Art History Final Overview Part 2

Vir Heroicus Sublimis by Barnett Newman

Another leading painter of the New York School was Barnett Newman. Barnett Newman's painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (above), is a non-objective painting. It's an enormous painting, just about 8 feet high and over 17 feet wide. Keep the scale in mind as you look at this red field of color with five horizontal lines breaking up the field of color. When Newman exhibited this painting, he realized that viewers would be inclined to step back to see it in its entirely. To invite the viewers to do precisely the opposite, he displayed a wall text that read, "There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance." Why did he invite them to stand close to this large painting? He likened the experience of viewing the large canvas to the experience of a human encounter. He said, "It's no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there's a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives." He intended the viewer to experience something intimate. This was surprising since the painting is so large, but he disregarded people's inclination to view large scale works from afar. He wanted them to have a one-on-one encounter with the color field and be enveloped by the field of color, to experience a physical reaction to the painting. He wanted them to be affected by the presence of the painting. The composition, at first glance, may appear simple. However, give it a moment and look at what Newman did. In Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Newman painted some areas of red lighter and some darker. The variation in the value of red creates the sensation that parts of the painting are lit differently, a subtle suggestion of three-dimensional form and pictorial space. The red chroma is saturated in some areas and dull in others which creates a varied tone throughout the red fields. The zips are not all the same. Beginning from the left, there is a light red zip, a stark white zip, a dark purple zip, a light red zip, and a warm, dull yellow zip. The zips interact with the red color field. The white creates contrast and breaks up the plane of red. The purple zip, an analogous color creates harmony. Because it is darker, it seems like it's receding into a background. The two light red zips pop forward in relation to the red color field, like a form in front of a background. The analogous dull yellow zip adds harmonious warmth. Watch the short video From the Curator hyperlinked above—a Museum of Modern Art curator analyzes the painting. Watch the short video Painting Techniques of Barnett Newman to see how Newman painted and made the zips. The compositional ploys with color are meant to overwhelm the senses of the viewer. Newman sought to create art that has a transcendent quality that takes viewers out of themselves; in other words, art that provides a sublime experience. The title, Vir Heroicus Sublimis means man, heroic and sublime. He explained the title in his essay, The Sublime Is Now. Newman asked, "If we are living in a time without legend or mythos that can be called sublime . . . how can we be creating a sublime art?" The time he is referring to is 1950. He and his generation of painters had lived through the economic depression of the 1930s, WWII, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Nothing was what it had been. He was intent on creating a brand-new language of art for a new world. Newman also believed in the spiritual potential of non-representational art. He wrote, "instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings." He used color to create a mood, to express passion, to create an experience of an encounter with something that is beyond the mundane—a sublime experience through color. This comment by the American art critic Clement Greenberg made in 1961 is a neat summary of the experience of looking at Western European, American, and Mexican art during the time period covered by this course; from the representational work of the Proto-Renaissance through French Realism to modernism and finally non-objective art after World War II. Thank you for joining me on this journey through time and space to look at and think about the variety of human endeavor in the visual arts.

The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (Night Watch) by Rembrandt

Another master of this Golden Age of Dutch painting is Rembrandt van Rijn who came of age in the first quarter of the 17th century. Rembrandt left his studies at the University of Leiden to pursue a career as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Unlike other painter with means, Rembrandt didn't study the works of painters abroad. Instead, Rembrandt made a thorough study of Dutch master painters and learned the works of other masters, like Caravaggio and Rubens, through printed reproductions. Over the course of his career, Rembrandt developed a style of painting that introduced innovations in atmospheric perspective, in the modeling of forms, and the use of textured brush strokes. Rembrandt had remarkable technical skills and a design sense for very interesting compositions. The way Rembrandt handled color value and intensity and how he handled light complemented the meaning of his compositions. Rembrandt was rigorous about studying people, objects, and their surrounding directly which he translated visually in compositions filled with vitality. By the age of 25, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam which was a thriving center of Dutch banking and markets. He set up a portrait studio in Amsterdam and in relatively short order established himself as a portraitist. He rose to prominence quite quickly and had enough income to establish a workshop with apprentices. For some time, Rembrandt received a considerable income from the output of his workshop which he spent on a collection of art and on living well. Eventually, in imitation of Italian master painters, he dropped the van Rijn from his signature and signed his works simply as Rembrandt. In 1642, the Amsterdam Civic Guard commissioned a group portrait from Rembrandt. This has become one of his most famous paintings, Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, also known as Night Watch. The photography above was taken shortly after the completion of a thorough cleaning and conservation of the famous work. Even at this distance, you can see Rembrandt's interesting composition and use of light. On the left is Rembrandt's painting and on the right is a contemporary copy of it painted by Gerrit Lundens. I show this to you so you can see what Rembrandt's original composition looked like and see how much of his work was cut away by a later owner. Unfortunately, this was and still is not an uncommon practice—to resize a work to make it fit a frame or fit in a display space. You'll notice the loss of the edges and top make the pictorial space of Rembrandt's painting a bit shallower and dampens some of the dramatic contrast of light and dark. Rembrandt didn't rely on a conventional composition to solve the challenge of representing the men of the Civic Guard who all had chipped in for the group portrait. He didn't take Frans Hals' approach of arranging the men in an easily read horizontal composition. Instead, Rembrandt posed the men of the Civic Guard on parade that expresses the vitality of the military company and still portrays every man individually. Rembrandt's composition is not a social gathering like Hals' treatment; Rembrandt's is more of a vision of the role the men played in civic life. Rembrandt's composition synthesizes the visual characteristics of Baroque painting. He places the action on a diagonal, uses light dramatically, and suggests a degree of vitality and movement. In the center of the composition is Captain Cocq wearing a red sash. The captain issues an order by extending his left hand. Rembrandt highlights his hand which makes it stand out from the captain's dark clothing and draws the viewer's eye. The reaching gesture also connects the pictorial space of the painting with the viewer's space. The light that falls on the captain's hand casts a shadow across the yellow jacket of Lieutenant van Ruytenburch. The diagonal line of the red sash and cast shadow makes a visual connection with the banner above on the left and with the lieutenant's pike decorated with the company's colors, the blue and gold tassel, on the right. This strong diagonal from left to right cuts across the composition and intersects with the right to left diagonal of the parade of men. This crisscross movement replicates the sensation of men on the march. In this closeup view of the pike, you can see the virtuosity of Rembrandt's modeling with color. He uses subtle gradations of light and dark values of color to replicate the way the eye perceives shifts in a hue when a form moves through space. The young girl caught up in the movement of the militia's parage is a symbol of the arquebusier's guild. An arquebus was a type of firearm. The girl has the attributes of the gild hanging on her back—the arquebus and a chicken. To the right of her is a helmet with an oak leaf, a symbol of victory. In the photographs on the right, you can see Rembrandt's brushwork up close. The black and white photograph (bottom right) shows Rembrandt's gradations of light and dark value that contribute to the realistic look of color and form moving through space. You can also see Rembrandt's loose brushwork and his thick application of paint, called impasto. One 18th century restorer commented that Rembrandt's paint was applied so thickly that, as he put it, "one could scrape nutmeg on it." In other words, the surface was not flat. Night Watch is an instructive example of some of the qualities that make Rembrandt's works stand out. His composition is arranged for dramatic effect and is innovative. He pays attention to the effects of light which contribute to the meaning of the work. His energetic handling of the paint adds vitality to an already lively interpretation. Rembrandt's works were in high demand during this Golden Age of Dutch painting and the appeal of his work continued after his lifetime. In the 18th century, Rococo artists copied his dramatic elements. In the 19th century realist painters was inspired by Rembrandt's style and his brushwork.

Woman Holding a Balance by Johannes Vermeer

As I mentioned previously, the expanded and independently operating art market patronized by the Dutch mercantile class in the 17th century made specific types of paintings popular—landscapes, still life, and genre painting. One of the most celebrated genre painters during the Golden Age of Dutch painting was Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer, the son of a silk worker, lived and worked in Delft, a city in the Dutch Republic. By the time he was 21 years old he was a member of the Saint Luke's Guild, the painter's guild of Delft. Unlike the prodigious Rembrandt, Vermeer left behind a very small body of work. Only thirty-five paintings by Vermeer are known to survive. Most of Vermeer's paintings are genre paintings set in domestic interiors with just one or two figures, often women. Invariably, a figure in the genre paintings is undertaking an everyday activity. The compositions work at this level but there is another level of meaning that is communicated by the objects in the composition. Many objects have allegorical meaning which complicates what would otherwise be an entertaining scene of the ordinary. Above is Woman Holding a Balance that is set in a prosperous Dutch home of the 17th century. On the right the standing woman holds a balance in her right hand and rests her left hand on the tall tabletop. The balance is an instrument, a scale, that is used to measure the weight of small objects. Vermeer balances his composition on a diagonal; the greater area of well-lit space in the right triangle is balanced by the smaller triangular area on the left in the shadows. Vermeer had a particular knack for depicting natural light entering a closed space, such as the illumination of the room in this painting. He represents the light's effect on form and texture by painting nuanced values of color. The light from an unseen window lands on the woman's hand, her sleeve, her bodice, and her face which emphasizes the figure in the composition. The light reflects off the gold and pearl jewelry that draws the eye to what the woman is doing at the table. The window that's visible farther back casts light on the painting of the Last Judgment on the back wall. The composition is balanced. The woman is holding a balance. And, in a moment, I'll explain how the painting on the back wall also is a reference to a soul's fate in the balance. Vermeer's precise attention paid to the detailed effects of light and to the depth of focus suggests that he used a camera obscura to study a model and props arranged in his studio. On the left is an 18th century print of a room-sized camera obscura. A camera obscura is a device that operates on the principle that if one bores a small hole on one side of a closed cube, the light rays from outside will project whatever is outside onto a surface in the interior of the cube. Usually, the projected scene of what's outside—the image—appears upside down on the wall opposite the hole. Artists used a camera obscura as a visual aid to study detail. Some scholars suggest that Vermeer used a compact camera obscura to study the effect of light on the model and props and the effect of focus on the forms' contours. The latter may explain Vermeer's uncanny perception of how the eye sees forms in peripheral vision; forms in the periphery tend to have softer, less-focused contours. Vermeer planned the orthogonal lines to converge on the vanishing point that falls precisely on the woman's finger. This places the act of weighing at the center of the composition and draws attention to this everyday activity. The woman is oblivious to anything else, lost in thought as she waits for the balance to come to rest. Some critics have likened this stillness in Vermeer's interiors to a "poetry of silence," in other words, a studied pause that Vermeer elevated to an expression of visual beauty. The woman's concentrated stillness suggests she is doing something more than merely weighing material goods. What she is thinking may be suggested by the large painting of the Last Judgment on the back wall. The Last Judgment is when Christ passes judgment on souls at the final reckoning. Vermeer places the woman's head in front of the spot where the Archangel Michael customarily weighed souls; therefore, she is linked with this final weighing of the souls. Vermeer's deliberate pause or stillness offers the opportunity to reflect on what can be weighed; the material which the woman does and the immaterial which will be done in the Last Judgment. This suggests that the focus of the composition is on the significance of a balance between the material and the spiritual. This notion is suggested also by other elements of the composition. For example, the woman's serene expression and the blue color of her jacket recall images of the Virgin Mary. Vermeer's highlight on the woman can be likened to the used by painters to connote a spiritual event or enlightenment. The material is suggested by the pearls that were associated with vanity and worldly concerns (vanitas) as was the mirror on the wall directly in front of the woman. Vermeer's genre scene elevates a mundane act of holding a balance by drawing a parallel with the weighing of souls in the Last Judgment and contrasting the transience of life and its symbols of vanitas with the eternal afterlife promised in the Last Judgment.

Rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson

During the later 18th century and early 19th century, a style that competed for primacy in France was the "true style," later called Neoclassical style. The style revived the look of ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture and was different from some 17th and 18th century works that derived their classicism from Italian Renaissance models. For example, the classicism in 17th century French architecture was drawn from classicizing Italian Renaissance models. Artists and architects of the later 18th and early 19th centuries returned to the classical sources and studied surviving ancient art and architecture they were coming to light in large-scale excavations such as those at Pompeii. This revival of ancient subject matter and visual idioms in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is called Neoclassicism. The American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, became familiar with the Neoclassical idiom in France at close hand when it was the height of fashion in western Europe. He was already disposed to classical ideas. He had received a classical education, held a humanist outlook (to some degree), and was among the American leaders who implemented their versions of the political ideals of the Roman Republic and the Athenian Democracy to forge the founding principles of the United States. While abroad, Jefferson studied the classical monuments at first hand and drew from them for his own architectural designs. When he returned to the fledgling American Republic, he designed public and private buildings in the Neoclassical style and was largely responsible for introducing Neoclassical design to the United States. These designs that drew from the classical past were meant, by association, to evoke the democratic, republican, and humanistic values of the early United States. Because so many architects followed Jefferson's lead and designed the majority of early federal buildings in the Neoclassical style, this style in the U.S. is called the Federal style. When Jefferson returned to private life, after serving as vice-president and president of the United States, he wrote the University of Virginia's educational curriculum and designed the university's campus (plan on right) in a unified Neoclassical style. Jefferson was invested in the success of the university because he believed that every citizen had the responsibility to educate himself (access to higher education was accessible only to white men at the time) and that only an educated and enlightened citizenry could protect the rights and liberties that he and the other early leaders worked so fervently to guarantee. Jefferson designed the layout of the campus on a longitudinal plan. The professors' residences along the long sides he designed based on different classical order, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Students met with professors in the residences and read books housed in the Rotunda (above left) that was the temple of learning on the short end of the plan. Thomas Jefferson based his Neoclassical design for the Rotunda (right) at the University of Virginia on the Roman Imperial Pantheon (left), an ancient Roman temple built by Emperor Hadrian circa 118-128 AD. Jefferson purposefully chose an ancient Roman architectural plan and design to evoke, through association, classical learning. He scaled the Rotunda by one-half the size of the Pantheon. Rather than using an oculus open to the sky as in the design of the Pantheon (left), Jefferson shielded the oculus with a window. This protected the books from the elements but allowed light into the reading room. Under this great dome in the temple of learning was where the university housed its library. Under this great dome is where the students of the University of Virginia read in pursuit of enlightenment and, from Jefferson's perspective, were on their way to becoming responsible citizens who would uphold the ideals of the country.

The French Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger

England was not spared the religious upheavals of the 16th century in western Europe. When King Henry VIII moved to have his first marriage annulled by Pope Clement VII (Giuliano de' Medici) and tried to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn in the hope of producing a male heir, he swept his kingdom into a heap of political and religious controversy. In 1526, when Henry VII was attempting to acquire an annulment, the Bavarian painter Hans Holbein the Younger arrived in England for his first visit. Before arriving in England, Holbein had apprenticed in his father's painting workshop and had established a career in Germany and Switzerland where he received important commissions such as the commission to illustrate an edition of Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible and the commission to illustrate an edition of the prominent Dutch humanist Erasmus' satirical work In Praise of Folly. In England for a second visit, Holbein presented a letter of introduction from the great scholar Erasmus to Sir Thomas More who facilitated Holbein's connection with well-placed members of the Tudor royal circle. After completing this painting, Holbein became the official court painter to Henry VIII until the painter's death from plague in 1543 at 46 years old. In 1533, two French ambassadors to the English royal court commissioned a double portrait from Holbein to mark the occasion of their appointment by François I, King of France. The French king sent Jean de Dinteville three times to assess the situation at court while acting as the king's representative. The portrait was done on his second assignment when his good friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, was also on a diplomatic mission for the king of France. This was the year in which Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and their daughter Elizabeth was born, the future Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Holbein's oil and tempera painting on a wooden panel depicts Jean de Dinteville (left) and Georges de Selve (right) in an interior setting surrounded by objects that represent their education and position. This was a cultural convention of Northern Renaissance portraiture painting. While the objects generally refer to the ambassadors' education and position in the world, some specifically allude to the discord caused by Henry VIII's rash decision to divorce his first wife and marry his pregnant mistress. On Jean de Dinteville's dagger sheath, his age is written in Latin (29 years old). On the top shelf, on the edge of the book Georges de Selve's age is written (25 years old). On the lower shelf are a lute, a set of flutes, a book of hymns, and a book on arithmetic by Peter Apian. These represent some of the liberal arts at the core of a Renaissance education. They also refer to the discord caused by Henry VIII's divorce and second marriage in defiance of the Church of Rome. The musical instruments, commonly were used as symbols of harmony. However, the instruments in the painting are flawed in some way. One flute is missing from the set and the lute has a broken string. Thus, the instruments become symbols of discord. Next to the lute is a Lutheran hymnal open to two hymns, Luther's translation of the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus into German and Ten Commandments on the facing page. The pairing of these hymns suggests a choice must be made between rebellion (rash acts of Henry VIII) or compliance (mission of ambassadors to promote the status quo). Another suggestion is that together the hymns point to shared beliefs. Peter Apian's A New and Reliable Instruction Book of Calculation of Merchants of 1527 (left) is propped open to a section on division. This refers to the political and religious divisions that disrupt society because of Henry VIII. On the top shelf behind the ambassadors are scientific instruments that educated and worldly men like the ambassadors used to tell time and make astronomical observations. The blue celestial globe, used in the 16th century to identify constellations, is set to the latitude of Rome (2:40 pm, July 12), a reference to the position of Rome and Pope Clement VII's reluctance to grant the English king a divorce. On the lower shelf with other objects concerned with the affairs of the world is a white terrestrial globe centered on the French location of Jean de Dinteville's chateau where he would return with this painting after his mission to the English royal court ended. The painting made its way back to England and into the collection of the National Gallery in London in 1890. In the upper left corner, half obscured by the edge of the green silk curtain is a sculpted Crucifixion (top right). This is a symbol of Christian salvation and the belief in life after death. The Crucifixion is a counterpoint to the symbol of mortality in the foreground. The symbol is a human skull depicted in distorted perspective (anamorphosis) which makes it appear as a blurry streak when seen head on. It only becomes clear when viewed while standing to the right of the painting (bottom right). The skull, as a reminder of mortality (memento mori), was not uncommon in northern European portraiture. A memento mori communicates the fleeting nature of mortal life in contrast with the eternal message of the Crucifixion. Holbein's double portrait of the French Ambassadors Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur is rich with symbols that reflect the nature of the two men and the issues of the time they spent at the English royal court. Jean de Dinteville, as the representative of the French king, had to attend the wedding of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn and acted as surrogate godfather on behalf of the French king at the baptism of their daughter Elizabeth. Pope Clement VII responded to the marriage by excommunicating Henry VIII from the Roman Catholic Church. Henry VIII retaliated by severing ties with Rome and established the Church of England which he placed under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the English monarch.

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix.

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix was born to a family of high public officials and ambassadors on his father's side and artisans on his mother's side. He received a privileged education, like Géricault, at the prestigious Lycée Impérial in Paris. At 17, Delacroix studied painting in the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, the same painter Géricault briefly studied under at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Neither painter was affected much by the classicism of Guérin. Delacroix became familiar with Géricault's work when he posed for The Raft of the Medusa. But Delacroix learned more about painting through copying the Venetian and Flemish old masters hanging on the walls of the Louvre Museum. Delacroix learned about the literary aspect of Romanticism through fellow artists also painting from the old masters in the Louvre. In 1822, Delacroix made his Salon debut. Delacroix was perhaps the most renowned painter of French Romanticism, a movement that had reached its peak in France by 1830. Delacroix's painting of that year, Liberty Leading the People (above), is a romanticized depiction of a contemporary event that was meant to elicit an emotional response. The composition suggests that the French people spontaneously took up arms and rebelled in unity against King Charles X on July 28, 1830. This deviation from the facts was characteristic of Delacroix. He thought art should be a sincere reflection of the artist's feelings and convictions even at the expense of the facts. Delacroix heightened the drama of the composition by making the rebels emerge from hazy veil of smoke. Leaving the haze, a metaphor for escape from tyranny, the rebels march directly toward the viewer. The skyline and the recognizable towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral places the scene in Paris. Delacroix tilted the view, as Géricault had done in the Raft of the Medusa. This perspective affords a view of the whole scene. As viewers look at the composition from the bottom up, they first encounter the corpses in the foreground and then ascend to the figures marching forward over their fallen comrades. Viewers reach the pinnacle of the pyramidal structure when they see the personification of Liberty with her raised hand holding the French flag. In Delacroix's conceptual rendering of the uprising are representative people from different social class which suggests that the rebellion against King Charles X was the will of all the French people. Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People met with little enthusiasm from the Neoclassical and grand manner painters of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. They who painted orderly and noble academic images objected to Delacroix's expression of his convictions about the uprising. They also found fault with Delacroix's style; in particular, the way he used color to define his figures, his loose brushwork, the textured surface of thick paint, and the mannered, energetic figures. The French Academy disapproved his work so much that they barred Delacroix's membership to the Academy until 1857 and, even then, didn't permit him to instruct. Contemporary critics who viewed Liberty Leading the People chastised Delacroix for his figure of liberty. They objected to the eroticism of the figure's bare breasts, her dirty skin, and the suggesting of hair in the armpits. One critic noted that she looked more like a fishwife than the noble personification of Liberty. Even though critics and academic painters disliked the painting and the French artistic establishment of the Academy considered him a loose canon, the French government led by Louis-Philippe purchased the work. As an anti-establishment figure of Romanticism, Delacroix and his work became a model for a later 19th century group of French painters who exhibited together outside the strictures of the Academy and were called collectively the Impressionists.

Bodies of Federal Soldiers Killed on July 1st Near the McPherson Woods by O'Sullivan and Gardner

In 1851, F. Scott Archer introduced a technological advance in photography, the wet collodion process. To see and understand this process click on Wet Collodion Process hyperlinked above. Archer's wet collodion process recorded an image on a light-sensitive glass plate as a negative image. This negative was used to create albumen prints. Archer's negative image on a glass plate produced sharper images than Talbot's paper negatives for calotypes because there were no paper fibers on a glass plate. Archer's glass negatives were more durable and yielded more prints than Talbot's calotypes. To make copies of daguerreotypes, a photographer had to re-photograph the singular daguerreotype. Archer's wet collodion glass negative and albumen print made images as sharp as daguerreotypes but had the advantage of being reproducible. Another practical advantage was the possibility to photograph outdoors on location. In time, the wet collodion replaced the daguerreotype and calotype. In its early years, photography became a substitute for more costly painted portraits; however, even the wealthy who could afford painted portraits had their portraits taken photographically. The immediate popularity of photography prompted a debate in the art world as to whether photography was a creative endeavor or not. A leading English art critic, John Ruskin, argued that photography wasn't art; however, many photographers defied this characterization and made images that were the product of a creative process. Although the equipment was cumbersome and the timing was tricky, photographers nonetheless worked outside a studio and photographed on location. Alexander Gardner, an immigrant to the U.S. from Scotland, and Timothy O'Sullivan, an immigrant from Ireland, apprenticed with the leading American photographer Matthew Brady. Gardner and O'Sullivan worked as a photographic team that built their reputation on their images of the destructive power of modern warfare in the American Civil War. The American public saw the team's photographs in the 1866 publication of Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. It was a two-volume work with 100 images from the American Civil War. The photographs were of soldiers in camp, battlefields, war damage, and death in the aftermath of combat. Gardner wrote a text to accompany the 100 images in his publication. His text for the 1863 Incidents of War: A Harvest of Death (above right) is "Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg-as all reluctant to expose their ghastly horrors to the light-came the sunless morn, after the retreat by Lee's broken army. Through the shadowy vapors, it was, indeed, a "harvest of death" that was presented; hundreds and thousands of torn Union and rebel soldiers-although many of the former were already interred-strewed the now quiet fighting ground,. . . A battle has been often the subject of elaborate description; but it can be described in one simple word, devilish! . . . Swept down without preparation, the shattered bodies fall in all conceivable positions." He then describes the Confederate troops who paid for their treason with their lives an died a lonely death only to be buried far from home by strangers. He concludes with "Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation." The realism of Gardner and O'Sullivan's photographs and the poignancy of the texts were meant to stir the viewer and to warn against future armed conflicts. Gardner took further steps to make his point and guarantee the success of his images. The Harvest of Death purports to show Confederate troops whereas the bodies in the photograph on the left are identified as Federal troops. In fact, these are the same men, Federal troops, photographed from different angles. The historian William Frassanito realized the deception in 1975 when he made a detailed study of Gardner's published photographs and text. The motive for Gardner's deception? He took it upon himself to create a scene with the material at hand. He used the means available to show the tragedy of war, as a creator of images, not a record keeper.

Impression Sunrise by Claude Monet

In 1863, Napoleon III recognized the limitations imposed on artists by the singular, annual Salon exhibition. To remedy this and accommodate artists whose works were rejected by the Salon, Napoleon III established the Salon des Refusés. A decade later, this annual exhibition event did not satisfy a group of artists who sought even more independence from the academy and official sanction. This group organized the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers which held 8 exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. This collective of independent artists had a fluid membership, from 9 to 30 members, at each exhibition. The members of this collective were not like the Realists who emphasized social observation and inherent commentary. Some of the painters of the Anonymous Society were interested in the optical effects of light and color. Some were interested in the observation of urban and middle-class life without an inherent commentary. Despite these different interests, the group exhibited together, and their contemporaries perceived them as a group. The painting that gave this collective group of painters its nickname, is Monet's painting of a view of Le Havre in the morning (above), Impression, Sunrise. This painting was exhibited at the Anonymous Society's first Exhibition of New Painting in 1874 held in the photographer Nadar's studio. Writing for the satirical newspaper Le Charivari, the art critic Louis Leroy took issue with the object of the paintings done en plein air (outdoors) by some of the painters. He accused them, and particularly Monet because of his title and his aesthetic, of painting sketches not completed paintings. The title of his article, Exhibition of Impressionists, gave rise to the entire group of painters being called Impressionists. Jules Castagnary who understood what the new, young painters were trying to accomplish, published a piece in support of their work and put a positive spin on the label Impressionists. What the conservative critic Leroy failed to grasp was the point of Monet's painting. Monet intended to capture the transient effects of light derived from his direct observation of the world. Monet's innovative brushwork confounded the critic Leroy who saw them as hastily painted strokes in what he perceived as an oil sketch. Monet, despite working quickly, was exacting in his brushwork. He used short brushstrokes of orange on blue to represent the reflection of the early morning sun on the waves in the harbor. He used broad strokes in the sky to convey the look of the sun reflected in the smog. Although the brushstrokes look spontaneous and effortless, they weren't. Monet painted with deliberation in a carefully constructed composition. Yet, conservative observers were shocked at his radical painting technique. Academic painters and conservative critics were also disconcerted by the bright colors used by many of the young painters in the exhibition. The bright colors of the painters' palettes were due to two things. Firstly, they rejected the use of a thick golden varnish that academic painters applied to their finished works. The golden varnish had the effect of making a painter's palette appear dull. Secondly, the artists used paints made from synthetic pigments developed in the 19th century that produced vibrant blue, green, and yellow that had never been used before.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso

In 1907 in Paris, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso revolutionized the Western art world with this painting of five nudes and a still life, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The work is a landmark because of what Picasso did with form, pictorial space, and color. Indebted to artistic pioneers like Manet who envisioned works of art from the past in new ways, Picasso adapted art forms from earlier periods. The way, however, Picasso envisioned these works was even more unconventional than any preceding painter. For example, Picasso's standing figure on the left in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is reminiscent of ancient sculptures of Egyptian pharaohs with one leg forward and a clenched fist (above left). The two central figures in the painting, with arms stretched behind their heads, are reminiscent of traditional poses of Venus popular in the classical past and from the Italian Renaissance onward. Picasso incorporated artistic elements from non-Western pieces as some of the Impressionists had done with Japanese woodblock prints. For Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso borrowed and adapted forms of sub-Saharan African wooden masks that he knew from the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum in Paris. Years later, in a published conversation with the intellectual and art critic Andre Malraux, Picasso described his reaction to the wooden sculptures. This is an excerpt of Picasso's thoughts, "When I first went to the old Trocadero . . . The masks weren't just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things . . . I too believe that everything is unknown . . . I understood what [they] use their sculptures for . . . Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have come to me that very day." In hindsight, Picasso was exoticizing the non-Western works somewhat, yet he appreciated the power of the forms and broke down traditional barriers between Western and non-Western art. Picasso refashioned the elongated and geometric forms of the Mbuya mask for the geometric wedge of a nose and off-set mouth of the seated woman. The architectural nose and striated markings of the Etoumbi mask appear as the structured nose and hatched lines on the face of the woman standing on the right. Picasso distorted the figures of these five, nude prostitutes from a brothel on Avignon Street in the red-light district of Barcelona. He made them appear threatening partly as an experiment in form and composition and partly to express his anger with the prostitutes from whom he contracted a venereal disease. Picasso referred to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as his "first exorcism painting" in which his perception of the sub-Saharan African masks possessing supernatural power plays a role. He imposed the mask-like forms onto the women as talismans against dangerous, life-threatening venereal disease. Picasso modeled the figures of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as solid, geometric forms. He blurred the distinction between the foreground and background which reconceived pictorial space. He imagined different sources of light falling on the forms which he used to create multiple and shifting points of view of the forms. The most radical departure from artistic convention, and the laws of nature, is the seated woman whom he depicted simultaneously from the front and the back. Picasso's fragmented and geometric treatment of the bodies, multiple perspectives, and compression of space effectively changed the course of Western art in the early 20th century.

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

In the United States, as part of the economic recovery package of the Roosevelt Administration, the Farm Security Administration put photographers to work by hiring them to document the devastating effect of the Great Depression. In 1936 Roy Stryker, the director of the Resettlement Administration, a branch of the Farm Security Administration, hired the photographer Dorothea Lange to photograph workers living in makeshift shelters at a pea-picker's camp in Nipomo, California. Lange took advantage of the crisp, precise contours she could achieve in black and white photography to convey the urgency of the condition of this mother and her children on the brink of starvation and to elicit empathy for her subject. Within 24 hours of making the photographs at the camp, Lange gave them to an editor at the San Francisco News who printed this one, and after it appeared in the newspaper, the federal government rushed food to the workers at the camp. In the tradition of documentary photographers, Lange was less interested in the formal elements of composition than with the social message she could convey with her photographs. Years later, in 1960, Lange gave this account of her experience at the pea-picker's camp: "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." (Popular Photography, February 1960). Lange's image came to exemplify the hardship endured by migratory farm workers in the Great Depression, and as a compelling image it speaks to the power of photographic images to move people to action.While an awareness of the circumstances surrounding the creation of any image enriches our interpretation of it, an examination from the perspective of the subject, Florence Owens Thompson, offers a more complex understanding of the haunting image.Thompson, a descendant of American Indians from Oklahoma, had been living in California for a decade when Lange photographed her.Contrary to the portrait of despair, Thompson was an active participant in farm labor struggles in the 1930s and occasionally was an organizer of labor.There is no record of what Thompson thought at the time Lange photographed her, but the immediate popularity of the image in the press did little to alleviate the profound financial distress of Thompson which had forced her to seek seasonal agricultural work.Later Thompson did say that she regretted having been the subject of Lange's photograph since she was permanently seen as a "Grapes of Wrath" stereotype.Thompson's daughter later commented that her mother "was a very strong woman.She was a leader.I think that's one of the reasons she resented the photo-because it didn't show her in that light

Breakfast Scene (The Tete a Tete) by William Hogarth

In the age of Enlightenment, 18th century English visual arts were not only concerned with scientific subjects. Subjects with witty satire in painting found an audience among the wealthy and in prints among the not so wealthy. The English Rococo painter and printmaker William Hogarth was a master of visual satire. Born in London, Hogarth was apprenticed in 1713 to a goldsmith and engraver and by 1720 had set himself up as an engraver, producing shop cards and book illustrations. He eventually expanded his repertoire with a new type of picture, what he called the "modern moral subject." These images were satires of the vice and folly in contemporary manners and social conventions. Hogarth painted these satires and then engraved the images to produce series of prints. Hogarth's satirical engravings were so popular that other artists frequently copied them and sold them as their own. To stem the loss of income and recognition, Hogarth lobbied parliament for the protection of his work under the relatively new Copyright Act of 1735. Hogarth's action, to protect his intellectual property and economic interests, signals the modern age, an age in which copying is perceived as an act of plagiarism and an individual artist's intellectual and creative work is considered proprietary. In 1743-44, Hogarth created a series of paintings, among his most successful series, that took a satirical look at contemporary marriage and was his first satire of the ruling classes who had more money and privilege than sense. This series, Marriage à la Mode, satirized marriage in the upper echelons of English society. The series of paintings tell the story of the progress and demise of the marriage of an aristocratic yet impoverished Viscount, the son of the Earl of Squander, to the daughter of a wealthy Alderman. Hogarth fills the scenes of Marriage à la Mode with French Rococo style and elegance, but the subject is not aristocratic escapism. Rather, Hogarth pokes fun at the hypocrisy of the landed aristocrats and the nouveau riche. In this painting of the series, The Tête à Tête, the marriage is proving a disaster. Hogarth shows the Viscount and the financier's daughter at breakfast in their expensive but disorderly home. The disheveled Viscount, seated in the chair on the right, has returned exhausted from a night spent away from home, most likely spent in a brothel. The couple's dog sniffs at the lady's cap in the Viscount's pocket which Hogarth uses to draw the viewer's attention to the Viscount's sexual exploits. The black mark on the Viscount's neck is a sign that he has already contracted syphilis, a venereal disease. Hogarth uses the device of placing paintings within a painting to contribute to the satirical view of this disastrous marriage. In the next room, in the background on the wall, paintings of saints line the wall. These are isolated from and ignored by the breakfasting couple. The reverential saints contrast with the last painting in the row, an erotic painting that is partially revealed from behind a curtain; only a naked foot peeks out from the covering fabric. The curtain hid the erotic subject from ladies and casual acquaintances, but the Viscount could reveal the titillating picture for his and his guests' pleasure. The financier's daughter, stretching in her chair on the other side of the table, likewise is fatigued from her evening activities. The upturned chair in the foreground suggests that her companion made a hasty exit just before the arrival of the Viscount. Behind the couple, on the mantle, rests a sculptural bust with a broken nose which was a symbol of impotence. The painting over the mantlepiece shows Cupid among the ruins, a comment on the state of the couple's marriage. Finally, Hogarth completes his satirical look at the state of the couple's marriage with the couple's steward departing on the left and carrying receipts and bills. The steward raises his right hand in despair over the state of the couple's finances, yet another indication of the ruin and folly of the marriage of greed and privilege.

The Slave Ship by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Romanticism was likewise popular with artists, patrons, and collectors in England. Among the English Romantic painters, Joseph Mallord William Turner stands out. Compared with the privileged families of Géricault and Delacroix, Turner was born to less august parents. His father was a barber and wigmaker, his mother the daughter of butchers and shopkeepers in London. When his mother was committed to an asylum, he lived for a while with his uncle and attended the Brentford Free School. In the late 1780s and early 1790s he attended the Royal Academy. To afford the tuition he worked as an architectural draughtsman and scene painter for London stages. The Royal Academy recognized his prodigious talent and made him an associate of the academy when he was just 25 years old. Like other Romantic painters, he painted a wide variety of subjects. Over the course of his long career and enormous body of work, his style ranged from picturesque to impressionistic depending on the subject. Above, The Slave Ship, is an example of the dynamic and sweeping brushwork of Turner. In this composition he blurred vivid colors to suggest form rather than delineate it. Painted when Turner was 65 years old, The Slave Ship recalls an event that occurred when he was a child and coincided with the first World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London in 1840. The painting is based on a poem that describes a slave ship caught in a typhoon and the real events of the Zong, a British ship bound for Jamaica laden with human cargo from Africa, a cargo of 417 kidnapped Africans destined to be sold into slavery. In 1781, the Zong sailed past its destination which extended its voyage by weeks. Fresh water was running out and disease was spreading among the Africans. The captain made the ruthless calculation that he couldn't claim compensation from the insurance company for the Africans who died from disease but could if the "cargo" were lost at sea. The captain ordered 54 Africans be chained and thrown overboard. As disease continued to spread, the captain ordered another 78 Africans be thrown overboard before reaching Jamaica. Upon its return to England, the ship owners filed a claim for each African "lost at sea." Abolitionists contested this claim which led to a hearing in court. Initially, a jury found in favor of the owners based on the justification that it was legal to kill animals for the safety of a ship. The insurance company appealed the jury's decision, and the case was retried. In this landmark case, the jury reasoned that Africans were people; therefore, the captain was not justified in murdering them and the ship owners were owed no compensation from the insurance company. To communicate the horror of this event, Turner uses the force of nature to signal danger. His loose brushwork contributes to the representation of the energetic, chaotic storm. His impressionistic contours blur the limbs of the Africans, still shackled, sinking into the churning sea. Turner, like the French Romantic Géricault, composed a sublime image that elicits a sense of awe and horror simultaneously. The first owner of The Slave Ship, the art critic John Ruskin, declared this painting emblematic of Turner's work. He wrote, "If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this."

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gough

The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work was characteristic of the second trend in Post-Impressionism, the use of line or color to express emotion. van Gogh was unlike most of the painters we've focused on so far. He had a more varied path to painting, spent just the last ten years of his short life dedicated to painting, and only sold one painting in his lifetime. He was the only painter we've focused on that lived a life that comes close to the commonly-held but misinformed stereotype of "the starving artist;" he was poor, sacrificed food for art supplies, and suffered from mental illness. As you've seen, from all the examples of artists since 1400, the stereotype is not based on the real lives lived by artists. It is a myth with few exceptions; van Gogh was one of the exceptions. One of van Gogh's more famous paintings, The Starry Night (above) is a composition based on van Gogh's memory of church spires in Dutch villages and his interpretation of the French landscape in Provence. van Gogh painted this while he was an inmate of a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy in Provence just one year before he died from a gunshot wound—either suicide or manslaughter. When van Gogh was working on this canvas, he wrote in one of his many letters to his brother Theo about the view from his window at the asylum in southern France. "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The morning star (the planet Venus) which van Gogh mentions in this letter appears as the large white star just left of center in the painting. The other stars and the crescent moon in the sky he added to the composition enliven what became an evening sky. He applied color in energetic curves that spiral and move from left to right across the sky in a way that departed from the Impressionist doctrine of truth to nature in favor of emotional expressiveness. van Gogh refashioned reality subjectively and rooted it in a psychological experience. His sweeping, wide brushwork define the flame-like cypress trees in the foreground and blocks of color delineate the surrounding hills and buildings of his imagined Provençal town. The cypress trees, traditionally planted in graveyards and associated with mourning, however, are not signals of morbid thoughts about death. The trees associated with death and the stars evoked something else for van Gogh as he explains in another letter to his brother Theo. "Looking at the stars always makes me dream. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star." Although van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime and rarely showed his work in public, his work with his thick application of paint (impasto) and expressive use of line and color eventually was seen by the public. A retrospective exhibition of his work in 1901, held a decade after his death, made an impact on the art world and since then his work has continued to fascinate and inspire succeeding generations of artist.

East Facade of the Louvre

The French Academy of Painting and Sculpture, known as the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, in Paris thrived under the patronage of Louis XIV, King of France. Louis XIV was an absolute monarch who believed that he had the divine right to rule, that he derived his authority directly from God. Louis XIV centralized all political authority under his control and ruled autocratically for 54 years. This certainly had political consequences for the subjects of the kingdom, but the focus here is on the impact this absolute monarch made on the arts. The arts were pressed into service of the monarchy. Louis XIV used the visual arts to glorify his achievements and to shape the perception of his power and splendor. In this, he was not so very different from other powerful patrons of the arts who had large amounts of capital at their disposal—the Medici and many popes to name a few. With the assistance of his chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV organized the arts under a central authority in the form of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648 in Paris. When the painter Charles Le Brun became the director of the French Academy in 1663, he imposed a strict curriculum of practical and theoretical studies. Classicism, derived from Renaissance models, was the preferred style. Le Brun promoted drawing and linear design in the creative process and deemed it superior to the process of colorists who composed in terms of color and light, like Rubens and Claude. Poussin, therefore, was in line with the ideals of the French Academy. The academy also established a hierarchy of value of subjects. Narrative painting (called history painting) was the highest form of painting because it required imaginative genius. Genre painting occupied the middle rung, and still life and landscape were inferior because they relied on direct observation and skill. Again, this falls in line with Poussin's thinking about subjects. Louis XIV undertook his first commission of a large architectural project in Paris in the late 1660s. Together with his Chief Minister Colbert, Louis XIV held a design competition for the remodeling of the Louvre in Paris. The king rejected the design submitted by Bernini because it was too flamboyant. The monarch favored rational and restrained architecture with a classicizing aesthetic therefore exuberant Italian Baroque architectural design with curving walls and activated spaces was out of the question. The king chose three French men to design the remodeling of the Louvre; the painter and director of the French Academy Charles Le Brun and the architect Louis Le Vau for the main design, and the physician Claude Perrault to design the east façade of the Louvre (above). Perrault's design for the façade is restrained classicism. It is executed with classical symmetry on a long horizontal plane. His design for the paired two-story columns between the windows on the second story that support a continuous entablature is a variation on Michelangelo's design for the Church of Saint Peter and reminiscent of Giacomo della Porta's treatment of the façade of the Church of Il Gesù, a clear preference for classicizing motifs of the Renaissance rather than the Italian Baroque. Perrault's central pavilion topped by a pediment is an interpretation of Italian Renaissance architecture that echoes the look of an ancient Roman temple front and triumphal arch. He repeats the pediment motif over the windows of the second story to unify the length of the façade. The look of Perrault's façade established the classicizing style of 17th century French architecture.

Olympia by Edouard Manet

The French Realist painter Manet created an even greater sensation with his 1865 Olympia which surprisingly was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon of the same year. The viewing public and critics were shocked by this painting that clearly is a depiction of a prostitute. In the esteemed rooms of the Paris Salon, viewers and critics were reminded of the scourge of venereal disease rampant in Paris in the 19th century thought to be spread by prostitutes and their customers. Much as he had done with Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, Manet took inspiration from works of art of the past and modernized the message and style. For example, Manet was familiar with reproductions of High Renaissance paintings of nude women, such as Titian's so-called Venus of Urbino. Manet transforms Titian's sexualized depiction into an image of a woman who is in command of her sex with a hand that bars access to her genitalia. Manet frees his figure from the accepted classical ideal of a Renaissance painting and places her in the social reality of contemporary Paris. Titian's nude resides in a well-appointed home, a dog representing faithfulness at her feet and her servants who draw attention to her contribution of worldly goods to the marriage. In contrast, Manet depicts the moment when Olympia's maid brings her the flowers sent by a client in appreciation of services rendered. In the place of the dog, Manet poses an alert black cat at her feet which refers to the popular reputation of the alley cat. Titian's pictorial space approximates what the eye would see looking into the room whereas Manet makes the pictorial space shallow, pushes the back wall forward, and bathes the nude in the foreground in a harsh light that flattens the form. Manet's painting doesn't disguise the medium in illusion. This signals a modern approach to painting that makes the medium part of the content of the work. Manet paints in response to the long tradition of the reclining female nude. The Baroque painter Velazquez (above right) kept some mystery in his portrayal of Venus whose face is seen in the mirror held up by Cupid. The Romantic painter Goya, on the other hand disregarded the niceties of a Venus figure and paints for the private collection of the patron and for the patron's titillation. Manet drops the classical scenario of Velazquez and rejects the pornographic element of Goya. Part of this long-standing tradition of the reclining female nude includes sculpture, such as the Neoclassical sculptor Canova's decorous depiction of Pauline Borghese as Venus, or the work of the Neoclassical painter Ingres who removed the figure from her mythological foundations only to replace them with the exoticism of the Ottoman Empire of his imagination. Many critics who viewed the Olympia on exhibit at the Paris Salon denigrated the work; however, a group of Manet's contemporaries led by the French writer Emile Zola defended the modernity of the image. Manet introduced a frank interpretation of a reclining nude woman. The subject is neither tentative or shy. She looks boldly and directly at the viewer much as Meurend did in Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. Manet challenged the long-tradition of objectifying undressed women, gave his subject a degree of agency, and defied the tradition of prettified academic nudes.

La Grande Odalisque by jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a child during the French Revolution, came of age during the Napoleonic ear, and learned painting from Jacques-Louis David. He was trained in the Neoclassical idiom, developed his own synthetic style, and had a career that spanned three-quarters of the 19th century. Art historians categorized the work of Ingres as Neoclassical because of his formal clarity and smooth texture which Ingres learned from David. However, Ingres adopted stylistic elements from the Mannerists, such as rich detail, elegance, and exaggerated forms, and painted subjects that the French considered exotic which was characteristic of Romanticism—an artistic movement, not a style. The combination of Mannerist with Neoclassical stylistic features gave the look of Ingres' painting its uniqueness. Ingres gave form to exoticism in the subjects of many of his paintings. One of these subjects was the odalisque, a women in an Ottoman harem. The term is derived from oda, the Ottoman Turkish term for a room in a harem. A harem is the women's space in a Muslim household but in 19th century France it referred to both the room and the group of women who were married to or the lovers of one man, usually perceived in the context of the Ottoman Empire. Ingres received the commission for this painting from the Queen of Naples, Caroline Murat, who was another of Napoleon's sisters. Caroline Murat commissioned two paintings to be hung in her private chambers; the other of the pair was destroyed in 1815. The imagery of La Grand Odalisque was purposefully seductive because it was destined for the private chambers of the Queen of Naples. It, however, was not devoid of more substantial meaning. It has undertones of the political agenda of the queen's brother, Napoleon, who had set his sights on the conquest of Near East which was part of the Ottoman Empire. In this painting, La Grand Odalisque, Ingres included furnishings recognizable as items found in a harem, the divan (reclining couch), the turban, peacock-feather fan, and the tobacco pipe. Ingres idealized the beauty of the reclining nude. He defined the form of the woman with precise contour lines, a signature of Ingres' style of painting. When Ingres painted, he left barely detectable brushstrokes which create a remarkably smooth surface, a characteristic of the Neoclassical style he learned from David. He posed the reclining nude to be seen from the back. He turns her head that makes her appear coy. He elongated her torso unnaturally that recalls the exaggerated proportions of Mannerist works like Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino. The nude in Ingres' painting is not an allegorical figure nor is she a depiction of Venus. No, she is a contemporary woman whose form sprang from Ingres' Romantic imagination about the exoticism of the Ottoman Empire. When Ingres exhibited La Grand Odalisque at the 1819 Salon, his synthesis of Mannerist coyness and distortion, Neoclassical precision, and the sensibilities and imagination promoted by Romanticism did not please the critics. It was not until Romanticism was the fashion in painting that critics reconsidered this work. They focused on the Neoclassical reserve and precise painting of the composition in contrast with the varied and emotive styles of Romanticism and found La Grand Odalisque acceptable.

Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) by

The French painter Édouard Manet was a pivotal figure in the 19th century Parisian art scene because his work was a bridge from the aims of Realism to the interests of the group of artists who exhibited independently from the Salon, known collectively as the Impressionists. Manet, born to a wealthy Parisian family, exhibited a talent for drawing at a young age and when his attempts to enter the Naval College failed, he entered the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture. He, like so many other French painters in the 19th century, honed his skill and developed his style by studying and copying the masters hanging in the Louvre Museum. His application of paint differed from many of the old masters. He rejected the application of thin layers to build and blend colors and the invisibility of brushwork on a smooth surface; instead, he applied opaque color with much freer brushwork. By and large, Manet's paintings in the 1850s and 60s were consistent with Realism; he represented modern subjects of his Parisian life with a degree of naturalism and challenged academic models. His later works, in the 1870s and early 80s, have a lighter palette and looser brushwork that reflect his interaction with younger artists. Manet's 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) depicts a scantily clad woman on the banks of a pond and a nude woman casually lunching in a public park with two fully dressed men. The nude in the foreground is the painter Victorine Meurend, Manet's model. Next to her is the Dutch painter Ferdinand Leenhoff, the future brother-in-law of Manet. On the right sits a figure that is a cross between Manet's younger brothers, Gustave Manet and the painter Eugene Manet who was married to the more famous Berthe Morisot, one of the few women to exhibit with the Impressionists. Meurend is the model again for the woman by the pond. Manet challenged the viewer's expectations on two levels with this composition. On one level, he challenged the viewer's sense of decorum by depicting a nude that is not a classicizing figure and is out of context at a picnic. On another level, he challenged the viewer's expectation of pictorial space and color. He doesn't rely on linear perspective to create pictorial space. Manet's perspective is shallow that allows little room between the picnic and the viewer's space. Manet doesn't use gradations of color to create three-dimensional forms; his application of paint defies this traditional approach which results in the figures appearing flatter. Although the figures are naturalizing, they don't conform to academic convention. When Manet exhibited Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe at the Salon des Refusés it created a sensation because it defied common propriety, the nude was recognizable as the painter Meurend, and the composition didn't conform to academic perspective and form. Meurend, staring casually and directly, seemed to confront and challenge the viewer. Critics found the sight of the bottom of Meurend's foot and the unidealized rolls of fat around her waist outrageous. Others were annoyed by Manet's application of paint. One critic complained about the flatness of the forms when he wrote, "I see fingers without bones and heads without skulls I see sideburns painted like two strips of black cloth glued on the cheeks." What they failed to see was the beginning of what is now known as Modern art. Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe references Renaissance paintings where nudes appear in a natural setting. For example, Titian's Pastoral Symphony which Manet knew from the Louvre Museum depicts nude women in the company of fully dressed men. Titian's painting was an allegory of the poetics of harmony and love set in Arcadia, that classical idyl. Manet's painting was not classicizing and was not an allegory. Critics read Manet's painting as a satire of the genteel and sacrosanct images of the Italian Renaissance. Critics found Manet's figures unappealing because they were neither classicizing nor Renaissance. What the Parisian public and critics were expecting can be seen on the right, the academic painting of William-Adolphe Bouguereau who, in Nymphs and Satyrs, depicts nudes in a classically inspired scene. Four nude nymphs dance and tug at a satyr in a lush, idyllic landscape. This exemplifies the classical tradition of French academic painting. Manet, on the other, painted his first-hand experiences, painted an ordinary subject, painted a new look for a changing world.

Raft of the Medusa by Gericault

The Raft of the Medusa by the French painter Théodore Géricault is an example of Romanticism because its depiction of a contemporary event was Géricault's visual commentary on social injustice and was meant to provoke an emotional response. Géricault was born to wealthy bourgeois property owners who had him educated at the prestigious Lycée Impérial in Paris. Géricault excelled in his study of drawing and classics and decided to pursue a study of the visual arts. In opposition to and behind his father's back, Géricault studied in the studio of Carle Vernet. Géricault finally made his intent public and entered the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the post revolutionary name for the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. In less than a decade from entering the Academy, Géricault painted and entered The Raft of the Medusa to the annual Salon, his third entry and his last. The Raft of the Medusa depicts the predicament of shipwrecked men on a raft. Géricault dramatically uses pose, light, and color to commemorate these victims of a contemporary disaster and victims of injustice. When the French frigate Medusa hit a reef off the west coast of Africa on July 2, 1816, the ship was beyond repair. The Medusa's captain, the Comte de Chaumareix, the senior officers, and some passengers boarded six lifeboats. The captain crammed the 149 crew members remaining onto a raft which the captain then cut loose from the lifeboats! During the following 13-day voyage, the raft became a floating nightmare of disease, starvation, cannibalism, and death. When the frigate Argus rescued the raft, only 15 men, of the 149, were living. Five of the men died shortly after reaching shore. Géricault rented a room opposite the hospital where the few survivors recuperated to have ready access to the men. He drew preparatory figure studies of the survivors which he used for the basis of the writhing forms on the raft in the painting. Géricault dramatizes the moment when the people on the raft have spotted the Argus. Still, they struggle to survive on the inadequate raft on choppy waters. In the foreground, a father mourns his dead son, other corpses hang over the edge of the raft. In the background, some of the survivors frantically wave at the distant Argus. Géricault tilted the raft upward to ride the swell of the wave. This bird's eye perspective brilliantly communicates the forces of nature working against the men while shows all the struggling and deceased figures. Géricault spared no detail in depicting an ordeal that is horrifying and emotionally intense. There are no idealized heroes in the composition, just the ugly truth. The truth that is a visual condemnation of the French admiralty who assigned the Comte de Chaumareix to command the frigate Medusa, a man who had no commanded a vessel for 25 years. The painting caused a stir when Géricault exhibited it at the Salon. Some critics found the subject matter objectionable, too raw for their tastes. Others praised Géricault's presentation of the scandalous behavior of the French captain and the plight of the surviving men. Géricault was disappointed that neither group wrote about the work's artistic merit. The public was fascinated by the painting's power to transcend the everyday and to elicit a sense of awe while still having a moral value. This is the sublime, an aesthetic quality that can induce awe or fear and has spiritual, moral, intellectual, or emotional value. This quality of the sublime achieved by Géricault was what many artists of Romanticism strove to achieve.

Pilgrimage to Cynthera by Antoine Watteau

The leading painter of the French Rococo was the Flemish painter, Antoine Watteau. Born the son of a roofer, Watteau's early training is obscure. When he moved to Paris, Watteau eventually found work in the studios of Claude Gillot and Claude Audran III where he mastered their design sense for the ornamental and witty subjects. He found a patron to sponsor his admission to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1712. For his reception to the Academy, he submitted the painting seen above, Pilgrimage to Cythera. The subject matter was unprecedented that didn't fit any of the established categories of the Academy's hierarchy. It is a scene of elegant aristocrats relaxing in an outdoor setting. The French Academy created a category for this painting, the fêtes galantes; declared Watteau the painter of the fêtes galantes; and accepted the painting in 1717. Watteau worked in the painterly, colorist tradition of Rubens but his figures were slimmer and more elegant. This elegance, the silky textures of the landscape and the aristocrats' clothing, and the powder-pink cupids frolicking in the sky typify the look of Rococo. The Pilgrimage to Cythera depicts aristocratic couples in love who have visited the island of Cythera for romantic trysts. The island, in the ancient past, claimed it as the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love—the equivalent of Venus. Couples are frolicking on the island that was sacred to the goddess of love and the composition focuses on amorous encounters. On the right, a statue of Venus is draped with flowers. She oversees some of the frivolous lovers while others have already descended to take their leave from the magical island. Watteau drains his color palette of the figures as they near the world of reality. This subject set the standard for Rococo representations of the fêtes galantes and is characteristic of the Rococo fantasy paintings that were popular with aristocratic patrons.

"Oath of the Horatii" by Jacques-Louis David

The painter Jacques-Louis David was a master of the Neoclassical idiom in painting. Neoclassicism was emerging as a style in contrast with the French Rococo when David began his training at the French Academy in 1766. He was able to study ancient art and architecture at first hand when he won a scholarship that sent him to the French Academy in Rome in 1774. We'll look at three Neoclassical paintings by David that have very different patrons. The first is the French monarchy that patronized Neoclassicism for its associations with civic virtue. The patrons of the second painting were leaders of the French Revolution who patronized Neoclassicism for its associations with Republican Roman ideals of sacrifice and liberty. Finally, the patron of the third painting, in the early 19th century, was the dictator Napoleon who patronized Neoclassicism for its associations with Roman Imperial rule. David received the commission to paint The Oath of the Horatii (above) from the French King Louis XVI. The king commissioned the painting for its value as political propaganda meant to improve the morals of the French people. The French intellectual and critic Diderot railed against the frivolity of the French Rococo and advocated for the painting of moral subjects which, in a way, echoed the perspective of the king. The precious style of French Rococo, used in the depiction of mythological and classical subjects, was more a pretext for female nudity and eroticism for the delight of the aristocracy than for the edification of the viewer. Louis XVI patronized the Neoclassical out of political expediency. He chose the ancient subject and the Neoclassical style expressly to send a message of patriotism and morality. Therefore, the style is part of the message. David relied on ancient Roman historians and a 17th century play about Horace, an ancient Imperial Roman poet, for the story of the Horatii. David composed the painting in his studio in Rome where he worked methodically from drawings he made of life models, draped mannequins, and props such as swords and helmets. David based his composition on the horizontal friezes of ancient Roman sarcophagi and ancient Greek vases and set the scene in a stage-like set of a simple Doric arcade. David's subject is set in the 7th century B.C. when the Horatii of Rome and the Curiatii of Alba chose to meet in battle to put an end to the state of war between Rome and Alba. The moment David depicts is the taking of the oath by three Horatii brothers. They swear to defeat the enemies of Rome, or to die trying. The swords of the oath are the focal point of the composition. The moment is complicated by the bonds between the Horatii of Rome and Curiatii of Alba. The two families were inextricably linked through marriage. Sabina, of the Curiatii, was married to the eldest son of the Horatii. Camilla, a sister of the Horatii, was betrothed to one of the Curiatii. David marks the difference between the men and women and alludes to the familial complexities in the composition by painting sharper contours and in saturated colors for the men's figures and softer contours and dull, muted colors for the women's figures. This is how he distinguished between the men's unwavering resolve in their mission and the women's grief and resignation in reaction to the impending slaughter. In the end, the Horatii were victorious, but only one of the three brothers returned alive. When he returned he felt betrayed by his sister Camilla because she mourned the death of her fiancé. He exacted his revenge by murdering Camilla. Roman officials condemned him to death for the murder of his sister, but by the will of the people of Rome he was pardoned. This narrative of duty, loyalty, and ultimate betrayal is made more austere by the Neoclassical style. The king's message of loyalty and duty, which he expected from his subjects, was well served by the style. When David exhibited the finished painting in his studio in 1785, the public made it a sensation and even Pope Pius VI admired the work. When he exhibited it at the annual Paris Salon, in the public gallery for works by members of the French Academy, David received unanimous acclaim. Part of the acclaim stemmed from the painting's Neoclassical style that departed completely form the frivolity and eroticism of the French Rococo. Although The Oath of the Horatii became the herald of the Neoclassical style in painting, it wasn't as effective at rallying support for King Louis XVI who was executed by the people during the French Revolution that erupted in 1789. At the outbreak of the revolution, David judiciously chose to support Robespierre and the Jacobins, one of the leading factions of the revolution. David became a member of the National Convention of the Jacobins and voted to send Louis XVI, his former patron, to the guillotine. David spearheaded the movement to replace the French Academy with the, short-lived, Commune of the Arts. The French revolutionaries commissioned works of art that promoted their sacrifice for France, depicted them as patriots, and served their ideology. For these commissioned works they hired artists working in the Neoclassical style, among them David, a master of the style.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket by Whistler

The painting that put Whistler further at odds with the art establishment of London was this work, Nocturne in Black and Gold. Whistler finished it in 1875 and exhibited at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. It is a view of fireworks on the River Thames at night. It is a study in the atmospheric effects of spots of light in a cloudy, night sky—essentially a study of black and gold. Whistler's concentration on the effects of dull and bright color is an aesthetic a much later art historian dubbed tonalism. In case you're no familiar with the term, tone refers to the degree of saturation of a color, ranging from fully saturated (bright) to dilution with a complementary color or gray (dull). Whistler initially gave his paintings titles that related to the scene; for example, he gave a composition of the light effects in an dark urbanscape the title "Moonlights." When Frederic Richards Leyland, one of his patrons, suggested that he use the musical title for a work inspired by the night, a nocturne, Whistler was delighted. He wrote to Leyland to thank him, and added how meaningful a musical title would be and how it would confound the critics, "You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me; besides, it is really so charming and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish!" John Ruskin, the art critic, published a scathing review of Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold. Ruskin insisted that it was not a serious work of art and he accused Whistler of , in his words, "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Ruskin found fault with Whistler's character, saying Whistler was guilty of "Cockney impudence" and of "willful imposture." Ruskin stated that the asking price of 200 pounds (the equivalent of $25,000.00 in 2022) was outrageously overpriced. Finally, Ruskin objected to Whistler's use of a musical title and claimed that Whistler was pandering to the fad for being incomprehensible. Whistler responded by suing Ruskin for libel. The case went to trial in 1878 and during the trial on cross-examination, Whistler was asked, "What is the subject of Nocturne in Black and Gold?" Whistler replied, "It is a night piece, and represents the fireworks at Cremorne." The court asked, "Not a view of Cremorne?" Whistler responded, "If it were a view of Cremorne, it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement . . . It is as impossible for me to explain to you the beauty of that picture as it would be for a musician to explain to you the beauty of a harmony in a particular piece of music if you have no ear for music." Whistler explained to the court his formalist theory. He contended that art did not necessarily serve a useful purpose and could be a study of the beauty of form and color. Despite Whistler's moments of speaking down to the court, the court rendered its decision in favor of Whistler and awarded him a penny in damages. The verdict restored his reputation, but the award of a penny did little to help Whistler who was bankrupted by the legal fees. An account of this somewhat absurd trial serves to reveal the competing thoughts on art and beauty in the late 19th century and the impact of art criticism on an artist's career.

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco de Goya

The work of the leading Spanish painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Francisco de Goya falls into the category of Romanticism. In Saragossa, Goya trained with the painter José Luzán Martinez and when Goya moved to Madrid, he apprenticed with the Spanish royal court painter Francisco Bayeu. While Goya was apprenticed to Bayeu, the Spanish King Charles III noticed his talent and appointed Goya as one of his court painters. King Charles IV of Spain promoted Goya to principal painter to the king. In 1808, Charles IV was convinced that Great Britain, Spain's historical enemy, had plans to invade Spain. Keeping this in mind, the Spanish king invited his ally Napoleon Bonaparte to pass through Spain to reinforce French troops in Portugal. Charles IV made the miscalculation that the French troops on the peninsula would come to his defense in the event of a British invasion. The French troops, once on Spanish soil, launched a campaign to conquer Spain. Napoleon deposed Charles IV and installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte as the King of Spain. Goya, who had been the principal painter to Charles IV initially pledge allegiance to Bonaparte and painted for the French regime. In 1811, Goya received the Royal Order of Spain from Spanish King Joseph Bonaparte. However, when Goya witnessed the brutality of the French occupation of Spain, he was repulsed and withdrew his support of the French occupation. When Napoleon fell in 1814, Ferdinand VII (son of Charles IV) took the Spanish throne. Goya then found himself in a precarious situation because he had collaborated with the French. Ferdinand VII launched a reign of terror against those who had collaborated with the French; however, Goya demonstrated his allegiance to Spain and the monarchy by painting two works commemorating the Spaniards who rebelled against the French regime. The Second of May 1808 depicts Spanish rebels who fire on French-led troops on horseback. The Third of May 1808 (above) depicts what happened the next day, the suppression of the Spanish rebellion by rounding up and executing approximately 1,000 Spanish freedom fighters. Goya's tenebrism heightens the drama of the scene and emphasizes the Spanish victims of the French troops' atrocity. Legend has it that Goya, from his window, witnessed the executions on the hill of Principe Pio near Madrid on May 3, 1808. After the firing squad finished its mission, a bereft and enraged Goya went to the spot in the dead of night. He drew preparatory sketches of the Spanish corpses by the light of a lantern. Goya arranged the composition of his painting so that the line of the hill leads to the French soldiers who aim their weapons at the Spaniards on the left. The large lamp in front of the line of soldiers illuminates the center of the scene. It casts an emphatic light on the Spaniards and casts the faceless French troops in the shadows. Goya contrasted the two groups of men by arranging the deadly force of the French in a rigid firing line and arranging the victims of that force in disarray making them appear as vulnerable as they were. Goya posed the standing man wearing a white shirt and yellow pants in a gesture of surrender, but this pose also recalls Christian images of the Crucifixion. Goya makes the most of the pose to communicate the unrelenting brutality of the French troops and to suggest the martyrdom of the Spanish rebels. For greater effect, Goya repeats this martyr's pose for the corpse in the foreground, the corpse whose blood oozes and soaks the ground. This is characteristic of Romanticism, Goya's intent to elicit an emotional reaction to the brutal force of the firing squad visited upon unarmed freedom fighters. Goya's Third of May 1808 is likewise characteristic of Romanticism because it champions a cause, the struggle of the individual against tyranny.

Shop Block the Bauhaus

When the Bauhaus made plans to move to a new campus with new facilities, the school's director, the German architect Walter Gropius, designed the new headquarters (above). Gropius designed the school's new building as a complex of three buildings (top right) linked by elevated bridges. These linked the living quarters, studios, and classrooms of the school. Gropius' design for the new Bauhaus is entirely rectilinear. It spreads out horizontally. It was built with reinforced concrete and finished with sheet-glass walls. The sheet-glass walls let in a great deal of light, perfect for a school of art. This was radically different from conventional, classicizing Western European architecture that had clearly marked entrances and distinct facades and was constructed with masonry and thick, load-bearing walls. Gropius' modernist work creates a new relationship between architecture and people. Gropius' work and the architectural designs of Mies van der Rohe were based on a principle of simplicity (but no simplistic!). Both architects strove to create a new architectural style that was devoid of a specific, regional identity. They were both attempting to create a universal and modern style of architecture. The look of the architectural designs of these Bauhaus instructors caught on. Their designs lay the foundations for the look of avant-garde Western European and American architecture, a style that is called the International Style.

Realism

"In its specific sense realism refers to a mid nineteenth century artistic movement characterized by subjects painted from everyday life in a naturalistic manner; however, the term is also generally used to describe artworks painted in a realistic almost photographic way."

Piazza of Saint Peter by Bernini

A pinnacle in Bernini's career was his appointment as the architect in charge of the Church of St. Peter in 1629. Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) appointed Bernini to the post which Bernini held for the rest of his life. The pope commissioned Bernini to design interior sculptures for the church and to design a new layout for the piazza (square) in front the Church of St. Peter in Rome at the Vatican. The design challenge was to match the scale of the latest façade and added bays in the front done by the architect Maderno in the early 17th century. Above right are the floor plans of the various manifestations of the church, from Roman Emperor Constantine's basilican plan, on the far left, to Maderno's more recent design. In addition to the look and scale of Maderno's façade, Bernini had to incorporate an Egyptian obelisk that Pope Sixtus V had moved to this spot in 1585 to create the architectural equivalent of a Christian triumph. Finally, Bernini had to consider the fountains on either side of the obelisk in his design. Bernini conceived the piazza as a large, open space and organized it into trapezoidal and elliptical shapes. Gone are the right angles favored by Renaissance architects. The obelisk stands at the center of the elliptical design. The oval measures approximately 800 feet across which gives you an idea of the scale of the largest open section of the piazza. Fountains on either side of the obelisk form a strong north-south axis lying perpendicular to the east-west axial approach to the church. Bernini designed curved colonnades to delineate the perimeter of the oval. These colonnades end in pediments that resemble ancient Roman temple entrances. The 284 columns of the colonnade stand four deep and rise to the height of 39 feet, again this gives you an idea of the scale of the piazza. The area of the piazza closest to the church is a trapezoid that lies on an incline and incorporates the steps leading to the façade. The walls of the trapezoid gradually become shorter as they near the façade. Bernini did this to enhance the verticality of the entrance of the church. Bernini wrote that he designed the curved colonnades of the elliptical area to act like the arms of the Mother Church, spread out to embrace the faithful. Bernini was a quintessential Baroque architect because he designed on a grand scale, was deliberately theatrical, and composed the architecture to interact with the surrounding space and the people moving through that space. He did the same with his sculpture as we saw in Bernini's David. Bernini defined the Piazza of Saint Peter as a public space for the faithful to gather and he integrated the architecture with the space of the piazza to beckon crowds of people, to inspire awe, and to funnel them toward the high altar of the Church of St. Peter.

Model for Glass Skyscraper Bauhaus by Mies van der Rohe

After World War I, Weimar Germany sponsored the Bauhaus, a new school of art, architecture, and design. Modernist design that strived for a universal aesthetic would be taught at the state-sponsored school. The government's goal was that this new, contemporary education would inform inexpensively produced and widely distributed manufactured goods and affordable architecture that would improve the quality of life in Weimar Germany. This was an extension of the effort to rebuild morale in Germany after its defeat in World War I. The German architect and Bauhaus instructor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe entered this design (above) in a competition for Berlin's first skyscraper. Mies van der Rohe based his design on American skyscrapers built with structural steel skeletons; however, Mies van der Rohe was the first architect to transform the look of the skyscraper. While Louis Sullivan, for example, had used terracotta as an inexpensive and practical substitute for more traditional stone revetment, Mies van der Rohe re-imagined the high-rise building entirely in steel and glass, free from any masonry. His motto, less is more!

Nature Symbolized No. 2 by Arthur Dove

An American painter who joined Stieglitz' avant-garde circle was Arthur Dove, a native of Geneva, NY, and graduate of Cornell University who began his career as an illustrator for popular magazines. After a trip to Paris, and study of avant-garde painters, Dove painted, Nature Symbolized No.2. Dove used colors derived from the natural world, but limited his palette to create a decorative, not naturalistic, display of color and painted organic shapes that evoked the natural world without transcribing it. Dove recorded how he abstracted from the nature world to make this painting, "one day I made a drawing of a hillside . . . I chose three forms from the planes on the sides of trees, and three colors, and black and white. From these was made a rhythmic painting which expressed the spirit of the whole thing. The colors were chosen to express the substances of those objects and the sky. There was the earth color, the green of the trees, and the cyan blue of the sky." Dove used color and form to convey his impression of a fragmented view of nature that art historians now consider one of the earliest examples of purely non-representational imagery done by an American painter.

Kintescope by Edison Company created Fred Ott's Sneeze

Artists, inventors, scientists, chemists, and engineers were fascinated with ways to depict motion in the last quarter of the 19th century. Magic lanterns and other devices used to simulate fluid movement existed as popular entertainments, but the breakthrough in motion photography took place at the Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was the engineer in charge of the research project on recorded motion at Thomas Edison's laboratory. Dickson incorporated Étienne-Jules Marey's development of a continuous role of film and John Carbutt and the Eastman Company's development in emulsion-coated celluloid film in his invention of a camera capable of recording a succession of images on a single strip of film. Dickson and his assistants at Edison's laboratory invented the kinetograph, a camera that recorded images on a strip of film and the kinetoscope (above left), a viewing machine that streamed the images as a viewer watched through a peep hole. Edison patented the kinetograph and kinetoscope in 1891. The first motion picture Dickson made at the Edison Movie Studio, the Black Maria, was The Sneeze. This was the first copyrighted motion picture in the history of the movies. Click on the hyperlinked The Sneeze to watch this very short historical film—don't blink or you may miss it!

Still Life with Flowers, Goblet, Dried Fruit and Pretzels by Clara Peeters

Clara Peeters was a Flemish painter based in Antwerp but was not a member of the Saint Luke's Guild. No records survive that shed light on her training as a painter, but the presence of her work in Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish collections suggests that she sold her work through an agent and probably travelled in Holland. Peeters was a pioneer in the genre of still life. Her compositions, like the one above, are images of accumulated goods and reflect the worldly success in commerce, trade, and banking in the Low Countries. Collectors of her work were members of the wealthy merchant class who delighted in the optical effects of Peeters' painting. Still Life with Flowers, Goblet, Dried Fruit, and Pretzels is a still life of objects on a table. This everyday subject with breads and fruit is called a breakfast piece. On this table is more than just the meal; there is a vase of flowers, a Faenza bowl with raisins and figs imported from Spain, almonds, and sugar candy, a pewter plate with cookies, sugar candy, and pretzels, a silver-gilt goblet, a pewter ewer, and a stemmed glass made by Italian glassblowers in Antwerp filled with imported wine. Peeters' skill of depicting a variety and quality of textures and materials is remarkable. On the silver-gilt goblet she shows her skill by depicting a self-portrait (closeup above right) that asserts her presence and by reflecting what's outside the picture plane adds another dimension to the composition. The dark background creates a shallower space which Peeters develops forward. She places the leaves on the left and the sugar candy and pewter dish on the right over the edge of the table which brings them into the viewer's space. The appeal of Peeters composition is the illusion of the textures and forms that fool the eye and the realism. The half-eaten pretzel enhances the realism and suggests that someone has been at the table. Peeters success as a still life painter, in a field dominated by male painters and members of painter's guilds, was due to her exceptional skill and the choice of objects, imported and fine objects that collectors associated with their own distinct social position.

Et in Arcadia Ego by Poussin

Claude Lorrain's rival in painting in the 17th century was a fellow Frenchman, Nicolas Poussin. Like Claude, Nicolas Poussin spent most of his career painting in Rome and likewise rejected the exuberance and drama of Italian Baroque painting. However, Poussin's approach to composition was different. While Claude developed his compositions based on light and color, Poussin based his on linear design. The notes for a written treatise that Poussin left unfinished at his death reveal his thoughts on painting and composition. His notes indicate that he considered subject matter and composition fundamental in creating a beautiful painting in the "grand manner." The subjects he deemed worthy were battles, acts of heroism, the classical past, and sacred scenes. According to Poussin, compositions ought to achieve beauty through classical proportions and a rationally ordered arrangement of objects in space. Poussin's approach to painting was the antithesis of Rubens' sensuous compositions of saturated color, light, and motion. These are the notions that Poussin put into practice in his painting Et in Arcadia Ego (above). The painting is set in the classical past and the idyllic landscape is rationally ordered. In this scene, three shepherds examine the inscription on a tomb. A personification, possibly Death, puts her hand on the shoulder of the shepherd on the right. The inscription, Even in Arcadia, I am, is a reminder to the young men that even in Arcadia—a Classical idyll—death exists. The figure types and poses echo classical models Poussin had access to in Rome. Poussin's work represents the classicism promoted by the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Poussin's ideas about which subjects were preferred and how to achieve beauty echoed the ideas taught at the French Academy. The academy placed more value on grand manner paintings than on picturesque landscapes. The academy considered works like the picturesque landscapes of Claude to be secondary to grand manner painting. Poussin's painting exemplifies French academic classicism of the 17th century, a classicism that found favor with the French monarchy.

Romanticism

Contemporaneous with Neoclassicism was the Romantic movement in art and literature. This movement swept through western Europe and the United States in the late 18th century and was popular in the first half of the 19th century. In contrast with the precision, order, and clarity of Neoclassical style and the classical subjects of Neoclassicism, Romanticism gave privilege to emotions and sentiment. Works of art with dynamic compositions dealt with evocative subjects. In some ways, Romanticism shared the Baroque penchant for drama and expression. However, painters of Romanticism practiced must looser brushstrokes generally and worked with a greater variety of subjects. For example, some artists of Romanticism were interested in an individual's mind and imagination as the generator of dreams and nightmares. Other Romantic artists weren't interested in these fantastical, subconscious phenomena. Their interest lay in contemporary events and causes which they depicted in contemporary settings. Often their compositions evoked an emotional response from the viewer. Almost all Romantic artists asserted and placed a value on the individuality of an artist's work.

Arrangement in Black and Gray No. 1 (Portrait of the Artists Mother) by James Whistler

During the Gilded Age of the 19th century, a host of American painters lived abroad, enjoyed international success, and contributed to the new movements in art. Among them was the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler was born abroad to upper middle-class parents. He studied art in St. Petersburg, Russia and continued his drawing studies at West Point. After he was dismissed from the military academy, he went to Paris to study with the Parisian landscape painter Charles Gleyre. Gleyre instructed many avant-garde painters in Paris including members of the so-called Impressionists. Whistler left Paris for London where he developed his own formal approach to painting that was based to some degree on what progressive painters were doing in Paris. Whistler's work received some critical acclaim in London, but the Royal Academy of Arts rejected his work because it was too innovative. The academy didn't approve of Whistler's view that painting should be about painting and aesthetics, not the subject. The importance Whistler placed on aesthetics complemented the emphasis on design of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. This importance was central to what some painters were doing in the 1870s and 1880s in the Aesthetic Movement. An example of Whistler's way of thinking and art of the Aesthetic Movement is Arrangement in Grey and Black (above). The subject of the painting is recognizable; the elderly woman is Whistler's mother. But Whistler was more concerned with the arrangement of the composition and the relationships of forms and colors than he was with the representation of a woman. Whistler, in this composition, was interested in the relationship of flat planes of gray and black, such as the flat black frame surrounding a light matte as a counterpoint to the dark black dress and stark white head covering. The curtain appears not so much as a hanging textile, but rather a field of gray and black. Whistler's experiment with and perfection of the formal elements of this composition were not well received by critics, especially not by the English art critic and tastemaker John Ruskin. Despite being a proponent of Turner's progressive work, Ruskin took issue with Whistler's work because Ruskin asserted that a painting had to have a narrative and convey a moral message.

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane by Borromini

Francesco Borromini who had worked under both Bernini and Maderno. Borromini received some papal commissions during his career but perhaps his most representative work of Italian Baroque architecture is his design for the Trinitarian monastery Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Borromini's façade of the church is on the left and on the right is Giacomo della Porta's façade for Il Gesù. In this comparison you can see the difference between the reserved, rational and ordered Renaissance composition of Il Gesù and the implied movement and vitality of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Borromini composed an undulating exterior surface to suggest movement. He did this by alternating convex and concave forms, a hallmark of Italian Baroque architecture. The challenge for Borromini was to design this church in a compact, urban space. He had to consider how life was conducted around the church and consider how to orient the church that was to built at the intersection of two streets. To achieve an uninterrupted composition under these conditions, Borromini had to rethink the nature of the façade. He thought of the idea of the façade acting like an architectural screen placed between the interior nave and the exterior urban setting. The façade would mirror the church interior. He then had to compensate for the awkward intersection. He did so by designing a secondary façade on the corner of the building that creates a beveled edge. He unified the design of the entrance façade with the interior (above left) by repeating the undulating curves of the interior. Even though the curves are reversed, the transition is seamless. Borromini's Baroque design resulted in a centrally-planned interior that is not static nor segmented and is organically connected with the façade.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat recast some of the Impressionists' approaches to the optical effects of light on color by applying his own and the latest scientific theories of light and color. Seurat applied paint to the canvas as small marks of pure color next to one another (above right). He didn't blend colors on his palette or on the canvas. This new application of paint, pointillism, was based on the theory that the eye of the viewer would blend the dabs of colors placed next to each other and would comprehend another color. For example, dabs of yellow and blue placed next to each other are perceived as green. This perception of color is optical color. Seurat's pointillism was a structural approach to painting that built optical color to produce forms that appear solid when seen from a distance (above). However, when seen up close (above right), the pointillism appears as individual dabs of saturated colors. The structural technique of pointillism distinguished Seurat from the spontaneous-looking brushwork of painters in the older generation of Impressionist painters. Seurat's pointillism is representative of one of the two major trends in avant-garde painting, that is Post-Impressionism. Seurat was among the painters who used strong, structure-like brushwork to build forms. The work of the French painter Paul Cézanne was part of this trend. The other trend among Post-Impressionists was the exploration and expression of emotion through line and color, as in the work of Vincent van Gogh.

Installation Photograph of the Armory Show

In 1913, an international exhibition of art shown consecutively in New York, Chicago, and Boston heralded the new look of art from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century. This exhibition, called the Armory Show, drew the American public's attention to American and European avant-garde and modern works of art as never before. The works in the exhibition challenged and changed the American public's perception of what constituted art which is why critics and historians of art recognize the Armory Show as a turning point in modern American art. Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the exhibition was intended to be a public presentation of the most recent artistic developments in America and to stand as a challenge to the traditionalism of the National Academy of Design. The organizers then expanded the exhibition to include European work, making it a major international exhibition. See above for a partial list of the artists whose works were in the exhibition. Works were displayed in 18 rooms and a record number of 70,000 visitors attended the exhibition in the month that it was in New York. Although a good three-quarters of the 1,300 works on display were by artists from the United States, the European paintings and sculpture took center stage in the popular press. The critical response by American critics and journalists to the European avant-garde was mixed to say the least. Writing for the New York Herald, the art critic Royal Cortissoz wrote a nativist and reactionary critique of the exhibition. He likened the danger posed by imported works of art to the threat posed by foreign immigrants. He makes this clear in this excerpt from the newspaper, "The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way." Among the works targeted in negative reviews was the French artist Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

Christ with the Sick around Him, Receiving the Children by Rembrandt

In addition to Rembrandt's prodigious output of paintings were his prints. Rembrandt was a master printmaker who applied his imagination and skill to the composition of prints. That Rembrandt gave his compositions a lot of thought and was frequently working out design challenges is evidenced by the stages he worked and reworked the copper plates for his intaglio prints. The etching above, Christ with the Sick around Him, Receiving the Children, was popular for well over two centuries in western Europe. This print is also known as the "Hundred Guilder Print." The meaning of this is a bit elusive. A later story holds that Rembrandt paid this high price at auction to buy back an impression of his own work. Regardless, Rembrandt took years to perfect the final image on the copper plate. He used various intaglio techniques to create the image and he experimented with different papers for various impressions. This result is that there are versions of this print in collections that show the various stages of the development of the image and are on different papers. Rembrandt combined several incidents in this composition that are recounted in the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 19. On the right, a crowd of sick and crippled people flock to Christ. They seek a miraculous cure for what ails them as they emerge from the dark. On the left is a group of people in such intense light that it seems to wash them out. They are the Pharisees presumably who were attempting to provoke Christ about his position on divorce. Next to the Pharisees, still on the left, woman and children make their way to Christ. A mother presents her child for Christ to lay hands on the baby. Peter pushes her back which prompts Christ to say, according to the Gospel of Matthew verses 13-15, "Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven." I quote the text so that you can see how Rembrandt, with the same textual source, visually interprets this moment. Just to the left of Peter is a finely dressed man who must be the wealthy man who was challenged to give up his riches and follow Christ. Silhouetted in the doorway at the right is a camel which is a refence to the oddly translated passage, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." In all there are 35 figures in this composition that distills Christ's ministry.

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) by Jackson Pollock

In his Number 1 1950 (Lavender Mist) Pollock eliminated all reference to recognizable objects. This is a non-objective, or non-representational, painting that is concerned with the composition, the medium of paint, and the act of painting. The color lavender dominates the composition and moves through it. Diagonal lines intersect with swirling lines of different widths and textures. The completed painting was a record of Pollock's movement propelled by his creative process. Pollock, writing about his technique of paint application, expressed how he felt during the creative process. In his words, "On the floor I'm more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting . . . When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing . . . because the painting has a life of its own." The work of Pollock and the non-objective works by other artists working in New York were labelled Abstract Expressionist by an American art critic. Strictly speaking they aren't abstract because they don't reference form, but the label stuck to describe collectively the non-representational work of New York painters, also called the New York School.

Allegory of Law and Grace by Lucas Cranach the Elder

In support of the Reformation, Lutheran artists anonymously produced dozens of broadsheets and pamphlets that satirized the pope, clergy, and many tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. A contemporary of Dürer, the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder was a particular admirer and friend of Martin Luther. Cranach heeded Luther's call for a reform of the Church and joined other Lutheran artist in creating art to educate the public. The woodcut above, Allegory of Law and Gospel (also known as Allegory of Law and Grace), is based on two painting of the same subject by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The woodcut possibly was made by Cranach the Younger. Prints were used to educate the public at large because they were relatively inexpensive to produce and could be widely circulated. In his work, Lucas Cranach the Elder depicts the differences between the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church on the left and the Protestant movement on the right. The carefully chosen Biblical passages at the top and bottom and the visual allegory of the composition convey the meaning of the print. On the left side of the composition is Cranach's interpretation of Roman Catholic belief. He interpreted the belief that on Judgment Day (Last Judgment in the sky), despite the soul's attempt after the Fall (Adam and Eve in the background) to follow the laws (represented by Moses with tablets), the soul is judged inadequate and condemned to hell. Cranach depicts the personification of Death and a devil driving a man to hell at spear point. This was Cranach grim visual suggestion that by misguidedly following Church law led to damnation. Cranach contrasts this with his interpretation that the Protestant rejection of Church law is the path to salvation. He makes the visual argument that salvation is possible through God's power, not human action. On the right side of the composition is Cranach's interpretation of Protestant belief. Cranach expresses his belief that God shows mercy, forgives, and grants salvation even to sinful believers here represented by the Israelites with the Brazen Serpent in the background. He promotes the Protestant belief that on the day of Judgment the deeds of the soul do not matter. Instead, belief in salvation matter on Judgment day. John the Baptist points the way to the Crucifixion while God's grace emanating from the dove of the Holy Spirit washes over the man, washing away original sin. To the right of this the resurrected Christ triumphs over death which leads the way to the soul's eternal salvation. Cranach favors the Protestant interpretation of Christian spirituality and accomplishes it visually in a format that was inexpensively produced and could be widely circulated.

Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat) by Henri Matisse

In the first half of the 20th century, many artists continued to loosen the constraints of western European academic conventions and traditions that had dominated the art world since the Italian Renaissance. Before World War I, the center of avant-garde art was Paris. The French painter Henri Matisse and the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso were mavericks in the world of painting and crossed paths with leading European and American artists and intellectuals at a time when newness became an end in itself. Matisse and Picasso were leading figures because of how they revolutionized the use of color, redefined form, and shattered traditional pictorial space. What they and other artists made in the first half of the 20th century entirely changed the look of Western art. Henri Matisse was the leading painter of a group that absorbed what Cézanne did to form and moved further from conventional color palettes by using saturated, vivid, and non-local color. For example, in Woman with the Hat Matisse used saturated, non-local color to build the background and to model the contours of the model's face, his wife Amélie. Matisse showed this work at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris. This Salon was somewhat of a revival of the Salon des Refuses but admission to the exhibition was made available to artists in all media and the jurors were members of the society, not members of any academy or any official art establishment. The exhibition distinguished itself by being held in the fall in opposition to the academic exhibitions of the spring. When the public saw Matisse's Woman with the Hat, many observers thought his use of saturated and non-local color disconcerting. According to legend, when asked about the real color of the dress, Matisse replied, "Black, of course." Some viewers thought that his loose brushwork made the painting look unfinished. When the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles spotted a more traditional, academic painting having among the avant-garde works in the exhibition, he reportedly exclaimed, "Donatello parmi les fauves!" His characterization of the traditional piece as a Renaissance masterpiece and the work of the avant-garde as wild beasts was turned on its head. The epithet Fauves was applied to the work of Matisse and his contemporary circle of painters who defied conventional rules of color and form. Michael Stein, the brother of the expatriate writer and intellectual Gertrude Stein, bought the painting. Michael bought it despite his brother, also a great collector of modern art, Leo's comment that the work was, in Leo's words, "the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen." Michael Stein recognized the painting's significance for the avant-garde art movement.

Iron Bridge Coalbrookdale

In the first phase of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, people implemented the notion that they could control and reconfigure the natural world. Case in point is the Iron Bridge in Coalbrookdale England that spans the Severn River. Advances in steam power and iron making made their impact on architecture and were instrumental in the development of this first cast-iron bridge. In 1776, Thomas Pritchard and Abraham Darby III designed the cast-iron bridge. Darby's grandfather had advanced the practical and economical uses of iron on an industrial scale which lay the foundations for using cast-iron in bridge construction. Darby and Pritchard's cast-iron bridge is composed of rib castings that weigh five tons and measure 70 feet long to span the distance of 100 feet across the river. Darby and Pritchard's design is reminiscent of facets of ancient Roman aqueducts such as the precise stonework and the subtle arc of the span. While Darby and Pritchard's design conforms to the engineering requirements of a functioning bridge, it makes the bridge much more than a utilitarian structure. The designers fully took advantage of the graceful forms and curves that were possible with cast-iron and set the standard of beautiful engineering for large-scale constructions with exposed armatures. In the 19th century, the designers of the Eiffel Tower continued this type of beautiful engineering.

Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte

Like Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte painted scenes of modern life in the French capital of Paris. The city was particularly suited to depictions of modernity because of the renovations carried out between 1853 and 1870 under Napoleon III. Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's city prefect, was responsible for the plan of renovation. Hausmann implemented the plan by demolishing medieval buildings to make space for the erection of new buildings in more open spaces bordered by large boulevards and public gardens. Impressionist painters like Caillebotte captured the new look of the city and urban life in compositions that depicted fleeting moments in which different social classes mixed in public. Impressionist painters approached their depictions differently from academic painters. The Impressionists stayed away from the sentimental depictions and explicit narratives found in works by painters of the Academy. Impressionists favored a more detached view of a slice of life in a moment. They differed from the Realists who captured the ordinary present by focusing on a more limited moment. A more limited moment with more spontaneity. Caillebotte, who was independently wealthy, funded and organized several of the exhibitions held by the Anonymous Society of Painter, Sculptors, and Printmakers. This was true for the third so-called Impressionist Exhibition held in Paris in 1877 at which Renoir exhibited Le Moulin de la Galette and Caillebotte exhibited this painting, Paris Street Rainy Day. Caillebotte's painting is a spectacular portrait of a random moment on a Parisian street in which he relied more on draftsmanship and line than on texture and color. Yet, his composition still appears spontaneous. A well-dressed couple on the right, other couples in the middleground and background, and individuals stroll in different directions. They avoid eye contact with each other, a symptom of modernity. There is no narrative, just a moment in the life of the city. Caillebotte was exacting with the composition's perspective and the relative scale of the forms which produced a convincing portrait of modern life. Caillebotte's Paris Street Rainy Day was well received by viewers who were accustomed to the aesthetic of Salon paintings and by viewers who were looking for a more modern sensibility. Caillebotte's asymmetrical balance, modern subject, and cropping that resembled a photographic composition were what appealed to those looking for a modern image. The French writer Emile Zola praised Caillebotte's work and lauded the painter's courage to, in the words of Zola, "treat modern subjects on a life-sized scale."

Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Netherlandish painters in the 16th century introduced landscape painting that often subordinated an underlying narrative or eliminated it completely. The painter foremost in this development of landscape painting was Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The audience for landscape paintings comprised wealthy collectors of art in Antwerp like Nicolaes Jongelinck who commissioned a series of six landscapes of the seasons, each representing two months of the year, from Bruegel Unlike the labors of the seasons represented in Books of Hours, Bruegel's scenes concentrate on the seasonal transformation of the landscape. Above, Hunters in the Snow, is Bruegel's depiction of the months of January and February in the grip ow winter in which hunters trudge through blankets of snow with just one rabbit to show for their efforts (on the left). Bruegel muted his color palette to communicate the chill of winter. The brighter red he reserved for the fur of the dogs, the peasants' fire, and the brick of the houses. These spots of bright color are focal points that draw the eye from the upper left diagonally down to the ice skaters on the frozen river. How a landscape painting functioned in the homes of northern European collectors can be culled from surviving documents. Domestic inventories indicated that landscapes were hung in dining rooms. Other documents describe the role images played in stimulating conversation among dinner guests and that images of high quality communicated the high status of the painting's owner.

The Thankful Poor by Henry Ossawa Tanner

One of Thomas Eakins' students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia was Henry Ossawa Tanner. Tanner was born to a middle-class family in Pittsburgh that supported his studies at the academy. Although his forte was landscape painting at the academy, Eakins encouraged Tanner to paint scenes from everyday life and from his experience. He emerged from the academy an excellent painter but found it a challenge to make a living in the United States in the late 19th century because of racial prejudice against African American painters. So while his classmates from the academy pursued further studies in Europe after the academy, he lacked the means to do so. The activist Bishop Joseph Crane Harzwell, of the African Methodist Episcopal church in New Orleans was aware of Tanner's ambition so he purchased several of Tanner's paintings to fund Tanner's study tour in Europe. When Tanner arrived in Paris, he discovered that his African American heritage proved less of an obstacle than it was in the United States. He enrolled in the progressive, private Académie Julian and set his sights on submitting a work to the prestigious Paris Salon. When he did submit a work to the 1895 Salon, it won an honorable mention. In the tradition of American Realist painters, like Homer and Eakins, he depicted his subjects as individuals and based them on his experience. This was especially significant because his depiction of African Americans was not caricature and he didn't capitalize on exploitive stereotypes. Tanner made clear his motives for painting African Americans in his autobiography that he wrote from the third-person perspective. In the following passage he comments on the subject matter he chose after his return from Paris. "Since his return from Europe he has painted mostly Negro subjects, he feels drawn to such subjects on account of the newness of the field and because of a desire to represent the serious, and pathetic side of life among them, and it is his thought that other things being equal, he who has most sympathy with his subject will obtain the best results. To his mind many of the artists who have represented Negro life have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior" The Thankful Poor is Tanner's genre painting of a moment shared between a man and a boy and affords a rare glimpse into traditions in African American homes. Tanner's genre painting countered the negative image of African Americans that was pervasive in late 19th century American fine and commercial art. Tanner, by identifying with his subject and avoiding caricature, subverted the derogatory representation of African Americans so commonly found in genre paintings by European American artists.

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne

Paul Cézanne was a leader in Post-Impressionist painting. He, perhaps more than any artist before him, transformed paint into a visible structure. Like Seurat, Cézanne was a meticulous and deliberate painter who worked on one painting for months. Cézanne applied short strokes of oil paint that resemble small, rectangular shapes of saturated color. He applied the color shapes to build the volume and mass of forms in his compositions. In his 1902 painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne composed in a way that looks like a patchwork of shifting green, orange, and blue. These block-shape colors form a geometric landscape of a trapezoidal mountain and cube-like house. Cézanne's geometric, faceted forms were a significant departure from the traditional artistic conventions of western European painting. Cézanne restructured how space and form were represented in painting. His work sparked a revolution in the visual arts that set the course of the avant-garde in modern art in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. On the following page read what his contemporaries and later artists say about the impact Cézanne's painting made on their work.

Le Moulin de la Galette by Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibited Le Moulin de la Galette at the 1877 exhibition of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers, the so-called Impressionist Exhibition. It exemplifies his two major interests, the essence of middle-class Parisian life and the visual effects of natural light. The composition depicts middle-class Parisians enjoying themselves at the outdoor courtyard of a Montmartre dance hall, the Moulin de la Galette. Like Monet, Renoir captures the effect of natural light at a certain time of day and place. In the foreground, a group of men and women sitting on benches and gathered around a table are the focus of the composition. Renoir anchored the group to the foreground in an arrangement of an oblique triangle. The rest of the composition pulls away from the edge of the picture plane and balances the composition. Renoir animates the scene through a variety of natural poses and through the play of light. The half-filled glasses on the table in the foreground reflect the sunlight. Patterns of dark and light color mimic the effect of dappling sunlight breaking through the leaves of the trees in the courtyard. Another characteristic in the work of Renoir is the soft and velvety texture of his brushwork which adds a suggestion of motion to the composition.

Joaquim Bishop's camera obscura

The 19th century invention of photography significantly changed the way people viewed and recorded the world. In the 1820s, the French scientist Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce invented a new process of making images based on an 18th century photochemical discovery that silver salts reacted to light. Niepce's multi-step process of making an image essentially comprised applying light-sensitive chemicals to a silvered plate and exposing the light-sensitive plate to light through the lens of a portable camera obscura (like the one above right). The exposed plate was bathed in a chemical bath to fix the image on the plate. This impractical process required hours of exposure, but when Niepce collaborated with the French painter and printmaker Louis Daguerre, the men refined the process. They reduced the length of exposure to minutes. Above is an example of Daguerre's early work, a still life. When Daguerre reduced the exposure time to seconds, it became a practical process to photograph people. The process and resulting image was named after Daguerre who outlived Niepce. To see and understand the process of making a daguerreotype, click on the hyperlinked Making daguerreotypes above. The daguerreotype is a unique positive image that is not reproducible. Daguerre realized the importance of the daguerreotype and offered the patent to the French government for the public domain in exchange for a lifetime pension. This was agreed to, and Daguerre publicly announced the invention in 1839. Simultaneously, in England, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype, an image made in a photographic process that made a paper negative used to make multiple photographic prints. The daguerreotype and calotype changed people's view of making images of the world.

Veteran in a New Field by Winslow Homer

The American Realist painter Winslow Homer was born in Boston to an entrepreneurial father and amateur watercolorist mother. His father arranged his apprenticeship to the Boston commercial lithographer John H. Bufford which comprised his formal training. After his apprenticeship, Homer took some lessons in painting from Frédéric Rondel. Homer spent the first half of his career as a free-lance illustrator for various national magazines. The second half he dedicated to oil and watercolor painting. Homer shared some of Courbet's attitudes about painting. Homer thought that an artist should look to his own experiences and the natural world for his subjects and forms rather than relying on artistic traditions and convention. The following two statements attributed to Homer give some insight into his approach to making art and his essentially self-taught foundation in painting; "If a man wants to be an artist, he should never look at pictures." and "Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems." While still working as a professional illustrator, Winslow Homer painted The Veteran in a New Field in 1865, the same year the American Civil War ended with the surrender by General Lee and Booth assassinated President Lincoln. This Realist painting is set on a farm in Belmont, Massachusetts. The solitary figure uses an old-fashioned scythe to cut wheat. Wheat was a characteristically northern crop and the figure's allegiance in the recent Civil War is evidenced by the cloverleaf insignia on the canteen lying to the lower right in the field. The insignia was for the First Division of the Second Corps of the 61st New York Volunteers. This therefore is a reunion of this man with what he had done before the war, a reunion with nature after the ravages of battle. Homer, who was committed to depicting subjects taken from life, was indirectly representing his own progress as a painter that was interrupted by the war when he served as a front-line correspondent. The old-fashioned scythe evokes images of the Grim Reaper and references the harvest of death in the Civil War, especially poignant in the wake of Lincoln's assassination. Homer's painting of The Veteran in a New Field was his vision of loss and renewal in the wake of war.

The Child's Bath by Mary Cassat

The American painter Mary Cassatt came from a well-to-do Pennsylvania family and completed her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. For most of her career Cassatt lived in France. She developed a close working relationship with Degas who invited her to exhibit with the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers. Cassatt was the only American, and one of four women, who exhibited with the Impressionists. Mary Cassatt shared an interest in the effects of light on forms with other painters who exhibited at the Impressionist Exhibitions. After viewing a large exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts with Degas in 1890, Cassatt, too, became interested in the use of shifting perspective and bold patterns that she saw in Japanese woodblock prints. In her painting, The Child's Bath, Cassatt picks up on the theme of the toilette that she knew from Japanese woodblock prints. She also incorporates the Japanese aesthetic of blocks of color that flatten forms and pictorial space. Cassatt compressed the pictorial space in this painting by manipulating the perspective and using abstract patterns for the oriental rug, wallpaper, and chest of drawers. These flatten the forms which negate an illusion of depth. In this modern approach to composition, color and line push toward the surface of the painting. In The Child's Bath, Cassatt depicts a woman giving a child a bath. She was best known for her works with this theme of women with children. The theme was relevant because it reflected the late 19th century fascination with maternity and a new social emphasis on childcare prevalent in the literature of the period. Cassatt's depiction of the intimate domestic world of women doesn't diminish the role of women or make them simply decorative. She depicted active women absorbed by their tasks and didn't idealize them. For example, in this painting, to secure the child on her lap, the woman places a firm hand around the child's waist. With the other hand she gently washes the child's foot. Cassatt's painting shows the woman as competent and caring, not an idealized non-entity. Mary Cassatt achieved critical success through her exhibitions in France but was little appreciated in the United States until much later in her career. A few years after this painting, Mary Cassatt expressed her dismay at not being appreciated in the U.S. when she wrote, "I am very much disappointed that my compatriots have so little liking for any of my work."

The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz

The American photographer Alfred Stieglitz's early 20th century photograph, The Steerage, represents an emerging trend in photography that used the inherent light, shadow, clarity and realism of the medium to make, commonplace, modern subjects visually interesting and aesthetically pleasing. The subject of Stieglitz's photograph is not the passengers but is the spacial and formal relationships of the objects in the composition. Stieglitz's composition is about the round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the circular links in the chains of the white drawbridge, the cross of the white suspenders, and the round iron machinery. The funnel, mast, and gangplank form an implied triangle that grounds the composition. Stieglitz took photography to yet another level of composition by making this image about shapes and forms. Stieglitz made it very clear what this composition was about and what he was attempting to do when he describes The Steerage in the following extract, "On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck...A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains - white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape...I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life." Stieglitz published The Steerage in a 1911 issue of the art publication Camera Notes, an issue otherwise entirely devoted to Cubism, the new style of Parisian painting by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz deliberately published his photograph with the Cubist works because he considered that what he was doing in photography was what the Cubists were doing in paint. As in Cubism that takes an analytical approach to form and reduces forms to their essential formal elements of lines and planes, Stieglitz was attempting to do the equivalent in photography. For example, neither Braque's portrait of a Portuguese guitarist nor Stieglitz' photograph of passengers were primarily interested in the subject. Like Braque, Stieglitz was interested in the unusual shifts of spacial depth and the interplay of shapes and forms in his work, that's why this photograph is more than a record of third-class passengers getting ready to debark from a ship at port in England. Rather, it's a photographic composition about dispersed and interconnected forms. Stieglitz's The Steerage is a signature work of the American photographer, and it signals Stieglitz's first modernist photograph in which he moved toward a new perception of reality.

The Clinic of Dr. Samuel Gross (The Gross Clinic) by Thomas Eakins

The American realist painter Thomas Eakins took as his subject the world of middle-class women and professional men in post-war America. He was born to a well-to-do family in Philadelphia that sent him to the city's prestigious Central High and supported him while he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Jefferson Medical College where attended anatomy lectures. His family even could afford to pay for a substitute soldier to take Eakins' place in the American Civil War just as Géricault's father did to keep his son from military conscription in the early 19th century. After the American Civil War, Eakins studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux-arts—the academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music consolidated in 1816. In Paris, Eakins studied under the painters Gérôme and Bonnat and the sculptor Dumont. When he returned to Philadelphia three years later, Eakins resumed his anatomical studies at Jefferson Medical College and turned to painting full time. For the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (World's Fair) in 1876, Eakins submitted this ambitious painting The Clinic of Dr. Samuel Gross, one of his earliest portraits of a professional man. Eakins made the Philadelphian surgeon the focal point in the depiction of an operation in a surgical amphitheater filled with medical students at Jefferson Medical College. Gross wears street clothes which was the standard practice in the 19th century. Although this may seem primitive now, Philadelphia was a leading center in the education of physicians and surgeons in the English-speaking world and Dr. Gross was renowned for his surgical and teaching skills. Dr. Gross trained at the Parisian École de Médicine where instruction was based on the clinical method rather than the British practice of students working individually with a surgeon; another difference was the Parisian school was free and open to anyone with a passport while admission to the British schools was elitist and more dependent upon personal connections than ability. Eakins depicts the French, more egalitarian, method of Dr. Gross who, with a scalpel in his bloody hand, addresses an amphitheater full of students. True to the movement of Realism, Eakins paints what he knows. He portrays himself seated in the amphitheater, at the far right, holding a pad of paper and pencil as he had done when he studied anatomy at this same college. The patient lies on the operating table, the incision in his left thigh clearly visible, as several physicians attend to him. The chief of clinic Dr. James M. Barton grips the patient's sock-clad calves, Dr. Daniel M. Appel leans over the buttocks and operates, and the anesthetist Dr. W. Joseph Hearn holds a folded cloth soaked in chloroform over the patient's face. The clinic clerk Dr. Franklin West at the bottom right records the proceedings and hands a surgical instrument to Dr. Appel. Eakins juxtaposed the clinical procedure with a woman recoiling in horror on the left to create an emotional tension between the devastated woman and the calm Dr. Gross in command of the procedure. Eakins arranged the scene to place Dr. Gross in the most honored spot at the apex of a triangle in the center of the composition and used the light from a skylight to illuminate the surgeon's forehead, to highlight the intellectual prowess of Dr. Gross. Eakins placed the procedure in the foreground to emphasize the contemporary surgical procedures practiced at the college and included the students in the background to underscore the more equalitarian method of instruction at Jefferson Medical College. The subject matter honored Philadelphia's renowned surgeon and the college's place at the forefront of medical instruction. The viewer at the time would not have failed to link this with Philadelphia's significant role in American scientific research, publication, and debate through its institutions like the Academy of Natural Sciences founded by Benjamin Franklin and the American Philosophical Society. Eakins' earnest attempt to honor this exalted tradition and the renowned surgeon at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia fell flat with the visitors. Many were repelled by the gore and complained to the art jury of the exhibition. The art jury demanded that Eakins move his painting from the art exhibit to the medical exhibits of the world's fair. The painting was moved to the U.S. army field hospital exhibit. This displacement was noted by an art critic in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (June 16, 1876). He wrote that no American art entries compared with the work of Eakins, "There is nothing so fine in the American section of the Art Department of the Exhibition and it is a great pity that the squeamishness of the Selection Committee compelled the artist to find a place in the United States Hospital Building." The Clinic of Dr. Samuel Gross is representative of Eakins Realist work and his body of work that depicts the professional class as a subject matter. Two years after the exhibition, Eakins began teaching painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and quickly was promoted to the position of professor of painting. Eakins used progressive methods to instruct his students, promoted the principles of Realism, and steadfastly insisted that his students, male and female, paint from nude models, a practice which many in the academy considered inappropriate for the female students.

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images by Rene Magritte

The Belgian painter, René Magritte, painted The Treason of Images in 1929 within the context of the European art movement called Surrealism that was dominated by poets and literary critics. The writer André Breton bridged Dada with Surrealism with his manifesto of 1924 in which he advocated an art and literature based on Freud's psychoanalytic technique of free association as a means of exploring. An offshoot of the Dada movement, the Surrealist movement promoted art and literature based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis as a means of exploring the imagination and fantasy, dreams, myths, and fear. Surrealists were interested in creating expressions of the mind, in fantastic or dreamlike images or images that were inspired by the unconscious mind that is void of preconceived notions Magritte, who worked on the fringes of this movement, and exhibited at times with the Surrealist artists, was less interested in the movement's fascination with dreams and fantasy but was intrigued by the possibilities of working with preconceived notions about images. On this canvas he subverted an outstandingly realistic picture of a pipe, which most viewers would call a pipe, by including a French text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"-that translates in English to "this is not a pipe". Magritte was a trained graphic designer, understood viewers' habits of immediate perception of visual advertisements; however, his intent in The Treachery of Images was not to elicit immediate recognition without hesitation; he wanted the viewer to pause when reading the phrase "this is not a pipe." The painting was meant to challenge the viewer's notion of what a pipe is, because the viewer consciously knows this is not a pipe, but it looks like a pipe, and a viewer is used to declaring what something is by what it resembles.

Landscape with Cattle and Peasants by Claude Lorrain

The French painter Claude Gellée was born in the Duchy of Lorraine. He is known as Claude Lorrain, for his birthplace. He trained as a painter, spent time in Germany, and was a studio assistant to the landscape painter Agostino Tassi in Rome. He returned to France for a short while before he settle permanently in Rome in 1628. Although he spent most of his career in Italy, he did not embrace the exuberant and theatrical aspects of the Italian Baroque. The body of Claude's work comprises landscapes. Claude based the composition of his landscape paintings on his extensive brush and ink drawings of the Italian landscape. He composed in terms of light and color, not linear design. He composed landscapes that were composites of his detailed studies and were idealized interpretations of the natural world. In Landscape with Cattle and Peasants, Claude composed a landscape in which the natural light of the sun is the source of light that reveals the colors of the natural setting, the animals on the left, and the people on the right. He keeps the horizon low in the composition and uses bands of shadows and light to increase the perception of pictorial space. Claude's softens the contours of objects meant to be perceived in the distance which adds to the seemingly infinite space of the hills and open sky in the background. His imaginary landscapes, like this one, were an idealized depiction of a landscape which is called picturesque. Picturesque is a specific aesthetic category. Picturesque refers to depictions of the natural world that are more harmonious and more balanced than a natural vista might be. Picturesque landscape paintings, a specialty of Claude, include visual passages that are surprisingly delightful, appear natural, but are wholly a product of the artist's imagination. The sensuous and the beautiful are aims of picturesque landscapes; they are meant to delight the viewer. Above are another two works by Claude that he painted in the 1630s and 1640s. As you can see in these three paintings that span three decades of his career, Claude was a proponent of the picturesque landscape.

Water Carrier of Seville by Diego Velazquez

The Water Carrier of Seville is a genre oil on canvas Velázquez painted when he was 20 years old. Even this early in his career, the painting exhibits two characteristics of his work—his respect for his subject matter and his great technical skill. Velázquez depicts the middle-aged man on the right wearing clothes of the working poor but doesn't denigrate his subject, the water carrier. He uses highlight in the way that his contemporaries used highlight in religious subjects. Through his use of light, he pays tribute to this humble man. He paid very close attention to everyday details such as the fig placed at the bottom of the glass, a custom of Seville to make the water taste fresher. An example of Velázquez's mastery of technique is his depiction of water, in the glass and the sparkling droplets on the large jug. Seen at first hand, the mastery of light and form is breathtaking. In the summer of 1623, Pacheco used his connections to arrange a meeting between Velázquez and King Philip IV of Spain. The king commissioned a portrait from Velázquez. The king was so pleased that he appointed Velázquez as the king's painter. At the royal court of Spain, Velázquez met the Flemish painter Rubens who was on a diplomatic mission in 1628. Rubens saw Velázquez's potential and convinced the king to send Velázquez to Italy to study art. The king took the Flemish master's advice and sent Velázquez to Italy. In Italy between 1629 and 1631 Velázquez studied the work of Italian masters. King Philip IV sent Velázquez to Italy again for an extended sojourn, 1649-51, to purchase art for the king's collection. These trips, financed by the king, demonstrate the trusted position Velázquez held at the Spanish royal court and the confidence the king had in Velázquez's taste and discretion with the king's money in purchasing art.

Painting Technique of Jackson Pollock

The Western world of art after World War II experienced a turning point when the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York City. One of the pivotal figures of the New York school was Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock, born in Wyoming, spent his career in New York. He was a Regionalist painter when he worked for the Federal Arts Project during the Depression. He turned to Surrealism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. From 1947 onward Pollock changed his brushwork and employed a unique painting technique that created a new style wholly his own. Pollock used a drip technique and engaged his entire body in the act of painting. The American art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term action painting to describe Pollock's drip and pour technique of applying paint to canvas. Pollock also broke away from artistic conventions by using house paint on his canvases. He painted directly on raw canvas by dripping paint from the end of a stick or from the bristles of a brush onto a canvas. He splattered paint onto a canvas. He threw paint directly at the canvas. His canvas wasn't on an easel, it wasn't on the wall, Pollock placed the canvas on the floor to compose. In the same vein as the Dada artists of previous decades, Pollock welcomed the element of chance in where the paint landed on the canvas and its effect on the composition. In 1952 Harold Rosenberg described what happened to the canvas in a Pollock composition. In his words, the canvas "became an arena in which to act—rather than . . . a space in which to reproduce . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event . . . The image would be the result of this encounter."

Self-Portrait by Judith Leyster

The demand for genre scenes and portraiture presented opportunities even for the two women who were admitted to the painter's guild of Haarlem in the 17th century. The first woman admitted to this guild in Haarlem was the Dutch painter who specialized in portraiture, Judith Leyster. Leyster was a younger contemporary of Frans Hals. It is unclear where she apprenticed but she had mastered painting and was admitted to Saint Luke's Guild by the time she was 24 years old and a few years later had three students working for her in her studio. Leyster painted the self-portrait above before she entered the guild but was working independently. Her brushwork is applied somewhat loosely which enlivens the contours of her figure and the figure on the canvas that she is painting. It is evident in her work that she was a follower of Frans Hals and his painting technique. In her self-portrait, Leyster turns toward the viewer in a casual pose. Her right arm is propped on the back of her chair and her lips are parted. She has depicted herself as if she has paused to speak with a visitor to her studio. She confidently takes a break from painting to engage with the supposed viewer. This is not a character study but is a work of self-promotion. She exhibits the tools of her trade—paint brush and paint palette—and her wares, the painting on the easel. She showcases a subject that was accomplished at depicting, the so-called merry company. This is a genre scene with revelers, costumed actors, dancers, and musicians. In this canvas she's working on the figure of a fiddler. Recent infrared photographs of her underpainting reveal that she initially painted a woman's face before deciding on a male musician. The underpainting suggests that at one point she may have planned to showcase a self-portrait rather than a genre scene. However, the change was a judicious decision because the result showcases two of her specialties, genre painting and portraiture. Leyster's clothing is unsuited for painting—fine material and a stiff lace collar. The point of presenting herself in this getup was to communicate her commercial success even before becoming a member of the painter's guild. Leyster composed an image that advertises her skills and reassures a prospective client that she is a successful professional.

Archers of Saint Hadrian by Frans Hals

The leading painter in the Dutch city of Haarlem was Frans Hals. Hals was the son of a cloth worker in Antwerp but when the city fell to the Spanish in 1585, the Hals family moved to Haarlem in the northern Netherlands. Based on one account, Hals apprenticed as a painter to Karel van Mander, but Hals' work reflects little of van Mander's style or subjects. Hals joined Saint Luke's Guild, the guild for painters, in Haarlem in 1610. Frans Hals was renowned in Haarlem for his skilled and lively portraits of individuals and civic organizations. The liveliness stems from two aspects of his compositions. First is the manner of his execution. He applied paint in light, rapid brushstrokes that gave the contours of his figures a fleeting quality. This quality makes the figures appear more vivid and immediate. The other is his knack for posing group portraits in an informal way that makes it appear as if the viewer has just chanced upon the meeting. This type of group portraiture was largely an invention of painters in the Dutch Republic and was very popular. The participants in civic organizations, who were a vital component of Dutch urban centers, frequently commissioned group portraits to commemorate an event or milestone. The Officers and Sergeants of the Calivermen Civic Guard in Haarlem were no exception. They commissioned this group portrait to mark the end of the men's three-year service. The design challenge for Frans Hals was how to portray each paying member of the Calivermen Civic Guard as an individual while unifying the whole composition without being repetitious. Hals spread the figures out across the horizontal picture plane but used color to unify the whole. White, orange, and blue—the colors of the Dutch flag at the time—appear throughout the composition, look natural as part of the men's attire, and unify the whole. Hals varied the weapons to indicate the status of the men; sergeants carry the halberd and officers carry the spontoon. Hals enlivened the composition by varying each man's movements and expressions. He painted each man so that he is completely discernible but doesn't look like he is posing in a formal portrait. Hals composed the group portrait to look more like a social gathering which, along with his technique of applying the paint in quick brushstrokes, makes the painting look even more immediate and engaging.

Fountain by Duchamp

The transatlantic character of the American art scene in the early 20th century and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 attracted many European artists to New York City, such as Marcel Duchamp whose Nude Descending the Staircase had caused such a stir at the 1913 Armory Show. When Duchamp emigrated from France to New York in 1915, he brought with him a point of view that opposed the rules and traditions of Western art which was at the core of a new literary and artistic movement, the Dadaist Movement. Dadaism emerged at the start of WW I in Europe, first as a literary movement and then as an inclusive arts movement. It was a reaction to the old order of society that had plummeted headlong into the horrors of WW I. The nihilism of Dadaism paralleled the political beliefs of anarchists in that both believed that the world as they knew it was meaningless and had to be challenged. The New York Dadaists, founded by Duchamp, were less political than their European counterparts, but they took pleasure in debunking long-held traditions and beliefs of the art world all the same. An example of American Dada is the "ready-made object," which, according to Duchamp, was any object that he added a title to and declared it a work of art. Duchamp's most outrageous ready-made was the Fountain, a urinal that he submitted as sculpture to the Society of Independent Artists' 1917. The ready-made object, as a work of art, lay entirely outside artistic conventions, but Stieglitz, a staunch supporter of modernism and of Duchamp's conceptual work, took a photograph of the fountain the brief time it was on display at the exhibition (above right). The jurors of the exhibition, who were all modernists, deliberated the propriety of the piece while the few critics who saw it deemed the Fountain indecent. The members of the Society of Independent Artists decided on the side of propriety and withdrew the object from the exhibition—reportedly, they tossed it in the alley! Duchamp didn't take this lying down. Here is his reaction to being kicked out of the exhibition, published in the Dadaist The Blind Man, and signed with his pseudonym "R. Mutt." "The Richard Mutt Case: They say any artist who pays six dollars may exhibit. Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion, this object disappeared and was never exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt's fountain: 1.) Some contended it was immoral, vulgar; 2.) Others that is was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. Now Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is absurd. It is a fixture which you see every day in plumbers' show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not, has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has produced are her plumbing and her bridges." He answers the charges of immorality and plagiarism, and argues for a new form of art, the ready-made which is essentially conceptual art. The Fountain is a very early example of conceptual art, a work focused on the conceptual as opposed to manual and visual aspects of the creative act, and its final rejection and removal from the exhibition galvanized the debate over the direction of modernist art. Duchamp, always a proponent of American engineering and popular culture, challenged the definition of art by raising the questions of what allowed one object to be called art, and another not to be.

Laocoon and His Sons by Peter Paul Rubens

The well-born and well-educated Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens qualified as a master painter in Antwerp that was under the control of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Rubens traveled to Italy to study art and by using his connections, he secured an introduction to Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, in the early 17th century. Gonzaga hired Rubens as court painter but also allowed Rubens to accept other commissions. Gonzaga considered Rubens a trusted member of court and sent him on diplomatic missions. During the decade Ruben lived in Italy, he studied Renaissance works by Titian and Michelangelo, Baroque works of Caravaggio, and ancient statuary. One ancient work he studied and drew was the Laocoön (left), an Imperial Roman sculptural group excavated in the early 16th century and a source of inspiration for Michelangelo's designs for the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Rubens, like other artists, drew ancient sculptures to perfect his skill of representing the human form. Above right is one of his drawings of this Imperial Roman sculptural group. In his Latin treatise On the Imitation of Statues, Rubens makes clear what the point of studying ancient sculptures was, "I am convinced that in order to achieve the highest perfection, one needs a full understanding of the [ancient] statues, indeed a complete absorption in them but, one must make judicious use of them and before all, avoid the effect of stone." Like Michelangelo, Rubens perfected his understanding of form by studying ancient sculpture. Unlike Michelangelo, Rubens recommended the avoidance of the appearance of stone. Rubens perfected his skill of composing on a diagonal, foreshortening, chiaroscuro, and the definition of musculature through his drawn studies of the art of the ancient world.

Saying Grace by Chardin

Toward the middle of the 18th century, Rococo frivolity and artifice patronized by the aristocracy was not the only taste in painting. The French bourgeoisie, or middle class, patronized a "natural" art that depicted bourgeois subjects, such as people in humble, domestic setting exhibiting more honest emotions; in other words, genre paintings. An example of this "taste for the natural" is the genre painting Saying Grace by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Chardin learned his trade from a non-academic sign painter. He painted trade signs and found work as a painter of the secondary areas of other painters' compositions. A member of the French Academy noticed his work and succeeded in getting Chardin admitted to the academy. His specialty, still life painting, was at the bottom of the hierarchy of subjects at the academy but his skills were so admired by members of the academy that they prompted a degree of respect for still life painting. In the early 1730s, Chardin moved from still life to genre painting. As a genre painter, he strove to communicate his conviction that an uncomplicated, middle-class life was virtuous and noble. In Saying Grace, Chardin realizes his conviction through an uncomplicated composition that depicts people acting out their dutiful lives in a humble surrounding. The figures in Chardin's compositions interact with tenderness toward each other. The virtue of the middles class is underscored by this primary subject, a mother teaching her daughters to recite a prayer before a meal. His contemporaries, especially the art commentator and critic, Denis Diderot, praised Chardin for the way he truthfully depicted people who seem to breathe and have a life of their own. The King of France, Louis XV, was not immune from the attraction of Chardin's genre scenes and purchased this painting from the 1740 Academy Salon, the academy's annual exhibition for the royal collection. It remained in the royal collection until the French Revolution when it became property of the state and made its way into the collection of the Louvre.

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun) by Claude Monet

Twenty years after the first so-called Impressionist Exhibition, Claude Monet continued to study the optical effect of light in different atmospheric conditions and to paint the effects he saw. He painted series of paintings of the same scene at one location on different days and times and in different atmospheric conditions. Above, Rouen Cathedral is one painting from his series of eighteen paintings of the cathedral on different days, at different times, in different weather. The subjects of the series were light, color, and form—not the cathedral. Not a replica of the building but instead the essence of the scene in which the building serves to demonstrate the effects of light and atmosphere on color. Monet saw the objects in these series as abstractions which he clearly stated in this often-quoted passage, "A painted tree is not a tree at all, but a vertical accent on a flat surface." In this painting from the series at Rouen, the natural effects of light and atmosphere seem to dissolve the façade of the building. Monet's brushwork is so prominent that it dominates the painting. The physical presence of the paint and Monet's brushwork are not subordinated to the role of representing an illusion of reality. In Monet's modern approach to painting, they are a fundamental presence in the composition.

The Portugese by Georges Braque

When the French painter George Braque saw Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Braque said it made him feel, in his words, "as if someone were drinking gasoline and spiting fire," which conjures the idea of a carnival performance. Impressed, Braque invited Picasso to work with him in the studio. By late 1909, Braque and Picasso were working together and exchanging ideas and technique so much so that many of their Analytical Cubist paintings seem indistinguishable (above left Braque and right Picasso). George Braque used Cezanne's geometric forms and brushwork as the springboard to dive into a new style of painting. A style of splintered forms and segmented, multiple planes of pictorial space he developed between 1906-09. When Matisse saw what Braque was painting, Matisse commented to the art critic Louis Vauxcelles that Braque's work was painted with little cubes. This remark lent its name to this style of painting, Cubist. In The Portuguese, Braque limited his color palette to monochrome brown and analytically rendered the pictorial space and forms. He did this by using multiple lines, planes, and fragmented geometric solids as abstract forms while using letters as the only clearly representational aspect of the composition. The subject of the painting, Braque's memory of a Portuguese guitarist, is suggested in the fragmented instrument in the lower third of the painting. When, in 1911, Braque and Picasso exhibited their Cubist works in two Parisian exhibitions, they shook the foundations of Western art.

The Swing by Jean-Honore Fragonard

A master of painting in the Rococo visual idiom and master of composing small, sophisticated, erotic works was the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Fragonard originally did not set out on a career in painting. He was apprenticed to a lawyer who happened to notice Fragonard's talent for drawing. The lawyer suggested that Fragonard learn to paint. The painter Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin accepted him as an apprentice and shortly afterward François Boucher accepted the young man in his studio. Boucher later recommended Fragonard for a scholarship to study at the French Academy at Rome. Fragonard spent two years studying the Italian masters, antiquities, and drawing landscape studies of the Italian countryside. Academically trained, Fragonard initially painted "history" paintings, those narrative paintings that the academy placed in the first tier. Fragonard then expanded his repertoire and shifted the focus of his work to hedonistic scenes of the aristocracy. Above, The Swing, is an example of one of Fragonard's paintings when he shifted his focus. According to the 18th century writer Charles Collé, an aristocrat commissioned a painting of the aristocrat's mistress on a swing being pushed by a bishop. After the first painter Gabriel-François Doyen turned down the commission, Fragonard accepted the commission. Art historians suspect that the aristocrat was the Baron de Saint-Julien. In Fragonard's composition, an older man pulling the swing is no longer the cleric the patron asked for but the aristocrat in front of the swing is situated in a spot to admire his mistress' legs from below and to see her shoe suggestively slip off and sail into the air. Fragonard communicates more of the sensuality of the scene by emphasizing the shimmering texture of the woman's dress and her curvaceous contours. He makes the mistress become one with the setting by repeating the look of leaves and fluffy clouds in her lacy ruffles. In this garden where the amorous encounter of forbidden love unfolds, a well-known statue of Cupid stands on the left. The figure of Cupid calls for secrecy by putting his finger to his lips. This represents the sculpture by Étienne-Maurice Falconet done for the mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour. The statue, Menacing Love, bears the inscription by Voltaire, Whoever you are, this is your master-he is, was, or will be-so beware of love. Fragonard adds complexity to this frivolous scene of forbidden love by placing a yapping dog at the base of gnarled tree trunk on the right. Otherwise, a symbol of fidelity, the dog is upset by the game played by the aristocrat and his mistress. Fragonard makes another allusion to danger of the sting of love with the sculpture of the two putti cradling a beehive to the left of the bench where the older man is seated. The complexity of his compositions and his mastery of the Rococo idiom ensured Fragonard a thriving career until the end of the 18th century, right up until frivolous and aristocratic subject no longer had cache with the supporters of the French Revolution.

The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) by Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, designer, and printmaker at the end of the 15th and first quarter of the 16th centuries. He initially was trained by his father in the family goldsmith workshop then apprenticed with the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgemut. You may recall his name from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Dürer traveled throughout Switzerland and Italy in the 1490s were he studied works by his contemporaries and forged connections with Renaissance artists and humanists. He assimilated the artistic discourse of Italy, studied the Italian Renaissance ideas about ideal forms, proportions, and perspective. He especially admired the work of Leonardo. When he returned to Germany, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire, he continued his intellectual development through his friendships with Northern humanists. Like Italian Renaissance artists, Dürer made a thorough study of systems of proportion and measure. He published his theories about design and form in two works, the Manual of Measurement in 1525 and the Four Books of Human Proportion in 1528. Above is one of his prints from the early 16th century that shows Dürer's interest in and study of human proportions. Dürer was a proponent of the concept that the perfect human form corresponded to a system of proportion and measure. He, like Leonardo and Giacomo, made a study of the ancient Roman treatise on ideal proportion by Vitruvius. In this print, Dürer uses the distance of the forehead to the chin of the figures as the measure for the proportions of the rest of the body. The figures of Adam and Eve stand in contrapposto, in other words, their body weight rests on one leg while the other leg is relaxed and bent. He repeats the pose of their right arms angled upward away from their bodies and their left arms downward. They flank the tree in the center of the composition, the tree that was central to Adam and Eve's fall from grace. The design is wholly Dürer's; however, he did not engrave the copper plate used to make the print nor did he pull the print from the printing press. Dürer was an experienced printmaker who made a very good living from the sale of his prints. Although he knew and was skilled at all the steps in the printmaking process, for his commercial editions he hired expert engravers to incise the copper plates and expert printmakers to print the plates. Whether he chose to produce woodcuts (the medium of the Nuremberg Chronicle) or engravings was partly based on profit margin. When he planned a large edition, he often chose engraving because the metal plate was durable and could produce many prints from a single matrix. The Fall of Man was a stand-alone image that he printed in a large edition. A brief word about the engraving printmaking process. To make an engraving, an artist incises fine lines into a metal plate with various tools. Each incised line removes some of the copper of the plate. The printmaker removes the scrap metal to keep the surface of the plate smooth. The profile drawing (above left) shows you the grooves of the incised lines and ink resting in the grooves below the surface of the plate. The artist can vary the quality of the resulting lines by varying the size, depth, and number of lines incised into the plate. Before printing, the printmaker inks the metal plate and then gently wipes the surface to clean. The ink rests below the surface in the incised marks. This is the inked design that will make the printed image. The printmaker places paper on top of the metal plate (often copper) and applies pressure by putting the metal plate and paper through a press. The pressure forces the ink from the incised marks onto the sheet of paper. The result, an engraved print. Dürer's depiction of the bodies as idealized forms with classicizing proportions reveals his familiarity with ancient sculpture. For example, in this comparison with the ancient Roman statue of the Apollo Belvedere that was excavated in the late 15th century when Dürer was traveling in Italy, you can see that he drew from the ancient model while mirroring the pose. It would be nice to think that Dürer saw the ancient statue at first hand when it was freshly excavated, but he only knew it from drawings done by other artists. He based his interpretation of Eve partly on ancient representations of Venus. Dürer's representation of the natural setting is so precise that the species of trees are identifiable. The branch Adam holds is mountain ash and represents the Tree of Life. Eve has broken off a branch from a fig tree which represents the Tree of Knowledge. Like his contemporary humanists, Dürer was interested in visual allegory which he explores in his engraving The Fall of Man. The parrot on the branch Adam holds was a Renaissance emblem foretelling Mary as the second Eve. The other animals in the scene—cat, rabbit, ox, and elk—are allegorical. They represent the four humors of the human body. The humors were the basis of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates' theories of the body's function. Medieval and Renaissance theologians believed that the four humors were held in check while humanity was innocent, but once Adam and Eve at from the Tree of Knowledge, all the humors were activated. The four humors (temperaments) are allegorically depicted: choleric (cat), sanguine (rabbit), phlegmatic (ox), and melancholic (elk). Dürer's allegory of the choleric humor is interesting. A choleric temperament is one that is easily moved to unreasonable or excessive anger. The cat (choleric) is keeping a watchful eye on the mouse between Adam's feet. The cat is at rest but, because of its temperament, could pounce on the mouse. Dürer relates this tension between the cat and mouse to what is unfolding above, the tension between Adam and Eve immediately before the Fall. The cat and the other animals appear placid for the moment. Dürer represents them thus to communicate a state of equilibrium of the four humors. This state of equilibrium is echoed by the idealized proportions and forms of Adam and Eve. However, just moments after this, when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, this idyllic state of equilibrium will disappear. The Fall introduces humanity to the harsh reality of a mortal life outside Eden, a life in which the four humors will be subject to imbalance which will precipitate disease.

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini

An even more theatrical treatment is Bernini's sculptural ensemble in the chapel of the Cornaro family in the Roman Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. The dedication to the Madonna of this relatively small 17th century church commemorated the Virgin Mary's aid in the 1620 Catholic victory near Prague during the Thirty Years War. Cardinal Federico Cornaro, a member of a wealthy Venetian family and ardent supporter of the Counter-Reformation, commissioned Bernini's sculptural ensemble in what would be his funerary chapel in the church. The chapel is dedicated to Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun who was active in the Counter-Reformation and had recently been canonized a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. The focus of the chapel is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa located in the niche behind the chapel's altar. Bernini's architectural frame around the altar doesn't look static. The space is delineated by paired columns flanking the altar that support an entablature that projects then recedes. On top of the entablature is a triangular pediment that appears broken on the projecting entablature and then appears complete on the receding entablature. The implied movement of the architectural setting as vitality to the scene and the sculptural ensembles on the side walls of the chapel add to this vitality. On the left and right are shallow theater boxes filled with sculpted depictions of members of Cardinal Cornaro's family. On the right is the right-hand sculpture group of Cornaro men in what looks like a box at the theater. The Cornaro family members, all of whom were deceased at the time except Cardinal Federico Cornaro, behave like they're watching a theatrical production take place. Bernini's composition of the group has the figures interacting and seemingly discussing Saint Teresa's mystical experience (above left) that happens before their eyes. Bernini chose to depict Saint Teresa experiencing a mystical episode, one of many that she recorded in writing. She detailed her experiences that included going into trances, seeing visions, and hearing voices. Bernini depicts the moment Saint Teresa slips into an ecstatic trance that recalls the saint's written recollections. Her mystical experiences were encounters with a beautiful angel who, when he pierced her heart with a flaming arrow and then withdrew the arrow, left her feeling a painful but sweet love for God. Here is an excerpt from her writing that describes the angel and the throes of ecstasy in her words "he was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire . . . they do not tell me their names . . . In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times . . . When he drew it out . . . he left me completely afire with a great love for God . . . so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it" Bernini dramatized this mystical encounter by representing the angel and Saint Teresa as though they are floating on a cloud. The angel, about to pierce Saint Teresa's breasts, delicately lifts her robe and Saint Teresa swoons on a diagonal. The saint closes her eyes as she opens her mouth. Bernini's technical mastery of form transforms the stone into a pale vision of the saint's spiritual ecstasy and passion. Bernini's brilliance lay in his synthesis of a representation of the mysticism of Catholicism with a dynamic, theatrical composition, a composition that is still dignified despite the erotic undertones of the Saint Teresa's ecstasy. Bernini accomplished the very thing Ignatius Loyola argues in his Spiritual Exercises. Saint Ignatius, canonized as saint in 1622, argues that art put in the service of communicating the spiritual beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church and representing spiritual experiences in art inspires devotion and encourages the piety of Catholic Christians.

Water Lily Lamp by Louis Comfort Tiffany

An international style of decoration and architectural design composed of curvilinear, organic forms emerged from England and spread throughout Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. This style, Art Nouveau, was in large part a response to machine manufacturing and widespread industrialization. Art Nouveau is the term for this style that is used in the United States, based on the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, an interior design gallery that opened in Paris in 1896. The name for this "new art" style was different in European countries but the style was similar throughout Europe and the U.S. Art Nouveau was embraced especially by artists who worked in the applied arts, such as glass, furniture, jewelry, metal work, and architecture as we saw with the Eiffel Tower. The American painter, decorator, designer, and businessman Louis Comfort Tiffany became an internationally recognized proponent of Art Nouveau, especially recognized for his Art Nouveau Tiffany glass. Tiffany was the son of the famous jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany. Louis Comfort Tiffany studied art in the U.S. and Paris. He became an associate of the National Academy of Design in New York city. In reaction to the academy's conservative approach to art, he was an organizing member of a new artistic association, the Society of American Artists. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Louis Comfort Tiffany experimented with stained glass and established a glass making factory in Queens, New York. By the last decade of the century, he was the leading art glass producer in the United States. Tiffany Glass and Decorating company was patronized by wealthy Americans, from rich and upper middle-class New Yorkers to President Chester A. Arthur who hired Tiffany to redecorate the reception rooms at the White House. Louis Comfort Tiffany held a life-long fascination with light and the effect of light in design. When Thomas Edison introduced the practical electric light, Tiffany incorporated this innovation in his lamp and light fixture designs. The lamps were designed at Tiffany Studios and each lamp shade was based on drawn designs for the individual panels of glass. These drawings, or cartoons, often showed just a section of the overall design; that section was then repeated several times over to compose the complete light shade. The process of serially producing lamps and shades caused Tiffany to feel somewhat conflicted about his company's work. He was a creative artist who hired other artists to design for him; he and they were designers of unique objects. However, the nature of the business and the demand of customers meant that designs were repeated and were produced uniformly; this was irreconcilable with the notion of a unique work of art. The translucent glass shapes of Tiffany's Water-Lily Lamp (above) are characteristic of the Art Nouveau style of representing stylized natural forms. By 1906, Tiffany Studios offered more than 125 different shades. The shades ere priced from $30.00 (the equivalent of $1,960 today) for small lamps to $750.00 (the equivalent of $48,900 today). At any of the prices in this range, Tiffany lamps with elaborate Art Nouveau designs were luxury objects and remain so even to this day. Watch the hyperlinked Antiques Roadshow Appraisal to see how much!

David by Bernini (Baroque style)

Speaking of David, we turn to a 17th century version of the Biblical hero done by Gianlorenzo Bernini. Neapolitan-born Bernini trained in his father Pietro's Roman sculpture workshop that was well connected and received commissions from the papal circle. From all accounts, Bernini was a child prodigy who developed his many talents and became a sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and stage designer. He was 25 years old when he received the commission for this sculpture from Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Bernini's interpretation of the figure of David differs from Donatello's interpretations in sculpture and Michelangelo's interpretations in sculpture and fresco. Bernini depicts David armed only with a sling. He presents David just about to launch an attack on his giant opponent. The oversized cuirass (chest armor) that King Saul lent to David lies on the ground. David chose to put his faith in God rather than armor. Lying next to the cuirass is a harp, a harp that David will play after his victory and that references his composition of psalms. In recognition of his patron, Bernini decorated the harp with an eagle's head, the emblem of the Borghese family. Bernini fully was aware, when he accepted Borghese's commission, that his work would be compared with the sculptures of David made by the great Renaissance masters Donatello and Michelangelo. Bernini's interpretation is a departure from Donatello's bronze of David as an effete adolescent after the battle. His work is also a departure from Michelangelo's marble of David as a reserved, rational figure contemplating the pending confrontation. Bernini chose to portray David as a dynamic figure in a spiral of motion in the moment just before he launches the rock from his slingshot. Bernini took inspiration for the contours of movement from the Borghese Gladiator (above right), a 1st century BC work by the Hellenistic sculptor Agasias of Ephesos. It was a prized piece in the collection of ancient art owned by Cardinal Borghese. Bernini mimicked some of the stance and twisting torso of the ancient sculpture; however, he modeled David as a more mature figure with a more developed musculature. When Bernini departed from a conventional Renaissance composition by extending the twisting diagonal from the head to the left foot, he involved the space around the form. Viewed from different positions, the sculpture conveys more and more information. Seen from the right, David's stride almost becomes a leap. From the front, his pose is frozen in the moment before he fires the fatal shot. Going around to the left David appears in a spiral of muscular tension, the tension needed to sling the deadly stone. The element of time becomes a part of the Baroque composition because a viewer's understanding of the form unfolds in real time as he or she walks around the sculpture. A viewer must think of the continuum of the action in time and space and gets caught up in the unfolding event. In comparison with Michelangelo's David, completed over 100 years before, Bernini's David includes more details described in the Biblical text: the cuirass, the harp, and the shepherd's pouch hanging across David's chest. Michelangelo's David is still. His expression is stern as he contemplates Goliath, and his energy is confined whereas Bernini releases David's energy and reveals the hero's emotion through the expression of his face, a self-portrait of Bernini. Bernini represents David mustering all his strength, primed with the tension of a spring, ready to put all his force behind the stone projectile. Bernini's composition is theatrical. It is a drama of action that unfolds as a viewer walks around the sculpture. The drama, implied movement, and expression of emotion are hallmarks of Baroque art in the 17th century.

Butcher's Stall by Pieter Aertsen

The Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen was taught by Allaert Claesz in Amsterdam but spent the better part of his professional life in Antwerp. Antwerp had superseded Bruges and was a cultural capital in northern Europe and the hub of international banking and trade. Its population was smaller than Paris but larger than London. Art historians give credit to Aertsen for popularizing genre painting. The term genre painting refers to a painting of a scene from everyday life. For example, the Limbourg Brothers' paintings in the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours are genre paintings. Aertsen also set a high standard for still life painting through his meticulous representations. A still life is a painting of an arrangement of inanimate objects. Aertsen's Butcher's Stall (above) is a cross between genre painting and still life with a wealth of meaning. In the first half of the 16th century, the population of Antwerp had tripled, and the local markets were overtaken by international trade and finance. This sudden change caused friction between traditional civic interest groups and entrepreneurial newcomers. Aertsen touches upon this tension by focusing on traditional commerce in Antwerp in the form of the Butchers Guild. The guild had a monopoly on the butchering and sale of meat. The guild's stock and trade is pushed up to the front of the picture plane as a butcher's stall. When Aertsen painted this still life, butchers outside of the guild had presented a legal challenge to the Butchers Guild's monopoly on the trade. Their lawsuit reached the courts. The courts rejected the outsiders' claim at first and then upheld their claim to which the Butchers Guild then objected. The guild appealed the ruling in the imperial court and the court's decision was pending when Aertsen painted this. Thus, this still life of the meat market was relevant to a contemporary viewer familiar with the threats to the status quo of the city by outside interests. Another detail that relates to Antwerp at this moment of challenges to the status quo is the white placard in the signpost on the right corner of the roof. The sign advertises land that had been for sale in 1551. The land deal was a challenge to the traditional authority of the Order of Augustinian nuns who ran the St. Elizabeth's Hospital. In response to the rapid growth of commercial interests and shortage of available land in the city, the City Council of Antwerp decided to compel the Augustinian nuns to sell their property under market value. However, the City Council had overestimated demand and was left with a large parcel of undeveloped land. This is when the City Council, in a shady deal, sold the excess to the unscrupulous land developer Gillis van Schoonbeke. Aertsen's still life references the corrupt land deal that essentially cheated the nuns and favored an entrepreneur, and it references the threat of entrepreneurs against the hereditary rights of the Butchers Guild. The guild and nuns had represented the status quo but in the climate of rapid economic growth, the threat to those institutions was very much a contemporary issue that Aertsen broaches in his still life. Looking more closely at the still life, it's clear that Aertsen is depicting the stall during Lent. The pretzels hanging on the upper left and the crossed herrings resting in the pewter dish behind the ox head were Lenten foods. They are dwarfed by the display of an over abundance of cuts of meat and sausages. This seems to present a challenge to the Christian faithful at the time of year they were asked to observe a Lenten fast. Some scholars have suggested that Aertsen was showing the difficulty of avoiding the offerings of the world when trying to follow a spiritual path. An interesting aspect of Aertsen's composition is his subordination of genre scenes in the middleground on the right and in the background on the left and his emphasis on still life. His inversion of a traditional narrative elevates the status of the still life in the foreground. This was at a time when religious and mythological narratives were more valued by patrons and collectors. Aertsen was taking a risk but evidently the themes of the still life and genre painting were commercially viable since he painted and sold at least four versions of this composition. The theme of making choices and moral corruption, in the land deal and the tempting meat on offer during Lent, continues in the genre scenes in the background and middleground. On the right, a butcher wearing the guild's red tunic is seen watering the wine before serving it to the customers in the tavern. The floor around him is littered with the shells from oysters and mussels that the tavern customers consumed, apparently for their aphrodisiac properties as suggested by the presence of a prostitute in the tavern. On the left in the background is a scene of people, dressed in contemporary Netherlandish attire, in the countryside. They're walking towards a church. A mother riding on a donkey with a swaddled infant in her arms stops to give bread (alms) to a poor, starving child on the roadside. This undoubtedly is a reference to the Virgin Mary, Christ Child, and Joseph and the Flight into Egypt. Aertsen doesn't paint them as traditional sacred figures but uses the imagery recognizable to anyone in Europe in the 16th century to make the point that those beset by their own trouble still exhibit charity and share with the less fortunate. This contrasts with the tavern scene where a tavern patron puts his capital to use by indulging in food, wine, and sex. In these genre scenes and the still life, Aertsen seems to be communicating a message about personal decisions and the hard choice between a materialistic, sinful way of life and a more challenging spiritual, moral way of life.

The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David

While in power, Napoleon Bonaparte appointed Jacques-Louis David as imperial painter. When Napoleon was sent into exile, David left France and died in Brussels in 1825. Napoleon commissioned a painting of his coronation ceremony from David. The ceremony took place on December 2, 1804, in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. David spent the next three years working on the vast painting that measures just over 32 feet wide and just over 20 feet high. It was not the scale of the painting that took so much time but was David's meticulous method of working. He drew and painted numerous preparatory studies for the composition. He build a small-scale model of the event and arranged costumed dolls as a guide to his composition. This use of small-scale models recalls the method of Tintoretto. David's interpretation of the coronation took some license with reality. For example, he depicted the emperor's mother enthroned in the background when in fact she was absent. He painted Napoleon a bit slimmer and taller than he was and shaved some years off the appearance of Josephine, Napoleon's consort. David carefully chose a particular moment in the proceedings to represent the coronation. The moment is when Napoleon Bonaparte raises a crown above the head of Josephine to crown her empress and Pope Pius VII seated behind the emperor blesses her coronation. David deliberately chose not to depict the moment of Napoleon's coronation because it may have stirred up unwelcome controversy. After Pope Pius blessed Napoleon, Napoleon then crowned himself emperor. The location of the ceremony and the presence of the pope intentionally evoke two western European traditions of bestowing political authority. The first was the French tradition of the coronation of the king in a cathedral. The second was the western European tradition of the coronation of emperors by a pope. By avoiding controversy, David created a work in support of Napoleon's claim of legitimate power and a work of astute political propaganda. David included a self-portrait among the observers of the coronation. He holds a sketch pad and pencil and appears already to be make preparatory drawings for the commissioned painting. Incidentally, he depicted himself a bit younger than the 57 year old man he was at the time. David painted this vast canvas in the Neoclassical style to lend seriousness and legitimacy to the message of the painting. During his reign, Napoleon Bonaparte patronized the Neoclassical style and employed it in the interests of his political regime. He reasoned that the style that evokes the art and architecture of ancient Rome enhanced his claim to the throne and his image as heir to the ancient Roman emperors. David worked fluidly in the Neoclassical visual idiom, whether depicting the ancient past with a contemporary message as in The Oath of the Horatii or depicting current events with the gravitas of classicizing forms as in The Death of Marat and The Coronation of Napoleon. He even made the interior of Notre-Dame Cathedral into a classicized setting rather than the splendid High Gothic mastery of stone it was. The Neoclassical style used in these three painting was used for the political aims of widely disparate actors—the French monarch King Louis XVI, the French Jacobin revolutionaries, and the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. While the aims of the patrons differed, the Neoclassical style served their purposes.

Charles 1 at the Hunt by Anthony Van Dyck

A contemporary of Rubens was the Flemish painter, Anthony Van Dyck. Van Dyck was born to a silk merchant in Antwerp and was apprenticed to the painter Hendrik van Balen. Van Dyck's apprenticeship was shorter than what was normal at the time and the precocious painter established his own independent studio when he was in his teens. By the time he joined Antwerp's Saint Luke's Guild of Painters as a master, still in his teens, he already had established a reputation as a portrait painter. Art historians suggest that he could work independently before joining the guild because he enjoyed the protection of Peter Paul Rubens. Early in his career, Van Dyke spent time in England at the court of King James I, in Italy, and in the Low Countries before he settled in England in 1632. In London, Van Dyck established a name for himself in portrait painting and achieved the distinction of being an official portrait painter to Charles I, King of England and Scotland. King Charles I commissioned this portrait (above) around 1635. The king paid for the painting in 1638 but had little time to enjoy it. In reaction to his rule by absolutism, the people of England revolted against the king and executed him in 1640. Oliver Cromwell sold the English royal collection—this painting among them—to private collectors. A century later the Countess Du Barry, mistress of the French King Louis XV, acquired the painting for her chateau. She later sold the painting to the French King Louis XVI who met the same fate as the monarch of England and Scotland, executed by the people in 1793. This is how this portrait of an English monarch wound up in France. According to Van Dyck's notes, this depicts the king at the hunt, just dismounted, taking a short rest while two servants (a page and an equerry) care for his horse. This was not an official royal portrait because the king appears without his royal insignia. Van Dyck portrays the king as elegant and distinguished in a private composition. Van Dyck's portrayal is a statement of regal self-assurance—some might say haughtiness—that befits the figure's status as the king of England and Scotland. The king wears a wide-brimmed hat, a pair of elaborate boots, and a doublet made from fine material—all too luxurious for the rigors of a real hunt. Van Dyck illuminates the figure of the king to enhance his appearance and make him stand out from the landscape and servants. The light plays off the surface of his doublet and intensifies the saturated red of his breeches. The gleaming king contrasts with the servants and horse in the shadows. Van Dyck makes another reference to the king's status by positioning him on the headland overlooking the Thames River valley. Van Dyck privileges the king through light and color. Van Dyck placed the viewer looking up from below to see the king who commands the landscape as a master of all he surveys. The king's pose essentially is in profile, but his hand resting on his hip projects his elbow toward the viewer's space and his hand on the walking stick expands the horizontal command of the figure toward the low horizon and sky. The turn of the king's head, to look out of the picture plane, at first glance connects the viewer with the figure but his expression (above left) is anything but inviting. Van Dyck's rendering of the king as an elegant figure with an expression of aristocratic reserve set in a lush setting established a standard for British aristocratic portraiture. This Flemish painter laid the foundations of an English school of portrait painting that painters such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough later developed.

Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Another Netherlandish painter living in Antwerp at the time of Aertsen was Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He was accepted by the Guild of St. Luke, the Painters Guild, as a freelance master. Bruegel specialized in allegorical paintings and among his greatest works is this 1559 oil on wood panel painting, Netherlandish Proverbs. Proverbs are short statements of wisdom or advice that people use in everyday speech. Proverbs have a long tradition in western European language and culture and the humanist scholar Erasmus contributed to this tradition in 1500 with the publication of his scholarly examination of traditional and literary uses of proverbs. Bruegel tackles the theme visually in this genre painting that is, at its heart, an allegory of human folly (a lack of good sense; foolishness). In an amusing but instructive way, Bruegel holds up a mirror for people to see the absurdity and implications of their actions. In Netherlandish Proverbs, also known as The Blue Cloak or The Upside-Down World, Bruegel depicts about 90 proverbs in scenes that unfold side by side but have independent meaning. Peasants and wealthy people go about their business in a seaside village that comprises a merchant's house, farmhouse, run-down huts, a bridge, a tower, the village square, a wheatfield, a forest, and the shoreline. Bruegel presents a chaotic, comprehensive representation of a 16th century northern European world in which nothing is as it should be, and no one is behaving as he or she should. The meaning of many of the proverbs proves elusive to many modern viewers, but some do have parallels in contemporary English. In the section of the painting on the left are the proverbs Tiling one's roof with tarts, There the broom sticks out, and It depends on the fall of the cards. Tiling one's roof with tarts doesn't have a parallel in English. It means that using one's wealth for vanity is as useless as tiling one's roof with tarts. There the broom sticks out means that when the head of household is absent a party is in progress. A similar expression in English is, when the cat's away the mice will play. It depends on the fall of the cards means that much in life is a matter of luck, approximating the expression It's the luck of the draw. The man wearing a blue tunic with his arms wrapped around a truncated column is a pillar biter, this means one is a religious hypocrite. She caries water in one hand and fire in the other is the woman with a pail in one hand and in her other hand a pair of tongs holding a smoldering hot coal. This means someone is two-faced. To the right, one of the proverbs associated with the man wearing one shoe and holding a butcher's knife is One cannot walk headlong through a wall, in other words, a foolish attempt to ignore reality as is sometimes expressed in English like beating your head against a brick wall. In this section of the painting Bruegel depicts the proverbs The one shears the sheep, the other the pigs, Fill the ditch after the calf has drowned, and Pull the wool over someone's eyes. The two men on the left shear the sheep and pig. The meaning is some people are given the opportunity for success while others aren't. To the right is the man filling the ditch that means trying to fix something after the problem has occurred, like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Between these two is a woman dressed in red putting a blue cloak on her husband. The saturated, bright red color of the woman's dress and the bright blue cloak stand out in Bruegel's palette that is chiefly yellows and browns. This has significance in the context of this proverb. Red connotes sin and arrogance, blue cheating and foolishness. The horn-shaped hood of the cloak refers to the man being cuckold, in other words, his wife in red is cheating on him behind his back. She is pulling the wool over his eyes which means she intentionally trying to deceive. On the promontory over the shoreline (top left) is the proverb, The blind leading the blind. This has the same meaning in English. In town, in this section, are the proverbs Throwing roses to pigs, and Crying over spilled porridge. The man wearing the red tights and red and white cloak is tossing rose petals at the pigs and pigherd behind him. This proverb means offering something of value to someone who neither wants nor appreciates it, like the expression in English throwing pearls to swine. The woman kneeling just to the right is trying to scoop up the spilled porridge from the ground which means there's no sense in fretting over something that can't be undone, like the expression don't cry over spilled milk. Bruegel's visual collection of about 90 proverbs that reflect the folly of people throws this small town into chaos. Bruegel expresses the message that the world is upside down and has turned away from God by the terrestrial globe and cross turned upside down on the bracket outside the house on the left and the celestial globe that hovers above the left hand of the man who is throwing rose petals with his right hand. The heavens are out of reach to the foolish. Regardless of the reigning chaos, the painting is entertaining and humorous. The complex subject matter of Bruegel's allegorical painting was intended to stimulate conversation about contemporary morals and beliefs and was one of Bruegel's most popular paintings.

Portrait of Paul Revere by Copley

Artists in the late 18th century in the British colonies of North America followed western European models and styles. For example, the leading portraitist in Colonia America, Boston-born John Singleton Copley, painted in a style that combined the tenebrism of the Italian baroque and the naturalism of the English Rococo. His compositions followed Reynolds' use of visual cues to convey the character of the sitter. Copley followed the Rococo fashion for the portrait d'apparat, a portrait in which professional or purposeful objects associated with the sitter feature in the composition. Copley learned graphic arts from his stepfather, Peter Pelham, a limner (itinerant portrait painter) and engraver, and improved his draughtsmanship by studying the plaster casts, painting, and prints in the painter John Smibert's studio near the Pelham household. When Peter Pelham died in 1751, Copley had to paint in earnest to support the household and within a decade Copley established himself as one of Boston's leading portrait painters in the contemporary style of the English Rococo. The sitter in this portrait is Paul Revere, Jr., the American patriot, silversmith, and colleague of Copley. In their working relationship, Revere fashioned the silver frames for the miniature portraits Copley painted. Art historians suggest that Copley painted this portrait to settle his account with Revere. Unlike Reynolds, Copley doesn't idealize the figure of Paul Revere. Instead, Copley dressed Revere in simple work clothes of a homespun shirt and plain, dark bluish-green vest. The homespun clothing referred to the patriots' rebellion against the English and the boycott of taxed imported textiles. The teapot is, also, a symbol of the brewing rebellion in the Massachusetts colony and the boycott of tea taxed under the Townshend Acts of 1767. Copley painted dirt under Revere's fingernails to indicate the silversmith's industriousness. Copley poses Revere facing out to the viewer which makes the image more immediate. The highly polished surface of the table and the shimmer of the tea pot are Rococo refinements that demonstrate Copley's technical skill while showcasing the matching skill of Revere's silversmithing. Copley uses tenebrism to emphasize the figure of Revere and directs a highlight onto Revere's forehead to suggest the intelligence of the silversmith. Revere, posed with his chin resting in one hand, suggests a thinking individual. The silver teapot, light, and pose present Revere both as an accomplished silversmith and thinker, an artist-gentleman. A contemporary reading of this portrait and its context cannot ignore the significance of the silver teapot. The object speaks volumes about the international economy of the English colonies. The silver was from Mexico mined by enslaved people. The tea to go in the pot came from Asia. The sugar to sweeten the tea was grown and harvested by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. A more traditional reading of the portrait, regarding the skill of Copley and the patriotism of Revere, can be enhanced by a more complex consideration of the implications of the international economy represented and that economy's exploitation of so many human being

Guaranty (Prudential Building)

By the second half of the 19th century, merchants and captains of industry were clamoring for a new type of construction to make more economical use of urban land where space was at a premium. A solution to this matter of land use was to build upwards, however, there were two problems with this. One problem with this was vertical communication within a high-rise building. Stairs, above six stories, were impractical. Another problem was building with masonry. Tall masonry structures required thick supporting walls which increased the cost of materials, the overall weight of the structure, and the area that it occupied. Therefore, high-rise masonry buildings were an impractical solution. The problem of the movement of people within a vertical space was solved by the development of passenger elevators and the introduction of elevator safety breaks by Elisha Graves Otis. The first commercial building in which an elevator for people was employed was the Equitable Building in New York City in 1868. The impracticality of masonry construction was addressed in the second half of the 19th century by architects who began to build tall cast-iron structures. This was a temporary solution. Between 1883-85, in Chicago, William Le Baron Jenney introduced the innovation of building with structural steel and concrete reinforced with steel mesh. By using structural steel and reinforced concrete instead of cast iron, a high-rise building had greater tensile strength; in other words, it better withstood longitudinal stress. Architects began to use steel to build architectural skeletons that supported themselves and the weight of many floors. Steel eliminated the need for load bearing walls. The architectural marriage of structural steel construction and the elevator inaugurated the age of high-rise building, the skyscraper. The American architect Louis Sullivan, based in Chicago, arguably was the first architect to make these high-rise building beautiful and practical. Hascal L. Taylor, an oil magnate based in Buffalo, commissioned a high-rise office building from Louis Sullivan and his partner, the engineer Dankmar Adler. Taylor asked them to build, in his words, "the finest office building in the country" (above right). But, before the plans were made public, Taylor died. The Guaranty Construction Company based out of Chicago purchased the plans (above left) and the site where the building was to be built. The high-rise was built between 1894-96 and in 1898 was renamed the Prudential Building for the refinancing by the Prudential Insurance Company. Sullivan and Adler's high-rise stands 152 feet tall. It is constructed with a steel frame, a skeleton of steel if you will. The steel horizontal and vertical girders don't require load bearing walls to keep the building standing. Sullivan designed the building in a "U" shape to provide natural light to all the offices of the high-rise. The steel frame of the Guaranty Building is clad with brick masonry and a terracotta (baked clay) revetment (veneer). Sullivan chose brick masonry to enclose the space of the building because brick is lightweight. The same was true for his choice of terracotta revetment. Terracotta had the additional advantage of being easy to mold into a variety of shapes and designs. It was inexpensive to manufacture yet had the elegant look of stone. Sullivan designed the first and second storeys of the Guaranty Building as a horizontal base to ground the building. Establishing this heavy base, he designed the rest of the structure with a vertical emphasis. Between the windows of each story, he designed slim pilasters that ascend to the top. The window niches are set back from the pilasters which further emphasizes the ascent of the vertical lines. At the top of the Guaranty Building, Sullivan designed an entablature comprised of small circular windows and thin overhang. Albeit thin, the overhang is practical in that it hides the elevator mechanism and water tanks on the roof. Sullivan, more than any other architect of his time, strove to design a bold, American architecture that did not disguise its structure and emphasized its function, in this case, as a high-rise building. The Guaranty Building is recognized as one of the masterpieces of the Chicago School of architecture because Sullivan didn't borrow heavily from traditional European designs. His incorporation of the Art Nouveau botanical designs of the terracotta revetment are a reflection of the Art Nouveau movement in the United States. Sullivan thought that a properly designed building should reflect the reason for which it was built and that it should be obvious to a casual observer. Simply put, as Sullivan said, form follows function. Sullivan's design principle, that form follow function, set the standard for subsequent modern architecture in the U.S. and western Europe.

American Gothic by Grant Wood

In the 1930s in the United States, not all artists took an avant-garde approach to painting. Many American artists focused on the provincial United States for their subject matter and painted either representational or stylized depictions of their subjects. These artists are called Regionalists. The American painter Grant Wood was an American Realist and Regionalist. Born in Anamosa, Iowa, Wood went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and made several trips to Europe where he mastered the technique of the detailed brushwork of Northern Renaissance painting. Grant, unlike American modernist painters, rejected the modernist movement's fascination with form and art for art's sake, and decidedly did not choose to depict the consequences of industrialization and urban life. In a frequently quoted statement, Grant expresses his disenchantment with the French avant-garde and justifies his return to his rural roots. Although the following may be a bit disingenuous, it indicates that Wood consciously rejects modernism. In Wood's words, "I found the answer [about what I knew] when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war [World War I] who called themselves neo-meditationists. They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly, and they did most of their waiting at the Dome or the Rotonde, with brandy. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa." Wood looked to rural America and America's past for subjects and inspiration; he spent much of his career painting the landscapes and people of the American Midwest. Wood chose to depict the farms of his Iowa childhood and celebrated the farmers' enduring, virtuous, and heroic spirit from the perspective of a socialist, although he was considered a radical in his native state of Iowa. Grant Wood's visual perceptions of farmers in Iowa was not without wit, and in his most famous painting, American Gothic (above), Wood took the stoicism of the Midwesterner to its extreme. His models for this painting were his sister and his dentist. The two stoic figures are dressed in work clothes. The woman wears an apron and the man holding a pitchfork wears overalls which suggests that neither one is very far from their daily chores. He used precise brushwork, like that of the painters of the Northern Renaissance, to create meticulous and realistic forms. The two rigidly posed figure dominate the composition. Their rigidity echoes the vertical planes of the clapboard farmhouse in the background. This popular style of farmhouse, called Carpenter's Gothic, lends its name to the title of the painting. Conservative local critics accused Wood of satirizing the insular nature of rural life while on the other hand liberal critics condemned him for glorifying the insular nature of rural life and mistakenly aligned him with Fascist ideals current in Europe. In particular, the frontal arrangement and highly detailed brush work inspired by Northern European Renaissance painting, the very opposite of avant-garde abstraction, may be why he ruffled the liberal critics' feathers. Wood maintained that he painted an image that dignified the Midwestern character and was celebrating the regional traditions of the Midwest. Wood described himself, and the American Regionalist movement, as the representation of the American dream led by an American dreamer-this was vague enough so that no one could argue with it. Despite the rejection of his work by critics on the left and right of the political spectrum, his portrayal of a farmer and his wife won him national recognition, a bronze medal in 1930 from the Art Institute of Chicago, and the subsequent sale of this painting to Art Institute of Chicago.

Lord Heathfield by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century. He came from a privileged background, the son of headmaster and fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Before apprenticing with Thomas Hudson, the portraitist who also trained Joseph Wright of Derby, Reynolds received a formal education that was not typical of his contemporary painters. Reynolds lived abroad for three years, mainly in Italy, to study ancient art, Italian Renaissance art, and the Dutch and Flemish works of Rembrandt and Rubens. Upon his return to England, he set up his own workshop and established himself as a leading portraitist of his time. Reynolds was also a leader in art education as a founding member of the British Royal Academy in 1768 and was elected its first president. This portrait of Lord Heathfield that Joshua Reynolds painted in 1787 is an example of his synthesis of artistic idioms which introduced more variety and dignity to British portraiture. One of the visual idioms he employed was the "grand manner," or as he called it the "grand style." By this he meant the forms should be idealized and not a slavish copy of what the eye sees. The artist drew from the works of ancient Greek and Roman art and the classicizing works of Italian Renaissance painters such as Raphael. By adapting this visual medium usually used for history painting, Reynolds created a new version of portraiture that, from the perspective of academic art, elevated the status of portraiture. History painting in the academies referred to paintings with ancient Greek and Roman, classical legends, and Biblical subjects which the academies placed at the top of the hierarchy of painting genres. In Reynolds' grand manner portraits, the artist mimicked postures and gestures drawn from classical sculpture and Italian Renaissance paintings that connoisseurs of art would recognize and appreciate. Reynolds also employed the northern European idiom of visual metaphors in his portraiture to convey the status of the sitter. For example, classical architecture signified a civilized demeanor or landscape implied natural sincerity. The subject of this portrait by Joshua Reynolds is George Augustus Elliot whom King George III appointed Governor of Gibraltar in 1775. During the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar, from 1779-83, Governor Elliot held the fortress against the prolonged attack. For this military victory, King George bestowed Elliot the title of Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar in 1787. To commemorate this, the wealthy publisher John Boydell commissioned the portrait of Lord Heathfield. Lord Heathfield sat for Reynolds in August and September of that same year. Reynolds shows his subject at Gibraltar in a controlled pose. He idealizes the 70 year old general by making him appear younger and more athletic. He makes Lord Heathfield a large scale figure relative to the size of the canvas which is also an element of the grand manner of painting. The hills of the peninsula are in the background and a cannon aimed down to the sea sits on the promontory. The sky is darkened by the smoke of battle. The sitter holds the large key to the fortress in his hands and wears the honorific star of the Order of Bath on his red uniform. The landscape, cannon, and key refer to Lord Heathfield's defense of the fortress at Gibraltar. Reynolds employed the grand manner and visual metaphors to communicate the status of Lord Heathfield.

Nude Descending a Staircase by Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp's Cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (above right) was subjected to ridicule and parody by critics and journalists alike who didn't understand what Duchamp was trying to accomplish. Printed reactions likened the painting to, in the words of the journalists, "an elevated railroad stairway in ruins after an earthquake" and "an explosion in a shingle factory." Of the many published cartoons published lampooning the painting, this amusing one (above left) appeared in the New York Evening Sun newspaper on March 20, 1913, Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway), illustrating Seeing New York with a Cubist. The American Art News offered a ten-dollar reward to the first reader who could find the lady within the jumble of interlocking planes and jagged lines! Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase perplexed the American public who perceived it as representing all the tricks they thought European artists were playing at their expense, especially with the portrayal of the female nude. Outraged viewers could not understand what Duchamp was trying to accomplish. Duchamp used a monochromatic palette and splintered planes of pictorial space to represent the phases of a single, female figure descending a staircase. He fractured the volume of the figure into linear panels at each of the static positions. Duchamp's work was a synthesis of trends in avant-garde art in Europe and the U.S. His monochromatic palette and faceted figure were characteristic of Cubist painting. The effect resembles the photographic locomotion studies conducted by American artists like Eakins (above right). Duchamp plotted a body's motion and energy, as though on a map, in a way that corresponded with the Italian Futurists' interest in motion and velocity. Even a bit further afield, Duchamp's representation of a faceted figure related to contemporary re-definitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers—the theory of relativity comes to mind. Duchamp, who was still living in France when the Armory Show took place, was delighted at the notoriety from his painting. So delighted that he moved to the United States because he wanted to live in a country where art could stir such emotions and elicit such reactions. In a statement years later, Duchamp claimed that his composition was not related to locomotion studies and early cinematic works. In his words, "My aim was a static representation of movement—a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting." Regardless of all the fuss the painting raised, someone saw its value. A San Francisco art dealer bought the painting directly from the Armory Show in 1913 for three hundred dollars, the approximate equivalent of $50,000 in 2021.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

Symbolism was a movement that began as a literary movement in the late 19th century in France and Belgium and then widened to include the visual arts. Symbolism emphasized internal psychological phenomena rather than objective descriptions of nature; not coincidentally, this movement was contemporary with late 19th century developments in psychology and psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud. Symbolist artists were attracted to subjects inspired by the imagination and irrational aspects of the human mind. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was part of the Symbolist Movement and used his state of mind and emotions as the point of departure in his paintings. Munch's trip to Paris in 1889 afforded him the opportunity to see the work of avant-garde artists at first hand. The artists of Post-Impressionism made the greatest impact on him and shaped how he depicted forms and used non-local color. This embrace of the avant-garde is evident in his best-known painting, The Scream (The Cry) of 1893. The painting was one of a series he called Frieze of Life. The paintings were his view of modern emotional life that he explored through themes of love, angst, and death. In this composition, Munch displaced his emotional disintegration onto a figure, a self-portrait, crossing the bridge over Oslo's Christianafjord. Munch openly acknowledged his own mental suffering in public and used it to inform his work. An entry in his diary dated January 22, 1892, recalls what inspired this composition. "One evening I was walking along a path;, the city was on one side and fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream." This recollection quite possibly could be what he had seen a decade earlier in the aftermath of the colossal volcanic eruption on Krakatoa, Indonesia. For months after the eruption in 1883, newspaper accounts around the world recorded the most spectacular blood-red sunsets. In The Scream Munch used bright, saturated red, orange, and yellow to intensify the sunset and used darker blue and pink to define the water. The swirl of the sky and water echo the anguished, S-curved figure in the foreground. The figure has stopped and faces the picture plane. He simultaneously screams and holds his ears, a gesture that pushes in his cheeks to make him resemble a skull. The sturdy railing of the rectilinear bridge is the only thing to keep the figure from being swept up into the churning landscape.

Conversion of Saint Paul by Caravaggio

The 17th century painter Michelangelo Merisi, known by the name of his hometown Caravaggio, trained in Milan and worked his way south to Rome. In Rome, his career took off when his work was sought after by members of the papal circle. Caravaggio received a commission from Cardinal Tiberio Cerasi for two paintings to hang in the Cardinal Cerasi's funerary chapel. The chapel was dedicated to St. Paul and is in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. The two works by Caravaggio were to hang on either side of the altar while a work by Annibale Carracci was behind the altar (above left). According to contemporary sources, Cardinal Cerasi rejected the first paintings by Caravaggio. The cardinal thought they were inappropriate and requested Caravaggio redo them. Shortly after making this request, the cardinal died. This left the ownership of the first paintings by Caravaggio uncertain. Cardinal Giacomo Sannesio seized the opportunity to acquire the paintings by Caravaggio by purchasing them from the estate of Cardinal Cerasi. I relate these events to give you an idea of the popularity of Caravaggio's work in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century. The two paintings that hang in the chapel (one is visible above right) are the second versions Caravaggio painted to meet his contractual obligation to the estate of Cardinal Cerasi. We'll look at the second version of one of the paintings that hangs in the funerary chapel of Cardinal Cerasi (above left). Although the chapel is dedicated to St. Paul, the subjects of the paintings are St. Peter on one wall and St. Paul on the opposite wall. Our focus is on the Conversion of Saint Paul (above right). Like Venetian painters, Caravaggio worked directly on the canvas without making preliminary drawings. The moment in Saint Paul's life that Cardinal Cerasi chose was the moment Saul's conversion to Christianity begins. Caravaggio's interpretation of this moment is drawn from the Book of Acts in the New Testament that describes what happened to Saul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who had persecuted practicing Christians. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus when light flashed around him. Startled, he fell to the ground—presumably from his horse—and heard a voice. The voice said, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Saul asked who was speaking and the reply was I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. The voice commands him to get up and continue his journey to Damascus. When Saul rose and opened his eyes, he was blind. Led by his companions to Damascus, Saul remained blind for three days until a disciple of Christ healed his vision and baptized Saul, or Paul as a Christian. To dramatize the moment and bring the focus on Paul, Caravaggio used an exaggerated chiaroscuro called tenebrism. The tenebrism creates a high contrast between the pitch-black background and the highlight on Paul and the horse. Paul appears on his back with his arms splayed as though he's had the wind knocked out of him. Caravaggio intended Paul to appear completely struck by the voice he heard and stunned by his encounter with the divine. Caravaggio makes it seem like everything is paused, for just a moment, but is poised to resume. This stillness is a striking component of the composition and emphasizes the powerful effect of an interaction with Christ. At the peak of the Italian Renaissance, many painters strove to organize their composition in a way that the picture plane resembled a kind of window into the real world but separated from the viewer's space. Caravaggio departs from this convention in his composition. He lowers the horizon line so that it's at the sight line of the viewer. He places the body of Paul on the viewer's sight line and creates such a shallow pictorial space with the tenebrism that the figure of Paul is on the edge of the picture plane. So close that Paul's body looks like it could keep skidding across the ground and tumble into the space of the chapel. This striking configuration of pictorial space makes the viewer share the moment with Paul, almost inviting the viewer to experience what it's like to hear the voice of the divine. Some contemporary viewers were not entirely enamored with Caravaggio's composition. They commented that the pictorial space was far too cramped and were offended by the closeness of the horse's rump. They thought Caravaggio's interpretation of this sacred moment was too rustic and therefore inappropriate. On the other hand, many contemporary viewers of Caravaggio's painting found the tenebrism heightened the drama of the moment. They found the unconventional pose of Paul on a diagonal so close to the edge of the picture plane compelling. They argued that the work captured that mystical moment experienced by Saul that sparked his conversion to Christianity and his apostolic mission as Paul.

Death of Morat by Jaques-Louis David

David received a commission to paint a commemorative portrait of Jean-Paul Marat from the Jacobins, the stronger faction of the National Convention. The National Convention was the single-chamber assembly of France during the French Revolution. It was the first French assembly elected by universal (25 years old and employed) male suffrage without other distinctions of class. The portrait was intended for display at Marat's ceremonial funeral. Jean-Paul Marat, the subject of the painting, was a physicist, physician, and editor of a revolutionary news-sheet and had seen himself as a friend of the people. David used the Neoclassical idiom to represent Marat in the service of this commemorative, contemporary political event. David composed the painting much as he had The Oath of the Horatii in that he pared down the setting to its essential elements and set is in an austere space. Rather than choosing a Classical event to allude to the death of Marat, David depicted a murder scene meant to be understood as the scene in Marat's room. This choice made viewers privy to the moment immediately after the murder of Marat in his bath. David, drawing from the traditions of the classicism of Poussin, the grand manner, and Neoclassicism, idealized the figure of Marat. He made him look like a fallen ancient athlete or warrior. Whereas, in reality, Marat suffered from a serious skin condition that ravaged the surface of his body. He found relief from his affliction by soaking in a bath. Marat was soaking in his bath when Charlotte Corday, supporter of Girondin, a rival faction of the National Convention, burst into the room and stabbed him to death. David makes clear how Corday gained access to Marat by depicting her supposed letter requesting an audience with Marat. It reads, in translation, "July 13 1793 Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday to citizen Marat, It is enough for me to be truly wretched to have a right to your kindness. David changed the text; the actual note read, "I am being persecuted for the sake of Liberty; I am unhappy, that is sufficient to give me the right to your protection." David's alteration changes the tone and suggests that Corday was appealing to Marat's kind-heartedness which softens the perception of Marat and further vilifies the murderess Corday. David communicated the act of murder by making the stab wound visible and soaks the bed sheet surrounding the tub with the bloody bath water. David juxtaposes the dagger dropped by Corday on the ground with the quill pen still in the limp hand of Marat. This juxtaposition emphasizes the political nature of the assassination. The shadows surrounding Marat are reminiscent of the dramatic tenebrism of Caravaggio; the shadows intensify the lighter head and limp body of Marat and draw even more attention to the figure. The lighting and lifeless pose are reminiscent of images of the dead Christ. David makes the most of the pictorial vocabulary of religious art to serve the aims of the Jacobins. Essentially, in the Neoclassical idiom, David has created a secularized image of martyrdom, martyrdom for the revolutionary cause of the Jacobins. This painting, among David's finest, immortalizes a contemporary event by giving it a Neoclassical appearance and promotes a political agenda in an exquisite form of political propaganda.

Eiffel Tower

Realism in the late 19th century was expressed in the design structures that straight-forwardly portrayed their purpose. Perhaps one of the best known of these engineering marvels of the late 19th century is the Eiffel Tower. The organizing committee of the Universal Exposition (World's Fair) of 1889 in Paris, commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution, chose this structure as a showpiece of French engineering and design. The committee hired the company responsible for the design, owned and run by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, to build the structure. Done in anticipation of the exposition, Koechlin's initial drawing for the tower (above right) shows the scale of the project in comparison with the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral at Paris and the Statue of Liberty. In fact, Eiffel's company had designed the structural supports for the Statue of Liberty. Eiffel's engineers Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin and the architect Stephen Sauvestre engineered, designed, and oversaw the construction of the tower once the committee awarded the project to Eiffel. Four years before actual construction, Eiffel delivered a paper about the project to the Society of Civil Engineers in which he reviewed the technical challenges of the design and the possible practical uses of the structure. He concluded his paper with a comment about what the tower would symbolize for France, "not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude." Above, from right to left, are photographs of the stages of the construction of the tower—March 1888, August 1888, and December 1888. Gustave Eiffel and Company completed the tower in March 1889. The Eiffel Tower is a metal-truss construction that stands on a base of reinforced concrete. The iron is puddling iron (a type of wrought iron) that is less brittle than cast iron. The tower was manufactured in sections at Eiffel's Parisian factory and the open-lattice iron sections were assembled on the site of the exposition. Constructed of a total of 18,000 pieces of iron held together by 2 ½ million rivets, the Eiffel Tower rises over 1,000 feet in the air. The Eiffel Tower was an engineering marvel that the architect Sauvestre turned into an elegant architectural monument with the subtle curves of Art Nouveau design. The Eiffel Tower, despite its engineering accomplishment and beautiful design, was not to everyone's taste.When the Universal Exposition ended, some detractors circulated a petition demanding its demolition.However, the tower was saved from demolition because of its value as a transmission tower.At its original height, it was twice as tall as the dome on the Church of St. Peter in Rome and the Great Pyramid of Giza.Until the completion of the Empire State Building in New York in 1932, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world

Burial at Ornans by Courbet

Realism was one of the 19th century movements that was a response to societal change and a reaction against Romanticism and academic categories. Realism was a movement in which the artists were concerned with an authenticity and the direct observation of nature French painter Gustave Courbet was a leading Realist painter who argued that art could not be taught. He was born to a rural middle class family in Ornans in eastern France. While at boarding school he had some painting lessons by the Neoclassical painter Charles-Antoine Flajoulot. When Courbet went to Paris to study law, he entered the studio of Charles Steuben for a brief time. He spent his time copying the Spanish, Venetian, and Dutch masters hanging in the Louvre Museum and drawing the live models available at the informal Académie Suisse. He was, essentially, a self-taught painter thus his comment that art could not be taught. He held that the accurate making of art was entirely dependent on the artist's experiences and the studies he made from life. About representing the supernatural in painting, Courbet said, "Show me an angel, and I'll paint one." Burial at Ornans is an example of Courbet's rejection of Romanticism's exotic locales and the academic category of history painting. The subject is a funeral attended by clerics on the left, local officials dressed in red in the center, and to the right men and women dressed in black mourning clothes. Courbet's funeral is attended by people from all walks of life, a reflection of how things were done in his hometown. He employed the long, horizontal composition he knew from Dutch portraits of guild members. However, in Courbet's hands, the effect is different. He used the composition to express a certain repetitiveness found in French country life. The limited variety of poses and the dark, dull color palette contribute to the appearance of monotony with only the Crucifix that pierces the dark sky to break up the horizontality of the scene. Art historians have interpreted the repetitiveness and monotony as an expression of egalitarianism that was a preoccupation with many in the wake of the 1848 revolts against European monarchies. The leg bone and skull at the edge of the grave, at the feet of the men with green and white leg coverings on the right, invite the viewer to contemplate mortality, an inevitability regardless of class or status. Courbet is quite clear about the prosaic nature of the event but paints this ordinary subject in a size usually reserved for academic history painting. This was an innovation but most of the critics who reviewed the painting at the 1850 Salon exhibition didn't think much of this innovation. Many thought the scene was too ordinary and the people were too ugly. Some even interpreted it as anti-clerical. However, one critic understood what Courbet was trying to do, to record his direct observations of everyday life without idealization. This critic wrote that the painting would have the power to remain a portal to realism in modern history

Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery through Reconstruction by Aaron Douglas

A contemporary of Grant Wood was the American painter Aaron Douglas who, unlike Wood, embraced the avant-garde in his work. Douglas, born in Kansas, received his B.A. in art from the University of Nebraska and taught art in Kansas City before moving to New York to pursue a Master's degree at Columbia University. At Columbia, Douglas studied under Winold Reiss who was a proponent of the New Negro Arts Movement. Reiss introduced Douglas to the Philadelphian art collector Albert Barnes who patronized African American artists. Barnes invited Douglas to study his extensive collection of West African sculpture and modernist European painting. This made an impact on Douglas' art and with the encouragement of Reiss, Douglas incorporated elements of African design in his modernist paintings. Douglas and Reiss received an important commission from Alain Locke, a professor at Howard University. They were to illustrate Locke's book The New Negro, an anthology of the work of New Negro writers, later called writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In a letter to the American writer Langston Hughes, Douglas expressed his thoughts about Locke's call for a new art informed by Africa and a celebration of the lives and history of African Americans. In this excerpt from Douglas' letter, the artist comments on the challenges facing African American artists and how they should meet those challenges by developing an African American artistic expression. In Douglas' words, "our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era . . . Let's bare our arms and plunge them deep, deep through the laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material—crude, rough neglected. Then let's sing it, dance, it, write it, paint it . . . Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." By the late 1920s, Douglas became the first president of the Harlem Artists Guild. In the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) which gave artists work. Through the PWAP, Douglas received a commission to paint four murals on canvas for New York Public Library's 135th Street Branch. The subject of Douglas's 1934 murals, Aspects of Negro Life, was the history of African Americans, from their origins in Africa through 1930s America. In this mural, Song of the Towers, Douglas worked in a style that blended aesthetic traditions; for example, he employed modernist flattened forms, the schematic forms of West African sculpture, and the composite view of ancient Egyptian figures. On the left, Douglas depicts a figure fleeing the grasping hand that represents the rural serfdom suffered by African Americans in the Jim Crow south. The figure on the right with a suitcase signals the successful escape from southern servitude. His ascent of the concrete steps represents the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north in the early 20th century. The saxophonist in the center is a reference to jazz, the musical genre developed by African Americans in New Orleans and Chicago. The jazz musician stands on the enormous cog of a machine in a cavern between skyscrapers. This represents African American creativity in new urban settings—here the setting is New York signaled by the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty in the background. Yet, the triumph of African American creativity may be a fleeting moment, because the cog will soon turn. Douglas is expressing the tenuous hold African Americans had on the promise of a better life in the north.

Judith Slaying Holofernes by Caravaggio and Gentileschi

Caravaggio's tenebrism and predilection for dramatic compositions appealed to other painters. Art historians call the painters who mimicked Caravaggio's style followers. This term indicates a familiarity with the look of an artist's work but not a working relationship with the artist. Caravaggio didn't have a workshop with apprentices so there were no students to perpetuate the look of his work. Followers of Caravaggio embraced his idea of casting areas of the composition in shadow for effect and the idea of representing figures as everyday people, not idealized forms. One of the followers of Caravaggio was a Roman Baroque painter who learned to paint in her father's workshop, Artemisia Gentileschi. Yes, I said «her father's workshop.» I know, it's the first appearance of a female artist. Artemisia Gentileschi was remarkable because she made a living as a painter in a profession that was otherwise dominated by men. One obstacle, of many, that prevented women from pursuing careers as a painters was the social convention that prohibited women from receiving training in figure drawing which required the dissection of cadavers and the study of nude male figures. This prohibition explains why some of the few professional European female painters made it their specialty to depict heroic women. Another obstacle was the social convention that women were supposed to marry, produce children, and run the household; there was not the expectation that they have a trained profession. Above right is an example of the work of Artemesia Gentileschi. The subject and title are Judith Slaying Holofernes. Gentileschi painted this in the first quarter of the 17° century, almost a decade after Caravaggio's death. However, when you compare it with Caravaggio's treatment of the same subject (above left), you see that Gentileschi uses the same tenebrism to enhance the drama of the scene unfolding. If you look carefully at the two compositions, you might conclude that Gentileschi was more successful in painting a more believable depiction of the strength needed to decapitate a man. Judith convincingly pushes against Holofernes' head for leverage to draw the blade across his neck as her maid Abra is an active participant. Caravaggio's composition looks more like a staged melodrama whereas Gentileschi's is more like a dramatic staging of a gruesome Biblical event. The subject matter of the painting comes from the Old Testament Book of Judith in which the Assyrian ruler Nebuchadnezzar ordered the Assyrian General Holofernes to destroy the land of Judah. When Judith learns of the imminent threat to her town, she takes it upon herself to devise a plan to save her people. Judith, with her maid Abra, goes to the military encampment of the Assyrians. She seeks Holofernes, seduces him, and plies him with enough drink to put him in a drunken stupor. When he appears incapacitated, Judith and Abra get to work. Judith seizes the general's sword, Abra holds him down, and Judith uses the sword. Judith cut clean through and took Holofernes' head with her when she left his tent. She and Abra returned to their town where they displayed Holofernes' head on the town walls. Finding this grizzly display and having lost their leader, the Assyrian troops took flight. Judith was the hero who delivered her people from the enemy. Some art historians have utilized a biographical analysis to tease out more meaning from this painting. They suggest that Artemisia Gentileschi's seduction and rape by a painter in her father's workshop was the impetus for her depiction of a woman violently attacking a man. The facts are established; a painter did seduce and rape Gentileschi. Her family pressed charges against the male painter for the offence of the violation of a virgin (stupor violente) and the matter went to court. Gentileschi was vindicated. The seduction and rape was not uncommon in 17th century Rome and likewise families with means filed charges and went to court to restore the family's honor. When the matter was decided in favor of the violated woman and her family, the offender had to pay compensation. What Gentileschi went through, without a doubt, was traumatic, but it was not remarkable. Many women were subject to violent attack and rape. The suggestion by art historians that Gentileschi's personal history is expressed in the subject matter may be slightly off the mark. Certainly, Gentileschi's horrifying experience gave her insight and may have contributed to the immediacy she brought to her violent compositions. In this composition, Gentileschi emphasizes the subject by using the brightest highlight on the arms of Abra and Judith and on the arms and legs of Holofernes. She contrasts this with tenebrism—the darkness that surrounds them. She posed the limbs to guide the viewer's gaze to the focal point—the neck, blade, and blood. Her arrangement of forms and use of light heighten the drama of Judith's violent act. However, Gentileschi's specialization in the depiction of women was not because she had been raped; it was because of the restraints and limitations placed on the artistic training of women. Furthermore, the subject for this painting was chosen by the patron who commissioned the painting, the Dowager Grand Duchess of Florence, Critina de Lorena. The depiction of Judith slaying Holofernes was not an unusual subject. We just saw an earlier version of the same subject painted by Caravaggio. The subject appealed to Italian patrons who had a tase for drama and a tolerance for a violent scene. The message of the subject however is not violence; the message is heroism as perceived in the 17th century. Judith was seen as a heroine who, in the face of great odds, liberated her people. This message of the triumph of the underdog resonated with patrons of Baroque painting and particularly with the Dowager Grand Duchess of Florence. Florence had a long history of patronizing images of underdog heroes; for example, the story of David that we saw in the works by Donatello and Michelangelo.

Pauline Borghese as Venus by Antonio Canova

In 1804, the Italian Prince Camillo Borghese commissioned this life-size sculpted portrait of his wife, Pauline Bonaparte, shortly after their marriage. Historians point to Napoleon Bonaparte as instrumental in arranging his sister's second marriage that united his aspiring family with Italian nobility and suggest that it was with an eye to legitimize Napoleon's future claim to the Kingdom of Italy. Borghese hired the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova for the portrait. Canova was born into a family of stonecutters and sculptors. He apprenticed with the sculptor Giuseppe Bernardi, toured Italian collections of art in 1779-80, and then set up his own studio in Rome. Before setting up his independent studio, his work was somewhat reminiscent of the dramatic Italian Baroque. After establishing his own studio, he worked in the popular new style of the Neoclassical. Borghese's original commission was for a depiction of Pauline as Diana, the chaste huntress of ancient Roman legend. But Pauline insisted on being represented as Venus. That then became Canova's remit. He depicted Pauline Bonaparte Borghese as a reclining Venus holding an apple in her hand. This is the apple Paris gave to her, a prize for being the most beautiful goddess in that famous beauty contest of ancient Greek legend. The figure is Venus Victorious. Canova sculpted the figure in the popular idiom of the Neoclassical that mimicked the idealized and pared down forms of ancient sculptures. Canova was responsible for the design, outsourced the rough carving to a sculpture workshop, then sculpted the final refinements of the form. The choice to represent Pauline Bonaparte Borghese as Venus had two motives. Pauline was confident in her beauty and charm and embraced the association with the goddess of love and the standard of beauty both during antiquity and since the Renaissance. The other motive was to underscore the Borghese family's claim to have descended from Aeneas, the son of Venus and legendary founder of Roman civilization. The association with Venus suggests a continuity with the ancient world that served the political aims of the Bonaparte clan to reconstitute the ancient Roman Empire. Napoleon as a patron of works in the Neoclassical style imported artists working in that idiom to France. He commissioned works from them that complemented his imperial ambitions. For example, Napoleon summoned Antonio Canova to Paris. At first, Canova was reluctant to serve Napoleon but with the pope's encouragement, Canova accepted Napoleon's invitation. As the imperial court sculptor to Napoleon, Canova made an impact on the development of Neoclassical sculpture in France. After the fall of Napoleon, Canova returned to Italy. The pope appointed Canova as the Inspector General of Antiquities for the Vatican and, in a twist of fate, Canova returned to Paris to arrange the restitution of all the Italian treasures that Napoleon's imperial troops had plundered from Italy.

Salon de la Princesse

Rococo flourished from about 1700 to 1775. Rococo works of art and architecture expressed urbane wit, frivolity, and elegance. Rococo was the art patronized by the aristocracy. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the central patronage of the arts dissipated, and the center of French taste shifted from the royal court to the aristocracy. The aristocracy, following the monarch's death, left Versailles and set up new residences in Parisian townhouses. These townhouses, called hôtel, were gathering places for people of achievement to engage in the art of conversation and intellectual exchange. These gatherings, called salon, were hosted by the wealthy owners of Parisian townhouses, usually a well-educated woman as hostess. Above is a view into the interior of the Rococo salon in the Hôtel de Soubise commissioned by Hercule Mériadec de Rohan, Prince de Rohan and a Duke of Brittany. This is a typical Rococo salon interior decorated with the shell motif, curvaceous floral motifs, serpentine forms, and a palette of dull, light color. Prince de Rohan hired Germain Boffrand to design the architectural interiors of the townhouse. Boffrand conceived the salon as an elliptical room based on earlier designs by the Italian Mannerist architect Palladio. Boffrand articulated the interior walls with patterns of gilded floral designs and niches for paintings. The Prince de Rohan commissioned paintings for the shallow niches in the spandrels of the arcuated walls and windows. He hired Charles-Joseph Natoire to paint scenes from the ancient story of Psyche and Eros as a philosophical allegory of the soul's (psyche) search for union with desire (eros). The story is based on a late ancient Roman story about Psyche and Eros. Psyche was a young mortal woman so beautiful that she aroused the envy of the goddess of love, Venus. Venus sent Eros, her winged offspring, to make Psyche fall in love with a worthless mortal. However, when Eros set eyes on Psyche, he fell madly in love with her himself and saved her from that fate. Eros paid Psyche nightly visits for romantic trysts but didn't allow Psyche to see him in the light, not wanting to reveal his true immortal nature. But curiosity got the better of Psyche. During one of the nightly encounters, when Eros had fallen asleep, Psyche lit an oil lamp to see her lover. Some of the hot oil spilled onto Eros, he awoke, and angrily left Psyche because she had seen his true nature. For years afterward the two lovers pined for eachother and Psyche undertook many labors in order to satisfy Jupiter's price for reuniting them. The Prince de Rohan thought that this subject of the soul's (psyche) search for union with desire (eros) was a complement to the philosophical discussions that took place in the room. The lively and airy interior with painted decoration is typical of Rococo taste and this look set the tone for the social and intellectual gatherings in the salon.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

The American painter Edward Hopper painted the American scene and was both a Regionalist and Social Realist. He combined aspects of these movements in his paintings that principally feature urban interiors, urban landscapes, and rural landscapes that express the solitude of American life in the middle decades of the 20th century. Edward Hopper grew up in a middle-class family that encouraged his artistic aspirations but recommended that he follow a career in commercial illustration rather than painting because of the economic uncertainty of the latter. After high school, Hopper enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City and continued his study of illustrating at the New York School of Art. He supplemented his studies by taking painting lessons with leading New York artists. Through these lessons, Hopper honed his skill of painting the world around him realistically, and like Grant Wood, after European study trips, he had little interest in the avant-garde. Early in his career he exhibited at two groundbreaking exhibitions, at The Eight which was a group show in protest of the conservative tastes of the juries of the National Academy of Design and at the Armory Show. Art critics positively regarded his work as typically American; they praised his realism and the personal content of his canvases. Hopper painted his most iconic image, Nighthawks (above), in the winter of 1941 and used a diner on a wedge-shaped corner of Greenwich Avenue in his New York neighborhood as his model. In Nighthawks, Hopper painted a scene of a diner at night in which the figures are lost in their private thoughts. The scene is the antithesis of a bustling city; it portrays the overwhelming silence and stillness of a city at night. Writing about this painting, Hopper explains that Nighthawks, "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet . . . I didn't see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger." Hopper, a painter committed to realism, made seventeen preparatory drawings of coffee urns, objects for the counter, and the figure studies. In these drawings, he stripped away non-essential details. The composition is balanced by horizontal and vertical components. For example, the vertical mullions of the plate glass windows and the storefront and second story windows in the background are echoed by the vertical coffee urns, the wall, and the door on that back wall of the diner. These vertical passages are balanced by the horizontal expanse of the plate glass windows, the lunch counter, the storefront in the background, and the street that wraps around the diner. These strong geometric horizontal and vertical components frame the organic, curved figures of the diners and the hunched counter man. In a complex, seamless visual passage, Hopper connects the diner with the street. Viewed from a position outside the diner, the gaze travels through the transparent barriers of the diner's two large plate glass windows and arrives out in the street again. Hopper's virtuosity of painting creates the illusion of the transparency of plate glass and the color of fluorescent light that passes through the plate glass and floods the street. The light makes the street visible while emphasizing the interior of the diner. The artificial glow of fluorescent light contrasts with and, at the same time, balances the darkest corner of the urban landscape. Hopper amplifies the anonymity of the figures by making them appear to act independently of one another, not as companions. For example, the counter man may or may not be addressing the man seated next to the woman in red. She holds a book of matches which she may or may not use to light the adjacent man's cigarette. The stillness of the figures in a hushed urban landscape conveys Hopper's perception of this corner of Manhattan, not far from his painting studio; a fleeting moment of a city at night. The isolation and silence in this painting is a recurring theme in the body of work of Edward Hopper. Critics of his work offer endless interpretations of this theme—loneliness, alienation, melancholy. Hopper, at one point, did say that "the loneliness thing is overdone." However, Hopper, an observer of individuals, did acknowledge that in Nighthawks "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." In the letter Hopper wrote to the director of the Art Institute of Chicago when the institute purchased this painting, Hopper assesses his own painting. He writes, "It is . . . one of the very best things I have painted. I seem to come nearer to saying what I want to say in my work, this past winter, than I ever have before." This painting is the culmination of Hopper's body of work and is a modern masterpiece of American Regionalism and Realism in the 20th century.

The Tub by Edgar Degas

The French painter Edgar Degas trained at the École des Beaux-Arts where he mastered draftsmanship as beautiful as the sure line of Ingres. As a young man he developed the foundations for his signature combination of careful contour lines with loose brushwork. Degas was one of the founders of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and participated in their independent exhibitions. His favorite subjects were racehorses, laundresses, ballet dancers, singers, and women at their toilette which, except for the races, took place indoors unlike the outdoor subjects exhibited by other members of the Anonymous Society. Degas never reconciled himself to the label Impressionist that was applied invariably to the artists of the Anonymous Society after the third exhibition of 1877. He referred to himself as a Realist or an Independent, still distinguishing himself from academic painters. In the 1880s, Degas often worked with pastel crayons which he found gave him more direct and immediate results than oil paint. This pastel, The Tub, is a composition that focuses on forms rather than identity. The woman is anonymous, her face concealed, yet her form makes up the center of the composition. Degas was more concerned with the folded form of her body and the curve of her back than he was with her character. Another component of the composition is the ambiguous depiction of pictorial space. Both the subject and space are the result of Degas' close study of Japanese woodblock prints. He first saw them in the Japanese exhibit at the Paris Universal Exposition (World's Fair) of 1878. Japanese woodblock prints depicted various subjects, such as theater, dance, and woman performing daily tasks. Collecting them became a fad in Paris and Japonisme, the French term for the Japanese aesthetic, became fashionable in Paris. French artists and designers incorporated the aesthetic in their work. Degas collected Japanese prints and studied them for their subjects and ambiguous rendering of space which he then incorporated in his compositions like The Tub. Degas owned a copy of Women at Bath (top right) by the Japanese printmaker Kiyonaga Torii and hung it over his bed. The print depicts the intimate act of women and a child at their bath. Degas echoes the intimate but everyday gestures of a woman's toilette in his pastel The Tub and mimics the passages of ambiguous perspective. For example, the shelf on the right seems to rush up to meet the surface of the paper. The tilt suggests that the two pitchers, seen frontally, would slide off the shelf but, they defy perspective and gravity and do not appear to move. The pitchers cast no shadows which makes them appear somewhat flat. The woman, fully three-dimensional and casting shadows, is seen from above, like the shelf, but the draped white cloth in the background is seen from the front. Degas' play of three-dimensional forms with flatter forms signals a growing interest in acknowledging the surface of the picture plane as part of the composition, a signal of a modern way of approaching the creation of art. Degas exhibited The Tub at the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition in 1886.

Chrysler Building

The tallest building in the world, for a short time in 1932, was the Chrysler Building, a monument to the Chrysler automobile company and exemplary of a design movement that emerged in the 1920s, spanned the Depression-ridden 1930s, and was still popular through the 1940s in Europe and America. Sometimes referred to as Jazz Modern or art moderne, the design movement is most often called art deco. This term was coined in the 1960s, derived from the name of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris that brought together thousands of designs from Europe and drew 16 million visitors. Designers exhibited pieces that were an eclectic mix of styles borrowed from various traditions-the forms of industrial machines, European avant-garde, traditional European styles, the arts and materials of Africa and Asia, and the archaeological finds of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica In America, art deco was less self-consciously elegant and ostentatious than French art deco because American designers favored clean, uncluttered lines in their designs of stylized, geometric natural forms and machine-made aesthetic. Characteristic of American art deco were stream-lined forms, and the preeminent example of American art deco design is the Chrysler Building in New York city. The automobile magnate Walter Chrysler jumped on the opportunity to house his company's offices in New York city when he purchased the building project of real estate developer and former New York State Senator William H. Reynolds. The American architect William van Alen designed the building in 1928. Chrysler asked van Alen to apply modern design to his design for the skyscraper because Chrysler wanted the building to represent his and his company's modern and imaginative thinking. According to the Chrysler Company's promotional booklet, published for opening day of the building, the object of the building was to be "a thoroughly modern structure in every practical detail." An example of the art deco style that reflects the machine aesthetic is the stainless-steel spire of semi-circular forms that decrease in size as they reach the apex. The text of the promotional booklet draws attention to the style of the architecture and what the style says about the Chrysler Company in the following passage. The architectural design is, according to the booklet, "one of the outstanding examples of the application of modern art tendencies to the skyscraper. Its sponsor has expressed the same imagination and the same foresight in anticipating critical public demand that have given the name Chrysler international prestige as the symbol of new thinking and new daring in going beyond the less imaginative." Despite its shameless self-promotion, the booklet underscores the importance of van Alen's art deco design, the modern way of thinking associated with art deco, and the impact art deco design made on the public's perception of the company. van Alen's designs for the lobby and elevators use two of the prominent motifs of art deco, vegetal and streamline machine forms. For the elevator doors, van Alen created a stylized lotus motif based on ancient Egyptian art. For the lobby, van Alen relied on the machine aesthetic of geometric shapes that echo the lines of the skyscraper. On the ceiling of the lobby he placed a mural of the building's exterior to call to mind the high-rise structure that stretches above the lobby and to emphasize verticality. van Alen's design of the Chrysler Building made an impact on other media of art, such as the movies. The machine aesthetic of the Chrysler Building's lobby (left) is clearly mimicked in Cedric Gibbons' design for the Wizard's Audience Hall (right) in the 1939 Wizard of Oz. Hollywood and the movie studios used art deco design to represent modernity, fantasy, or the look of the future in movies of the 1930s and 40s. van Alen's design of this 77-story building is a master synthesis of the streamline aesthetic of art deco. In the details of his design are references to the nature of the Chrysler Company. On the 61st floor, van Alen mounted stainless steel eagle hood ornaments reminiscent of the gargoyle rain-spouts of Gothic cathedrals. On the 31st floor, van Alen placed winged radiator caps at the corners of a frieze of an abstract car motif reminiscent of friezes on the exterior of Mesopotamian citadels. Just as New York's Woolworth Building was fashioned as a cathedral of commerce in 1913, it can be said that van Alen's Chrysler Building was a cathedral of the automotive industry.

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery by Joseph Wright of Derby

Up to this point, I've focused on the preferences of the monarchy, aristocracy, and middle class in the 18th century. I'd like to take a moment to mention philosophical and scientific ideas that would come to shape western European society and culture. In the 18th century, a challenge to absolute monarchy was posed by followers of John Locke's 17th century political philosophy. Locke argued against the divine right of kings and supported the view that government was based on a contract between the ruler and the ruled, a secular government. In the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau complicated this idea by positing that the so-called contract was among the people. New and enlightened ways of thinking were the foundation for the arguments made and action taken in the 18th century. The outcome of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution shattered the belief in the divine right of kings and these new ways of thinking informed the men who wrote the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. Another thread of the 18th century Enlightenment, with roots in the 17th century, was empiricism. Empiricism posits that all knowledge of fact derives from experience. This point of view was the basis of the scientific method and led to the classification of various branches of knowledge. Empiricists encouraged intellectual inquiry, fostered a belief in human progress and concomitantly believed in the human ability to control nature. These new perceptions of the world are reflected in modern art theory and the foundations of the academic discipline of art history. The Enlightenment gave rise to new subjects in art, in particular the practice of science and industry. An example of this subject is A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery painted by Joseph Wright. Born the son of a lawyer in Derby, England, Wright trained as a painter under Thomas Hudson and forged a career as a portraitist. By the mid 1760s, Wright expanded his repertoire to what he called "Candlelight" paintings of primarily scientific subjects. The patrons and collectors of his work were the middle class of Derby and leaders of industry in this area of England. Wright's friendship with members of the Lunar Society, a group of men interested in experimental science, brought him into contact with scientific ideas of the Enlightenment but there is no proof that Wright shared their commitment to science, scientific education, or the notion of human progress that fueled the English Industrial Revolution. Ironically, his "Candlelight" paintings of scientific subjects placed him as the first painter of the Industrial Revolution. Washington Shirley, the Fifth Earl Ferrers, commissioned this painting with a scientific subject that reflected more the earl's interests than those of Joseph Wright according to the most recent research published by Matthew Craske. This painting, exhibited in an independent gallery in 1766, shows a natural philosopher—what we call a scientist—demonstrating the function of an orrery. The orrery was a mechanical model of the solar system named after the Earl of Orrery who invented this early type of planetarium. Wright's visual idiom to represent a moment of scientific education makes the scene more enchanting than rational. Joseph Wright of Derby mimicked the effects of candlelight to infuse the scene with mystery and drama. The tenebrism with regions of deep shadow make the lit areas shimmer. Yet, Wright uses the highlighted areas of his composition to convey the meaning of the experiment. Wright of Derby placed the light source in the position of the sun in a demonstration of an eclipse based on Isaac Newton's assertion that the plants move around the sun, not the earth. Art historians have made much of Wright's use of light and argue that the light is a metaphor for the illumination of knowledge and learning. That may have been the meaning derived by the patron; however, Joseph Wright of Derby was more interested in the dramatic potential of candlelight to express mystery.

Las Meninias (Maids of Honor) by Velazquez

Velázquez's primary duties as the official royal painter were to paint portraits of the royal family, oversee decoration, and supervise the renovations of the royal residences of Philip IV of Spain. Among Velázquez's many paintings, Las Meninas (above) is perhaps the most well known. The title is derived from the Portuguese word for ladies in waiting, a word that the Spanish court used for the maids of honor of the Spanish royal children in the 17th century. Velázquez painted this oil on canvas a few years before his death. It is a good example of his mature style and shows his free handling of paint. In the close-up on the left, you can see that Velázquez's free handling of the paint leaves behind textural effects on the surface and softens the contours of the figures. If you compare this with The Water Carrier of Seville, you see how his style matured over time. Las Meninas is a portrait of the Spanish royal family in an unconventional composition. The complex composition is filled with many figures. On the left standing next to a large canvas is a man holding a palette and paint brush, a short girl stands between a slightly older girl kneeling on the left and another standing on the right. To the right of this group of girls is a dwarf, a little person, and a mastiff. In the middleground near the right wall stand a man and a woman. In the doorway in the background stands a man. To the left of the man is a mirror reflecting a man and a woman not seen in the composition. Velázquez created the illusion of pictorial space by plotting three separate one-point linear perspectives. Look above left and see the orthogonals in red converge at a vanishing point on the door jamb, the orthogonals in blue converge at a vanishing point at chest height of the man in the doorway, and above right, the faint yellow orthogonals converge at a vanishing point on the head of the little girl—three separate one-point linear perspectives. The overlap of these perspective creates a complex pictorial space that almost has the effect of a moving target. Above left, the vertical green axis is where the viewer is imagined standing, in line with the reflection of the man and woman in the mirror. Implied triangles unify multiple focal points, as seen on the right; the green triangle connects the painter with the little girl and the dwarf, the red triangle connects the mirror, man in the doorway, and the little girl. Velázquez continues to emphasize the young girl by casting the brightest highlight on her. Velázquez's color palette consists of low intensity brown, grey, beige, and black that are a backdrop for spots of saturated red—the jug held by the girl on the left, the flowers on the little girl, the flowers on the wrist of the girls on the right, the garment of the little person, and the drapery reflected in the mirror. These spots of red lead a viewer across the groups in the foreground and then to the mirror in the background. There has been much scholarly discussion of the visual illusion and reality depicted in this canvas. One of the most frequent points of discussion is whether the king and queen, reflected in the mirror, are standing in front of the princess, the little girl. If so, Queen Mariana and King Philip IV are standing in the viewer's space and would be the subjects of the unseen painting; that is, the painting in the composition that viewers can see only the back of. Regardless of the presence of the king and queen, the subject of Las Meninas is the Infanta, or Princess Margarita She is the little girl, dressed in white in the center of the composition. She is flanked by her ladies in waiting (las meninas), kneeling Maria Agustina de Sarmiento who serves the infanta a jug of water on a tray and standing, Isabel de Valsco. Two court entertainers and companions stand to the right of the group of girls; they are Maria Barbola and Nicolasito Pertusato with his foot on the mastiff. In the middleground, Lady Marcela de Ulloa is in conversation with a guard. Standing in the doorway is the queen's chamberlain Jose Nieto. Hanging on the back wall are works painted by Velázquez's son-in-law, they are mythological paintings based on originals by Rubens. Queen Marian of Austria and her husband King Philip IV of Spain are reflected in the mirror. The man standing in front of the enormous canvas is Velázquez. The setting is the court studio of Velázquez. Velázquez took over the rooms after the tragic and untimely death in 1646 of Prince Baltasar Carlos who had been the heir to the throne. Velázquez use of the rooms is an indication of the privileges he was given by the Spanish royal family and show that he is an intimate member of the household. The red cross on the chest of Velázquez is a reference to the Order of Santiago (St. James). Velázquez, for many years, had attempted to become a knight in the Order of Santiago, a prestigious fraternal organization. However, the by-laws of the order disqualified him—he was not a member of a noble family, he had Muslim ancestry, and he was a craftsman. Yet, he persisted and did not cease to petition the order for membership and rallied support from the king, the pope, and other influential people until, finally, the order acquiesced and made him a member. The red cross emblem of the Order of Santiago however was not in the original painting by Velázquez. Documentary evidence suggests that the king ordered the addition of the cross after the artist's death to honor his favorite and most trusted court painter. The paintings on the back wall certainly are a reference to Velázquez's son-in-law but more significantly they create a link to Rubens, the great Flemish painter who was well-born, educated, a painter at court in Flanders and Italy, and a diplomat. It was Rubens who suggested the king send Velázquez to Italy and it was Rubens' work that Velázquez admired. Velázquez, in this unconventional composition, placed himself in the company of the royal family to signal his importance at court as the king's preferred and official painter and as the king's ambassador on diplomatic missions. Velázquez's self-portrait is an affirmation of the significant role he played at court for over 30 years. Most of Velázquez's work was done for Philip IV and remained in the royal residences which meant that his work had a limited audience. It wasn't until the Napoleonic War in the early 19th century that his work was dispersed throughout western Europe and that was when his body of work made an impact on other painters.

Consequences of War by Peter Paul Ruebens

When Rubens returned to Antwerp, Flanders was still under the control of the Spanish Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella. Impressed with Rubens' work, Archduke Albert hired him as court painter in Antwerp. Like Gonzaga, Archduke Albert sent Rubens on a diplomatic missions. In the late 1620s, Archduke Albert sent Rubens to the Court of Spain to assist in the negotiations between Spain and England. Rubens advised King Philip IV on art collecting and it was during this diplomatic assignment that Rubens suggested the king send Velázquez to Italy. In 1638, during the Thirty Years War, Ferdinando II de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, commissioned a painting from Rubens. Perhaps as a counterpart to the Allegory of Peace that Rubens painted for King Charles I of England, Ferdinando II asked for an allegory of war. Rubens took this opportunity to express his own view on the European conflict through monumental figures on a large canvas. In a letter written to Justus Sustermans, court painter to the Grand Duke Ferdinando II, Rubens describes and explains the meaning of his painting, the Consequences of War. Please read the translation of his explanation excerpted in your textbook on page 743. Rubens' Consequences of War unfolds in front of the Temple of Janus, an ancient Roman temple kept closed during times of peace. In Rubens' composition the doors of the temple are wide open. Mars, the helmeted figure of the Roman god of war, is on the march trampling a book and drawing paper. This is an allusion to war's destruction of the arts, learning, and literature. On the right, Alecto, the ancient Roman god of the fury of war, pulls Mars forward. Forward toward Mars' stalwart companions, the monstrous personifications of Plague and Famine. Tumbling to the ground, in front of war's onslaught, an architect with the tools of his trade lies sprawled on his back. This is an allusion to war laying waste to everything built in peacetime for humanity's benefit. Behind the architect, a mother and child cower in fear. They are symbols of fecundity and tenderness that war destroys. In front of the mother and child, a woman breaks her lute as she falls to the ground next to the architect. The broken instrument is an allegory of discord wrought by war. Just left of center, the sensuous figure of Venus, the ancient Roman goddess of love, pleads with Mars not to go to war and attempts to hold him back. Rubens uses the unbound bundle of arrows at Venus' feet to indicate her failure to convince Mars to turn back. The arrows, when bound together were a symbol of concord; unbound, the arrows become a symbol of discord. Behind Venus, a wailing woman with her arms raised in grief personifies Christian Europe. Rubens identifies her by the attribute of a globe surmounted by a cross. She raises her arms in despair because the prolonged war has robbed her of her worldly goods, her virtue, and has subjected her to misery. Rubens' message in the Consequences of War is exceptionally pessimistic. Even love cannot restrain the blind brutality of war, specifically the Thirty Years War that plunged western Europe into a mire of destruction and left humanity broken in its wake. Rubens' figure of Venus is voluptuous, with generous breasts and rippling flesh. This voluptuous vision was equated with prosperity. This plump and sensuous female figure is now called Rubenesque.