Good morning, everyone. Thank you for Breathing this weather to be here today. I am so excited to Introduce emeline Butterfield Rosen and to welcome her here today Hello to everybody who's tuning in from home My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director here for research interpretation and education emeline Butterfield Rosen is associate director of the Graduate program at Williams College in the history of art at the Clark Art Institute And I understand that she is currently the acting director of the program She has a PhD from Princeton University She has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at CASVA the Center for Advanced Study in the visual arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC She specializes in modern European art and cultural history her broad areas of research and interest include the history of art history and art criticism philosophical theories of the aesthetic Conceptions of the primitive the relationship between the visual and the performing arts Theories of gesture, which you'll be hearing about today The relationship between modern art and science, especially the sciences relating to the human subject her book Her new book modern art and the remaking of human disposition Just pout off the presses from the University of Chicago Looks at the way that artists in the late 19th early 20th century Broke with conventions for posing the human figure and how this break might represent a new understanding of human consciousness It is an incredibly ambitious piece of scholarship the research that it encompasses is is staggering I think it's one of the most brilliant things that I've seen in the field at least in my area I'm super excited about it. It's one of those books that just kind of takes you on an intellectual journey It brings together the history of psychology evolutionary biology and Intellectual history it brings all of these things to shed new light on some of the canonical works of European art and dance and one of those works is The pose those the major work by Surah in our collection Her reading of this painting makes us understand it in a whole new way as you will see So, please welcome emeline Butterfield Rosen Thank you so much Martha for that incredibly humbling introduction and for the invitation to speak here today The Barnes is one of my favorite places in the entire world So it's very special to be able to speak here and thank you also to Aliyah Palumbo and Everyone for for for making the technicalities of this event possible and to the audience for braving Snow sleet and hail which we probably thought we were beyond to be here this morning. So so thank you So as Martha said my book is called Modern art and the remaking of human disposition and and it as the title suggests it addresses a broad topic It's about strategies of posing human figures that were Occurring widely across modern art in Europe around 1900 But really this book grew out of my fascination with a single painting one of the jewels in the crown of the Barnes It's extraordinary collection and I'm speaking of course about George Searra's poses and I hope my remarks today and more generally my book will Give you some new things to think about when you spend time in the gallery with this painting So this morning I'm going to give a brief overview of the larger intellectual question that I frame in my book and then a taste of the new Interpretation of poses that the book advances and I'll highlight some of the new discoveries about the pictures iconography with which I think are fun and surprising and I'll say I'm very excited to be here. I have a lot I want to convey about poses but I'll aim to Be aware of time because I know I may be the only thing standing between you and your lunch or your brunch or mimosa this morning So my book's point of departure was a simple formal observation In the decades around 1900 across a range of practices a new paradigm for posing human figures emerged artists working in various geographical contexts and in diverse media began to present human figures in strictly frontal lateral and dorsal postures and I'm showing you here the canvas that Searra painted just before poses Which means which is translated in English as models, but it really means more something more like posers This is a Sunday on the island of Grand Giot 1884 which Searra exhibited two years before poses at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and I see this work as an early and particularly programmatic instantiation of formal strategies that would become commonplace across modern art By abolishing oblique twisting along the body's central vertical axis by aligning bodies either Parallel or perpendicular to the support by restricting the extension of limbs and often presenting multiple figures in identical positions and orientations turn of the century artists like Searra Violated some of European figural arts most enduring conventions for Disposing the human body and and I see this violation as a significant rupture within the history of European art Certain basic techniques of pose inherited from ancient classical statuary and Reinstated in the early modern period had held fairly constant in European art over centuries Right up through the moment of Impressionism The oblique rotation and ponderation of bodies the variation of postures and gestures among figures were techniques recognized as indispensable to simulating the human beings corporeal volume and Responsiveness to gravity and perhaps more fundamentally the human beings autonomous thought and movement And I'm showing you here an academy where students are training in these figural techniques alongside student drawings by two of my books protagonists on Searra's drawing at bottom and on the top a drawing by Gustav Klimt So my book examines the motivating circumstances and expressive consequences of the repudiation of these inherited conventions of pose and its broadest and most basic ambition is to show how new concepts of Subjectivity being theorized in Europe at this moment were made material in works of art by means of new dispositions of the body And now I'm showing you another student drawing by Searra and then one of his studies for the girl shop So I'm realizing I'm making a lot of broad statements I just my book tries to particularize these claims by drawing on and putting into conversation for primary bodies of evidence and so first is a series of artworks that adopt a changed approach to figural pose second is the response to these works of art recorded by a period critics and Third is a corpus of art historical literature that emerged in the late 19th century That's how to describe and explain distinctive modes of bodily presentation that are that were found in forms of art that turn of the century Critics and our historians would have characterized as primitive and fourth scientific and psychological and philosophical literature in which new concepts of mind and embodiment were being articulated and so by moving between these four registers my book really tries to pinpoint with a new degree of Precision how the kinds of connections that can be drawn between the history of concepts of the psyche and The formal logic of modern artworks So just to briefly show you the books at the center of the book the first is Poseuse which sir all exhibited two years after the Grand Jot in 1888 and the second work is a freeze by Gustav Klimt called the Beethoven freeze which was painted in 19 to and the third is a ballet afternoon of a phone which was danced and choreographed by Voslov Nijinsky a Russian dancer in 1912 and I chose these works because each makes particularly clear how Transformations in conventions of bodily pose were bound up in really fundamental ontological Questions that were becoming urgent across turn of the century Europe Questions such as what is human consciousness and what are its limits is consciousness the defining feature of the species that gave itself the name in 1758 homo sapiens Does consciousness mean that human beings are separate from animals and something special in the world? The motif of the animal is more or less pivotal across all the artists works that I study and this animal presence Reflects their embeddedness in a new imaginative terrain opened by the intellectual historical event Sigmund Freud referred to in 1917 as the biological blow to human narcissism namely the recognition of the animal descent of humankind following Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of the origin of species Equally and inseparably I suggest that these works engage with a closely related development that Freud extolled as the psychological blow to human Narcissism which was the recognition of the unconscious dimensions of human mental life Which were scientifically observed and theatrically exposed in the late 19th century as I'll show you a bit more with posseuse And it's really the aim of my book to show how and why it is that? posture is the formal device that enables these art with artworks to engage with modern psychological ideas So that's a broad picture of what I'm trying to do in my book as a whole and now I'll pivot to the actual fun part Which is the picture here at the barns which occupies quite a privileged position in the argument of my book And that's also why it's on the cover because surah through the form and iconography of posseuse and even through his paintings title posseuse posers is self-consciously I think Thematizing the very topic I'm aiming to examine in my book and that is the idea of bodily pose as a central topos of Arts history and also as an aesthetic device that came into crisis around the end of the 19th century under the pressure of new conceptions of the psyche so surah over the course of his short career between 1884 and 1891 produced seven large figure paintings or To use the phrase he coined to describe these works seven grand-toiled loot or great canvases of battle And I think that posseuse occupies a unique position among these works Literature on surah has been Understandably preoccupied by his innovations in terms of both his trademark invention of a quasi scientific system of pointal of Divisionist or pointillist color application and also his novel approach to composition Which many thinkers in the 20th century saw as a precursor to abstraction But surah's aesthetic innovation appears much less blatant in posseuse which has often been described as his Most academic or most naturalistic work and perhaps for this reason it has proven less intriguing to scholars than for instance Parade to Cirque which is at the Met and it's a more modest circus side show that surah painted and exhibited alongside posseuse Which has been described as surah's most radical or most abstract work And my book which contains to my knowledge the longest piece of scholarly writing thus far devoted to posseuse And I hope that will change soon Tries to restore focus to posseuse and show it's really indispensable to understand This picture if we want to understand more broadly the issues at play in surah's entire oeuvre I think that surah's work as an artist was structured by a fundamental conflict and that conflict as I see it is this Surah wanted to revive the academic hierarchy of genres that the previous generation of Impressionists who are primarily landscape painters had profoundly discredited He insisted on multiple occasions that he prioritized figure paintings or the great canvases of battle Over his landscape studies as he called them Yet his figure painting adopted a new manner of presenting the figure That in the eyes of his contemporaries really failed to convey all of the uniquely human Endowments that in the aesthetic tradition in which surah was schooled was what guaranteed the human figure's status as Art's most elevated subject and this is essentially the human intelligence human consciousness If previous centuries of Western figural art up through and including impressionism could Arguably be understood to share a guiding principle summed up in one on history of the French Academy that an artist who represents the human figure must always remember that he is drawing a Man or a human which is to say an intelligent and impassioned creature and not a thoughtless mechanical being Surah found an approach to the human form that challenged this conception of personhood if a human person to borrow the provisional definition that opens the philosopher Ipolli tens de l'intelligence or on intelligence of 1870 if a human person is understood as a living body with active members a refined economy of Organs and a thinking head driven by some interior thought desire or plan Surah's manifesto painting the grand shot Presented the human figure in a manner that seemed to subject that conception of the human person to a visual Cancellation I want to add by way of introduction that Surah's four years of dutiful study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts is deeply relevant to the conflicted structure of his mature figure painting and I think Okay There he is with his schoolmates So he studied there for four years and I just want to give a shout out to the Barnes Foundation's chief curator Nancy Ierson who did fantastic archival research that really clarified the chronology of Surah's early years of study and Revealed the importance of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in his life history when Surah entered this art Academy in 1876 hands-on Instruction continued to consist in a set of practices that were essentially institutionalized in the Renaissance on in essence on the sketching of antique casts and posed models And I'm showing you Surah's two of Surah's attempts at this activity and while this kind of practical training went on relatively unchanged The anatomy curriculum had been transformed to incorporate the most recent research on human physiology Psychology and evolutionary history So while Surah studied in the atelier of Henri Lehmann who was described By one of Surah's friends as a master as academic as one could possibly imagine He was also attending anatomy lectures by the neurologist Matthias Duvall And Duvall was close friends with many of the scientists in Paris who were beginning to study the unconscious mind through Experiments in hypnosis and here's Surah's teacher right here And in his anatomy course, which is show which I'm showing you taking unfolding here He concluded with the discussion of Darwin's Expressions of the emotions in animals and man from 1872 which was which emphasized the unconscious and Instinctive bases of human gesture and facial expression Many scholars and in particular Jonathan query whose work I'm very much in dialogue with have have stressed Surah's neo-impressionism was predicated upon his general familiarity with some of the most advanced research in physiology and experimental psychology of the late 19th century But it's crucial to add that he was likely initiated to this body of knowledge And to the burgeoning field of physiological psychology, which was promoted in France as a new species of psychology without soul in anatomy class at the Ecole and I emphasize this because I believe that the academic context which as you'll see will return in Composers is foundational to the conflict that animated Surah's neo-impressionist figure painting Which began with the debut of the grand shot a Work such as the grand shot can be seen as Surah's attempt to reconcile or even perhaps demonstrate the impossibility of reconciling the grand tradition of figural representation like the one Taught at the French Academy with the modernized conception of the human subject already being taught under the Academy's auspices so It's important to emphasize that when Surah It's important to emphasize that when Surah exhibited the grand shot and other Divisionist canvases at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1886 his approach to the figure was way more controversial than his new technique of pointillist paint application the grand shot instigated a major critical dispute about the aims and aesthetic effects proper to figure painting and While this dispute has rarely been examined in our historical scholarship I think it's vitally important because it not only Specifies what period viewers saw to be at stake in Surah's new approach to the figure but also because the artist himself was deeply preoccupied by and engaged with you know in a Philosophical sense with this figure focus dispute as we can see in poses a Turse two-line review from 1889 describes poses as a quote reprinted corrected and singularly augmented addition of the grand shot so by pointedly deploying the terminology of print this phrase pinpoints the mediating function of art criticism in in culturalizing poses which Surah began after the grand shot's debut immediately after and Executed while he was reading and archiving the copious number of reviews that was were generated from its year-long three-stop tour of exhibitions Surah vigilantly monitored his press A dossier found in his studio contains more than 60 clippings on the grand shot Which were supplied by one of these newly founded newspaper clipping agencies that were founded in the 1870s sort of like a analog version of Google alert and then also there were 33 hand copied reviews The very title that Surah gave to his picture is a word he plucked from a key phrase in one of these hand copied reviews La recréation men et poses even recreation is posturing so to describe poses as a reprinted corrected and singularly augmented addition of the grand shot is therefore apt and it captures the very ambivalent status that poseus adopts towards the grand shot as a simultaneous reiteration and a redaction The grand shot is a very large 7 by 10 foot figure painting that contains about 50 figures Which range from life-size to a few centimeters and when it debuted it was the centerpiece of a separate neo-impressionist gallery at the final impressionist exhibition where it was framed In a doorway and book ended symmetrically between two small figure list seascapes by Surah and so this inaugural hanging aggressively Asserted Surah's investment in figure painting over and against the genre of landscape which is presented as sort of subsidiary here and Yet the canvas at the center of the display also departed decisively as I've been saying from norms of corporeal presentation that were understood to allow for an Exaltation of the human subject and the rigid repetitive formerly abbreviated depiction of the promenaders really startled 19th century viewers with its seeming technical crudeness so before examining how Surah's contemporaries interpreted this technique, I'll just outline three related formal features I take as defining for the grand shots technique of figuration and The first is anatomical. I'm showing you I'm going to show you some details Of the picture alongside Surah's student sketches I think we can say that in the grand shots Surah De-articulated his figures the bodily extremities and members are contained or eliminated altogether In most cases arms are carried really tight against the torso so that you almost don't see them Hands are often eliminated or condensed into slabs without fingers Most men stand with their legs together so that the bipedal stance is Compacted to a column and feet are largely eliminated or concealed under skirts So that a sense of corporeal weight of placing placing weight on the ground kind of disappears And of course facial features are also imperceptible or blurred And the second feature is postural Surah's promenaders exhibit a quality his contemporaries repeatedly described with a single word on stiffness or radar Whether standing or seated most of them are posed bolt upright with what one critic described as the verticality of a sundial They face directly forward in a way that many viewers saw as reminiscent of the kind of at attention posture of soldiers And the the the maneuvering of the limbs or had arms and legs is minimized the figures appear Inelastic and inert they do not pace forward or extend or intertwine their arms or twist their torsos or turn their necks Or tilt their heads. They don't do any of the kind of Figural techniques that artists were Instructed to do as I'm showing in this instructional drawing by Leonardo da Vinci here So the third and final feature of the body language is Orientational Surah aligned his figures across the picture plane of the canvas in a manifestly regimented order All postural torsions requiring oblique foreshortening are eliminated in favor of postures at right angles to the picture surface So as the critic Felix Fanion was the first to explicitly observe Surah limited himself to a repertoire of three basic body body positions His figures are treated rigorously either from the back or full face or in profile and the phrase uses Udu do Udu face Udu profile so a Range of critics responded very enthusiastically to the figureless seascapes that Surah included on either side of Grand Jot But the Grand Jots gang of petrified beings and immobile mannequins as one critic described them provoked Hustility and laughter Fanion recalled in retrospect that the public's rage became fixated on the Grand Jots figures and then noted that in particular the foregrounded bustled woman and monkey pair in particular provoked paroxysms Only Fanion and a small minority of supporters mostly affiliated with the new avant-garde movement of symbolism appreciated Surah's approach to the figure One critic stressed this discrepancy after the close of the Impressionist exhibition Um, I quote the high erratic aspect of the Grand Jots figures Excited the dumbstruck hilarity of the public and on the other hand the approval of a rare few who understood These polarized reactions Determined positions when a within a broader debate over the question of whether Surah and moving forward could or should even continue to work as a figure painter after the Grand Jots debut many critics Publicly urged Surah to completely abandon figure painting and only do landscape But directly countering these admonitions several symbolist writers encouraged him to pursue it further So chief among them was Fanion Who became the new Impressionist group's principal spokesman his review of the Impressionist exhibition? Ended with a polemical prescription for how Surah should carry his project forward And he stated the naked human body would be Surah's ultimate subject He said la peinture au point or painting in points imposes itself for the execution of smooth surfaces and Above all the nude to which it has not yet been applied That Surah's legitimacy as a figure painter was debated in this manner indicates that the Grand Jot raised Fundamental questions about the limits goals and purposes of figure painting as such And I think that the rift the Grand Jot exposed concerned at its core The deeply held assumption that a painter should endeavor to convey the physical and intellectual liveliness of a human figure if an academic theorist like Charles Blanc who Surah read assiduously in his youth Asserted that figure paintings primacy over genres like landscape was rooted in the basis that the human being I quote Manifests the highest degree of life, which is to say thought Surah seems to privilege figure painting on an entirely different basis Which is no longer wedded to thought as the fundament of human existence The problem that most critics had with this painting Which was articulated most forcefully in an indictment by Georges Carl Huismont's was that there was not enough Life in it. That's a quote not enough life and more specifically This critic characterized the insufficient liveliness as an absence of inner life. He says about the Grand Jot's figures Pick away the colored fleas that cover Surah's characters and beneath them is a void No soul no thought nothing so the majority of Surah's detractors were not that explicit they Articulated their perception that there was a lack of inner life or consciousness in these figures by comparing them to various Modern mass produced objects the two most common comparisons were the fashion mannequin newly ubiquitous and window displays of modern department stores and Toy soldiers specifically flat tin soldiers mass produced for export in Nuremberg And there were powerful visual motivations for each of these comparisons Surah's numerous studies of silhouetted often virtually headless female torso suggests He may have actually looked at the mannequin bust to define the contours of his female figures and It's not difficult to see how the circles of dark green shadow underneath the grand jot figures and their strict profile postures Recalled those tiny poured metal figures that often that always balance upright on grass green painted bases most often in profile marching forward And I won't elaborate on this now But I think it's clear that undergirding these analogies that viewers saw to mass produced effigies was the recognition that this formal Dimension of the picture was making an insertion an assertion or an insinuation about human psychology In the book I argue that the reception of the grand jots technique of figuration was influenced by a preoccupation with Suggestibility hypnosis and sleepwalking that pervaded 1880s French culture Period audiences saw something in Surah's mannequin like or toy soldier like figures that they associated with a new concept of human mental disposition in which the role of conscious thought was radically circumscribed and unconscious and Instinctual impulses and in particular unconscious imitative impulses were acknowledged as dominant and in my book I spill a good deal of ink trying to show how the Fashionably bustled woman with her leashed pet monkey in the foreground of the canvas really condensed this constellation of associations Manifesting in visual form something akin to the proposition that the sociologist Gabrielle Tard advanced in 1884 Society is imitation and imitation is a form of sleepwalking Through the figure of the monkey I think Surah framed the imitative behaviors of Parisian metropolitan life at a particular moment in history 1884 CE Within a far more Macroscopic historical lens encompassing the evolution of humanity as a species and in the grand Jot an animal with striking formal similarities to period caricatures of Darwin and Darwinian theory serves as a powerful visual emblem for lower rather than higher forms of life or Intelligence and perhaps for forms of experience in which instinct as opposed to conscious thought were understood to be dominant So the majority of critics as I'm emphasizing responded very negatively to Surah's figural technique And perhaps more fundamentally they were responding negatively to what that technique insinuated about The human mind and human consciousness, but by contrast Surah's symbol as supporters I think appreciated the picture for precisely these reasons although they articulated that in very different terms these critics praised Surah for I quote Conferring high erratic austerity to human beings and for them the strength of the picture was precisely Surah's abandonment of techniques of figuration understood to undergird the illusion of consciousness within the human figure they praised the grand Jot for attempting to quote flee the poverty and insignificance of the classical tradition and return to primitive forms in 1930 the art historian Robert Ray observed that the grand Jot appears to have identified and implemented the formal law postulated in the Danish art historian Julius Long's 1892 book the representation of the human figure in its earliest period until its apogy in Greek art what a title Neither Surah nor his critics could have possibly been familiar with this text The grand Jot predated Long's book by six years But this little known yet influential book which coined the term frontality for the lexicon of art history is Very helpful in specifying What was at stake in the praise of Surah's supporters for his Hieratic figuration and the claim that he had fled the classical tradition to return to primitive forms In this book Long argued that a single development the invention of a new type of pose in Greek sculpture in the 5th century BC Had I quote strictly speaking created European art After scrutinizing a range of figural objects that Long termed primitive Including ancient Egyptian and Assyrian as well as modern Oceanic and native North American examples He claimed to have detected a Universal restriction governing the posture of the human figure in the art of all primitive cultures which he christened the law of frontality This law prohibited artists from introducing any torsion along the art the the body's central vertical axis demanding that figures be presented in attitudes in Which a strict vertical line could be drawn down the torso of the figure to evenly bisect it for long Greek art of the 5th century BC was a development of world historical import Because artists broke with the law of frontality for the first time in history and in doing so manifested a new conception of human interiority by Introducing the technique of incorporating oblique torsion and asymmetries into the pelvis trunk and neck of figures Long argued that Greek artists had found a method of corporeal presentation Corresponding to a conception of the human being in whom everything is directed and determined by an interior center an Interior center that long rendered in French as le moi Suras perceived negation of this conscious moi or interior conscious center I believe was what most troubled critics about the grand shot, but also what Suras can supporters found the most compelling about his approach to the figure in 1887 in a programmatic statement naming the aims of Suras neo impressionist school Fennel challenged the prevailing assumption that a painted figure should outwardly convey its consciousness In a sardonic passage that was certainly directed against who he's most recently published Denunciation of the absence of soul or thought in the grand shots figures He mocked the pervasive tendency to condemn Suras figures for their lifelessness He said critics in love with anecdotes wine. You're showing us mannequins not humans These critics are not bored of portraits that seem to question. Guess what I'm thinking So here in no uncertain terms Fennel implies that the conventional appetite for a certain kind of Simulated thoughtfulness in figural art had become outmoded So with these responses in mind, let's return to the moment of poses When its tour of exhibition was completed Suras reinstalled the work in his studio and as one of his friends were called He reexamined it with ever renewing anxiety Searching for its smallest faults and always trying to satisfy its conscience his conscience So this fraught reexamination of the grand shot in light of its critical reception is the key to comprehending poses in One sense we can understand poses as a throwing down of the gauntlet By painting this picture of life-size figures Suras obviously was defying the many critics who had urged him to stick exclusively to landscapes Instead he took up Fennel's challenge to paint the nude in an obvious attempt to Respond victoriously to critics who charged that he was powerless to evoke a figure But as a public statement the posers betrays ambivalence as much as defiance through its interplay of Reproduction and deletion repetition and difference Posers serve simultaneously as an apology for the grand shots figuration and a reassertion of its essential challenge So I suggested to you that the problematic quality of Suras figures for period viewers had to do with the way in which their Bodies were posed their stiffness and their obedience to the law of frontality Which eliminated oblique angles to position each figure from the back or full face or in profile as Fennel said So pose those sort of does and does not repeat that strategy Obviously the three nudes positioned from left to right are from the back or full face or in profile to Recapitulate that restrictive orientational schema and indeed Suras rather Insolently insisted upon it by hanging a posterior padding for a bustle like the one worn by the monkeys mistress in Grand Jat on a peg on the wall just to the right of the de profil pit figure Thereby resuming the cycle of udder dough udder false udder profile in the form of a grass green imitation Aspad turned around to face and moon the viewer and I would note that Discovering that this item protruding from the wall behind the models is in fact a rear and bustle pad Was kind of an interesting moment in my research process It's previously been identified as a bag and when I began to understand how Systematic and blatant Sera was in making the pose those refer back to the Grand Jat and specifically refer back to features of it that provoked hostile reaction and Certainly, there's a kind of crude humor going on here in hanging this undergarment Facing out so prominently on the wall I think Sera is playing with an ancient kind of symbolism saying to his critics in a sense You know kiss my ass and yet as much as its strident poses can also be seen as a kind of retreat or admission of guilt Perhaps most notably even as Sera frames the painting around the two figures that provoked most wrath from the critics So the bustled woman and her pet monkey So Sera foregrounds the woman and yet he uses One of the nude models to camouflage the monkey to to delete it To delete this figure, which I think crystallized the prior picture's most obvious evocation of a realm of unconscious instinctual life and Sera's posturing of bodies also seems to concede to the critics who found insufficient liveliness in his stiff mannequin like figures the three nudes adopt Three distinct and comparatively supple postures one critic observed that Sera had been Visibly wounded by the objections to the prior canvas and that he had abandoned the wooden rigidity of the grand jots figures And it's delight in static attitudes So while poses was obviously produced in collusion with penials avant-garde agenda It could at the same time be understood as the remedial exercise of a chastened a Koldebo's art student a Self-imposed endeavor to pass an official test of figural competence and this at least was how one critic understood it He said of poses Sera has a large canvas which in his mind will make the academy swoon with jealousy He is not afraid to tackle the academy So the academy as a designation for a specific kind of Figural study of the nude model and also as a pedagogical context in which specific Practices and reprisations were taught and sanctioned was I think a self conscious subtext in poses the painting Not only returned to the stylistic terrain of academic classicism, but it Insistently referenced the artist school So foregrounding the life model is the most fundamental way that poses invoked the a Koldebo's art Which was colloquially known as the a Koldebo's model and indeed it seems that Sera viewed the nude model as the token of his Education we know that he displayed an academy a painted study of a nude man on His studio wall as a souvenir of his time at school and the illegible vertical sheet pinned up behind the standing model In poses is perhaps a placeholder for this Academic relic that Sera retained in his studio More generally the hundreds of academies that Sera produced while at school the countless hours He spent participating in the attend attendant rituals of The life class are certainly not incidental to poses Which returned to the life the life posing session in theme if not in practice So by placing a model in the center of his studio Sera was implying that he is returning to the Catholic academic practice of working quote-unquote from life and a practice Which in fact we think played an extremely minor role in the genesis of the grand shot So poses academic overtones are established not simply by the depiction of opposing session but also by the specific postures that are adopted in the 1880s the adjective academic was applied in a pejorative sense to figures quote Given the conventional pose of the atelier and in that sense Sera's poses are paradigmatically academic because their attitudes demonstrably evoke and quote a classical artistic canon The two studies for the central figure of the picture demonstrate that Sera initially Solicited his model to pose according to the higher edict template of the grand shot in both The model is rendered in strict obedience to the law of frontality her head and torso torso are oriented directly Forward in a stiff and upright stance But before exhibiting the min the miniature version of the painting central figure in 1884 Sera made which which he just Enlarged to human scale in posse's Sera made several calculated revisions to the figure He separated her legs and shifted weight onto her back foot He considerably enlarged her head and cocked it off center. He added delicate facial features He relaxed her arms He gave her hands and he interlaced their fingers and he created her characteristic gesture described by one critic as hands simply clasped slightly below the prudentum and With these changes, I think we can say that the little poses Reenacted essentially what what Julius Long would call the the Greek revolution in miniature so by breaking with the law of frontality to introduce an asymmetrical Contra posto Sera Recapitulated what was perhaps the most hyperbolically celebrated theoretically freighted stylistic development in the history of European art as it was being defined at this moment the moment when To return to the language of long an interior center or a me is ostensibly discovered within the figure So if critics had bemoaned the absence of soul or thought in the grand jot I think poses set out to correct that defect by bringing these intangible entities back into the picture And so to do so Sera employed Practical time-tested solutions for conferring in her life upon the figure and he falls back on certain conventional techniques of pose By switching out of the grand jots hieratic postural mode Sera was very easily Altered the expressive presence of the nudes as it is attested by an immediate shift in the critical rhetoric So while the grand jot promenaders were described again and again in terms of stiffness The the nude models were described in terms of their suppleness And this physical suppleness crucially was explicitly linked by critics to a sense of vitality in a broader sense That is vitality of mind of being or of consciousness So one critic wrote of the nude models one feels that these supple alert and smooth women are ready to live to charge to laugh to will another critic interestingly described the central model as contemplative and Rather than alluding to toys or Egyptian reliefs or primitive sculpture or fashion mannequins Critics began to speak of the nudes in terms of their seamless compatibility with the grand tradition One critic referenced Ang while Fenial described the central model as a figure that would glorify the haughtiest of museums so If Sera's contemporaries were able to apprehend a deliberate evocation of a grand tradition in poses It seems that they did not recognize just how deliberately though the nudes were Aping iconic attitudes from the classical canon, but scholars now agree on sources for the two peripheral nudes It's it seems clear that the left seated model is an homage to The dorsal bather that on Ang recycled throughout his career Especially given that Sera had been charged with copying after Ang while studying in the atelier of his former people and The model on the right. It seems clear Quotes the Roman sculpture the thorn puller a sculpture of an adolescent boy Pulling a thorn from the soul of his left foot This was one of the most widely copied and popular of all antique statues, which would have been familiar to Sera through textbook illustrations and plaster copies and photographic academies that circulated among a cold abose art students But a specific source for the central models pose has not yet been attributed in general There's a strangeness to the figure that have that has been difficult for scholars to decipher It's been noted in general that she recalls the antique statues that Sera drew in his youth And because her folded hands cover her crotch some have associated her with the Venus pudica or modest Venus Yet the central models unembarrassed outward gaze the resolute quality of her stance Seemed to me to oppose this erotic type which is characterized in all of its variants by pressed thighs and a coy sideways glance. I Would like to propose a different visual source for the central models pose I think that the crucial elements of the central posers pose a Contra posto stance with weight shifted to the right foot hands clasped below the waist a quality of seriousness in countenance Correspond closely to a Hellenistic portrait of the orator Demosthenes attributed to the sculptor polyuktoes The fact that Sera introduced this pose in tandem with the white circular sheet beneath the figure resembling the base of a statue reinforces a reading of the central figure as alluding to a sculpture and I think there is strong evidence to suggest that it might be the Demosthenes in particular The Demosthenes sculpture was created in commemoration of the orators fierce Resistance to the Macedonian conquest of Athens It stood originally in the Athenian Agora on a base bearing the following inscription If you had strength equal to your intelligence of Demosthenes, the Macedonians would never have ruled the Greeks two full-scale copies of this statue survived Roman copies and only and by the end of the 19th century it was claimed that very few statues were better known and We can at least know that it was well known to Sera because he would have Confronted a copy of the Demosthenes daily on the premises of the Ecole the facade of the main building is decorated with Parade of sculptural copies by winners of the Rome Prize including an 1831 version of the Demosthenes so It's as if Sera drew back to the literal gateway through which he had entered the academic tradition in posos He counteracts the Grange off Deviation into primitive Figuration by superimposing over it a parade of classical figures echoing the facade of his school Indeed the formal and conceptual principle of the facades decoration a Horizontal row of figures spaced at regular intervals an arbitrary inventory of unrelated specimens from the classical canon Does resonate in important ways with Sera's treatment of the nudes in posos Who are in one sense presented simply as three statues in the classical bearing as one art historian observed in 1920? At the same time it's different then It's different than the facade of the school because it's not an arbitrary assortment of quotations Sera very clearly ordered the nudes to create a legible if ambiguous narrative Proceeding from left to right. We can perceive a single model Or it's somewhat ambiguous whether there's one or three models I think deliberately so but we can read perhaps a single model Waiting to begin her posing session then holding her position and then finally getting up to get dressed and depart the studio and Within this narrative framework Sera's use of Ang's bather and the thorn puller make a certain kind of sense the bather translates easily into a Transitional moment of naked repose and the thorn puller practically begged for an adaptation to ladies stockings Which was a favorite motif of 19th century erotic representation? And I'm showing you here for comparison a fantastic Corbe from the Barnes collection But I think the logic driving the Demosthenes quotation is far less self-evident a Monument to the most forceful of attic orators is far from an obvious reference for The depiction of a working-class adolescent female who strips down naked and poses for hire Yet precisely that incongruousness must be recognized as central to the larger thematics of poses the model in the Demosthenes pose Occupies the physical and narrative crux of the picture The climatic moment in the paintings narrative sequence when the poser referenced by the paintings title presents herself in a pose to be painted and Indeed this central figure served as a kind of Mascot for the painting standing in twice publicly for the larger composition in the small preview that Sera Exhibited in 1887 and also in a pen and ink replica, which he published in a magazine while the canvas was still on view so the the quotations potential Significance the significance of this pose I think can only be grasped from within the larger context of an intervention into the prior figure paintings reception if the grand shot was perceived to have Voided the illusion of the human figures thought or consciousness the Demosthenes was by contrast Renowned in the 19th century for being a particularly. I'm quoting an 1882 textbook here a pregnant representation of the interior life 19th century descriptions of the sculpture all emphasize that it projects the intensity and Intentness of the orators cogitation that it's a monument to inward life indeed to inward life in its most elevated manifestation the rational intellect in the throes of cogitation Which enables political conviction? The human subjects resistance to being conquered or vanquished So more than simply relapsing into classicism in Pozos Sera quite surgically Extracted and placed at his picture center a classical posture associated with thoughtfulness and significantly this posture already had a rich Quotation quotation history of being used in this manner Scholars have pointed to a long iconographic chain Extending from antiquity through early Christian art to Caravaggio in which figures adopt the Demosthenes posture to indicate moments of reflection or meditation Though the original sculpture by Polyukto's was displayed in the Athenian agora with a base that basically specified what the object of the sculptures meditation was what the figure was thinking about Answering the question that Fennel Mockingly formulated as guess what I'm thinking the pose of this thoughtful sculpture was apparently readily Detached from specific meaning context and even gender Becoming what the art historian Salvatore Cetis describes as an image sign an iconographic scheme for meditation Assuming a canonical posture of meditation then derived from a famous monument to a charismatic male political agitator the central model of poses demands to be seen in some sense as the depiction of a thinking person or Perhaps more specifically as the depiction of a thinking woman with considerable intellect and capacity for self-determination It is just this suggestion of an active and conscious Contemplation Structured in and through the quoted prose of the figure that would seem to invite a potentially feminist reading of Posos which was a picture Saraw did compose at a moment when the liberal feminist movement was gaining ground in France and It is possible to read the Demosthenes pose as a device that dignifies the central model Well, also distinctly Desexualizing her compared to the mannequin like woman pictured behind her the central poser appears somewhat androgynous and With an almost masculine bust and she projects this quality of contemplative inward life that seems deliberately opposed to the instinctual life evoked by the monkey's mistress behind her and Yet posos makes propositions about the inner life of the female subject that the painting leaves Profoundly unresolved for there is also a sense of Travesty that undercuts Saraw's Invocation of the highest faculties of human thought through the person of this naked Figure a kind of feminized Demosthenes stripped bear If Saraw Intuited the original meaning of the polyoptoe statue apprehending that the Demosthenes was in essence the figuration of a thinker we can ask whether the artist intended to retain That connotation as he transposed the pose across genders as Naomi shore Asserted in relation to Auguste Rodin's contemporaneous sculpture the thinker The figure of a woman cannot be substituted for that of a male thinker without evoking laughter Indeed as she notes period caricatures of Rodin sculpture as la penseuse The female thinker attest to the perceived absurdity of such a figure So while posos sustains a conflicted and open ultimately open-ended reading that I think is a Antithetical such a simple kind of punchline visual logic Saraw's figuration of his central poser as a thinker is also in some sense a Travesty of the very notion of the thinker and this travesty Necessarily hinges on the ambiguous but conspicuous presence of a professional model who mediates the recovery of the classical poses That stand in pointed contrast to the grand jots Hieratic and unconscious seeming figures Saraw's iconography spoke very knowingly to the trade secrets and social context of modeling in 1880s Paris He debuted the posos in the same year that the journalist Paul Dauphouse published the first book-length study of the modeling profession Journalistic interest in modeling peaked at this moment Because there was a recognition that the Parisian modeling populace was undergoing significant demographic transformation Non-professional models were increasingly being hired to pose for artists as a range of artists strove to reimagine the model's role in the compositional process Saraw's contemporaries like diga or Rodin for instance began to organize their posing sessions with the specific Intention of subverting academic arts perceived dependence on what the poet Rilke described as the repetition of pre-approved movements So posos sits somewhat curiously in relation to this development because it seems that it employs the model precisely to regurgitate certain pre-approved movements like for instance the the thorn puller It's possible to read the scenario presented in posos as Restaging a kind of audition that Saraw might have witnessed in his a cold a bozart life class as one student recalled in 1889 the models who arrived Monday morning at school seeking employment for weekly posing sessions would quote give their Repertoire of poses turning themselves do do the profile do fast with dignified or furious gestures the student William Chambers Morrow also described these Monday morning solicitations and Described how many of the professional Italian models still favored at the Ecole created their repertoire of poses by spending idle hours Studying the attitudes of figures in great paintings and sculptures at the Louvre and Adopting these poses when presenting themselves to artists But the but Morrow who was writing in 1899 Emphasized that these kind of studied attitudes no longer impressed a younger generation of artists. The trick is worthless. He wrote Posos seems to perform one of these worthless tricks Excuse me, so what pose those seems to perform one of these worthless tricks It shows a model Cycling through what appears to be a repertoire of poses the bather the Demosthenes the Spinario Turning herself from the back to the face in profile as she cycles through these poses More broadly, I think the painting alludes to the way in which the models Repertoire of poses might be molded by certain pre-approved movements artistic prototypes Precisely organized for the exteriorization of inner consciousness The central figure in posos can be seen perhaps as conjuring opposing scenario analogous to the one captured in an 1890 photograph of a male model that we know Serra drew while at school a certain gelon and we know from student anecdotes that gelon Possessed particular skill and enthusiasm for exhibiting himself in poses meant to evoke the cogitations of ancient rulers and literary characters a skill that he seems to be Practicing in this photograph where he appears with his fist clenched his head cocked and his chin resting on his hand in a traditional gesture of pensiveness The pose gelon is assuming here seems carefully calibrated to aid an artist in producing an image that will precisely beg the question guess what I am thinking It's a point of some interest that Fenial praised poses as a masterpiece Despite the fact that Serra served up precisely what he condemned in his criticism The central model coquettishly summons up a false inwardness and the studio Contrivance that Fenial understood to coincide with it the quote irritating image of a model who poses But Fenial ecstatic review of posos suggests that he perceived a Radical subversion of those conventions in it indeed his description of the central poser Strongly implies that he saw her to be unconscious and in a state of hypnotic trance He is she is he writes standing on a square of linen her arms at rest and her hands united Her eyes contracted from the fatigue and ecstasy of the pose There's ample evidence that Charcot began his spectacular public demonstrations of hypnosis in 78 The hypnotic seance and the posing seance began to present themselves to both artists and psychologists as somehow analogous Certainly we know from student memoirs of an enthusiasm for hypnotic Experiments among the Ecole des Beaux Arts students some of whom attempted to replicate some of Charcot's experiments in hypnosis on female models More broadly Popularization of hypnosis enabled new recognition of the ambiguous mental condition inherent to the posing session Dalfus's book on artist models Characterized the act of modeling as one that fostered the extinguishment of thought and consciousness Look closely at a model who has stood for several minutes on a posing table He wrote not thinking the eyes fixed in vagueness without seeing Some models actually find ways of putting themselves to sleep with their eyes open and resting like that Others and there are more than one reach Magnetic slumber like a catalepsy. I would like to propose in Conclusion that the central model in poses offers a fundamentally double conflicted subjective presence Simultaneously embodying thinking and not thinking a kind of thoughtlessness That duality is manifest in the enigma of the central models facial expression Well, these effects are difficult to perceive when examining poses in its current perch When one studies the painting at eye level her expression seems to oscillate between Vacuity and knowingness her eyes shift between glazed and communicative Her lips at times seem curled in a kind of beatific archaic smile at times stern and pursed as if on the verge of Elocution in that sense She is both a departure from and a return to the core problem raised by the grand shot a return Strongly underscored by Sera's title which referred back to the review of the grand shot in which Sera conflated the act of modeling with with the Instinctual imitation imitation the kind of instinctual life Embodied by the promenaders of the prior canvas for who for whom as the critic said in his review Even recreation is posturing. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Ellen You will be able to find emeline sitting outside our shop signing books Which are for sale in the shop and also on our website was amazing But first I would like to if it's okay with you invite questions from Delayments from the audience and also if anybody at home has a Question just type it into the chat and I will read it from my phone If you have a question, yeah, raise your hand. We have this box. It's called a catch box Just talk right into the top here And it's actually meant to be thrown so you can pass it or throw it. Oh Microphone too. Oh, yeah, we're very very thoughtful. Great. Um, thank you I'm trying to maybe you could speak a little bit about Sera thoughts on I guess on the unconscious Was he trying to make that argument and and and it seems like you develop the the argument of conscious thinker Um active thinker willful very very well and then the unconscious part seems to come from as I understand it seems like her facial expression and Maybe you could develop Maybe I missed why she's unconscious here That that's the peace sign and is that really his argument is it that these we are unconscious actors and and that's a reiteration of the ground shot right right here. Yes, I mean, I think the the argument that That she that she's unconscious here is an argument that I make by placing the the painting and kind of like a discursive context that Sera would have known from the time which was advancing the idea that kind of the act of posing of Standing for a long time In front of people is this kind of act which is one in which your one is particularly Inclined to sort of go to mental sleep and sort of turn off And so I think there's this paradox in in the central figure of the idea of going to sort of Going into a state of sleep while you're embodying a pose of intense mental Reflection and cogitation. So that's kind of the paradox of that I see in The the central figure of poses more broadly what are sorrows But so so the fact she's a poser to begin with is the unconscious element well that basically that the the practice of modeling Reveals certain inherent tendencies of human behavior and mental disposition and brings them to the foreground like there are certain situations and activities in which these kinds of states come to the fore in a more Visible manner and that posing the act of posing was recognized as such at this moment more broadly You know, I don't know what Sera thought about the unconscious I do know he was was deeply immersed in physiological psychology specifically kind of new research about the retina and the Synthetic properties of the eyes. So for instance, you know, the the continuous vision that enables, you know, that the The record the kind of recognition of the way that the mind works that enables the new medium of cinema in the late 19th century to be Invented the idea of Continued persistence of vision that the eye synthesizes unconsciously kind of various data to produce a continuous image That's at the core of Sera's pointless technique the idea that the eye is going to unconsciously Synthesize all these dots. That's his idea even though in practice. It doesn't really work So it's at the core of everything he's doing and it's at the core of what he's learning But I can't say what he thought he's a laconic guy He doesn't write it out for us But I think what we can do is make a proposition based on formal evidence and also based on what his contemporaries saw No, thank you. Thank you for the question Thank you. Thank you so much So persuasive so well done And such a such a stunning reading of this important painting Can I can already hear the puns, you know, so so intelligent about intelligence, you know Great so I would love to press you a little on an On one of the more implicit arguments you're making here and with the book Which is that broadly speaking modern art starts in the mid 1880s, right? And that's something around posing and so on starts then There and and I I would love to hear your full Justification for that choice because I think one could come along as as you on occasion did by sort of evoking digger that That there is a prehistory to this Right and and what happens in the sort of 25 years between the publication of Darwin and its first reception in France around 1860 and the mid 1880s that's sort of a 25 year stretch That's plenty interesting where I think, you know, what Manet does to frontality if we believe yeah freed and what What he then does to Socializing the academic pose and making it this sort of cultural modern life phenomenon And then someone like Cezanne comes along and undoes that in his early work so profoundly And and he knows the the kind of earlier generation of scientists and Psychologists cycle Analysts of the 1860s already then the Impressionists come along and really undo all forms of posing in the way that you've described Degas and it seems to me then at that stage Surah is able to reinvest all of this undoing and redoing with this new form of Posing that you're claiming so I just want to hear you you you in a couple of sentences make the claim that that The change is sort of there, you know, that's that's my that's You You know Well, thank you Andre. That's such a it's such a great question and your right that I would say and I'm You I'm only allowed a few sentences and so I feel so I am interpreting that as allowing me a sort of escape from this very hard question. I think you're right that there is a modern art is a sort of Boogeyman cipher that's sort of traveling throughout the book. I Have tried not to use the word modernism. I would say that in some fundamental sense. I I have to be honest that Defining the history of modern art or thinking about beginnings with With respect to modernism was not what I I think I had to almost be Productively Unaware of that question while I was working, but I think it's obviously incredibly urgent There's there is no way in which anything any of the problems and topics being taken up by these artists at the end of the Impressionist and also there's an implicit historiographic argument too by beginning the narrative with something that happens at the end of the Impressionist exhibitions and of course I mean, I'm talking to one of the world's foremost scholars of one of impressionism I'm sure that you you pick up on that and I I It's there is something post impressionist about this and exactly what is post impressionist about it would need to be Carefully defined and thought out and argued in a more sophisticated way than I've yet done Something about it has to do I think for me with a Reassertion of the figure in a way that it kind of went I mean diga obviously though is the artist that Like like Rodin, you know one thing that I didn't say here is Rodin Has this important role throughout all the chapters of the book as a sort of counter example of an artist who was pushing certain Conventions of body language to their very limits and collapse. I would say that diga who's an artist who I think is Deeply interested in Darwin just as much as Sera is doing kind of the same thing the artist that I am working on I think are going in a different tack. They're not pushing forward with body language, and I would say that something new is happening with respect to the emphasis on the human figure and I've already way exceeded my sentence limit it also has to do with symbolism and and I think And I'm I'm just gonna close there because oh This is so fun. Anyways This was an amazing talk. I was really grabbed by your argument about the central figure and the Demosthenes pose and I couldn't help but notice when you had the Wall at the Ecole how they had the different statues. There's actually it looked like a Venus right next to the Demosthenes So yeah, I was wondering your thoughts on maybe the feminist angle of this reading and how Maybe that could be seen as a deliberate rejection of the Vita's food pudica to Take a more thoughtful pose. So if you had any thoughts about that, I think it's more like a collapse or fusion of the two and again sort of I Was just having a debate recently with someone who is in this audience about the important Like about arguments that tend towards ambiguity and irresolution and how frustrating they sometimes are and how much they can be a Cop out and my tendency to always like head right for them. So I would say that There is no way I think the amp the Oscillation between the potential feminist reading and a and a Fundamentally anti-feminist reading one that actually goes further in denigrating the female subject because obviously the unconscious Instinctual life of the unconscious. It's not just anybody's unconscious Why is it that the the female is the kind of test subject that that gets acted out upon? So that that's that's being invoked here So thank you And I was wondering You know Fenneon comes up again and again in the talk and is like this very important But sort of subtle player throughout and I was wondering if you could speak a little more explicitly both like historically to their relationship between Fenneon and sir, but also kind of to the way that you're conceptualizing Fenneon's role in like is he pushing kind of sir on a particular direction that maybe sir all isn't going himself Or like, you know, how do you see that relationship as it plays out in this work? Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. I mean Fenneon Felix Fenneon is an absolutely Fascinating historical figure who was recently the subject of a quite wonderful exhibition at MoMA And at the at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris about his activities.  I mean all artists at this time I mean and it hasn't been said enough I mean Martha Ward was the person who first brought attention to this or at least the way that I learned about it these clipping service agencies That began in 1879 I believe that all artists, you know, you go to Rodin's archive senior They all have these little clippings of their criticism. I think sir all brought a certain intensity to that He wrote to critics saying you you called me an innovator nine times But you called him an innovator this many times and it's not right and I would like to prove to you So he's a very very fraught relationship. I mean, it's it's not unlike our current They're living in a fully socially mediated world and you there's no inside and outside to that I mean artists don't work in isolation Especially in an increasingly mediated world. So they're in dialogue. I Would like to ask a question. Thank you Martha. I want to hear you talk a little more about I Can't remember. What's the name of the garment hanging on the wall the bustle the the tournure the tournure. Well, yes Because if he's if he's You know Making if he's saying something about sort of the performance of The pose of consciousness How does the fact that he is in including that garment play into that because it really does seem to relate God Sorry, so much to it belongs to that to the standing figure, right? Like it just you just sort of know that it does Yeah, and Aside from it being his way of kind of Mooning the audience. What is how does it play into maybe what he is saying about? consciousness Well, and the sort of performance of it does it is it part of the undoing of that? Yes, I mean one of the things that I didn't go into because I'm a I I already probably went over and I couldn't this is part of actually my favorite part of my chapter But I had to painfully like not really discuss it here is all about the tale The tale of the monkey and the way and the relationship between the monkey's tail and the bustle of the woman in the Brangeot and the kind of relay of mimicry between the two figures that kind of presents her as informal Alignment with that kind of animal figure and I think and the the the bustle was also called an imitation tale so so the the ambiguity between this kind of like contemplative thinker and the kind of figure evocative of instinctual life, I think the Hanging the false ass, which was what it was also called up there is is reasserting it and making it so that she can't escape from it and also something that I talk about. Oh Sorry Is is this really really strange shadow? So she this has what back when we were in when this painting was in Marion I thought maybe there's some kind of weird optical illusion from the window where it was hung and You know it took and then and then when when the painting moved I talked with the conservator Judy Diane like is this from where it was folded? What is this because it makes?  So I think that's part of the ambiguity Oh, well, there's a red dot. Oh It so it's another way in which she can't escape from that It's the it's the undoing and the assertion at the same time But yeah, when you go into the oh my gosh Um When you go into the gallery, please look at this shadow and and think about it in relation to the figure in the grangeot Because it's very bizarre and once you notice that you kind of can't unsee it. It's it's the bustle Okay, I think we need to wrap up Unless there is there one more question. Okay Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation for the wonderful question


Hello, I just dropped you, didn't I? Oh, that's no good. Good thing GoPro's are tough, right? It would sound a little weak. You know what I love? I love when the sun comes up and hits my face and warms me up after a cold night. I actually slept really well. I think my rain fly kept the heat in nicely and I just had warm thoughts all night. It kept me warm. So today I'm heading up, up, up to the snow-capped peaks and then hopefully down into the backside of LA. What? Yeah, that's right. Let's do this, my friends. Thank you, soft sandy campsite. Thank you, fake cowboy town. Rock and roll time. No flaties, no crashies, no whammies, up to big bear, ease.  Feels good. I'm going to be going a lot of uphill today, up to about 8,000 feet, which is, which is all right. I knew it was gonna happen. I knew it was at the end of the ride. And I'm from Colorado. I'm used to going up hills. I like the sign, slow down. You move too fast. Gotta make the moment last. I'm not a singer, but I do like the idea of going slow. That's why I ride a bike, right? To go slow and see the world and meet awesome people. I hit the dirt. Now I'm going up, up, up and away. Nothing like a sandy uphill to warm me up in the morning. It's time for my morning thoughts. And I always do my best thinking on the seat of a bicycle. It's kind of meditative. And I've been out here riding for seven straight days now. And I'm really grateful that I'm here right now in this moment. This has been very good for me. It's been good to push my body physically. I haven't done an extended bike tour this year, like I usually do. I did a little tour with John and Mira in Mexico. I did Rag Brie with Amelia. But I've mostly been focused on running, which was great, you know? My big focus was the Leadville 100. And I was happy how that went, but I really cherish these bike rides. And while I'm out here in the moment, I get to think about everybody I love, you know, and it's been great to have time to process the death of my grandma, my Nana, the deserts of very healing place for me. And I just get to think about everybody I love, Amelia and my mom, my brothers and their cute kids. And not only do I get to be out here, but I get to share this adventure with you. Yeah, you sitting on the couch or at your computer chair. I see you. I get to share it with the world and hopefully inspire you to go out and do something fun and challenge yourself and connect with wonderful humans. Being out here reminds me that humans are good. 99.99999% of humans are good and generous and thoughtful and they wanna help you. And I get more in tune with my body and just the sounds of nature and birds overhead and the sounds of my tire slipping through sand and you know, bike creaking here and there, it really is quite special. And then when I get home from a ride like this, I feel recharged and I feel like my heart is bigger and I'm more loving and caring and compassionate, which is always a good thing, right? And when I'm on a bike adventure, it really forces me to be hyper present in the moment at all times. Like right now I'm like, wow, the light is really nice on these Joshua trees, you know? I just get to appreciate it as I slowly ride by and look up at the sky and see the swirly clouds behind them. Look at that. Look at that. I mean, give me a break. It's so awesome. And when I'm in the present moment at any time, that's when I feel the most alive, for sure. You know, life is just really simple when you're on a bike. Everything that I have in life that I've needed is right here on this bicycle and that's pretty cool. You know, people talk about how van life is really minimalistic, but I say bike life is way more minimalistic. You know, and I love sleeping under the stars. I love getting out of my tent at two in the morning when I have to pee and look at the stars and just think, wow, look at this beautiful planet we get to live on. And when I'm out here, all those thoughts just get really enhanced. You know, I love life at home, of course, but I think I was getting a little too comfortable. This year I'd been home a lot. Usually I travel a lot more than I do, but you know, I have different priorities this year. I met Amelia this year and I've wanted to be home more, but this little week-long adventure has been exactly what I needed and I'm so grateful and happy and fortunate and privileged and all those things, even though I'm, you know, gonna ride up a big old mountain today and it's gonna hurt and my legs are sore after seven days of riding, that's all good. Reminds me that I'm alive, whoo! Okay, morning thoughts done. Oh, I see some white stuff on the top of those mountains over there. Oh boy, that looks like a straight-up wall. Man, might be walking that one. Whew, yep, this is the real deal. It's real steep. Most difficult, I'll say, that's where I'm going. Right there, up, up, up and away on loose rocky roads. Look what I found, snow! Nice little snow crystals. Tastes like Christmas. Crunchy! I like the California snow. Look how good that looks, don't you want some of that? It's called a chili mango, chili mango. It's one of my favorite Mexican candies. It's a piece of mango dipped in, like, chili sauce. And it's so good, mm! We're up high, yes we are. Oh, the air is crisp up here. Tastes like Colorado. Riding through some icy slippery patches here. I imagine with just a little bit more snow, this road is completely impassable. I lucked out, I'm here early enough in the season where the snow isn't causing problems. You're probably wondering why I'm in a jacuzzi. Well, here's the story.  I was looking at my watch and I realized that I still had over 40 miles to finish the entire route. It was about 1.30 p.m. I've been racing sunlight this entire trip. I thought I could get up and over and be done with it in a day, but I chose to just come here instead. I was riding by this hotel, Fireside Lodges, and it was one of those spontaneous moments where I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna go there.  You heard me talking about gratitude this morning. Well, I'm very grateful to be here right now. And this is my Thanksgiving gift to myself. Best $150 I've ever spent. Thank you, patrons, for your support. And I think this was the right decision. Sometimes in life, you hem and ha over decisions, this is definitely the right decision. I feel good, I can be rested, I can wake up tomorrow and hammer out the last 40 miles and get into San Bernardino, find a bike box, do that whole thing and then fly home on Thanksgiving morning. And of course, my bike is right next to me. It has to be, right? My bike is my buddy, my buddy and me. You know, I've always wanted to be in a jacuzzi hotel. All my life, I see them in movies and stuff. And this is the first time I've ever splurged and done it. So I'm feeling good about my adult decisions right now. Look at that beautiful sunrise. And look at that cold snow. Okay, thank you, amazing bathtub and bed. It's time to finish off the SoCal Desert Ramble. Although it doesn't feel very desert-y right now, but I am returning to the desert. Gotta go up a little bit and then down about 40 miles. Yeah, it's cold. There's no doubt. I am at a ski resort and people are skiing today. Oh, there's the sun, please warm me up. Look at that, a bowling barn, that looks fun. Ooh, look, they're making snow. All right, I've gotten off the main road and I'm heading up toward the dirt road. And I'm hoping that it's clear. I'm seeing a lot of snow in the yards of these houses and I doubt they plow the dirt roads. So we'll see. Well, the good news is all this uphill riding is keeping me plenty warm. And the trees are quite big. Oh, and for the last day, of course, no crashies, no flaties, and no whammies. It smells really good out here. You know that pine needle smell, Christmas tree smell. That's what it smells like. And I'm really happy to be away from the busy road. Got a little nutty down there. This is my happy place. I'm still going, I keep on thinking I'm gonna turn around a corner and there's gonna be three feet of snow blocking the road, but so far, so good. And it is a beautiful morning to be out in the woods. Loving these giant trees. Oh, bummer. I finally hit an area with a lot of snow and now it's gonna be walking time. I hope this doesn't last long because this is gonna go really, really slowly. All right, nice day for a walk in the woods, I guess. I'm having flashbacks of my adventure in New Mexico. I can't even move my bike. Just like that adventure, I will go down in altitude and the snow will melt and all will be right in the world. I'm really, really happy now that I spent the night in Big Bear. There's no way I would have gotten through this yesterday afternoon. Good news is I have all day. Okay, some of this is packed hard enough that I can ride it. It's kind of like riding through the sand. Woo, well, that's slippery. Yikes. I'm not sure if it's worth trying to ride. So slippery after walk time. Well, the good news is there's no way I'm gonna get hit by a car out here. It's actually not too bad. The snow's pretty hard. Easy to walk on. Might seem weird that I'm taking my long pants off, but all this pushing has made me very hot. All right, I've stripped down a bit and I feel better. And I'm gonna treat myself to a Snickers. Back when I was a kid, the commercial was, Snickers does a body good. And I don't know if it's still the slogan, but I love these things. I only eat them on bike trips. I rarely eat this kind of stuff in regular life, but it's gonna taste so good right now. Woo, sun's coming up and it's warm and glorious. And hopefully I'm almost done with the snow. Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. Going top speed here. It really is about as fast as riding through a desert wash. I'm still going up too. I'm not gonna see this snow disappear until I lose some altitude. It's actually a very good thing. I'm riding through this snow in the morning while it's hard and crispy, because later in the day, this snow is gonna turn to mush and getting through it would be much more difficult. And wet.  Man, got to the tippy top. I think I'm at about 8,000 feet of elevation and it's time to go down all the way down to I think the valley floor is about 1,000 dish. Woo, and hopefully the snow gets out of here soon so I can start cruising. It's like sledding, yeah buddy. Look at that view, right about there. Oh, it feels so good to finally be moving downhill. My body is warm and I'm loving this. And I might feel like I'm home free, like I'm almost there, but I still have 30 miles to go. And you'll see on this map have a lot of little squiggly squiggles to go. I'm the blue dot heading down there. Lots of fun between here and San Bernardino. Who put this tree here? I can't bunny hop that high. Okay, carry on. I thought I was done with you snow. I might be getting wet here. The snow has turned to water. It's not a free ride all the way down. So this is going much slower than I anticipated. You know, I figure, okay, I'm at Big Bear. I'm up high and I'm going down pretty low. That's going to be all downhill, right? But, oh gosh. But that's not how it's gone. There's a lot of uphill and as you can see, it's not easy uphill. But that's okay, that's okay. That means I just get to enjoy this route a little bit longer. Every time I think I'm near the top of whatever I'm riding up, it's not. It just keeps going. And the worst part is, there's all these little flies that are following me and they're biting. I need to go downhill to get away from them. But there just isn't any downhill. Back there, up those mountains. That's where I came from. And you know what today is? Thanksgiving Eve. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving Day. And I have to finish this adventure today because I have a flight early tomorrow morning. My mom would kick my butt if I didn't show up for Thanksgiving. I'm getting closer to civilization. That's a good sign. That is quite the wall of rock right there. Okay, up, up, up there and then over that little ridge bump. Hopefully that's the last uphill but that hasn't been the case at all today. I'm earning it. I'm earning this final day of the SoCal Desert Ramble. There's another good hill. Here we go. There really is never ending. I think I'm done and then I'm not. I go up, down, up, down, up, down. You know, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks to my bike. I love this thing. It's taken me so many beautiful places. And I'm not just saying that because I helped design it but I really love it. This is my dream bike. I designed it essentially after riding the Trek 1120 down Baja and all the flaws with that bike. I was like, well, if we have a drivetrain that can handle sand and snow and not need to be lubed 100 times a day, that would be awesome. And here we go with the pinion and gates. It's been solid, so solid. So thank you to this bike, the 600X. The Deuzer Cruiser. And thank you to Mother Nature, yeah. You know, I've always been told that the surrounding areas outside of LA are stunning and they sure are. Because LA is a city, isn't my favorite, but this is not far away. So I just looked to my right and I see this and I'm thinking, is that a mirage? Is the mountain cheering me on? R for Ryan. That's pretty cool, huh? Los Angeles. There's the dirt. There's the pavement. I finally made it. Today was way harder than I thought it was gonna be. I figured, seriously, three hours to go 45 miles downhill. That's pretty reasonable, right? But man, this took almost seven hours and it was beautiful and it was fun. And I got to reminisce about how wonderful this adventure has been in so many ways. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I'm full of gratitude and thanks. And now I'm here in LA at some, they're gonna be building some cookie cutter houses here it looks like. You know, it's fitting that I pop in on the edge of LA. And I'm not here alone. This is really, really the best part of today. I have a new friend, Dave. How you doing, buddy? Doing good, doing good. And this is Karen. And they came to say hi. They knew that I was in the area. They brought a bike box so I can pack my bike. And this means so much. And we have a cute doggie too. Look at the cute doggie.   Yeah, buddy, you're on YouTube now. And look at this. We've got some new bags. So, you know how a lot of my bags that I use are Kai Venture Bags. You've heard me talk about them for years. Well, this is Karen. One half of Kai Venture Bags. And what did Kai make for me here? He gave you a fanny pack, two snack caddies. One for your girlfriend and one for you. He made one this one, especially because if your daddy was in the green, he was a green beret. Yeah, my grandpa was a green beret, yep. And then made a little doggie snack caddy for her. Oh, you're so sweet. Give Kai a big hug. Oh, well. I was talking to Kai the other day. The dozer code is good forever, right?  All Kai Venture Bags made in America, made by these two. Well, Kai's not here, but made by these wonderful humans. And they are awesome. I can't believe it. You're so wonderful. Oh, yeah, look at this. And look at that. Ah. Here we are, step two after burritos, boxing the bike. And we have a new friend. What's your name? Andrew. Andrew, where'd you come from, man? It's come to save the day. Down the way. So I'm unloading everything from my frame bag. And I noticed that my bag of beans here has a leak. And there's beans all in the inside of this bag. There's still some left if you guys are hungry. Whoa, we did it. You did it. Just barely. 29-inch mountain bike into a road bike box. Andrew and Dave, you're the heroes of the day. And it was so great to meet you and you. Now you have a friend in Boulder, come visit any time. Well, do, do. Hello there. I just took a shower. I'm feeling very relaxed. What an amazing nine days. Ah. I'm gonna fall asleep. Please like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Oh. Hey there, just a quick heads up. My book, The Long Way Home is now for sale at dooserbook.com. It's about my very first adventure from Honduras to Boulder.


Right now, A.D. is a top what player? 20? I mean, there's a lot of great players at the top of the league. You're not putting him above Joao and B. You're not putting him against Giannis. You're not putting him against those top tier bigs. And it's not for like a talent. It's just for what we've seen and the expectations we have to have with his health. But when he's on and when he's healthy and look, this is ifs, we're doing a lot of ifs here. But when, yeah, he's up there. He's higher. He's in consideration for a lot more than top 20. But I think, yeah, right now he's a top 20 player. And that's great. This is a talent rich league. It's a top heavy league. And that's right about where he should be. I don't know. Maybe he's closer to 15 than 20. But he's up there, but he's a game breaker. He's an absolute game breaker on defense and offense as of late.