Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2014 Realism to : European art and culture 1848-1936

Divining Psyche: and Portraiture

Craig Judd

3/4 September 2014

Lecture summary: In ancient Greek the word “psyche” referred to a breath, a soul, a ghost or a singular self or conscious personality. Psyche a beautiful woman despised by Venus is the centrepiece of a complex fable in Apuleuis The Golden Ass. In the 18th century the fable was made more provocative by La Fontaine. It is interesting to note that at roughly the same time a large free standing mirror became known as psyche. With the rise of Romanticism the word psyche becomes more clearly associated individual tastes and experiences. People started to interrogate just how the soul might operate; how thought, feeling, instinct and culture might effect the soul/psyche.

Psychology as a discipline emerges in the mid 1860s with scientist /philosophers such as William Wuntde (1832 -1920) William James (1842- 1910) , Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) There as also many other less known utopian thinkers such as Edward carpenter 1844 - 1929, Emily Pankhurst (1858 – 1928) and Rosa Luxembourg (1871 – 1919). Today, this type of intellectual is hard to find.

This is a lecture that examines the work of several artists, some known, some more obscure from the period c1900-1940, the heroic phase of modernism with the development of signature styles of , Expressionism and Surrealism. This overview of the work of artists as diverse as Wyndham Lewis (1882- 1957), Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876 – 1907) , Laura Knight (1877 – 1970), Tamara de Lampicka (1898 -1980) Doris Zinkeisen (1898- 1991) and Meredith Frampton (1894 -1984) will show how artists working in the conservative celebratory genre of portraiture responded to the then new notion of the psyche - a self that is in constant motion, ever changing dependent on the vast array of contexts and possibilities available in the modern materialist world.

Slide list: Edvard Munch “Self portrait Between the Clock and the Bed” oil on canvas 1943 Paula Modersohn Becker, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke” oil on canvas1905 Tamara de Lempicka “Portrait of Grand Duke His Imperial Highness Gabriel Constaninovich of Russia” Collection Hollywood New York Meredith Frampton “Game of Patience’ 1937 Wyndham Lewis “Portrait of TS Eliot” oil on canvas 1938 Durban Art Gallery Laura Knight “ Self Portrait aka the Model 1913”

Reference: Diane Radycki : Paula Modersohm- Becker: The first modern women Artist. Yale U.P. 2013 Laura Cumming: Tubular Bells and all that Jazz The Observer 16 may 2004 Judith Mackrell: Flapper Six Women of Dangerous Generation, Macmillan 2013

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Images:

Laura Knight “Ruby Loftus scewing a breech ring” 86x100cm oil on canvas 1943 Imperial War Museum London

Wyndham Lewis “Mr Wyndham Lewis as Tyro” oil on canvas 1921 Ferens Art Gallery, Hull City Museums and art Gallery UK

Meredith Frampton “Marguerite Kelsey” 120x 141 cm, oil on canvas 1928 Tate London

Tamara de Lempicka “Self portrait driving a Green Bugatti” 1925 oil on canvas private collection

Wyndham Lewis “Edith Sitwell” 86x11cms 1923 Tate London