#43 草地上的午餐-习作 

Manet 1863 oil paint on canvas

Technical examination by the Conservation team here at The Courtauld revealed this study in fact played a crucial role in the look of Manet’s infamous, large-scale painting, now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Hello my name is Maureen Cross, and I’m a Paintings Conservator and a Senior Lecturer here at the Courtauld Institute. So during the treatment of this painting we discovered that the tree, seen here on the left-hand side of the painting was highly developed. It’s rendered much more carefully than the sketchy and less developed figures in the foreground. And this led us to look more closely at some of the technical material we had on the paintings. We looked at the X-ray of both our painting, and the large-scale painting at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. And what the X-rays revealed was really interesting. There had been an alteration in the painting. In Manet’s initial work he painted an open Italianate vista on the left-hand side of the composition. His original painting didn’t include this large tree. The tree closes down the composition. It forces the viewer to arrive at this awkward picnic, this strange gathering of a nude woman and two clothed gentlemen. Manet certainly must have realised this. Without the tree the viewer can circumvent this strange picnic and that by closing down the composition, Manet forces the viewer to confront our own feelings of this shocking scene.

考陶德学院的保护团队通过技术检测发现，这幅速写实际上对马奈那幅臭名昭著的大尺幅画（现藏巴黎奥赛博物馆）的最终面貌起了关键作用。考陶德学院的绘画修复师兼高级讲师Maureen Cross在修复这幅画的过程中，我们发现画面左侧的那棵树被描绘得非常精细，比前景中略显草率、未完成的人物更为成熟。这引导我们对已有的技术资料进行了更仔细的研究。我们对这幅画及巴黎奥赛博物馆藏的大尺幅作品都进行了X光检查。X光揭示的发现非常有趣：画作经历过修改。在马奈最初的创作中，画面左侧原本是一个开放的意大利式远景，并没有这棵大树。这棵树的加入收束了构图，迫使观者直接面对这次尴尬的野餐场景——一位裸体女性与两位着衣男子奇怪地聚在一起。马奈显然意识到了这一点：如果没有这棵树，观者可能会绕过这幅奇特的野餐场景。而通过收束构图，马奈迫使观者直面自己对这一令人震惊画面的感受。

#47 A Bar at tje Folies-Bergère  女神游乐厅酒吧/福利贝热尔吧台 

Manet 1882

This wonderful painting by Manet is often seen to be the representation of a place, the Folies-Bergère, or a portrait of this wonderful barmaid in the centre. But what I like to focus on is this incredible still life that unfolds in the foreground. And you can start on the bottom left, and you can see Manet’s signature actually, and the date, 1882, on the bottle of wine really that starts this incredible lavish display of champagne and beer and wine and liqueurs. What always strikes me though is that it’s a very static display in that none of the bottles are open, there are no glasses, it’s just showing off Manet’s incredible skill at rendering different types of textures. And indeed I often wonder if Manet didn’t mean for the barmaid herself to be part of that display. Was he trying to say something about her status, the fact that she is just like an object and overlooked by the patrons of the Folies-Bergère? He’s obviously lavished as much attention on her as he has on the rest of the still life.

这幅马奈Manet的精彩画作，人们常把它看作是某个地方的描绘——佛乐丽丝-贝尔热舞厅（Folies-Bergère），或者是画面中央那位迷人的女招待的肖像。但我更喜欢关注的是前景中展开的令人惊叹的静物。你可以从左下角开始看，你会看到马奈的签名和日期1882年写在一瓶酒上，而这瓶酒也拉开了这场奢华的香槟、啤酒、葡萄酒和利口酒的盛宴。令我印象最深的是，这是一种非常静态的陈列：瓶子都未开，桌上没有酒杯，整个画面仅仅展示了马奈令人难以置信的材质表现技艺。实际上，我经常在想，也许马奈并不是单纯为了描绘女招待本人，她本身可能也是静物的一部分。他是否想通过她来传达某种信息——她的身份、她就像一个被佛乐丽丝-贝尔热舞厅的顾客忽视的物件？显然，马奈对她的关注程度，与他对其他静物的精心描绘一样。

📝镇馆之宝

这是马奈创作的最后一幅作品，直到马奈弥留之际，官方沙龙才将作品展出，并授予其“荣誉团勋章”。这幅画也是马奈最后一次用作品向崇拜的大师——“镜子画师”委拉斯凯兹致敬（经典代表作《宫娥》）。展现马奈登峰造极艺术水准的一幅画作，马奈的吹短笛的少年，奥林匹亚，草地上午餐都是年轻时候的成名作，但这副是他晚年的作品，艺术水准炉火纯青，也包含了更多的人生思考。

观赏者面对着吧台后的女子，却能从镜子中看到整个酒吧的一切，而这恰恰是女子眼中所看到的场景。后面的镜子展现了夜总会内部热闹的场面，人头攒动，歌舞升平。画面左侧上方可以看到在空中荡秋千的杂技演员包着绿袜的双脚。画中的模特儿是一名叫苏珍的女性招待。她身穿贴近胸部的黑色连衣裙，以吊坠和紧身胸衣尽显风采。如此繁华的场景下，她的面部表情却空洞，默落，眼神心不在焉。或许马奈在生命末尾也体会到了孤独和无力感。右侧是镜子里女招待有点变形的背影；她的身体略微前倾，镜子中有位衣冠楚楚、戴高礼帽的男子正在接近她，可能是想来吧台购买饮料和水果。

但有些艺术史家认为他与女招待有着某种秘密交易，并引证当时很多女招待兼任ji女？镜子中人物的角度和大小都不自然，这是因为画家故意无视远近法，歪曲了场面，镜像中女招待身体那不合理的变形其实表明她身兼两职？

#44 Te Rerioa (The Dream)

Paul Gauguin 1897

When you look closely at this canvas you might notice Gauguin has used some very rough hessian here and you can really see the surface texture of that showing through the thin paint. This is something that I think makes this painting particularly modern in many ways. Old Master paintings are often thought of as trying to conceal the flatness of the picture and make it seem like a three-dimensional space, and here Gauguin is showing us, through that hessian, that he has a flat object which is a decorated surface. The idea of the decorative was actually very important to Gauguin in terms of the content of the picture as well. The decorative carvings on the walls for him were supposed to represent a return to the sort of idyllic nature of Tahitian life. He wanted to show the authenticity of his engagement with that culture. At the same time if you look to the left-hand side of the composition, the lower part of that decorative carved scheme there, at the very edge, you can see a kangaroo. There would never have been any kangaroos on Tahiti, they’re not indigenous to Tahiti. So Gauguin is clearly involved here in some quite intricate and perhaps slightly amusing storytelling and mythmaking. This is an exotic culture and he is not somehow concerned with some of the specificities of that exoticism, he just wants to depict it as something other from the northern French culture that he had left behind.

The space itself seems to be the interior of the house that Gauguin made for himself in Tahiti. It was a traditional house built on stilts, which explains the slightly strange perspective out of the door or window that you can see in the background there, looking down onto the landscape below. He called his house the ‘House of Pleasure’ and he used wooden carvings to articulate that above the doorframe. So, the space itself is supposed to represent a traditional Tahitian abode, and yet in the way that Gauguin uses storytelling and exoticism within that, we know that actually it’s quite far removed from being an authentic traditional space; it’s very much a constructed space that he has made for himself as an idea of what Tahiti might stand for in his mind.

仔细看这幅画，你可能会注意到高更（Gauguin）在画布上使用了非常粗糙的麻布（hessian），而且通过薄薄的颜料可以清晰看到表面的纹理。我认为，这一点在许多方面让这幅画显得特别现代。传统大师画作往往试图掩盖画面的平面性，让它看起来像三维空间，而高更通过这种麻布向我们展示：他面前的确是一个平面物体，只是被装饰过的表面。

“装饰性”的概念对高更来说在画面内容上同样非常重要。画中墙上的装饰雕刻，对于他而言，是对塔希提理想化生活的回归的象征，他希望展示自己与当地文化的真实互动。同时，如果你看画面左侧，装饰雕刻下方边缘，你会看到一只袋鼠。塔希提并没有袋鼠，它们也不是当地动物。由此可见，高更在这里进行了一种复杂而略带趣味的叙事与神话化创作。他描绘的是一种“异国文化”，但他并不拘泥于这种异国的具体细节，而是想把它呈现为与他所离开的北法文化截然不同的东西。

画面所表现的空间似乎是高更在塔希提为自己建造的房屋内部。这是一座传统的高脚屋，这也解释了背景中透过门或窗看到的稍显奇特的视角——俯瞰下面的景观。他称这座房子为“快乐之家（House of Pleasure）”，并在门框上用木雕加以装饰。因此，这个空间本应代表一个传统的塔希提住所，但结合高更在其中运用的叙事与异国情调，我们可以看到，它实际上远非一个真实的传统空间；它是高更为自己构想的、他心中塔希提意象的建构性空间。

#46 Antibes

Monet 1888

The south of France had remained quite inaccessible to those living in Paris because there had been no railroads going there, but a new line had been inaugurated and Monet went down three times over a decade and he always went in the winter, in December and January, leaving behind the snow in Paris, and he stayed for months at a time trying to really capture the atmosphere that was so different from what he knew in the north of France. And here you can see how actually the conditions in the south were not necessarily better. Here the pine is really wind battered and doesn’t stand up straight, and Monet also often complained about the very strong sun that blinded him. But on this occasion he has focussed on a calmer moment, a peaceful sunrise across the bay in Antibes.

#51 Card Players 玩纸牌的人

Paul Cézanne 1892

The Card Players is one of Paul Cézanne’s best-known subjects and he produced five canvases depicting men playing cards in what appears to be a local tavern or bar. And this is one of the most important of them. In the past, artists had treated this sort of subject in a very different way. They usually depicted card players in a very rowdy environment with men getting drunk and gambling, but Cézanne’s work couldn’t be further from that. This is a picture that really exudes a sense of serenity and even a sort of meditative quality. And when you look at the drawings that he produced for this work, you see that in fact he didn’t draw these men as a pair across a table, but he drew them individually in a quiet corner of his studio and only when he was painting brought them together from the drawings on the canvas, and I think that allowed him to combine this sense of solitude and calm. It’s as if they’ve been there for centuries playing this same hand of cards.

Narrator: If you’re in the galleries listening to this you won’t have failed to notice this painting is just one of a whole wall of Cézannes. Barnaby Wright again.

The Courtauld has the most important collection of works by Paul Cézanne in the United Kingdom and that is because our founder, Samuel Courtauld, loved his work above all else and bought his work in great depth but, crucially, bought very important examples of his paintings. Courtauld was buying Cézanne in the 1920s and 1930s when major examples of his canvases were still available, at high prices, but still available, and he went out of his way to assemble a really great collection of Cézanne’s paintings, covering really all aspects of his work.

《打牌者》（The Card Players）是保罗·塞尚（Paul Cézanne）最著名的题材之一，他创作了五幅画，描绘男性在似乎是当地酒馆或小酒吧里打牌的场景。而这幅是其中最重要的一幅。五福中另外有一幅在201年校卡塔尔王室购入达2.5亿美元，世界最贵画作之。它不仅影响毕加索与立体主义，更被视为现代绘画一个新风格的拐点

过去，艺术家们对这一题材的处理方式大不相同。他们通常把打牌者描绘在喧闹的环境中，男人们酗酒赌博，而塞尚的作品则截然不同。这幅画散发出一种宁静感，甚至带有某种冥想般的氛围。仔细观察他为此作准备的素描，你会发现，他其实并不是把这些人画成桌对面的组合，而是在工作室的安静角落单独画他们，只有在绘画时才将他们组合到画布上。我认为，这种方法让他能够将孤独与平静感结合起来，就好像他们在这里打同一手牌已经几个世纪了。