DR. BETH HARRIS: Two of
my favorite paintings, John Everett Millais' Ophelia,
a Pre-Raphaelite painting. SAL KHAN: What do you
mean by Pre-Raphaelite? DR. BETH HARRIS: Well,
the Pre-Raphaelites were a group of artists
in the 1850s in England. Actually they formed
a group in 1848. And their goal was to challenge
the official ideas of art and what it should be. SAL KHAN: They were
Pre-Raphaelite, but Raphael was a Renaissance
artist who really made things exact, and very technical, and-- DR. BETH HARRIS: Raphael
was a Renaissance artist who was revered in
the Victorian era. But by then, they were so
used to looking at Raphael and painting like
Raphael, they so admired him, that it had become
a kind of formula for painting. And the Pre-Raphaelites
said, we want to go back to look at
the art before Raphael because we've descended
into a formula, and we've lost our
real connection to looking and
observing the world. And so they painted directly
from looking closely at nature. They really fit with
these ideas that we've been talking about
of how we value art that challenges
the establishment. SAL KHAN: And I definitely
appreciate that. What this piece does is
it still is aesthetically beautiful in a
traditional sense. And you also look at
it and say, well, there was definitely skill there. I can't just show up at a
canvas and produce something like that. DR. BETH HARRIS:
Yeah, the painting is incredibly absorbing. I mean, in person, it's
astoundingly beautiful. The colors are rich and deep. You can look at how
the artist painted every flower, every blade
of grass, every reed. So that idea of
technical skill-- SAL KHAN: And even the
choice of subject is very-- DR. BETH HARRIS: Beautiful. SAL KHAN: Beautiful. DR. BETH HARRIS: Yeah,
the subject and the way it's painted are both beautiful. And the way it's painted
shows great technical skill. SAL KHAN: So for
this one, I get it on a bunch of different levels. It challenged people. It was kind of a
pivotal piece of art. And it is beautiful and
technically sophisticated. What are we looking on
the right-hand side? DR. BETH HARRIS: Barnett
Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus. SAL KHAN: This is kind of the
classic when people look at it. And they say, well, you
know, that looks nice. It might look nice
above my sofa. But there's a big
difference here where most people would look
at the left-hand side and say, geez, it's pivotal, challenging,
and very technically and beautiful and all. While on the right, it's like,
well, I think I could do that. In fact, you see on these home
improvement shows, people say, oh, we need a piece of artwork. And literally they'll
produce something that looks not too
different than that in a little amount of time. DR. BETH HARRIS: Absolutely, so
it's not about technical skill at all. But for me, what the
Newman asks me to do is something that I really
value in my experience of art. What it does is it
concentrates my attention. First of all, it's really big. And so when you're in its space,
you feel really overcome by it. You feel it kind of
calling out to you. And so you're kind
of drawn to it. And you walk up
close, and it almost starts to become your world. The color is really intense. What happens to me when I'm in
the presence of the painting is that I start to notice
the color and its effect on me and the way that
colors remind me of feelings. SAL KHAN: And I
guess the cynical-- and there are people
who look at that and say, oh, I can
appreciate that. It's a big aesthetic. It's a big red thing
with some lines in it. But it's not-- someone
else could have done it, or someone could do it now. And so that's not why--
what you just described, you are appreciating
the aesthetics of it. And it is this huge
painting, and I can see that. But it's more that he was
the first to kind of-- DR. BETH HARRIS: It actually
is a lot more complicated than it looks. And so it draws us into it. And then we start
looking at the lines, we notice that they go
from the top to the bottom, that he created the
lines in different ways, that they have
different qualities. These are hard
things to tell when we're looking at
the reproduction. It draws us in, and I find
myself paying attention in a way that I don't
normally in my everyday world. And I really appreciate that
for that moment in the museum, I'm taken out of my everyday
world of being distracted and surrounded by a million
different things that I hardly notice. And I'm being asked to
really visually focus. SAL KHAN: I actually appreciate
it in a very similar-- I've actually never
visited it in person. But I can somewhat
imagine on a larger scale, especially if you go up close
and you see the detail there. But there does seem to
be a fundamental division between what-- I mean,
they're both aesthetically captivating and interesting. The painting on
the left, I think you go across culture, really
almost any time in history, and you would have gotten
some appreciation for it. While the painting on
the right, they also would say, well, that's
an interesting way to paint a wall or something. But they wouldn't put
them in the same category. Is that fair to say? DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: I think that
what you're saying is fair. There is a real rupture here. The image on the left
is still very much a part of a history
of art making that has to do with
representation and depiction. And I think that what we're
looking at on the right is a fundamental break. The painting on the left
was a fundamental break in its own day, this
Pre-Raphaelite idea. SAL KHAN: It was more
of a break in style, though, but not really
hitting what is art. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That's right. It is pure abstraction. Barnett Newman was an
abstract expressionist. He belonged to a
group of artists that were thinking
about painting in very different ways. They were asking
whether or not art had to be something
other than what it was. In other words, if
you look at Ophelia, you see this woman
who's drowning, who's submerged in this
stream, and it is beautiful. But in a sense, it's a lie. This is colored
paste on canvas that is trying to represent
something that it's not. It's a falsehood. It's an illusion. The image on the
right is saying, can we be true to the
materiality of our art and still create something
that is profound? So think about
music for a moment. In music, we do not
require a symphony to represent a landscape. It might, and certain
symphonies will do that. But music has taken on its own-- SAL KHAN: Or a human voice. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That's right. But music has taken
on its own terms. Music is about tone. It's about rhythm. It's about its own
internal logic. Painting had never been that. DR. BETH HARRIS: And
you could say, in fact, that the Millais distracts us. SAL KHAN: Right. DR. BETH HARRIS:
From those things that Steven is referring to,
to color, to shapes, to lines. SAL KHAN: The paint itself. DR. BETH HARRIS: Yeah. In a way, what the Newman is
doing is concentrating that. And look at it. Don't be distracted by
all of these other things. SAL KHAN: Yeah, I'm
not trying to be a scene out of Shakespeare. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: But can
I still be as profound? Can I still be in fact
as emotionally powerful? And so here an artist is
saying, you know what? A canvas is two-dimensional. I am going to create
something that seems at least at first
blush to be absolutely flat. But then look at those lines. How do they occupy space? Do they begin to create
an illusion of space in a subtle way? Beth mentioned just a
moment ago that the lines moved from the
top to the bottom. And so they do measure actually
the size of the canvas. In that way, announce
the two-dimensionality of the canvas. But at the same time,
they're different tones, and they're different
qualities of density. And they recede or
they project forward. DR. BETH HARRIS: So let me
ask you, do one of those lines move back? Does one come forward? SAL KHAN: No, it is interesting. It kind of has this very core
primitive dimensionality to it, and you start to see-- I never
thought of it that way before. You're right. What's on the left is a lie. It's something trying to
be something that it's not, while on the right, it literally
is, look, this is the painting. The painting is what
you are trying to see. It's not trying to be a TV
set for the rest of reality. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And so there is a kind of fundamental truth
to the painting on the right that was upending 2,000
years of representation-- SAL KHAN: Or longer, probably. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Absolutely. SAL KHAN: And with
cave paintings. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
That's exactly right. One could say 38,000
years of tradition. And so how radical is that? How brave is that? How heroic is that?