 Good morning everybody. Welcome to day one of our graduate student symposium in the history of art hosted by the Barnes Foundation in partnership with Bryn Mawr Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Martha Lucy. I am deputy director for research interpretation and education at the Barnes. Welcome to our speakers to faculty, advisors, and all guests who are watching. Thank you for tuning in this morning. This symposium is one of the premier forums for the new, for new research and ideas in the field of art history and the speakers come from nine top PhD programs in the area. The Barnes inherited this hosting role from the Philadelphia Museum of Art four years ago and we are so glad we did. It's really one of our favorite events of the year because not only do we get to hear, you know, the most new research in the field, but we also get to connect with more colleagues all over the region. Grad students are a very important part of our research program at the Barnes and many of you may know that the Barnes was for a long time sort of cultishly devoted to one single way of looking at art and that's no longer true over the past 15 years, especially since the move to the parkway we've become an institution that is actively producing new scholarship about our own collections and bringing in more contemporary methodological approaches to the way that we talk about our holdings, even as we keep Barnesian formalism very much at the center and much of this important new work has been done by graduate students. Our program today is and next Friday I should say right off the bat that the program is takes place today and the second half of it is next Friday, but our program is a kind of double session this year because 2020's symposium was canceled last minute because of the pandemic. You may have you may have heard about that this pandemic that happened. We moved all of the talks that were supposed to happen last year to this year combining them with this year's speakers, which means that we will have 18 total talks over the course of two days, nine today and nine next Friday. So it's a very robust agenda. You can probably imagine how much work went into organizing this and I need to thank my colleague, Alia Palumbo, who was at the center of organizing this and who did just incredible work and our AV team led by Gillan Riggs for taking such special care to make sure that everything goes smoothly. So now it all has to go smoothly. Thank you to our thank you to our co-organizing institutions Temple, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Maher, and especially to Homey King and Lisa Saltzman. Thank you to Jonathan Katz for a brilliant talk last night and for being willing to chair two sessions this year, one today and one next Friday. Thank you to Cindy Kang, our associate curator at the Barnes who will be chairing the first session today and to Carl Walsh who is a postdoctoral fellow in Egyptian art at the Barnes and he is going to be chairing a session. So with that I will turn things over to the wonderful Lisa Saltzman who is a professor at Bryn Maher and chair of the Art History Department. Thank you. Thank you, Martha and good morning everyone. As Martha has already said, my name is Lisa Saltzman and as chair of the Department of History of Art at Bryn Maher College and this year's co-host of the Graduate Student Symposium, it's my pleasure and honor to introduce the day's proceedings and I also want to thank Jonathan Katz for opening this year's symposium yesterday evening with his eloquent and elegiac account of how art and activism came together in the 1980s in an artistic community devastated by AIDS to animate even the most obdurate of abstractions with political purpose and subversive meaning. I also want to offer a little bit of history even if it will loosely reprise a bit of what Martha already said but for those who are new to the Philadelphia Graduate Student Symposium at the Barnes I think it's important to know. Roughly 25 years ago at the initiative of Ann Darnancourt, faculty members from Bryn Maher and and Temple joined with colleagues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to plan and launch a Graduate Student Symposium in the history of art for the city of Philadelphia in so doing the idea was not simply to mimic those graduate symposia long in existence at the Frick and the National Gallery. Yes there would be a keynote and a roster of graduate student speakers drawn from regional institutions and as at the National Gallery introduced by their advisors but built into the very structure of our symposium would be an active forum of intellectual engagement. This would be modeled and facilitated by the keynote speaker who would also serve as the initial respondent during the day of panels and papers to follow engaging graduate students as the scholars that they are training to be and then opening that opportunity to the audience. Under the leadership of Tom Collins and his deputy director of research interpretation and education Martha Lucie since the spring of 2017 we have not only shifted our symposium to a new venue but with the Barnes as our new institutional partner we have reconceived the model of the symposium now explicitly incorporating curators into the program as well but the history of this graduate symposium coincides with my own history in Philadelphia gives me a special sense of connection to it with the exception of a sabbatical lead or two I've heard roughly 25 keynotes 25 years of keynotes and if memory serves I think Molly Nesbitt was our first or at least the first one Brynmar was co-hosting and I've witnessed generations of graduate students debuting their research and though I don't have a file of those old programs and I don't know that anyone archived them except me be David Brownlee who was instrumental in launching this Philadelphia graduate symposium back in the mid 90s I would like to imagine that at least a few of those graduate student presenters are now in the ranks of the faculty of our local and regional partners faculties that at least in the case of Brynmar have also have almost completely transformed themselves David Cast and I being the only leftovers from that inaugural moment all that said I am not here to reminisce but to introduce and so without further ado it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the first day of two so don't forget to come back next Friday of the first purely virtual iteration of the Philadelphia graduate symposium on the history of art and with that I will turn things over to Cindy Kang who will introduce this morning's panel and papers. Good morning I'm so delighted to welcome you to the first session of our first virtual graduate student symposium we are so pleased to be able to continue this tradition and though we can't welcome you to our beautiful auditorium this year it's wonderful to be able to gather in this virtual space so I am really pleased to be introducing this fascinating group of papers this morning on art and visual material culture of the 19th century from the Naby the avant-garde artists who's uh were in Paris knows the Naby to Japanese souvenir photo albums of the Meiji period I'm very much looking forward to this discussion these are topics that are close to my heart as I wrote my dissertation on the Naby and I'm pleased to introduce our first speaker who is Jordan Hillman from the University of Delaware and actually I'm introducing her advisor who will introduce her Dr. Margaret Worth professor of art history at the University of Delaware who has been a great friend of the Barnes and I'm delighted to have her introduce Jordan to you this morning. Hello I'm Margaret Worth and I'm introducing Jordan Hillman. Jordan has long been interested in questions of authority crime and punishment and policing her doctoral dissertation project concerns pictures of the police in France in the late 19th and early 20th century by artists such as Felix Valleton and Teophil Steinland as well as other lesser known figures it also amplifies our understanding of urban space and its contestation around 1900 and the forms of visibility and invisibility that circulated within it. Jordan is working on her dissertation this year with funding from a number of institutions including several competitive UD fellowships a university doctoral fellowship and a Delaware public humanities institute fellowship among them as well as receiving a Catherine Malley fellowship from the Institut Francais de Marique and a research grant from the Centre Almond d'Histoire la in Paris. Other notable recent accomplishments of Jordan's include her research for an exhibition women behaving badly 400 years of power and protest at the Baltimore Museum of Art and she has also given quite a few papers recently about her dissertation project as well as other topics including trompe l'oeil postcards of the Dreyfus Affair which she presented at the 19th century French Studies Association Conference. The paper she's giving us today offers us a glimpse of an ambitious dissertation that will expand our understanding of the history of the police. The title is Valleton's police states countering authority in print. Welcome Jordan. When the artist Felix Valleton contributed a lithograph to the Parisian literary and satiric journal Lycannar Sauvage in April 1903 he was nearing the end of a decade of experimentation and critical engagement with the image of the policemen. Beginning in the early 1890s Valleton produced dozens of prints that registered the growing police presence in Paris. From the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 social economic and political anxieties were especially acute in the French capital. The devastating aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris commune as well as concerns over increasing industrialization and urbanization led to instability within and resistance to the government and its policies. The perceived threats of urban crowds the so-called dangerous classes and organized forms of social protest were not unfamiliar in France. Already in 1851 Emperor Napoleon III had initiated reforms that sought to modernize and strengthen police authority on a national scale. However strikes riots and anarchist bombings reached their apex in the last decade of the century resulting in the state's 1892 authorization of more than a thousand additional police in Paris. That Valleton's varied graphic confrontation with the police officer appeared in this decade suggests that the artist was responding to changes in the visual and experiential character of the city brought by the increased police intervention in its public spaces. Valleton moved from Lausanne Switzerland to Paris in 1882 and his frequenting of establishments in the radical Montmartre put him into close contact with avant-garde groups. Through his association with the Ancohérent and the Navi both artistic collectives made up of members who shared his own anarchist sympathies and instincts for graphic way. Valleton became fluent in an innovative often politically charged pictorial language that offered former solutions to his own visual meditations on the space of the street and a decade later on the role of police within it. His unusual points of view dramatic cropping and spatial voids in his pictures of police contrasted with the orderly arrangement of official images as in this group portrait photograph from around 1905. Valleton's distorted and truncated pictorial spaces thereby translated the actual urban spaces he represented into powerful visual commentaries on the police and social life of Paris. I will argue that in his police prints Valleton frequently left pronounced graphic voids that convey the instabilities of police authority and the dynamics of its visibility and invisibility in the streets of Paris. In his lithograph Le Faire Cronkville Valleton positions a policeman on a Parisian street at the far right edge of the composition his back aligned with the pictures frame. The officer's dark uniform is accentuated by the wide expanse of open space that surrounds him. Valleton fills the void with sketchy Cren-like scratches that heighten the sense of movement created as the proletarian crowd leaves quickly in the opposite direction of a man whom the caption claims spreads terror. Unlike Valleton's woodcut Le Charges of 1893 which foregrounds a mass of policemen engaged in a violent encounter with the crowd Le Faire Cronkville exposes a more passive elvet no less intimidating mode of asserting authority. In Le Charges an elevated viewpoint flattens the image and the arrangement of bodies on the sheet produces a decorative effect. Simplified figures with caricatural features are crammed into the pictures lower register. Above others are scattered haphazardly across the printed surface. The gridded lines of the cobblestone street have been obliterated creating a space devoid of any architectural elements. Despite this Valleton partially renders the implied three-dimensional space of the composition. He uses diminution to suggest that the much larger figures at the bottom of the frame are closer to the viewer than those smaller figures at the top. Moreover he articulates the plane of the street by positioning a man at the far left lying completely flat on his back and another crawling away just right of center the white soles of his shoes indicating the foreshortened nature of his body in space. This hint at spatial recession is ultimately contradicted however by the rising ground plane which allows for the figures in the supposed distance to be visible at all. Should Valleton have composed the scene head-on the already injured and fallen men would be entirely obscured by the attacking officers. A dark border printed around the plate's edge emphasizes the limits and control imposed by the artist over the imagined street activated and violently cropped by the policemen forcefully wielding their baton blanc. In le fer conqueville space functions differently the street remains recognizable as such. In the background Valleton renders a curve receding into the distance the feet of pedestrians in a fragmented tree trunk visible on the crop sidewalk. Gradient tones lend volume to the figures and the urban setting the two women in the lower left corner for example are highly individuated. The scattering crowd is seen from different points of view simultaneously from behind in profile and head-on tightening the sense of confusion and manipulating the viewer's response to this chaotic urban scene. Empty space radiates outward from the policemen further widening the physical and judicial distance between the officer and the citizens as they escape the frame of both the picture and the law. There are no signs of outward brutality yet the crowd disperses. Here the policemen's presence alone is capable of altering the street from a site teeming with life to an emerging void overseen only by authority. La Foule Perrie a woodcut published the year before Le Charge combines these two pictorial modes of spatial control and explicitly announces Valleton's role in its construction. In the print a policeman is depicted at the lower left corner his outstretched arms forming an obtuse angle around a compressed massive citizen. His left appendage is aligned with the diagonal recession of the street while his right extends parallel to the paper's surface holding in the proletarian swarm. That Valleton inscribed his monogram on the policeman's dark uniform announces the artist's authoritative role in visually ordering the street. But his precipitously rising ground plane works against this by upending the street itself which threatens to spill the crowd out of the frame and the control of the officer. A pair of disembodied feet dangling from the upper left corner serve as a further reminder of the street's potential instability. Through this interplay Valleton reveals the ways in which urban space is multiply if ineffectually constructed in relation to the police. The policeman in the fair Cronkville signifies a similar paradox. In the Canard Sauvage this two-page illustration accompanied Jules Crenard's product column au théâtre and the April 4th issue. The title refers to a three-act play by Anatole France adapted from his short novel of the same name that was staged at the théâtre de la renaissance that march. The fair Cronkville tells the tale of a street merchant who is arrested after a verbal misunderstanding with a police officer and who upon his release from jail finds that his record has left a permanent stain on his reputation. He decides he must return to prison in order to survive. After soliciting a second arrest to Noah Vale by actually insulting an officer in the same manner in which he was previously accused, Cronkville ultimately resigns to his fate and drowns himself in the scent. France's story mocks the law through its narrative of justice gone awry. Cronkville's comically sad experience underscores the inherent biases and prejudices of the judicial system. At the same time, the title points to the story's central irony that France aligns the trivial incident of the lowly Cronkville with the series' drama of Le Faire Drayfou, a contemporary scandal that divided the nation over the fate of the Jewish army captain Alfred Drayfou who had been falsely accused of treason. Balaton's lithograph, like France's story, operates in a critical space between reality and representation. A nameless, nearly faceless police officer stands his post, yet the dark coat and flat brimmed cap of his uniform operate as obvious signs of his authority. The velocity with which the figures disperse and the anxiety that Balaton's caption instills suggests an exaggerated sense of fear. Perhaps it is the story that perhaps it is the social and economic status of this crowd that renders the officer all the more frightening. At this time, the state was particularly wary of the working classes, whom they deemed unruly and subversive. Here, however, the potential threat has reversed. No longer is the disorderly crowd the source of anxiety. Instead, it is the figure of order who poses the threat. This was, to some extent, the officer's role in the last decades of the 19th century. The modern force was largely centered around the maintenance of social order, often through modes of surveillance, intimidation, and intervention. Balaton thus not only acutely registers these ironies in the new police system, but also the nature of its contradictory and condemnatory public criticism. Attitudes toward the police during this period were indeed complex. An essay entitled The Parisian Police published in the English Illustrated Magazine by A. Shadwell in 1892 explained, quote, It seems impossible for the police to please the public. When we want them, they are our best friends, to whom we turn with the utmost confidence. When we do not, we join in treating them as a common enemy. Competing categorizations of the police as absent or overly present, too lenient, or unnecessarily harsh, thus occupied the Parisian cultural imagination. Read in this context, the graphic punch of Balaton's police to Paris picks on a more critical tone. The growing space that fans outward from the officer in the fair compil visualizes the distance between the moral and ethical expectations of police behavior and their actual conduct in the urban sphere. A space that is likewise indicated by the contrasts between this officer's detached surveillance and the hands-on exertion of force in the fool and the charge. Indeed, in other images, this detachment is made complete by Balaton's removal of the policeman from the image entirely, while still acknowledging the ways in which his palpable presence continues to activate those around him. Such is the case for la manifestation, which depicts the characteristically frantic aftermath of one of late 19th century Paris' many demonstrations. Writing in the Gazette de Lausanne shortly after its publication, Balaton's poet friend Matthias Morehart described the print, quote, Imagine a very wide boulevard. The crowd flees in a fan shape into the distance, exhibiting diverse attitudes which evoke memories of scenes that we've often witnessed over the last five years. However, nobody pursues the crowd, yet it scatters in frantic light. Near the front, just one bloke turns around, and his expressive silhouette indicates that he expects the regulation kicking from the police, which is the very ethos of these demonstrations. Published in 1893, la manifestation appeared during the height of both the labor strikes and the anarchist bombings in Paris. Balaton was clearly aware of these threats and of the rise in police activity they incited, as he also produced a woodcut entitled Le Narchiste just a year earlier, which showed a young anarchist being apprehended by four sinister policemen. Yet, as Morehart describes, this print includes no police presence whatsoever, only an implication of their likely proximity to the scene. This was further acknowledged by Julius Maillacré in his 1898 illustrated biography of the artist, in which his entry for la manifestation points out that Balaton audaciously chose a point of view that, quote, left out of the picture the principal thing, the police, who do not show themselves, but whose effect is nonetheless felt, quote. This absence is made present through Balaton's elevated angle of view, which seems to embody the vantage point of mounted police at the charge. The menacing perspective, coupled with the frenzied nature of the crowd's dispersal, echoes the terror inspired by Balaton's policemen in the fair-con field. Art historian Richard Thompson has suggested that, in light of the fragmented crowd, bound together only by, quote, the ungiving structure of the street, the practicalities of crowd control by command or violence are the true subjects of la manifestation. I argue, however, that Balaton's interventions in the street are also violent. The up-ends, tears up, and collapses completely the gritted elements of Thompson's ungiving street in ways that disorient and displace the policemen, the crowd, and therefore the viewer. Balaton's bold distillations of actuality rendered through dramatic cropping and disorienting spatial distortions refuse ideological resolution, registering the ironies of a world shaped by and filtered through the law. This is bolstered by a refusal of optical resolution, as graphic void oscillates between blank page, abstract design, and built environment. Returning to a lithograph in the Canard Sauvage, we see Balaton using the volatile nature of the Parisian street to destabilize the very notion of authority itself. While the crowd aptly navigates their way through the scene, the still policemen seems to hover in midair with nothing to anchor. Balaton dissolves the solid ground beneath the officer's feet, revealing the only blank space in an otherwise roughly shaded composition. As in many of his police prints, the artist thereby inverts or erases completely the elements of the street that feign order, exposing gaps in its structural logic, both physical and legislative. Through these violent interventions, Balaton gives visual form to the inherent disconnects that occurred between law and its enforcement in the unpredictable streets of late 19th century Paris. Although rendered as blank or just disjointed spaces by the artist, these visual gaps in the urban fabric are not devoid of meaning. Rather, they function for Balaton as charged, synaptic junctures where exchanges between the police and the police in reality and in artistic reimagining were continuously negotiated, complicated and misunderstood. Exploiting such confusion, Balaton's Prince of Police called attention to the instabilities of urban space and of its control at the turn of the century. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jordan. That was incredibly fascinating. I am so delighted to hear this work. Balaton, I think, is gaining more attention recently, especially with the exhibition that was at the Met and the Royal Academy. It's really fascinating to look more closely at these prints. These have always been some of my favorite works, and they're so graphically powerful and, as you have pointed out, incredibly complex in what they're observing about the control state. Let's move on to our second speaker, Claire Heidenreich from Penn State University. She will be introduced by her advisor, Dr. Nancy Locke, another great friend of the Barnes who is associate professor of art history there. So without further ado, here is Nancy Locke. I'm Nancy Locke, and I teach the history of modern art at Penn State University. It is my pleasure to introduce Claire Heidenreich, who is working with me on her dissertation, Apparition and Abstraction, Maurice Denise, Visionary Catholicism. Claire has researched the Nabi movement from many different angles, and her dissertation examines the religious imagery of Denis in the context of neo-Catholicism in the late 19th century. Her article on Émile Bernards Ragpickers of Clichy, published in 19th century art worldwide, examines the persistence of the practice of headbinding in Provincial France and its appearance in Bernards' image of two chiffoniers at the edge of the city. At Penn State, Claire has been the instructor of record for an introductory art history course called Pictures and Power, and she has also taught a survey of non-Western art that covered the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Claire's paper today is entitled Mystery, Lourdes and La Salette, Maurice Denise, Catholic Mystery and Miraculous Apparitions. I'm pleased to present Claire Heidenreich. When Maurice Denise said these words in 1922, he was referring to a painting he created when he was only 20 years old. Catholic Mystery was first publicly displayed at the 1891 Salon des Indépendants, and Denis completed six versions of it between April 1889 and 1891. He exhibited alongside his fellow Nabi as a founding member of their pseudo-mystical artistic brotherhood. A subsection of artists grouped under the heading of symbolism, the Nabi were a close-knit community of friends who emphasized abstract forms and patterning in an attempt to capture the interiority of a subject rather than its exterior appearance, conveying their own versions of truth. Although Denis dismissed this canvas as a traditional Catholic theme much later in his life, in this talk I disagree with his statement. While his paintings of Catholic subjects can be and often are read as typical enunciations and crucifixions, I argue that they should be understood as depictions of miraculous visions similar to those experienced by Bernadette of Lourdes and Melanie Calva at La Salette. Through his use of abstraction and subtle alterations of traditional Catholic motif, Denis was able to transform his paintings into contemporary depictions of visionary experiences, offering an answer to the question of what modern religious art should look like. During the 19th century, France underwent a resurgence of not just Catholicism, but a particular type of medieval mysticism that saw a re-emergence of miraculous visions and pilgrimage practices. These visions were experienced primarily by peasant children, providing an argument that connecting with God was not solely the realm of priest and long-dead saints, but was also available to the humblest of French citizens. The word of God was no longer only communicated through the Catholic Church, but also through the lowliest of vessels, uneducated children. This offered a model for a more accessible version of Christianity, one in which holy experience was democratized, providing new opportunities for modern Catholicism by offering average people the possibility of having personal, visceral connections with holy figures. Beginning when he was just 14 years old, Denis repeatedly stated his intention of reinventing Catholic art. Although his strategies for achieving this goal changed throughout his life, his earliest attempts were a reflection of a form of newly emerging Catholicism. Simultaneously modern and backward looking, this popular piety connected people with a medieval tradition that sidestepped the complicated recent history of Catholicism in the long 19th century. By examining the visionary experiences occurring at the time, I'll demonstrate how Denis's religious work in this period related to recent historical apparition, providing him a vehicle through which he could bridge the gap between religion and the avant-garde. Not only can his paintings be more profitably read through this lens, allowing us to achieve a deeper understanding of his work, but it also provides a window into the period, helping us to grasp the type of fervor that was occurring in popular piety. The 1846 La Salette apparition was the first vision of the Virgin Mary to gain widespread popularity in the period. Located in southeastern France, the small community is situated in the French Alps. The principal participants in this miraculous occurrence were two shepherds, Melanie Cova, aged 14, and Pierre Maxime Giraud, aged 11. Due to time constraints, I'm only briefly summarizing the visions at La Salette and Lorde, although there were certainly many other publicized instances of miraculous visions in this period. The children at La Salette only met within a day or two of seeing the vision. While outtending their sheep, they saw a woman sitting. They described her as tall, dressed in white, with a brilliant light around her. Melanie's account of her is surprisingly abstract, breaking her figure down into shape. When questioned, she described the light as round-like in shape. She went on to explain that, quote, when the light began to whirl around, we could hardly look at it. It dazzled us. Then we saw the light extend upward and reach the height of a person. As it whirled around, we began to perceive, within the light, a pair of hands and a face that grew very white. However, we couldn't see the face very clearly. The hands were open over an oval face. We couldn't see clearly. We only saw a light shining. We did see our arms and our elbows, but we couldn't distinguish the wrap. End quote. Although the children were afraid, the lady called them forward and gave them dire warnings that her son was angry and she could no longer protect the world from him. The incidents would soon give rise to a surge of popular piety in the area, including stories that a spring at the site of the vision had emerged after the incident and had miraculous healing properties. These events ultimately resulted in the construction of a church dedicated to the apparition in 1852, just one year after the church recognized the validity of the children's vision. Additionally, while the vision occurred in 1846, 1879 saw a revival of interest in the La Salette apparition as Melanie finally published a secret message that the Virgin had relayed to her. Bernadette Subiro's 1858 visions at Lord remain the most famous incident of miraculous apparitions in modern France. Bernadette, born in 1844, was in many ways similar to Melanie Calva. Her family was poor and Bernadette was never enrolled in school and therefore left a formal education. While out clubbing wood for her family, she observed a grotto from which a brilliant light and a figure emerged. Bernadette said the figure resembled a young girl and knelt to pray in front of her. When her sister and neighbor came upon Bernadette, they commented that she seemed to be in a trance and would not respond to them even after they hit her with stones. Bernadette repeatedly returned to the site and during her third vision, the apparition spoke to her and asked her to return each day for two weeks. Due to the consistency of the rest of her visions, the news quickly spread and Bernadette began to draw large crowds at the grotto each day, up to several thousand within the first week. On the eighth day of the two week period, Bernadette dug into the damp ground of the grotto near the wall, revealing a source of water. The water was later regarded as having miraculous healing powers and people still make pilgrimages to Lord today to bathe in it. By 1862, Church authorities confirmed the authenticity of her visions and Bernadette went on to school then to take vows before her death in 1879. Lord became a famous pilgrimage site with 40,000 pilgrims visiting in 1873 alone, testifying to the immense popularity of the vision. I would like to focus on the way Bernadette described her apparition, both the words she used to refer to the figure in the appearance of it. Unusually, Bernadette used the word aquaro when referring to the apparition. Aquaro was a local word for that. This is key because it suggests Bernadette was not necessarily regarding the figure as a person, in which case she would have referred to the apparition as a she, but perhaps viewing it as an object or an apparition itself, not an actual woman, but some kind of representation of one. In some ways, this level of abstraction predicts how Denis will go on to paint his holy sleeves. Similarly, Bernadette's earliest descriptions of the vision emphasized whiteness above all other qualities, and she was quite vague about the appearance of the apparition. Like the vision at La Salette, Bernadette's choice of words objectified the figure. Denis, born in 1870, was only 14 years old when he began writing of his desire to become a Christian painter. In his journals, Denis noted that his parents believed his religiosity was excessive, going so far as to claim that they feared for his sanity. While Bernadette's visions happened over a decade before Denis' birth, there would have been a resurgence of Bernadette because of her death in 1879. The same year that Melanie published the secret that her vision gave to her. Additionally, Bernadette's death offered the chance for true believers in the Lord Miracles to begin calling for her beatification. These two events would have compounded, garnering attention in Catholic circles in the early 1880s, during which time Denis was a young teen who, by his own admission, was fervent in his faith. Not only were Bernadette and Melanie proof of miraculous visions, but they were also near to his age when they had them, allowing him to relate to the women more easily and encouraging him in his devotion. The ways Denis may have heard about these figures are varied. There were dozens of books published in the 19th century about both Bernadette and Melanie, in addition to pamphlets and prints that were available for purchase at the pilgrimage sites that certainly would have been taken back to Paris. Furthermore, from 1875 to 1900, hundreds of newspaper and journal articles published discussions of the vision of La Salette and its cult. To offer some scale for these publications, the Catholic Daily newspaper La Qua dispessed La Salette over 600 times from 1883 to 1899. It is unclear how much Denis would have heard about the abstract descriptions the children gave, and we cannot know the conversations that occurred in his church or his home. Regardless, the abstract terms the children used demonstrate that it was a logical way for people experiencing visions to process them, and therefore, Denis' utilization of abstraction likely occurred to him as a coherent visual language for illustrating holy apparitions. Catholic mystery is a painting that embodies Denis' early attempts to reinvent Catholic imagery. His six versions of the painting share the same format. The 1889 canvas that currently resides in the Musée départementale Maurice Denis is the second he completed, and the largest version, spanning over three feet by four and a half. The paint is matte and thinly applied with no impasto marring the surface. His use of pastels creates a light infused theme, giving the viewer the impression that the canvas is glowing as it calls to mind the work of Frau Angelou. This painting and Denis' other iterations of it have always been read as emancipations by both critics and historians, and indeed, the title may reference that Mary's virgin pregnancy is one of the central mysteries of Catholicism. Inarguably, Denis has painted most of the major elements of an enunciation scene in the right half of the canvas. The Virgin Mary is sitting with a book falling from her hand, her attention caught by something on the left. Although Mary is more often shown in blue, here she is dressed in a white nun's habit. A halo encircles her head, and a pot with a lily rests on the windowsill, separating her from the other figures and serving as one of the key symbols of the enunciation. Behind her, the wallpaper is printed with flared stalee, perhaps serving as a conservative political signifier. However, the other half of the canvas refutes that this is a strict rendition of the biblical scene. Rather than the angel Gabriel's form, we see that of a priest and to acolyte. The priest's robe is white, broken up with a golden geometric pattern echoed in the cross of the curtains. His eyes are closed, head slightly bowed, as he holds aloft an open text containing the Ave Maria in Latin, as if presenting it to Mary. In front of him stand the two boys, bright red collars and sleeves drawing attention to them as they stand with eyes likewise closed, hands clasped around lit handles. Although all three of these people are shown with halos as if they are holy figures, they appear to be participating in a contemporaneous Catholic service, seemingly processing towards or standing before an altar, not fulfilling the role of Gabriel as messenger. I argued that in this painting, there's a real divide between these two halves of the canvas. Not just a physical one wrought by the expanse of white wall, but a spiritual one that separates the secular and the divine. And including not just a priest, but two children, Deni moved the scene away from an enunciation and towards the modern concern with miraculous visions. All three of the figures on the left stand with their eyes closed, not engaging with the virgin and suggesting that they may not actually be in the room with her. Instead, their meditation indicates that they are not seeing her with their eyes, but within their mind. As no one else could see Bernadette's visions because they were a miraculous occurrence meant for her alone. Here we can understand that this is a vision happening in the mind's eye rather than the physical space these figures occupy. This is further supported by the scale of the figures. The Virgin Mary, usually painted as feet next to the angel, is shown here larger than light. Although seated, her face is noticeably bigger than that of the grown man before her. If she stood, she would be several inches taller than the priest, powering over the modern figures. This suggests that the males are not actually occupying the same space as she is. Rather, they are experiencing a vision of the Virgin that forms miraculously transported into her space. The way Deni chose to depict Mary in the scene is also key. Deni had been experimenting with abstraction in the late 1880s and early 1890s, utilizing the technique for both his secular and religious work. In this canvas, Deni's abstraction is most prominent in Mary's body. Her right arm, as well as the right side of her body, dissolves into her veil, creating the impression of an oval rather than the carefully detailed body of the Virgin Mary. While the hems of the boy's robe seem to meld with the wall behind them, there and the priest's bodies are more carefully delineated, their form suggesting three-dimensionality. Deni's use of abstraction helps to transport the viewer, indicating that we are not seeing a historical depiction of the moment of the annunciation, but a miraculous one. Mary's body dissolves into light and shadow because she is in fact not physically there. Rather than choosing to represent a corporeal view of the Virgin, Deni paints a spiritual one, a choice that he emphasized by clothing Mary in a nun's habit rather than a gown. Such a depiction was in line with the goals of the Nabi, as Deni painted the Virgin's inherent nature, choosing to prioritize the portrayal of her interior being rather than her historical exterior form. This imitates the descriptions given by both Melanie and Bernadette. Melanie had broken the woman's body down the woman's body in her account, emphasizing abstract shapes rather than an idealized whole. Similarly, Bernadette had described her vision as a that rather than a she, focusing on the vision itself as an object, not the holy figure as a person. These instances show that abstraction served as a useful vehicle for holy visions, both when describing and depicting them. The choice of abstraction emphasized a level of removal from the holy figures, allowing both the visionaries and artists to mediate the audience's experience with the divine. In his 1896 notes on religious painting, Deni demonstrated that he was actively thinking about the ideal way to paint miraculous imagery. Quote, And it is painters who provide God with the form of visions. He favors, in the course of centuries, the saints and the simple. Painters event the ideal of divine beauty scattered in the souls of their time, to realize it and impose it in their turn. Those who see only see through the forms created by painters. We read the description of the apparitions of yesteryear and those of today. Is it not to the iconography of Flandren or Signeaux that we must attribute the poverty of the miraculous images recently appeared on our soil of France? Painters are responsible for the plastic beauty of religion. End quote. Beyond the critique of his fellow artists, in this passage, Deni not only utilized the language of miraculous visions, but he also revealed that he conceived of the role of the artist as someone who was responsible for illustrating visions for his audience. It is only through the forms created by an artist that the larger public can have their own visionary experiences. Although Catholic mystery has been regarded as a traditional biblical scene, I argue that it should be read as a depiction of a miraculous vision. In doing so, I bring Deni's painting firmly into his own time. No longer an enunciation that solely references medieval and early modern motif, Catholic mystery is a painting that actively engaged with recent events as Deni sought a new direction for religious art. Through his utilization of visionary imagery, he participated in both abstraction and devotion. In this way, Deni balanced his two worlds of faith and modernism, producing canvases that brought devotion into the modern world as he imagined contemporaneous children having a vision of the Virgin Mary. Thank you. Thank you, Claire. That was very convincing. I was really fascinated to hear this paper also because I was really excited to hear that you're taking Deni's religiosity seriously. I think in this field we tend to emphasize urban life and leftist politics, and to get more of this context of Catholicism and really intimately relating it to his painting was really great, was again very convincing. I wanted to remind the audience that we will have a Q&A after the end of the third paper, so please do put your questions in the chat. I can see some of it is being populated already, so please continue to do that. Our third and final speaker for this morning's session is Naoko Adachi of the University of Pennsylvania, and she will be introduced by her advisor, Dr. Julie Nelson Davis, Associate Professor of History of Art at Penn. Good morning. I'm Julie Nelson Davis from the University of Pennsylvania, and it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Naoko Adachi to you today. Naoko completed her BA at Doshishaw University in 2015 and came to Penn the following fall. Ever since arriving at Penn, she's been a vital part of our intellectual community. She's done so many things at Penn since she's arrived. She's been an active member of the Incubation Series. She was also a spotlight lecturer and a Mellon Summer Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she's worked extensively on the collections of Japanese prints and illustrated books at the Kislak Center in the Penn Libraries. She was also a contributor and co-author for the World on View, Objects from Universal Expositions, 1851 to 1915, a show that was held at the Arthur Ross Gallery in 2018. Naoko is currently working on the Japanese photograph album as a new material form. She's literally rethinking the Japanese photograph album from cover to cover. This year she holds the Dr. Anton C. R. Draceman Fellowship at the Rijksmuseum, where she is working on her project in the larger European context. Her presentation today focuses on lacquer covers, and I'm sure you will find it as I have to be quite exciting and illuminating an important contribution to this entire field. Thank you so much. Naoko, take it away. Here on the cover of the photograph album from the Meiji period, we see a group of distinct motifs. A falcon is shown at rest perched on a patterned screen, enclosed in a dark blue rectangle. To the left, an ox cart and a cherry tree are shown in a plum-shaped frame. In the upper left, we see a scene of a young boy asking his mother for some amazake, a sweet tasting fermented rice beverage, and on the bottom right, two women are depicted doing laundry. Four disparate scenes are crammed together on the glossy black lacquer surface. It makes us wonder how these scenes are related and what they might mean. This is the front cover of a photograph album made in Japan around the 1880s. Inside, there are 50 hand-colored photographs with one large print pasted on each page. Watercolor illustrations decorate the margins, featuring motifs from everyday life or native birds and flowers. The back cover shows a dianthus in a boardface next to a peony branch with a dragonfly hovering over them. Albums like these were sold as souvenirs to foreign visitors to Japan from the 1860s to the early 1900s. After Japan lifted restrictions on international trade and opened the port of Yokohama in 1859, many travelers from Europe and the United States came to Japan for the first time. Diplomats, merchants, and tourists bought Japanese commodities including toys and craft objects as souvenirs for their families and friends back home. Souvenir stores lined the streets of Yokohama. Lacquer goods were among the many collectable items on display as seen in the depiction of a lacquer seller in a book published for Japanese readers, Yokohama Kaiko Kenmonshi, for the record of things seen and heard at the open port of Yokohama. Photographs and photograph albums were extremely popular in these markets and they were the one thing that most travelers brought home. Customers wishing to purchase photographs for an album would choose from a long list of stock images like this one. As we can see, numbers and titles are written in white on the black strip on the edges of photographs and these were likely used as call numbers. The customer would select the photographs and the album covers to have bound as a complete set. My project takes up a new dimension of major period artistic culture through the study of the photograph album. The major period lasting from 1868 to 1912 marks a shift from feudal rule to an imperial government and is a period of increased international trade, technological modernization, and militarization. For Japanese artists and artisans it was a revolutionary moment that brought new clients from Europe and the United States as well as new venues such as international and domestic exhibitions. To date, scholarship on major period Japanese art has mainly focused on painting, examining how Japanese painters interpreted European painting styles as they increasingly gained access to European paintings and prints. However, studies on souvenir objects are still limited for their commercial nature even though they account for a large part of extant Meiji art collections especially those outside of Japan. As a part of these Meiji period export objects some scholars such as Mio Wakita, Luke Artland, and David Odo have made close studies in English for photography as a new mode of representation in Japan. My research will be the first to closely examine the album format which was the most common way to collect these photographs. These albums provide important insights into the Meiji period art as they show the collaborations of Japanese artists who are specialized in various techniques like photography and lacquer. Previously, several studies have explored how Japanese artists adjusted to the changing demands of the new international markets. As art historian Chelsea Foxwell discussed in her book Making Modern Japanese Style Painting in 2015, international exhibitions significantly changed the ways in which nations presented themselves as well as how people perceived the cultures around the world. In this context, Japanese artists searched for and created a unique style of Japanese crafts and Japanese crafts that stood out in the global competition. Foxwell's arguments showed that Japanese craft objects thus shaped the foundations for the styles and iconography of the Meiji period paintings. In addition, the 2014 exhibition Furushinokindai for the Lacquerware in Modern Japan forecast on lacquerwares from Kyoto as they responded to the domestic and international forces that transformed the production and exhibition practices. I take this historic context as a starting point for my analysis of lacquer album covers. Souvenir and commercial objects give us important insights into how artists and dealers created the image of Japan for foreign consumers from various backgrounds. My project examines the album as a whole from cover to cover. These albums are the results of the innovations and collaborations among artists who worked in different media. I use the commercial photograph album as a prism that allows us to see Meiji period Japanese art and its many elements more clearly. I propose a new methodology for the study of Meiji period art first by paying more attention to souvenir objects and second by considering them as a collaborative effort by artists, merchants, and scholars. Susan Stewart has described that the materiality of the covers create the illusion of closure, separating the world inside the covers from the reader's temporal and spatial realm. The lacquer covers enclose and retain the contents of the album and preserve selected representations of Japan. The covers acted as the facade that represented the depicted places and people photographed inside. The glossy lacquer surface also reflects the face of the viewer as they take the album in their hands, inviting them to connect with the object physically and visually. The lacquer covers signal luxury in their size and materiality, making these lacquer covers was extremely complicated and time consuming. Lacquer is a material made from the sap of lacquer trees. This sap is poisonous enough that some people develop a serious rush from direct contact. It is processed into a lacquer paint that has a unique sticky texture different from other pigments used in East Asian painting. Some lacquer objects include makie, a decorative technique that uses gold powder. The term makie comes from the Japanese word to sprinkle the maku and literally translates into sprinkled picture. In this makie process, lacquer paint lines are drawn with a long thin brush. Then gold is sprinkled on the wet lacquer lines using a special device made with a bamboo stick and mesh cloth. To smooth out the surface and to make it durable, lacquering involves many applications of lacquer coating and polishing using a stone and a finger. The technique also takes a long time to finish because every layer of lacquer paint requires more than a week to set and most lacquer ways have more than 10 layers of lacquer paint. Lacquer designs usually appear on both the front and back covers on these photograph albums. Of the nearly 100 albums that I have studied in person and through reproductions, no two album covers are exactly the same. Often these illustrations include birds and flowers or scenes from classic folk tales. However, some designs reappear and two of the most common motifs are the rickshaw and Mount Fuji. For instance, these covers show rickshaw pulled by a young woman, pulled by a young man with a young woman riding and holding an umbrella. Mount Fuji is an even more popular motif on the covers found on landscapes or in the backgrounds of everyday life, including rickshaw, scenes. These are also popular images to appear on the souvenir photographs that would be included in sight. These covers have two main types of makie techniques. Black covers with makie applied on simple black cover, simple black lacquer and red covers that show a technique called sukiy. Sukiy can be translated as translucent picture for its glass-like appearance. These lacquer covers show a generous use of gold with relief techniques and lavish inlays. Some covers also demonstrate elaborate inlay technique called Zorgan, a process in which pieces of metal, wood, ivory, shells or other materials are set onto the lacquer surface. The combination of these techniques on Japanese photograph albums add tactile details on the lacquer covers soliciting visual and haptic engagement from the viewer. This is a striking contrast to European albums with simple leather covers. These makie processes on the lacquer covers point to a specific school of makie makers from this period, the Shibayama school located in Yokohama. Shibayama Lacquerware is especially known for the luxurious and elaborate inlay, often using a variety of materials including ivory, shell pieces, tortoise shells, coral reef, metal, wood and animal bones. These inlay pieces are carved to replicate the textures of flowers, birds, landscapes and humans and then carefully layered and placed together on the lacquer surfaces. The Shibayama Lacquer is recognized by historians today as specialists in the production of export objects. The Atelier produced numerous works for international exhibitions since 1876 when they first exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. One of the most accomplished examples of Shibayama craftsmanship is at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This small cabinet dated to the late 1880s shows a meticulously shaped rooster's bodies using layers of inlays. Pieces of coral imitate the red combs and waddles while distinct green and palm lusters of shell pieces shape the parts of the wings. The subtle and tail feathers are made with gold and brown shells and the tail feathers a gradation of colors from brown to white. Meticulous carving recreates the shine of the feathers, the varying colors of the shell pieces whose hue shifts when viewed from different angles creates a lively representation of colors of the rooster. This small cabinet shows how multiple craftspeople planned and chose appropriate elements for maximum effect. This cabinet represents another important aspects of Meiji period art, a collaboration of artists and the work of trade companies. This cabinet has the artist seals including one for Shibayama Exe, the grandson of the founder of Shibayama school and two additional marks for the artists who likely made makie and metalwork. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum records this Shibayama cabinet was acquired from the Ozeki company. It is likely that the Ozeki company orchestrated the collaboration of the artists of Shibayama craft, makie and metalwork, all of whom signed on the cabinet. Japanese crafts from Meiji period including Shibayama lacquer reached foreign audiences through trade companies. The first of these trade companies, Kiryu Koshou Kaisha, was established under the auspices of Japanese government in the preparation for the 1873 Vienna international exhibition, the first exhibition that Japan participated in as a nation. Through this trading company the government aimed to establish Japan as a strong presence in the international market of artworks and industrial products. Kiryu hired their own artists who worked in various genres such as lacquer, ceramics, cloisonet, bronze and textile. Private companies followed the footsteps of Kiryu to participate in this lucrative market. Ozeki Tejiro who sold this cabinet was one of the three major companies that traded Shibayama along with Minoda Chōjiro and Araihanbe. Those sources are limited to find out if or how these trading companies participated in the production of photograph albums. It is likely that they played a significant part in connecting artists who made lacquer wares, photographs and book illustrations. They would have introduced the sellers of the album to desired foreign clients as well. The album covers follow the popular craft designs from this period using motifs like Mount Fuji and rickshaws. These images that appear in other media like the photographs inside the covers planted and reinforced the stereotypes of Japan. As Foxwell pointed out, the designs of objects produced by the trade companies show both, quote, technical sophistication while insisting on Japanese cultural distinctness, unquote. Using specialized techniques like colored glazing on porcelain or elaborate makie, these products shaped the stereotypes of the Japanese image. On the reflective surface, the viewers saw themselves on the Japanese lacquer album. The album thus assimilated the viewer's personal experience with the distinctively Japanese product. These lacquer album covers thus had layers of meanings embedded into their flat and glossy surfaces. Shibayama lacquer makers made these objects designed to appeal to foreign customers as they collaborated with trading companies. This network behind the album production demonstrates the essential roles these companies trade companies played in the making of Japanese export art. Though these companies are often left out of the discussion on major Japanese art, they were crucial in building a new system of art production in exhibition. The representatives of Japanese artists in this period with the strong backing of the Japanese government tried to consolidate a position for Japanese art in the global exhibitionary places which were largely controlled by the European and American powers. Their research around the world helped define and create a powerful and enduring image of Japan for the international audience. Thank you. Thank you, Naoko. Naoko, that was beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you all of you for your really fascinating and rich and beautiful papers. I loved hearing about all of these different subjects which are nevertheless actually quite tied together. I have so many questions. Actually, let's just start with Naoko since you finished her. You were lost to go. I was curious about a couple things. One is clearly you're talking about the Shibayama Lacquerware as being made for this export audience. I was just curious, did they make things for a Japanese audience, does a Japanese audience buy completely different products? What is the difference between the market for the Japanese audience and the Western audience? Thank you. The Shibayama school, they mostly made objects for export since they have started selling for the foreign market. That was the only thing they did around the 1860s and 70s. But before that, they were a very small school in Japan that also made for the domestic market, and very little is known about what they made and what kinds of objects were made in that period. It's hard to say how did they make things differently, but I think for the export market they were really enthusiastic about making really elaborate, detailed objects that are so impressive for the export market. First of all, I thought it was really innovative that you're looking at these photograph albums, not in history of photography, which is usually how I've heard about them, but as decorative objects that you're looking at the lacquer covers and you're looking at them in the context of decorative crafts and objects that were imported from Japan and China. I couldn't help but think of the longer history of this, that like since at least what the 17th century, lacquer ware, screens, cabinets, etc. were being imported from China and from Japan, and how this story of the lacquer covers fits into that longer history of Shima, Zuri, Japanese, and all this, the image of Asian decorative objects in the West. Yeah, definitely. That's exactly the perspective that I'm looking at, the prehistory to the images of Japan or East Asia that are exported to Europe, and that's basically the research I'm doing here now in Amsterdam. That's very exciting. So we have a question for Jordan from Nancy Locke. She says, thank you for a wonderful paper. Can you speak to the exaggeration of the running postures, at least somewhat comic, in La manifestiación? Could this comic dimension be related to the point you were making about its disconnect between Valentin's representation of authority and the crowd? Thank you. That's a great question. I think that that image is also comic. There's one of the figures who's running away is sort of thumbing his nose at the police. So there is a sort of comic dimension that underlies most of, I think, Bellatone's work has this kind of comic dimension most of the time. He contributes to many satirical and humoristic journals during the period. So I do think that the sort of exaggerated nature of the running, it sort of, he criticizes both the sort of police threat, but also the reaction to it. I think he exaggerates that even by saying this man who inspires terror. So there is this kind of comically exaggerated aspect to the way that he depicts the way that he depicts both policemen and the crowds that they are attempting to control. I was also struck by your discussion of La manifestiación when you were talking about that, that the elevated viewpoint is like the viewpoint of mounted police. So in a way, as a viewer, you're being put in the position of mounted police, that you are the mounted police controlling the crowd. Yeah, that was, that also to me is part of Bellatone is so ambivalent or, you know, he's not so clearly coming down on with one, you know, he's not like clearly I am an anarchist and this is my viewpoint. He is definitely very complex and nuanced and ambivalent. I thought that was part of that, this elevated viewpoint where you are the police and at the same time, you're, you know, you're seeing the, again, the comic-ness of this scene and the threat that the crowd is running from. What is my question there? I guess my related question there is, you know, you also talk about this idea of the decorative effect of his woodcut. And I was so struck by that because there's clearly a very incisive social and critique and commentary going on through this quote unquote decorative effect. And of course, the formalist innovations that he is using in these prints are coming from Japanese prints. Anyway, I wondered if you could talk more about those different connections. Sure. I think, you know, Bellatone is sort of a modern innovator of the woodcut and this is something that has been discussed more recently, as you mentioned, at the Met exhibition, but also, for example, he contributed a woodcut to an exhibition in Toulouse in 1894. And in the review, the reviewer sort of compares him as this new modern innovator bringing the kind of work of Durer and other sort of well-known woodcut makers from the past into the present and how he sort of brings this traditional medium into the modern through the street. So I do think, you know, he has this, many of his images and his sort of reputation is tied to his sort of woodcuts and the very sort of stark black and white character of them. And I think when you look at something like LeCharge where you see him up tilting the image so that the street sort of flattened but also kind of three dimensional, I think there you can see some of the influence from Japanese woodcuts where there's this kind of elevated perspective and sort of flattening of the dimensions so that you sort of get multiple perspectives in a single image. Yeah, so I think that he's definitely drawing on the past and sort of remaking that in the present. And I think the fact that his images are very sort of black and white is something that adds to that kind of decorative effect that I mentioned because there is this sort of patterning of people and, you know, different textures. He often has sort of gridded streets next to people and blank spaces. So there's also this combination of these different structural spaces, but the way that he renders them is very graphic. Thank you. Claire, we have a question for you. Could you comment more specifically on the visual connections Denis might be making to medieval images of divine visions? Yes, this is actually the topic of my second chapter of my dissertation. So I've been reading a lot about medieval examples. What we're seeing here varies in several ways. Of course, medieval visions are widespread and different differ a lot, but most of them tend to be attached to a physical art object. So more often than not, the vision is directing someone to find a miraculously created object, or they are seeing a painting or a sculpture that is moving speaking, weeping, blinking, doing something very activated. So what we're seeing here is a little different because we aren't actually getting a physical object attached to it. We're having children sort of in rural areas seeing something and then there's no like physical reminder left behind, except arguably maybe a miraculous stream of some kind. So it is varying depending on where you are in Europe. The idea that like these figures are wearing white tends to be very common in Spain in the Middle Ages. And there are depictions in medieval manuscripts that can be quite abstract as well. So it's a big question if that answers some of it for you. Thank you. I also couldn't help but think about Corbe's burial of Ulna when I was listening to your presentation looking at the picture and maybe it isn't completely not really, you can dismiss it completely, but just in terms of like the visual history of seeing the little acolytes as you said, it just brought to mind that this is perhaps in reaction to that kind of realist depiction that Corbe made. Yeah, do you have any, especially the landscape that you see out the window? I just felt like that was probably part of placing this theme. I don't know if you could comment more about that. I've never connected it to burial or none. So that's really fascinating and I'm going to spend a lot of time looking at that painting. You're not wrong because I can picture those boys in my head. I think the landscape is in some ways placing it, particularly in the tradition of medieval through early modern enunciations where you tend to see some kind of cityscape outside the window that is placing the Virgin Mary as a modern woman in whatever time she's in. Here we're getting this sort of abstracted beautifully pink landscape that very much is related to the kinds of landscapes we see in Nabi paintings. So I think it's certainly a way to play with abstraction and add kind of their own modern take on it by having that in the background. Although, of course, it doesn't, unlike burial or none, where you're really being placed in a very specific location. I don't think that's what Denny is trying to do in his because it's so kind of, it's just landscape. It's not like, oh, this is the specific hill, this is a building we can see. It's much more kind of broad and decorative. Thank you. We have a lot more questions and we're at 11.30. I don't know if someone can confirm for me that I can go through all these questions still. Good. Okay. So for Naoko, we have a question from Lisa Salsman. Are the lacquer covers unique to photographic albums as opposed to collections of, say, colorful COA prints? If so, might they compensate for the coloristic impoverishment of black and white photographs? Yeah, thank you for that question. I'm thinking about other examples where the lacquer covers are used and this is a very unique time and also purpose that lacquer covers are used. I know that there is an album of lithograph prints that uses lacquer covers from an exhibition catalog and I've never seen it in person and I don't know much about that at all. But that's the only example where I know lacquer covers that are used for anything other than photo albums. I also know that lacquer covers can be used for photo albums made for domestic consumption. I think that's also in the in the imperial collection in Japan, but I've only heard about that and I've never seen any, I don't have any specific information on it. But in terms of the compensating for the colors, I have to say that these black and white photographs are hand colored and some of them are really colorfully colored. But I think also it's a very flat image, right? The photograph images are very flat and the lacquer covers can be very tactile and three-dimensional and if the lacquer covers are compensating for anything, I think that might be something that lacquer covers are doing so differently than the photograph prints. Yeah, that is a really good point because some of them are like belief sculpture and really, really incredible material-wise, you know, in tactility. We have another question about lacquer. Naoko, isn't lacquer very difficult to maintain? In your experience, do collectors and consumers do a good job with the upkeep of the material of the album itself? And what does it mean to make a travel slash tourist-oriented photo album that demands you continually revisit it? Yes, that's a great question about the materiality of lacquer. And I've seen many albums where a large part of it is cracked or the ivory inlays are fallen. But lacquer has been very popular for thousands of years because of its strength and durability. So yes, and also these lacquer export objects are not made as they were more mass produced objects. So these are not the kind of thing where lacquer makers are spending a lot of time and care. So these lacquer covers are more fragile than something in an imperiable collection. But they do still do a good job of protecting itself and the photographs inside. I think the bigger problem is that how to store them in museum settings, because photographs storage are usually dry and cold temperature, while lacquer is best stored in humid and warmer temperature. So that's the problem that museum curators and conservators are facing with these photo albums. Are they often stored separately? In your experience? They are stored usually in the photo storage and they look fine. They are stored in their nice box and they have been doing all right after a couple of hundred years. So they seem fine for now, but it's not ideal for the covers. We have more questions about lacquer. Do you know if these lacquer covers were sold to travelers or tourists or exported separately, or did they mostly reach overseas as part of the album completed in Japanese port cities? I was also wondering if you know the price range of these lacquer covers and or photographic albums. Right. Price range is difficult because every album is different. Every album has different numbers of photographs and the image on the lacquer covers or how many inlays they're very different. It varies a lot by album to album and I've seen, I can't really, I can't remember what the kind of what the price is for, but I have seen some prices written on the albums, like maybe one or two examples, but I'm not sure if that was the original price or the price when it was sold to other people. So I don't know, I can't say much about that. And what were they other questions? It was if they were sold to travelers and tourists or exported separately. Oh yeah, yeah. I think they might have been exported separately as well, because I have found quite a few lacquer, lacquer albums with no photographs inside. Interestingly here in the Rijksmuseum, I've seen maybe three or four lacquer albums with no pictures inside. And yeah, but I think it was also people could also purchase these albums with the photographs inside bound in the lacquer format, lacquer covered format in Yokohama as well. I think we are getting to the end of our time. So I will just wrap up to say thank you so much, all of you for your wonderful papers. I really enjoyed them. I really enjoyed reading them. I really enjoyed listening to you deliver them with your beautiful slide presentation. And I'm really excited that this is kicking off our two days of presentations. I thought it was very rich. And it's really exciting to see the direction that you're all going in, because they're all very, I think, much needed in the field. So thank you again. And I hope you will all join us for the next session.