent conservation projects for instance the theas portrait family and the and mon F jardan which have been conserved uh in the past three or four years here you know major projects that involved SED MF uh and and when it comes to uh the use of white paint it’s a it’s a wellestablished fact that the pigment most widely used in impressionist paintings was actually lead white which had long been around uh in fact since uh Antiquity so it was hardly new at all uh even though the impressionist had on the other hand this uh this very intense interest in new pigments and the U and in the um unpre unprecedented diversity that it could bring to their pallette so when it comes to White that’s something we wanted to look into uh but maybe uh Joanna uh maybe if if you wanted to tell us more about all these technological advances and and the context in which this was happening in the 19th century so um just to give a an overview of the main technological Improvement in the 19th century um one very important one are the progress in chemistry in the chemical industry that lead to the development of a lot of new pigment such as zinc white but also a lot of other color such as um emerald green uh artificial um ultramarine um cadmium yellow so we have then a lot of very bright colors that are available for artist another uh very important uh aspect is the development of paint tubes from 1840 so the artists don’t have to anymore to prepare their own uh colors and so it really uh give new opportunities to artist to paint outside far from the studio so it’s also a very important element and the consequence from this development uh is also then the central role of color man in pain Supply so the the colorman uh designed the paint formulation uh and then sell them and so it has this Central wall so just as a reminder uh paint tube um formulation it’s made basically from a powder pigment the main color that is label on the tube and then it’s ground uh in a binder for example oil and then the color man can hand a a lot of different additive to um improve the properties to ensure the stability of the paint tubes and also to reduce cost for example so I think now it would be interesting Neta if you can give us uh some information in term of material more specific for the zinc white yeah sure so as I was mentioning at the at the beginning of the presentation we had the chance to analyze a huge Corpus of artist materials so for example here you can see some samples from the vi mon which was the one of the main producers of zinc oxide in in Europe and from this research we learned actually that the the pigment powders that were used to to produce zinc white were very pure and when we go to two tubes uh Pink tubes uh we observed that also in this case a lot of tubes were just composed of Z Zin white by by itself but there was another part of tubes that as jna was mentioning before contained some Addies such as calcium carbonate barium sulfate that were added up to reduce the cost or to modify the the properties moreover we also detected a couple of cases of adulteration so in painting treis a lot of people were complaining about the fact that this zinc white was was actually not zinc white by itself and we actually indeed found found found uh some tubes that were whose chemical composition was not Zin oxide and moreover we also have to remark the fact that zinc white by itself was also a component of other paint tube formulations such as colored formulations for example in some yellows and some greens and that there there are also other pigments that are that also contain zinc which is the main inorganic part that composes zinc zinc white zinc oxide uh and that are their zinc based product can be found find in artworks such as fungicides and and dryers uh why is it so important because when we observe zinc in artworks we have to be very careful because the source of zinc could be not only zinc white but all of these elements together so you you can see that it can be quite tricky and complex to interpret this presence of zinc okay so maybe now you could you could uh tell us about the uh when it first appears on artist pallette you know about the time frame of its use and when it stops being used yeah sure as I was mentioning at the beginning the like the real time frame is from the 19 half of the 19th century until the half of the 20th century but during my project we also found a early use in an English Miniature from the collections of the Victorian Alberta museum and uh at the laboratory at the C resarch restoration M France some colleagues had the chance to analyze LOM by kurb and um and they found zinc white that was used to actually retouch the skirt of the of the artist covering the face of his wife when he retouched the painting when uh when they separated and uh moreover it is also known that pelites used the zinc white for their grounds so to prepare uh before applying their paint layers in order to provide more Luminosity even locally so in just some specific locations it is however uh from the impressionist so and the posst impressionist especially that uh zinc white really starts to be to be found in artworks and uh and also in some 20th century artworks I will focus now maybe on more on the on on some a couple of example of the impressionist use but uh first of all so I will present a bit the the the artworks the Corpus of analysis that that we had in my in my work so we analyzed the around 80 80 artworks and uh 49 of these were from the collections of the Museum of the M uh and almost half of these were impressionist artworks the we analyzed the artworks in the museum with the xray exray fluorescence spectroscopy which is a complex name to say indicate a technique uh that allows us to know which elements are present in the in the artworks and this gives us a preliminary idea of the pigments that could be could be present a preliminary idea because uh we don’t know for example if the elements are coming from top or deeper layers and also because we don’t know how these elements are linked to one another so zinc could be for example uh coming from zinc oxide but also some other uh P some other pigments uh and as you can see the date from the date overview uh we tried to respect a bit the whole time frame of views of Zin white and since we are we worked in France we had the majority of artworks coming from France with also some representations from other other countries in in the world when yes maybe uh maybe we could focus on on impressionist and other interesting case studies uh among not just impressionist and their contemporaries yeah yeah yeah exactly so as you can see uh we analyzed so this uh this almost 50 artworks here at the Muse m d and we we divided the results in three categories so in some artworks we did not F find any zinc at all so no zinc white in some other artworks we found found just some traces of zinc which do could be related to other other other zinc based compounds so not just zinc white and in some other artworks we did find we did detect zinc but it is important to remark also that only in a minority of them we were able to really be sure or almost quite sure of the presence of zinc white because we found it in really in in an abundant intense way and especially in in white areas so because for each painting we tried to we try to analyze around 10 10 to 20 spots to have an idea of the presence of this pigment both in whites and in colored areas and so in just a few cases we were quite sure of the presence of Zin white it it is important to remark that more analysis would be required to actually be be sure of the presence of the pigment and especially invasive analysis with with sampling uh in order to recognize the connection of zinc to other uh to other elements that could be related to zinc white or other or other pigments and if we focus a bit more on the impressionist paintings here you can see we listed also we included also man F L for just for a comprehensive overview of the uh artists that we analyze the r Museum so these are the anal the artworks the artists that were most represented in the in the Corpus of studied and uh we actually detected zinc in most of most of them uh and sometimes also specifically for some specific effects as you can see here in these transparency effects of the of the w white in the in the glass of these natur Mort by by manyy and if we go even further among oops among contemporary of the impressionist uh we we found a a specific Trends among artists from Nordic countries more in general uh in in a more General way so not not just Scandinavia but also Russia for example and actually from in six out of seven Nordic artworks we detected zinc and in half of them we it was qu present in a quite abundant way and uh also for specific reasons as you can see here uh the artist in this uh in this artwork by maximov uh used the lead white to to provide this brighter white coming from the light from the from the window uh while use the zinc white more for this off white of the table and other details of the painting yes and this of course we find very interesting given the widespread use of white in in Nordic and and scandinav and Scandinavian painting and uh so yes you say that in this work by maxim of Z white was identified in the uh in the tablecloth and which in the case of Russia seems to make sense as Russia had its own uh production you said of zinc uh oxide side which may in fact account for its uh its presence here and if we look at the next uh slide you see likewise likewise in the case of mon so mon was very much all his life committed to to lead white uh but it’s significant that the greatest amount of uh zinc you have identified was on this particular work by uh painting by by by mon view of of zand which is again no doubt linked to the uh to the site of its of its making namely Holland where the artist stopped uh from at the beginning of June of 1871 on his way back from London where he had taken Refuge from the Franco Prussian war and where he might have found these pigments more readily U available uh IE um the greater presence of Zin white here has to be uh related to the geography of mon travels yeah it could be an interesting hypothesis to to be confirmed but it is true that among the Mones that we analyzed uh in this painting we we found we found zinc for example more abundantly in a some in a green area and then also we detected it in some whites and in in some colors so it would be really interesting to go to go further with the with these hypothesis but now if we go a bit on or over time uh it is only among the posst impressionist that really the the use of Z white knows is really a knowledge and and knows a rise and maybe Jonah you can you can provide us a bit more light on this use of Z white among post Impressions we are going now to to give a couple of example among the post impressionist uh about the detection of zinc and the relation to the distinction of U to be interpreted as zinc white because it’s kind of cical uh easy that that will help put light on then the Last Detail case study we’ll have that is on the impressionist artist pisaro that we will do at the end so here um the first example is we show is vason vog which is well known to have used some zinc white uh that we know from analysis but also of course from his letters where he mentioned zinc white and Lead white um so in this example um we detected using uh xrf analysis um that are non-invasive that we mentioned before we detected abundant amount of zinc that could be really easily related to the use of zinc white in term of um in term of sample you can see here on the right example of a cross-section of sample and then prepare the cross-section that has been taken from the blue the blue train and uh you see below the image under UV light and and you can see here you have a very specific blue bright luminescence of the zinc white particles that you see here under UV light so um so yes it’s the second example uh we have here is just to it’s an example where we have both zinc white and Lead white that vog very frequently used together and uh we put also this example to show um one of the example of use uh of advantage of Zin white that we um highlighted uh during my PhD um is about the Well ogical Properties that we study to compare the texture of zinc white paint and Lead white paint to understand a little better why Von goog was using simultaneously the two whites and uh one of the reason we identify is that we can do better in Pasto with Z whites and this is why we wanted to show this picture to show an example of the of the use uh then uh we maybe you can give me the then the second example we would like to to show is about this blond PA go that we had the opportunity to study during restoration intervention uh here again we have also an interesting use of zinc white uh together with lead white so in fact the the main white pigment in the pictural layer uh is lead white so uh in the white horse mixed with other color colors but also in all the other color we have lead white while Zen white is used in the artisanal ground as a second layer and interestingly we have also an intermediate white layer that is based on zinc white that has being used uh between the colored layer so it was very interesting to see that uh we don’t really know what was exactly the rle but we could see it was apply with a pette knife and we think it might be related to giving some texture uh for example to the ground so here again we have some importance of the constituency of the zinc white paint so uh in this different example Pi in the post impressionist of Paul Goan and v vog u what we wanted to show you is that in fact the detection of zinc was very abundant and it was very easy to connect it to the use of zinc white we are going to see now that it’s a bit different uh in the most of the impressionist paintings that we studied during this Z white project so we are going to detail this example of Dil salel from Kami pisaro uh that we had the opportunity to study uh at the sedf lab yes yes so indeed this small painting by pisaro was also studied as part of this project painting which entered the National Collection as part of the mor gift to the nation in 1906 painted in uh in early 1870 uh uh at Len where um where pisaro had settled two years earlier and that he will leave in in August when he’s going to flee the um the the Prussian Invasion so here is uh is the road to um to versil uh uh and it was actually the route of the stage coach so the diligence and what you can see on the left is the uh is the post house and in add distance the wall of the of the park of the chatau the marle and Venturi has described it as a work where and I quote but you can see on the on the wet glistening pavement this the subtle silvery highlights so Joanna the painting was the subject of your very detailed uh in investigations can you tell us what you were looking for uh and I believe pisaro is particularly uh important uh in in this field of study of zinc white because in one of his letters he mentions his purchase of zinc white from a color Merchant called yeah in fact in the letter it was mentioning not zinc white but zinc based pigment so we we remain unsure but at least we know that he was using at least at some point some zinc based pigments uh so the the objective here because we studied it in C2 with the XF analysis and then detected some zinc and we wanted to study it in more detail to see the location of the zinc and to confirm it is uh zinc white that he was using so uh what we were able to do uh uh what we were able to do is to do uh what we call a NX RF mapping of the entire painting So in fact you scan the whole painting it’s noninvasive but then it give you the distribution of the chemical element uh in the painting so what you have here uh on the right is in fact uh the the distribution of zinc so the wider area correspond to the areas where the the most zinc was detected uh and the gray area are intermediate so you can see here that you have a a widespread use of um of zinc in the painting um so we had the opportunity also to to see that the zinc was not coming from the ground because in fact the ground is a lead white base and also with calcium carbonate another technique called confocal uh x fluoresence uh give us the information that zinc was not uh was on the top and intermediate layers and uh then we use other complementary non-invasive technique uh to e to confirm uh the presence of zinc white or to of other zinc based the pigments and surprisingly uh in this last phase we had a lot of difficulties in fact to to characterize the nature of the zinc compound uh in only one spot after a lot of uh attempt we managed to detect a little uh zinc white but otherwise uh we didn’t uh it was not very conclusive so uh we had uh the authorization to take two samples from this painting uh on the Edge to try to uh elucidate uh this mystery and have more information about the nature of the zinc compound so you can see here uh on the here on the right the sample that was taken from the sky uh in a zinc Rich area uh and in fact if you uh remember the cross-section and Sample I showed you from Von goog before it has a very dis different aspect uh you have uh in this in the UV image here you don’t have the very bright luminiscent spot of zinc uh White uh and the zinc is present on the the Z is present here on the um cross-section but as form of Zinc ingate that are shown here in with the yellow circle um the other sample uh was taken from the from the grass it was around here it was also a squish area and in fact in that case we saw only very rare a bright luminent particle of zinc supposedly zinc oxide um but this uh specific study lead us to uh to highlight three main points and interrogation to uh investigate further uh the first one is about um the difficulties in fact uh to identify uh zinc white from non-invasive analysis using only xrf when uh the zinc is in a low to moderate amount uh the second one uh is about the question of intentionality uh here in the case of pisaro uh it seems we have a little zinc white in the in the paint layers but the very kind of low amount make us Rel leave more leave lead us to the hypothesis that it’s more maybe an additive in the paint tube formulation he was using and the last Point uh is about the potential alteration uh that we might have seen here um if the painting is a very good condition of preservation but what we see at the microscale uh make us wonder if it might be some sign of Sil deterioration and I forgot to mention that we also saw in this different pain layers uh of the uh sample from the sky some soaps zinc soaps uh that are known to form but they they are in a diffused way and they are not specifically focused on the zinc in gregate so so it’s this example of a pisos diligence isolated uh case you know where the very small amount of Z detected actually raises the uh the issue as to whether the artist actually intended to use uh zinc white or whether it is just there as a component of the uh of the formulation of the paint tube formulation maybe I will say a few words about it and um so it’s not an isolated case actually so both in our analysis for example confirmed that already in an earlier example in in man uh there was this widespread presence of zinc especially in colors but uh could be also related to to some other zinc based pigments so in this case for example we confirm zinc white in um in in some green areas together with the emerald green but there is always this open question that is also confirmed by literature for example in studies at the National Gallery at the C art institute uh that confirmed this kind of trend and also in po Inu uh we observed a very similar Behavior to the to the c p room so a a potentially WID spread presence of zinc but a bit more difficult to relate to to zinc white or just to zinc white so sh I you give you the concluding remarks so yeah to conclude yeah please give us your so just to say yes because I I realize very much over time that this is an essential contribution to technical art history for what it brings to the knowledge of this pigment and its use and not least because it allows for a better understanding of of the aging and deterioration process uh of paintings due to a zinc white related condition uh issues and that this uh uh will help us in museums deal with these issues and and Define uh Protocols of of treatment and generally generally tackle these issues in a more um informed uh way and it also opens up the possibility of applying this these results to the uh to the field of uh authentication uh of course um um and then I I suppose we’ve discussed this before but but uh uh further aspect that it would be good to uh investigate uh might be uh as we said before the correlation between artist Travel location and the evolution of their pallette in relation to Zin white and and maybe if we if we try and think of a specific Corpus uh like duga working in New Orleans in 7 in 1872 or 73 or mon uh in Norway in 1895 so no doubt there will be uh plenty more plenty more to do and now uh I’m going to hand over to uh to to to Fabian rupen who is going to talk about cesan and the impressionist paper Trail so Dr Fabian rupen holds a um a PhD from the University of Zurich she was formerly working pardon in in the um in in inel in the um in the cator department in theal museum in Frankfort and he’s now an assistant curator in the department of Prince and drawings at the K Museum in Basel and she has uh published on sesan uh San’s drawing extensively since it is her specialist subject so we hand over to you now thank [Music] you cont um I would like to first thank the organizers and above all pH for thank you for putting together this incredible conference and it’s been highly inspiring so so far and I’m glad that we still have a full day ahead so yeah looking forward my contribution focuses on drawings or rather on what we usually call their support the paper I will look closely at the selection of drawings and watercolors by Paul cison and my goal is to stress the potential of paper as a source material I hope to make the point that this monographic study can actually serve as kind of a blueprint in order to look at cis’s contemporaries as well to start with I’m going to give you a very brief overview of cis’s paper supports and the second part of my talk will then focus on a case study and this will be uh tackling a paper that many of you are likely familiar with the so-called mishali brand that you can see a picture of over here looking at zon’s works on paper I would first like to point to their wied online catalog reson formerly under the direction of Walter Feld Jane Warman who is here today and uh David Nash and who has just um handed over to the soete cesan this resource is obviously a tremendous tool for any kind of project related to cison and it lists around 1,000 paintings and 2,100 works on paper studying the works on paper not only their huge amount but also their heterogeneity can be slightly overwhelming at the beginning so they include all kinds of sizes and all kinds of paper qualities at the Second Glance it’s is exactly this variety that actually provides or proves to be key because it allows for the structuring of the drawings according to their supports I have so far studied around 1,400 drawings and watercar in 65 Collections and I have tried to assign as many of them to their original material entities as possible and I did that in order to get a better sense of seon’s working process on a general level his paper supports can be divided into four categories so first of all he worked either on everyday paper or on actually designated drawing paper there is only about 2.5% of everyday papers um it’s about 30 works that are executed on simple writing paper and in about 15 cases they done used the blank versos of magazine plates to draw on the very vast majority of his drawings are done on designated drawing paper and those can then again be um attributed to either Sketchbook origins or to loose sheets both of them count for about 1,000 works the Sketchbook pages are consistently W paper and they are usually considerably smaller than the loose sheets so the loose sheets on the contrary they both include laid and W paper types and with regard to the size cison would predominantly buy a French standard size called resan and measuring about 63 to 48 CM he would hardly ever use the full sheet though but instead usually cut that in half and in a bit um rarer cases you would also quarter those sheets these regular formats result from San’s own handling of the paper supports and he would usually do that before he started drawing on the other hand though apart from those regular formats we also have a whole bunch of very irregular sizes and those are what I call fragments um some of those result from just trimming the edges this is like mainly um yeah assignable to early dealers who thought to optimize compositions in the sense that they would as seen here um in the watercolor in the K house surc trim those blank pages that made the tree not to be centered but actually sitting kind of on the in one corner and so now we have this very um yeah very standard uh or centered composition on the other hand we also have a lot of of um Sketchbook pages that were dismantled and cut apart in some parts but we also have those large scale study sheets that were cut into pieces and sold individually that one here has already been puzzled Back Together by Adrian sha in his catalog resonate in 1973 and there are many more examples today I’m going to focus on the loose sheets of drawing paper so when trying to figure out how fragments partial sheets and full sheets are actually connected a closer look at the paper qualities provides essential Clues at least 245 sheets bear a watermark there are 32 different watermarks I found so far and some of them I only came across once uh but others up to 51 times this variety is representative of the immense selection of paper available at the second or in the second half of the 19th century with industrialization the paper mill switched from handmade to machine made paper and this meant that they significant significantly increased their production both in terms of quantity but also in terms of variety of paper types available the wide range of products may be the reason for which um art history hasn’t really tackled those watermarks and the paper supports for 19th century works on paper as much as it did for old Master drawings for example where it has proven to be very informative and it did so also up until or up to um Peter Bow’s fantastic studies on William Turner’s papers I hope to demonstrate that the paper support and especially watermarks remain a crucial source for cison and his contemporaries and that it’s worth to try gaining an actual orientation within that at first overwhelming ver Vari field for that purpose it is obviously key to identifyy the watermarks at first and I got substantial support from Mar and durta from the National Gallery of Arts paper sample archive and from the late Lou Andre who really was the imminent scholar for industrialized uh or um for paper in France that was produced during the Industrial Age thanks to them I was able to assign most watermarks that I came across in ceson ER to a specific Mill or to specific products and knowing then again about the history of those individual Mills uh that that can actually provide us hints for dating some of those as you likely know hardly ever precisely dated works by cison so I’m only showing this example of a monogram it might be a bit hard to detect at first but it’s three letters sa a v that you can see here and those stand for the societ anony vialon since this Society was only founded in December 1880 none of the artists whoever worked on this paper can actually have done so before that time furthermore looking into the Mills and their clients also allows for connecting the so-called Main and counter marks what I’m showing you here is a illustration from Peter luber’s great introduction to paper making it refers to handmade paper only so it’s slightly different or more complicated again for machine made ones but you get a sense of how those watermarks are placed on the sheets and also what would happen to them when you cut full sheets so you may only come across half or um yeah very partial watermarks when it comes to an earth such as the one of Zan which contains mainly partial sheets this knowledge enables us to at some point at least puzzle some pieces back together and that only I only managed to do so once so far but I’m still very excited about this find that’s the one work that I already showed from a private collection uh it Bears the sa monogram and the other one is in the Cal gallery and bears the vidalon counter Mark and you can see that very irregular torn Edge irregularly torn by zon himself and that is literally this matching uh puzzle piece that comes together here so as a Next Step knowing about main encounter marks allows for the grouping of works that bear the same Watermark when tackling such Watermark groups it is important to be aware of the fact that artist supply shops would offer loose drawing paper either as blocks or Al that means inquires of 25 sheets there’s only a handful of works by cesan or sheets used by Caan that actually Bear traces of a block origin such as a perforated Edge or glues could link to that so we can assume that he mainly bought Al due to practical Reasons I’m assuming that such a choir would be used within a relatively short time span and therefore works on paper bearing the same Watermark can be understood and analyzed as entities similar to sketchbooks looking at such Watermark groups can therefore reveal connections that may have been overlooked so far and that’s what I would like to tackle Now with uh focusing on any paper uh bearing this famous mishali Watermark I first give you this overview of the tiny pictures we’re going to tackle them um in a minute so these are all the works that can be found on the in total 20 sheets bearing a mish Watermark since Sean used four of them double-sided it’s a total of 24 drawings and water colors and this makes it one the fourth largest Watermark group that I have so far for we will get to the artwork soon but I would first like to give you a little bit of background information on mishal so it really likely is the most famous Watermark of the 19th century and that has one particular reason that is Sur so many of you may know that s really as far as we know almost exclusively used to work on mishal paper and he almost exclusively would cut it into pieces twice so that he would have quarter sheets of standard format his signature combination of a soft black con crayon and this distinctive grid surface of the late mishal paper were already noted by Robert Herbert in his seminal study on San suras drawings in 1962 and it also stood at the very center of Jody halfman’s wonderful Zur show in 207 just to give you an idea of the rather sensual Topography of this paper I’m quoting Robert Herbert’s the description here the paper’s Myriad tfts can be seen to project from the surface in little comma-shaped hooks when SRA lightly stroked its surface the hooks caught the crayon here and there leaving The Valleys between them untouched when it comes to the producer LeAndre did the extensive research on the mill and I’m only mentioning very few key facts here so paper Watermark mishal was on the market in 1860 the latest in 1874 the Widow of bankas mishal registered mishal as a commercial brand and she would collaborate with Shier who had four different Mills and he would mainly produce mishelle paper in Samar laier this localization or location is also where the counter Mark comes from this is in this case an SM monogram and I unfortunately so far have only come across this once in Sean world and only in this partial way that you can see it here I therefore put a full SM monogram next to it that I kindly got from Lou Andre so um and Below you also see another version of Samar represented in watermarks that’s a full name Sam so far this has not been shown to be a countermark of mishal but I’ve never seen a full sheet including this Watermark yet so I would be very grateful for learning about anyone who knows about one taking these Works into account as well our group Grows by four sheets or a total of six works it’s now 30 works that we have here and they spend roughly 30 years so they obviously include all kinds of motives they include all kinds of techniques or approaches and a large Variety in general however thanks to the different typographic versions of the mishal watermark we can further distinguish five subgroups so it’s likely slightly difficult to see those two pictures taken in natural light but if you look closely at the M the I and the H you can probably see the differences uh in the kind of style of those letters thanks to L yandre all those five versions can also be linked with specific production dates and that’s really a a gift which we hardly ever had any Watermark apart from Mell so far looking at those subgroups each of them is then in itself very stringent starting with the first one or actually the first two which one can hardly call groups because they only consist of one sheet each both show drawings of academic nudes and they would probably have been done in the 19 in the 1860s when seisan was working in the academy SS Michelle was a very inexpensive paper brand compared to other paper available at the time and it was handed out to students very often exactly for that reason the third group is already slightly larger and it’s linked to the 1870s it contain contains a portray and then two studies after Old Masters from The lus Collection I erroneously marked the first one as being in the private collection as well but that’s actually in Munich in the St so both of those drawings of their sculptures by Michelangelo or rubben respectively they show a similar interest in the Twisted human body and the Verso of the second one is particularly interesting because you yeah it actually includes one of the very rare cases where a child’s hand is present on seon’s sheets and this is here even with a color pencil or color pencils that is the only case that I’ve know of about so far and uh it’s like likely been Sean’s son who drew on this work since that one was only born in 1872 and this is unlikely to be done by a child younger than six years this again gives us another clue for the the date in two portraits in the fourth subgroup Sean son is already slightly older uh according to LeAndre this specific type of the water Mark has been uh found only since the 1880s this enables us to adjust the dates that were previously given to some of those drawings or at least to limit the PO possible dates they were done uh at when you look at the composite sheet on the left for example the the earliest date has been suggested to 1876 but now we know that this is unlikely to have been done before 1880 and when it comes to the motives at first glance there’s a very R wide range so we have Landscapes portrays and then again study after an old Master it therefore isn’t surprising that those Works have never been directly compared so far and it’s really only the watermark connection that suggests that we could possibly do that and when doing so they do have several similarities or Parallels at least loose ones and it becomes evident that San no matter whether he was drawing his son or a stool or a landscape or an entrance to a garden was apparently very interested in a kind of structural analysis here or a geometry of his subject matter and in fact several depictions are even reminiscent of some of some kind of an architectural drawing they’re all very detailed with regard to the many small parts that they are literally constructed out of similar connections and maybe even bit more surprising ones come up with regard to the fifth which is also the largest group these eight works are dated to the late 1880s and this matches the waterm mark that was only available from 1885 onwards all the drawings were likely done in or around Paris the landscape shows a bridge across the mar a the study of the anti antique Satur is associated with the lra and the studies of the harleen are likely done in cesan parisan at the time may not be too surprising that a large part of studies closely linked to San’s mikra painting which comes next um such as the harleen and the curtain were all drawn on the same type of paper but I find it very interesting to see that for example this antique study or the study of the antique Sati here belongs to this group as well and there are some affinities with regard to the posture that may have informed his Harlequin studies as well and when you look to the pot with the plant this the shape of the leaves it might be a loose one but it still kind of seems to go together with the pattern of the curtain and also with the dress of the Haren and then again the last one the study of the coat sitting or lying on the chair this general interest of like fold and fabric that plays in all of those uh drawings and in the painting as well I find very interesting to look at here I hope to have shown that considering the watermark and thinking of Works done on the same type of paper as groups May encourage to look across the boundaries of different motives and these CH positions May reveal overarching questions or challenges that cison was facing at a certain time watermarks can therefore Broad mod our Horizon when it comes to the creative process and in addition watermarks also provide new possibilities to link C on with his contemporaries so most of them have overlaps when it comes to their paper supports we’re very lucky with the Mally paper to have those production dates but there are lots of other works where we other watermarks where we don’t have those but we have artists that have very welld works such as maybe Fango for example um knowing about their paper support can then inform Our dating with regard to artists who would not date at all so recently there have been several or more or less recently have been done more um several monographic Endeavors to look at paper more systematically and what I’m most excited about is the potential to link up those monographic studies and to actually get a better sense kind of a GE graphy of paper in 19th century France that would allow for us to um make a yeah get a better sense of who would use what type of support when and where which also goes a bit back to uh traveling to the Netherlands May making Fang use a different pigment and therefore what I’m highlighting here especially is a project that I just learned about that was launched by the associ and that is going to evaluate the paper supports of uh whole collections with regard to 1850 to um what does it say 1830 to 1950 even so that would be a very generalizing kind of combining approach and having that one linked up with monographic studies really Bears a huge potential I’m very optimistic that by following this paper trail and I have picked this uh wording from Susan Stein’s wonderful essay on fangor drawings will may get new clues about who worked together where and when at what what point of time and may have been looking at the same field somewhere out of Paris in 1874 thank [Applause] you thank you uh very much Fabian for this fascinating paper which allows of um an improved grasp of sesan’s work working uh process and thank you for your uh research which is a a major step forward uh in the understanding and and reconstruction of sesan’s working method i s your case study on on michelis subgroups which is also very new is uh is is fascinating the way in which you have been able to uh reconstruct these subgroups of 25 shows us how Priceless this Watermark information is so maybe I’ll start with a first question and then we’ll see whether you you you you you you want to ask us uh more uh I was wondering whether there there might be any plan long or short or or short term to have this Watermark information recorded on the online catalog reson to make it possible to search on on sheets coming from the same batch yes good we’re very happy yeah um yes we’re about to get that link together so we we hope that to make that a criteria and so um yeah that that’s the wonderful thing that this online version provides for that you can actually add new criteria and make those searchable yeah fantastic because yes I saw that some entries are already um already show constructed images such as the one with the the the the drawing of the the skull in in the fog but that would bring it you know one step further so um thank you um um uh very much uh and also in obvious questions you what uh significant revisions to the dating of San’s work has been brought uh by these discoveries and have you been able to correct any flagrant errors or yes although it also it confirms many of the dates that were given according to style which I also find I just like the fact that we have this additional external source that would confirm it and it’s more about limiting time spans probably that uh often they are they are very rough sometimes states have been suggested that last for 10 years or sketchbooks and and lose sheets that include a a large variety of of dates which is just unlikely I reckon in terms of practical reasons and so this is it’s mainly the Terminus post quem that we get at some points that can help us to limit that and yeah draw other already very precious uh information so I don’t know if you you know I realize it has been a long impressionist Marathon this afternoon that we’ve all been through so um um but I don’t know if you have any questions for niceta and Joanna or more for um for Fabian thank you thank you very much I just wanted to ask the question to Fabian whether she would like also to look to um the people in in libraries who work on watermarks for writers papers like Victor Hugo and so on I think there’s a lot been done about that or FL at the laboratory and LeAndre did that as well so he was really helping yeah and he also pointed me to some 19th century Publications that were were made out of paper like obviously then folded into the book uh production and is therefore available at full and with main Mark and countermark which we hardly ever find in artists production or are not aware of so far poost and so on I think there’s studies about that yeah thank you also musicians this is for all an and niceta um I was very interested to hear what you’re were saying about the selective use of zinc white and Lead white I actually wanted to share something that might be useful as you move forward when a few years ago our conservators cleaned manon’s old musician uh we discovered that he used lead white throughout the entire canvas the only place we found zinc white was in the later changes that he made here’s some very distinctive changes that we found are confirmed with X-ray and that’s where he used zinc white so I wonder if that might also be another Avenue to consider in addition to topography geography and the evolution of materials that maybe there might be a way of identifying changes to a canvas as well thank you very much for for your comments and it’s very interesting as the painting you you mentioned of man where with specific use of zinc white and it remind me also a little bit of the KB Neta presented less where in fact he made change 10 years ago to cover his his former wife and use specifically in fact zinc white to do that as well so I think yeah it’s it’s a very interesting um area also to to follow to to provide information on this specific uh type of question Al we’ve discussed it between ourselves Joanna but still what I find puzzling about uh about the use of Zin white in in k with on is that zinc white has the the uh the least covering power you know it is the least hiding white pigment and yet this is the one that corit chooses to to conceal the figure of of of of the woman next to him of his wife so so so this is something that would need a further looking into to to cover it but not completely fully also hello is the sun yeah okay sorry I have a question for Fabian um do you ever do here sorry do you ever do um testing of samples of your paper to see precisely what they’re made out of no so that I mean that was the my kind of problem also chance at the same time when I did this research I was not affiliated with an institution I would go visit all kinds of institution and so institutions and therefore the access was also very different depending on the institution so in some cases I would be allowed to use a a lamp in some cases I wouldn’t um and in some cases paper conser conservation had already looked at those works very closely and others they hadn’t at all um and I I still hope that there will be more um yeah proper analysis of those papers happening fa CIS did amazing studies on that on the Philadelphia watercolors but did you ever take physical samples of them to see what the fibers were made out of or did that so she did that for the some of the Philadelphia works on paper and there have been a bit of only more measuring really of the thickness and opacity of the paper in on the Basel Works um also MAA has now looked closely at their watercolors and Chicago does so there’s more and more adding up to that but I have not obviously initiated that yeah thank you that would be very helpful yeah thank you maybe one last question if any okay okay all right well thank you very much thank you for your attention [Applause] so oh dear on stage the lch the lch P of these two wonderful days all of these speakers of course destination impr with our two colleagues present and who there every day they were important support services and the students from the IM school thank you very much give them a big round of applause thank you 40 to 50 drawings every half day and they exhibit their work at these and I encourage you to come and see their work and view it and also um see and the person running all of this for today he’s the head of the research center of theu school we’d like to applaud him thank him and welcome him and thank him very warmly and I also want to say that these two days are available for listening re re if you would like to listen once again thanks to our partnership with UB live I would like to also thank sulan for the translation and the through the interpret translated over the past two days and I would also like to thank my colleagues in great numbers here David Jak Valentin Mar and Manel who have really shouldered the production and helped us throughout the day and I’m not forgetting of course all of the technical team who allowed us to bring you sound pictures fixed and uh mobile pictures or images and my colleagues in the general technical room and I’d like to will wish you a very good evening and I think that we are meeting tomorrow at the National Institute for art history e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e for