[music] Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm Tyler Green. It's a holiday weekend, which means we have a holiday clips episode for you. As an author and historian who believes strongly in revisionist history, it's a pleasure to bring you a show on one of the great revisionist series of artworks in our nation's history. Along with Austin Baron Bailey, my guest Elizabeth Hutton Turner was the co-curator of Jacob Lawrence, the American Struggle. The exhibition, which debuted at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts in 2020, presented Lawrence's 1954-56 struggle from the history of the American people. The series presents a revisionist in pictorial history of the first five decades of the United States Republic, or what Lawrence called "the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy." The exhibition marked the first time in more than 60 years that the paintings had been together. The excellent catalog, "It's Terrific You Should Own It," was published by University of Washington Press. Amazon still offers it for $45. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, "After the Break." [music] Modern Art Notes is supported by Getty. One view through July 7, 2024 at the Getty Center, 19th Century Photography Now, explores early photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Organized around five themes dating back to the mediums beginnings, the exhibition considers how many of the conventions established during photography's earliest years persist today. Featuring works by Anmi Lee, "Carry Me Weems," "Paul and Poggy Supoya," and "Wendy Red Star," among others, the exhibition invites us to re-imagine these early pictures while drawing connections between photography then and now. Learn more and make free advanced reservations today at Getty.edu. For more than three decades, Arthur Jafa has crisscrossed the worlds of art, film, and music, taking viewers on a powerful journey through black expression. With a selection of works you won't want to miss, Jafa's newest survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago underscores his unique approach to art making, where the lines between popular and high-culture blur and the personal collides with the political. Plan your visit at mcachicago.org. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents Raquib Shaw, "Ballads of East and West," and his luminous paintings Shaw masterfully blends Eastern and Western influences, weaving together fable, history, and autobiography. His works unite Western art and history with Asian ornamental aesthetics and philosophical traditions. The artist paints with porcupine quills and fine needles to render precise details of delicate flowers or distant mountains. Opulent scenes adorned with jewels and semi-precious stones captivate viewers with iridescent shimmer. This exhibition is on view through September 2. Learn more at mphh.org/requibshaw. The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas presents Janet Sobel all over through August 11, 2024. Janet Sobel burst onto the New York art scene in the mid-1940s with a novel approach to modern abstraction, dripping and pouring skeins of paint onto horizontal boards or canvases, and filling these supports from corner to corner. She was an innovator of all over painting. The Menil's exhibition focuses on Sobel's abstract practice, bringing together some 30 artworks from museums, private collections, and the artists' family. Find details at menil.org. The Menil Collection is always free. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. Glad to be here. Let's set the stage a bit for our conversation about these paintings. The mid-1950s, how old is Lawrence and how many of his 10 narrative series of paintings has he already completed before he begins on this series? Yes, so Lawrence is 37 years old, just thinking back when he came to fame with the exhibition of the Migration series at Edith Halpert's Gallery, he was only 23 years old. And so moving forward in time, we find him in middle age, 37. And he is at the top of his game, his style has evolved, developed into a multi-layered, multi-valent kind of application of paint, and his content is equally challenging and developed in terms of a very strong relationship between a word and image with his narrative cycles. This will be his seventh out of 10 narratives that he'll do in his career. So you can see that it's heavily weighted, this narrative form, very challenging narrative form comes out early in his career, and then he uses it strategically only at later intervals. Although I would add that there is a narrative component to many of his works, but this idea, his invention of the same sized Masonite panels or hardboard panels gathered together with texts accompanied by text, this is number seven. Five years after finishing the series, Lawrence calls it a turning point in his career. How so? I think he realized that he was operating at that level of control and the idea that he believed, I mean, he honestly believed in the power of his narrative invention and for his narrative invention to freight this kind of content about being American and seeing and owning American history, embracing it for what it is, what it was, and to present that understanding to the American public writ large. I think he very much meant it to be a part of the conversation at that moment in 1954, he started it exactly the month in May 1954 at exactly the moment of the Brown v. Board of Education decision being handed down. I think you can see his research working in concert with that kind of backdrop. Why do you think the subject he chose at that moment was the history of the nation, which I mean, it's certainly the biggest subject he could have chosen. Well let's think about it in terms of the kinds of conversations that were in the media at the time, this idea of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the idea of this lit mistest for who is an American and who is the true American at the same time, this question and important claim for equality in the desegregation of schools, you know that I think calls for an identity check and Lawrence is saying to the public writ large that all of American history is African American history, that they're inseparable and that one needs to understand that the African American lens is critical for understanding American history. If I could just provide a moment of historiographical lens for that idea, the field of American history in 1956, especially 19th century American history, was dominated by Southerners. It's really not until you kind of get the Eric Phoners and in that generation, the kind of the southern hold on the American story is overturned. Are there any contexts for Lawrence's address of American history and his insistence on putting black Americans at the heart of it that are relevant or informed him anything contemporary or is this entirely a product of his own revisionism? You're right, it's well before Howard Zinn's social history of the 1960s, its social history bottom up, if you will, everyday people, ordinary people, decisions made by the people that shape our life and times. So he's well ahead of his time in terms of historiography, but in backing up a bit, one must look also to the publication of John Hope Franklin's book from slavery to freedom, being published in the late '40s and then also think of the work, important work of Herbert Aptaker in his documentation of bringing forward important documentation of the history of slavery in America and also bringing forward key documents and publishing them. All of that I think goes to create this larger awareness on the part of Lawrence, but it is also, I think, his view that history should not be segregated and that he, of course, as we all know, was not a cultural separatist, that he really believed that his claim to those iconic events was a part and parcel of his own citizenship in the United States. So he believed that this subject should be a part of something that everyone needed to see and that from the public writ large, all Americans needed to understand it through the African-American lens because it had been totally left out. And so I think it's an eye-opening, eye-popping kind of experience to be able to really deeply look into these paintings and read these words of individuals from that timeframe. I think that's just a part of just how far he thought this invention could carry the message. It's quite exciting. You were mentioning earlier about Lawrence's moment at the moment where he was in time, how old he was and that kind of thing, that point of his career. He was also perhaps the best-known African-American artist in America, or actually internationally. He, modern artist, he was included in all of the key surveys of American art. He is representing his figurative style, if you will, his way of presenting content was present in all the surveys of American art, American painting. So he was quite prominent. There's one other book I thought of as I walked through the exhibition that's in Salem as we're recording this. And that is W.E.V. Du Bois' 1935 book, "Black Reconstruction in America," the subtitle of which almost perfectly describes Lawrence's project. The subtitle is an essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America. Du Bois' framing foregrounds through all Black Americans played as primary actors within an historical narrative that had not always included them as such. And I suspect Lawrence as well aware of the book. Yes, I imagine so. And Du Bois is also, you know, has a very large profile in America and in Harlem. I mean, he is very much challenging the United States' conventional view of history, even as Lawrence is doing so in the 1950s. He is a part of teaching history at the Jefferson School, which has a branch in Harlem. There's very much a sense that history needs to be rewritten, expanded, and understood as a larger phenomenon than simply the iconic events with the single white male hero at the helm. And as we get to talking about individual paintings, individual panels at a moment, we'll touch on a couple of places where Lawrence really emphasizes that. But before we get into the panels, let's quickly set up this series. Lawrence plans this as a 60 painting series. It ends up being a 30 painting series. 25 of them are in the show as we tape this, although who knows maybe if another one or two gets found, it will work its way in. This exhibition and book are an act of assembly, really. What did you have to do to get all these pictures in one place at one time again for the first time since 1957, I think? Well, I think we had a, what shall we say, a leg up as our ally, a very passionate collector by the name of Harvey Ross, who at the time of the Reunion of the Migration series in New York in 1995, which was a reunion that I had curated and MoMA and the Phillips had collaborated on. There was an exhibit of the struggle series or some panels from the struggle series, an exhibit of Jacob Lawrence's work with the 17 panels of the struggle series at the Midtown Basin Gallery, and he began looking at these works and wondering why these were scattered. They were in the hands of many different collectors, private collectors, and this was the only series that was not held by an institution, or at least a group of them weren't, so he and his wife Harvey Ann began to collect them. I came to know him. We stayed in touch, and so I would say, how did we get these works together? We had a leg up in that Harvey and his wife Harvey Ann had gathered together 12 of them. That pushed us to begin through the catalog race and A to contact other owners and would be lenders. And it's so interesting, Tyler, these panels had been located, but then it had been practically 20 years since their location had been identified, and in some cases they had been sold, they had been dispersed. I mean, memory is a very short-term thing when it comes to the art market and tracing provenance, and so it became a real detective game, finding people that were finding the new owners of certain pieces and being able to tell them about our project, this idea that we wanted not only to reunite the physical paintings, but also to reunite them, and this is where it really becomes the first time in 60 years, reunite them with the words that were meant to accompany them. And it's amazing how quickly those, the words of the captions, the painting captions were peeled away from these objects. They did not accompany them through time, and so in reuniting these pictures, pulling them together one by one, it was also reuniting them with the words because Lawrence's invention really comes, narrative invention really comes when you start to decipher these color patterns and forms and bringing them together with the words. His method is to read the full text of, let's say, a quotation that he's excerpted. So his manner of visualization comes from reading, and it's always been an interesting phenomenon that Lawrence is a modern artist who spends a great deal of time in the library, and he had a tremendous capacity for synthesis, and to really understand the flow and also to get to the heart of a particular passage or moment. That was also one of the great discoveries in bringing this together. Lawrence originally plans, he has various ideas for this historical narrative, and he starts researching it in 1949, so it's five years of research before he ever begins to paint, and so he in one of his funding applications, he explains that he has assembled a clipping file of 300 items. One can think about this kind of research, and we went to all the various archives for Jacob Lawrence searching in vain for these clippings. What we found instead is, of course, the clipping files at the Schomburg Library, and I don't know whether you remember the famous Harmon Foundation photograph of the reading room of the Schomburg where people are diligently working at tables. What you see are people not people reading books necessarily, you have people making up these clipping scrapbooks. In the trash can beside the tables, you see the leavings of whatever they've cut out of newspaper articles that are related to African American culture and history, various articles from magazines, just very interesting kinds of contemporary looks at history and commentary and book reviews and all manner of things come up in these clipping files. The Schomburg Library actually stopped doing that kind of work in 1972, and the clipping files last only live in microfiche, but they're there. What they do is they give you an idea of Lawrence's research process, the idea of extrapolating or paying clear attention to what is going on in the news, in the various publications at the time that he is working, but also knowing that Lawrence can rely on these various thematic files, organized thematically at the Schomburg. I think that's an interesting aspect that we discovered, but Lawrence does start off working these five years, and he thinks at first it's going to be an African American history that covers the entire timeframe of US history from its founding, but then Lawrence shifts, and it is in this period of 1954 that he decides, "No, I'm going to take iconic events from American history and look at them through the African American lens, and yes, very much in keeping with WB Du Bois' notion that America, all of America, needs to see or understand this through this lens." So turning to the panels themselves, what are the themes or subjects that maybe aren't in every panel, but that remain present and foregrounded across the series? I think foregrounded in this series is the notion of the people. The idea that you see groups of people in the midst of deciding or fighting or pursuing moving toward a goal, but they are in groups and they're ordinary people. They're women, they're men, they're all colors, races, you don't get a sense of overtly racial identification, but you do have a sense that there's all kinds of people. I guess the word "all" is the best way of putting it, that Lawrence has a way of bringing people together and having it understood what kind of spirit is galvanizing their movement and what is creating these clashes. So for example, I'm thinking of his painting called "The Masker at Boston," and this is of course the iconic moment where the colonists who held captive in a kind of city occupied by British troops are fighting against this force. They see it as oppression, so we have the colonists throwing rocks and the moment where the British soldiers fire. And what Lawrence chooses to bring out of that iconic moment, again, a very strongly remembered moment, not the British soldiers, not the guns, but the colonists united, throwing the rocks, centered in the midst of that group is Christmossatics who has fallen and is bleeding and is the first martyr, or considered to be the first martyr of the revolution. And so you've got that kind of triangular kind of composition that is filled with this fury of the colonists. It's about what is galvanizing that group and how it is that, and their bodies almost enfering the fallen, Christmossatics. You mentioned that the panels really focus on groups of people. There are only two panels in the entire series that feature individuals, single individuals. You also mentioned the muscular compositions, I'm sure that's going to come up again and again as we talk. "Masker in Boston" is just dominated by this impossibly beefy triangle at the right hand side of the panel. We'll have an image of it on manpodcast.com. Another painterly element that recurs across panel after panel after panel is the way Lawrence uses the color red. How does red and really small but very loud passages of red recur over and over again? Well, starting with the very first panel that's in the sequence there in the exhibition which you begin with a quotation from Patrick Henry's speech to the Virginia Convention asking, are we willing to bear the chains of slavery is his question? And of course, that's not the famous quotation of "Give me liberty or give me death" but Henry's speech is more like a petition of an enslaved people so he invokes slavery on behalf of the cause of the colonists quest for freedom. And what Lawrence shows you are people listening to these words, hearing these words, and there is a curtain that covers part of the scene and dripping from that curtain are large strokes of red. And it's the symbolism of that red and the red for the blood of sacrifice that what is it going to cost to gain this freedom and who will sacrifice and of course all are meant to sacrifice everyone listening to those words knows that what will come is that kind of bloody sacrifice in the fight. And of course, Henry's words were meant to raise money for or to send the Virginia to bring together the Virginia militia. So interestingly enough, there is a figure standing tall above them pointing behind that curtain. You can't see what's behind the curtain, the curtain is dripping with blood but is pointing ahead. The people in below him are clustered in groups. There are mothers with children, there are men and women of all persuasions and looking and thinking about these quickening I guess into these small groups, listening to these words. So he puts the words and he makes a painting about what is it like to hear those words. And one imagines that that man standing with the musket pointing is Henry, but we've all had debates in our group of curators trying to figure this out. Henry has their own theory but I think that goes to the point. It's the group. It's how Americans are this diverse and clustered people. Speaking of the group, the 10th panel which features the quotation, "We crossed the river at Mcconkeys Ferry nine miles above Trenton. The night was excessively severe which the men bore without the least murmur. French Tilman, 27th of December, 1776. The 10th panel which is at the Met is a riff on another painting at the Met by Emmanuel Lutze from 1851. What is that 1851 painting and how does Lawrence change the narrative to focus on the group? Can you imagine any greater contrast than the Emmanuel Loytse painting with Loytse's painting? This Emmanuel Loytse painting, of course history painting in the 19th century was the highest form and the most important type of painting and so it is given the largest amount of square footage and I do mean square footage. It is the size of a large wall. Its frame is equally imposing and what, of course, you have is a life size practically George Washington with his men crossing the river on Christmas Eve in order to surprise the Hessian soldiers that are fighting for the British. This is a particularly important moment in history because, of course, Washington's army had suffered any number of defeats and so his ability to rally this army even under the most adverse conditions to cross is the main story here and Loytse wants you to know who's in charge and the hero there is Washington and the men in the boats with him and behind him pushing away the ice and crossing. It was a night crossing so, of course, this iconic image doesn't really give you that sense at all so it is definitely a construction to feature Washington in a way that is not really related to the facts. The facts are that the men crossed in, huddled in these small boats, these very flimsy boats and that it was a rough cold night in choppy water and so what Lawrence chooses to favor is this firsthand count of Washington's secretary a letter sent to Washington about how the men were feared during this crossing and so you got three boats in this blue sea of choppy water you don't see either shore. What you are focused on is that they are in the midst of trying to get across that river and not drown and they are huddled down the swaths of cloth over these hunched bodies various sort of hats distinguishing the individuals that are in the boat but they are mostly muffled and huddled and then the blood, the red blood of sacrifice is dripping over the sides of the boat various accents just to remind you of exactly how harsh the conditions were but what I love about that is that you are in the midst. The way in which Lawrence wants to portray this you don't know that this is going to be successful you don't know that how it's going to be it's the matter of submitting and undergoing and doing the willingness finding the strength to actually pursue this even when you know they had suffered already so many defeats but they rallied and they got in the boat and went across the river. So I think that's what he wants people to see. He doesn't want you to forget that it really called upon everyone. Another constant across nearly all of the pictures in the series is the palette Lawrence uses you know there are some browns and some blacks of course but the palette is overwhelmingly oriented around the three primary colors red, yellow and blue and Lawrence often uses pale green as well green into the 18th century was considered to be a primary color until it was supplanted by Leblanc for example. So in a painting like panel 18 in all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit from a letter Jefferson wrote to Lewis and Clark in 1803 Lawrence is absolutely clearly building the panel around not just the groups of figures that we've discussed but around the primary colors is there a metaphor did he intend there to be a metaphor between his use of primary colors and the American democratic project or the centrality of democracy to the American project. Well certainly though you make a good point about the repetition of that palette throughout the entire series and of course it is the unifying device and I do think that the strength of that construction and he is literally constructing with those primary colors really does have to do with seeing a unifying thread going through the whole series. I've often wondered about that I've often wondered because we often with the migration series talk about the migration colors but in terms of orange and green and black and thinking about how those work together and then thinking about the struggle with I would say the white and the blue and the golden brown and then these flashes of red though those seem to be his colors of choice and in talking about the panel that you just referred to about with the quotation from the letter Jefferson's instructions to Lewis and Clark on the treatment of native peoples that they certainly most certainly will encounter and most certainly need the help of in order to traverse this territory at all. You see that panel being the one that employs I would say the greatest range of colors and the greatest display of colors. I almost see this as a kind of a very human love note in the middle of what obviously it is a very tense and frenzied kind of there are many tense and frenzied moments but here we have a moment in a vertical panel that's almost divided in half and of course that's a very daredevil move for an artist to create that kind of deliberate kind of symmetry because it could very well fall apart fall flat but in Lawrence's hands these colors the red and the blue meeting there at the center the two columnar figures then the stacking the meeting of two parties there's the voyage of the explorers from the voyage of discovery led at this moment by Sacajawea meeting up with the chief come Kuwait and they are it is a really signal signal moment in this journey and almost every journal anyone that kept a journal on that voyage of discovery recorded this event it was so momentous and what Lawrence does is tell it in the most dramatic fashion possible he picks this moment where Sacajawea is talking to chief come Kuwait and she recognizes that the person she is talking to is her brother and she's not seen him for fifteen years and she had been captured in a tribal dispute in a war and enslaved and then she had eventually been sold to her French fur trapper husband Charbonneau who was hired as a guide for Lewis and Clark with his wife and so you have this incredible reunion and this wonderful warmth and these two figures come up together and they almost form a shape of a heart they want to the movement of their shoulders bending inward almost makes you feel that sort of shape heart shape in the center and it's the moment just before they burst into great joy and happiness and dancing they all all the journals from this moment tell us that there was great joy and dancing at this reunion of this family and I think Lawrence wants you to understand beyond the political implications of conquest or ownership or territory that there is this bond this sense of humanity and this love and I like I said I think that this is a love note in the middle of this very troubled story of American history but you find this and it is a real achievement for Lawrence to portray this visually with these various planar forms and these very bright colors speaking of colors panel four is one of the most interesting in the series for me it the quotation that goes with it is I alarmed almost every house till I got to Lexington Paul Revere the the panel presents Revere's horse as as being black and has Revere wearing a black coat and a black hat which we of course read is the famous tricornard hat of the time I'm not a Revere expert of course but I don't know of anything that meaningfully or truthfully suggests that Revere wrote a black horse and wore a black cloak but certainly much of but certainly the ride was at night and he was unseen and unknown about by the British and certainly one reading is that Lawrence is using black for the horse and Revere's garments as a way of referencing how he was cloaked from their sight but another possible reference came to mind and I wonder if you think Lawrence could have been using it this is a painting made in in 1954 just a year or two after Ralph Ellison's invisible man was published do you think Lawrence is compressing and layering histories here could he be referring to Allison I must say that I hadn't thought about it that way but now that you mention it I can understand the connection that certainly Lawrence was aware of Ellison and there are other ways in which he indicates this in other series so I'm thinking that what is so unique about Lawrence's rendering of Paul Revere as the Knight Rider, as the rider who comes in to alarm the sons of Liberty he's one step ahead of the British he's cloaked in darkness and he's not calling a huge amount of attention to himself as he explains in this text which was you know a recollection and written many years later but he was talking about just this idea that he was being pursued and that he needed to get this information to this group of people who cluster around him it's very hard to even distinguish the individual figures that are around this horse and rider this is not your traditional scene that Grant Wood for example the Paul Revere of the of the American scene painters this is someone who is meant to blend meld kind of be instrumental but then move on the last panel I want to specifically raise is number 19 it shows an imagined passage from the war of 1812 when the British impressed American soldiers and in Lawrence's representation three soldiers are bound poked with swords prompted to bleed and of course this is one of the series of such events that that leads to the war of 1812 so speaking of the illusion of history again it's a picture that very much recalls slavery in the middle passage and the impressment of Africans who were then transported to the Americas and the Caribbean do you think Lawrence is referencing many histories at once here or am I overreaching you know I start to think about many things when I think of that panel of the prisoners being marched before the commandant of the or the captain of the ship who postures over them and they're being goaded and pushed along and then you can see the blood coming from you know where they've been pierced and poked and I sort of connected that with certainly the stacking and the terrible dehumanized aspect of this you know the prisoners have their heads hunched they have their backs toward you their the laws and shaped their stacked kind of vertically as they're walking onto the deck and chains I don't think there's any question that the analogy with enslavement impressment and enslavement was certainly used by people at the time and then thinking the way in which that memory of slavery and the presence of the unresolved I think this is the you know we're talking about historical illusion and how the past and present work together in these paintings it's unresolved history it's history waiting for an acknowledgement it's history waiting for a kind of recognition of what it took to be American to defend America's to fight for America to gain equality and justice in America all of that is an unresolved history and I think Lawrence is giving you kind of an ambiguity with his this wonderful way in the struggle series abstraction really is an important component of that historical lesion that's going on in these compositions where you know these vertically stacked forms really allow for you to begin to imagine how that kind of analogy was absolutely clear but there are other compositions where you've got amazing abstraction that allows for you to understand and empathize I think that's the other aspect of this series we've talked about sacrifice we've talked about this kind of frenzy and conflict and these overlapping and clashing very sharp forms coming together but abstraction also creates passages that aren't necessarily describing any one thing but allows for you to see many things so if you let me just go back in the series and point to the the farmer with the load of hay that is he's hauling he's almost he's so encumbered by this gigantic load of hay that is this profusion of this golden these golden shapes and and he's weighed down he's hunched over he's pulling this cart and it has to do with the weight of the obligation of our democracy that we mutually pledge to one another in our democracy and we are we're encumbered by this weight this pledge and so Lawrence visualizes it in that way and I I can't get over you know just the number of abstract passages that allow for you to begin to understand and feel so many things that's panel six it recalls melee and it absolutely does not recall melee let's close by talking a little bit about how Lawrence painted these panels each is 12 by 16 or 16 inches by 12 depending on orientation each is egg tempera on on on board to me each of them I mean almost all of them recalls or looks a lot like fresco painting albeit with a course all kinds of modernist twists and such but the way Lawrence lays on his paint and layers it even looks like fresco painting into wet plaster what was Lawrence interested in fresco painting he spoke about fresco painting he talked about the paintings of the early Renaissance and being very influenced by the way in which tempera paint was applied in making these very small panels a devotional panels and in tempera and the brightness of the colors and the way in which they could be applied in these layers you know you see many similarities across his series with the idea that you know the panels are prepared they have the gesso and then he draws on them you can see the pencil drawing it shows through and then the way in which he then makes these amazing shapes in applying these colors it's not two or three shapes as one might find in the migration series it's it's just these amazing kind of fractured kaleidoscopic shapes that that start to mesh and overlay and then each color area starts to have there might be a darker blue and then a lighter blue but you get a kind of sense of flashing light and there's a amazing kind of chromatic brilliance he's able to get by allowing the colors that he's using to have these different kinds of shaded areas but it's not traditional modeling in any any stretch of the imagination it's much more about allowing this color to begin to operate in the space of this construction of what he called composition and this armature of the line and then these these amazing colors that come to these very very sharp points are just remarkable i found myself walking through the show thinking of thinking very much of fresco painting and the relation of fresco painting to endurance to how frescos are fundamental to or part of the architecture once they're completed and thinking of that as maybe Lawrence's metaphor for how art and indeed his own interpretation is fundamental to the history of the nation i do think the idea of the permanence of tempera and the the strength the permanence and the strength of temper paint and the architecture of his composition that is organized by his dividing the space with this these lines there's very much an analogy there uh Tyler i think you've set up a beautiful analogy Elizabeth Hutton Turner thanks so much oh thank you it's been my great pleasure that's all for this week's show the modern art notes podcast is edited by wilson butterworth special thanks to steve roden who created the sound for the program the modern art notes podcast is released under a creative commons license please visit modern art notes for more information thanks for listening
