 Um, if you're just joining us now, welcome, um, we are going to get started right away. I am going to introduce, um, the each student's advisor who will then introduce their student. So it is my pleasure to first welcome Professor Andre Dombrowski from the University of Pennsylvania to introduce his student Miriam Stanton. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Andre Dombrowski in the Department of History of Art at U Penn, and it's my distinct honor and my great pleasure to introduce Miriam Stanton to you this afternoon. Miriam came to Penn in 2013 with a master's in art history from Williams and already several years of curatorial experience under her belt at the Williams College Museum of Art among several other institutions, and she has equally excelled at Penn here. She's been the sex fellow, she has been the PMA, uh, Mellon fellow, and this year she holds a prestigious Mellon ACLS dissertation completion fellowship as well, and these are just some of her many accomplishments. Miriam has an especially capacious and especially generous mind, which is what I think we all especially love about her and white-ranging interests as well, covering modernism from its inception in the mid-19th century all the way to the 1960s. And her dissertation, which she's completing this year, is just as unusual and inventive in the modernist story that it seeks to tell. Miriam is interested in the arts relationship to gravity and to states of levitation, the artistic mobilization of the vertical rather than the horizontal, when bodies are suspended in the air, material falls or flies, or the world turns upside down in representation. She's looking at Moibridge, Monet, Duchamp, Pollock, and others through this fascinating lens, and what she will share now is her work on Monet's upside-down aesthetics in his water lilies. Miriam, the virtual podium is yours. I cannot wait. Good luck. Thank you, Andre, for that kind introduction, and my gratitude to Alia, to Gillan, Thomas, Martha, my fellow panelists, and to all of you for joining us today. All of my image captions information to that extent will be included in a final slide at the conclusion of my talk. Upside down. Many of us have described life in this way over the past year. Literally, the term assumes a governing axis, and upside establishes our bearings. Our world is made strange when we reverse its logic, when a force so fundamental as gravity seems in flux. That then is an upside-down picture, and how does it alter our relationship with gravity? Claude Monet's water lily paintings both pose and respond to these questions. Produced between 1892 and 1926, the nearly 250 canvases portraying his water garden are a collective portrait of suspension and oscillation. Immersive in scale, their liquid depths confound orientation as they lack horizons or earthen foreground. Built into their indefinite compositions and material surfaces is a gravitational uncertainty, a renegotiation of the pictures and our relationship with fixed axes. Met with these ungrounded expanses of paint, we too are unmoored, imaginatively echoing and embodying their indeterminate coordinates. Though these canvases were described as upside-down when first exhibited in 1909, and again during the so-called Monet revival in the mid-20th century, they have yet to be analyzed according to this rotational logic. Today, I take up that charge, assessing their effects through the trope of the modern upside-down picture. The idea that a work without an apparent internal compass would look the same regardless of its orientation on the wall. Though built into the history of modernism, this pictorial proclivity toward inversion is often dismissed as shorthand for illegibility in abstract art. I aim to complicate this definition, problematizing the conditions in which composition is released from fixed coordinates. Resuscitating the gravitational tenor of the water lilies' initial and mid-century reception demonstrates how they sat and test the limits of the upside-down picture. Internalizing and materializing the state of suspension at its core. The point is not so much whether they would in fact look identical no matter their orientation. In fact, I contend that Monet moves beyond such directional conflation. What is significant is that they challenge previously coded navigational devices, bringing gravity into question within and around the picture plane, and suspending us in turn. Now Monet invites us to consider might visually dislodging the tethers of gravity open space for novel embodied experience. These painted realms reconfigure our perceptual connection with the world, picturing what becomes possible when objects are no longer bound by a singular orientation. By engaging the upside-down, the water lilies participate in a visual history. These old imagery portrays a world upside-down in which imagined figures live in reverse, walking on the ceiling in cities hanging from the sky. Evolutions of the form unseat agents of power, kites fly children aloft and fish are airborne while birds reside underwater. Such disruptions can surely be disquieting, but not all upside-downs are sinister, nor do they signal a disavowal of our world. A number of Monet's contemporaries promoted upturned views. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised his readers to turn the eyes upside-down by looking at the landscape through your leg. And how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these 20 years. Here, an embodied revolution transforms the banal into the artistic. The upside-down yields the pictorial. Philosopher and psychologist William James made this corollary literal, saying that when we turn a painting bottom upward, we lose much of its meaning. But to compensate for the loss, we feel more freshly the value of the mere tints and shading. In its newfound uncertainty then, the upside-down picture enhances perception. Though the stability of recognition is lost, expanded awareness is gained. Because the upside-down picture depends upon this ambiguity, its proliferation runs parallel to the emergence of abstraction. Still, artwork's invited rotation before figurative content exited the picture. Critic Theodore du Ray tells of 1877 audiences amusing themselves by turning impressionist paintings upside-down, because the line of the horizon was indistinguishable, so that earth, water, and sky were equally amorphous, and consequently, it made no difference whether the bottom of the picture was the top or the top, the bottom. Though this instance is sourced in entertainment, such narratives ultimately marked the careers of artists from James McNeil-Whistler to Vasily Kandinsky. The history of modernism is replete with stories of upturned canvases and the epiphanies they engender. And again, many of the works prone to such rotational choreography maintain representational ties to the world. In fact, the upside-down picture originates from reflection, images we see projected onto water participate in an undulation between a physical world above and its mirrored manifestation below, opening space for gravity to lose its compositional hold. Recall du Ray's observations. The works that inspired inversion were dependent upon reflective potential, as the horizon was indistinguishable so that earth, water, and sky were equally amorphous. Though intended to conjure imagery lacking in specificity, his words nevertheless describe a particular pictorial category, scenes in which the world is reflected in a body of water. However commonplace this liquid reversal, painter Robert Reed observed in 1903 that such bit of heaven below the horizon can elude our comprehension when translated to an artwork. The world, he noted, would hang that picture upside down. It is in this way that many viewers have described Monet's water lilies as upturned. What we see in these canvases is the reflection of the sky as it meets the surface of the water and the lilies themselves. By rendering the mirrored scene that displays itself inverted upon the water, Monet reminds us that the world offers us myriad upside down pictures. If we focus our attention on the reflections that cast themselves downward, we are immersed in nature's most emphatic self-portrait. Watery reflections present themselves as the other half of our earthen existence and reversal emerges as a primary mechanism of representation. Many of Monet's earlier compositions evidence his interest in this echoing of landscape with its liquid double. In Regattas at Argenteuil of 1872, the distinction between solid ground and watery expanse is clear as one is portrayed with less interrupted strokes while the other is a dispersed pattern of ripple effects. Ship sails are opaque triangles while their reversed counterparts are a staccato of pigment offset by diffracted touches of red flickering with aquiline blue and the green of reflected vegetation. This fractal fluidity occupies nearly half of the canvas, a painterly commitment that establishes the zones on either side of the water's edge as of equal importance. We make sense of liquid imagery by way of its solid counterpart. Monet's later paintings move beyond such fluid flux to ask what becomes possible when reflection does not proclaim itself as such and instead grows increasingly indistinguishable from the realm above. The Mornings on the Sun series probes the limits of this question. Water vapor envelops this 1897 scene, dissolving the horizon so that liquid and sky are virtually the same color while vegetation turns into itself. We can see why art historian Dario Gamboni describes these images as reversible. While some observe a similar reversibility in the water lilies, I detect markedly different dynamics in Monet's depictions of his water garden. Though early scenes include strips of land delineating the ponds and the pictures upper edge, these earthen elements soon recede. So that with a shift in angle, the painter's protagonist becomes the unbounded surface of the water. By granting us a reflection without the perceptual security of that which it reflect, Monet suspends gravitational logic, placing the pictures orientation newly in question. Lacking the traces of concomitant right side up world, waterborne imagery is therefore no longer reversible, but instead suggests the possibility of rotation without taking that inversion to a concise conclusion. Depictions that are legible as reflections but that nonetheless lack a reference make the disruption of coordinates their very subject. This logic underpins accounts of the painting's 1909 exhibition debut, in which poetic interpretations of the Upside Down proliferate. Reviewer F. Robert Kemp observes. Not even a corner of sky above this water without horizon, not a bunch of leaves, but upon this clear and sensitive mirror, the sky is reflected and leaves see themselves. This mirroring water into which powerful images plunge Upside Down offers itself to the shifting gaze of noon. Here the watery surface is the site of the Upside Down picture. Louis Gillet instead calls the canvases themselves inverted, saying, The artist strictly limits himself to reflections with this consequence that one has an Upside Down picture. The invisible trees announce themselves only through their images. The sky, ingenious surprise, instead of forming a cupola touches the lower border of the frame. Vertically encoded understandings of how the world and its representation are organized are thus inverted. In politician George Clemenceau's words, the water lilies are an encounter with a world turned Upside Down, made unfamiliar. These observations, just a sampling of such language, evidence an audience attuned to Monet's plays with gravitational disruption. By only offering an already upturned picture, the water lilies depend not on doubling, but on an enigmatically profuse single view. This turn towards the pond to the exclusion of its earthen edges materializes what journalist Maurice Guillemot described as a horizon of water. Compare this with Clemenceau's view of water without horizon, which echoes Monet's own vision of a wave without horizon and without shore. As both of presence and an absence, the horizon thus defines the water lilies. If duret had reported that in 1877 paintings the horizon was indistinguishable, it now exceeded that imperceptibility, seeming at once accentuated and expunged. Echoing the operations of the Upside Down, which employs dynamic reversals in order to yield meaning, this intersection at the limits of our view, typifies liminality. How then did Monet navigate portraying and occluding the horizon? Even in scenes with earthen horizons, that recede beyond bodies of water, the line between land and liquid constitutes a pivot, a kind of internal horizon. Monet attends to such edges as early as 1868 in On the Seine at Bencourt. The fact that he portrays the reflection of the house at left obscures its architectural counterpart, puts pressure on the function of this threshold in the construction of Upside Down pictures, demonstrating what such a watery hinge has the power to grant and withhold. The angle Monet selected assigns significant space to the reflection, calling our attention to what that inverted imagery offers that the structural world cannot and vice versa. The pictorial element that adjudicates this distinction is the pivot of an internal threshold. Even scenes in which these linear divisions are less demarcated depend upon rotation around a fixed intermediary that analogizes the zones it sets. Whether or not they are visually interchangeable, these two alternating possibilities emphasize the joint in the middle. By contrast, the water lilies inhabit that very space between Up and Down, activating and endlessly multiplying its rotational potential. Ultimately, what isn't shown at a distance, the horizon, is rather the very arena of the picture. So proximal as to be enveloping, thresholds in the water lilies are both eradicated and encompassed. From within these canvases, horizons of water expand infinitely. This capacious pictorial space is born of angular intersections. The left side of the water lilies' green reflections, for instance, maintains a calculated balance between horizontal and vertical. Shocks of deep blue, reflected sky, are interspersed with green, reflected willows. If not for the elliptical gestures, lily pads and blooms that chart lateral pathways across the canvas, the inverted imagery behind, below and above them would not read as such. The blossoms signify surface of the pond and of the canvas. This incursion connects the paintings to the upright. We see swaths of pigment as trees or clouds because the dabs of paint that sit atop them coalesce in our perception as floating flowers. The expanses of undulating color become inverted projections of our world. Importantly, none of these elements recede so as to grant our eyes a sense of volumetric depth. Instead, we see axial transpositions. Here, blues seem both behind and under suggestions of lily pads. White, while white lilts to the front, only to be overtaken by the dark pool at right. We know that the physical pond exists on a horizontal plane, expanding outward and below where we would stand on the shore, but Monet has not given us the stability of such a view. Instead, we are met with an upturned surface whose downward-plunging reflections convey a verticality that is consonant with the wall. These counterbalancing elements omit a singular governing axis, destabilizing gravity's pole so that the canvases register as at once horizontal and vertical, poised to expand, contract, and oscillate. We are, in turn, enveloped in their vertiginous sensibility. Like the floating vapor and liquid around us, we are somewhere between water and air, and perhaps simultaneously intersecting with both. Though the water lilies do not depict humanity, I contend that our bodies are vital to their construction. People need not be portrayed to be present. The painting's sheer scale invites us to imagine entering their life-sized space. But we do not merely inhabit these fields of paint. They elicit corporeal response. A seemingly upturned picture can inspire an embodied echo of its alignment. We do not necessarily perceive the object as upside down so much as ourselves. Our gravitationally conditioned bodies are implicated in axial disorientation. The water lilies thus open us to a sensation of inversion, as one 1909 critic describes. The basins of water appear to double themselves in a mirror. The feeling produced by this impression is almost inexpressible. In the water, there are reflections of trees that one doesn't see, so that when one turns away, one is surprised not to be walking on the ceiling and seeing everyone who has also come to admire these magical portraits upside down. What she relates is not a sense that the compositions are removed from reality, but that they and their portrayed orientations affect and even govern our own. In 1956, our historian Leo Steinberg described similar corporeal and pictorial acrobatic when faced with a water lily canvas. You can invert yourself for the picture at will, he says. Lie cheek to cheek with the horizon, rise on a falling cloud, or drift with lily leaves over a sunken sky. Translated to the temporal, these ongoing oscillations yield a protracted experience. Though Monet's watery depths and surfaces capture the passing impact of light and wind, the relative stillness of the water capable of mirroring such effects imbues even the most fleeting of scenes with a sense of elongation, a more meditative and less momentary tempo. In fact, in order to legibly yield upside down pictures, water must be still as reflections are fickle. Noting this, Clamenceau posits, doesn't it follow that as we look at the sky on the surface of these still waters, this dynamic reality turned upside down? We pursue in our own imagination realities that we can never catch, never keep still? While the waters are at rest, our imaginations are not static. This vibratory stillness emerges as the oscillatory other to the pressing pace of modern life, a kind of temporal upside down to the momentum of modernity. From the state of sustained in conclusion, I will conclude. Monet's canvases suspend rather than grant definitive direction, inviting us to imagine liberated negotiations with gravity, in addition to being upside down paintings in the sense that period critics observed, the works themselves exude and evoke oscillation by simultaneously functioning as representations of an inverted reality, suggesting that they themselves could be upturned and invoking imagined corporeal calisthenics, the water lilies thematize the condition of upside downness, holding its potential in suspension. We are not explicitly upside down, nor are the paintings, but their creative manipulation of the poles around which such reversals occur opens them up to a kind of gravitational imagination. There is a quietude these paintings invite us to feel in disorientation. Thank you. Thank you, Miriam. That was absolutely fascinating. I look forward to talking about it in the discussion. I would like to welcome now Wendy Bellion, professor and chair in American art history at the University of Delaware to introduce her student, Thomas Busiglio Ritter. Greetings. My name is Wendy Bellion. I'm a professor of art history at the University of Delaware and it's my great pleasure to introduce my student, Thomas Busiglio Ritter. Thomas is an Andrew W. Mellon fellow in our curatorial track PhD program. He came to Delaware with several prestigious degrees in hand, including a BA from the Sorbonne, an MA from Sciences Po, and a second MA from the Equal de Louvre, from which he graduated with highest honors. While at Delaware, he's completed several curatorial internships, including one at the Met and another at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He's also been very active in our center for material culture studies, where he's serving as co-chair for an upcoming emerging scholar symposium on the topic of animaterialities, and he also has held a competitive fellowship in the public humanities. Thomas is now working on his dissertation, which is entitled The Union of Excellences, an Atlantic history of American landscape views, 1790 to 1860. This innovative project asks how the practice of American landscape art turned on the work of painters and printers outside the United States, as well as those within it. Thomas has identified British, French, and German artists creating landscapes of the U.S. on both sides of the Atlantic. His dissertation thereby aims to complicate long-held assumptions about the supposed American-ness of American landscape art. Thomas' presentation today derives from this project, and it's entitled After the Celebration, Antoine Imbert and the Rise of Transatlantic Landscape Lithography. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for tuning in wherever you are. And thank you to the organizers of this symposium for allowing me to present my research here. A man fires a row of cannons, a ship's response to the shots coming from the pier. The lighthouse stands to the right, not far from a fort jutting out into the sea, as smoke rises from everywhere. All around, the noise is probably deafening. This, however, is no war scene. The date was November 4th, 1825, in the place, the Battery, at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan. Assembled in the bay, the fleet that reached the city after a journey down from Albany, the state's capital, was the arch spectacle of celebrations organized by New York to mark the completion of a major project, the Airy Canal. Connecting Buffalo to Albany, the canal had been advocated by a number of merchants, with construction starting in 1817. It should come as no surprise then, that shortly before the festivities, Cadwalador David Colton had been commissioned by the Common Council of New York, the city's highest legislative body, to produce an illustrated memoir to commemorate what many saw as a national achievement. Completed a few days before the inaugural parade, the printed memoir was approved by the Common Council on November 7th, 1825. The publication consisted of a narrative of the canal written by Colton himself, as well as speeches, maps, and engraved scenes. A folding nine by 39 inches lithograph in particular, was meant to offer a striking depiction of one of the naval feasts planned by Colton and his fellow organizers. Designed by painter Archibald Robertson, the view represented one of the first attempts by an American publication at resorting to a faster printing mode recently imported from Europe, lithography. It also represented, for its printmaker, an opportunity to make a name for himself in a city where he had recently moved to from his native France. Born around 1794, Antoine Humber, the man entrusted with the task, was a self-trained artist. His background as painter and engraver is unknown, yet he advertised his services as such, in Europe for New York in 1824. Though the first month of his immigration were not flourishing, his collaboration with Robertson and Colton would soon turn him into one of the main architects of a lithographic reinterpretation of American landscapes and waterscapes. In truth, Ambele's enterprise represented one of the many forms of early 19th century circulation of printed American scenes on both sides of the ocean. Ambele encouraged the diffusion of such pictures by engaging with the works of the young painter Thomas Cole. Yet, he also trained several European immigrant printmakers who would then disseminate the medium in the country. This presentation examines how Ambele and his peers contributed to expanding transnational print cultures in the Atlantic world during the 1820s and 30s. Through their example, I hope to show that landscape lithography linked different communities of mostly French printmakers across the United States and the Atlantic. One outcome of this research will thus be a new transatlantic narrative of 19th century American landscape prints. Ambele's involvement with the publication of the memoir stemmed from his familiarity with the landscape of New York. In October 1824, while still establishing his reputation locally, he had run an advertisement announcing the exhibition of his latest painting depicting the landing of the Marquis de Lafayette at the Battery on August 16, 1824. In many regards, Ambele's composition highlights the same visual elements chosen by Archibald Robertson to frame his own waterscape. In fact, it is likely that Robertson knew of Ambele's picture, focused on the same site. Moreover, Ambele's timely arrival coincided with the lithographic boom in the United States. Developed by Bavarian playwright Louis Zenerfelder in the late 1790s, lithographic printing was a cheap and fast method of engraving. By 1820, it had been turned into a continental medium. Born in Moulouse, Alsace, Côte-Fois Engelmann, for example, served as a bridge between German and French print cultures. As a painter, Engelmann was introduced to lithography in Munich. Upon returning to France in 1816, he opened the studio in Paris, becoming the city's premier lithographer. Engelmann's career illustrates the transnational exchange of knowledge occurring across Europe around lithography during the first decades of this process. The technique soon reached the United States. In 1819, artist Bass Otis produced the first American lithograph, a scene featuring a millhouse by a stream. Reproduced in the Antelactic magazine, Otis' picture was accompanied by a discussion of the benefits of the new technique, as well as of the methods developed by Engelmann in France. Otis' choice of subject matter was reminiscent of his surroundings as a Philadelphia-based painter, yet also of contemporary landscapes by Thomas Birch and Thomas Dowdy. Otis would have encountered them at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the three men displayed works together at the turn of the 1820s. From the start then, American lithography became linked to the development of landscape painting in the early Republic, a process which Philadelphia and New York stood at the forefront of. Meanwhile, Archibald Robertson's own interest for landscape adjoined him to various print media, having studied in London, the Scottish-born Robertson had moved to New York in 1791 with his brother Alexander. He quickly started sketching surrounding natural sites, and the brothers' watercolors were circulated both in the US and in Britain. There, he commissioned London publisher Francis Jukes to turn them into aquitains for the British market. Thanks to this early and wide circulation, Walter Colton and his colleagues were familiar with Robertson's productions, even when they appointed him Superintendent of the Plates to be included in the memoir of the Erie Canal. The medium of lithography deported by Colton, who gave Robertson the lead in collecting grades responsible for the process. Such, the latter was allowed to publish a series of remarks in the memoir to justify the choice of Antoine Ambert, with his skills while introducing lithography to readers. However, Robertson's mention in the same text of a collaborator to Ambert, named Félix Dupanchel, also hints at the already active presence of a group of French lithographer engaged in the production of American views in New York. In fact, as early as 1825, Ambert had taken all the practices from Europe in his studio at 79 Murray Street. Located in the neighborhood of Tradespeeple, west of City Hall Park, the studio of Surroundings offered Ambert a large clientele of merchants for whom he designed emblems both painted and engraved. The gentrification of the neighborhood during the 1830s brought yet another potential market to Ambert's doors, a phenomenon he seemed aware of since during this period he also opened a second studio at 104 Broadway, not far from Trinity Church. Ambert soon put his European assistance to the test by creating prints after compositions by a young British-born American artist, Thomas Cole. Originally working for his father's wallpaper business in Ohio, Cole had relocated to Philadelphia in 1823 and then to New York to pursue a painting career. After 1825, less than a month before the city celebrated the area canal, his views of the Catskill mountains caught the attention of John Trumbo and president of the American Academy of the Fine Arts who publicized them. Taking notice of Cole's success, Ambert enlisted Dupont-Shell to produce a lithograph of the painter's view of the Catskill-Mountain House. Though it is unclear how Ambert intended this lithograph to be distributed, his involvement with Cole did not stop there. Two years later, in 1828, Ambert engraved a distant view of the slides that destroyed the Wiley family depicting a site known as Crawford Notch in New Hampshire. The site had made the headlines after a landslide had killed the Wiley family on August 28th, 1826. Turned into a tourist attraction, the structure revived public interest for landscapes of spectacle. The visual immediacy and mass reproducibility of lithography rendered the medium particularly suitable to record such sensational events. Cole himself was no stranger to the advantages of lithography in promoting his pictures. And while lithographers continued to tackle his penics, the artist experimented with the technique himself for a view of the falls at Catskill in 1829. This print was formerly attributed to Ambert by scholars, which highlights the constant dialogue between the French lithographer and the American painter. Ambert's connection to Cole's art also manifested forms of transatlantic exchanges around American landscape views. In the late 1820s, Ambert became acquainted with Italian immigrant painter Gerlondo Marcilia. Born in Palermo, Sicily, Marcilia had been educated in Naples. In 1824, the year Ambert sailed to America, Marcilia moved to New York as well. There, he tackled the genre of landscape. In 1828, he followed the direction of Thomas Cole by sketching natural sites located in the Catskill's region of upstate New York, especially Catskill Falls. Though Marcilia's painting has been lost, the lithograph made by Ambert after it gives a measure of the flows of exchange between American and European artists. Marcilia's composition engraved by Ambert emulates Cole's view of the falls painted in 1826 by his patron, Daniel Wadsworth. Cole's sublime mode expressed in the violence of rushing waters has however been replaced by the feeling of a toned-down wilderness, domesticated by figures strolling at the foot of the waters. Yet Marcilia's reinterpretation of an American landscape was not the first translation of Cole's canvas. A year earlier in 1827, Irish artist William Guy Wall had already tackled the subject of Cole's picture. His composition, again imitating that of his predecessor, presents figures exploring the landscape safe in the majesty of the mountains posing as well of Euro-American tourists. In that regard, it seems Marcilia's version borrowed more from Wall than it did from Cole, inscribing multiple visual languages onto the same landscape. Producing a lithographic version of a scene by Marcilia, Ambert's caterscale falls participated in the materialization of a new transatlantic scale with the reshaping of American landscape views. These efforts were pursued into the 1830s as Ambert focused on other iconic American sites such as Niagara Falls. In 1834 he lithographed two views of the falls by Marcilia, this time inspired by British artist William James Bennett. The falls were painted by Bennett during a trip in 1829 and first turned into Aquatase by English artist John Hill before being published in New York. It is likely under this form that the images weren't encountered by Marcilia, still working for Ambert at the time. Thus, his reproductions of Bennett's images in turn found their way into lithographs by Ambert. It lacked Marcilia's caterscale falls, these views of Niagara Falls appealed to the power of landscape in a syncretic Euro-American way engraved by Ambert after an Italian artist had reinterpreted British pictures. Ambert's involvement with landscape photography had a profound impact on another of his trainees, Italian artist Domenico Canova. Born in 1800 in Milan, he had moved to Paris before trying his luck in the United States. For Ambert, he lithographed a variety of materials, an example of which you can see here. Pursuing the craft on his own, Canova then disseminated his Atlantic aesthetic, first encountered in Ambert's studio. In the early 1830s, the artist relocated to New Orleans to work as a drawing teacher. The paintings and lithographs that Canova completed in the city continued to enact a visual amalgamation between European art and American wilderness. As in his allegory of Mother Louisiana, reminiscent of Raphael's Madonna's, it set among an idealized southern vegetation. More significantly, Canova's partnership with Jules Lyon best underscores the entanglement of networks of French lithographers in the United States. Through his collaboration with Canova, Lyon too contributed to expanding the transatlantic circulations of images of America. Born in 1806 into a Jewish family of Paris, he took part in the salon early in his career already displaying lithographs. In November 1836, he sailed to New Orleans and worked for the bilingual newspaper the New Orleans Bee issued in French with sections in English. Soon after, Lyon opened the lithographic shop on Royal Street where he also offered the garotype services. Though it is unclear when Lyon and Canova met, it is certain that Lyon had a particular interest in landscapes and cityscapes in the early 1840s. In 1842, for example, he issued a large lithograph of the old St. Louis Cathedral of New Orleans. At that time, Lyon was building a transatlantic identity and market for himself, relying on his brother Achille as his business agent in France. He was also engaged by Canova in teaching activities, another venue to showcase his views. In 1848, the two men even founded an art school together, furthering their bond. Lyon would pursue his teachings until his death in January 1866. Such use of lithography to circulate American hues was far from one directional. This dimension was manifested by the existence in Europe itself of initiatives similar to Ambers and Lyons. In December 1821, for instance, Charlotte Bonaparte, niece to former French emperor Napoleon I, joined her exiled father Joseph in his New Jersey estate of Point Brees. She proudly devoted her time to sketching U.S. scenery. As of 1822, she was invited by Joseph Hopkinson, resident of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, to display her works at the institution's annual shows. There, she would cross paths with the young Thomas Cole, who had just relocated to Philadelphia. Through her father, Bonaparte also got acquainted with artist Charles Lawrence and with Bass Otis, who had been hired by Joseph Bonaparte to paint a portrait of his American mistress, Annette Savage. Repeated contacts with Otis introduced the young Charlotte to the technique of lithography, which is selected upon her return to Europe in 1824 for American views. Titled Vu pittoresque de l'Amérique or picturesque views of America, the portfolio was lithographed by artist Marcelin Jaubert in Brussels. It helped popularize printed views of American landscapes among French-speaking audiences in Europe, just as it testified Charlotte Bonaparte's involvement with transatlantic networks of Latin America. During the contemporary debates over landscape and national identity in the U.S., at a time, an American approach to landscape was taking shape through people like Thomas Cole. Her papers indicate that she fashioned herself as a transatlantic landscapist with no artistic teacher while in America. In conclusion, ventures such as Amber Studios in New York City offered European lithographers both their mastery of the technique and the advantages of the latter for the mass circulation of images in America. As I have argued, Amber relied on several European-born and trained artists, especially French ones, to make sure lithography could address aesthetic discourses about landscapes in the early Republic. The resulting visual objects were portable and quickly reproducible. They became aesthetic and material supports to several individuals involved in the transatlantic exchange of U.S. landscape views who gradually constituted an active constellation of art makers from New York and Philadelphia to Louisiana and Western Europe. The trajectories of Arbeth, ANOVA, Lyon and Charlotte Bonaparte thus paved the way for a more transnational history of 19th-century lithography in the United States. Thank you. Thomas, thank you. Well done. Our next talk is by Brittany Bailey from Rutgers University and it is my pleasure to welcome Professor Susan Sidlaskis. She's Professor and Chair of Art History at Rutgers to introduce Brittany. Hello, my name is Susan Sidlaskis and I would like to introduce you to my PhD student, Brittany Bailey. Brittany came to us after earning her Masters at American University in Washington, D.C. and she is currently at work on a very rich dissertation on what she is calling the Queer Utopia. She has worked on this for the past, say, one to two years while she's been juggling many things including teaching in the department and supervising senior thesis students no small task she also relocated once back to Oregon with her husband so they could be with their families as soon as the pandemic was coming upon us but she did not reckon with the Oregon wildfires which necessitated a second relocation to Idaho where she continued to work. She has never flagged in her progress so today you will be hearing a piece of one of her chapters on the Queer Utopia which brings together two characters whom you will rarely see sharing the same stage, so to speak and that is the French 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur and the American celebrity performer Wild Bill Cody so I introduce you to Brittany Bailey. Thank you. Thank you to the Barnes Foundation for this event, to Martha for sharing today's panel and for Susan for that generous introduction. The exposition Universale of 1889 was the site of a fascinating but little explored exchange between two Fendiciakla celebrities the internationally recognized Anna Malier, Rosa Bonheur and the Frontiersman turn showman Colonel William F. Cody better known as Buffalo Bill they are shown together here outside of the Wild West shows the main tent along with other members of the company initiated by herself proclaimed fascination with the American West Bonheur spent several weeks with the show during its tenure at Newly on the outskirts of Paris while the approximately 17 paintings and sketches that she based on this encounter remain largely unstudied, likely the best known and most widely reproduced was a portrait of Cody himself. His biographers agree that Cody was a master showman and self promoter and as a record of his proximity to Bonheur's own fame, which was considerable by this late point in her career the painting was a feather in his wide brimmed cap. He displayed it prominently in his home in Wyoming and it was reproduced repeatedly in promotional ephemera for the Wild West show and Congress of Rough Writers. Although the privileged status of this painting might imply a grandisement of her subject, close study reveals that Bonheur subverted the traditionally heroic genre of the equestrian portrait in several ways. Seated on the back of a white horse, the painted buffalo bill Cody is on full display for the viewer in his iconic buckskin suit and positioned close to the picture plane. However there's little for us to glean from a study of his countenance. His face is turned away in an almost full profile and his eyes are hooded and cast into shadow. While Bonheur carefully attended to the physiognomic details of his prominent nose, the curl of his mustache, and the distinctive curve of his one visible ear, the pose is one of withholding and we are left to wonder precisely what it is that Bonheur endeavored to document in this reticent portrait. As I will argue today, Bonheur's portrait of Cody records a dynamic exchange between painter and performer charged by their mutual engagement with constructions of late 19th century masculinity and in particular a masculine ideal located beyond the borders of modernity. In the two decades prior to their meeting, Cody developed his buffalo bill persona into a larger than life character which was and continues to be synonymous with what Monica Rico has termed frontier masculinity. For her part, Bonheur's life was also shaped by her relationship to masculine signifiers. Her masculine presenting identity was famously documented in her official license from the French government to wear pants. While efforts to divine a relationship between her painting practice and her gender identity have tended to focus exclusively on her same sex relationships, when she did turn to the human figure, that figure was almost exclusively male. This has led to the continued assumption that her work bears little relationship to her gender identity. To date, the withdrawn character of the Cody portrait has been primarily interpreted as evidence of Bonheur's supposed disinterest in the human figure. Albert Bohm describes it as a striking instance of her indifference to the humans in her pictures. He attributed this to the acute sense of alienation Bonheur would have felt because of her proto-lesbian identity. According to Bohm, this led her to retreat from the human figure entirely. However, given as a gift in gratitude for the unrestricted access that his management team gave to Bonheur during her time in the Wild West camp, it seems likely that the painting offers more than indifference. Rather, I would argue that in her portrait Colonel William F. Cody, Bonheur strategically deploys the aesthetic of obfuscation to visually rupture the presumed attachment between the male body and masculinity, of which she was acutely aware thanks to her own distinctly female relationship to the masculine. In my presentation today, I will endeavor to demonstrate that through her handling of paint, the pose of the figure, and the composition of the portrait, Bonheur simultaneously exploits and subverts the equestrian tradition in an effort to record not only the performed masculinity of Buffalo Bill, but something of the humanity of William F. Cody as well. Although the details of his biography have become muddled with the heroic deeds to which Cody would lay claim, his early life was predominantly marked by financial instability, itinerant labor, petty crime, and a brief stint with the 7th Kansas volunteer cavalry. Before he became Buffalo Bill of the stage, he gained notoriety as a popular icon of the West through the serial novels of Ned Buntline, beginning with the publication of Buffalo Bill King of the Bordermen in 1869. By the early 1870s, Cody began to transition to a life on stage, and in 1883, along with his theatrical manager, Nate Salisbury, he organized Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which they conceived as a touring spectacle designed to compete with popular circuses of the period. In developing his Buffalo Bill persona, Cody strategically deployed existing yet oppositional ideologies of American masculinity, combining signifiers of New World primitivism with those of Old World chivalry. For his audiences, this offered a stable, legible alternative to the perceived emasculation of modern society. Historians R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel have served that as America developed and urbanized, middle class working men were compelled to relinquish the control of their labor to factory owners and managers. To fulfill the prescribed role of provider and patriarch, men were bound to the spaces of the city and the factory, and were thus trapped close to the feminized sphere of the home. In response to these anxieties, Cody rooted his theatrical persona in opposition to the urban educated male through a visual association with the dual primitivisms of the American frontier and the European past. A circa 1895 promotional photograph that features Buffalo Bill at the height of his notoriety illustrates his savvy use of costume and pose to locate his masculinity beyond the limits of the industrialized city. In one of several embellished buckskin suits that he sported over the years, Cody stands tall, hands resting jointly near his hips at the top of his massive belt. The panels of the vest separate like lavish curtains revealing an oversized buckle and a horseshoe pendant at his waist. Although conspicuously covered in fabric, a typical distinction between the civilized Westerner and the naked exposed savage, the buckskin that adorns his body speaks to a direct encounter with the indigenous American. His characteristic westward gaze also positions Buffalo Bill on the precipice of civilization. The upward glance and slightly lifted chin suggests that he sees before him an expansive western horizon. Images of Cody consistently feature this staunch outward gaze which implies control and dominance over a wild frontier. Like the many other promotional photographs of this period, the image shows as much of the character Buffalo Bill and very little of William F. Cody. In her painted portrait, Bonor notably alters the direction of Cody's gaze even as she dutifully records the details of his iconic ensemble. Turned to the side, her Buffalo Bill no longer communicates control, but rather introspection. Through the simple gesture of a turned head Bonor's portrait begins to unravel the tenuous ties that find Cody's masculine persona to his male body. Cody's status as a skilled horseman was also key to his anti-modernist masculinity. Promotional posters like the scout Buffalo Bill from 1863, the mounted warriors of all nations from 1902, and Colonel W.F. Cody from 1907 frequently positioned Buffalo Bill as both primitive and pre-industrial through an association with the equestrian tradition. Rico has observed that for his audiences, especially those in London and Paris, quote, on horseback, Cody seemed a throwback to an earlier chivalric age when men rode beautiful stallions rather than taking buses and trains to offices and factories, end quote. Bonor was well aware of the power of this key element of his persona. The equestrian format of her portrait strategically places Cody in dialogue with a long tradition of viral military men on horses, such as Jacques Louis David's Napoleon crossing the Alps, who are always in control of their surroundings. However, with the same gesture she also visually challenges the stability of his status as yet another hyper masculine martial leader. Cody's form commands our attention less than we might expect. When compared with a photograph taken of the rough rider during the 1889 tour, Bonor's Cody appears markedly smaller and less physically commanding than he was when he actually sat in the saddle. What's more, rather than an expansive prairie or an alpine crossing, both Cody and his horse are physically contained and framed by the painted line of trees. These strategic choices to subvert tradition, the turning of the head, the adjustments in the proportions of man and horse, and the choice to place her subject in a domesticated space, call the authenticity of Cody's masculine performance into question. As we shall see, Bonor's painterly interest in the romantic masculine ideal made her uniquely equipped to document both Cody's performance of that ideal and the unidealized humanity of the performer as well. Like her contemporary George Saund, Rosa Bonor is frequently celebrated as a paragon of proto-feminist resistance to the deeply gendered social structures of her day. And like Saund, her masculine presentation attracted considerable attention. Adrian Marx, an American journalist who visited Bonor's chateau at Bay in 1866, devoted considerable space in his subsequent art article to recount how he initially mistook her for an elderly man. In spite of this, critics and scholars alike have struggled to reconcile the more radical aspects of her identity with what has been characterized as a conservative painterly practice. While mining her ove for hidden themes of sapphism is doomed to disappoint, distinguishing her female masculinity from her sexuality opens up new avenues for inquiry. The queer theorist Jack Halberstam has observed that frequently critical analysis of masculinity is limited either to the biologically male body or exclusively to lesbianism. Instead, Halberstam argues that, quote, far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity. We understand as, what we understand as heroic masculinity has been produced by and across both male and female bodies, end quote. In this context, Bonor's portrait of Cody becomes more than a simple record of a celebrity encounter. The impact of Bonor's female masculinity is brought to bear on the totalizing masculinity which Cody sought to embody in his role of Buffalo Bill. The significance of this exchange becomes all the more salient when read against the masculine types to which Bonor repeatedly turned throughout her career. It is certainly true that the majority of Bonor's painting practice was dedicated to the depiction of animals. However, a review of her ove reveals that she also produced a significant number of works featuring heroic male figures, which like Cody's Buffalo Bill occupied spaces beyond the confines of modernity. While her Impressionist contemporaries trained their gaze on the urban Bonor featured in works like Edward de Gaas's Place de la Concorde of 1875, and the industrial and industrial labor in the paintings such as Gustave Kaibot's The Fourscrapers from the same year, Bonor focused on romanticized types, Scottish islanders, knights on horseback, and indigenous Americans. The consistency and frequency of these images suggests that far from antipathy, Bonor's painterly practice reveals a career-long study in the parameters of masculinity and its varied signifiers. The first page of a Bonor sketchbook from 1855 shows a minute armored knight rapier in hand, striding towards the edge of the page. The subsequent pages are filled with scenes of knights jousting on horseback or gathered at court. It is clear that these pre-modern heroic icons held a significant appeal for the artist. While most viewers would gender these figures as male, their armor renders their sex unreadable, leaving space for Bonor to appropriate them in the construction of her own masculine identity. These chivalric caricatures gain poignant relevance when compared with an 1837 photograph of the young Rosa Bonor. She is dressed in the garb of a knight which alludes to her induction into the Order of the Knight's Templar, made possible by her father's brief membership with the group. Years later, Rosa Bonor would recount the memory to her partner and a clumpy quote, to complete the initiation ceremony I had to trot on my little legs down through an archway of swords crossed overhead. Of course, I didn't understand what was going on, but I felt transfigured, once a feeble little girl, now a valiant woman warrior, end quote. This account and accompanying photograph suggest that in the mystical, pseudo-historical iconography of the Moyenne age, Bonor found a visual language that articulated her own distinctly female masculinity which contemporary categories of gender could not accommodate. This gesture is consistent with the nostalgic backward glance that Jose Esteban Munoz has identified in the construction of many queer utopias. Her self-described transfiguration from a quote feeble girl to a valiant woman warrior suggests her appropriation and queering of medieval martial masculinity. By extension, her many knights can be read as womanly warriors as well. Bonor's courtly scenes attest to her willingness to borrow from mythologized narratives of heroic masculinity to distinguish masculine signifiers from the modern male body and to bring those signifiers into closer proximity with her own female body. In the same spirit, the painter's rendering of her male contemporaries revealed an effort to humanize these otherwise romantic male types. Her depictions of Scottish Highlanders drives this point home. Bonor produced several paintings based on her 1850 tour of Scotland, but the Highland Shepherd is particularly illuminating. There is a stoic humility to the worn character of the Shepherd's shoes, the visible softness of his sheepskin stockings, and a vulnerability to the way he braces himself against the wind that ruffles his hair and kilt. The Highland Shepherd employs strategies of realism to offer a frank assessment of the environment and its subject rather than molding her Highlander into a preconceived type. Bonor's Shepherd contrasts significantly with that of her traveling companion, Edwin Lanseer. His 1850 The Highlander offers a highly idealized depiction. The Highlander, like the cowboy, was an emblem of masculinity who functioned in a liminal space between white European civility and primitive martial strength. Lanseer conflates these opposing ideologies by wrapping the physical mass of his subject in tightly fitting garments, barely containing the brute animality of his features under an expression of restraint. The overall effect re-inscribes stereotypical attitudes toward Scottish men in the period of British rule. Where Lanseer attests to the authenticity of his encounter with the Scotsman through detail and idealization, the authenticity of Bonor's painting instead from her unidealized assessment of her subject. Rather than a straightforward re-inscribing of pre-existing stereotypes, her romantic male figures reflect an effort to make real and idyllic, untamed mode of masculinity otherwise unavailable to her in contemporary French society. Far enough removed from the gendered strictures of her own lived experiences, these romanticized images of masculinity allowed Bonor to gather and assemble a more pliant taxonomy of alternative masculinities from which she could draw in her efforts to create a space for herself in the world. In the Codi portrait, Bonor leverages her finely attuned female masculine gaze to record both the performer and his performance of the masculine ideal. Nowhere is this more evident than in her handling of paint. There is a nebulous quality to his visage that permeates the space around him as if he is shrouded in a kind of painterly haze. Her individualized brushstrokes threaten to overwhelm Codi's features. This gesture serves as a poetic echo of the performer's tendency to submerge his own individual identity in favor of an association with a generalized cowboy type. Throughout his career, Codi consistently conflated the details of his personal life with the exaggerated narratives of Valor that originated in his stage performances. Bonor's highly individualized brushstrokes give visual form to the space between Codi's individuality and his hypermasculine performance. In so doing, she not only asserts her painterly identity, she effectively contains two subjects, William F. Codi and Buffalo Bill, in the body of one subject. In asserting her own female masculine gaze, Bonor quite literally blurs the lines between man and myth. As I hope to have shown, Bonor's portrait of Codi offers a critical point of access through which we might begin to reinterpret both the boundaries of masculinity and its construction. For while both Rosa Bonor and William F. Codi looked beyond the borders of modern masculinity in the construction of their respective gender identities, it was the particulars of Bonor's female masculinity that made her uniquely equipped to reify her subject's male body and his masculine performance. In the end, it took a woman in pants to see Buffalo Bill for who he was. Thank you. Thank you all, three of you so much for three really, really fantastic papers all of which were so different. You know, we group these papers together before we read them and these were together because of the time period basically, right? They're all sort of 19th century. And so it's been a lot of fun to listen to the three of you and it was fun to read them ahead of time and to try to think of the kind of intersections. Not that they're needed to be any, but it's just a sort of fun thing to do and I think that what I, the thread that I was able to draw out is that they're all about destabilization in one way or another. Brittany's about the destabilization of constructions of masculinity. Thomas is about I think the destabilization of the idea of Americanness perhaps and Miriam's about the destabilization of the viewer's own sense of gravity. And so I want to ask you each some questions individually and then open it up to the audience for questions because I know that there are a lot that are already coming in. And I will start with Thomas. I would like to, I wanted to ask you about the reception of these works in the UL and whether the sort of transnational quality of them had any impact on the way that U.S. audiences received them. Sure. That's an excellent question. Thank you. I would say that most 19th century audiences in the U.S. were unbothered by the transatlantic nature of these works. They just saw many of these images as quintessential expressions of America's uniqueness and identity through the landscape. So what I've been trying to show and this is also what I'm trying to show in my dissertation is that there was a sort of fluid circulation and reception of these works and that we should maybe expand the ways in which we think about nationalism and what national art means especially because these people were producing images at the same time as an artist like Thomas Cole was since then being revered as the founding figure of an American school of landscape. But contemporary audiences didn't really make the difference as long as they perceived these images as really praising an American spirit. Thank you. And it was, I have to say it was it was really kind of striking to look at to see your paper or your talk after Miriam's because the landscapes that you're looking at are so about legibility and kind of clear orientation and Miriam's obviously were not like you made them, Miriam. Monet's were if only the opposite so that was that was very fun to sort of see those two right up against each other. So I wanted to ask Miriam I mean you're listening to your talk I had there were several moments where I sort of gasped because out of excitement and even you know something that is probably really really obvious to everybody listening but it wasn't to me was the when you when you got to the point where you started talking about the reflected images being inversions I was like oh my god yes they are because I've I've thought about reflections as reproductions and as images but I've never thought about them as inversions and that seems really important and what you do in that paper seems like a very exciting and important new way of opening up a way of looking at Monet and talking about Monet. What I wanted to ask you was how might you connect what Monet is doing in these works that destabilization of the viewer's position or of the viewer's power to the historical moment in which he was working? Absolutely well thank you so much for that good question and I'm glad the gasps were for excitement and not for other reasons but of course for the sake of time today I couldn't speak to the historic context that informs not only Monet's production in really the early 20th century and I would say that just right off the bat too often these paintings are read as manifestations of impressionism because they were created by a painter who is so often associated with the 19th century but again most of them are painted into the 20s into the 1920s and again as I mentioned received with much admiration in the mid 20th century and so I would say that both of those periods deeply inform my readings of the paintings firstly often these water lilies when they are spoken about in 20th century terms are seen in relation to World War one which of course happened as a backdrop to part of the period of Monet's painting and they're often read as sort of escapist enterprises that are not engaged with the horrific events of that period but I want to emphasize that Monet himself was certainly affected by the war and by aftermath he also was working right near the front and was contributing vegetables to a field hospital in Giverny he was not a stranger to the effects of that environment and so to me the disruptive and even disturbing aspect of modern life both in that World War one sort of early 20th century period and even again in the later reception show up in the paintings to me as a kind of recapitulation a sort of inversion of something that might typically be seen as disturbing allowing it to have a kind of ameliorative effect that is not an escape but rather a kind of alternative possibility so that uncertainty is not purely upsetting but opens possibility Thank you and then Brittany I loved your discussion of the performance of the primitive masculinity was very interesting to me in the context of the new sort of urban less physical more reliant on technology type of man right at the time I, my question for you, I mean I have lots of them but the one I wanted to ask is in challenging I don't want to, in challenging this Buffalo Bell's masculinity is Bonor challenging the myth of America itself? That's a great question thank you so the records that we have suggest that Bonor was actually really enamored by the myth of America and in particular the West just a few years later she meets the American portrait painter Anna Klumpke and they begin a romantic relationship that they would carry for the rest of Bonor's life and their courtship was from San Francisco and their courtship is very much entangled with Bonor's fantasy of being able to someday visit the West so I actually think it's the opposite rather than a challenge I think she thought of the West as a site of escape and ultimate social freedom and therefore it makes sense that she would see Cody as a figure where she could perhaps test the boundaries and play with the parameters of her own identity I think the scholarship there's some really interesting scholarship that suggests that the West both in Europe and in the eastern United States was both a geographical space and an ideological one that symbolized the edge of society and this kind of interaction with primitivism and I very much think that's true for her she was also really really interested in and portrayed several of the indigenous Americans that traveled with the Wild West show in this period including the two gentlemen that are featured in the first photo that I shared and even before she met the performers of the Wild West show was sketching and reproducing works based on George Catlin's project so I think there's a long investment that she has with the West and there's a lot more to unpack about it Thank you Let's go to some questions now so I'm going to try to read some questions from the chat and I will start with this one from Margaret Worth She says, thanks Thomas You sparked some musings about possible associations between the flow of transatlantic crossings landscapes with various bodies of water and the watery fluids printmaking Thank you for this comment Margaret There's definitely something there about the fluidity of the material the great advantage of producing prints instead of painting is that the circulation is multiplied so you can have the same views over and over again circulating really fast across not only the US but also the Atlantic world Of course the Atlantic world is itself a water based metaphor for the ocean separating these two continents that actually have more in common and more interactions that's what I'm trying to show in my dissertation, more interactions that people wanted to see in this very early period of time so I guess that to follow up on Margaret's comment the issue of fluidity is really central not only the fluidity of movement but also the fluidity of transfer material transfer because in the end what we're tracing here is the life of objects and images that are constantly shifting shapes, changing and being circulated from hand to hand from city to city so it's also important in terms of the material culture surrounding them Thanks and there are more questions in the chat but first I wanted to give the three of you a chance to if you had questions for each other you don't have to but you know try them in, type up I'll hit a question for Brittany about your talk, I thought it was fantastic I'm really interested again because your talk was really focused on masculinity I was really interested to hear more about Bonner's relationship to the American landscape self, to the land itself because she is also known to be a fabulous landscape painter so did she paint landscapes of the west how did she approach that because I think she never traveled to the US she never traveled to the US but she did have a very strong client base in the United States the horse fair, her most well known painting of course toured the US before it was purchased by an American collector and actually she painted several American landscapes and in particular the west these western prairies were of particular interest to her and when she died actually she had an unfinished scene of buffalo's hunting she had a couple of those but there was a quite large one that she was still working on painting which I think you've keenly picked up fascinating since she never actually visited so it's really an idea a fantasy of the west that she is engaging in which is just very interesting to look at thanks for asking, what's a great question great okay this is from Nancy Locke from Miriam thank you for a truly creative and beautiful paper I love the way you relate your argument about Monet to abstract painting in the 20th century what do you think about the look of reflections in early landscape photography artists like Eugène Couvelier with the appearance of reflections and photographs have contributed to Monet's visual thinking thank you so much for this question and I think that's a beautiful point that of course reflections are perhaps most often manifested in photography for us right I even put up photographs of my own visit to Giverny while illustrating this idea so we know that Monet was working with some photographs in his studio of his own there are some certainly some self-portraits so to speak of his own reflection in the pond and those come up in accounts of these paintings I haven't thought specifically about Couvelier but I would say that certainly those kinds of scenes are a part of the broader visual culture and one though that I would say that the scenes that I'm familiar with are emphasizing that kind of doubling nature that I was referring to so that you often see the land doubled in water whereas Monet is turning the focus downward and across and upside down in paint and lastly I would say that while that photographic visual culture was very present in Monet's world and something that friends of his were employing and he was as well this project is in many ways trying to think about what the medium of paint more specifically offers and how it's actually non-photographic properties in some way can destabilize us in relation to a painting more than if we were looking at a photograph regardless of how so to speak abstracted a photograph of reflection might be we would tend to read it as such and have a sense of an axis in relation to it so I think that Monet was likely aware of some of that photographic production and perhaps sort of working with but also against it to think about what his paintings could offer that such photography wouldn't. There's a question another question for Miriam from Gilbert Jones. Thank you for such a wonderful talk which I found absolutely convincing Monet's triptych is so large that it overwhelms the viewer's visual field. Do you think that it might be possible to isolate and experience the same unease about the sky slash earth dichotomy within a very small section of the larger painted canvas or should the viewer step back and try to engage with as much of the painting as possible visually in order to experience the upside down world. Thank you so much Gilbert for this lovely question I would say that both are possible and that that is in many ways the point that Monet offers us the chance to feel this sensation on the kind of close-knit intimate scale when we're looking at just a portion of a canvas but also to feel sort of more broadly upturned and disoriented in relation to the kind of panoramic possibilities that the paintings offer on a more kind of zoomed out scale if we step back from them and that in and of itself is actually echoing Monet's own way of working this is something that was even documented in film and has been spoken about that in order to sort of legibly read his mark making we and he sort of worked close to the surface but then would stand back to a different kind of sense of the scene and in relation to the water really specifically because we are not again granted either an earthen foreground or a horizon we don't have a specific entry point that would necessitate a particular point of view we're not looking at say a classic perspectival you know receding picture and so therefore we're actually I believe liberated to sort of imaginatively enter the picture from really any position and at any scale um okay thank you trying to I've lost my here we go okay um Thomas I was just wondering about whether you know there is discussion in I don't know the news media um just at the time about the democratic nature of the lithographic process I'm just thinking about you know America is still a pretty young democracy at that point and whether this medium was talked about um in that way thank you for your question it was absolutely discussed in contemporary newspapers and magazines just starting with the fact that the very first lithography published in the united states happens to be a landscape is published in a magazine is published in a magazine with description so from the get go um lithography gets wanted as this very useful medium to send the idea the visual concept of American landscape everywhere in the country and then starting in the 1830s and 40s you have art association like the American art union relying heavily on different techniques of printing and especially on lithography to send dozens of views of American landscapes to their subscribers throughout the country and this is also picked up by artists as well the entrust lithographers to turn their landscape paintings into lithograph that would then be added to a purchase or a subscription to an organization so really this print culture revolution taps into the idea of the populist and also very common widespread need for people to connect to that sort of aesthetic so yes definitely thank you okay going back to the chat um Lisa Salzman asks Miriam um diving bells long proceed not just dirigibles airplanes and spacecraft but even balloons do moneys most radical experiments with the disorientation of painting reflective sorry sorry I think I'm messing this up do moneys most radical experiments with the disorientation of painting sorry with the disorient I see it now let me start over diving bells long proceed not just dirigibles airplanes and spacecraft but even balloons moneys most radical experiments with the disorientation of painting reflective watery expanses augur or echo a broader transitional cultural moment when descending into oceanic depths is rivaled or supplanted by sheer aeronautical ascent breaking the barrier not of sea but of sky I'm amazed by some of these these questions absolutely Lisa thank you very much for that beautiful question it speaks more broadly to my dissertation project as a whole which is thinking about what I term a kind of gravitational imagination that emerges in my view in the late 19th century with Edward Moybridge photographing a horse in midair in a run what that offers to pictorial space is a kind of airborne suspension and my broader project traces that through to the space age so I think absolutely that there is a sense in which while moneys watery expanses are of course about a kind of plunge downward and across and upside down they also open space for a kind of a kind of not necessarily elevated but sort of suspended embodiment that is very much about the way that we as humans can imagine ourselves taking to the air and to having a different relationship with a vertical axis that is both upward as well as downward thank you and I am seeing that we are a little bit over time it's 433 so I think we should wrap it up I would like to thank the three of you for three wonderful talks and all of our speakers today nine wonderful talks everybody who listened and asked questions in the chat all the advisors who worked with you on these great topics and were here to introduce you today it's been a great day and I learned a lot and it's just really exciting to see what you're all doing and to know that the future of the history of art is in such good hands so please join us again next Friday for day 2 of the symposium nine more talks we started at 10 o'clock thank you to AV our AV team thank you to everybody at the barns Aaliyah, Kaelin, Jewel I am forgetting people but it's been a great day