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all right so it looks like we’ve got some people already logged in and it’s

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just about nudes so I think we’ll get started so first of all hi and welcome

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to everyone who is logged in live and may or may be watching this recorded

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later my name is Liz I’m the programming and engagement coordinator at the art

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gallery of Alberta so you might have seen me introduce speakers before but I’m very excited to be giving the

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program myself today so today’s Ag live is inspired by our

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current exhibition in golden light which features a selection of Russian and

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Greek Orthodox icons dating from the 16th to 19th centuries but we’re going

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to go in a slightly different direction today and look at how Orthodox icons actually influenced modern art and the

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early 20th century avant-garde so first off just a little quick orientation of

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this platform there is a chat box on the right-hand side and so if you have questions or comments

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you can submit them there I’ll try to check it at intervals in the during the

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presentation and there’s a few times we’ll ask for comments but just so you’re aware there is a delay on the

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stream so I may not be totally responsive and I might not be able to see it at all times when we’re going

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through slides and stuff but do feel free to drop your questions in there there is also a reconnect button for you

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at the top of your screen so if you’ve been doing zoom meetings or watching

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other webinars you know that sometimes internet connections can be a little unpredictable so if you hit that

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reconnect button it’ll refresh for you and that might help if we run into

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issues on my end I also have a way to sort of refresh and restart but hopefully we won’t have any issues and

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as I mentioned a recording of this will be posted on our website and social

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media in a few days so to get started let’s talk a little bit about in golden

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light so that opened in December did anyone have a chance to see it before we closed in March okay so uh

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while I’m talking about the exhibition I’m gonna show you a video taken by

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Charles our creative director just so you can have a little sense of what it

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looks like okay

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so sorry for the kind of rough screen share but it’s just to give you a

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general idea of the space so it includes 25 icons from the 16th 19th century and

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was organized by the EGA and the art museum at the University of Toronto the

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all the objects are in loan from the University of Toronto Art Center where they form part of the malkos collection

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so the malkov collection was bequeathed to the U of T by dr. Lillian Malekith

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who was a psychoanalyst who lived in New York and she had a very interesting and

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extensive collection of objects mainly Greek Roman Byzantine and Western

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medieval items but also spanning from prehistory to the 20th century including

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a lot of icons which she displayed in her New York apartment I’ve heard that

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the images are quite impressive and oh I see that a couple of you have seen the

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exhibition so I’m glad that you’re joining us to get a different perspective today so the exhibition is

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divided in two rooms one focuses on the life of Mary and the other on the life

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Jesus so you can get a little sense here that when you walk into the exhibition

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there’s rich color the walls are a deep sort of reddish color it’s looking a

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little brown on the video and then blue in the other room there’s dim lighting which of course is a very evocative way

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to see the icons but it’s also for conservation purposes they can only have

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so much light because they’re very old and somewhat fragile and of course there’s a lot of

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gold when you walk in and you’re very struck by the color isn’t the gold so I’m gonna stop that there second and as

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you might be able to tell I am in my basement today because it’s where I can plug into the Internet

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so I’m gonna try and show you a lot of pictures so you don’t just have to look at my wood paneling but let’s talk a bit

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more about icons what is an icon can anyone give me a little definition this

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is the part where we have a bit of an awkward pause that we wouldn’t have it if we did this live so I’ll just jump in

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and say that an icon is generally speaking a depiction of a religious

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figure um but we’re talking about Orthodox icons today yes so amanda says

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an icon off to specifically represent someone with a halo so yeah you’ll often see a halo signifying of course that the

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individual in the icon is holy and so

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it’s a depiction of a religious figure but not just any religious figure to be an icon in the strict Orthodox sense so

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it must be a true and accurate depiction which means it has to depict the figure

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based on certain conventions and standards of the of the Orthodox Church

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and it has to be a figure who is recognized as holy by the Orthodox Church so someone could paint a picture

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of Saint Thomas Aquinas in a Byzantine style but that would not be an icon a

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proper icon because Thomas Aquinas is a Catholic saint not worth doc st. and of

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course the Catholic Church has a lot of beautiful art but they are not icons in

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a specific cents and that is because of a very specific role that I contemplate which

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is that they they have a theology says

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that there is a sort of connection between subject the actual subject of

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the icon so Christ or Mary or a saint who’s called the prototype for the icon

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and then the icon which is that true and accurate representation has this

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connection to the these figures who are said to exist at a higher spiritual realm

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so this visible material icon beautifully painted gilded is connected

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to the the prototype allowing a contact between the person who venerates the

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icon and the spiritual level of being and that individual who they venerate

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through the icon so it’s a little complicated I can’t say I fully understand it or the best person to

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explain it but what I want you to take away is that an icon is not just a picture someone thinks oh I bet Jesus

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looked like this and painted them that way it is a an object that has this sort

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of mystical connection to a holy person so icons are also of course beautiful

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and they are used they used to enhance

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the beauty of the church and also to instruct people and matters of faith and remind them of the faith yes as Lilia

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says Catholic has icons – they just have a different purpose so it’s an icon in

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the sense of fiction of a holy person and of course like an orthodox icon is

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used to educate people about church doctrine and faith and also to inspire

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the people who venerate them – to imitate the holy figures so that’s sort

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of a quick definition of an icon and I want it but I want to talk about the formal traits of

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a Byzantine or Russian icon not all icons have to be painted in that

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particular style but many of them are it’s not most so let’s pull up some more

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images okay so I’m gonna show you three

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three icons from in golden light and if you just want to put a little

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description of the style that you see sort of how the artist creates the image

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what traits jump out at you and then we’ll talk a bit about how that could

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influence modern painter so this is Virgin enthroned the child the Pantone

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NASA icon it’s Serbian or Macedonian from the 17th

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century and you can see Mary and Christ in the middle surrounded by Archangels behind

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them and Old Testament prophets from the outside so I’ve got some very rich reds

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and blue gold this is a very large icon it’s one of the first you see when you

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walk into the exhibition now this is one of my favorites it’s another one that

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really grabs you right away it’s a nativity scene so unlike some

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nativity scenes that we might be more familiar with from Christmas cards and such the Holy Family is shown in a cave

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rather than a a barn but apparently that’s because people used to keep their

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cattle and sheep in caves rather than in barns convenient ready-made so here

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you’ve got some like rays of light and and more gold up at the top and around

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and the halos that someone mentioned and also all these very jagged so geometric

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forms forming this rocki cave now this one’s a little

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different so this is our lady in the

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burning bush Oh stylized landscape from Danielle yeah it’s very very stylized on

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that last one emphasizing like the jaggedness of the rocks so this one’s a

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little bit more allegorical it’s comparing the Virgin Mary with Moses’s

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vision of the burning bush in the Old Testament and some interesting colors

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the peach and orange and red and these figures painted just in white lines okay

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so I’m gonna exit out of here does anyone else have any observations okay

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so I guess some traits there’s a lot of things you can probably pick up on but

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there’s not really any linear perspective so the figures sizes there’s

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big figures in large one and small ones and that tends to represent their relative importance

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yes geometric figures so the linear the lack of perspective is kind of more

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symbolic so you know Mary and Jesus were very large and that first one and then

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the arch Archangels were a little smaller not necessary because they were farther away but just because they are

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the less significant figures and then

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there’s the flat geometric forms I also noticed that there’s very strong

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outlines on the forms rather than using sort of like shaded modeled volumes

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there’s very rich [Music] that’s possibly symbolic that’s a whole

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other thing we could get into and of course there’s the gold so I think those

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are some key ones to identify so abstract art is another topic we’re

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going to try and bring these two two different traditions together in a minute so defining abstract art could be a

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pretty complicated discussion so I’m gonna leave it kind of simple and just

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borrow a an explanation from the Tate website so abstract art is art that does

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not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead ease of shapes colors forms and

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gestural marks to achieve its effect so strictly speaking the word abstract

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means to separate or withdraw something from something else so maybe capturing just an essential

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form from a scene or an idea so the term

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can be applied to art that is based on object figure or landscape where forms

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have been simplified or schematized so maybe like that cave in that nativity

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scene or Picasso for example is an abstract painter who took an actual

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scene and simplified it down to certain expressive shapes but also is applied to

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art that uses forms such as geometric shapes or marks that have no source and an external basilar reality and the

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painters were going to look at today are really more in that school so they’re really trying to create a pure

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abstraction that has no reference to a subject outside of the painting itself

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it’s all about those color form and lines so since the early 1900’s abstract

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art has formed a central stream of modern art and we’re also going to be looking at the very early early stage of

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abstract art so around the turn of the century so how on earth could the icon

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tradition and influence abstract art so we’re gonna go back to the very start of the

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20th century with a few artists who were intentionally exploring the potential of

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totally abstract art and we’re gonna start with some formal influence and the

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constructivists actually we’re gonna

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start a little sooner than that okay so here you can see so three pretty

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different looking kinds of kinds of art on the Left we have Breton

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brother-and-sister by William Boudreaux which I’ve included a serve an example of academic painting so it’s it’s very

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realistic very technically skilled and

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then in the middle we have a piece by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner who was a German

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expressionist and then we have the Virgin and Child icon that we saw earlier

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so all those formal traits of the icons

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that we talked about so the lack of perspective the flat geometric forms and

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powerful use of color appealed to a lot of modern artists who are looking for a

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new visual language that either rejected or just departed from the academic tradition so by the late 19th century

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early 20th centuries some people sort of felt that the academic tradition that was taught in like the bows our Academy

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in Paris and other traditional schools was getting a little stuffy and boring

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it maybe wasn’t capable of expressing the ideas that they wanted to express so

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there was some artists who sort of departed from that that school and started experimenting with abstraction

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is one of the main things that they did so they were looking around for other

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kinds of visual languages often looking to non-western art Picasso famously was

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influenced by African sculpture and also to some extent elections so

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artists we’ve encountered them in that context and there are also a lot of of

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course for Eastern European artists and for Russian diaspora artists in the West

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icons would being part of their contemporary culture and environment students coming up I’ll mention now that

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anything I don’t get to in the talk I’m going to try and find answers for you and marketing will send out a little

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follow-up email with with answers so

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let’s look at the constructivists so this is a painting by alexander rodchenko he’s also I think that are

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known as a photographer but he was a constructivist painter so the Russian

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constructivists they really emphasize building and science over expression and

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they viewed the artist as a builder or an engineer and art is something to be constructed hence constructivist so they

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use sparse geometric forms and simple materials now looking at this we noticed

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some strong lines and flat geometric forms and the icons and to me some of

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those yellow lines remind me of the ways that they painted rays of light the star and the Nativity and we know that icons

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were source of sort of reference and inspiration for the way that constructivist painted light there’s of

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course no perspective in these paintings because they’re purely abstract but

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here’s a sort of an older paint an early painting by another constructivist named vladimir tatlin who is also I think

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better known as a sculptor but I’m focusing on our paintings today so

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Kathleen actually did early on paint

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Saints and traditional iconographic styles but then he later used that same visual language to paint non-religious

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motifs like this painting of himself as a sailor so there is a background here

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this figures in the background but you can see those flat sort of sharp

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geometric forms the the last sort of

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composition is also very similar to an icon so this is from 1911 the next one

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also by Todd plane is from 1913 so he’s made a pretty big departure here but

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this is more of us sort of sculptural work using wood metal and leather and

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there’s been some comparison with the use of metal here with the use of gold

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in icons and also the practice of creating a metalwork cover for an icon

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which would often cover maybe just the fragments of the outside frame or even as much as the whole icon except for the

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face and hands so some of his technique here might be a little inspired so some

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of the the sparseness of the constructivist let’s go back you know

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that seems very odds with with the richness and or maintenance of a

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Byzantine or a Russian icon but we can see the connections in the in the

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flattened forms bright colors not bright colors in this one bright colors in that

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and geometric shape and those visible rays of light slate especially as a side

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note something that occurred to me while I was preparing last night is that there’s also kind of an interesting

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connection between the constructivist idea of what the artist who the artist

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is and what they should do and the role of the iconographer in icon painting so

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the constructivist were communists and they they viewed the artist just as an

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engineer who builds art in service of the proletariat not out of personal self-expression so the arts not supposed

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to be an expression of who the artist is similarily iconographer z’ historically

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our anonymous craftspeople highly skilled craftspeople who crafted icons

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following following the strict formula and they did their survey their work in the service of God and the

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church not again out of self-expression

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so the second area of connection is a

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little more conceptual so it’s a bit more about what art is for what it can

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do and what icons are for and what they can do so let’s return again to an icon

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from and this is also from in golden light so you go visit you can see it so

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this is a Transfiguration icon so the icon of the trans the Transfiguration is

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an episode that appears in each of the Gospels it’s an important moment for

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Christians because it shows evidence of Christ’s divinity it’s the moment that

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that’s sort of revealed to some of his followers so Jesus Peter James and John

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so three of the Apostles climb Mount Tabor to pray with Jesus and Jesus

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begins to shine with with rays of light and of waste from the sky seems to be

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God calls him son so that moment is sort

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of a revelation of Jesus’s internet true nature and in that episode he glows with

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divine light and the land around them is

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also transfigured and glows with this infusion of divine light so here we can

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see Christ’s clothes are white they’re described as white as light in the

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Gospels and that sort of oval shape around him is called a mandorla and that

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also represents divine glory and then we’ve got these triangular red sort of

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shafts of light striking the three apostles who are sort of contorted in

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expression of their their sort of ecstasy in shock so the sort of point of the

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Transfiguration as it shows us if the moment when Christ’s divinity is revealed and it also is a moment in

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which all of material reality is transformed and transfigured with divine light so it’s about revealing truth

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within reality a sort of hidden truth may be and that is what icons are kind

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of for as well they unveil an essential inner nature of a being in this case

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Christ and reality or can also reveal the holiness the saint allowing the

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venerate er to make contact with those eternal presences and also reminding

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them of doctrine and teachings of the church so in that sense icons have this

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kind of transcendent mystical function and meaning which is specific specifically Orthodox Christian and

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focuses on truths held by the church but the idea that art can be revelatory and

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transcendent is found in other traditions and sure but it shows up in abstract art in the very beginning

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that’s what I want to talk about yes I

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think Lilliana is mentioning here Transfiguration is a still a significant

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celebration in the church so I’m going

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to talk about three main abstract artists who are examples of artists who

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brought some of this idea of art being transcendent or revealing an inner truth

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and being generally spiritual into their search for abstraction and all three of

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these artists are Russian or Eastern European and have connections with the

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Orthodox Church but they are certainly not the only ones who took this view

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they’re just early influential ones so this is composition six by Vasily

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Kandinsky so very famous abstract painter and considered one of the pioneers of

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abstraction although who actually painted the first abstract painting is a very debated topic but he’s one of the

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candidates so he was born in Moscow and grew up in Odessa and was raised in the

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Orthodox Church he studied paint is he studied art but

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then studied law and economics and only began really seriously painting at 30 and he he went to Munich to continue his

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studies excuse me before returning to Moscow in 1914 so he worked for some

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time in Russia after the Revolution as a cultural administrator but his spiritual

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outlook was a bit at odds with the ethos of the Soviet Society so he’s kind of

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the opposite of the constructivist in that for him art is all about expression

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and about the the artists inner world so he left Russia and taught at the Bauhaus

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until it was closed by the Nazis and then he moved to France or he worked until his death in 1944 so in his as you

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can see his style is very lyrical he often compared his compared painting to

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music calling his pieces improvisations or compositions just like a piece of

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music and Colour was very important different colors have different for him

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have different spiritual and psychological effects so he was also influenced by theosophy I should mention

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as well as his Orthodox upbringing but it’s undoubted that that spirituality

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was very important he in 1910 wrote a treatise called concerning the spiritual

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in art in which he talked about the role of the artist which was to use art to

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elevate humanity to the pinnacle of spirituality so to bring people up from

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focusing on material things or themselves to being able to connect with

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some sort of higher spiritual experience or now that reminds me a bit of what icons

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are supposed to do for those who venerate them by allowing people to access this higher spiritual realm and

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have contact with the the holy figures who sort of exist at that realm so

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artists are supposed to be guided by a spiritual inner necessity which would allow them to produce art that would

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have that effect so art for Kandinsky is obviously very mystical it’s a way to

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connect to a spiritual truth so on the

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left there you can see Constantin Brancusi in his studio isoprene koozie

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the sculptor and in the middle is one of his earlier sculptures from 1918 and on

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the right is bird in space which is probably his most famous work he took an

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intro to art history class you might have studied it so from brain koozies

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Romanian but he moves to Paris in 1904 to study at the Ecole des Vosges R and

31:51

to work in Auguste Rodin studio only very briefly he said I felt that I was

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not giving anything by following the conventional mode of sculpture he seems like a fairly opinionated

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figure he didn’t mince words so he left for a dance studio because he felt that

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it was old-fashioned and conventional and in 1907 is what he enters serve the mature period of his work where he

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starts using abstract forms and sculpting with direct carving so what that means and why it’s important is

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that he worked directly with his material with the metal that he was using or the wood or a stone rather than

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creating the kowax model and to be cast and then executed into a finished

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sculpture by someone else so throughout his life Brancusi was

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involved in the Catholic in the Orthodox Church sorry as a server as a child he got a grant

32:53

from his church to study in art in Romania and he was a chanter in an

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Orthodox parish in Bucharest well he was a student and later at the Romanian Chapel where in Paris where he’s now

33:06

buried so for brain koozie reality was a

33:12

union of matter and spirit so the material world was very was very important because it’s sort of combined

33:19

with with spirit he gave a lot of care and attention to his materials that he used while at the same time trying to

33:28

use those materials to reveal an inner idea or essence at a more spiritual

33:34

level so I’m going to show you another quote from brain koozie which is also a bit blunt and his opinion on having his

33:43

work called abstract in the sense of you know not real so they are imbeciles who

33:49

call my work abstract that which they call abstract is the most realist because what is real is not the exterior

33:55

form but the idea and the essence of things so you can see for brain koozie

34:01

abstract art is a way to reveal an inner truth that is probably more significant

34:07

than the truth of how something looks on the outside ok and now on to our last

34:17

figure who I’m going to focus on for a bit longer so this is Casimir Malevich

34:25

who probably the most obviously combines

34:31

with the form and the theological ideas of icons with abstraction to create a

34:39

totally new kind of painting that he calls suprematism so suprematism was a

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search for the barest essentials of art pairing away everything that was unnecessary to reach what they called

34:54

the zero degree of art which was the point at which his motifs just – a circle a square and a rectangle

35:01

and get deeper into that although he wrote 1913 on the back so maybe he was trying to make himself even more

35:08

avant-garde so it’s pretty straightforward to describe its formal qualities its oil-on-canvas

35:16

plain black square on a white background those cracks and texture that you see

35:22

that’s not how it originally would have looked that’s just the result of it aging it’s a square canvas seventy nine

35:31

and a half by seventy nine and a half centimeters and that’s that’s basically it so

35:37

Malevich claimed that this was the first painting that is not of something there’s debate about that but for now

35:45

take him at his word so he wrote this about this painting up until now there

35:51

were no attempts at painting as such without any attribution but without any attribute of real life painting was the

35:58

aesthetic side of a thing but never was original and an end in itself

36:06

so black square was first exhibited at the last exhibition of futurist painting

36:13

0-1 in 1915 and Petrograd so although

36:18

being called the last exhibition of futurist painting it was actually a groundbreaking first exhibition of a

36:25

group of key artists of the pre-revolution Russian avant-garde where

36:31

they sort of demonstrated that they were not just following the Western

36:36

avant-garde artists in Paris and Germany but we’re like on the cutting edge in

36:41

their own rights and doing new and interesting things so Malevich exhibited

36:47

39 completely non representational non figurative works consisting just of

36:52

geometric shapes painted on white grounds and here you see one of the few

36:58

photographs of that exhibition these are all Malevich work so do you notice

37:05

anything about the placement of the artworks and can you spot black square

37:31

so the works are hung from Florida ceiling kind of a chaotic version of a

37:39

salon hang so that’s what we call it when when you hang paintings from floor

37:44

to ceiling like that but here they’re quite almost scattered almost jumbled so

37:53

quite dynamic yeah it’s a seemingly random hanging of a comment so the one

38:02

that I want to draw your attention to I don’t know if anyone spotted it but black square is hung in a very unusual

38:07

spot up on that top corner so it’s sort of almost liberated from the wall the

38:15

way it just makes contact on this on the sides and sort of hovers out there over the corner it also really hangs over the

38:23

viewer sort of dominating the room so it’s a pretty striking and unusual hanging I think even if you walked into

38:30

an art gallery today and saw one painting up in the corner you probably notice and probably find it a little

38:36

strange but Russian viewers actually would have recognized this and probably

38:42

understood its reference which is that that position is a spot that in a traditional Orthodox home would be

38:49

occupied by an icon of a saint so as anyone what do you make of this

38:54

reference if in putting this black square up in the place of an icon any

39:00

thoughts there’s really no right answers

39:12

I think there’s a lot of interpretations we could take away from that and if you

39:18

have ideas continue to share what I’m gonna talk about Oh like an anti icon

39:24

yeah like a black hole that’s definitely something that would

39:30

be my first thought I think also it elevates the status of this painting

39:36

that he made so he’s not in iconographer he’s not making holy images but he’s putting his own artwork up in that

39:43

position so what I’m gonna focus on though is how this bringing together of

39:52

the position of an icon and abstract painting is it’s kind of creating a new

40:00

idea of what an abstract painting can be and what a painting should do so iris

40:05

says she’d be immediately drawn to it if you went to this gallery and I agree I think I would be – just the way it pops

40:13

out from the wall like that and is you know very simple but very powerful I’ve

40:20

never seen it in person but I imagine it would be so back to this idea of a new

40:27

kind of painting you’ll recall that I said that icons are not just a picture

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of a holy figure but they are in a sense the presence of that holy person through

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their icon they are present in that space that they’re in so similarly black

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square is quite a presence in this room it changes the relationship between the

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the painting or the image and the viewer by asserting itself as a presence in the

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gallery in the space it’s not on a flat plane to the viewer sort of hovers above

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them and importantly it’s not a depiction of something it’s just pure

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color and form or blackness and form and the viewer is confronted by its presence

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just as that as a black square it’s got no subject or background or

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perspective so you can’t look at it as a window into a scene and there’s no

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picture plane separating the viewer from the content of the image it just sort of

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I’ve seen it described as opening itself up into the space in which it’s placed I

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don’t know if you see it as a whole or as a as a physical presence extending

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into the room may be either but it kind of messes with space that way and I

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guess to sort of explain I’d say you know is there a distinction between

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painting a black square on a canvas like a painting of a black square on a canvas which is hung in a space and simply a

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black square in the space as such so is it a painting of the square or is it

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just a black square that is present so

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Malevich considered realism to be a distraction oh I almost want to show you so here’s a reconstruction of that

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exhibition missing a few artworks as you can see but with a lot of the same ones at the Tate Modern and you can really

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see how that squared dominates especially compared to the colorful works that sort of lead up to it and how

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its its presence in the space feels in a sense so the legacy of suprematism well

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of it considered realism to be a distraction from the transcendent experience of art and he became

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increasingly these spiritual ideas and you so tarik ideas became very important

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to suprematism and trying to find the the essence of art that could make it

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transcendent so he divided suprematism into three phases so there’s the black

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phase which we saw with black square and that was about finding that zero degree

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of painting that’s the essence of of art and then the colored stage on the left

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there sometimes referred to as the dainties dynamic suprematism so it focused more on color and shape and the

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sensation of movement in space and then finally culminated in the white phase

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which as you can the well is exemplified by white on

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white where Malevich completely got rid of form and color to focus just on the

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idea of a square on a canvas so suprematism was initially tolerated

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after the revolution but it was a bit too spiritual and abstract and he so

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tarik and was condemned under Stalin who only permitted socialist realism so

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Malevich stopped painting and focused on theoretical writing between 1919 and 1927 and eventually only returned to

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painting – to do representational painting but the influence of

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suprematism even though it was fairly short-lived and not a huge movement was

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quite widespread so constructivism that we looked at earlier even though it’s much more

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grounded in material world actually grew out of suprematism and some of the

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constructivists you know worked with Malevich and were supremacists initially and they particularly grew out of that

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dynamic colorful phase so suprematism also created this pared down language of

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abstraction that focused just on form in color you can see it in in Piett

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Mondrian as well and sort of this classic idea of what abstract art looks like and suprematism was introduced to

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the West in 1927 with an exhibition in Berlin that was received with interest by both European and American artists so

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I’ve touched on three influential artists who viewed abstract art from

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various spiritual perspectives Kandinsky was very mystical francuzzi kind of was

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about revealing inner truth of reality of material and then Malevich was about

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how art can like transcend everyday reality

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so but this idea that abstract art is spiritual or metaphysical resonates throughout modern art history

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to move a bit further down that family tree of abstraction here is a quote from

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Mark Rothko who is a Jewish American artist an abstract expressionist so he

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says pictures must be miraculous a revelation and this is a shot of his

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black paintings in the Rothko chapel in Houston which is a non-denominational

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sort of chapel religious space so you

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can see that although the artists that I focus on today we’re rooted in in the

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Orthodox Church and probably drew a lot of inspiration from that this idea that

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art can be spiritual and miraculous can be found throughout the 20th century

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now the icon tradition is not the only source for that idea I think I mentioned that Kandinsky was very interested in

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theosophy and their ideas about color but it was definitely part of the

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intellectual and spiritual and artistic environment in Russia and Eastern Europe which produced many influential abstract

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artists so it’s not surprising that we see these connections so I guess to wrap

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up the kind of comparisons the the reason I make these comparisons is I

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think it shows us interesting things about both about the icon tradition and about abstract art so it reminds us the

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abstract artists were not just motivated by rebellion and novelty and just

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looking for the newest thing that they could sell they they developed the new

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visual languages of abstraction in order to express ideas about the world and

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about reality and experience that they cannot do through purely representational traditional art forms

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and then on the other hand you have Orthodox icons which

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are often just mute as traditional objects they’re pictures of saints they

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tell us things about Bible and about Christianity but in reality the the

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theology of icons contains a very complicated theory of art and what it’s

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for and what it can do and that that influenced abstract artists who are coming up with new and exciting ideas

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about what art can do and B as well so I hope that these connections have

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illuminated some new ideas about either icons or about abstract art I think I’ve

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got time for some questions I know Lily Anna asked about the difference between Byzantine Greek and

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Russian schools I can’t I don’t know off

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the top of my head a lot about that but I’ll try and get an answer for you and we’ll send it out to everyone who’s

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registered I would say that the Byzantine school would probably refer to

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the icons made in the Byzantine Empire and period which I should know the dates

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of but I don’t remember right now but the earliest the Byzantine Empire was

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the period in which icons originated and

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all of the theology and debates about what icons are and are for we’re sort of

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hashed out there were two periods called the iconoclasm where icons were

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forbidden and they were destroyed but after many debates they were reinstated

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and considered to be not idolatry I think was the center of that debate

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and I know that there are differences between different Greek and Russian schools of icon painting and there’s

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also an icon painting tradition on Crete but I’ll try and look up a bit more for

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that and send that out to you guys does anyone else have any questions or

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comments

50:44

okay so we’re modern artists of Western Europe indirectly influenced by icons in

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any way perhaps through El Greco I think that I didn’t get into this in too much

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detail but yes I’d say that modern artists from Western Europe were influenced by icons partly in the same

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way that they are influenced by non-western art that if you’re familiar

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with the term primitivism it refers to the way that artists looked to art from

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the past or from non-western cultures which were at the time viewed as being

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more primitive in the sense of being there art was being it was more simple

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or naive or more primal this is

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complicated so they are just like Picasso drew on things like African

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sculpture and of course the idea that these were primitive traditions was

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reflected racist ideas at a time as well as of course a lack of understanding about the cultural context but they did

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take a lot of the forms and and shapes of imagery from these traditions to

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create new abstract visual languages

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that they believed were more primal and expressive so I think Byzantine and

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Orthodox icons although they’re not like totally unfamiliar and exotic compared

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to art from further away places and colonies they they still would have been

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a bit exotic and for modern artists and because of their associations with like

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the medieval past and being a pre-modern tradition might have been viewed as you

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know quote-unquote primitive and so drawing some of that same

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inspiration you mention alla Greco I don’t know what the lineage is between El Greco and modern Western art but el

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Greco is from Crete which does have a an icon painting tradition so I think there

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was definitely a connection between his sort of glowing figures and and the use

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of gold and rich color that we see Thank

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You Lillian yes it is difficult to tell about via the comparisons between icons and abstract art in just one hand I bit

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off quite a bit so it’s almost one so I think I’ll wrap up if you have any other

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questions feel free to email marketing at your HEA dot CA and I’ll pass

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anything on to me and I’ll try and find a little bit more about those different

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schools and see if I can sense something is everyone okay so recording of this

53:52

webinar will also be posted in coming days and I’ll also mention the next AGA

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live is next Thursday at 10:30 a.m. so June 4th so chief curator Catherine

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Creston will be speaking with Vancouver artist Damien Moffitt about untitled abstract drawing in space which is a new

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mobile installation which was just installed in our atrium so no one’s had

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the chance to see it yet but we are reopening next week so you can come see

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the icons in golden light as well as Rembrandt nest for the end of the world Damian’s new piece starting on June 4th

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if you’re a member so we’ve got a members preview from June 4th to 6th and then we’ll be open to the general public

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on June 11th and you can find out more information about that and our new hours on your heig a so thank you all for

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joining me today and I hope you’ll join us again as we continue to do digital

54:54

programming for the rest of the summer Thanks

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