AP Art History Brillant Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 14e, Chapter 27 Romanticism, Realism, Photography: Europe and America, 1800 to 1870
What are the defining elements of Realist art? Select a Realist work of art and describe how it epitomizes the style
WINSLOW HOMER, Veteran in a New Field - One of the leading American Realist painters was Winslow Homer, of Boston. - landscape, very real, more SUBTLE symbolsn.
collodion process
"Wet process" that used glass instead of paper, it had greater sensitivity and shorter exposure times. Higher quality prints (free of imprint for paper's texture).
Beaux-Arts style
Elaborate late 19th/early 20th classical architectural style
What was the artistic communities reaction the camera?
For the traditional artist, photography suggested new answers to the great debate about what is real and how to represent the real in art. Because photography easily and accurately enabled the reproduction of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, the new medium also challenged the place of traditional modes of pictorial representation originating in the Renaissance. Artists as diverse as Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, and the Impressionist Edgar Degas welcomed photography as a helpful auxillary to painting. Other artists, however feared the camera was a mechanism that would displace the painstaking work of skilled painters. 791
27-15A EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Scenes from the Massacre at Chios, 1822-1824. Oil on canvas, 13' 10" X 11' 7". Louvre, Paris.
Pg 767
Documentary power of the Photograph
Photographers were quick to realize the documentary power of their new medium. Thus began the story of photography's influence on modern life and of the immense changes it brought to communication and information management. Historical events could be recorded in permanent form on the spot and for the first time. The photographs taken of the Crimean War (1856) by Roger Fenton, and of the American Civil War by Matthew B. Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan remain unsurpassed as incisive accounts of military life, unsparing in their truth to detail and poignant as expressions of human experience.
lithography
The process or method of printing from a metal or stone surface
For people living in the 18th Century, the Middle Ages were the
"dark ages", a time of barbarism, superstition, dark mystery, and miracle. The Romantic imagination stretched its perception in the Middle Ages into all the worlds of fantasy open to it, including the ghoulish, the infernal, the terrible, the nightmarish, the groutesque, the sadistic, and all the imagery that comes from the chamber of horrors when reason sleeps.
camera lucida
(light room) an optical device consisting of prism that enables an observer to view simultaneously the image and a drawing surface for sketching it
German and American Realism
* Examine German artist's interests in regional and national characteristics, folk customs and culture. * Identify the American artists and key works of Realist art.
27.5 Pre-Raphaelites
* Examine the Pre-Raphaelites' choice of subject matter in contrast to the Realists. * Understand the influences of the literary world and of the critic John Ruskin in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. * Identify artists and styles of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Realism did not appeal to all artiste, of course. In England, a group of painters who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood refused to me limited to the contemporary scenes strict Realists portrayed. These artists chose instead to represent fictional, historical, and fanciful subjects, albeit with a significant degree of convincing illusion.
27.4 The French Academy and Other Classical Models
* Examine the importance and influence of the French Royal Academy of Art, the artists it trained and the styles it promoted. * Understand the popularity of other classical models in art.
27.3 Modernism and Realism
* Examine the meanings of "Modernism" and "Realism" and the rejection of Renaissance illusionistic space. * Understand the changes in Realist art in form, style, and content. * Examine the use of art - especially photography and printmaking -- to provide social commentary.
27.7 Photography
* Examine the origins of photography and its impact in visual art. * Discuss initial uses of the new art medium known as photography. * Recognize the artists and the works of early photography. * Examine artist's use and response to the technology of photography.
27.6 19th Century Architecture
* Examine the variety of revivalist styles in architecture, the origins of the designs and their impact. * Discuss how the availability of new building materials will affect the structure and appearance of architecture
The Art of Realism
* Understand Realist art in its forms, styles, and content. * Examine the social commentary, shocking subject matter, formal elements, and public reaction to Realism.
The French Debate: Color vs. Line
* Understand the French debate over theories related to color (expression) vs. line (drawing or form) as appropriate to artistic expression. * Realize that this debate has roots in the paintings and ideas of Nicolas Poussin, considered to have set the canon for French academic paintings, and the works of Peter Paul Rubens, most famous for his rich and sensuous colors. * Differentiate between Poussinistes and Rubenistes.
Romantic Landscape Painting
* Understand the romantic interest in the landscape as an independent and respected genre in Germany, England, and the United States.
Define Daguerreotype Calotype Wet Plate Process Albumen Print
- Daguerreotype: a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor. - Calotype: an early photographic process in which negatives were made using paper coated with silver iodide. - Wet Plate Process: involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of collodion (cellulose nitrate) and coating a glass plate with the mixture. - Albumen Print: the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative.
Napoleon
. Overthrew French Directory in 1799 and became emperor of the French in 1804. Failed to defeat Great Britain and abdicated in 1814. Returned to power briefly in 1815 but was defeated and died in exile. (p. 591)
Romanticism
19th century artistic movement that appealed to emotion rather than reason
realism
A 19th century artistic movement in which writers and painters sought to show life as it is rather than life as it should be
positivism
A belief that the world can best be understood through scientific inquiry
transcendentalism
A philosophy pioneered by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1830's and 1840's, in which each person has direct communication with God and Nature, and there is no need for organized churches. It incorporated the ideas that mind goes beyond matter, intuition is valuable, that each soul is part of the Great Spirit, and each person is part of a reality where only the invisible is truly real. Promoted individualism, self-reliance, and freedom from social constraints, and emphasized emotions.
calotype
A photographic process in which a positive image is made by shining light through a negative image onto a sheet of sensitized paper.
palette knife
A tool used to mix or apply paint. The palette knife is a flexible tool that may be plastic or metal, it may straight (similar to a butter knife,) or have a bent end
Daguerreotypes
A type of photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J. M. Daguerre.
Realism
Advances in industrial technology during the 19th century reinforced Enlightenment faith in the connection between science and progress. Both intellectuals and the general public increasingly embraced empiricism and positivism. To empiricists, the basis of knowledge is observation and direct experience. Positivists ascribed to the philosophical model developed by Auguste Comte, who believed scientific laws governed the environment and human activity and could be revealed through careful recording and analysis of observable data. Comet's followers promote science as the mind's highest achievement and advocated a purely empirical approach to nature and society.
Figure 27-19 CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1810. Oil on canvas, 3' 7 1/2" X 5' 7 1/4". Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
Among the first northern European artists to depict the Romantic transcendental landscape was Caspar David Friedrich. His work balances inner and outer experiences. "The artist," he wrote, "should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If he does not seel anything within him, he should give up painting what he sees before him."
Figure 27-25 FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH, Twilight In the Wilderness, 1860s. Oil on canvas, 3' 4" x 5' 4". Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1965.233).
Church's paintings eloquently express the Romantic notion of the sublime. Painting during the Civil War, this wilderness landscape presents and idealistic view of America free of conflict. 775
Figure 27-27 GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849. Oil on canvas, 10' 3 1/2" x 22' 9 1/2". Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Courbet was the first artist ever known to set up his own exhibition outside the grounds, call it the Pavilion of Realism. His most famous statement - "I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one." Although as monumental in scale ( and considered his masterpiece) as a traditional history painting, Burial at Ornans horrified critics because of the ordinary nature of the subject and Courbet's starkly antiheroic composition. Although this bold, somber palette was essentially traditional, Courbet often used the palette knife for quickly placing and unifying large daubs of paint, producing a roughly wrought surface. His example inspired the young artists who worked for him ( and later Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Auguste Renior) but the public accused him of carelessness and critics wrote of his "brutalities."
Figure 27-30 HONORÉ DAUMIER, Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862. Oil on canvas, 2' 1 3/4" x 2' 11 1/2". Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929).
Daumier chose a cramped and grimy third class railway car of the 1860's to show how the poor were cramped together on hard benches stretching from one end of their carriage to the other.
Figure 27-29 HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834. Lithograph, 1' x 1' 5 1/2". Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (bequest of Fiske and Marie Kimball).
Daumier used the recent invention of lithography to reach a wide audience for his social criticism and political protest. This print records the horrific 1834 massacre in the workers' housing block. In response, the authorities imprisoned him. A painter, sculptor, and, like Durer, Rembrandt, and Goya, one of history's great printmakers. Daumier produced lithographs that enabled him to create and unprecedented number of prints, thereby reaching an exceptionally large and broad audience. In addition to individual prints for sale, Daumier also contributed to the satirical lithographs to the widely read, liberal French Republican journal Caricature, further increasing the number of people exposed to his work. In Caricature, Daumier mercilessly lampooned the foibles and misbehavior of politicans, lawyers, doctors, and the rich bourgeoisie in general.
Realism was a movement that developed in
France around mid century against this backdrop of an increasing emphasis on science. Realists 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 they were neither visible nor present and therefore were not real.
In music,
Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin and Johannes Brahns emphasized the melodic or lyrical. For these composers, music had the power to express the unspeakable and to communicate the subltest and most powerful human emotions.
Figure 27-34 WILLIAM LEIBL, Three Women in a Village Church, 1878-1882. Oil on canvas, 2' 5" x 2' 1". Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
French Realism spread quickly to Germany where Leibl painted this moving depiction of simple peasant women of different generations holding their prayer books in hands roughened by work.
Calotype
From the Greek kalos, "beautiful". A photographic process in which a positive image is made by shining a light through a negative image onto a sheet of sensitized paper. 791-792
Gothic Revival
Gothic cathedrals, according to Chateaubriand, were translations of the sacred groves of the ancient Gauls into stone and should be cherished as manifestations of France's holy history. One result of this new nationalistic respect for Gothic style was that Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc received a commission in 1845 to restore the interior of Paris's Notre Dame to its Gothic splendor after removing the Baroque and Napolenoic alterations.
Figure 27-11 FRANCISCO GOYA, Third of May, 1808, 1814. Oil on canvas, 8' 9" x 13' 4". Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Goya encouraged empathy for the massacred Spanish peasants by portraying horrified expressions on their faces, endowing them with a humanity lacking in the French firing squad.
Figure 27-26 GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone Breakers, 1849. Oil on canvas, 5' 3" x 8' 6". Formerly at Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed in 1945).
Gustave Courbet - the leading figure of the Realists movement in the 19th century. The Realists sincerity about scrutinizing their environment led them to paint subjects artists had traditionally deemed unworth of depicion - the mundane and trivial, working-class laborers and peasants, and so forth. The Stone Breakers - using a palette of dirty browns and grays, Courbet conveyed the dreary and dismal nature of menial labor in mid 19th century France.
Figure 27-10A FRANCISCO GOYA, The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Oil on canvas, approx. 9' 2" x 11'. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
In 1786 Goya became the official artist in the court of Charles IV and produced portraits of the family. It has been suggested that this portrait is a political statement regarding the inept ability of the king and the unscrupulous stupidity of the queen. Has Goya caught those character traits forever? The positioning of the family members allows the viewer to create a personal dialog with the various characters. But there is an ambiguity in the portrait, some of the family members do establish eye contact with the viewer while others are simply starring off into space or as one female member turning her head to the back of the interior space the family occupies.
Compare and contrast Canova, Paulina Borghese as Venus and Ingres, Grande Odalisque
Ingres transports the viewer to the Orient, a far-away land for a Parisian audience in the second decade of the nineteenth century (in this context, "Orient" means Near East more so than the Far East). The woman—who wears nothing other than jewelry and a turban—lies on a divan, her back to the viewer. She seemingly peeks over her shoulder, as if to look at someone who has just entered her room, a space that is luxuriously appointed with fine damask and satin fabrics. When glancing at the painting, one can immediately see the linearity and the French neoclassical style more broadly. her elongated back and right arm. Canova's is a defeat of death by beauty - as expressed through art - that is being celebrated in the image. the sculpture would have been on a revolving mechanism, allowing the static viewer to see the work in the round. It would also have been viewed by candlelight. The finely polished waxy surface would have reflected light brilliantly, creating chiaroscuoro, a more painterly than sculptural effect, perhaps, but then Canova was a painterly sculptor
Select a Napoleonic work of art and describe what it tells us about Napoleon's reign
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, Coronation of Napoleon: a carefullly crafted tableau designed to present Napoleon in the way he wished to be seen. For instance, this picture clearly shows his mother but in fact, she refused to attend. - he crowned himself (separation of church and state; usually the pope crowning himself)
Figure 27-28 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, The Gleaners, 1857. Oil on canvas, 2' 9" x 3' 8". Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Jean-Francois Millet and the Barbizon School painters specialized in depictions of French country life. Here , Millet portrayed three impoverished women gathering the scraps left in the field after a harvest. As did Courbet, Millet found his subjects in the people and occupations of the everyday world.
Figure 27-33A ADOLPHE-WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU, Nymphs and Satyr, 1873. Oil on canvas, approx. 9' 3/8" x 5' 10 7/8" high. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Manet bases his work off of Bouguereau, who has been largely forgotten today, although he was a towering figure in the French art world during the second half of the 19th-century.
Features of Romanticism : P. I. N. E.
P. I. N. E. - Past - longing for the medieval past, pre-industrial Europe (Gothic architecture will be revived) - Irrational/ Inner mind / Insanity - Romantic artists depict the human psyche and topics that transcend the use of reason. One Romantic artist, Gericault chose to do portraits of people in an insane asylum. - Nature - longing for the purity of nature, which defies human rationality - Emotion/ Exotic - Romantics favored emotion and passion over reason. Exotic themes and locales were also popular because they did not adhere to European emphasis on rationality.
In literature,
Romantic poets such as John Keats, William Wadsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published volumes of poetry manifesting the Romantic interest in lyrical drama. Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, transported readers to faraway, exotic locales. Byron's poems conjures images of eroticism and fury unleashed - images Eugene Delacroix made concrete inhis painting Death of Sardanapalus. One of the best examples of the Romantic spirit is the engrossing novel FRANKENSTEIN, written in 1818 by Shelley's wife , Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Frankenstein served as a cautionary tale of the havoc that could result from unrestrained scientific experimentation and from the arrogance of scientists.
27-42 KARL FRIEDRICH SCHINKEL, Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany, 1822-1830.
Schinkel conceived the first public art museum in Europe as a Neoclassical "temple of culture". The Altes Museum's facade of 18 iconic columns resembles an ancient Greek stoa. 787
What are the defining elements of Romanticist art? Select a Romantic work of art and describe how it epitomizes the style.
THÉODORE GÉRICAULT, Raft of the Medusa - rejected Neoclassical compositional principles and, in the Romantic spirit, presented a jumble of writhing bodies in every attitude of suffering, despair, and death. - dramatic true story; X-composition; exotic story in a dynamic way
Figure 27-15 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827. Oil on canvas, 12' 1 1/2" x 16' 2 7/8". Louvre, Paris.
The Death of Sardanapalus is perhaps the grandest Romantic pictorial drama ever painted. Inspired by the 1821 poem by Lor Byron, the painting does not illustrate the text faithfully. The king has just received news of his armies' defeat and the enemies' entry into his city. The setting Delacroix painted is much more tempestous and crowded than Bryon described, and orgiastic destruction has replaced the sacrificial suicide of the poem. See page 766
Henry Fuseli The NIghtmare and Manet Olympia
The Nightmare shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, in a room filled with white light, and with a demonic and apelike incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dream like and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession Her brilliant coloration is set against the darker reds, yellows, and ochres of the background; Fuseli used a chiaroscuro effect to create strong contrasts between light and shade. Manet shows Olympia's nudity, the presence of a fully clothed maid, her confrontational gaze and a number of details identifying her as a demi-mondaine or prostitute. The painting deviates from the academic canon in its style, characterized by broad, quick brushstrokes, studio lighting that eliminates mid-tones, large color surfaces and shallow depth. interesting plays with light and dark, two women but completely different situations. A visual horror and another one that is more internal.
What was the argument between the Poussinistes and the Rubenistes at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century?
The Poussinistes were conservative defenders of academism who insisted that drawing was superior to color, whereas the Rubenistes proclaimed the importance of color over line (line quality being more intellectual and thus more restrictive than color).
Daguerre, Still Life in Studio vs Julia Margaret Cameron, Ophelia
The function of Daguerre's Still Life was to perfect the focusing of the Daguerreotype. The most interesting objects are not centered but slightly offset. Diagonals in the picture draw your eyes to the center of the photograph along with the edges being fuzzy. Ophelia, Study No. 2 typifies her portrait style. The slightly blurred focus also became a distinctive feature of her work, the byproduct of photographing with a lens having a short focal length, which allowed only a small area of sharp focus. The blurriness adds an ethereal, dreamlike tone to the photographs, appropriate for Cameron's fictional "characters". Her photograph of Ophelia has a mysterious, fragile, quality reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. One is more practical, the other is ethereal. Both are blurry; one was trying to get rid of the blurriness, the other used it to a cool effect
Figure 27-31 ROSA BONHEUR, The Horse Fair, 1853-1855. Oil on canvas, 8' 1/4" x 16' 7 1/2". Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887). This is Rosa's best known work.
The most celebrated woman artist of the 19th century. Winner of the gold medal at the Salon on 1848, she became in 1894 the first woman officer in the French Legion of Honor. She received her training from her father, Oscar-Raymond Bonheur who was a proponent of Saint-Simonianism, an early 19th century utopian socialist movement that championed the education and enfranchisement of women.
Figure 27-8 HENRY FUSELI, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, 3' 4 3/4" x 4' 1 1/2". The Detroit Institute of the Arts (Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman).
The transition from Ceoclassicism to Romantisicm marked a shift in emphasis from reason to feeling. Fuseli was among the first painters to depict the dark terrain of the human subconscious. Fuseli specialized in night moods of horror and in dark fantasies - in the demonic, in the macabre, and often in the sadistic.
Figure 27-32 ÉDOUARD MANET, Figure 27-32 ÉDOUARD MANET, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, 7' x 8' 10". Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, 7' x 8' 10". Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
This audacious painting outraged the French public. It featured ordinary men and promiscuous women in a Parisian park. With Dejeuner, he sought to to reassess the nature of painting. This work contains sophisticated 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. Manet aimed to move away from illuisionism toward an open acknowledgement of painting's properties, such as the flatness of the painting surface, which would become a core principle of many later 19th century painters as well as their successors to the present day. The style of the painting, couple with the unorthodox subject matter, made this painting one of the most controversial artworks ever created. 781
27.2 The Rise of Romanticism
Whereas Neoclassicism's rationality reinforced Enlightenment thought, particularly Voltaire's views, Rousseau's ideas contributed to the rise of Romanticism. Rousseau's exclaimation," Man is born free, but is everwhere in chains!" - the opening line of his Social Contract, summarizes a fundamental Romantic premise. Romanticism emerged from a desire for freedom - not only political freedom, but also freedom of thought, of feeling, of action, of workship, of speech, and of taste. Romantics asserted freedom was the right and property of all. They believed the path to freedom was through imagination rather than reason and functioned through feeling rather than through thinking.
camera obscura
a darkened enclosure in which images of outside objects are projected through a small aperture or lens onto a facing surface
Landscape painting
came into its own in the 19th century as a fully independent and respected genre. Increasing tourism which came courtesy of improved and expanded railway systems both in Europe and America, contributed to the popularity of landscape painting. The notion of the picturesque became particularly resonant in the Romantic era. Already in the 18th century, artists had regarded the pleasurable, aesthetic mood that natural landscape inspired as making the landscape itself "picturesque"- that is, worthy of being painted.
In 1798, the German printmaker Alois Senefelder
created the first prints using stone instead of metal plates or wooden blocks. In contrast to earlier printing techniques, in which the artist applied ink either to a raised or incised surface, in ligthography (greek, "stone writing") the printing and nonprinting areas of the plate are on the same plane. See pg 778
daguerreotype
forerunner of the photograph
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
group of rebellious 19th-century artists who rejected The Royal Academy's categorization of art into a hierarchy (which they felt essentially stripped art of its creativity and overall purpose to connect with lives)
wet-plate photography
provided greater sensitivity & shorter exposure time; made multiple prints; process was complex and untidy
Neo-Gothic
style of architecture in which Gothic motifs and forms are imitated
Related to the imaginative sensibility was the period's notion of the
sublime. Among the individuals most involved in studying the sublime was the British politican and philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke articulated his definition of the sublime - feelings of awe mixed with terror. Burke observed that pain or fear evoked the most intense human emotions and that these emotions could also be thrilling. Thus, raging rivers and great storms at sea could be sublime to their viewers. Accompanying this taste for the sublime was the taste for the fantastic, the occult, and the macabre - for the adventures of the soul voyaging into the dangerous reaches of the imagination.
empiricism
the view that knowledge originates in experience and that science should, therefore, rely on observation and experimentation