Quiz 5

Courbet, The Stonebreakers

- 1849 painting by the French painter Gustave Courbet - work of social realism, depicts two peasants, a young man and an old man, breaking rocks. - first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1850 - concern for the poor is at the forefront of the painting - Unlike Millet, who, in paintings like The Gleaners, was known for depicting hard-working, but idealized peasants, Courbet depicts figures who wear ripped and tattered clothing. - Courbet was the leading figure in the Realist movement. Using a palette of dirty browns and grays, he conveyed the dreary and dismal nature of menial labor in mid-19th-century France. - suggests that the laborers are physically and economically trapped - Courbet wants to show what is "real," and so he has depicted a man that seems too old and a boy that seems still too young for such back-breaking labor. This is not meant to be heroic: it is meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life. - implies that those born to poverty will stay there their entire life - stonebreaking was backbreaking, poorly paid work that fell to the lowest members of French society

Millet, Gleaners

- In The Gleaners (fig. 27-28), he depicted three impoverished women—members of the lowest level of peasant society—performing the backbreaking task of gleaning. Landowning nobles traditionally permitted peasants to glean, or collect, the wheat scraps left in the field after the harvest. - Millet's investiture of the poor with solemn grandeur did not meet with approval from the prosperous classes. In particular, middle-class landowners resisted granting gleaning rights,

Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare

- In his "impression" of the Saint-Lazare railway terminal, Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris's modern transportation hub. The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape. Monet's agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life.

Caillebotte's Paris: A Rainy Day

- commemorates the redesigning of Paris - Although Caillebotte did not dissolve his image into the broken color and brushwork characteristic of Monet's version of Impressionism, his composition is, save for the central lamppost, strongly asymmetrical and in violation of academic norms of design. The major building in the painting is at the upper left, a large empty space is at the lower left, and the largest figures are at the lower right. The frame also cuts off parts of Caillebotte's figures, underscoring that the men and women in this painting are moving and that this is a transitory moment in the life of the city and its residents. Significantly, those residents are all well-dressed Parisians of the leisure class—the only ones who could afford to live in the elegant new neighborhoods that Haussmann created. Thus, despite the sharp focus of Paris: A Rainy Day, the picture is the artist's "impression" of modern urban life. In fact, many city dwellers of the time complained that the new Paris was too impersonal and anonymous. Caillebotte incorporated that less celebratory view of the city by showing the pedestrians moving through Haussmann's Paris on a dreary, rainy day and by depicting all of them in similar dress and carrying identical umbrellas.

Winslow Homer, Veteran in a New Field

- commentary on the effects and aftermath of the civil war - a man with his back to the viewer, harvesting wheat. Homer identified him as a veteran by including his uniform and canteen carelessly thrown on the ground in the lower right corner. The man's current occupation, however, is as a farmer, and he has cast aside his former role as a soldier, as did the veterans of America's Revolutionary War in the previous century. The Civil War veteran's involvement in meaningful and productive work implies a smooth transition from war to peace. This postwar transition to work and the fate of disbanded soldiers were national concerns - also comments symbolically about death

Courbet, Burial at Ornans

- depicts the funeral of an ordinary man and is nearly 22 feet long - Although the painting has the imposing scale of a traditional history painting, the subject's ordinariness and the starkly antiheroic composition horrified critics. Burial at Ornans is not a record of the burial of a Christian martyr or a heroic soldier. It commemorates a recurring event involving common folk, and it does not ennoble or romanticize death. - The seemingly equal stature of all at the funeral also offended the hierarchical social sensibility of the Salon audience. - In place of the heroic, the sublime, and the dramatic (the mourners are all emotionally detached), Courbet aggressively presented Salon viewers with the mundane realities of daily life and death.

Vincent van Gogh Night Café

- explored the ways that colors and distorted forms can express emotions - aimed to convey an oppressive atmosphere - he communicated the madness of the place by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposition augmented their intensity - van gogh insisted on the expressive value of color; this led him to develop an expressiveness in his paint application (which involved direction, thickness, and shape of his brushstrokes)

Origins of Photography

- invented during 1820s - suited realism, as photography made art more accessible. art during this time turned away from the patronage of a wealthy elite - challenged the place of traditional modes of pictoral representation

Georges Seurat

- investigated color theory - invented pointilism - Post-Impressionism - The subjects of Seurat's paintings of the 1880s were essentially Impressionist themes, but unlike the Impressionists and ToulouseLautrec, Seurat depicted modern life in a resolutely intellectual way. He devised a disciplined and painstaking system of painting focused on color analysis. Seurat was less concerned with the recording of immediate color sensations than he was with their careful and systematic organization into a new kind of pictorial order. He disciplined the free and fluent play of color characterizing Impressionism into a calculated arrangement based on scientific color theory. Seurat's system, which he called divisionism, but which is better known as pointillism, involves carefully observing color and separating it into its component parts - most famous painting is La Grande Jatte

Manet, Olympia

- loosely based on Titian's Venus of Urbino - the subject is a naked prostitute - horrified the public and critics - One reviewer of the Salon of 1865 (remarkably, the jury accepted Manet's painting for inclusion) described the painter as "the apostle of the ugly and repulsive." Although images of prostitutes were not unheard of during this period, the shamelessness of Olympia and her look verging on defiance shocked viewers - public perceived Manet's inclusion of both a black maid and a nude prostitute as evoking moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality. The contrast of the black servant with the fair-skinned courtesan also conjured racial divisions. - Manet's style was criticized too bc the painter's brushstrokes are much rougher and the shifts in tonality are far more abrupt than those found in traditional academic painting.

Pugin and Barry, Houses of Parliament

- neo-gothic buildings in england - During the 19th century, architects revived many historical styles, often reflecting nationalistic pride. The Houses of Parliament have an exterior veneer and towers that recall English Late Gothic style. - Pugin was one of a group of English artists and critics who saw moral purity and spiritual authenticity in the religious architecture of the Middle Ages and revered the careful medieval artisans who built the great cathedrals. - The Industrial Revolution was flooding the market with cheaply made and ill-designed commodities. Machine work was replacing handicraft. Many, Pugin included, believed in the necessity of restoring the old artisanship, which they felt embodied honesty as well as quality - The design of the Houses of Parliament, however, is not genuinely Gothic, despite its picturesque tower groupings (the Clock Tower, housing Big Ben, at one end, and the Victoria Tower at the other). The building has a formal axial plan and a kind of Palladian regularity beneath its Neo-Gothic detail.

Manet, Luncheon on the Grass of 1863

- rejected by the jury for the 1863 Salon - not truly realism because the subject is incomprehensible - references and allusions to many artistic genres—history painting, portraiture, pastoral scenes, nudes, and even religious scenes. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe is Manet's impressive synthesis and critique of the entire history of painting. - this painting outraged the French public. Le Déjeuner is not populated by anonymous idealized figures in an idyllic setting (like most pastoral paintings). Instead, it features ordinary men and promiscuous women in a Parisian park. - the style of painting was seen as crude

Daumier, Rue Transnonain

- similar to Goya's third of may - The title refers to the day when, on that street in Paris, an unknown sniper killed a civil guard, part of a government force trying to repress a worker demonstration. Because the fatal shot had come from a workers' housing block, the remaining guards immediately stormed the building and massacred all of its inhabitants. - The print's power derives from its factualness.

Salon Exhibitions

For both artists and art historians, modernist art stands in marked contrast to, indeed in forceful opposition to, academic art—that is, to the art promoted by the established art schools such as the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in France (founded in 1648) and the Royal Academy of Arts in Britain (founded in 1768). These academies provided instruction for art students and sponsored exhibitions, exerting tight control over the art scene. The annual exhibitions, called "Salons" in France, were highly competitive, as was membership in these academies. Subsidized by the government, the French Royal Academy supported a limited range of artistic expression, focusing on traditional subjects and highly polished technique. Because of the challenges that modernist art presented to established artistic conventions, the juries for the Salons and other exhibitions routinely rejected the works that more adventurous artists wished to display, thereby preventing the public from viewing any art other than the officially sanctioned forms of expression

Realism

Realism was a movement that developed in France around midcentury against this backdrop of an increasing emphasis on science. Consistent with the philosophical tenets of the empiricists and positivists, Realist artists argued that only the contemporary world—what people can see—was "real." Accordingly, Realists focused their attention on the people and events of their own time and disapproved of historical and fictional subjects on the grounds that they were neither visible nor present and therefore were not real. - The Realists' sincerity about scrutinizing their environment led them to paint mundane and trivial subjects that artists had traditionally deemed unworthy of depiction—for example, working-class laborers and peasants, and similar "low" themes. Moreover, by depicting these subjects on a scale and with a seriousness previously reserved for historical, mythological, and religious painting, Realist artists sought to establish parity between contemporary subject matter and the traditional themes of "high art.

Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere

The Folies-Bergère was a popular café with music-hall performances, one of Paris's most fashionable gathering places. At the center of Manet's Folies-Bergère is a barmaid, who looks out from the canvas but seems disinterested or lost in thought, divorced from her patrons as well as from the viewer. In front of her, Manet painted a marvelous still life of bottles, flowers, and fruit—all for sale to the bar's customers. In the mirror is the reflection of a gentleman wearing a dapper top hat and carrying an elegant walking stick. He has approached the barmaid, perhaps to order a drink, but more likely to ask the price of her company after the bar closes. Also visible in the mirror, at the upper left corner of the canvas, are the lower legs of a trapeze artist and a woman in the nightclub's balcony watching some other performance through opera glasses. What seems at first to be a straightforward representation of the bar, barmaid, and customers quickly fades as visual discrepancies immediately emerge. For example, is the reflection of the woman on the right the barmaid's? If both figures are the same person, it is impossible to reconcile the spatial relationship among the gentleman, the bar, the barmaid, and her seemingly displaced reflection. These visual contradictions complement Manet's blurred brushstrokes and rough application of paint. Together, they draw attention to the tactile surface of the canvas, consistent with late-19th-century artists' emerging insistence on the artifice of painting.