Painted Words: Oral Culture in the Art of Goya, Manet, and Picasso

As an academic discipline, art history rests on a foundation of dynamic interactions between images and words: material artifacts of human creativity and language that seeks to interpret and shed light on the content, meaning, interrelations, and, in some cases, the function of these artifacts. Language gives art history its freedom, but it also sets boundaries for its practices and processes. One of the foundational barriers inherent in the discourse of art history is the chasm between spoken and written language. As art historians, when we look back in time and excavate our topics of query, we rely in our research primarily on texts, written culture, because the sounds and spoken words of the past appear to be beyond our reach. In practice, this has resulted in the functional treatment of images as texts even when a particular image, while de facto silent, screams at us, projecting upon its audience unmistakable auditory signals, echoes of humanity’s lived experiences.

The past, of course, was not silent, and no history of art can be complete without a committed excavation and investigation of the ways in which oral culture is inseparable from the material contexts in which art was created. Just as the oral cultures of our own time impact the practices of contemporary artists and leave indelible impressions on the artifacts created today, so did the oral cultures of the past. And just as we interpret and reinterpret images, as well as texts written about them, through a growing corpus of new texts, we can use our senses and interpretive apparatus, the toolkit of art history, to breathe life into auditory landscapes that we cannot experience firsthand but which we know with certainty once existed.

The history of modern art is replete with artists who sought and found inspiration for their avant-garde pursuits in the rambunctious oral cultural and auditory landscapes that surrounded them. This lecture, the 2024 edition in the Walter W.S. Cook Annual Lecture Series, asks how we might rethink our discipline, its processes and literacy-based prejudices, if we were to deconstruct art history’s implicit bias towards written language. Building on research undertaken at the Institute of Fine Arts more than three decades ago, it argues through the lens of Goya, Manet, and Picasso, and some of their contemporaries, that art history, while benefitting greatly from its wedlock with written culture, has been hampered by its failure to imagine and from visual evidence deduce how the rich oral cultures of previous eras impacted the creative practices of trailblazing artists whose lives and careers unfolded in lockstep with sonorous societies, milieus saturated with sound in which language existed—just as it does today—as a living, vibrant, pulsating means of communication and content production. For artistic rebels, the evidence will show, visualizing an unruly, gritty oral cultural world was a subversive turn against the norms of high culture, a class society that prioritized texts and literacy.

Advance registration is required for this in-person and virtual lecture.