SLIDE LIST LECTURE 6

Georges Seurat, 1889 Study for The Chahut, oil on canvas

Emile Bernard, 1886, Boy sitting in the grass, oil on canvas, 40 x 33 cm,

Emile Bernard, 1892, Pont-Aven, oil on canvas

Emile Bernard, 1888, Self-portrait with portrait of Gauguin, dedicated to Vincent van Gogh.

Emile Bernard, 1888, Breton Women in the Meadow, oil on canvas

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Breton Women and Children (after Bernard), watercolour,

Paul Gauguin, 1888, Vision after the Sermon, oil on canvas

Gauguin, 1889, Christ in the Garden of Olives, oil on canvas

Paul Gauguin, 1889, The Yellow Christ, oil on canvas

Paul Gauguin, 1895, Self-portrait

Paul Gauguin, 1889, Jug in the form of a head (self-portrait), Glazed ceramic

Paul Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x 27 cm

Paul Gauguin, c1895, Maurka, Polychromed wood

Paul Gauguin, ca.1891-1893, Tehura (Teha'amana), polychromed pua wood H. 22.2 cm.

Gauguin, 1897-1898, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gauguin, 1892, Aha oe feii? (What! Are You Jealous?) oil on coarse canvas

Gauguin, 1892, The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch, oil on canvas

Sir John Tenniel, 1882, Parnell’s Monster

Artist unknown, 1799, Erin go Bray

Sir John Tenniel, 1870, The Irish Tempest

Pear’s Soap Ad, 1890’s

Pears’ Soap Ad, 1884

Saartje Baartman, C 1911?

Artist unknown, 1819, Illustration of Sartje Baartman from Illustrated History of Mammals

‘Ota Benga, a human exhibit, in 1906. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.’ A sign outside the primate house at the Bronx Zoo, September 1906.

Paul Gauguin, 1892, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), Oil on coarse canvas

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of Gauguin

Van Gogh, 1888, L’Arlisienne

Paul Gauguin, 1888, Mme Ginoux,

Van Gogh, 1880, Miners, Cuesmes, Belgium

Van Gogh, 1880, The Angelus,

Van Gogh, 1882, Woman pulling carrots. Charcoal and pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1882, Woman Digging, Charcoal and pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1883, Churchyard in the rain, Charcoal and chalk on paper

Van Gogh, 1886-87, Feet (Paris), Pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1887, Double Bass Player (Paris), pencil on paper

Van Gogh, 1887, Portrait of Père Tanguy, Charcoal on paper

Van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of Patience Escalier, Pen and ink on paper

Van Gogh, 1888, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin,

Van Gogh, 1888, Field with Houses under a Sky with Sun Disk, Arles

Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Starry Night, Drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper

Vincent van Gogh, 1889, Starry Night, Drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper

Van Gogh, 1889, Enclosed Wheat Field with Reaper, Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1890 , Sower in Enclosed Field in the Rain , Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1889 , Olive Trees in a Mountain Landscape, Saint-Rémy, Pen and wash

Van Gogh, 1889 , Pine Trees in Front of the Wall of the Asylum , Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh, 1889 , Women Picking Olives , (Saint-Rémy),

Van Gogh, 1890 , Woman Stooping in front of Trees , Saint-Rémy or Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh, 1890 , Wheat Field with a Stack of Wheat or Hay , Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh, : June-July, 1890 , Women Working in Wheat Field, Auvers-sur-Oise

Edvard Munch, 1886, Separation,

Semester 2, Lecture 6

We looked at the way that the Renaissance both reflected and shaped a changing view of reality. Impressionism represents the same kind of momentous shift in seeing and understanding the world. Particularly in the arts it made an irreversible difference; after-impressionism art was never the same. Towards the end of the 19^th C, from the 1880’s onwards, artists moved quickly beyond Impressionism’s commitment to what could be observed by the eye. These artists represented not only what they observed, but what they felt, setting painting free to deal with internal as well as external realities. The first generation of these artists included Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon, and Matisse and Picasso.

We call this period Post-Impressionism, although it’s important to point out that the term post-impressionism was devised much later as an umbrella terms for a range of very different artistic styles and approaches. What the artists that we call post-impressionist had in common was that they experimented with new subjects and techniques, moving art closer and closer to abstraction.

There are a number of different branches within PI. We have already looked at Expressionism in the work of Edvard Munch. Over the course of the next two lectures we are going to look at other PI in terms of the various concerns that they had. These concerns developed as recognisable styles which proliferated in Europe in the pre-war period.

The main characteristics of Post-Impressionism are;

1.    An acceptance of the artificiality of the picture and what it might represent

2.    The abandonment of one-point perspective

3.    A belief in colour as emotional/aesthetic carrier of meaning, almost independent of form and composition.

The first break with Impressionism was not entirely a rejection of Impressionist principles. The Neo-Impressionists, whom we have looked at, formalised the idea of optical mixing and turned it into a kind of science, applying the colours as regular dots, independent of the surface that they were supposed to be portraying. In Seurat’s work every surface receives the same treatment. The method has become more important than the subject, or we might say that the style becomes the real subject of the work.

Emile Bernard began as a Neo-Imp, but he became disillusioned with this approach, and abandoned it to “allow ideas to dominate the technique of painting” as he said later. He destroyed nearly all his Neo-Impressionist work and left Paris for Brittany, an area that was still fairly untouched by the effects of Modernity. This reflected a kind of nostalgic longing for ‘the primitive’ – the idea of society untainted by urban civilization and its values.  Bernard established himself in a village known as Pont-Aven, and experimented with rustic, archaic subjects and anti naturalistic techniques  until he reached a simplified style of bold outline and flat colour which he called Cloisonnism.

This name comes from a stained glass technique. The areas of colour in glass are joined together by black lead wire, so the paintings that this style refers to take the form of areas of flat colour surrounded by dark outline. Bernard is most famous for the fact that Gauguin and van Gogh travelled to Pont Aven and adopted his style. It was Gauguin who really mastered the style. In addition to areas of single colors separated by heavy black outlines, Gauguin abandoned classical perspective and eliminated subtle gradations of color which were two of the most characteristic principles of painting since the Renaissance. The way in which colours are separated and isolated reflects an interest in visual discontinuity that is characteristic of Modernism.

Vision after the Sermon is essentially an image of something not seen.  It is the record of something imagined and interpreted into visual metaphors.  At first glance, it might seem to represent both an outward and an inner experience –the priest and the peasants and their recollection of the sermon they have just heard (on Jacob  wrestling and angel) but the vision is a double one, the religious vision of the Breton woman and the artists imaginary vision of them and the power of the faith that moves them.

“Given this ever present riddle: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? What is our ideal, natural, rational destiny? And under what conditions can it be accomplished? or what is the law, what are the rules for accomplishing it in its individual and humanitarian meaning?”

Gauguin, like many other artists in the period, wanted to escape what they saw as the alienating effects of Modernism as they saw it, and so they went in search of places and cultures that were untouched by the. These days we call this Primitivism, meaning a European cultural elite discovering the art of other cultures like Africa, Micronesia, and the Native Americas. The artists often mistakenly saw these cultures as simpler, more immediate, more authentic than modern European culture.  Fascinated and intrigued by the newness, the wildness as they saw it and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places, artists who employed primitivism emulated some of the aesthetics of those cultures resulting in for example exaggerated body proportions, animal totems, geometric designs and stark colour contrasts.

From our perspective, we recognise that Primitivism arises out of a colonial mindset, in which the Europeans often approach these other cultures with a sense of superiority and entitlement. Gauguin's paintings and prints present a view of Tahiti as an earthly Arcadia of free love, gentle climate, and naked nymphs. However, it is clear from his work and from the fact that he acquired a number of teenage brides, that his idea of the primitive included a desire for more sexual freedom than was available in 19th-century Europe.

Gauguin believed he was celebrating Tahitian society and defending the Tahitians against European colonialism. However, feminist and postcolonial critics remind us that Gauguin saw this society strictly from the male European point of view. His work, like that of many of the Primitives, is a "dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal". Although Gauguin believed he was celebrating and defending the Tahitians, to the extent that he allegedly saw them as less developed, he participated in the outlook of his time and  so contirubted to the mindset that allowed the West to exploit and dominate other nations in its own interests.

The period that we are looking at, roughly 1830 – WW1 was a period of intense colonial expansion by European countries. Europeans in the period that we have been looking at viewed themselves as more highly evolved than other peoples of the world which allowed them to colonise at will. Colonialism always used racist principles to justify itself. The ‘natives’ could not be trusted to govern themselves or manage their own affairs. 

Paradigm; A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

By the 19^th C, a scientific paradigm was well established in Europe. Everything was being measured, weighed up, catalogued, scrutinised, taken apart and studied. A number of pseudo-sciences grew up in this period. Pseudoscience takes the form of claims, beliefs or practices which are presented as scientific, but do not adhere to a valid scientific method. They are often characterised by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims. They often set out to confirm a pre-existing idea, rather than setting out to discover something.

One of the pseudo-sciences that dominated in the 19^th C was scientific racism. Racism is often founded on skin colour, but not always as 19^th C attitudes to the Irish show. Racism works on the idea that some ‘races’, defined according to variable criteria, are less evolved than others. A number of pseudoscientific approaches were developed at this time to prove the claim of racial superiority. The methods that they developed included physical anthropology, anthropometry and craniometry. These methods supported the classification of human populations into physically discrete races asserted to be superior or inferior.

Craniometry and cranioscopy asserted that the size and shape of the skull related to the level of evolution that a ‘race of people’ had attained. This technique was also used to show that the poor, the insane and the criminal were lower forms of life.

A similar technique was anthropometry, in which the physique of non-European peoples was measured in this way. Anthropometry linked to  biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.” 

These kind of techniques led to Eugenics, a social philosophy that advocated the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive eugenics), and reduced reproduction of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics). The question about who would decide what were positive or negative genetic traits was of course not debated, as it was assumed that European ‘scientists’ would be able to decide that in an impartial way. Eugenics was a technique that was dear to the Nazi heart, and they used a great deal of Scientific Racism in their anti-Jewish propaganda.

The horror that some Europeans felt about the native body was matched by a kind of equal fascination, and throughout the 19^th C non-Europeans were routinely the subject of so-called scientific exhibitions, carnivals and international fairs that purported to explore racial diversity and ethnicity.

Saartjie Baartman, also known as Sarah Baartman, was one of the Khoi people of South Africa, known in the 19^th C as Hottentots. Women of the Khoi people generally have particularly large buttocks; when Baartman was barely in her 20s, she was sold to London by an enterprising Scottish doctor named Alexander Dunlop. She spent four years in Britain being exhibited, where her treatment caught the attention of British abolitionists, who tried to rescue her. She claimed that she had come to London on her own accord, and later after Dunlop's death she traveled to Paris amusing  onlookers who frequented the Palais-Royal until this kind of exhibit lost its appeal. She lived on in poverty and died in Paris of illness in December 1815. After her death, a professor of anatomy dissected her body and preserved and displayed her remains. For more than a century and a half, visitors to the "Museum of Man" in Paris could view her brain and skeleton. However in 2002, at the request of Nelson Mandela, her remains were returned to South Africa and buried. 

Throughout the 19^th C at the series of World Fairs such as those held in Crystal Palace, in Paris, in Brussels and even in Chicago a bit later, non-European people were placed on exhibit, many grouped by skin color from the darkest to the lightest, or "lowest" to the "highest" on an evolutionary scale. These “expositions” were a major factor in perpetuating the idea that African, Asian, and Natives were inferior to Europeans and white Americans.

This is Ota Benga,  Congolese pygmy who was taken from Africa and put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other primates. A prominent Eugenicist persuaded the director of the zoo to put Benga in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan and a parrot, and labeled him The Missing Link, suggesting that in evolutionary terms Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.The display triggered protests from the city's clergymen and members of the Black community, but the public reportedly flocked to see it.

Both Gauguin and van Gogh were inspired by a similar quest to recover the sincerity and purity of simple, unspoilt people as they saw it - Gauguin of went native in search of this quest, Van Gogh travelled endlessly moving from the cold flat lands of Holland to the sunny hills of Provence. 

Van Gogh was a mentally unstable character, with a deeply religious nature. He spent a number of years working as a pastor to a community of miners in Belgium; he would make sketches of them. It was there in 1880 that he decided he wanted to be an artist.

From 1883 – 86 he lived in Antwerp, where he made many many studies of peasants at work in potato fields. These works really show the influence of Realism, and the attempt to capture the toil of the working poor. These sketches led to his first major painted work, The Potato Eaters, but an artist friend criticised this and recommended that he look at Millais.

He remained almost entirely self-taught, but after arriving in Paris in 1886 he took life drawing classes and some painting classes where he met Emile Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec. His brother had a gallery in Paris, so he was familiar with the work of the Impressionists, and was on personal terms with many of them.

In 1888 he left Paris and moved to the South of France. He invited Gauguin with whom he had struck up a friendship to visit him there, and they worked together there for 8 months. However, they fell out and after Gauguin left van Gogh had one of his disabilitating breakdowns.

In May 1889 he committed himself to an asylum at St. Remy. had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy. This is visible in many of the works that he did in this period.

We discussed how Munch experienced something akin to the landscape screaming at him. Van Gogh had a very ecstatic experience of landscape, as though he could see the forces behind the appearance of things that kept things animate. Van Gogh also experienced great torment and personal anguish, but it was expressed in a quite different way.

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 5

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

19th C Botanical illustrations ;

John James Audobon, Birds of America

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist , Botanical drawings, 1850 - 70

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1901, House for an Art Lover, Ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1901, House for an Art Lover, Ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, East Façade, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, East Façade, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, ink on paper

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Music Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Oval Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Oval Room and Hall, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, Hall and Dining Room, near Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, House for an Art Lover, near Glasgow

Aubrey Beardsley, 1893 The Peacock Dress, ink on paper

Aubrey Beardsley, 1893 The Black Cape, ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1895 , Salome and John, ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 , J'ai baisé ta bouche lokanaan , ink on paper, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 , How Sir Tristram drank of the Love Drink, illustration

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 Isolde, Colour illustration from The Yellow Book

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 The Slippers of Cinderella, Indian ink and wash illustration from The Yellow Book

Aubrey Beardsley,1896, Incipit Vita Nova, Block print

Harry Clarke, 1923 , Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Harry Clarke, 1923 Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysteries

Edvard Munch, 1894-5, Puberty, Oil on canvas 151.5 x 110 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895, Anxiety, Colour woodcut

Edvard Munch, 1896, Death in the Sickroom, Lithograph 40 x 54 cm

Edvard Munch, 1896, By the Deathbed, Lithograph, 39.7 x 50 cm

Edvard Munch, 1891, Melancholy

Edvard Munch, 1896, Melancholy, Woodcut 41 x 41.5 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895, Jealousy, Oil on canvas 67 x 100 cm.2 cm

Edvard Munch, 1896, Jealousy, Lithograph 46.5 x 56.5 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895-1902, Vampire, Colour Woodcut

Edvard Munch, 1896 , Man’s Head in Women’s Hair, Colour Woodcut, 54.6 x 38 cm

Edvard Munch, 1920 , Girls on the Bridge, Woodcut and Lithograph 50 x 43 cm

Edvard Munch, 1895 The Scream, Lithograph 35.5 x 25.4 cm

Edvard Munch, 1893? The Scream, oil on cardboard 35.5 x 25.4 cm

Semester 2, Lecture 5

The Arts and Crafts movement you will remember was a reaction against the alienating effects of industrialisation and mass production. William Morris, who was the main figure in the movement, had a very strong social and political philosophy about the positive effects of good design on the lives of ordinary people, he and the others who were involved in the movement advocated a return to handcraftsmanship and traditional techniques. His ideas were supported by the British art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who argued strongly for the unity of all the arts, for the end of segregation between the fine arts of painting and sculpture and the so-called decorative arts, or what we now call craft and design.

Follwing in the Design Reform footsteps of the Arts and Crafts movement was another movement called Art Nouveau, a philosophy and a style which also proposed that art should be a way of life, embracing all the art forms including architecture, graphic art, interior design, and jewellery, furniture, textiles, household silver and other utensils and lighting, and fine arts as well. However, where the Arts and Crafts movement was oriented towards manual production and a more rural lifestyle, Art Nouveau was not opposed to mechanisation and it was a strongly urban movement.

In the 18^th and 19^th Centuries arising from a new scientific attitude towards nature, the art of botanical drawing became highly developed. This form was largely produced by scientists – botanists, zoologists, naturalists – rather than artists. The work of German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel achieved a great deal of popularity within his own lifetime and exerted an influence over taste and aesthetics. The sinuous lines and "whiplash" curves in particular dominated the unfolding of Art Nouveau's flowing line, which may be understood as a metaphor for freedom and release from the weight of artistic tradition and critical expectations that Art Nouveau was trying to achieve.

Art Nouveau’s philosophy of art as a way of life resulted in an attempt to create total works of art, spiritually uplifting environments in which every single element was the result of an overall design aesthetics. The Tassel House by Henry van de Velde was one of these works, as was the House for an Art Lover by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Mackintosh, like many others in the Art Nouveau movement, was influenced by Japanes aesthetics. In the Japanese furniture and interior design, the focus was on the quality of the space produced, which was meant to evoke a calming and organic feeling to the interior.

This was designed as an entry for a competition of a German magazine in 1901. It was disqualified for technical reasons, but was awarded a special prize by the jury. The drawings were published in the magazine but the house was never built during Mackintosh's lifetime. 90 years later Glasgow City Council and the Glasgow School of Art built the house near Glasgow. Some of the rooms are open to the public, while others are used by the Glasgow School of Art.

Mackintosh admired the Japanese restraint and economy of means, and his own designs used simple forms and natural material. He developed a style of his own based on a contrast between strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves. The Mackintosh rose is a distinctive element of his decorative work.

Art Nouveau emerged in a wide number of European cities in the years between 1880 and 1914, including Paris and London, but also Vienna, Barcelona, St. Petersburg, Brussels, Berlin, Milan, Riga in Latvia which is now considered to have the finest collection of Art Nouveau buildings in the world and even as far away as New York. It varied considerably from centre to centre and even went by a number of different names. In some places it was a restrained affair while in others it drew strongly on aspects of the Rococo style. At the more Rococo end of the scale we have the work of Paris-based Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who produced many posters and advertisements, bringing the style into popular view.

The use of luxury veneers and finely cast gilt mounts in the furniture of leading cabinetmakers Georges de Feure (1868–1943), Louis Majorelle (1859–1926), Édouard Colonna (1862–1948), and Eugène Gaillard (1862–1933) indicated the Neo-Rococo influence of François Linke (1855–1946).

Art Nouveau quickly reached an international audience through the vibrant graphic arts printed in such periodicals as The Savoy, La Plume, Jugend, The Yellow Book, and The Studio. The Studio featured the bold, Symbolist-inspired linear drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). Beardsley's flamboyant black and white block print J'ai baisé ta bouche lokanaan for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé (1894), with its brilliant incorporation of Japanese two-dimensional composition, may be regarded as a highlight of the Aesthetic movement and an early manifestation of Art Nouveau taste in England. 

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 4

 Antonio Canova, 1777 Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss Marble - H. 1.55 m; L. 1.68 m; D. 1.01 m

Artist unknown (Italian), early 19th C, Wrestlers, marble

James Heffernan, 1825 Susannah at the Bath Plaster 125 x 82 x 50.5cm

Sophie Fremiet, 1842, Portrait of Francois Rude, oil on canvas

Francois Rude, 1827, Mercury fastening his sandals, Bronze

Begun 1802, L’Arc de Triomphe, Paris

Francois Rude, 1833–36, Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, Chérence stone

Eugene Delacroix, 1830, Liberty Crossing the Barricades, oil on canvas

Francois Rude, 1833, study for Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, plaster

Francois Rude, 1837, Study for bust of Jacques Louis David, (left) 1838,

Bust of Jacques Louis David , Marble

Francois Rude, 1852, Joan of Arc hearing voices , Marble

Auguste Rodin in his studio, 1885

Rodin, 1874, Man with a broken nose , Marble

Rodin, 1875, The Age of Bronze , Bronze

Rodin 1883, Jules Dalau , Bronze

Rodin, 1884 , Model for The Burghers of Calais , Plaster

Rodin, 1884 - 86 , The Burghers of Calais (first version) , Bronze

Rodin, 1894 , The Burghers of Calais , Bronze

Rodin, 1880 – 1917, The Gates of Hell, height 520 cm Bronze

Rodin, 1880 – 1917, The Gates of Hell, Original plaster, height 520 cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1425-1452, Gates of Paradise , Baptistry of Florence Cathedral, gilded bronze relief, approximately 17 ft. high

Rodin, 1880 , The Gates of Hell (third maquette) Plaster, 112 x 75 x 30 cm Musée Rodin, Paris

Rodin, 1900 , The Gates of Hell Plaster, 600 x 388 x 98 cm Musée Rodin, Paris

Rodin, 1880 – 1815, The Gates of Hell, (detail), Bronze

Rodin, 1880 – 1815, The Gates of Hell, (detail), Bronze

Rodin, 1880 – 1815, The Gates of Hell, (detail), Bronze

Rodin, 1902 – 04, The Thinker, Patinated Bronze height 180 cm

Rodin, 1887, tHe Kiss Terracotta, height 79 cm Musée Rodin, Paris

Rodin, 1890 , The Kiss Bronze

Rodin, 1901 - 04, The Kiss, Marble

Rodin, 1905 The Prodigal Son, Bronze, height 138 cm

Rodin, 1885-9, Assemblage of Heads of the Burghers of Calais, plaster

Rodin, 1895 (?) Assemblage: Mask Of cAmille Claudel And Left Hand Of Pierre De Wissant , Plaster, H. 32.1 cm ; W. 26.5 cm ; D. 27.7 cm

Rodin, 1898, Farewell, Plaster, H. 38.8 cm ; W. 45.2 cm ; D. 30.6 cm

Camille Claudel (above) and at work in the studio, 1885 (left)

Camille Claudel, 1886 , Bust of Jessie Lipscombe, Terracotta

Camille Claudel, 1887, l’homme Penchee, Bronze

Camille Claudel, 1887, Bust of Paul Claudel at the age of 13, bronze

Camille Claudel, 1888, Sakountala , marble

Rodin, 1889, The Eternal Idol, Marble

Claudel, 1888, Bust of Rodin , Bronze

Camille Claudel, 1893, The Waltz, bronze

Camille Claudel, 1894, The Waltz, Gilded bronze

Camille Claudel, 1895, Clotho, Plaster

Camille Claudel, 1897, The Wave, marble, onyx, bronze

Camille Claudel, 1894 – 1900, L’age Mur (Age of Maturity), Bronze

Camille Claudel, in 1915 aged 50

Edgar Degas, 1880, The Little Dancer, Coloured wax, tulle, horsehair and ribbon

Edgar Degas, date unknown, figure study in wax

Edgar Degas, date unknown, figure study in wax

Edgar Degas, (above) date unknown , horse study in wax

Eadweard Muybridge, 1878, horse running

Edgar Degas, date unknown, horse study in wax

Edgar Degas, date unknown, horse study in wax

Edgar Degas, date unknown, Woman in a tub, bronze cast after Degas’ death from wax original

Semester 2, Lecture 4

19th Century Sculpture

French sculpture in the 19th C was very closely aligned to the grand tradition of sculpture that flowed from Michelangelo on. This kind of work tended to be monumental or architectural. Neo-classicism had reinforced that idea of Roman and Greek sculpture as the highest attainment of sculptural form. It dealt largely with the heroic human figure using solid and durable materials like marble and bronze.

The technical limitations and the expense of producing sculpture meant that the expansive gestures that we saw develop in French Romantic painting were much slower to emerge in sculptural forms.

Portrait of Francois Rude from 1842, by his wife, Sophie Fremiet who was a pupil of Jacques Louis David. Rude initially worked in the neo-classical style, producing idealized figures that referenced ancient Roman myths, like this one of Mercury, the Roman god with the winged sandals. Politically, Rude was a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, and was forced to leave the country when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. Like the painter David, another ardent Bonapartist, he lived for some years in Belgium, returning to his native country in 1827.

After he returned to France, he became increasingly Republican in his views.  His work found favour with the public, and led to his receiving a commission to create a sculpture for the front of Arc de Triomphe. This fifty metre high structure had been built under Napoleon’s orders to celebrate France’s military achievement. It was unfinished at the time of his defeat in 1815, and was left untouched until the 1830’s when the constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe decided to use the completion of the structure as an ideal opportunity to promote national reconciliation, aiming to offer something that would please every segment of the French political spectrum.

Rude rejected the classical repose of late 18th- and early 19th-century French sculpture in favour of a dynamic, emotional a bas-relief which owes a lot to the Romanticism of Gericault and Delacroix. Departure of the Volunteers of 1792  is intense, rousing, full of drama and movement. The subject commemorates the Battle of Valmy when the French defended the Republic against an attack from the Austro-Prussian army.  The surge of the volunteers, inspired by the great sweeping movement of the Genius of Liberty above them.

Like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Rude’s sculpture effectively captured the energy of the republic in its early days, more so perhaps than anything to be found in the art of the 1792 generation. Rude has not entirely rejected neoclassicism, the treatment of the figures, some nude, some dressed in classic armour, draws heavily from antiquity, while the allegorical figure of Liberty recalls the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. In fact, 19th C Sculpture had trouble in shaking off the classical legacy; but with the work Rodin in the last quarter of the century, that classical tradition really comes to an end.

Rodin’s first work to be accepted to the Paris Salon was this work, The man with the broken nose a marbel bust. At that time he was working on a sculpture of a life size nude warrior called Le Vaincu or the Defeated One, a memorial to the catastrophic year of 1871. Before he sent it to the salon he removed the spear and called it The age of Bronze. This work formally brought Rodin into the public view, although the anatomical realism which closely echoed the specific model who posed for the sculpture was considered an objectionable feature by many.  Some claimed that it had been cast from real life which at that time would have been seen as cheating, although the practice of making plaster casts of parts of the human body and keeping them around as guides is well documented at this time.  Rodin vehemently denied the accusation, providing photographs of his model and a public letter signed by many of the most respected sculptors of the day. The controversy did not damage Rodins reputation but firmly established him in the public’s mind as an artist of importance. 

In 1884 learned that the city government of Calais wanted to commission a monument to Eustache de St Pierre who, in 1347, had delivered himself along with five other prominent citizens as hostages to King Edward III to persuade the English to lift the siege of Calais. According to the chronicler of the event, Edward’s conditions were harsh indeed .  The hostages had to be bare foot and in sackcloth, with ropes around their necks, bearing the keys to the city fortress and the king was free to do with them as  he pleased. The memory of these civic hereos had been rekindled by the recent war between France and Prussia, which had resulted in the lost of many cities in eastern France.  What attracted Rodin to this commission was the unusual task of a monument honouring a group rather than an individual. 

Rodin’s Maquette, which won the competition shows the hostages moving forward defiantly (only one of them turns aside and clutches his head in terror) on top of a tall base suggesting a triumphal arch.  After he had been granted the commission, the  design however struck him as being too conventionally heroic, and psychologically implausible.  He abandoned it along with the tall base and concentrated on the character of each member of the group, making numerous studies of every figure, every face.

This early version is closer to the original model, but In the final form of the monument the six Bugher de Calais no longer present themselves as group they seem in fact hardly aware of each other’s presence.  What unites them is only their common condition and the low rectangle of ground on which they stand.  The beholder confronting them almost at his own level is urged to focus on the self-absorbed quality of the figures- unheroic, complex human beings like ourselves.

The city fathers of Calais who had been expecting a patriotic public monument, thought the version Rodin presented to them was a failure.  Rather than commemorating a specific historic event, this is a monument to human crisis, showing six varieties of emotionally complex response, which seemed at the time more appropriate for a private rather than a public monument. The idea that sculpture might be a vehicle to express states of mind was a very modern one. After years of argument and struggle the official unveiling took place in 1895.

Rodin made a number of casts of this work, which are now located in different places around the world.

In 1880, before this controversy with the Burghers of Calais, Rodin received a commission from the French state for a pair of bronze gates for a new museum of decorative arts in Paris which had not yet been built. As it turned out it never was built in the end.

Rodin chose Dante’s inferno as his theme and visualised The Gates along the lines of Ghibertis gates of Paradise which he had seen on an Italian trip.  Early on he considered dividing the doors into framed rectangles, but abandoned this in favour of two huge cavernous panels with an uneven background from which a multitude of figures would emerge. He even animated the architectural framework of the door with sculptures of various scales and degree of relief.

For Rodin this was a tremendous seedbed of invention. At 24 feet tall, the commission made it possible for him to explore the expressive potential of the human body as no other artist had dared to before him.  Over the course of the next 20 years Rodin extracted and enlarged many of the forms which had their geneses in the Gates

The thinker was originally conceived as a generalised figure of Dante the poet, who is positioned in the centre, imagining the scene that emerges all around him. This figure was produced in a number of larger versions by Rodin.

This embracing couple are based on Dantes Paolo and Francesca, an ill-fated pair of lovers who have an illicit desire for one another and are therefore tortured in hell. Rodin reconsidered this as a passionate embrace in this world, and reproduced the work many times in various materials and sizes.

Like the Burghers of Calais, the Gates of Hell display a bravado, but also an anxiety and distress that was part of the atmosphere of the modern period in the years between the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War.

Not until 1900 was a plaster cast of The Gates of Hell was first exhibited to the public. It was not a hit, and Rodin seemed to have abandoned any idea of finishing his work. After his the first curator of the Musée Rodin had a complete model of the Gates assembled from the original molds, with the first bronze cast paid for by public subscription carried out in 1926-28. Today there are seven casts of the Gates of Hell throughout the world, made between 1926 and 1997.

In his studio Rodin experimented with a process of assembling together plaster casts from various disparate works in progress. This method of assemblage had not been considered a valid form of sculpture before this, but found its way into early Modernist sculpture as a very important sculptural form.

Portrait of Camille Claudel, who was a pupil of Rodin’s.

The Ecole des Beaux Arts would not take women students, so a group of women got together in a studio in Paris and received instruction there from various tutors. In 1883, when Claudel was 19, Rodin became the tutor for the studio. He recognized her visionary talent very early on. They became lovers and it is now widely believed that Rodin’s vision was significantly influenced by Claudel’s, although for many years it was presented as being the other way around. From 1884 Claudel worked in Rodin’s studio. It is believed that she assisted on many of his most famous works including the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais, but she also produced and exhibited works of her own.

Claudel was noted for her sensuous nudes, which were considered inappropriate and improper for a woman to express through any art form, especially sculpture, although similar erotic and sensuous forms in Rodin’s work were hugely popular. She came from a wealthy Catholic family in the north of France; her mother was totally opposed to her becoming a sculptor, and when word got out of her affair with Rodin her family was scandalized. Claudel and Rodin had a relationship for 10 years, but when Claudel became pregnant Rodin insisted that she have an abortion. She brought the relationship with him to an end following that in 1894, although they remained in contact for a number of years after.

In 1895, Claudel received a commission for this work, Clotho, to commemorate the painter Puvis de Chavannes, although as a woman she was not allowed to attend the unveiling banquet.

In 1897 La Vague and a number of other works are presented in a Paris gallery. Claudel continues to be referred to as Rodin’s protégée or pupil and she becomes exceedingly frustrated by this. She begins to cut herself off from all those associated with Rodin, which leads to her professional isolation.

In 1898 she finished this commissioned work, which hints at the love triangle between herself, Rodin and his wife Rose Beuret. By 1900 Rodin was a world-famous artist, while Claudel continued to work but struggled to get paid quite often. From around 1905 onwards she became very depressed and exhibited signs of paranoia. She accused Rodin of stealing her ideas, and she destroyed many of her own works. Her father supported her to some extent, but in 1913, a few days after his death her family had her committed to an asylum against her will. Indignant articles were published in the press at the time accusing her family of locking up a genius. She spent the last 30 years of her life being moved between asylums, often in very poor conditions, and never made another piece of work. Although Claudel definitely was suffering from mental illness, many of the doctors who treated her over the years denied that she was insane, and attempted to persuade her family to allow her to be released. They repeatedly refused, and never visited her, apart from a few visits by her brother in the course of the 30 years. This was a relatively common practice used against women who didn’t conform, particularly those who conceived outside of marriage or were considered to be eccentric in any way. In 1929, her former studio mate Jessie Lipscombe visited her in the asylum and insisted that it was not true that Claudel was insane.

Following her death in 1943 her family refused to claim the body and she was buried in a collective grave at the asylum.  

Degas' sculpture stands outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century French sculpture. He was never interested in creating public monuments, and, with one exception, neither did he display his sculpture publicly. The exception wasThe Little Dancer. It was shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881, but doesn’t really correspond to any idea of impressionism. The figure astonished Degas' contemporaries, above all for its realism which was judged brutish by some, but also for the very unusual use of materials. The figure was modeled in wax, wearing a real bodice, stockings, shoes, tulle skirt, and horsehair wig with a satin ribbon. The work had a mixed reception – one critic did speak about it as pointing to a new future for sculpture, but it was never exhibited again in Degas’ lifetime, It has since been cast in bronze and a number of copies exist in different musuems around the world.

The rest of his sculpture remained a private medium, akin to sketches or drawings. Degas limited himself to a small range of subjects, exploring the dynamics of movement or of muscular tensions within the body. On his death 150 of these sculptures were found in his studio, mostly of ballet dancers, women washing and drying themselves and horses. Most of the works were in wax, clay, and plasticine. Nearly all had reached various stages of deterioration.

They were later restored and many of them were subsequently cast in bronze. Like Rodin’s experimental assemblage pieces, these studies of Degas had an effect on the development of Modernist sculpture.

Regarding Degas’ drawings of women it has been noted by some recent critics that they have an extraordinary self-sufficiency, separateness, and sensuous privacy which is largely lacking in the depictions of women in European painting up to this point. In many ways the viewer (always assumed at this stage, and for this kind of work, to be male) is excluded.

The brothel monotypes constitute a series of repetitive images in which the variety of expressive gesture is minimized, individual physiognomic difference is reduced, and complexities of composition, such as costume and decor, are greatly simplified. These images go a long way towards negating traditional aesthetic norms of legibility and corporeality. They present seemingly crude, scribbled, smudged, murky forms in what are frequently almost illegible juxtaposed masses of light and shadow, quite baffling at first sight, almost cartoonish or caricatural in the clumsy quality of the figural delineation, strangely unfinished, abbreviated, and apparently hasty in execution. One has the impression of a rapid sketch made sur place , although these monotypes are actually remembered images composed après coup

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 3

 Edouard Manet, 1863, Le Dejeuner sur l‘Herbe, oil on canvas

Claude Monet, 1865, Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, (fragment), oil on canvas

Color theory

color icons (c.1700): additive hue circle after Newton, 1704;

(c.1750): subtractive color wheel after Harris, 1766;

(c.1800): perceptual color hexagram after Goethe, 1807;

(c.1850): additive hue circle by Laugel, after Helmholtz, 1856/1869;

(c.1900): subtractive color triangle after Sloan, 1923;

(c.1950): subtractive color wheel by Famous Artist's School, 1958;

(Harris, Goethe and Laugel diagrams revised to place yellow at top)

Michel Chevreul’s Colour Wheel, 1834

Examples of Chevreul’s equal-triadic color combinations include: red, yellow and blue; green,

purple and orange; yellow-green, blue-violet and red-orange; or blue-green, red-violet and

yellow-orange.

Claude Monet, 1869, The Magpie

Claude Monet, 1869, La Grenouillere, oil on canvas

Claude Monet, 1870, La plage de Trouville

JMW Turner, 1844, Rain, Steam and Speed; The Great Western Railway, oil on canvas

Claude Monet, 1872, Impression: Sunrise, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1873, The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare), oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1863, Le Dejeuner sur l‘Herbe, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1873, The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare), oil on canvas

Victorine Meurent, 1880’s, Palm Sunday

Claude Monet, 1877, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet, 1877, Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack Sun in the Mist

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack Thaw, Sunset

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack in the Sunlight, Morning Effect

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystacks Snow Effect

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack Morning Snow Effect

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystack,

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystacks (Sunset, Snow Effect)

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystacks, Sunlight

Claude Monet, 1889 – 91, Haystacks White Frost Effect

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral

Monet, 1892 – 93, Rouen Cathedral 

Semester 2, Lecture 3

At the beginning of this course, when we looked at the development of the Renaissance, I talked to you about the fact that the Renaissance came about as a result of a shift in the way that European people viewed reality. The change in the way that things were seen happened because of a whole range of social, political and cultural developments; what happened in art was both a cause and an effect of that shift.

With Impressionism in the second half of the 19^th C, we see another significant change in the mode of representation taking place in visual art which reflects and also speeds up changes that are taking place in society at large. Impressionism supplanted the visual modes that Renaissance Art had established, and it paved the way for huge changes in art which we know as Modernism.

We have already observed that early 19^th C photographs captured, for the first time, images of fleeting phenomena, like body shapes when people are walking, or the shape of a horses legs when it runs. This was the first time that images had been seen of insignificant or trivial phenomena. This changed all of the rules of image-making that had been established during the Renaissance and modified in the following centuries. The old ways of seeing were literally abandoned by some artists in favour of a new way of seeing and relating to the visual world. For example, the actions and events of everyday life began to be seen as appropriate subjects for painted images, moving the subject matter away from historical, religious or romantic subjects. We know that the Realists had put forward the idea that artists should deal only with the world around them, and that they should invent nothing. Their concern should be solely with the truth and actuality of contemporary experience.

I have discussed with you the fact that Manet initially saw himself as painting in the tradition of the great masters, but in the 1860’s recognised his affinity with the Realists. The Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe was so scandalous because it seemed to represent the scene of the picnic as a contemporary event.

However, in 1865, Claude Monet began this painting, which was intended to be both a tribute and a challenge to Manet. This was originally a huge painting, over four metres by six. The project had to be abandoned in 1866, just before the Salon where Monet had intended to show it, opened. He later described how he gave the unfinished painting to his landlord as security for rent that he couldn’t pay. The landlord rolled it up and put in the cellar; when Monet had the money to get it back in 1884, he discovered that it had gone mouldy." He cut it up, and kept only three fragments. The third has now disappeared.

It seems to say, well if you are going to paint real life, contemporary life, then why not paint it as it actually is? Why modify the scene to include an unlikely nude? You can see that the poses of the figures represent the kind of casual movement that any of us can recognize as part of everyday life. The second challenge in the work seems to come from the manner of painting it. This is a faithful representation of the effects of sunlight, which suggests with the real focus of contemporary painting is not the subject matter, but the effects of light and the nature of vision itself.

Throughout the 19^th C science and technology was developing at an incredible rate; the study of optics and the physiological principles of visual perception were being intensively pursued by various sciences. Artists, scientists and philosophers in this period were all moving in the same direction, towards a realization that colours were not as Leonardo and Alberti thought, immutable realities but depended on individual perception, that they were part of the universe of light, one of the elementary dimensions of nature. Michel Chevreul (1786-1889) is credited for formulating the first systematic attempt to study and write about the subject of color combining. He developed laws of contrast and harmony from which stemmed concepts of monochromatic, analogous, complementary and triadic color schemes that are found in most modern art textbooks.

This discovery, along with many others, caused many people to doubt the existence of a permanent, independent, unchangeable reality which could be controlled by perspective or the physics that Isaac Newton had described. Instead, the nature of matter was being revealed as the interaction of underlying forces and processes. For the impressionists this meant that attempts to capture the immediate, momentary impressions with the greatest possible fidelity were aligned with a developing modern understanding of how the universe operated. They really revelled in seeing the world in all of its unfolding, ephemeral complexity.

A critic and poet of the time, Jules Laforgue wrote extensively about Impressionism. He wrote “Essentially the eye should know only luminous vibration, just as the acoustic nerve knows only sonorous vibration.”

Monet advised a young American artist at the time ” When you go out to paint, to forget what object you have before you-a tree, a house, a field, or whatever.  Merely think , here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow and paint it just as to looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own naïve impression of the scene before you.” What we see in these works is Monet’s attempt to recreate in pigment an equivalent for his optical sensations or the neurological reactions of the retina to stimuli received from light rays reflected by the phenomenal world. 

Alongside all of the technological and scientific developments that were taking place in the 19^th C, chemistry was developing at a furious rate, and one of the consequences of this was the development of a range of chemical pigments which are more stable than natural ones; this led to the invention of the paint tube containing ready mixed oil paints in a wide range of colours. Mass production meant that these materials were cheaper and readily available which facilitated the possibility of painting outside of the studio. The Impressionists laid great emphasis on painting in the open air, placing them in direct personal contact with the subject that was engaging their attention.  They eliminated black shadows and outlines which do not exist in nature, painting shadows in brilliant colour. They experimented with various techniques of broken colour, trying to maintain brilliance, rather than mixing to produce dull shades. 

We have already considered the impact of photography on the way that people were seeing at the time. Another factor that must be taken into consideration in the way that visual experience of the world changed has to do with speed. Until the popularisation of the railway in the 1830s nobody had experienced travelling faster that roughly 15 mph; from a train it was possible to view a landscape moving at speeds of 50-60 mph. This motion and transience blurred the precise outline to which most of renaissance art had attuned the eye, and it effected the subjective nature of visual experience. It also made travel easier and  more accessible, so we see artists moving from the city to the country and back again.

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – 71 a number of the artists went to England where they saw the works of Turner and of Constable.

[SOCIAL CONTEXT AFTER GARE ST LAZARE]

Impressionism came out of a certain social and cultural context, which was responsible for shaping its forms and determining its ideology.  Most of its practitioners had grown up under the not so distant shadow of the revolution and of Napoleon, they had lived through ’48, the Coup d’etate, the Second Empire, the Franco Prussian War and the Commune, dying under the Third Republique.  The background to their lives was one of constant political turmoil, with which they were necessarily involved.  They were not as overtly political as say Courbet was; their politics was more in their resistance to the artistic establishment and views of what art should be. Like the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which we looked at last week, the Impressionism were a self-conscious group.  They held their first exhibition together in 1874, and continued to paint together and to exhibit together intermittently over a number of years, but artistically and in terms of personality these artists were quite different to each other, and there were many tensions within the group.   Underlying basic animosities between different personalities there was a basic dichotomy between line and colour, between thought and feeling, between form and atmosphere. You could see that very clearly in the contrasting of those two works at Gare St. Lazare – Monet’s atmospheric semi-abstract treatment, with a heavy emphasis on colour, and Caillebot’s much more traditional rendition with it’s linear perspective and clarity of form.

Impression- Sunrise Monet’s painting which gave the movement its name is a good example of how Monet constructed a whole composition in terms of colour alone. High viewpoint.  No solid clear cut shapes, and all content or subject matter in the traditional sense is gone. 

CONCLUSION TO MONET

The concept of the impression which held the group together at the start was an inherently contradictory one, because it seemed to indicate both objective and subjective approaches to perception, going someway beyond a straightforward accurate view of nature to include the individual and unique sensation of a particular artist. This internal contradiction led to the group pulling apart in different directions. The one we are going to look at is what is called Neo-Impressionism.

SLIDE LIST LECTURE 2

STUDY REFERENCE ONLY; DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED

 Rosa Bonheur, 1849, Ploughing in the Nivernais, oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, c. 1843–1845, Self-portrait (The Desperate Man)

Gustave Courbet, 1854 The Meeting or "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet", oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, 1849, The History of a Burial at Ornans, oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, 1849, The Farmer’s Lunch at Ornans, oil on canvas

Diego Velázquez, The Farmers' Lunch, c 1620

Annibale Carracci, early 1580s, The Butcher's Shop,

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, ca. 1738, Woman Cleaning Turnips, Oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, 1849, The Stone Breakers

Jean-François Millet, 1857, The Gleaners, oil on canvas

Jean-François Millet, 1871,  A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville,  oil on cardboard

Honore Daumier, (left) c. 1850-53, The Burden oil on canvas (right) 1863, The Laundress

Honore Daumier, 1864, The Third Class Carriage, watercolor, ink wash and charcoal on

slightly textured, moderately thick, cream laid paper

Honore Daumier, c. 1834, Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834

Honore Daumier, 1834, The Legislative Belly

Honore Daumier, c. 1860, The Uprising, Oil on canvas, 87.6 x 113 cm

Edouard Manet, 1862, The Old Musician

Edouard Manet, 1862, Music at Les Tuilieries, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1863, Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, oil on canvas

Georgione, 1510, La Fete Champetre, oil on canvas

Alexandre Cabanel, 1862, The Birth of Venus. Oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1865, Olympia

Titian, 1538, Venus of Urbino

Edouard Manet, 1865, Olympia

Edouard Manet, 1868, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1867, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, 1864, The Races at Longchamp, oil on canvas

Semester 2, Lecture 2

STUDY REFERENCE ONLY; DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED

You may recall that in the middle of last semester we had a session about Representation.

Mark Wartofsky is a cultural theorist who wrote an essay about how cameras see. In it, he argued that our perceptual process is socially and culturally moderated. "The general thesis I am proposing is this: that human vision-visual perception, if you like-is an artifact. It is the product of our own making. Starting with the mammalian eye, in biological evolution, we have transformed visual perception by means of transformations of our visual praxis-the ways, or modes, of our visual activity. The instrument of this transformation is pictorial representation."

In Cultural Studies the word representation refers to the social process of making images, sounds and signs stand for something. One of the things referred to in that programme is that early photography froze moments so that people could look at things they had never looked at in that way before. Minute, irrelevant detail was given the same weight as the objects or people at the centre of a composition. The kinds of representations that photographs are, changed the way that people saw the world. We will come back to that at the end of the lecture.

Last week we discussed Romanticism, and as we will see throughout this period of the 19th and 20th C whenever you have any kind of movement or philosophical or stylistic position in the visual arts, you are going to very quickly find a reaction against that same position.

Around 1850 a movement that we know as Realism emerged, primarily in France.  Realism revolted against what they saw as the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement.

This is a work that sits on the boundary of Romanticism and Realism. Stylistrically, we might call it Realism, because of the way that it has been painted. But in fact, while the word Realism if often used to mean forms of representation that try to create an optical illusion on a flat surface, this work by Rosa Bonheur is closer to Romanticism in spirit – the heroic quality of the work.

If Realism referred to a realistic style of image making, then there are many works from Art History that would fit that category - Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding would be a masterpiece of realism in that sense – almost photographic in its rendering of things.

Realism was influenced politically by the growing sense of dissatisfaction with social inequality. Another series of revolutions had taken place in France in 1848. In February there was an uprising that led to the deposing of the monarchy and the establishment of the Second French Republic. However, that government very conservative, and in June the workers of Paris staged a bloody but unsuccessful revolt against the government. So the work of the French Realists was not so much about a realistic style of painting as it was trying to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life.

We saw already that typically Romantic artists like Goya and Gericault were making works that presented real-life situations, although they tended to dramatise them. The Realists sought the meaning of their work in the ordinary situations and gestures of people encountered in the everyday.

I should point out that Rosa Bonheur is now considered more interesting for her feminist lifestyle than for her work. She was known for wearing men's clothing and living for over forty years with her childhood friend Nathalie Micas. On her wearing of trousers, she said at the time that her choice of attire was simply practical as it facilitated her work with animals: "I was forced to recognize that the clothing of my sex was a constant bother. That is why I decided to solicit the authorization to wear men's clothing from the prefect of police. But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else. The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me...."

The first painter to use the term Realism in this way was Gustave Courbet. Courbet’s earlier works, like this one, fitted in with Romantic ideas, favouring intensity, drama, the portrayal of the artist as a slightly demented visionary.

From about 1849 he had shifted towards this kind of work, as he became increasingly radical politically, embracing anarchy and desiring the abolition of class difference. The Burial at Ornans records the funeral of his grand uncle which he attended in September 1848. People who attended the funeral were the models for the painting. Previously, models had been used as actors in historical narratives, but in Burial Courbet said he "painted the very people who had been present at the interment, all the townspeople". The result is a realistic presentation of them, and of life in Ornans. The painting measures 10 by 22 feet (3.1 by 6.6 meters), upsetting convention by depicting something so ordinary and undramatic on a scale that was reserved for history paintings. The like of idealisation would have been considered vulgar.

Many of Courbet’s works in these years portrayed peasants, people at work, unremarkable scenes, employing a fairly rough, immediate handling of paint.

Honore Daumier was another artist whose work expressed a deep interest in people, especially the underprivileged. Of all the Realists it is Daumier who seems to express the most compassion for these people living extremely hard lives. As a chronicler of modern urban life, Daumier captured the effects of industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Images of railway travel first appeared in his art in the 1840s. This Third-Class Carriage in oil, unfinished and squared for transfer, closely corresponds to a watercolor of 1864. His painting style is really very abstract for the period; The Uprising is done in a style that is closer to work we will see in the early years of the 20th C when Modernism is in full swing.

In 1830, after learning the still fairly new process of lithography, he began to contribute political cartoons to the anti-government weekly called Caricature. In 1832 he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for his cartoon attacks on the King Louis-Philippe, whom he represented as `Gargantua swallowing bags of gold extorted from the people'. An assassination attempt on Louis Philippe led the government to ban political satire in 1835, at which point Daumier turned to satire of social life, but when the 1848 revolutions began he returned to political subjects. He is said to have made more than 4,000 lithographs.

The final artist that we will look at with regard to Realism in Edouard Manet. His work is seen as a bridge between Realism and Impressionism which comes hot on its heels. We are going to focus on Manet’s work from the 1860’s and we will look at his work from the later years when we cover Impressionism.  

Manet is credited with producing the first truly Modern works in painting, ushering in the age that we know as Modernism, which covers the period from about 1870 up to the 1960’s or so.  He didn’t particularly intend to be a rebel. He considered himself to be a Realist painter and admired the works of Velazquez and Goya in particular. However, something about Manet’s vision and his way of composing and painting images challenged the social process of representation through painting.

This early work, Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe was rejected by the Paris Salon of 1863. The Salon was the main exhibition run by the Academy, the place where painter’s reputations were made. In that year of 1863 the Salon had rejected 4,000 paintings, so the Emperor Napoleon 3^rd intervened and created an exhibition called the Salon des Refusés. Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe was exhibited there and caused a storm of controversy.  Although it is loosely based on a painting by Giorgione, known as Fete Champetre, the naked or semi-naked women are painted in such a way that they cannot be mistaken for allegorical figures, or goddesses. They are clearly contemporary women who have taken off some or all of their clothes and are having a picnic with some men. The loose handling of the composition was also quite sketch-like, almost spontaneous and this further emphasised the contemporary nature of the event.

The hypocrisy of the criticism for this work is demonstrated by the fact that this painting, The Birth of Venus by Cabanel won the medal for the best painting at the Salon the same year and was bought by the Emperor. 

In the year 1865, Manet was challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. H made this work, Olympia, again based on a much admired work from the Venetian Renaissance. Once again, Manet’s work created a scandal. A contemporary journalist wrote ‘"only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" by offended viewers. The painting was controversial largely because it presents a self-assured, naked woman, the implication being that she is a prostitute, since no other women would allow themselves to be painted in this way. The fact that she is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers accentuate her nakedness, sexuality, and comfortable courtesan lifestyle.

Olympia's body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. A contemporary critic denounced Olympia's "shamelessly flexed" left hand, which seemed to him a mockery of the relaxed, shielding hand of Titian's Venus. Likewise, the alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time.

The flatness of the treatment of the subject, which serves to make the nude less voluptuous, more human along with the painting's lack general of idealism rankled viewers

"Olympia" was the subject of caricatures in the popular press, but was championed by the French avant-garde community. As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution in contemporary France, something that was widely practiced but not acknowledged. The role of women within society was now openly under question.