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STUDY REFERENCE ONLY; DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED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