What work of art inspired you?
About this video
Art historians describe works of art that inspired them: Cassatt's Lydia in a Loge, Chartres Cathedral, Dürer's Self Portrait, the bust of Nefertiti and Holbein's The Ambassadors. Their stories show how seeing art in person, looking at details and thinking about context can change how we see art, the past and even our careers.
You'll be able to
- explain why seeing art in person can change what we learn from it.
- describe how details in an artwork can change our view of the past.
- reflect on a work of art that has affected me.
Key words
- loge
- A private box for seating at a theatre or opera house.
- slide
- A projected photograph of an artwork, once the main way art history was taught.
- self portrait
- A picture an artist makes of themselves.
Transcript
(jazzy music) - [Host] Was there a work of art that inspired or moved you or changed your life?
- [Commentator] An artwork that really stopped me in my tracks is Mary Cassatt's "Lydia in a Loge." It is an interesting composition, the fact that it was done by a woman artist made one explore the idea of gender in art and it made me actually go to Paris and go to the Opera and sit in a loge box and experience a performance there.
- [Commentator] I thought I really understood Chartres Cathedral. When I saw slides it really looked like a cathedral on a hill where there was open air all around it. It was a complete myth, this photograph that I learned from. I was lucky enough to be able to go to Chartres and it was completely surrounded by a city and I realized how integral the cathedral was to the community because the entire city was really built around this central plaza.
I think any time I've ever seen a work of art in person that I learned first as a slide I learned something new and I'm just bowled over.
- [Commentator] Albrecht Durer, his "Self Portrait" where he kind of looks like Jesus, it really blew my mind that anybody would think so highly of themselves as to put themselves in that position, but at the same time it's such a gorgeous painting and you see his expertise.
You almost think, well, maybe he is right. Maybe he should put himself on that pedestal. It is humorous, it's elegant, and that's the one that really made me look at work in a different way.
- [Commentator] When I was 13, this is a few years after the wall came down in Berlin, and we book a trip and saw Nefertiti. I was totally awestruck, she is utterly beautiful and imperfect. She is human and yet she's thousands of years old and so to have this vivid image of a powerful woman from the past was something that I think put me on the trajectory of becoming an art historian.
- [Commentator] A work of art that has changed the way I've thought about the past is when I was a freshman undergraduate I was taught of Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" as being this portrait of a European Renaissance man and then later on I learned to pay attention to the globe that is on the shelf and I learned to pay attention to the navigation instruments and realized through that work of art the past was an interconnected place in a way that is not exactly the same as our globally connected, 21st-century lives but similar.
(jazzy music)
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