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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 3
Lesson 5: The School of ParisModigliani, Young Woman in a Shirt
Amedeo Modigliani, Young Woman in a Shirt, 1918, oil on canvas (Albertina, Vienna). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
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- I've seen two paintings here by Modigliani. Both of them look like "outsider art". Did he paint anything that was more substantial? These look like 6th grade art class.(3 votes)
- It seems as if Modigliani wants to show a realistic figure of a women that is why his brushwork is not all smooth and dainty, and why her skin does not look as smooth as porcelain.(2 votes)
- Its not "Ang", its Ingres (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the French Neoclassical painter)(3 votes)
- Perhaps the computer at Youtube, guessing an American English spelling for a properly pronounced French name, made that error.(3 votes)
- I don't understand why he didn't put the pupil or the iris in the eye. I don't get the point. They say he allow us to look at the form but it just scares me.(2 votes)
- By not giving the woman a pupil, the artist keeps her eyes open. To me, this makes the woman seem more open as if you could see right into her.(2 votes)
- I love the title of this painting(2 votes)
- I do too. I think there is something about whether it is a shirt she is draped in or something else that also questions how we define things. In this sense, it is the use of language itself. Should language be representational of our thought i.e. a replica of our thought, or is language a process, open to varying interpretations. Calling this a "shirt", I think raises this question.(1 vote)
- Why do his paintings resemble something from a children's scary movie?(2 votes)
- In the Video the doctors are alluding to the resemblance of the work to a classical Greek sculpture. I think the way her head is tilted, the general grace and curvature of her body, and the blanked out eyes are all reminiscent of this style. Perhaps it is a cultural thing as well. In the west we are so used to these kind of figures inhabiting horror movies. I am making assumptions of course, but in the early 20th century perhaps such figures would not have been so much scary as a challenge to the classical depiction of a nude.(1 vote)
- was watercolor used to make this painting. also this video was great!(1 vote)
- Why were his paintings so, well I guess you could say different? Ir seems as if he attempted to step way outside of the box which is a good thing but it just looks funny.(1 vote)
- I think with these pioneering modernists, we are dealing with a major issue of representation versus technique as alluded to in the video and also the raising of the question of what constitutes art. I think for many of us, art and the beautiful walk hand in hand. These artists I believe challenge this assumption. This video points out to me that the artist here is concerned with the act of creation itself; what goes into it, not so much with a representation of something that is beautiful.(1 vote)
- Also why is the painting called Women in a Shirt because she isn't wearing a shirt? She is exposed.(1 vote)
- She is wearing some type of clothing but I do see what you mean(1 vote)
- How can I block this video? I have young students on Khan Academy learning math. They somehow stumbled on this video. It is inappropriate for young students. We would like to somehow restrict this video for our students. Any help please?(0 votes)
- Well, you can't block the video from your students by any means other than telling them NOT to go poking around the Art History curriculum. If you want a math curriculum free of the possibility of students finding art, you'll have to go elsewhere than Khan Academy.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazz music) Voiceover: We're in the
Albertina and we're looking at a Modigliani called
Young Woman in a Shirt. It's a fairly classical Modigliani. Voiceover: She's not really in her shirt. Voiceover: No, that's true. She seems to be holding some
sort of white cloth against her. Voiceover: But you used the word classical and I think that makes a lot of sense. We notice these lovely
curves of her contours and that calls to mind
ancient Greek sculpture or even the nudes of Ang with
their elongated sinuous contours. Voiceover: There's this
real crisis, I think. Here we have somebody coming
out of the Italian tradition who is very much a modernist,
but trying to find a relationship between the 20th century, between
all of the precepts of modernism in its self-consciousness and
of course its history, as well. There's so much emphasis on
his self-aware use of material. Look at the quality of the skin. So often, you referred
to Ang, you might think of this porcelain-like
quality to this skin of the more academic traditions
coming out of the 19th century, but here you have this very
stippled, rough surface, that looks as if it's stucco,
that is anything but porcelain and anything besides smooth. It is calling attention to itself
as material and more than that, calling attention to the artist's
application of that material. Voiceover: You're right, her skin
doesn't look like porcelain like an Ang, but on the other hand, it reminds
one of fresco or terra cotta. There is still that sense of
classicism that comes through and it's important, I think,
to remember that this is 1918, after Braque and Picasso have
dissolved form and fractured space and Modigliani is very
intentionally painting something that looks timeless and classical. Voiceover: I think that that's right. This is, first and foremost, a nude and
this is the most traditional subject. There is a tremendous amount
of respect for that tradition that's built into this painting. At the same time, he's
also emphasizing a system of seeing or a system of
representation that has less to do with what he's observing and more
to do with the painting itself. I'm seeing that, for instance, in the
way that the limbs are constructed, which seem to be relating
to the system of arabesques, as opposed to the way the musculature
and the skeletal structure is actually defined in this body. Voiceover: Right, but you
could say that also about Ang. Voiceover: That's true, absolutely. Ang begins to play fast and loose
with the skeletal structure, but this is Ang on the other side of
Braque and Picasso, as you were saying. Voiceover: There is a
kind of shorthand here that Ang would never have taken. For example, if you look
at her hands, the left hand that's on her lap is formed by just
some orange, terra cotta colored paint and then little lines of orangeish-red
for the tops of her fingers. Voiceover: We're talking
about the process of making, of the artist finding his
forms, finding his lines, finding the methods of representation. I think Modigliani wants us
to have our attention there. Yes, he wants us to see this
woman, but at the same time, he wants us to see his
process and he's allowed for his pencil lines to remain present. Voiceover: And even the canvas
underneath in many areas. Voiceover: That's right, and for a
variety of different kinds of strokes, different kinds of
brushwork, different touches. There is something very physical and very much process-oriented here
that is allowed to remain visible. In a sense, the method of
construction, the process, the intellectual thinking
through of the method of representation and meaning
is made apparent to us. Voiceover: Yeah, I think
that's absolutely right. I think that Modigliani is
certainly drawing our attention to different kinds of strokes
and the rapidity of some, the carefulness of others,
the delicacy of some. Voiceover: In some ways,
and this is something that Modigliani does often,
by not painting in the eyes, he's allowing us, almost
like a classical sculpture, to look at the forms, as opposed
to the gaze of the figure. Voiceover: By making those
eyes these lozenge shapes without real pupils to gaze back at
us, we are reminded, immediately, of the abstraction here, of
the geometry here, of the form. Voiceover: The early 20th century was such an extraordinary moment when
there was all this tension between representation and
technique and what that meant in a world that was aware of the
process of art making as the art itself. (jazz music)