Art historical analysis (painting), a basic introduction using Goya's Third of May, 1808 — Transcript

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1. 0:04There are different methods that art historians use to get at meaning in a historical sense.
2. 0:09What did the work of art mean to the artist?
3. 0:12What did it mean to the culture for which it was originally made, and how did that meaning change up to the present moment?
4. 0:17One of the first things you can do when you approach a work of art is to begin describing
5. 0:21it. Normally we walk past the work of art quickly, but if you stay with it and
6. 0:27interrogate it, just on what art historians call its formal properties,
7. 0:30you can learn a lot. Formal properties refers just to the physical object itself, and formal
8. 0:36analysis is really based on a simple act that is looking closely. Another thing you can start thinking about is the subject matter; the
9. 0:44content of the work of art. Is it telling a story from mythology,
10. 0:48from history, from the Bible?
11. 0:50And then when it comes to modern art, sometimes that's a little more difficult because sometimes there is no
12. 0:55overt story.
13. 0:56And then the last and, perhaps, even most
14. 0:59important way that art historians try to understand a work of art is to think about the
15. 1:05context in which that work of art was originally embedded. What was the world like when this work of art was made?
16. 1:11What was it made for. Who asked to have it made?
17. 1:14What was happening politically, economically, socially at that moment?
18. 1:17So let's begin with Goya's 3rd of May 1808.
19. 1:22Now, when I walk up to a painting, very often the first thing
20. 1:25I'll try to do is
21. 1:26understand the painting formally. So what decisions did the artist make? Well, for one thing, the arts decided to make a large
22. 1:32painting. That says something about the artist's ambition for the work of art.
23. 1:37And it's important to note that this is oil paint on canvas.
24. 1:42Substantial works of art were oil on canvas. This is not watercolour.
25. 1:46It's not a sketch. The next thing that I notice is the extreme contrast of light and dark, and the way that the artist has
26. 1:53almost divided the canvas into these zones of light and dark. So scale,
27. 2:00material, and value—that is the use of light and dark—are all formal qualities.
28. 2:05But so is composition. Think about it as stage direction. Where is the artist placing his actors?
29. 2:12What is their relationship to the landscape? What is their relationship to one another?
30. 2:17What is the artist asking me to look at? What is he drawing my eye to? And clearly, in this painting,
31. 2:24it's that figure in white with his hands outstretched above him. Goya makes it very clear that we're looking at that man
32. 2:30who's about to be shot. Those guns are pointing right to him. But the composition
33. 2:34also reinforces that by the artist placing that figure against a hillside so that he is
34. 2:40entrapped there. Our eye is led down to the gunman by the
35. 2:45horizon of the hill, and then our eye shoots back to the left, right back to that bright white shirt. The
36. 2:52gunmen form a receding diagonal line, creating an illusion of depth. When we talk about
37. 2:58paintings, we're looking at works of art that are flat, and one of the key questions
38. 3:03we can ask is: is the artist creating an
39. 3:05Illusion of space on that flat surface? And one of the ways that Goya is doing that is by using this
40. 3:12diagonal line that appears to recede into space. He also
41. 3:16reinforces depth in a number of other ways. He does it with light. The brightest elements are forward. Things become dimmer as we move back.
42. 3:24The level of detail
43. 3:26diminishes as we move into the distance. And finally, the artist also uses scale.
44. 3:31So the buildings in the distance are small in comparison to the men in the foreground.
45. 3:35But he's also using light and dark as modeling or chiaroscuro to
46. 3:41create a sense that the forms, the figures in this case, are themselves
47. 3:46three-dimensional, and you can see that really well, for instance, in the man's right hand.
48. 3:50There you can see the fleshy quality of his thumb, where there's a white highlight,
49. 3:54and you can see shadow that is used to trace the contours of that thumb.
50. 4:00And so you have this grounding in space, this volume, and all of these are formal elements.
51. 4:06And if we want to stay on this topic of creating an illusion of space, an artist can also do that by using
52. 4:13foreshortening—that is creating the illusion that forms are coming directly out towards us, or receding back into the space of the painting.
53. 4:21A great example of that is the dead figure in the foreground who's fallen toward us after being shot,
54. 4:28his arms outstretched; and you can see his body move back into space. So the artist has distorted the body, made it
55. 4:36too short, but we see that accurately in the illusionistic depth that the artist has created.
56. 4:41We see that Goya is using a lot of earth tones: browns and golds, and it's nighttime.
57. 4:47You talked about the radical contrast between light and darkness, and the real
58. 4:53reduction of colour in this painting helps to reinforce that. Another important thing to think about is the brushwork. Now
59. 5:00seeing the hand of the artist pushing paint across the canvas is
60. 5:05possible because of oil paint. The energy of the brushwork can activate the surface of the canvas and give it a sense of power and
61. 5:12motion. For example if we look at the white shirt, the brushstrokes are not careful.
62. 5:17It looks sketchy. It looks quick,
63. 5:19and it gives us a sense the man has just raised his arms, that that shirt is actually still in motion.
64. 5:25Look at the facial features of the man. His eyebrows are raised up almost too much, but because the brushwork is so loose,
65. 5:33we forgive that. It becomes a kind of gesture. That speaks of yet another decision the artist is making. The
66. 5:39simplified forms of the face. The simplified forms of the neck, and then the hair.
67. 5:43The artists is not spending a huge amount of time finishing this, making it perfect.
68. 5:48And there's a really different quality that results from that kind of brushy
69. 5:53sense of spontaneity. For me, that visible
70. 5:56brushwork makes me feel the presence of the artist in front of the canvas. There is a sense of immediacy, as
71. 6:04opposed to an artist who might create a very finished line,
72. 6:07which we might see, for instance, in the neoclassical tradition, where the figures seem sculptural and they seem timeless.
73. 6:14This is very much of a particular moment, and how appropriate this is of a particular day: the 3rd of May 1808.
74. 6:21We have a man about to be shot. Figures on the ground in front of him who have just been murdered.
75. 6:27And I see another figure holding his head,
76. 6:30who's next in this line of fire. Goya has taken this static flat object, this oil painting, and he has suggested
77. 6:38depth and the passage of time. We could also notice that the figure in white and many of the other figures, we see their faces.
78. 6:45They're human. We have empathy for them; whereas the soldiers are lined up with their backs toward us,
79. 6:53and we have the sense of a machine-like firing squad
80. 6:57confronting these deeply human figures. We've now entered into the subject matter, into the content of the painting. Well
81. 7:04it's hard to keep those things entirely separate, because as we're talking about the formal elements,
82. 7:08we can see figures who are victims and figures who are the perpetrators of the violence.
83. 7:12So what is the painting about? The narrative and what's actually being conveyed in terms of the unfolding of an action?
84. 7:20Subject matter can be very closely tied to the historical context, and this is a perfect example.
85. 7:27Napoleon Bonaparte is on the throne in France and is asserting his power throughout Europe, including
86. 7:33Spain. Now
87. 7:34Napoleon, through some complex machinations, is able to march into Spain, is
88. 7:38able to depose the king of Spain, Charles the fourth, and is ultimately able to make his brother the king of Spain.
89. 7:45But the people of Spain don't take this sitting down.
90. 7:48There's a popular uprising against the French occupation of Spain. And that event is just the day before,
91. 7:54May 2nd 1808, and in retribution, the French then take a series of innocent people from the city of Madrid,
92. 8:01line them up outside of the city, and shoot them.
93. 8:04And that's what this painting commemorates: a group of innocent Spanish people being brutally murdered by
94. 8:11Napoleon's Army. Goya has given us an
95. 8:14innocent figure with his arms raised in a position that is reminiscent of Christ on the cross; an innocent
96. 8:22martyr brutally murdered. The formal elements are here in support of
97. 8:28Goya's position regarding this event. This is one of the great examples of
98. 8:33Romanticism: this moment in literature, in music, and in painting when
99. 8:38emotional expression came to the fore; when painting was no longer about
100. 8:43abstract ideas, but very much about a kind of emotional response and a more
101. 8:49individualized response. Here we have someone being killed for no good reason;
102. 8:56the Brutal facts of how
103. 8:59inhumane human beings can be to one another. And one of the ways that he conveys that message that is that
104. 9:06content is through the use of symbolism.
105. 9:08Goya has appropriated a historical symbolic language. If we look, for instance, at the man in the white shirt,
106. 9:15he is a martyr–a martyr to Spain—and in fact, his arms are raised up as if he's hanging from the cross; and if
107. 9:22we look very closely, we can see
108. 9:24small indentations in his palms that are a reference to the holes that Christ received on the cross, known as the
109. 9:32Stigmata. So Goya is using this
110. 9:35historical tradition in painting for the representation of this modern event, and
111. 9:41painting that event from this subjective
112. 9:44modern viewpoint. This isn't about a message from the State or the Pope or a
113. 9:51person in position of power. This is very much Goya's point of view, and that speaks to
114. 9:57the economic environment in which this painting was made. This was not a painting that was made for a patron. Somebody did not
115. 10:04commission this painting.
116. 10:04But this was a painting that Goya felt was important to paint, and so he did. It is so clearly about the horrors and the
117. 10:12brutality of war. The painting and our understanding of it is so much more enriched by understanding its
118. 10:20original historical context, and the meaning that it had for the artist and for his world in the early 19th century.