Original subtitles

We've already talked a lot about how politics, religion, science, and technology transformed

Paris during the Belle Epoche and influenced the art of the Post-Impressionists.

And you've probably picked up on some of the exciting and important social changes that

were going on through the works of some of the artists we've been studying.

The Moulin Rouge in the Paris nightlife through the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec.

The rise of the modern working class and bourgeoisie in the paintings of Seurat.

The changing attitudes towards women through the intimism of Nabi.

New engagement with the world in South America, Asia, and Pacific through Gauguin.

In this lecture, I want to make sure we dive a little deeper into some of the big ideas

– in philosophy, literature, and psychology – that became infused in the psyche of artists

in this era.

And we'll finish with some fascinating social and pop culture trends that were also informing

what artists were up to.

So it won't all be heavy, I promise.

Now, philosophical ideas can look somewhat detached from reality.

You know, thinkers in their ivory towers coming up with esoteric notions.

One has to wonder what their influence can be.

But philosophical ideas have a way of being embraced by just a few academics, free thinkers,

writers, and artists who then disseminate these into the public consciousness.

And the Post-Impressionists really engage with the big ideas of their time, even compared

to the Impressionists before them.

In fact, finding harmony between these competing influences was what some Post-Impressionists

strive towards.

Some of this was inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel, who identified and explained what they called the dialectic.

In a dialectic, you develop an argument or thesis.

Inevitably, arguments against that thesis – the antithesis – will arise.

Finding the truth of the matter requires you to create a synthesis between the opposing arguments.

Hegel saw this reflected in society where patterns in history show politics swinging dramatically

from one idea to the extreme opposite and back and forth until a balance is found.

Sounds fair enough.

You might recall just how much the pendulum swung back and forth in 19th-century France between

extremes.

It gets messy.

So a deeper truth synthesis sounds inviting.

And before the term Post-Impressionism was ever mentioned, one of the first terms some

Post-Impressionists used to describe themselves was synthetists.

If you look at it this way, academic art is the thesis and the Impressionists were the antithesis.

Then we can see Post-Impressionism in the synthesis.

If academic art focuses on the traditional appearance of things and Impressionism captures

the way an artist feels and experiences, then the Post-Impressionists, through a bold aesthetic

style using science, technology, and mythology, are creating a synthesis of nature and emotion,

bridging the real world and the dream world.

Paul Gauguin liked to debate ideas like this with other artists, and some of his younger

protégés like Emile Bernard and Paul Ceroussier, who use this philosophy in helping to construct

their ideas.

And Emile Schuffenecker, a stockbroker friend of Gauguin and artist, gets really excited

about these ideas.

So much so that he organizes a big show in 1889 with a group of artists he calls synthetists.

Schuffenecker is an interesting footnote to the Post-Impressionists.

He's really excited about this new philosophy of art, but his show was a total flop.

Nothing really sold, and no one seemed to get the big idea.

Big hitters like Van Gogh didn't participate, and Seurat and Pissarro weren't even invited.

Part of the problem is Schuffenecker is not a great artist.

In his paintings, he attempts to synthesize pointillism, impressionism, academic influences,

all the things he knows about.

But it never quite comes together, and it looks fairly generic and uninteresting.

Even his supposed friend Gauguin, true to his character, is pretty brutal about Schuffenecker's

work, calling him a mediocrity who was born to be a janitor or shopkeeper rather than an

artist.

Ouch.

The Schuffeneckers frequently let Gauguin stay with them as a poor artist, but he later repays

that kindness with a painting depicting his friend's marital problems.

Classy.

That seems to end the friendship and synthetism as well.

It never catches on like the other movements.

Decor, or a symbol of power in the hands of the wealthy.

He believed his major job was to convey ideas, or more closely, the sensuous presentation

of ideas.

To take the good, helpful, and important thoughts, to make them stick in our minds and resonate

in our hearts.

Art did that by being a synthesis of both aesthetics and ideas—not just decoration,

not just propaganda—but a clever combination of both.

Of course, this doesn't preclude propaganda or art as power and status symbol.

In fact, if anything, it probably reinforces it.

But the ideas that Hegel is talking about are big ideas, grand ideas—what he believed

were real and eternal truths, morals that reveal the best in us.

Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, lots of 18th- and 19th-century philosophers echoed the

same belief, that the purpose of art was to ennoble us and make us better people, or, in

the immortal words of Jedediah Springfield, embiggen us.

If it didn't lead us to a deeper truth, it wasn't worthy of being called art.

And a lot of academic art really rests on this philosophy.

From the Renaissance onwards, a hierarchy of genres emerged, which ranked the worthiness

of art according to its underlying purpose.

Still lives, animal paintings, and landscapes were at the bottom of the pile.

They were merely pretty representations of the world.

They had no big truth to them.

Historical paintings were at the pinnacle of the hierarchy—works that showed humanity at

its best and inspired us and could reveal something essential about ourselves.

Doing a big historical or allegorical painting was what a serious artist was supposed to strive

for and dominate the gallery and inspire the people.

Artists looked to the classics—gods, myths, legends.

These things were eternal and would instill permanence in your work.

Gods go on forever, and so will your art, revealing eternal truths to future generations

as well.

And it wasn't just painting—operas, literature, symphonies—they often had the same goal.

So, it flies in the face of the established philosophy of art, too, when artists embrace lower forms

of art—landscapes, genre paintings, still lies.

Artists reject the criticism that they are simply creating decoration.

They've got much bigger ideas—they're not just being contrarian.

The realist movement, which came before the Impressionist movement in the 1840s and 1850s,

was the first major philosophical rejection of the establishment.

Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet—we've heard some

of these names before when talking about the earlier artists that influenced and inspired

the Post-Impressionists.

It wasn't necessarily their painting style that inspired them.

The realists were fairly similar stylistically to the academics.

It was their bigger mission—to shine a light on deeper truths, without resorting to grand

historical narratives or allegories—that really resonated.

They believed even deeper and more important truths were found depicting everyday life—workers,

peasants, or even just a couple of guys playing chess.

In fact, Courbet paints a graphic close-up of a woman's vulva and titles it The Origin of the World.

You can't get much more real than that.

The peak of realism as a thought movement would be typified more by writers like Gustave

Flaubert, who was made famous by his first novel, Madame Bovary, in 1857.

Realist writers like the painters sought to depict the everyday life of ordinary people.

The government was outraged, and public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity and overt sexuality—which,

of course, makes the book even more popular.

So, the Post-Impressionists, who also liked to depict ordinary scenes of people, places,

and things with deeper meanings, shared this philosophy with the realists, even though stylistically

they were worlds apart.

You wouldn't necessarily look at a Courbet and a Van Gogh and realize they had similar

conceptual goals.

But there's a deeper question some Post-Impressionists started to ask.

Was there any truth in painting at all?

Artists like Van Gogh spent their careers searching for important truths in their art.

Whether he found it or not, that search may have cost his sanity.

Centuries earlier, Rene Descartes was tackling this idea.

A hero of Western philosophy, Descartes wanted to ground the framework of ideas and what we

know in personal experience and reason.

In 1637, he coins the infamous concept, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, where he

addresses questions that we're still asking ourselves to this day.

How do we know our lives are real?

How do we know anything around us isn't some sort of delusion or computer simulation?

What is truth?

Descartes felt most physical sensations could be explained away by a trick of the mind.

You can't necessarily trust what you see, hear, smell, or even touch.

All these senses can be fooled.

So how can we know what is real or true?

Then it occurred to him the only thing he could be sure of is that he was thinking.

He concluded that he could not be thinking if he didn't exist.

Therefore, he must exist.

To me, this seems like a big shift in the overall human experience.

Some say this is what makes humans human.

We have the ability to step back and think about the thoughts that we are having, rather than

just purely experiencing them.

He was convinced of the absolute truth of this concept and used it as a foundation for all

his other ideas.

He said, if I can figure out this fundamental truth, I can use it as the foundation to figure

out other truths.

And he was convinced that all anyone needed was some quality one-on-one time with their

own brain, and this could solve any problem of nature.

He also believed that, through our minds, we could master ourselves and nature around us,

and believed everyone should be trained to control their passions and emotions, for those were

the enemy of rationality and therefore the truth.

Descartes casts a huge shadow over philosophy, and in some ways his thinking foreshadows the explorations

of the Post-Impressionists. That the senses can be fooled, that the mind is supreme, is definitely

an idea the divisionists embraced. That's what Seurat is showing you with paint.

Hey, you think you're seeing green, but it's actually little dots of blue and yellow.

Your eyes can lie to you. And Descartes shifts the primacy to your own thoughts,

rather than meaning inherited from authority or tradition.

This also tracks with the Post-Impressionists. Their art is about what they feel,

and know personally, not what they think others want them to feel or know.

The idea that your own thoughts could be a foundation for fundamental truth,

and that reasoning and rational deduction could create a framework of knowledge,

is the most potent legacy of Descartes that the Post-Impressionists latched onto.

Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, all big rationalist philosophers who built on Descartes,

and helped kick off a whole new era of scientific and enlightened thought across Europe.

But in the late 19th century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,

who may be the perfect hero for the Post-Impressionists. Nietzsche is a complicated guy with a lot of ideas.

I'm not going to pretend I can summarize him here. Famously, he claimed God was dead,

and one of his major contributions is to reject the idea of objective truth entirely.

There's no set of morals or values better than another, no perspective that is truly objective.

So in that sense, you're fooling yourself if you think that art could capture eternal truth.

Maurice Denis, one of the most philosophical of the Post-Impressionists,

wrote several long treatises on the nature of art that channels Nietzsche's thoughts.

Go to the museum and consider each canvas apart, isolated from the others. Each one will give you,

even if not a complete illusion, at least an aspect of nature that pretends to be true.

You'll see in each picture what you want to see. He also goes a bit further to say that

painters have an electable tendency to merge those aspects perceived in reality with aspects of

painting already seen. Whoa. Basically, he's saying that no matter how realistic you think you're painting,

an artist isn't a camera. When you paint a tree in front of you, you're trying to paint that tree

accurately, but inevitably, the way you paint it is influenced by the way you've seen other trees

painted, or the way others taught you to paint it. But although Nietzsche didn't believe in eternal

truth, he definitely believed in being true to yourself as the next best thing. He encouraged

people to face up to their true desires and put up a fight to follow them. He believed that the highest

form of being was the ubermensch, or overman, a person who transcended the order of their day and

created the world anew. In his words, companions the Creator seeks, not corpses. Not herds and

believers. Fellow creators the Creator seeks, those who write new values on new tablets. He's comparing

being a follower, part of the herd, to being a corpse. It's the creativity of humans, our individuality

and drive that made life worth living. The church, the state, the military, the schools saw these as

necessary pillars of a society, but they suppressed the best parts of humanity. Nietzsche thought artists

were exactly the type of people society needed, both as unique individuals who embraced creativity,

and as people who constructed new ideas via new works of art. He thought culture should take the

place of religion. As a properly valued cultural product, art could become our source of answers,

meaning, and catharsis. While still in illusion, art was a better kind of lie that could help us cope

with the crushing pain of modern life. Plenty of post-impressionists love Nietzsche because,

of course, they said, hey, he's talking about us. They were breaking out of the academy's chains and

creating a new world as Übermensch. Mönch pays tribute and paints Nietzsche in one of his hero paintings.

Klimt and members of the Vienna and Berlin secessions were also very taken with him. And the idea of a

macho, genius artist definitely filtered around Europe and gave a generation of artists new

confidence in tearing down tradition. One last philosopher we have to mention is, of course,

Sigmund Freud. Freud's ideas were perhaps too new to be as influential to post-impressionism as others,

but they are relevant because they were developing in the same milieu, and the field of psychology

generally was exploding in the late 19th century. A major early pioneer was Jean-Martin Charcot,

one of the most famous doctors in France who greatly influenced the development of psychiatry

into a modern medical field. Charcot studied hysteria and used hypnosis in his therapies.

This totally fascinated the public because it suggested the power of the unconscious mind

and just how vulnerable we were to control. Charcot was an early advocate of art therapy as well,

giving scientific credibility to the idea that art could reveal hidden truths about ourselves.

Freud had studied with Charcot in Paris, and he took things to the next level. The field of

psychoanalysis that he developed was a lot more sophisticated than hypnosis, but tried to do the

same thing—unlock the hidden areas of the mind so that we might access and cure our neuroses. Freud was

getting people to think deeper about themselves, why we do the things we do, and the importance of

analyzing our psyche. He wrote extensively about dreams, the unconscious, and hidden, all exciting new

ways to perceive ourselves. And Freud, of course, was fascinated about what art revealed about the artist.

In 1910, he even published an investigation about Leonardo da Vinci, exploring how his childhood,

sexuality, and psychology informed the art he would eventually create.

Psychological examination of the self and others was very popular in the 19th century.

Novels like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment took deep dives into what made people do the things

they do and to explore the interior of the mind. Post-impressionist art and portraiture often sought

to do the same, asking deeper questions about identity and the self, rather than merely presenting

the visible truth. So the post-impressionists had a lot more on their minds than just being rebellious.

Of course, some thought more about these issues than others. It's not like every artist read Nietzsche and

Freud. Like today, some artists were probably totally oblivious to philosophy and just painted what they

thought looked good. But they lived in a time where these bigger ideas were spreading, and so directly

or indirectly, they were influenced as well. There was plenty that artists disagreed with philosophers

about too, like not drinking alcohol. Nietzsche didn't like that it numbed pain. He said that pain was pushing

us to be better, and that alcohol was sapping us of the will to improve our lives. Nietzsche's ideas

certainly did embody a kind of toxic machismo that has definitely not aged well.

Obviously, the post-impressionists skipped that chapter because many worship the Paris nightlife.

It's hard to imagine Paris without the Moulin Rouge, without Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, without Renoir's

parties and cafes. And the key ingredient, of course, was alcohol, especially absinthe. From the 1850s to

1870s, the great French wine blight caused by an infestation of American aphids had ravaged French

vineyards. The price of wine shot up as production collapsed. Absinthe and anise-flavored spirit derived

from the wormwood plant became the cheap alternative, and was quickly adopted by the poor artists of

Montmartre. It was very strong, and was reputed to have psychoactive effects. Its color gave the

nickname the green fairy. Artists and writers often deliberately drank it in large quantities,

chasing that creative inspiration. Paris in the Belle Epoque was carefree and open like it had never

been. Wars had dominated France for decades. People just wanted to enjoy life. More types of entertainment

were becoming more accessible to more people. Public parks are sprouting up all over the place after

the Haussmann renovation. Gas and electric lighting made walking the streets much safer at night.

Paris became a 24-hour city in some districts. Cafés and restaurants were not just for the wealthy

either. The bouillon, a type of simple restaurant that served inexpensive food, made eating out

affordable even to artists, who often stopped in on a painting break. Middle-class fashion and luxury

turned shopping into a cultural phenomenon. Department stores opened across the city. It was their golden age

in Paris. They were pioneering advertising, posters, mail order catalogs, and discount pricing to draw in

Parisians. Fashion became faster. There were now big shows every season with the latest designs and cheaper

versions of the latest fashions found their way into stores that the middle-class women could afford.

It wasn't all fun and games, though. 19th century Parisians also entertained more morbid ideas. As

Christianity's dominance was in decline, there was a surge of interest in spiritualism and the paranormal,

particularly the occult and the afterlife. Seances and mediums, and also magic shows, were embraced by the

upper classes like Queen Victoria. Ghosts, spirits, souls. These are all exciting and interesting topics for

artists because not all of them are science nerds like Seurat. Many wanted to reject the rational

perspective on life and embrace the spiritual and supernatural. We see surprising social trends that

reflect this, like the Paris morgue becoming a huge tourist attraction. It was actually redesigned to

accommodate the crowds of people who came to view the bodies. Especially if there was a high-profile

celebrity death in the news, you would be standing room only to see the corpse. Death photography also

became popular for recently passed relatives. The newly deceased family member would often be shown

relaxing in a chair, maybe lying in bed. Sometimes they even went so far as to paint eyes on the eyelids

to make them look alive. Another unexpected trend from the interest in the afterlife was taxidermy. This

becomes very popular not just with professionals. Many daring folks even tried preserving their deceased

pets all on their own. Listen, I know you don't take legal advice from an art history lecture,

but trust me on this one. Please don't DIY taxidermy on your pets. Another lesser-known trend in the 19th

century was taking a few locks of hair from your recently deceased loved ones and turning it into

jewelry. Anything from a small lock of hair in a locket to elaborate tightly woven hair wreaths mounted

and framed. There was even a hair museum exhibiting these not far from my home in Kansas City, Missouri.

People were also super interested in medical abnormalities. Freak shows become very popular

as another element to the traveling circus or fair. The circus was an iconic institution of the late 19th

century. They were cheap and accessible to even the working class and had all the entertainment you

could imagine, from exotic animals to dancers to acrobats and musicians. The circus was a very popular

subject for post-impressionists. The theater was popular in this period as well, of course, but it wasn't

all Shakespeare and neoclassicism. They had what were called boulevard theaters, and they introduced the

melodrama. This type of entertainment would dominate pop culture in the 19th century because they gave the

people what they wanted. Natural disasters, violence, murder, blood, hell, and even ghosts using proto-hologram

special effects. They had it all. They had some brilliant and creative innovations throughout the

century. But unlike paintings that persist in time, live theatrical special effects became a lost art

with the advent of film and movie effects. I want to talk specifically, though, about phantasmagoria.

This was an adaptation of a technology that magicians and necromancers had been using for generations.

A variation of the camera obscura, where you illuminate either a drawing or an actor in costume,

like a ghost or a demon or whoever your boogeyman is, and then reflect that image onto the wall,

a semi-transparent screen. Or, for the ultimate sensorial experience, they would project it onto

smoke they had created. And you suddenly have a very convincing ghost hovering above you, floating in the

air. The supernatural, live, in theater, before your eyes. The projectors, or magic lanterns as they

were called, got more portable, and you could move the mirror around, which moves the reflection.

You could also change the size to make it look like it was getting closer or further away. With multiple

projector operators, you could orchestrate quite an elaborate scene. This would have been an amazing

sensorial experience. Imagine sitting in a darkened theater, full of creepy music and sound effects being

performed live, and the only illuminated things you see are holograms of ghosts flying around the theater.

I think it sounds amazing, and I know we have more advanced holograms now, but I really wish we did more

old-school tricks like that today. The smells, the sound, the drama. It would have been an intense and

unforgettable experience. But perhaps the biggest spectacle of all in late 19th century Paris were the

world's fairs. These were a defining institution of the age, where people and ideas from all over the

globe were all on display in one place. Many of the great inventions of the time, from phonographs to

x-rays, made their debut at the fairs. Architecturally, they were enormous, taking up entire sections of the

city. France would have three major fairs in 1878, 1889, and 1900, and each one tried to outdo the last.

The world's fairs played a big role in the background of the Post-Impressionists. They weren't just

technology fairs. They always had a major art and design component as well. Huge art galleries were

built, exhibiting artists from around the world, like the Salon, but on a grand scale. The Post-Impressionists

usually didn't get a chance to exhibit, but they visited frequently and were excited about what others

were creating. How conservative the world fairs were artistically and architecturally

was often a major source of debate. However, the Paris Fair of 1900 embraced the emerging Art Nouveau

design movement in France and launched its popularity across Europe. Most importantly, the

fairs were major sources of international inspiration. In an era where knowledge of other cultures was

pretty poor, Paris was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe in the late 19th century,

yet still was overwhelmingly white and French, nowhere near as diverse as it is today.

But fairs offered a window on the world, as pavilions from international destinations showcased

art, culture, and products from overseas. Make no mistake, the fairs were racist and xenophobic in

their fetishization of the exotic and their assertions of cultural superiority. The 1889 fair had a whole

street built up as a fake Cairo with Egyptians in costumes pretending to be snake charmers, belly dancers,

musicians, and other characters of Middle Eastern culture. But this was still far more than anything

artists in the previous century had been exposed to. Japanese, African, and South American aesthetics

were especially popular with Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Fauvists, who borrowed, stole, and reimagined

their motifs, techniques, and ideas into their own. So new ideas, big and small, philosophical and fun,

fed the art of the Post-Impressionists in all sorts of ways. These are often the hidden scaffolding,

providing underlying structure to their paintings. But when you unpack them,

they make you see what they created in a whole new light.