#1882 after Manet)

[thinkingimages]

Robert Longo. Untitled (X-Ray of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 after Manet), 2017 (detail). Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London · Paris · Salzburg. Photograph: Artist Studio.

[dankusner]

Life Secrets of the Late Bloomers

Being an ugly duckling in your youth can be the key to becoming a successful swan later in life

Paul Cézanne always knew he wanted to be an artist.

His father compelled him to enter law school, but after two desultory years he withdrew.

In 1861, at the age of 22, he went to Paris to pursue his artistic dreams but was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts, struggled as a painter, and retreated back to his hometown in the south of France, where he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank.

He returned to Paris the next year and was turned down again by the École.

His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869.

He continued to submit paintings until 1882, but none were accepted.

He joined with the Impressionists, many of whose works were also being rejected, but soon stopped showing with them as well.

By middle age, he was discouraged.

He wrote to a friend, “On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.”

No Cézanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cézanne’s most prominent contemporaries.

In 1886, when Cézanne was 47, the celebrated writer Émile Zola, the artist’s closest friend since adolescence, published a novel called The Oeuvre.

It was about two young men, one who grows up to be a famous author and the other who grows up to be a failed painter and commits suicide.

The painter character was based, at least in part, on Cézanne.

(“I had grown up almost in the same cradle as my friend, my brother, Paul Cézanne,” Zola would later write in a French newspaper, “in whom one begins to realize only today the touches of genius of a great painter come to nothing.”)

Upon publication of the novel, Zola sent a copy to Cézanne, who responded with a short, polite reply.

After that, they rarely communicated.

Things began to turn around in 1895, when, at the age of 56, Cézanne had his first one-man show.

Two years later, one of his paintings was purchased by a museum in Berlin, the first time any museum had shown that kind of interest in his work.

By the time he was 60, his paintings had started selling, though for much lower prices than those fetched by Manet or Renoir.

Soon he was famous, revered.

Fellow artists made pilgrimages to watch him work.

What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity?

One biographer attributed it to his “inquiétude”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety.

He just kept pushing himself to get better.

His continual sense of dissatisfaction was evident in a letter he wrote to his son in 1906, at age 67, a month before he died:

“I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature.”

He was still at it on the day he died, still working on his paintings, still teaching himself to improve.

The year after his death, a retrospective of his work was mounted in Paris.

Before long, he would be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern art:

“Cézanne is the father of us all,” both Matisse and Picasso are said to have declared.

Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers.

Our school system has sorted people by the time they are 18, using grades and SAT scores.

Some of these people zoom to prestigious academic launching pads while others get left behind.

Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan.

Magazines publish lists with headlines like “30 Under 30” to glamorize youthful superstars on the rise.

Age discrimination is a fact of life.

In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment.

“Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.

But for many people, the talents that bloom later in life are more consequential than the ones that bloom early.

A 2019 study by researchers in Denmark found that, on average, Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at the age of 44.

Even brilliant people apparently need at least a couple of decades to master their field.

The average age of a U.S. patent applicant is 47.

A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old.

A study published in The American Economic Review found 45 to be the average age of an entrepreneur–and found furthermore that the likelihood that an entrepreneur’s start-up will succeed increases significantly between ages 25 and 35, with the odds of success continuing to rise well into the 50s.

A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to start a successful company as one who is 30.

A study by researchers at Northwestern University, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau found that the fastest-growing start-ups were founded by people whose average age was 45 when their company was launched.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation produced a study that found that the peak innovation age is the late 40s.

Successful late bloomers are all around us.

Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s.

Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s.

Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa, at 52.

Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55.

If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language.

Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s.

Grandma Moses started painting at 77.

Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).

Why do some people hit their peak later than others?

In his book Late Bloomers, the journalist Rich Karlgaard points out that this is really two questions:

First, why didn’t these people bloom earlier?

Second, what traits or skills did they possess that enabled them to bloom late?

It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age.

Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system.

They usually have to invent their own paths.

Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”

Jim VandeHei: What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago

If you survey history, a taxonomy of achievement emerges.

In the first category are the early bloomers, the precocious geniuses.

These are people like Picasso or Fitzgerald who succeeded young.

As the University of Chicago economist David Galenson has pointed out, these high achievers usually made a conceptual breakthrough.

They came up with a new idea and then executed it.

Picasso had a clear idea of Cubism, and how he was going to revolutionize art, in his mid-20s. Then he went out and painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Then there are the “second-mountain people,” exemplified by, say, Albert Schweitzer.

First, they conquer their career mountain; Schweitzer, for instance, was an accomplished musician and scholar.

But these people find their career success unsatisfying, so they leave their career mountain to serve humanity—their whole motivational structure shifts from acquisition to altruism.

Schweitzer became a doctor in the poorest parts of Africa, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1952.

Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.”

In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young.

This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.

These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments.

They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more.

Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly.

Their focus is on the process of learning itself:

Am I closer to understanding, to mastering?

They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life.

They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.

Let’s look at some of the traits that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers—the qualities that cause them to lag early in life but surge ahead over the long haul.

Intrinsic motivation.

Most of our schools and workplaces are built around extrinsic motivation:

If you work hard, you will be rewarded with good grades, better salaries, and performance bonuses.

Extrinsic-motivation systems are built on the assumption that while work is unpleasant, if you give people external incentives to perform they will respond productively.

People who submit to these extrinsic-reward systems are encouraged to develop a merit-badge mentality.

They get good at complying with other people’s standards, following other people’s methods, and pursuing other people’s goals.

The people who thrive in these sorts of systems are good at earning high GPAs—having the self-discipline to get A’s in all subjects, even the ones that don’t interest them.

They are valuable to companies precisely because they’re good at competently completing whatever tasks are put in front of them.

People driven by intrinsic motivation are not like that.

They are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to.

Winston Churchill was a poor student for just this reason.

“Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life.

But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them.

The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy.

They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions—and the power of this motivation eclipses the lesser ones fired by extrinsic rewards.

Extrinsically motivated people tend to race ahead during young adulthood, when the job is to please teachers, bosses, and other older people, but then stop working as hard once that goal is met.

They’re likely to take short cuts if it can get them more quickly to the goal.

Worse, as research by scholars like the psychologist Edward L. Deci has established, if you reward people extrinsically, you can end up crushing the person’s capacity for intrinsic motivation.

If you pay kids to read, they might read more in the short term—but over time they’ll regard reading as unpleasant work, best avoided.

A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”

I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years.

A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.”

These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed.

They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.

Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task.

They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners.

As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

In Drive, the writer Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic-motivation models work fine when tasks are routine, boring, and technical.

But he cites a vast body of research showing that intrinsically motivated people are more productive, more persistent, and less likely to burn out.

They also exhibit higher levels of well-being.

Over the long run, Pink concludes, “intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.”

Early screw-ups.

Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems.

To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep”—bad at following the conventional rules of success.

Or to put it another way, they can be assholes.

Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance.

But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Colonel Sanders was fired for insubordination when he was a railway engineer, and then fired again for brawling with a colleague while working as a fireman.

His career as a lawyer ended when he got into a fistfight with a client, and he lost his job as an insurance salesman because he was unsuited to working for other people.

Then, at 62, he created the recipe for what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, began to succeed as a franchiser at 69, and sold the company for $2 million when he was 73.

Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.

“Diversive curiosity.”

Our culture pushes people to specialize early: Be like Tiger Woods driving golf balls as a toddler.

Concentrate on one thing and get really good, really fast—whether it is golf or physics or investing.

In the academic world, specialization is rewarded:

Don’t be a scholar of Europe, be a scholar of Dutch basket weaving in the 16th century.

Yet when the journalist David Epstein looked at the lives of professional athletes, he found that most of them were less like Tiger Woods and more like Roger Federer, who played a lot of different sports when he was young.

These athletes went through what researchers call a “sampling period” and only narrowed their focus to one sport later on.

In his book Range, Epstein writes that people who went through a sampling period ended up enjoying greater success over the long run:

“One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earning lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fitted their skills and personalities.”

Jessica Lahey and Tim Lahey: How middle school failures lead to medical school success

Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation.

Julia Child made hats, worked for U.S. intelligence (where she was part of a team trying to develop an effective shark repellent), and thought about trying to become a novelist before enrolling in a

French cooking school at 37.

Van Gogh was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a street preacher before taking up painting at 27.

During those wandering years, he was a miserable failure.

His family watched his repeated downward spirals with embarrassment.

During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience.

But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.

The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways.

When the psychologist Howard Gruber studied the diaries of Charles Darwin, he found that in the decades before he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin was “pen pals” (as David Epstein puts it) with at least 231 scientists, whose worked ranged across 13 broad streams, from economics to geology, the biology of barnacles to the sex life of birds.

Darwin couldn’t have written his great masterworks if he hadn’t been able to combine these vastly different intellectual currents.

Epstein notes that many of the most successful scientists have had diverse interests, and especially in different kinds of performing: Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to spend large chunks of time as an amateur actor, musician, magician, or other type of performer than non-Nobel-winning scientists are.

Epstein quotes Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience:

“To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies,” Cajal wrote, speaking of these late-blooming Nobelists, “while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem.

They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency.

They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.”

He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.

The ability to self-teach.

Late bloomers don’t find their calling until they are too old for traditional education systems.

So they have to teach themselves.

Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot.

In his book Curious, Ian Leslie presents a series of statements that, when answered in the affirmative, indicate a high need for cognition:

“I would prefer complex to simple problems”;

“I prefer my life be filled with puzzles that I can’t solve”;

“I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.”

Leonardo da Vinci is the poster child for high-cognition needs.

Consider his famous lists of self-assigned research projects:

“Ask the master of arithmetic how to square a triangle … examine a crossbow … ask about the measurement of the sun … draw Milan.”

Benjamin Franklin was similar.

After he was appointed U.S. ambassador to France, he could have relaxed on his transatlantic voyages between home and work.

Instead, he turned them into scientific expeditions, measuring the temperature of the water as he went, which allowed him to discover and chart the Gulf Stream.

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility.

They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.

This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).

The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning.

Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own.

The benefits of acquiring this self-taught knowledge compound over time.

The more you know about a subject, the faster you can learn.

A chess grandmaster with thousands of past matches stored in their head will see a new strategy much faster than a chess beginner.

Knowledge begets knowledge.

Researchers call this “the Matthew effect”:

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.”

Pretty soon, the late bloomer is taking off.

The ability to finally commit.

Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever.

At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive.

They have to commit.

Ray Kroc endured a classic wandering period.

He got a job selling ribbons.

He played piano in a bordello.

He read the ticker tape at the Chicago stock exchange.

He sold paper cups and then milkshake mixers.

In that latter job he noticed that one restaurant was ordering a tremendous number of milkshake machines.

Curious, he drove halfway across the country to see it, and found a fast-food restaurant that was more efficiently churning out meals than any he had ever encountered.

“There was something almost religious about Kroc’s inspirational moment when he discovered McDonald’s,” Henry Oliver writes in his forthcoming book, Second Act.

Kroc just cared about hamburgers and fries (and milkshakes) more than most people. He bought the restaurant, and brought to it his own form of genius, which was the ability to franchise it on a massive scale.

The mind of the explorer.

By middle age, many late bloomers have achieved lift-off and are getting to enjoy the pleasures of concentrated effort.

They are absorbed, fascinated.

But since they are freer from ties and associations than the early achiever, late bloomers can also change their mind and update their models without worrying about betraying any professional norms.

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown.

But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward.

“Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall. “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Crankiness in old age.

So far, I’ve been describing late bloomers as if they were all openhearted curiosity and wonder.

But remember that many of them have been butting against established institutions their whole lives—and they’ve naturally developed oppositional, chip-on-the-shoulder, even angry mindsets.

In his essay “The Artist Grows Old,” the great art critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote about painters—like Titian, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Cézanne—who produced their best work at the end of their lives, sometimes in their 80s or even 90s.

He noticed that while these older artists painted with passion, this passion was inflected with what he called “transcendental pessimism.”

The artists who peak late, he found, “take a very poor view of human life.”

They are energized by a holy rage.

The British artist William Turner felt so hopeless late in life that he barely spoke.

“Old artists are solitary,” Clark writes. “Like all old people they are bored and irritated by the company of their fellow bipeds and yet find their isolation depressing. They are also suspicious of interference.”

The angry old artists fight back with their brushes.

They retreat from realism.

Their handling of paint grows freer.

“Cézanne, who in middle life painted with the delicacy of a watercolorist, and was almost afraid, as he said, to sully the whiteness of a canvas, ended by attacking it with heavy and passionate strokes,” Clark writes.

“The increased vitality of an aged hand is hard to explain.”

Younger painters, like younger workers in any field, are trying to learn the language of the craft.

Older painters, like older expert practitioners in other fields, have mastered the language and are willing to bend it.

Older painters feel free to jettison the rules that stifle their prophetic voice.

They can express what they need to more purely.

Clark’s analysis is insightful, but I think he may be overgeneralizing.

His theory applies to an angry, pessimistic painting like Michelangelo’s late work The Crucifixion of St. Peter, a painting of an old man raging against the inhumanity of the world.

But Clark’s theory doesn’t really apply to, say, Rembrandt’s late work The Return of the Prodigal Son.

By the time he painted it, Rembrandt was old, broke, and out of fashion; his wife and many of his children had preceded him to the grave.

But Prodigal Son is infused with a spirit of holy forgiveness.

It shows a father offering infinite love to a wayward, emaciated, and grateful son.

It couldn’t be gentler.

Wisdom.

After a lifetime of experimentation, some late bloomers transcend their craft or career and achieve a kind of comprehensive wisdom.

Wisdom is a complicated trait.

It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on.

The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox.

“Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them.

When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which are now often considered his greatest works.

He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light.

He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time.

He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions.

“I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker.

“Here and there does not matter /

We must be still and still moving /

Into another intensity /

For a further union, a deeper communion.”

For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends.

They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.

Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is.

But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise.

It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.

Arthur C. Brooks: How to succeed at failure

When I was young I was mentored by William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, both at that time approaching the end of their careers.

Both men had changed history.

Buckley created the modern conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan.

Friedman changed economics and won the Nobel Prize.

I had a chance to ask each of them, separately, if they ever felt completion, if they ever had a sense that they’d done their work and now they had crossed the finish line and could relax.

Neither man even understood my question.

They were never at rest, pushing for what they saw as a better society all the days of their lives.

My friend Tim Keller, the late pastor, was in some ways not a classic late bloomer—his talents were already evident when he was a young man.

But those talents weren’t afforded much public scope at the church in rural Virginia where his calling had taken him.

Tim didn’t feel qualified to publish his first major book until he was 58.

Over the next 10 years he published nearly three dozen more, harvesting the wisdom he’d been gathering all along.

His books have sold more than 25 million copies.

During this same time, he founded Redeemer, the most influential church in New York and maybe America.

When Tim got pancreatic cancer at the age of 70, he was still in the prime of his late-blooming life. Under the shadow of death, as he wrote in The Atlantic, his spiritual awareness grew deeper.

He experienced more sadness and also more joy.

But what I will always remember about those final years is how much more eager Tim was to talk about the state of the world than about the state of his own health.

He had more to give, and he worked feverishly until the end.

He left behind an agenda for how to repair the American church—a specific action plan for how to mend the Christian presence in our torn land.

I’ve noticed this pattern again and again:

Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay.

They are seeking.

They are striving.

They are in it with all their heart.

[mybeingthere]

Isaac Israëls, 1865-1934 In the danshouse, Amsterdam oil on canvas 97.5 x 74.5 cm, signed l.l. and painted ca. 1892-1897.

Son of the Hague School artist Jozef Israels, Isaac Israels was a leading figure of the Amsterdam Impressionism movement, renowned for his highly personal, luminous and free brushwork and subjects from his travels to Paris, London, and Indonesia.

At the mere age of thirteen, Israels attended the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague where he befriended Georg Hendrik Breitner. Between 1880 and 1884, Israels and Breitner were both particularly fascinated by military subjects and in 1882 Israels debuted at the Salon with Military Burial. In 1886, the two artists enrolled at the Reijksacademie in Amsterdam but after only a year the pair left the academy and joined the circle of the Tachtigers (or ‘Eighties’ group), a progressive Dutch movement of writers and artists.

Through trips to Paris with his father, Israels had come into contact with the French realist writers Emile Zola and J.K. Huysmans. In 1894, Israels received a permit to take his easel to the streets and paint the urban milieu en plein air. 1900, he was introduced by his childhood friend Thérèse Schwartze to the Amsterdam fashion house Hirsch & Cie, in whose studios he regularly painted.

In 1904, Israels moved to Paris. The parks, cafes, cabarets, and street scenes which Israels studied in Amsterdam continued to be his chosen subject in Paris; however, he also took to painting acrobats and fairgrounds. Israels moved to London in the spring of 1913 but grew increasingly frustrated here as the outbreak of the First World War prevented him from painting out in the streets. He redirected his interests towards boxers and wrestlers. He returned to Holland for the remainder of the war, moving between The Hague, Amsterdam and Scheveningen, where he used to holiday with his father, accompanied by other artists such as Edouard Manet.

After the war, Israels passed much of 1919 in Paris and then spent 1920 in Copenhagen, Stockholm and London. Between 1921 and 1922, Israels and his friend Jan Veth went to Java and Bali after befriending many East Indians during the war. Israels was enraptured by the landscape and people whom he encountered in South East Asia. He sketched the household of the local ruler at Solo, and produced numerous watercolours and oil paintings of Balinese women, Chinese weddings, dancing girls, bands, beggars and children. Upon his return, Israels spent the greater part of 1923 in The Hague where he took over his father’s studio. During this time, his focus returned to theatre-life and portraits. Israels received significant awards for his artistic achievements including a knighthood in 1925 and an Olympic Award for Art three years later.

Sotheby's

[spectercollector]

This is Dorothea Arnault, drawn into the painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Manet from 1882. I’m writing a paper about this painting for a university class, and while doing research, was struck by the kinds of things I could be saying about this character and this painting by making this.

A common assumption about this painting is that the interaction in the reflection between the man and the woman is more or less sexual in nature. Bargirls in general, and especially those at this particular venue in Paris, were known for being more or less sexually available. Anyone who knows Dorothea knows that part of how she externally presents herself is pretty sexual, though she also gives off a very confident air, something that says you could never have her.

One prevalent interpretation of the difference between the reflection and what we can see of the “real” girl is that one represents her inner world and one represents her outer world—generally the mirror being an inner world and her detached expression being her outer world. I don’t personally agree with that interpretation, but I thought it would be interesting to put Dorothea into that context, and make you wonder which is really the internal and which is the external. She flirts a lot to succeed in her self-imposed external goals, like the girl’s reflection may be doing in the painting, but I always got the sense that she would rather have something more real than that, if she could.

But—Dorothea is at heart a performer. I could imagine that she longs for the glitz and glamour as shown by the crowd in the painting. Perhaps she’s metaphorically stuck behind this bar while wishing she could indulge in the fantasy more than she is. Perhaps the man off to the right is not superficially propositioning her for sexual favors but interested in *her* her, and that is the real fantasy. He does look stoic.

So is the mirror reflecting reality while you see her as she really is, or do you see her hopes and dreams in the mirror?

As for the second point, the one that really made me think ‘Dorothea’:

It is important to know the historical context in which this painting was done—the cusp of industrialization, which is a time period I enjoy picturing Dorothea’s home city of Enbarr in. Cities became metropolises, huge and crowded and bursting with a growing kind of middle class, which meant more people had a bit more free time and free money to spend on entertainment and luxurious goods. The lowering costs of production and travel meant that more goods and entertainment were available. The department store made its big debut around this era, the Era of Crowds, and they’re applicable to my point for two big reasons.

First, they were a kind of adventure. With salespeople behind counters, goods within your senses of touch and taste, glittering displays, and huge venues, going to a department store meant spending your day being assaulted with all kinds of within-budget spectacles.

Second, stores adopted other forms of entertainment—some added cafes, others theaters, others *became* theaters after hours. Managers hired performers, hosted events, generally did all kinds of things to advertise and get people to spend their time in their stores.

These things combined meant that shopping and entertainment sort of conflated together. A store became a show, a show often became a store with merchandise and bars and cafes. Due to this association, salesgirls and bartenders and other service people became performers in their own contexts.

Dorothea *is* a performer. She’s a talented opera singer, the star of many shows, who left her success to go to a school and secure her future (by finding a rich husband, as she says.) She’s not a literal salesgirl, but she is metaphorically. By positioning her at the bar in the painting, a bar that almost looks like it extends into your space, is she potentially asking you to buy her future? Is she judging the passersby like a customer at a store? Does she wish she was one of the performers, like the trapeze artist we can barely see in the top left? Does she wish she wasn’t part of this whole spectacle at all?

There is also something to be said for the mixed clientele of an entertainment venue of a place like the Folies-Berger—people from many social classes mixed and saw themselves in those mirrors as wealthy socialites partaking in luxury. One of Dorothea’s themes is the seemingly arbitrary division between her world’s nobility and commoners. As a commoner herself that interacts regularly with the upper class, she doesn’t think the division should exist at all, much less be as pronounced as it’s shown in her story. The working class of this time period, such as barmaids like the one shown, often dressed in a higher-class fashion as per their uniforms to appeal to more people. Those attending a venue like this may not have been the wealthiest, but they wanted to feel like they were. This place of false luxury is at odds with Dorothea’s ideals, making her place in this painting and the questions about the reflection and her role all the more obvious.

While putting this specific character in the context of this painting answers some questions, I believe it raises more, and highlights some of those I find the most interesting. Is the mirror a reflection of her dreams or is it her harsh reality? What is she selling and does she even want to? And is any part of this literal, or is it purely a metaphor, a piece of poetry, a collection of good questions in one image?

…I should really go write my real essay now.

[bitacoradeclase2203039198]

𝒜𝓁𝑔𝓊𝓃𝒶𝓈 𝑜𝒷𝓇𝒶𝓈 𝒾𝓂𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓈

Berthe Morisot (1841 - 1895) ; Después del almuerzo, 1881 Técnica: óleo sobre lienzo ; Dimensiones: desconocido Colección privada ; https://www.wikiart.org/es/berthe-morisot/after-luncheon

Berthe Morisot ; La cuna, 1872 Técnica: pintura al óleo ; Dimensiones: 56 x 46 cm Museo de Orsay, París, Francia ; https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cuna#/media/Archivo:Berthe_Morisot_008.jpg

Mary Cassatt ( 1844 - 1926) ; Verano, 1894 Técnica: óleo sobre lienzo ; Dimensiones: 100.6 x 81.3 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, EE.UU. ; https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cassatt#/media/Archivo:Mary_Cassatt_-_Summertime_-_TFAA_1988.25.jpg

Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906) ; Naturaleza muerta con flores y frutas, 1890 Técnica: óleo sobre lienzo ; Dimensiones: 62 x 65 cm Museo de Orsay, París, Francia ; https://arthive.com/es/paulcezanne/works/375411~Naturaleza_muerta_con_flores_y_frutas

Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) ; Los Nenúfares, 1920 - 1926 Técnica: óleo sobre tela ; Dimensiones: desconocido Orangerie de las Tullerías, París, Francia ; https://www.salirconarte.com/magazine/curiosidades-sobre-los-nenufares-de-monet/

Édouard Manet (1832 - 1883) ; Un bar del Folies-Bergère, 1882 Técnica: pintura al óleo ; Dimensiones: 96 x 130 cm Courtauld Gallery, Londres, Reino Unido ; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Edouard_Manet%2C_A_Bar_at_the_Folies-Berg%C3%A8re.jpg

[ephjournal]

Artist Research

Jeff Wall

Most of his famous references to painting are also tributes to modern painting led by Baudelaire's aesthetics. Through precise and ingenious arrangement and thinking, the contradictions and conflicts in the reality of western society are episodic. The systematic study of art history background and the support of the rise of digital technology not only become the inspiration of his creation, but also make the audience often confused about what is true and what is false.

Wall’s early pictures evoke the history of image making by overtly referring to other artworks: The Destroyed Room (1978) explores themes of violence and eroticism inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s monumental painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), while Picture for Women (1979) recalls Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and brings the implications of that famous painting into the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s. These two pictures are models of a thread in Wall’s work that the artist calls “blatant artifice”: pictures that foreground the theatricality of both their subject and their production.  A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), reinterprets the scene in a woodcut print by Japanese printmaker and painter Katsushika Hokusai. Part of the larger portfolio called The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, Hokusai's original image, Travelers Caught in a Sudden Breeze at Ejiri (c. 1832), depicts seven individuals caught off-guard in the wind at different points along a narrow path. (https://gagosian.com/artists/jeff-wall/)

[detournementsmineurs]

"Untitled (X-Ray of A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, 1882, after Manet" de Robert Longo au fusain (2017) et "Un Bar aux Folies Bergère d'après Manet" de Vik Muniz à partir d'images de magazine (2012) en référence à “Un Bar aux Folies Bergère" d'Édouard Manet (1881-82) présentés à la conférence “L'Art Contemporain a-t-il de la mémoire ?“ par Paul Bernard-Nouraud - Historien d'Art - pour le cycle “Etre de son Temps : L'Art Contemporain Face à l'Epoque” de l'association Des Mots et Des Arts, décembre 2021.

[arts-dance]

Édouard Manet French: 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

Born into an upper-class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the future originally envisioned for him, and became engrossed in the world of painting. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, both 1863, caused great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the start of modern art. The last 20 years of Manet's life saw him form bonds with other great artists of the time, and develop his own style that would be heralded as innovative and serve as a major influence for future painters.

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe  ( Luncheon on the Grass )

A major early work is The Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), originally Le Bain. The Paris Salon rejected it for exhibition in 1863, but Manet agreed to exhibit it at the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) which was a parallel exhibition to the official Salon, as an alternative exhibition in the Palais des Champs-Elysée. The Salon des Refusés was initiated by Emperor Napoleon III as a solution to a problematic situation which came about as the Selection Committee of the Salon that year rejected 2,783 paintings of the ca. 5000. Each painter could decide whether to take the opportunity to exhibit at the Salon des Refusés, less than 500 of the rejected painters chose to do so.

Manet employed model Victorine Meurent, his wife Suzanne, future brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff, and one of his brothers to pose. Meurent also posed for several more of Manet's important paintings including Olympia; and by the mid-1870s she became an accomplished painter in her own right.

The painting's juxtaposition of fully dressed men and a nude woman was controversial, as was its abbreviated, sketch-like handling, an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. At the same time, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) based on a drawing by Raphael.

Two additional works cited by scholars as important precedents for Le déjeuner sur l'herbe are Pastoral Concert (c. 1510, The Louvre) and The Tempest (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice), both of which are attributed variously to Italian Renaissance masters Giorgione or Titian. The Tempest is an enigmatic painting featuring a fully dressed man and a nude woman in a rural setting. The man is standing to the left and gazing to the side, apparently at the woman, who is seated and breastfeeding a baby; the relationship between the two figures is unclear. In Pastoral Concert, two clothed men and a nude woman are seated on the grass, engaged in music making, while a second nude woman stands beside them.

Olympia

As he had in Luncheon on the Grass, Manet again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist in the painting Olympia (1863), a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting The Nude Maja (1800).

Manet embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. His uniquely frank depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865, where it created a scandal. According to Antonin Proust, "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" by offended viewers.[9] The painting was controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuated her nakedness, sexuality, and comfortable courtesan lifestyle. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers. The painting's flatness, inspired by Japanese wood block art, serves to make the nude more human and less voluptuous. A fully dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed.[4] That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

Olympia's body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. A contemporary critic denounced Olympia's "shamelessly flexed" left hand, which seemed to him a mockery of the relaxed, shielding hand of Titian's Venus.[10] Likewise, the alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino.

Olympia was the subject of caricatures in the popular press, but was championed by the French avant-garde community, and the painting's significance was appreciated by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin.

As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère), 1882, Courtauld Gallery, London

In his last years Manet painted many small-scale still lifes of fruits and vegetables, such as Bunch of Asparagus and The Lemon (both 1880). He completed his last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère), in 1882, and it hung in the Salon that year. Afterwards, he limited himself to small formats. His last paintings were of flowers in glass vases.

Manet's public career lasted from 1861, the year of his first participation in the Salon, until his death in 1883. His known extant works, as catalogued in 1975 by Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein, comprise 430 oil paintings, 89 pastels, and more than 400 works on paper.

 The grave of Manet at Passy

Although harshly condemned by critics who decried its lack of conventional finish, Manet's work had admirers from the beginning. One was Émile Zola, who wrote in 1867: "We are not accustomed to seeing such simple and direct translations of reality. Then, as I said, there is such a surprisingly elegant awkwardness ... it is a truly charming experience to contemplate this luminous and serious painting which interprets nature with a gentle brutality."

The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in Manet's paintings was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works he copied or used as source material. He rejected the technique he had learned in the studio of Thomas Couture – in which a painting was constructed using successive layers of paint on a dark-toned ground – in favor of a direct, alla prima method using opaque paint on a light ground. Novel at the time, this method made possible the completion of a painting in a single sitting. It was adopted by the Impressionists, and became the prevalent method of painting in oils for generations that followed. Manet's work is considered "early modern", partially because of the opaque flatness of his surfaces, the frequent sketchlike passages, and the black outlining of figures, all of which draw attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint.

The art historian Beatrice Farwell says Manet "has been universally regarded as the Father of Modernism. With Courbet he was among the first to take serious risks with the public whose favour he sought, the first to make alla prima painting the standard technique for oil painting and one of the first to take liberties with Renaissance perspective and to offer "pure painting" as a source of aesthetic pleasure. He was a pioneer, again with Courbet, in the rejection of humanistic and historical subject-matter, and shared with Degas the establishment of modern urban life as acceptable material for high art."

Art market

The late Manet painting, Le Printemps (1881), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $65.1 million, setting a new auction record for Manet, exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $25–35 million at Christie's on 5 November 2014. The previous auction record was held by Self-Portrait With Palette which sold for $33.2 million at Sotheby's on 22 June 2010.[38]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Manet

[artdaily7]

Lilac by Øyvind Rimbereid Franz Kafka, Vienna 1924 After Kafka had corrected "A Hunger Artist", but before Dora rushed out to look for the flowers she wanted him to feel the scent of before it was too late, he scribbled on a piece of paper that he "had felt such a desperate need for water, to feel gigantic mouthfuls of water" stream past his ruined larynx, knowing full well that the dying don't drink water "but that only certain flowers drink as they die, not to mention lilacs, that continue to drink afterwards as well". Edouard Manet 1882 Lilac In A Glass, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

[carmengblr]

IMPRESIONISMO

Francia, siglo XIX: Final del clásico/Principio de lo moderno

Espontáneo, directo, personal. Luz y color real, natural

El concepto se le adjudica a Louis Leyor (1874)

Rompe la formalidad, surge en conjunto con el cine

Estilo difuminado por la luz, la composición cambia por condiciones atmosféricas e intensidad de la luz. 

No importa el objeto, sino las variaciones cromáticas que este sufre a lo largo del día

[an-imbibing-gentleman]

Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Edouard Manet, 1881-82

Le Bar aux Folies Bergère, painted and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882, was the last major work by French painter Édouard Manet. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris. It originally belonged to the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, who was Manet’s neighbor, and hung over his piano. The painting exemplifies Manet’s commitment to Realism in its detailed representation of a contemporary scene.

The painting is rich in details which provide clues to social class and milieu. The woman at the bar is a real person, known as Suzon, who worked at the Folies-Bergère in the early 1880s. For his painting, Manet posed her in his studio. By including a dish of oranges in the foreground, Manet identifies the barmaid as a prostitute, since Manet habitually associated oranges with prostitution in his paintings. Other notable details include the pair of green feet in the upper left-hand corner, which belong to a trapeze artist who is performing above the restaurant’s patrons.

The beer bottles depicted are easily identified by the red triangle on the label as Bass Pale Ale, and the conspicuous presence of this English brand instead of German beer has been interpreted as documentation of anti-German sentiment in France in the decade after the Franco-Prussian War.

Very interesting indeed.

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) “Spring” (1881) “Autumn” (1882) Oil on canvas

“Spring” was the first of a planned quartet of allegorical pieces using chic Parisian women to depict the four seasons. The idea came from Manet’s friend, Antonin Proust, who suggested a series of seasons personified by contemporary ideals of women, fashion and beauty. The series was never finished as Manet died a year after finishing only the second of the series, “Autumn.”

“Spring” depicts Parisian actress Jeanne DeMarsy, and “Autumn” depicts Parisian demi-mondaine Méry Laurent.

[jakekavfineart]

Art in the City : Paris Edition

Manet ‘Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe’ 1863 Oil on canvas 

The people in the painting are art students, the naked women as once discussed before is naked not nude for the fact the painter has not idealized her in anyway for the male gaze. Speaking of gaze, the naked women is staring at the viewer, whoever that may be. Her gaze is challenging and not submissive, a classical painting with a passive women's glance witch caused outrage at the time of its creation.

Claude Monet ‘St Lazarre Railway’ 1977 Oil on canvas

Before Monet no one would have painted a railway station, at the time of this painting railway stations were a new concept. Being an impressionist painting Monet tries to emulate light and movement. Monet painted this in the station which was made possible because tubes of paint had just been manufactured at that time.

Le Banlieue ‘Banlieue Parisienne’ 1979 Photograph

Seen in this photograph is where artists went and built a community because it was extremely cheap, people that lived here consisted off painters, writers, poets and musicians among more that because of the high level of unemployment at the time allowed them a place to go.

Pierre-Anguste Renoir ‘Luncheon of the boating Party’ 1881 Oil on canvas

Renoir captured an impression in time of modern life in 1881, people who were off different social classes mingling over lunch. It is visible form the peoples clothes of which class they appear to be from, such as the men white vests will be off a lower class than the suited and booted men.

Manet ‘Bar at the Folies Bergeres’ 1882 Oil on canvas

Manet here has painting a nightclub of sorts, one not attended by high society but rather musicians and artist as well as writers would meet here. Many of the females Manet painted were in fact prostitutes, this women in this painting is believed to have been one too. Oranges in a painting depict and suggest prostitution metaphorically, because Manet has painted a bowl full of oranges alongside the lady in question it gives strong evidence to believe she was a lady of the night. However, Monet has also painted roses which signifies the lady has a sense of innocents and purity about her, the position of which Monet has placed these roses (on her chest in fact covering cleavage) supports this idea strongly. When it comes to the bar ladies gaze, she could be looking at one of two things, the gentleman who can be seen behind her in the mirror, or she could be engaging with us the viewer. Her look suggests to me a disconnection from her environment, a detachment from what is going on around her. While her eyes are challenging, she is not confrontational, she looks as if she is a product on sale.

Picasso ‘Les Demoiselles ‘Avignon’ 1907 Oil on canvas

Picasso was influenced by tribal masks from trocadero in Paris when producing this analytical cubism painting. For this painting, he reduced real life into geometrical shapes analysing the way form is depicted. Never leaving representation Picasso would always leave a link to reality.

Juan Gris ’Tabacco, newpaper and bottle of wine’ 1914 Oil

In Paris artists would more often than not meet in cafes, which sparks where the inspiration came from for this painting. The newspaper was from a cafe Gris visited, the bottle of wine that can just about be made out in the painting signifies everyday life.

Picasso ‘Two Women Running on a beach’ 1922 Oil on wood

“Two women running on a beach” is painted in a Neo classical style, people returned to painting this way after the war, as it brought them and others comfort and normality again.

Rene Magritte ‘This is not a pipe. The treachery of images’ 1928-9 Oil on canvas

The title “this is not a pipe” can be confusing when so clear as day you’re looking at a painting of a pipe. However, there is the key word “painting”, this is not a pipe, this is a painting of a pipe.

[theunabashedepicurean]

A Bar At The Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet, 1882. After viewing @andhetravels stories this last week, showing their visit to @courtauld , it reminded me of my recent whistle-stop trip to London to see my favourites galleries and exhibitions. On my blog today I have published my London diary, describing my capital excursion. Link in story/bio. ___________________________________________ #edouardmanet #abaratthefoliesbergere #thecourtauld #courtauldgallery #courtauld #art #artwork #artist #artgallery #exhibition #artmuseum #museum #galleries #exhibitions #artexhibition #postimpressionism #postimpressionist #artcollector #artcuration #london #somersethouse #strand #frenchpainter #frenchartist #modernist #modernistart #frenchmodernist #19thcentury #19thcenturyart #culture (at The Courtauld) https://www.instagram.com/p/CaNTE0GIj2h/?utm_medium=tumblr

[art-now-france]

ROSES IN A CHAMPAGNE GLASS after Manet, Claude GUILLEMET

Towards the end of his life, Eugene Manet was too sick to paint major works. Instead, he painted the flowers his friends and admirers used to offer him. This one was painted in 1882.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-ROSES-IN-A-CHAMPAGNE-GLASS-after-Manet/868422/3800737/view

[namitaylor99]

Project Proposal and Research

12/5/20

Idea: Comfort food/human’s conciseness/ figural and its significance in photography 

Comfort food, providing a consolation or a feeling of well-being. Everybody has their own sweet and savoury craving, wether its after a long day, a midnight snack or a Sunday morning brunch, we all have one. This personal series will undergo individuals close to me including family and friends, capturing their personality and of course their most desired comfort food. Each image will have its own uniqueness reflecting the person’s characteristics. Constructing an aesthetic series using complimentary colours and artificial lighting to capture theatrical scenes, will tie in each image all possessing the same quality and idea of an individuals own comfort food. I believe this concept connects very nicely to project three, as I will be undergoing this notion of the figural. Figural being a form of significance which relies on imagery and association, capturing symbolic meaning in ones person life.  Inspired by Anne Hardy and Henry Hargreaves, and their ability to capture empty spaces and aesthetic foods, still possessing this notion of the lack of human body except its clear that their soul and presence still remain in the image. This feeling of emotion is what I would like to portray and capture in my series. 

Journal Articles 

The Chicago School of Media Theory: Figurative/Figural 

Theorist Micheal Fried, explores the relationship between the figure and literal within the modern art world. 

Fried’s understanding of the modern age, views art as literalist and minimalist, suggesting that the whole work “they are what they are nothing more” than shapes, colour and form. 

Literal can be seen and used as a metaphor 

The introducing of anthropomorphism can be only depended on literalist art once a person seeks a hidden meaning. 

Anthropomorphism can be seen as a symbol seen from a singles of a shape. 

Literalist art proclaims its object hood

Referring back to literal and the figure, Fried suggest that literalist art is almost seen as non-art because it rejects the representation of art that calls the attention to in the term figure. 

The status of an object within Literalist works are further emphasised between the relationship of the view to the artwork in space. 

Fried draw attentions around the dichotomy betwen the liter and the furfural and figurative, as he further implies the way in which these dichotomy dissipated within the modern art movement. 

Identifying the figure and the literal, yes photography can be seen very literal as we capture something that is clearly identified by all. However once the audience starts to connect the dots (anthropomorphism) thats when the image itself creates it’s own meaning and symbolism. 

https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/figurativefigural/ 

Comfort Food: Nourishing Our Collective Stomachs and Our Collective Minds by Jordan D. Troisi1 and Julian W. C. Wright1 

Food is a powerful motivator in human functioning—it serves a biological need, as emotional support, and as a cultural symbol. 

Comfort food in the media is seem as unhealthy, often  consumed in moments of stress or sadness

But for anyone who has a love of food and of eating, it will come as no surprise that food also has emotional, cultural, and symbolic mean- ing as well. 

Food satisfies our collective minds 

Comfort food serve as a memory based link to close others  and that those with secure attachment styles would have favorable associations with foods associated with other people.

This article provides information on how society identifies comfort as it can be seen through two perspective, as stress eating (unhealthy food) causing anxiety and is something tradi- tional, cultural, regional, familial, or otherwise imbued with meaning 

Eating is the perfect social psychological variable, because it is connected to almost every social variable or process you can think of! (Herman, as cited in Baumeister & Bushman, 2014, p. xxi)

Given the need for humans to consume food in order to maintain numerous homeostatic processes, such topics also seem relevant for courses in biopsychology. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that stressful experiences have numerous bio- logical implications.

This article provides insight on what comfort can really represent for ones individual - it’s a guilty pleasure meal that is close to their hearts. It can be something that endure and crave if feeling overwhelmed or stress which is why some may seem to be fatty and fills with sugar and oil however comfort food isn’t always seen as that. It possess cultural aspects and symbolises their homes - when feeling home sick.

https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1177/0098628316679972 

Artists of Inspiration 

Through my online journal I have briefly discussed Anne Hardy and Henry Hargreaves, both strongly influencing me for my idea for project three. I have also done research of artist Jeff Wall. I will be elaborating further below on what aspect of these artists works have influenced me and how I will use this to create a capture my own innovative series. 

Anne Hardy 

Hardy’s work transforms sculpture into photographic ‘paintings’. Though her scenes are built in actuality, their compositions are developed to be viewed from one vantage point only and it’s only their 2 dimensional images that are shown. Hardy uses the devices inherent within photography to heighten her work’s painterly illusion. In Cipher, aspects such as the hazy aura around the fluorescent lights, faux grotto walls, and the spatial defiance of the hanging ropes, give allusion to gesture and drawn lines.

‘Cipher’ 2007 

Henry Hargreaves

Photographer Henry Hargreaves and installation artist Nicole Heffron have spent the past year imaging how famous directors might celebrate their birthdays in order to recreate the scenes for a unique photo series. Pictured: The bloodied samurai sword suggests that this cake was intended for Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino

The image of the staircase on this birthday cake suggests that this birthday cake was intended for the Vertigo director Alfred Hitchcock 

The bear-shaped cake here is an instant giveaway that this is the birthday cake of Ted director Seth Macfarlane

The glass of milk in this set up is a subtle suggestion that this sterile birthday is that of the Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick

The scene at Martin Scorsese's knees-up has elements of New York's Little Italy as well as the gambling and cigars of Casino and his first hit Mean Streets

John Waters' identity is given away by his Pink Flamingos cake, a reference to the title of the 1972 movie starring drag queen Divine

What I love the most of Hargreaves food images is how he can create these bloody to half eaten food scenes look so pleasing to the eye even when it should make you feel a little gross out. Food photography I feel is very difficult to capture and the same goes in films. It’s so easy for people to be gross out by them especially when their hands and mouths involved, however Hargreaves manages to create these aesthetic food series, almost making me hungry and wanting to eat those cakes. Hargreaves has inspired in the past with previous food photographs, and he still manages to continue to inspire me now. His work is so intriguing and the use of colour and composition overall ties in the image very nicely. However, instead of capturing celebrities and prisoners on death row, for my own work I want it to be personal. Using the pope around me such as family and friends and capture what their own comfort food is their favourite and what it means to them. Is it a stress comfort food or is something that reminds them of home, child hood or a distant memory. Even for myself and capturing my own comfort food and exploring why I have chosen that specific meal. I believe exploring on this idea of food and the figural, it will ultimately challenge me, and let me undergo such research and even an experience of capturing something more than just a photograph of food but the human soul behind that. 

Jeff Wall

I begin by not photographing.

—Jeff Wall

This quote really speaks to me on what art really means to myself. I believe their is so much more than just taking a photo. Behind the scenes artists have to create this ideal image before capturing the photo itself. I love constructing and forming this perfect composition in my mind and capturing it with a camera allows that form to last forever however just creating art itself bringing forth this new world of what photography can really say. 

Jeff Wall’s work synthesizes the essentials of photography with elements from other art forms—including painting, cinema, and literature—in a complex mode that he calls “cinematography.” His pictures range from classical reportage to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at the larger scale traditionally identified with painting

Some of Wall’s early pictures evoke the history of image making by overtly referring to other artworks: The Destroyed Room (1978) explores themes of violence and eroticism inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s monumental painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), while Picture for Women (1979) recalls Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and brings the implications of that famous painting into the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s. These two pictures are models of a thread in Wall’s work that the artist calls “blatant artifice”: pictures that foreground the theatricality of both their subject and their production. Dead Troops Talk (1991–92), a large image depicting a hallucinatory moment from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, is a central example, and was one of the first works to employ digital-imaging technology, which has since transformed the landscape of photography. Wall was a pioneer in exploring this dimension and remains at the forefront of its development.

Doing research on Wall and his work, it’s clear he really wants to capture these somewhat candid images however, behind these image unfold stories and visions. His work in a way have these capturing aesthetic scenes that drawn the audience in. It creates a sense of narrative and story lines by one single picture. I did find the “Destroyed Room” to be very fascinating and it held many similarities on what I wanted to create. However after viewing his other works I couldn’t help   but be intrigued by his image “Changing Room”, the image itself look as if it’s some kind of painting. I think it also ties in with this theme figure and figural topic. The top half of the body looks as if it's some kind of bird especially the animal pattern on the fabric. However, on the bottom half it’s clear that a women is simply just getting change. The figure itself seems to be part human and animal, thats how I view the image as a whole. And I do believe thats what Wall was trying to capture this weirdly human figure or it could have been by accident of the lady putting the shirt or another from of dress and it just seemed as if it was a bird. Overall Wall’ work is absolutely amazing, it has this sense of allude affect on the scenes, drawing myself within the images, trying to figure this narrative by just viewing one image. I wanna be able to incorporate this whole emotional effect on my own images and creating this sense of narrative. 

200 word Project Proposal 

Looking at a variety of artists and articles surrounding this whole notion of the figural within art has allowed me to compose a solid idea of what I will be exploring within project 3. Comfort food is known for providing a consolation or a feeling of well-being. Reading 'Comfort Food: Nourishing Our Collective Stomachs and Our Collective Minds’ it provides insight into what comfort food really means for an individual. It can be seen through two perspectives, including stress and anxiety eating, this makes people crave more unhealthy sugary or high fat food, or is something tradi- tional, cultural, regional, familial, or otherwise imbued with meaning to an individual. Gathering both research on the figural/literal themes within art and this whole concept of comfort food, I believe both have similar qualities and can be captured in a unique form. Wanting to approach this project in a more personal outlook, I will be exploring and capturing my friends and families own comfort food and what it means to them. I will also be using myself and my own desired comfort food, to explore and ask questions what makes comfort food comfort?. Inspired by Anne Hardy, Jeff Wall and Henry Hargreaves, each artists has provided a source of inspiration that I will be incorporating within my own work, however still creating an innovative personal series of my own.