So now we have the task of saying a few things about the famous oil painting of Marcel Duchamp called "Nude Descending a Staircase". It happens that right here in Philadelphia we have No. 2. I don't know if he did two of these. I should know this art history, but the great one is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I have seen it many times. I assume you have, too. And our job is not to do the art history of this fabulously famous and much-commented-upon painting, but to say a few things about its possible relationship to what Williams is doing, and maybe some of the other poets. So who wants to try to describe this painting? Good luck! Halli? I knew you were going to call on me. And I was really hoping you weren't. At first glance, after kind of seeing the title, it's definitely very far from your traditional nude portrait. You can kind of see the outline of the body, but it's in motion. How could it be in motion if it's a flat plane painted on on oil and canvas? Because you see the image, kind of in successive frames. Oh, okay. So this breaks the realistic notion, the depictive notion, the mimetic notion that when you're capturing motion you capture it in an instant and you pause it. This is doing something different. How would you describe what it's doing differently about capturing motion? Max just put some vocabulary on it. One thing is that this definitely--this painting and maybe even to some extent, the Williams poem--benefit a lot from the technologies of photography and cinematography of the time. And this painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase" reminds me of a photograph with a sort of prolonged exposure time where you can see something moving. And that's a sort of vision that's like a static vision of motion that's not something you can really see for yourself. Right. In fact Eadweard Muybridge's "Woman Walking Down Stairs" (1887), which was first cinematic experiments with watching motion; it was very much an influence. So you take that motion picture and you turn it into a single's static image. And so that's how you get the multi-perspectival approach which is a hallmark of Cubism. The idea is that you break things up into its constituent pieces, into shards, and you reproduce all at once the motion. What does this have to do with "Portrait of a Lady"? Probably not much. Dave? They're both saying that the traditional, usual way of communicating something is no longer sufficient. It just doesn't work. A traditional way of painting is only one way. It can't capture every single angle. And it's possible that the emergence of photography had something to do with that. This is sort of a standard art historical point which is that, as photography really comes into sway it becomes less urgent for painters to depict photographically real depictions. So they are set free. Duchamp and Williams had other motives setting them free as well. So in what way is this a rebuke of traditional depictions, specifically? How are we going to compare this painting with "Portrait of a Lady", specifically? How about content or topic? Well first of all, traditional nudes are romanticized and very sort of sensual and rounded and curvilinear. Rounded, yes. And here we have a very straight-edged, [inaudible] sort of robotic, mechanical aspect to it. And I would say it's slightly different from Cubist paintings in that Cubist paintings are a collage of a single or multiple objects but from multiple perspectives, whereas this is one object from the same perspective at multiple points going down the stairs. Now when you try to do this. I'm sorry. Go ahead. In the same way with "Portrait of a Lady", is that it's sort of a transcript of this internal dialogue of the poet at multiple stages of the process at the same time. Yes. If we were conventionally to transpose this painting--this Cubism--into a poem, you might fail in the attempt to reproduce the "multi-prospectivalism". So what Williams does is what, instead? What does he do? He exposes all of the backwork and all of the operational problematics of the portraiture in poem. He opens up the hood. He shows you how it's going to work. Any comments on that. Is it exciting? Does it work? Are we forcing this parallel? Do you think Williams' poem could be talked about as Cubistic? Well, let's think about, I mean, Ezra Pound's "At the Metro Station." You know, we said that he wrote 90 lines of that poem and then got rid of all of it and just left those two. Williams doesn't do that. He gives you the entire... This is really different from Imagism. It is. He gives you the whole process laid out. And in the same way, I mean, this painting is so great because it's simultaneously asserting its two-dimensionality and the fact that it isn't just paint on a canvas. It's admitting that it is... It's admitting that while also showing motion and showing how motion can exist on a two-dimensional... There's a ton of self-consciousness here. Interesting. Emily. But what I'm noticing is that it doesn't seem to me that you can do both at the same time--that you can't represent something and talk about the process of representation. Because, doesn't that woman disappear from that painting? And don't this sort of, this sort of morass of terrible metaphors and analogies, doesn't the woman disappear from this too? It's very possible that painting doesn't have, especially single-dimensional painting, doesn't have the ability that a poem does to create its metapoetic content at the same time as it does its depicting or its anti-depicting. I would actually argue that one of the reasons I'm into poetry and not an art historian is I think poetry and Frank O'Hara will argue this specifically. "Why I Am Not a Painter," is a poem, that we probably won't talk about in this course but maybe we'll refer to, where he implicitly says that 'I can show in a poem what I used to think was going to be the composition of this poem. I could keep it there and not affect the outcome', and in a typical painting you can't quite do that. But both of these art works try for that kind of self-consciousness, which is relatively new. Maurice? I also want to say that I don't particularly view that as a loss... The disappearance of the woman? The disappearance of the woman because that to me wasn't the subject or the focus of this poem or the painting. I found it touching and affecting in that it expresses that struggle for human expression that's in both, I mean especially in the reading we heard that anger in his voice, and well, the frustration in his voice at the final two lines. And that to me is much more human-relatable and honest than any beautiful, totally complete and polished... I think you're absolutely right. He's totally displacing what the actual subject is, you know, by calling it "Portrait of a Lady". The subject of the poem was not actually the lady. By calling it "Nude Descending a Staircase", the subject is not actually the nude descending a staircase. Subject meaning subject matter. Yeah. And what is the subject matter of this painting? I think it's showing the painting's two-dimensionality and I think it's showing the process... It's implying, it's bespeaking a self-consciousness of the limitations of the medium. Definitely. And in what way is "Portrait of a Lady" by William Carlos Williams bespeaking the limitations of the medium? He's trying to make the language equal to the subject in beauty. He's trying to find language that's commensurate with what he's trying to say about the problem of representing beauty. Yeah? And because he doesn't finish the task that he sets out with at the kind of outset of his poem... Because it can't be done. And so we have artwork in both cases that says, "I'm going to depict can't be done this." It used to be that if it can't be done you didn't do it. And now in this modern period you get the boldness, bravery, some would say heroism, of doing what can't be done because it can't be done and a resistance to doing what can be done because it's already been done. We want to do something that's new. And in doing so I think along the way of both of these figures--Williams, known as a "appetitious heterosexual"; Duchamp, somewhere else completely--both of them give due respect to the tradition of the... (I was going to say "portraited") the portrait-depicted woman. In one case by essentially finally refusing to do it in the Fragonard kind of way. What kind of man is Fragonard? And Duchamp by titillating people to be outraged at the legendary Armory Show in 1913 by saying, "A nude. This is terrible! I'm outraged!! And women are being violated by this lousy depiction." If she if he had depicted a woman in a Fragonard kind of way there would have been an outrage about that as well. And so in respecting the fact that the whole problem of portraiture is impossible, they finally--both of them finally, through the backdoor, I suppose--respect the object of their study, I would say. So, any final word on this? Who has seen the painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art? Uh oh! Yes, you have??? Oh, thank goodness! Okay. Any thought on what it's like to stand in front of that painting? Did you think some of these thoughts? Anna. I really enjoyed looking at it because of the kind of infinite complexities of it; that you can look at it a hundred times and see something new every time. Terrific. Max. I'd say it's always remarkable to see a painting in person because you get to see the richness of the color and the texture and things that an image on the computer can't do justice to, unfortunately. So finally, I guess I would say that in these last few instances, the poems and this painting and the ready-made, we are moving past imagism stasis. Imagism really started us off. It cleared the ground from that gloopy, rhetorical, verbose terrain that these people inherited. But finally people like Pound took a few months or maybe a year at most to move on to Vorticism, Futurism, other kinds of more dynamic things. And clearly we see Williams doing that as well and to me that's a sign of a dynamism to come.
