Schad, Self-Portrait - Humanities, Arts Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(lively piano music)
Voiceover: We're in the Tate Modern,
and we're looking at Christian
Schad's "Self-Portrait."
It's a painting from 1927.
It's a tough painting.
Voiceover: It is.
It shows two figures who really take up
the entire space of the canvas,
with the male figure in
front looking very menacing,
and a passive, very sexual,
female nude behind him.
Voiceover: He's the artist,
looking almost directly at us.
There is a very hard edge.
The figures are on a bed together,
and yet they feel worlds apart.
Voiceover: She has none
of the erotic sensuality
that one normally associates
with a female nude.
She's very sexual, but
she looks very modern.
She's not an idealized Venus.
She's got makeup on.
She's got a 1920s hairdo, and
a ribbon around her wrist.
She very much looks of the city,
but then she's got this
terrible scar on her face,
and the way that the male figure in front,
who looks directly at us, as you said,
and looks kind of menacing,
one wonders what kind
of harm he's inflicted
on this female figure behind him.
Voiceover: Or perhaps metaphorically,
what kind of harm he inflicts
through his painting,
perhaps in his life more directly.
Now, let's just replace these figures.
They're both on a bed, very,
very close to the foreground.
They're really immediate to us.
But then, we see a very, very
thin veil behind these figures.
Voiceover: Separating them from the city.
Voiceover: Right,
[unintelligible] the city.
We can just see the last
traces of light fade away.
Voiceover: He's wearing a shirt
that's very much like a veil,
that's almost completely transparent.
Voiceover: Yeah, that's
a pretty wild outfit
for him to be wearing.
Notice that the shirt continues down
past the roll of his
waist, down to his hips.
Voiceover: And casts a
greenish tonality on his flesh.
Voiceover: For all the sexuality here,
there's really no passion.
Voiceover: There's no warmth at all.
Something in this painting that speaks
to a kind of ugliness, and
difficulty, and harshness
of sexuality of the body, of ...
and a harshness human relations.
Voiceover: It's interesting
to put this, then,
in historical context.
Germany had been a fairly
agrarian society for a long time.
In the years that preceded this,
in the several decades that preceded this,
had caught up to much of the West
in terms of industrialization,
in terms of the city becoming
central to German life,
and the sexuality and the
freedom that comes with-
Voiceover: The sexual
freedom of the city.
With the anonymity of the city.
You have an artist that
seems to be directly dealling
with that new reality.
Voiceover: As many German
artists had before him.
When we think about
Kirchner's street scenes.
Voiceover: Absolutely, but
whereas Kirchner was dealing with
Voiceover: Kind of distortion.
Voiceover: Or a kind
of Dadaist distortion.
Here, you have a return
to a focused, clarified,
intense rendering, where you can't
even hide behind abstratction.
It's absolutely there.
Voiceover: That's exactly,
I think, what these artists
were looking for, the
[unintelligible] artist,
this new objectivity, new
realism rejecting the distortions
used by expressionist artists before them
who used those kinds of distortions
to represent emotional states.
Here saying, "No, we're
not going to do that.
"We're going to represent
this cold reality."
(lively piano music)