Thank you very much for inviting me and making me feel welcome. I ...

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These questions lead us to the great parting of the ways in modern painting. It is a story about a fundamental innovation in art history. In a nutshell, I would like to ...
                                                     

Thank you very much for inviting me and making me feel welcome. I am highly delighted to contribute to this very special event at the MoMA. In January, Jim Elkins informed my about the overall idea of this symposium. When preparing this talk I came back to his initial email. Since he had some very specific idea in mind I would like to quote from his email:

„I would like to have someone present a PowerPoint version of the talk, to see what the logical structure of the talk is. I don't know if you know Clark's writing: he is very ambiguous, and writes an especially complex kind of English. I thought as an expert on PowerPoint, you would be perfect: your job would be to pull the propositional, logical claims out of the talk, strip away the rhetorical flourishes, and present the argument "itself."“ I regard these lines as a kind of briefing: present the argument „itself“. Without further critical thoughts about this task, Powerpoint, my handicaps as a non-native speaker, as a simple-minded business school guy etc.etc. I am going to present my version of Tim Clark’s talk right away.

 

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My talk touches upon some fundamental issues of our time: education, innovation, creativity, quality, path-dependency: How are new strategies and means of comprehension created? How can a creator be sure about the quality of the new work? Who is really able to identify the originality of an artistic piece? How do apprentices learn from a master? And what can still be learnt, if the apprentice potentially excels the master? And how can education lead to the creation of something new? And working within a creative development project there is often the issue of documenting the different stages of progress. But is there really a value in going back to older versions of a development project? Is not the entire progress accumulated and captured in the most recent version? These questions lead us to the great parting of the ways in modern painting. It is a story about a fundamental innovation in art history. In a nutshell, I would like to tell a different story about the collaboration between Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne. The presentation offers a new way of looking at these two pioneers of modern painting.

 

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Conventionally, the great parting of the ways in the modernist tradition is traced back to the long lasting artistic relationship between Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne. This relationship begins in the early 1860s when the two artists meet for the first time. It continues through the 1870s and early 1880s when Pissarro and Cezanne frequently work next to each other in Pontoise and Auvers. It finally leads to a mutual influence that manifests itself in their works by the mid 1880s. Accordingly, we just need to look at the six or seven paintings by the two that are of more or less the same motif. Some of them might even be painted side by side. Thus, the pairs serve as a point of reference. They seem to answer all questions about the collaboration between Pissarro and Cezanne and the emergence of modern painting.  

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Yet, a closer look at the pairs reveals that they might raise more questions: In fact, what has been described as the same motif turns out to be an inadequate description.

    Look at the two studies of the orchard in the back of Pissarro’s house! Pissaro’s flowering of the fruit trees on the left hardly corresponds with a spring subject on the right. Apparently, there is first of all a difference in season. And this more obvious difference leads to further more fundamental questions: How do we get the impression that we can almost touch and feel the sky though it only covers a tiny spot on the painting? In other words:

 

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What might be the purpose of the duplication? How are these pairs of paintings really related? Maybe, Cezanne did not even refer to this 1877 Pissarro – maybe the dynamics of the two painters’ dealings with one another are a bit more complex ... This is the line of argument I would like to pursue in the following.

In fact, a number of pictorial questions suggest an analogy to an older Pissarro, the Pissarro from 1875: What is the orientation of the ground plane? How is the ground plane adjusted to the picture surface? How is the presence and vividness of the solids affirmed?

 

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Yet, even if Cézanne is entirely right in taking the 1875 Pissarro, as opposed to the 1877 one, it is still an open question how this relates to the dynamics of the two painters’ dealings with one another. Undoubtedly, Cezanne, after all, is Pissarro’s best critic. Cezanne knows for sure his master’s masterpieces. On the other hand, Pissarro as the creator is deeply and personally involved with the production of the paintings. The paintings are closely linked to him as person. This intimacy with the works naturally obscures his perception: Pissarro can hardly know himself when he has achieved a masterpiece.

The heuristic tool of the Johari window helps to analyze this situation. In general, the Johari Window provides a framework for looking at how we interact with each other. The two axes focusing on Pissarro’s as well as  

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Cézanne’s perception create a 2x2 matrix. It distinguishes between four different types of personal awareness: 1. The open arena is the easiest quadrant, because it is known to both of them. 2. The facade refers to what Goffman coined the presentation of self in everyday life. Pissarro knows what he wants to disclose and is able to do so. 3. The unknown territory at the bottom on the right leaves us with all the problems of our cognitve constraints. 4. Finally, the blind spot at the top on the right represents what Cézanne knows about Pissarro, but that Pissarro is not aware of. Obviously this framework also works dynamically: If you now tell me that I have something on my face, then the open arena moves to the right. The blind spot shrinks. Yet, there is the problem, how can you get this information out in the open, how can I receive it, since it may be affecting the level of trust between us. In other words, the blind spot creates potentially new opportunities for development through feedback. Coming back to Pissarro and Cézanne: Basically, like any creator Pissarro heavily depends on a competent, empathetic and honest feedback. And Cézanne faces the problem how to communicate his feedback as an apprentice to his master. But what is Cezanne’s feedback to Pissarro?

 

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This question brings us back to Cezanne’s study of the orchard in the back of Pissarro’s house (listed as from 1877) and the analysis that this painting does not really correspond with Pissaro’s flowering of the fruit trees (dated 1877). Cezanne recapitulates more or less the same motif. However, he remakes the flowering orchard as the Pissarro of 1875 would have done it. He chooses the same level of cool, green and moderate purple intensity. Unconsciously, he realizes that he can even excel the more recent Pissarro most comprehensively. Thus, Cézanne demonstrates what one can gain from engaging deeply with the structure and texture of the 1875 Pissarro. Isn’t it a nice, friendly and an artistic form of feedback?

 

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Accordingly, there can be constructive effect on Pissarro. He might change his mind, when looking at Cézanne doing this painting. Perhaps he is encouraged to go back to his masterpiece from 1875. He might even want to do the masterpiece again or produce variations on it. To put it in a nutshell: This form of artistic feedback avoids the partly oppressive atmosphere of a seemingly empathetic feedback. Instead, it communicates visually and artistically. It uses the epistemic and performative qualities of the picture: The deixis. Thus, Cezanne’s garden can develop into an active agent in the interaction between the two pioneers of modern painting. It goes beyond the scope of this talk to analyze whether this feedback is well received, whether it works or how Pissarro responds to this feedback. Therefore the fourth picture must remain empty at this point. However, I would rather like to close the argument and come back to my initial issues and questions about innovation, creativity, education and path-dependency. Let me conclude with a couple of bullets

 

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We are very much contemporary and future oriented these days. We sense that our time accelerates day by day. Yet, there is no guarantee that the works of today are really more advanced. Instead, we might face intertemporal inefficiencies that demonstrate the value of an archive, the value of a museum and the practical use of looking at less contemporary masterpieces: History is valuable:

 

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One usually thinks of education as a kind of knowledge transfer. The knowledge is transferred from a more knowledgeable person to a less knowledgeable person. This story however demonstrates that education is more than an information management challenge. Great apprentices find unique ways to learn even if they might be the real masters: Great apprentices find unique ways to learn.

 

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Similarly, one usually thinks of education as a kind of one-way learning process. However, this story shows that there is something to learn for the master as well: A master can learn from the apprentice

 

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                        Finally, I would like to stress the creative potential of imitation. What is often considered to be boring, dull, not-interesting can be the basis for a highly original breakthrough – a true innovation. Therefore, imitation consists of a highly creative appropriation. Imitating is different from copying. In a digital age where copies are a simple and almost free operation we might therefore rethink our understanding of imitation as a form of translation and transformation: Imitation can lead to innovation Let me conclude my presentation with a few remarks and reflections on this approach. I faced some very tough challenges when developing my presentation: The power of an elaborated language sharply contrasts with the rather confined vocabulary a foreign speaker brings to the table. Since business presentations work with a rather confined vocabulary of a few hundred key  

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words, I thought that what might be a handicap could also be part of my qualification. Yet, more fundamentally Clark’s talk really seems to elude what Tufte called the cognitive style of Powerpoint with bullets outlining dilute thought.

                          Powerpoint wants to create a communication that drives action. But what kind of action would appeal to Tim Clark?

 

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The slogan “say it with charts” alludes to the promise that visual communication is faster and more effective than verbal communication. But how does this work when talking about pictures?

 

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                          In the early days of Powerpoint Peter Norvig created a powerpoint version of Lincoln’s famous Gettyburg address using the standad powerpoint template of this time. Looking at the sequence of six charts, one realizes that there is no sphere of pure information. Expressive means are not just decoration (Ehses 1986). Any choice of font, color, placement, proportion forms etc. interprets and changes the purported knowledge and influences the visual effects. One might even argue that these effects do not occur accidentally, but can be traced back to rules of effect (cf. Schneller 2010a). Thus, a new dimension of media rhetoric might complicate the whole picture. Following from this I am wondering whether any presentation can meet Jim’s original briefing: strip away the rhetorical flourishes, and present the argument "itself."  

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