Abstract
This study was prepared to be heard and seen. It works most effectively in that way. In the medium of the illustrated lecture, images appear, as it were, before the mind — seen illuminations of what is heard. The following is merely the text of the lecture with annotations that indicate the images used in slides. In order to preserve, as much as possible, the quality of “performance” piece in an unillustrated text, a separate list of images, annotated with references to high quality reproduction, is included in an appendix.
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Notes
As cited by Albert Christ-Janer, George Caleb Bingham, Frontier Painter of Missouri (New York: Abrams, 1975), p. 49.
Christ-Janer notes that “the Missouri is, of course, a whimsical force and, had it not been somewhat tamed by the engineers, a dangerous one” (op. cit., p. 22).
The original title of the painting, Fur Trader and His Half-Breed Son, was less lyrical. It identifies the figures as characters in an implied historico-sociological narrative. Nancy Rash takes a sociological approach, pointing out that the Fur Traders should be paired with The Concealed Enemy (Orange, Texas, Stark Museum) which shows an Osage Indian hiding in ambush. Bingham plays on a popular longing for the lost world of the late eighteenth century when French voyageurs canoed American rivers. The “calm atmosphere, the Claudian mode” of the painting for her is the result of nostalgia (The Paintings and Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven and London: Yale, 1991), p. 49). To my eye, the sensibility of the Fur Traders is far above mere nostalgia. Such emotion would be better served by the 1851 copy, Trapper’s Return (Detroit Institute of Arts), in which he is much concerned to make the details accurate: the figures are more clearly expressed, the animal is clearly a bear cub (symbol of the state of Missouri on a state seal of 1822), as is the French pirogue, dug-out canoe. “Missouri” is an Indian word meaning “the people who use wooden canoes.” The 1851 version was executed in his New York studio and carries none of the mood of the original. The change in mood is even evident in a comparison of the preparatory drawings for the two compositions. The earlier drawing for the trapper is as evocative as the original. When he used it for the later painting, the mood is transformed so that it shares that of the preparatory drawing for the half-breed son in the 1851 painting. See Maurice E. Bloch, The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham, with Catalogue Raissoné (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), nos. 2 and 77.
For further sociological discussions, see Francoise Forster-Hahn, “Inventing the Myth of the American Frontier: Bingham’s Images of Fur Traders and Flatboatmen as Symbol of the Expanding Nation”, pp. 118–145 in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspective on Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt: Santa Monica, Getty Center for History of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and David Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth Century America (New Haven, London: Yale, 1994).
Rath notes that “the viewer, like them also on a river, shares the calm of their journey for one brief moment” (op. cit., p. 49). This effect is directly opposed to contemporaneous continental convention, as Michael Fried has recently pointed out. Under the influence of Denis Diderot, French painting from the middle of the eighteenth century until the first half of the 1860s was “anti-theatrical,’ that is, the figures in a painting were to be so absorbed in their own world that they are obvious to the beholder. ”The representation of absorption emerged as the privileged vehicle for seeking to establish the metaphysical illusion that the beholder did not exist, that there was no one standing before the canvas…. [This denies what Fried thinks] of as the primordial convention - almost transcendental condition - that all paintings are made to be beheld.“ (”Between Realisms: From Derrida to Manet“, Critical Inquiry 21(1) (Autumn 1994), pp. 5–6; see also Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).) Fried’s discussion is a response to Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1993).
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova (D. Reidel Publishing, 1982), p. 29. Full title in text of this paper.
Ibid., p. 30.
Albert Boime emphasizes Manet’s physical condition, pointing out that the man in the mirror in Manet’s study for the painting (1881, Amsterdam, Stedilijk Museum) might be identified with Manet who had to sit to paint. He suffered from locomotor ataxia in his left leg due to syphilis. Boime further has Manet “identify with her subjectivity because of his physical condition that has essentially terminated his career as a stroller”, a flâneur. See “Manet’s Un bar aux Folies-Bergère as an Allegory of Nostalgia”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56(2) (1993), 234–248, esp. p. 238.
Most recently Ruth E. Iskin, “Selling, Seduction, and Soliciting the Eye: Manet’s Bar the Folies-Bergère”, Art Bulletin LXXVII(1) (March 1995), pp. 25–44, in which the painting is related to discourses of mass consumption, the development of department stores, and the expanded visual culture of illustrations and advertising posters. The girl in Manet’s painting is an example in Rallis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven: Yale, 1991).
George Mauner, Manet, Peintre-Philosophe (University Park: Penn State, 1975), pp. 161–162. In 1994, James H. Rubin wrote that in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère “the aesthetic of the detached gaze (is) as surgical operation… it seems as if the displaced eye concentrates us wholly on the signs of art” (Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1994), pp. 88–89).
Mauner, op. cit., p. 161.
John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959), p. 179.
For T.J. Clark and the barmaid “is detached: that is the best description. She looks out steadily at some thing or somebody, the various things which constrain and determine her, and finds that they float by...” See The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 254.
Tymieniecka, op. cit. p. 30 and pp. 33–34. Boime also notes the dichotomy in Manet’s painting, but his conclusions are at the other end of the spectrum: “she has allowed her private world to obtrude on her public persona.” Her “private world” is a dream of “owning her own establishment instead of working for someone else. Her fantasies would include relationships that might bring her into sudden wealth to finance her scheme.” Boime, op. cit., pp. 244 and 242.
Ibid., p. 30.
See Günter Busch, Edouard Manet — Un Bar aux Folies — Bergère (Stuttgart, 1956), pp. 11–12, as cited by Mauner, op. cit., p. 162. Manet complained to Antonin Proust about models for portraits: That’s always been my principal concern, to make sure of getting regular sittings. Whenever I start something, I’m always afraid the model will let me down…. They come, they pose, then away they go, telling themselves that he can finish it off on his own. Well no, one can’t finish anything on one’s own, particularly since one only finishes on the day one starts, and that means starting often and having plenty of days available.
See Manet by Himself: Correspondence & Conversation, Paintings, Posters,Prints & Drawings, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau (Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 184. 16 J.-L. Vaudolyer, E. Manet, Paris: Ed. du Dimanche, 1955, Introduction (“Manet, magicien du réel”), unpaginated, as cited by Mauner, op. cit. Proust recorded Manet as saying in 1878–1879: “The truth is that our only obligation should be to distill what we can from our own epoch, though without belittling what earlier periods have achieved. But to try and mix them into what barmen call a cocktail is plain stupid.” See Manner, op. cit., p. 187.
Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 36.
Much has been made of Dürer’s appropriation of the type, but James Snyder considers it doubtful that Dürer identifies outright with the sacred icon. It may be an example of imitatio Christi, pious devotion population in northern Europe. See Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 326. See also Charles Cuttler, “Undercurrents in Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait”, Pantheon 50(1) (1992), pp. 24–27; George Didi-Huberman, “L’autre miroir: autoportrait et mélancolie Christique selon Albrecht Dürer”, pp. 207–240, in Ritratto e la memoria: materiali 2, ed. Augusto Genti et al., Rome: Bulzoni, 1993.
Tymieniecka, op. cit., pp. 38–39.
J. A. Ward, American Silences (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 169.
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper, the Art and the Artist (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 60.
Ibid.
As quoted in Brian O’Doherty, “Portrait: Edward Hopper”, Art in America 52 (December 1964), p. 80. Even if the scenes are artificially lit, the sense of the present moment pervades.
This quality has been recognized, but is referred to as voyeurism, a sneaked peek into a private world. See Ward, op. cit., p. 171. Levin (op. cit., p. 61) counts “Times of Day,” as one of the themes of Hopper’s work.
See Levin, op. cit., p. 55.
Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 39.
Ananda Coomarswamy gives a lyric account of the myth in The Dance of Shiva (New Delhi: Sagar, 1968).
Tymieniecka, op. cit., pp. 39–49.
Ibid., pp. 34–35.
Ibid.
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Trutty-Coohill, P. (1998). Visualizing Tymieniecka’s Poetica Nova . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Analecta Husserliana, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2604-7_16
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