2025 Lecture Series: The 50 years that changed painting 1867-1917

Join us for a series of Sunday afternoon lectures with Terence Maloon. This series of 12 lectures – 6 which were held in 2024 and 6 to take place in 2025 – looks at the reorientation of painting from 19th-century Naturalism to 20th-century Abstraction, exploring the shifts and examining the rationalisation that gained a pervasive influence over the entirety of modern and contemporary art.

In 1867 James Abbott McNeill Whistler changed the title of one of his paintings, renaming it Symphony in White – the implications of this change were more far-reaching than anyone could have imagined. Whistler’s subsequent work, which took on a musical and colouristic emphasis, began an ineluctable drift towards abstraction.

Over the next 50 years a sequence of bold initiatives seemed to intuit a common goal. The paintings of Claude Monet were more abstract than those of Whistler, Cézanne was more abstract than Monet, the followers of Gauguin even more so… until around 1910–1911, when the first non-objective paintings began to appear in public in various places in Europe.

One of the strangest facts surrounding the birth of Abstraction was that it was not seen as a new movement or a novel idiom. The first non-objective paintings appeared surrounded by a multitude of near-abstract, quasi-abstract and abstract-tending works which were associated with modernist movements such as Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Expressionism and much besides. The eventuation of abstract painting was the outcome of a gradual evolution or a continual stripping-down or purification which was consistently enacted by anti-academic or avant-garde painters over half a century.

An “abstract way of seeing” infiltrated not only non-objective painting, but a whole gamut of figurative painting, photography, graphic design, sculpture and architecture, and became a defining feature of modernism. This lecture series is based on the exhibition Paths to Abstraction 1867–1917 curated by Terence Maloon for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2008, yet it will embrace the opportunities to expand visual references and explore the ramifications for art in Australia, as well as to incorporate many afterthoughts stimulated by the 2008 exhibition.

Lecture 7: Cézanne’s posterity
Sunday 6 April, 2 pm

At the dawn of the twentieth century modern painting was poised to assert its difference from anything that had gone before it. In decades past, Paul Cézanne had been a marginal figure in the French art world, yet suddenly he became the most adulated and imitated artist for the rising generation, his influence felt not only in France but worldwide. On the face of it he was a most unlikely candidate for such a position of pre-eminent authority. A late starter with seemingly little aptitude for painting and drawing, the strange fact was that the flaws and idiosyncrasies of Cézanne’s approach became legitimised as new orthodoxies of modernist painting.

Lecture 8: Fauvism and the primacy of colour
Sunday 4 May, 2pm

In 1899 the Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac declared: “The triumphant colourist has only to appear, his palette has been prepared for him”. We may imagine those lines being eagerly read by Bonnard, Matisse, Derain, and the earliest non-objective artists – all of whom promoted the primacy of colour in their work. Fauvism, which expanded into several related trends (Expressionism, Orphism, Futurism) had a modest beginning in 1905 at the seaside village of Collioure where Henri Matisse and Andre Derain were on holiday, egging each other on with reckless experimental gambits, both of them brandishing the incandescent palette foreseen by Signac.

Lecture 9: Cubism and the birth of abstraction
Sunday 1 June, 2pm

Much to his consternation, the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler began to notice that some visitors to his gallery in Paris – people who were seriously interested in the paintings by Picasso and Braque on display – not only failed to identify a “subject” in those paintings, but assumed that there was none to be found. The possibility of non-objective painting, bubbling under the surface for decades, was now within a hair’s breadth of being realized, much to Kahnweiler’s alarm. But were his apprehensions misplaced? Had the advent of “abstraction” not already occurred, long ago, in the “abstract way of seeing” whose occurrence we have noted in previous lectures? And had this abstract way of seeing not already become entrenched as a defining feature, even asthe defining feature of modern art?

Lecture 10: Art after the conquest of the air
Sunday 6 July, 2pm

Pioneering flights by the Wright brothers and Blériot in the early twentieth century captured the imagination of a huge public, and that of visual artists as well. Coinciding with the early demonstrations of flight, new conceptions of time and space arose and altered forever the conventions of visual representation. Cubist and early abstract artists sought to recreate and to appropriate for their own advantage the heroic aura of the pioneers of flight. This lecture considers artists who were the most conspicuous flight-fantasists: Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși, Kasimir Malevitch and Vladimir Tatlin.

Lecture 11: The new “nature” – art and science
Sunday 3 August, 2pm

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical shifts in scientific understanding, in philosophy and in visual representation tended to move in unison. It may seem profoundly mysterious how such synchronicity prevailed, yet the parameters of what was possible to think, how it was possible to think, were recalibrated across an entire culture. Analogies to the observations of Brownian motion, parallels to the “field” theories of Clerk Maxwell, intimations of new conceptions of space and time proposed by Poincaré, Einstein and others might have been communicated via simple catch-phrases in the publicity heralding scientific breakthroughs, yet their effect was to inaugurate major changes in approaches to visual representation, constructing a distinctively modern world-view.

Lecture 12: War and peace – the proliferation of abstraction in a time of conflict
Sunday 7 September, 2pm

In August 1914, when war broke out in Europe, some artists were caught unawares vacationing abroad and found themselves unable to return home. Others were declared enemy aliens and deported to their native countries. The disruption caused by the war reconfigured artists’ communities into new associations, some of which became very consequential. In Switzerland, the Dada group consisted of a rag-tag gathering of exiles and conscientious objectors; in Holland a group of painters, architects and designers interested in the possibilities of abstract art amalgamated to call themselves De Stijl; while in Russia a turbulent avant-garde mirrored the revolutionary ferment. Was there a connection – was there some underlying cause or effect – linking the cataclysm of war to the great crack-up transforming the world of art? Artists of the time had their views on the matter.

Accessibility: The Coombs lecture theatre has wheelchair access and accessible bathrooms. If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact anne-marie.jean@anu.edu.au

2024 LECTURES – recordings available on YouTube

Image: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire ca. 1902–6, 57.2 x 97.2 cm. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1994, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002