Being a Zoom Student

Being a Zoom Student Many months ago, I signed up to a summer art history course at the Courtauld Institute: a week’s intensive study of Manet and Cezanne. The course would include guided time looking at works by these artists in the Courtauld’s gem of an art gallery in Somerset House. Alas, the suffocating blanket of Lockdown fell on us all. The Summer School was in jeopardy. The Courtauld decided to move some of the courses online, including mine, discounting for the lack of the real art. So it was, in mid-July, that some 20 students filed into a virtual lecture hall via their “devices” (the preferred, rather old fashioned, word for all our phones, tablets, lap and desktops). As all the many people that have now experienced Zoom know, the basic version at any rate does not in fact create any kind of virtual environment, but instead presents an array of small mugshots (one hopes just mugs…), satellites of a larger image of the person running the Zoom encounter, who from time to time shrinks to allow a contributing participant to hog centre screen. How to create a classroom atmosphere among strangers in these circumstances? In a preliminary session, we all make our introductions, sitting in different time zones, from Malaysia to the US East Coast, via France, Britain, and Ireland. Some of us are elderly, some still at school or college, some are employed in connection with the Arts or have pretty deep knowledge (often being veterans of previous Courtauld courses). Some (eg myself) have uneven amateur knowledge. One woman in the US has a summer job running an ice cream kiosk, which opens an hour after the start of the daily Zoom session. She sits at her laptop in the closed kiosk… The “classroom” is never really created. A handful of students are forward, and ready to give their opinions: the remainder are for the most part silent, some never participating at all – and some always switching off their video images, so that they are mere ghosts at the seminars; but not haunting ghosts, more the feeble sort (“shades”) imagined by the ancient Greeks. There’s not a great deal that a course tutor can do about this. It would be possible to conserve something of a class’s esprit if an existing “live” class is moved online, with relations already formed, tutor’s assessments already made, and her tactics of engagement developed... No such hope, if your goal is to lick a very disparate group of strangers into a humming, harmonious whole. The live Zoom seminars, once a day for an hour or so, did not falter (there was a large enough minority with opinions) but did not create a “class”. The tutor could not be faulted for the fluency with which she knitted together what was offered. Live seminars need lectures to discuss. These were not live, but pre-recorded and released in a full batch just before the formal start date of the course. Here virtuality has an advantage. Although the conceit was that the “class” would watch the day’s two lecture videos over the course of the morning before the afternoon’s live Zoom, we could of course watch them in our own time, pausing and repeating at will. This is an excellent feature of the Online. (A further advantage was that the lectures were available for a short time after the end of the course, so could be re-viewed with the benefit of our new knowledge.) Did I learn more as a result of Online’s gift of control over videos, and the undoubted ability of the Zoom seminars to get questions addressed by the tutor, even in the absence of class esprit? Maybe, in terms of intellectual detail – following the tutor’s explication of the contexts, themes and styles of the artists was limited only by one’s ability to comprehend the content. But there was missing what that narrative was analysing and explaining – the pictures themselves. In the live world, we would have gathered before masterpieces in the Courtauld collection – Mont Sainte-Victoire, Bar at the Folies-Berge

We would have visited the Royal Academy exhibition of Cezanne’s monumental and vivid quarry paintings. A slide show is no substitute. Cezanne abstracted away from imitative painting, but always retained a respect for the intrinsic volume of buildings, rocks, mountains, persons indeed, as he tried to express his multi-sensory, immersive response to landscape – thereby inspiring Picasso and Braque to develop Cubism.

And it is argued that Cezanne is the ancestor of Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and 60s, when artists literally turned their backs on the external world and sought to express immediate emotions direct to canvas. Some of Cezanne’s work seems at first sight to belong in their company, although the starting point for him is always the external.

Manet turns a sardonic gaze on his contemporary Paris, skilfully playing with and subverting the conventions of Old Masters. One might say that he “saw through a glass, darkly” as indeed is is the actual case in his mysterious and unsettling Bar at the Folies -Bergere. A postscript: a few days after the course ended, I was lucky enough to be in an actual art gallery, at the Royal Academy, looking at the Picasso and Paper exhibition. (social distancing measures have the adverse effect of reducing drastically the number of tickets to shows; but for ticket holders the result is spaces and time to look carefully at the exhibits, rather than at the backs of the heads of other ticket holders.) In the final but one room there were a series of works inspired by Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’Herbe, executed in the 1960s, some 100 years after the original.

Picasso was fascinated by Manet’s bold updating of a theme, common enough in classical painting, of nude women allegorically juxtaposed to clothed men, and explored his own version or versions, in over 150 works in various sizes and media. Skilfully playing with and subverting the work of a Nineteenth Century Master…

Given that Cezanne is the starting point of Picasso’s early radical experimentation, one might say that this series represents a confluence of the far-reaching influences of Cezanne and Manet. July 2020