art history ch 31

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

-The American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) also focused his attention on the rooms and walls where art was hung, but he did so to satisfy elitist tastes for beauty as its own reward. He also became embroiled in several artistic controversies that laid the groundwork for abstraction in the next century. -After flunking out of West Point in the early 1850s, Whistler studied art in Paris, where he was briefly influenced by Courbet's Realism; the two artists painted several seascapes together. Whistler settled in London in 1859, after which his art began to take on a more decorative quality that he called "aesthetic" and that increasingly diverged from observed reality. He believed that the arrangement of a room (or a painting) could be aesthetically pleasing in itself, without reference to the outside world. -He occasionally designed exhibition rooms for his own art, with the aim of creating a total harmony of objects and space.Whistler's ideas about art were revolutionary. He was among the first artists to conceive of his paintings as abstractions from rather than representations of observed reality, and he was among the first patrons to collect Japanese art, fascinated by what he perceived as decorative line, color, and shape, although he understood little about its meaning or intent. -By the middle of the 1860s, Whistler began to call his works "symphonies" and "arrangements," suggesting that their themes resided in their compositions rather than their subject matter, and he painted several landscapes with another musically derived title, Nocturne. (Whistler took the term "nocturne" from the titles of piano compositions by Frédéric Chopin.) When he exhibited some of these in 1877, he drew the scorn of England's leading art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900), a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites and their moralistic intentions. -Decrying Whistler's work as carelessly lacking in finish and purpose, Ruskin's review asked how an artist could "demand 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

Fig. 31-17 Édouard Manet LUNCHEON ON THE GRASS

-At mid-century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts increasingly opened Salon exhibitions to non-academic artists, resulting in a surge in the number of works submitted, and inevitably rejected by, the Salon jury. -In 1863, the jury turned down nearly 3,000 works. A storm of protest erupted, prompting Emperor Napoleon III to order an exhibition of the rejected work called the "Salon des Refusés" ("Salon of the Rejected Ones"). Featured in it was Manet's painting luncheon on the grass (le déjeuner sur l'herbe) (fig. 31-17). -A well-born Parisian who had studied in the early 1850s with the independent artist Thomas Couture (1815-1879), Manet had by the early 1860s developed a strong commitment to Realism and modernity, largely as a result of his friendship with Baudelaire. -Luncheon on the Grass scandalized contemporary viewers all the way up to Napoleon III himself, provoking a critical avalanche that mixed shock with bewilderment. Ironically, the resulting succès de scandale ("success from scandal") helped establish Manet's career as a radical, avant-garde, modern artist.

Fig.31-2 Jean-Léon Gérôme THE SNAKE CHARMER

-French academic painter Jean-León Gérôme (1824-1904) creates a nineteenth-century fantasy of the Middle East—a characteristic example of Orientalism, the European fascination with Middle Eastern cultures. -A young boy, entirely naked, handles a python, while an older man behind him plays a fipple flute, and an audience huddles within the background shadows in a blue-tiled room decorated with calligraphic patterns. -Gérôme paints the scene with photographic clarity and scrupulous attention to detail, leading us to think that it is an accurate representation of a specific event and locale. -He traveled to the Middle East several times and was praised by critics of the 1855 Salon for his ethnographic accuracy, but his Snake Charmer is a complete fiction, mixing Egyptian, Turkish, and Indian cultures together in a fantasized pastiche.

Fig. 31-9 Henry Fox Talbot THE OPEN DOOR

-Talbot realized that the imprecision of his process could not compete with the commercial potential of the daguerreotype, and so rather than trying to do so, he chose to view photography in visual and artistic terms. -In this, for example, shadows create a repeating pattern of diagonal lines that contrast with the rectilinear lines of the architecture. And it conveys meaning, expressing nostalgia for a rural way of life that was fast disappearing in industrial England.

Fig. 31-39 Georges Seurat A SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF LA GRANDE JATTE

-Seurat's monumental painting a sunday afternoon on the island of la grande jatte (fig. 31-39) was first exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. -The theme of weekend leisure is typically Impressionist, but the rigorous technique, the stiff formality of the figures, and the highly calculated geometry of the composition produce a solemn effect quite at odds with the casual naturalism of Impressionism. -Seurat painted the entire canvas using only 11 colors in three values. When viewed from a distance of about 9 feet, the painting reads as figures in a park rendered in many colors and tones; but when viewed from a distance of 3 feet, the individual marks of color become more apparent, while the forms dissolve into abstraction. -There was a social hierarchy in Parisian parks in the late nineteenth century; the Bois de Boulogne (see fig. 31-32) was an upper-middle-class park in an area of grand avenues, whereas the Grande Jatte faced a lower-class industrial area across the river and was easily accessible by train. The figures represent a range of "types" that would have been easily recognizable to the nineteenth-century viewer, such as the middle-class strolling man and his companion to the right—usually identified as a boulevardier (or citified dandy) and a cocotte (a single woman assumed to be a prostitute)—or the working-class canotier (oarsman) to the left. -From its first appearance, the painting has been the subject of a number of conflicting interpretations. Contemporary accounts of the island indicate that on Sundays (the newly designated official day off for French working families) it was noisy, littered, and chaotic. Seurat may have intended to represent an ideal image of harmonious, blended working-class and middle-class life and leisure. But some art historians see Seurat satirizing the sterile habits, rigid attitudes, and domineering presence of the growing Parisian middle class—or simply engaging in an intellectual exercise on the nature of form and color.

Fig. 31-24 Henry Ossawa Tanner THE BANJO LESSON

-With strongly felt, humanizing images like the banjo lesson (fig. 31-24), he sought to counter caricatures of African-American life created by other artists. An elderly man is giving a young boy a music lesson: two figures connected by their seriousness and concentration. -The use of the banjo here is especially significant since it had become identified with images of minstrels—just the sort of derogatory caricatures that Tanner sought to replace with his sympathetic genre scenes focused on the intimate interactions that brought dignity and pride to family life. -After a trip to Palestine in 1897, Tanner turned to religious subjects, believing that Bible stories could illustrate the struggles and hopes of contemporary African Americans.

Van Gogh

-adapted Seurat's Pointillism by applying brilliantly colored paint in multidirectional strokes of impasto (thick applications of paint) to give his pictures a turbulent emotional energy and a palpable surface texture. -Van Gogh was a socialist who believed that modern life, with its constant social change and focus on progress and success, alienated people from one other and from themselves. His paintings are efforts to communicate his emotional state by establishing a direct connection between artist and viewer, thereby overcoming the emotional barrenness of modern society. -In a prolific output over only ten years, he produced paintings that contributed significantly to the later emergence of Expressionism, in which the intensity of an artist's emotional state would override any desire for fidelity to the actual appearance of things.

Fig. 31-1 Gustave Eiffel EIFFEL TOWER, PARIS

-is a proud reminder of the nineteenth-century French belief in the progress and ultimate perfectibility of civilization through science and technology. -Structural engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) designed and constructed the tower to serve as a monumental approach to the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. -When completed, it stood 984 feet high and was the tallest structure in the world, taller than the Egyptian pyramids or Gothic cathedrals. The Eiffel Tower was the main attraction of the Universal Exposition, one of more than 20 such international fairs staged throughout Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. -These events showcased and compared international industry, science, and the applied, decorative, and fine arts. An object of pride for the French nation, the Eiffel Tower was intended to demonstrate France's superior engineering, technological, and industrial knowledge and power. Although originally conceived as a temporary structure, it still stands today. -The initial response to the Eiffel Tower was mixed. In 1887, a group of 47 writers, musicians, and artists wrote to Le Temps protesting "the erection ... of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower," which they described as "a black and gigantic factory chimney." Gustave Eiffel, however, said, "I believe the tower will have its own beauty," and that it "will show that [the French] are not simply an amusing people, but also the country of engineers." -Indeed, the Eiffel Tower quickly became an international symbol of advanced thought and modernity among artists and was admired by the public as a wondrous spectacle. Today it is the symbol of Paris itself. -The tower was one of the city's most photographed structures in 1889, its immensity dwarfing the seemingly tiny buildings below. Thousands of tourists to the Exposition bought souvenir photographs taken by professional and commercial photographers. This one shows the imposing structure rising above the exhibition buildings around and behind it along the Champ de Mars.

Seurat

-was born in Paris and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, sought to "correct" Impressionism, which he found too intellectually shallow and improvisational. -Seurat's goal was to find ways to create such retinal vibrations to enliven the painted surface, using distinctively short, multidirectional strokes of almost pure color in what came to be known as "Divisionism" or "Pointillism." In theory, these juxtaposed strokes of color would merge in the viewer's eye to produce the impression of other colors. -When perceived from a certain distance they would appear more luminous and intense than the same colors seen separately, while on close inspection the strokes and colors would remain distinct and separate.

Fig. 31-13 Gustave Courbet A BURIAL AT ORNANS

-was inspired by the 1848 funeral of Courbet's maternal grandfather, Jean-Antoine Oudot, a veteran of the French Revolution of 1789. It is not meant as a record of that particular funeral, however, since Oudot is shown alive in profile at the extreme left of the canvas, his image adapted by Courbet from an earlier portrait. -The two men to the right of the open grave, dressed not in contemporary but in late eighteenth-century clothing, are also revolutionaries of Oudot's generation. Their proximity to the grave suggests that one of their peers is being buried. Perhaps Courbet's picture links the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, both of which sought to advance the cause of democracy in France. -his is a vast painting, measuring roughly 10 by 21 feet, and depicts a rural burial life-size. A crush of people forms irregular rows across the width of the picture. The gravedigger kneels over the gaping hole in the ground, placed front and center and flanked by a bored altar boy and a distracted dog; to the left, clergy dressed in red seem indifferent while to the right, the huddle of rural mourners—Courbet's heroes of modern life—weeps.

Fig. 31-19 Édouard Manet A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE

*closer look video*

Fig. 31-42 Gustave Moreau THE APPARITION

-A visionlike atmosphere pervades the later work of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), an academic artist whom the Symbolists regarded as a precursor. They particularly admired Moreau's renditions of the biblical Salomé, the young Judaean princess who at the instigation of her mother, Herodias, performed an erotic dance before her stepfather, Herod, and demanded as reward the head of John the Baptist (Mark 6:21-28). -In the apparition (fig. 31-42), exhibited at the Salon of 1876, the seductive Salomé confronts a vision of the saint's severed head, which hovers open-eyed in midair, dripping blood and radiating holy light. Moreau depicted this sensual and macabre scene and its exotic setting in meticulous detail with touches of jewel-like color, creating an atmosphere of voluptuous decadence that amplifies Salomé's role as femme fatale.

historicism

-Academic art and architecture frequently used motifs drawn from historic models—a practice called this. -Elaborating on earlier Neoclassical and Romantic revivals, historicist art and architecture encompassed the sweep of history. Historicists often referred to several different historical periods in a single work. - Some academic artists catered to the public taste for exotic sights with Orientalist paintings (see "Orientalism"). These works also combined disparate elements, borrowing from Egyptian, Turkish, and Indian cultures to create an imaginary Middle Eastern world. -*copy down definition from text*

Fig. 31-21 Thomas Eakins THE GROSS CLINIC

-was one of Eakins's most controversial paintings. Although created specifically for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, it was rejected for the fine-art exhibition—the jury did not consider surgery a fit subject for art—and relegated to the scientific and medical display. -The monumental painting shows Dr. Samuel David Gross performing an operation that he pioneered in the surgical amphitheater of Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Gross pauses to lecture to medical students taking notes in the background, as well as to Eakins himself, whose self-portrait appears along the painting's right edge. -A woman at left, presumably a relative of the patient, cringes in horror at the bloody spectacle. At this time, surgeons were regarded with fear—especially teaching surgeons, who frequently thought of the poor as objects on which to practice. But Eakins portrays Gross as a heroic figure, spotlighted by beams of light on his forehead and bloodied right hand with glinting scalpel. -Principal illumination, however, is reserved for the patient, presented here not as an entire body but as a dehumanized jumble of thigh, buttock, socked feet, and bunches of cloth. -In conceiving this portrait, Eakins must have had Rembrandt's famous Baroque painting of Dr. Tulp in mind (see fig. 23-35), and the American painter's use of light seems to point to a similar homage to scientific achievement: Amid the darkness of ignorance and fear, modern science is the light of knowledge and the source of progress. - The procedure showcased here, in fact, was a surgical innovation that allowed Dr. Gross to save a patient's leg that previously would have routinely been amputated.

Gustave Courbet

-was one of the first artists to call himself avant-garde or a Realist. -A big, blustery man, he was, in his own words, "not only a Socialist but a democrat and a Republican: in a word, a supporter of the whole Revolution." Born and raised near the Swiss border in the French town of Ornans, he moved to Paris in 1839. -The street fighting in Paris in 1848 radicalized him and became a catalyst for two large canvases that have come to be regarded as the defining works of the Realist Movement.

Ossawa Tanner

-who became the most successful African-American painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. -The son of a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner grew up in Philadelphia and after studying at the academy, he worked as a photographer and drawing teacher in Atlanta. -In 1891, to further his academic training, he moved to Paris, where his painting received favorable critical attention. -In the early 1890s, he painted scenes from African-American and rural French life that combined Eakins's realism with the delicate brushwork he encountered in France.

Camille Claudel

-who was Rodin's assistant while he worked on The Burghers of Calais, had already studied sculpture formally before joining Rodin's studio. She soon became his mistress, and their relationship lasted 15 years. -Claudel enjoyed independent professional success but suffered a breakdown that sent her to a mental hospital for the last 30 years of her life.

Fig. 31-10 Alexander Gardner THE HOME OF THE REBEL SHARPSHOOTER: BATTLEFIELD AT GETTYSBURG

-Alexander Gardner (1821-1882) was a "camera operator" for Mathew Brady (1822-1896) at the beginning of the conflict and working with an assistant, Timothy O'Sullivan (c. 1840-1882), made war photographs that were widely distributed. the home of the rebel sharpshooter (fig. 31-10) was taken after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. -The technical difficulties were considerable. The glass plate used to make the negative had to be coated with a sticky substance holding the light-sensitive chemicals. If the plate dried, the photograph could not be taken, and if dust contaminated the plate, the image would be ruined. Since long exposure times made action photographs impossible, early war photographs were taken in camp or in the aftermath of battle. -Gardner's image seems to show a sharpshooter who has been killed in his look-out. But this rock formation was in the middle of the battlefield and had neither the height nor the view needed for a sharpshooter. In fact, the photographers dragged the dead body to the site and posed it; the rifle propped against the wall was theirs. -The staging of this photograph raises questions about visual fact and fiction. Like a painting, a photograph is composed to create a picture, but photography promises a kind of factuality that we do not expect from painting. -Interestingly, the manipulation of this photograph did not concern nineteenth-century viewers, who understood clearly that photography could not record the visual world without bias.

Fig. 31-26 Philip Webb and William Morris "SUSSEX" CHAIR AND "PEACOCK AND DRAGON" CURTAIN

-Although many of the furnishings offered by Morris & Company were expensive, one-of-a-kind items, others, such as the rush-seated chair illustrated here (fig. 31-26), were inexpensive and simple, intended as a handcrafted alternative to machine-made furniture. -Concerned with creating a "total" environment, Morris and his colleagues designed not only furniture but also stained glass, tiles, wallpaper, and fabrics, such as the "Peacock and Dragon" curtain seen in figure 31-26. Morris and his principal furniture designer, Philip Webb (1831-1915), adapted the company's Sussex line of chairs from traditional rush-seated chairs of the Sussex region. The handwoven curtain in the background is typical of Morris's fabric designs in its use of flat patterning that affirms the two-dimensional character of the textile medium. The pattern's prolific organic motifs and soothing blue and green hues—the decorative counterpart to those of naturalistic landscape painting—were meant to provide relief from the stresses of modern urban existence.

Fig. 31-13 Gustave Courbet A BURIAL AT ORNANS (con)

-Although painted on a scale befitting the funeral of a hero, Courbet's depiction has none of the idealization of traditional history painting; instead, it captures the awkward, blundering numbness of a real funeral and emphasizes its brutal, physical reality. -When shown at the Salon, the painting was attacked by critics who objected to the elevation of a provincial funeral to this heroic scale, to Courbet's disrespect for the rules of academic composition, and even to the painting's lack of any suggestion of the afterlife. -But Courbet had submitted his work to the Salon knowing that it would be denounced; he wanted to challenge the prescribed subjects, style, and finish of academic painting, to establish his position in the avant-garde, and to create controversy. -After the rejection of some of his works by the International Exposition of 1855, Courbet constructed a temporary building on rented land near the fair's Pavilion of Art and installed a show of his own works that he called the "Pavilion of Realism," boldly asserting his independence from the Salon. Many artists after him would follow in his footsteps.

Fig. 31-14 Jean-François Millet THE GLEANERS

-Among his best-known works is the gleaners (fig. 31-14), which shows three women gathering stray grain from the ground after harvest. -Despite its soothing, warm colors, the scene is one of extreme poverty. Gleaning was a form of relief offered to the rural poor by landowners, but it required hours of backbreaking work to collect enough wheat to make a single loaf of bread. -Two women bend over to reach the tiny stalks of grain remaining on the ground, while a third straightens to ease her back. -When Millet exhibited the painting in 1857, critics noted its implicit social criticism and described the work as "Realist." Millet denied the accusations, but his paintings contradict him.

calotype

-At the same time as Daguerre, in England, Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), a wealthy amateur, made negative copies of engravings, lace, and plants by placing them on paper soaked in silver chloride and exposing them to light. -He also discovered that the negative image on paper could be exposed again on top of another piece of paper to create a positive image: the negative-positive process that became the basis of photographic printing. Talbot's negative could be used more than once, so he could produce a number of positive images inexpensively. -But the calotype, as he later called it, produced a soft, fuzzy image. When he heard of Daguerre's announcement, Talbot rushed to make his own announcement and patent his process. The term for these processes—photography, derived from the Greek for "drawing with light"—was coined by Herschel. -calotype* add definition from text -Talbot published a book in six parts entitled The Pencil of Nature, illustrated entirely with salt-paper prints made from calotype negatives. Most of the photographs were of idyllic rural scenery or carefully arranged still lifes; they were presented as works of art rather than documents of reality.

Fig. 31-20 Ilya Repin BARGEHAULERS ON THE VOLGA

-Ilya Repin (1844-1930), who attended the St. Petersburg Academy and won a scholarship to study in Paris, joined the Wanderers in 1878 after his return to Russia. -He painted a series of works illustrating the social injustices then prevailing in his homeland, including bargehaulers on the volga (fig. 31-20), which features a group of peasants condemned to the brutal work of pulling ships up the Volga River. -To heighten our sympathy for these workers, Repin placed in the center of the group a young man who will soon be as worn out as his companions unless something is done to rescue him. This painting was a call to action.

Fig. 31-22 Winslow Homer THE LIFE LINE

-But following a sojourn during 1881-1882 in a tiny English fishing village on the rugged North Sea coast, Homer developed a commitment to depicting the working poor. -Moved by the hard lives and strength of character of the people he encountered in England, he set aside idyllic subjects for themes of heroic struggle against natural adversity. In England, he had been particularly impressed by the "breeches buoy," a mechanical apparatus used for rescues at sea. -During the summer of 1883, he made sketches of one imported by the lifesaving crew in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The following year he painted the life line (fig. 31-22), which depicts a coastguard saving a shipwrecked woman with the use of a breeches buoy—a testament not simply to valor but also to human ingenuity. -In the early sketches for this work, the man's face was visible. The decision to cover it focuses attention on the victim, and also on the true hero, the mechanical apparatus known as the "breeches buoy."

Fig. 31-37 Suzuki Harunobu YOUNG WOMAN LOOKING AT A POT OF PINKS

-Cassatt directly emulated the compositions, designs, and colors of ukiyo-e after multiple visits to an influential 1890 exhibition of 725 woodblock prints mounted at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris. This art appealed to Cassatt because its concentration on the private lives of women (fig. 31-37) coordinated well with her own preferred subject matter (see fig. 31-35), but she also felt a connection to the stylistic character of these prints—their cropped, diagonally structured, and often asymmetrical compositions; their use of broad, flat, unmodulated areas of color or tone; their emphasis on outline and pattern over form and space; and their oblique vantage points. -This exhibition inspired Cassatt to create her own portfolio of ten prints (fig. 31-38) using the contemporary medium of aquatint and drypoint. The exhibition of these prints in 1891 was her first solo show, and her work was acclaimed by her fellow artists. Cassatt's friend and mentor Degas was dumbfounded—"I do not admit that a woman can draw like that."

Fig. 31-25 Dante Gabriel Rossetti LA PIA DE' TOLOME

-Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His painting la pia de' tolomei (fig. 31-25) illustrates a scene from Dante's Purgatory in which La Pia (the Pious One), wrongly accused of infidelity and imprisoned by her husband in a castle, is dying. -The rosary and prayer book at her side refer to her piety, while the sundial and ravens suggest the passage of time and her impending death. La Pia's continuing love for her husband is represented by his letters, which lie under her prayer book. -The luxuriant fig leaves that surround her are traditionally associated with shame, and they seem to suck her into themselves. They have no source in Dante, but had personal relevance for Rossetti: Jane Burden, his model for this and many other paintings, was the wife of his friend William Morris, but she had also become Rossetti's lover. -By fingering her wedding ring, La Pia/Jane suggests that she is a captive not of her husband but of her marriage, evoking Rossetti's own situation. -The massive, gilded frame Rossetti designed for La Pia de' Tolomei features simple moldings on either side of broad, sloping boards, embellished with a few large roundels. The title of the painting is inscribed above the paired roundels at the lower center. On either side of them appear four lines from Dante's Purgatory, spoken by the spirit of La Pia, in Italian at the left and in Rossetti's English translation at the right: "Remember me who am La Pia,—me/From Siena sprung and by Maremma dead./This in his inmost heart well knoweth he/With whose fair jewel I was ringed and wed."

Fig. 31-36 Gustave Caillebotte PARIS STREET, RAINY DAY

-Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), another friend of Degas, was instrumental in organizing several Impressionist exhibitions and used his wealth to purchase the work of his friends, amassing a large collection of paintings. He studied with an academic teacher privately and qualified for the École des Beaux-Arts, but never attended. Caillebotte was fascinated by the regularized, radiating streets of Haussmann's Paris (see fig. 31-3), and his subjects and compositions often represent life along the boulevards. -paris street, rainy day (fig. 31-36) has an unconventional, almost telescopic, asymmetrical composition with a tipped perspective. The broad, wet streets create the subject of this painting, with anonymous, huddled Parisians mostly pushed to the periphery, their shiny umbrellas as prominent as their silhouetted bodies. Only the connected couple strolling toward us is fully realized and personalized. Squeezed between the lamppost and the saturated red and green of a shopfront, they stand within an internally framed rectangular composition capped by the strong horizontal of the two umbrellas.

Fig. 31-23 Edmonia Lewis FOREVER FREE

-Her highly successful busts and medallions of abolitionist leaders and Civil War heroes financed her move to Rome in 1867, where she was welcomed into the sculptural circle of American expatriate artist Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) and used Neoclassical style to address modern, realist concerns. -Galvanized by the struggle of recently freed slaves for equality, Lewis created forever free (fig. 31-23) in 1867 as a memorial to the Emancipation Proclamation (1862-1863). A diminutive woman kneels in gratitude beside the looming figure of her male companion, who boosts himself up on the ball that once bound his ankle and raises his broken shackles in a gesture of liberation. -This sculpture not only celebrates the freeing of American slaves, but also reflects white attitudes toward women and people of color. Lewis's female figure is less racialized and more submissive than her male counterpart to align her with the contemporary ideal of womanhood and make her more appealing to white audiences. -Lewis had to borrow money to pay for the marble for this work. She shipped it from Rome back to Boston hoping that a subscription drive among abolitionists would pay back her loan. The effort was only partially successful, but the steady income from the sale of commemorative medallions eventually paid off Lewis's debt.

Van Gogh's letter to his brother

-I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. This man will be fair-haired. I should like to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I will paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can—to begin with. But that is not the end of the picture. To finish it, I shall be an obstinate colorist. -I shall exaggerate the fairness of the hair, arrive at tones of orange, chrome, pale yellow. Behind the head—instead of painting the ordinary wall of the shabby apartment, I shall paint infinity, I shall do a simple background of the richest, most intense blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination, the shining fair head against this rich blue background, I shall obtain a mysterious effect, like a star in the deep blue sky.

Fig. 31-32 Berthe Morisot SUMMER'S DAY

-Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) defied societal conventions to become a professional painter. Morisot and her sister, Edma, copied paintings in the Louvre and studied with several teachers, including Corot, in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The sisters exhibited their art in the five Salons between 1864 and 1868, the year they met Manet. -In 1869, Edma married and gave up painting to devote herself to domestic duties, but Berthe continued painting even after her 1874 marriage to Manet's brother, Eugène, and the birth of their daughter in 1879. Morisot sent nine paintings to the first exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874 and showed her work in all but one of their subsequent shows. -As a respectable bourgeois lady, Berthe Morisot was not free to prowl the city looking for modern subjects, so she concentrated on depictions of women's lives, a subject she knew well. In the 1870s, she painted in an increasingly fluid and painterly style, flattening her picture plane and making her brushwork more prominent. -In summer's day (fig. 31-32), Morisot shows two elegant young ladies enjoying an outing on the lake of the fashionable Bois de Boulogne. First shown in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, the painting exemplifies the emphasis on formal features in Impressionist painting—the brushstrokes and the colors are as much its subject as the figures themselves.

Fig. 31-7 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre THE ARTIST'S STUDIO

-In Daguerre's photograph of his studio tabletop (fig. 31-7) the details are exquisite (though impossible to see in reproduction, even using today's technology), and the composition mimics the conventions of still-life painting. -Daguerre, after he patented and announced his new technology, produced an early type of photograph called a daguerreotype in August 1839. (add definition of daguerrotype to quizlet)** -Even before Daguerre announced his photographic technique in France, the American artist Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) traveled to Paris to exchange information about his own invention, the telegraph, for information about Daguerre's photography. -Morse introduced the daguerreotype process to America within weeks of Daguerre's announcement and by 1841 had reduced exposure times enough to take portrait photographs (fig. 31-8).

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

-In France, while experimenting with ways to duplicate his paintings, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) discovered that a plate coated with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed to light for 20 to 30 minutes would reveal a "latent image" when later exposed to mercury vapors. -By 1837, he had developed a method of fixing his image by bathing the plate in a solution of salt, and he vastly improved the process by using the chemical hyposulfate of soda (known as "hypo") as suggested by Sir John Frederick Herschel (1792-1871). The final image was negative, but when viewed upon a highly polished silver plate it appeared positive. The resulting picture could not be duplicated easily and was very fragile, but its quality was remarkably precise.

Manet

-In his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," poet Charles Baudelaire argued that in order to speak for their time and place, artists' work had to be infused with modernity. -He called for artists to be painters of contemporary manners and "of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains," using both modern urban subjects and new approaches to seeing and representing the visual world. This break with the past was critical in order to comprehend and comment on the present. -Especially after the invention of photography, art was expected to offer new ways of representing reality. One artist who rose to Baudelaire's challenge was the French painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883).

Starry Night (con)

-In painting from imagination more than from nature in The Starry Night, Van Gogh may have been following the advice of his close friend Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who once counseled another artist, "Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result." Born in Paris to a Peruvian mother and a radical French journalist father, Gauguin lived in Peru until age 7. - During the 1870s and early 1880s, he enjoyed a comfortable bourgeois life as a stockbroker, painting in his spare time as a student of Pissarro. Between 1880 and 1886, he exhibited in the final four Impressionist exhibitions. In 1883, he lost his job during a stock market crash, and three years later he abandoned his wife and five children to pursue a full-time painting career. -Gauguin knew firsthand the business culture of his time and came to despise it. Believing that escape to a more "primitive" place would bring with it the simpler pleasures of preindustrial life

avant-garde

-In reaction to the rigidity of academic training, some French artists began to consider themselves members of an avant-garde, meaning "advance guard" or "vanguard." -The term was coined by the French military during the Napoleonic era to designate the forward units of an advancing army that scouted territory that the main force would soon occupy. -Avant-garde artists saw themselves as working in advance of an increasingly bourgeois society. -The term was first mentioned in connection with art around 1825 in the political programs of French utopian socialists. -Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) suggested that in order to transform modern industrialized society into an ideal state, it would be necessary to gather together an avant-garde of intellectuals, scientists, and artists to lead France into the future. -*add definition from text*

Fig. 31-35 Mary Cassatt MOTHER AND CHILD

-Like Morisot, Cassatt focused her paintings on the world she knew best: the domestic and social life of bourgeois women. She is known for extraordinarily sensitive representations of women with children, which, like the genre paintings of fellow expatriate Henry Ossawa Tanner (see fig. 31-24), sought to counteract the clichéd stereotypes of her age. -In mother and child from about 1890 (fig. 31-35), she contrasts the loosely painted, Impressionist treatment of clothing and setting and the solidly modeled forms of faces and hands to rivet our attention on the tender connection between mother and child at bedtime, right after a bath. -The drowsy face, flushed cheeks, and weighty limbs of the child have a natural quality, even though the space occupied by the figures seems flattened. Because the composition and subject recall much earlier portrayals of the Virgin and Child, Cassatt elevates this modest scene of private life into a homage to motherhood and a dialogue with the history of art.

Fig. 31-29 Claude Monet ROUEN CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, SUNLIGHT

-Monet continued to explore personal impressions of light and color during a long career that extended well into the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s he focused his vision even more intently, exploring a limited number of outdoor subjects through several series of paintings: haystacks, poplar trees silhouetted against the sky, and the façade of Rouen Cathedral (fig. 31-29). -He painted the cathedral not as an expression of personal religious conviction, but because of his fascination with the way light played across its undulating stone surface, changing its appearance constantly as the lighting changed throughout the day. -He painted more than 30 canvases of the Rouen façade, begun from direct observation of the cathedral from a second-story window across the street and finished later in his studio at nearby Giverny. -In these paintings, Monet continued his Impressionist pursuit of capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, but his extensive reworking of the paintings in his studio produced pictures that were more carefully orchestrated and laboriously executed than his earlier, more spontaneous, plein air works.

Fig. 31-30 Camille Pissarro WOODED LANDSCAPE AT L'HERMITAGE, PONTOISE

-Monet's friend and fellow artist Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) offered a new Impressionist image of the landscape, painting scenes where the urban meets the rural. At times he portrayed the rural landscape on its own, but he often shows urban visitors to the countryside and small towns or factories embedded in the land as the city encroaches upon them. -Following his return to France, Pissarro settled in Pontoise, a small, hilly village northwest of Paris where he worked for most of the 1870s in an Impressionist style, using high-keyed color and short brushstrokes to capture fleeting qualities of light and atmosphere. In the late 1870s, his work became more visually complex, with darkened colors. -In his wooded landscape at l'hermitage, pontoise (fig. 31-30), for instance, a foreground composition of trees screens the view of a rural path and village behind, flattening space and partly masking the figure at the lower right. Pissarro applies his paint thickly here, with a multitude of short, multidirectional brushstrokes.

Fig. 31-46 Camille Claudel THE WALTZ

-One of Claudel's most celebrated works is the waltz (fig. 31-46), produced in several versions and sizes between 1892 and 1905. The subject of the waltz alone was controversial at this time because of the close body contact demanded of dancers. -The sculpture depicts a dancing couple, both nude, although the woman's lower body is covered with long, flowing drapery, a concession she made after an inspector from the Ministry of Fine Arts declared their sensuality unacceptable, recommending against a state commission for a marble version of the work. -Claudel added enough drapery to regain the commission, but she never finished it. She did, however, cast the modified version in bronze as this tabletop sculpture, in which the spiral flow of the cloth creates the illusion of rapturous movement as the embracing dancers twirl through space.

Fig. 31-11 Julia Margaret Cameron PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE

-One of the most creative early photographers was Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who received her first camera as a gift from her daughters when she was 49. Her principal subjects were the great men and women of British arts, letters, and sciences, many of whom had long been family friends. -Cameron's approach was experimental and radical. Like many of her portraits, that of the famous British historian thomas carlyle is deliberately slightly out of focus (fig. 31-11): Cameron consciously rejected the sharp focus of commercial portrait photography, which she felt accentuated the merely physical attributes and neglected the inner character of the subject. - By blurring the details, she sought to call attention to the light that suffused her subjects and to their thoughtful expressions. In her autobiography, Cameron said, "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man."

Starry Night

-One of the most famous examples of Van Gogh's approach is the starry night (fig. 31-40), painted near the asylum of Saint-Rémy. Above the quiet town, the sky pulsates with celestial rhythms and exploding stars. -Contemplating life and death in a letter, Van Gogh wrote: "Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star." This idea is made visible here by the cypress tree, a traditional symbol of both death and eternal life, which rises to link the terrestrial and celestial realms. -The brightest star in the sky is actually a planet, Venus, which is associated with love: It is possible that the picture's extraordinary energy also expresses Van Gogh's euphoric hope of gaining in death the love that had eluded him in life. -The painting is a riot of brushstrokes of intense color that writhe across the surface. This is clearly more a record of what Van Gogh felt than what he saw. During the last year and a half of his life, before he made this painting, he had experienced repeated psychological crises that lasted for days or weeks. While they were raging, he wanted to hurt himself, heard loud noises in his head, and could not paint. The stress of these attacks led him to the asylum where he painted The Starry Night, and eventually to suicide in July 1890.

William Morris

-Other British artists drew inspiration from the medieval past as a panacea for modern life in London. -he worked briefly as a painter under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites before turning his attention to interior design and decoration. Morris's interest in crafts developed in the context of a widespread reaction against the shoddy design of industrially produced goods. -Unable to find satisfactory furnishings for his new home after his marriage in 1859, Morris designed and constructed them himself with the help of friends, later founding a decorating firm to produce a full range of medieval-inspired objects. -Morris inspired what became known as the Arts and Crafts Movement. He rebelled against the idea that art was a highly specialized product made for a small elite, and he hoped to usher in a new era of art for the people. -He said in lectures: "I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few." A socialist, Morris opposed mass production and the deadening impact of factory life on the industrial worker. He argued that when laborers made handcrafted objects, they derived satisfaction from being involved in the entire process of creation and thus produced honest and beautiful things.

Paul Gauguin MAHANA NO ATUA (DAY OF THE GOD)

-is very much a product of such synthesis. Despite its Tahitian subject, it was painted in France during Gauguin's brief return after two years in the South Pacific. He had gone to Tahiti hoping to find an unspoiled, preindustrial paradise, imagining the Tahitians to be childlike and close to nature. -What he discovered was a thoroughly colonized country whose native culture was rapidly disappearing under the pressures of Westernization. In paintings such as this, however, Gauguin chose to ignore this reality and depict instead the Edenic ideal of his own imagination. *watch closer look video*

Fig. 31-45 Auguste Rodin THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS

-Rodin's status as a major sculptor was confirmed in 1884 when he won a competition to create the burghers of calais (fig. 31-45) for the city of Calais, commemorating a local event from the Hundred Years' War. In 1347, Edward III of England had offered to spare the besieged city if six leading citizens (burghers) surrendered themselves to him for execution. -Edward's wife, Queen Philippa of Hainault, convinced her husband to pardon the men because she feared their execution would be a bad omen for their unborn child, but Rodin's sculpture captures a moment before this pardon was known. -Rodin's relocation of public sculpture from a high pedestal to a low base would lead to the twentieth-century elimination of the pedestal itself, thus presenting sculpture in the "real" space of the viewer. *watch closer look video*

Degas

-Subjects from urban life also attracted Edgar Degas (1834-1917), although his paintings are closer to Realism in their intensely frank portrayals that often suggest social commentary. -Instead of painting outdoors, Degas composed his pictures in the studio from working drawings and photographs. His rigorous academic training at the École des Beaux-Arts in the mid-1850s and his three years in Italy studying the Old Masters blossomed in paintings characterized by complex compositional structure and striking representational clarity. In many respects his themes and style were closer to Manet's than to the Impressionists. -After a period of painting psychologically probing portraits of friends and relatives, during the 1870s, Degas began painting the modern life of Paris, especially its venues of entertainment and spectacle—the racetrack, the music hall, and the opera, usually focusing on the entertainers rather than on the bourgeois audience. -He was especially drawn to the ballet in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time when it was in decline. Occasionally Degas drew or painted actual dancers in rehearsal, but he also hired dancers, often very young "ballet rats" (as he called them), to come to his studio to pose for him

Fig. 31-43 Edvard Munch THE SCREAM

-Symbolism originated in France but had a profound impact on the avant-garde in other countries, where it frequently took on Expressionist tendencies. In Norway, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) produced a body of work that shows the terrifying workings of an anguished mind. -the scream (fig. 31-43) is the stuff of nightmares and horror movies; its harsh, swirling colors and lines direct us wildly around the painting, but bring us right back to the human head at the center and the echoes of its haunting scream, sensed visually. -Munch described how the painting began: "One evening I was walking along a path; the city was on one side, and the fjord below. I was tired and ill.... I sensed a shriek passing through nature.... I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood."

Fig. 31-44 James Ensor THE INTRIGUE

-The Belgian painter and printmaker James Ensor (1860-1949) studied for four years at the Brussels Academy, but spent the rest of his life in the nearby coastal resort town of Ostend, where like Munch he produced terrifying paintings combining Symbolist and Expressionist tendencies. -the intrigue (fig. 31-44) shows a tightly packed group of agitated people pushed toward the viewer into the foreground. Masks—modeled on the grotesque papier-mâché masks Ensor's family sold for the pre-Lenten carnival—conceal their faces, giving them a disturbing, mindless, menacing quality. Ensor's acidic colors and energetic paint handling only increase the viewer's anxiety.

Fig. 31-6 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux THE DANCE

-The academic artist Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) illustrates the kind of experimentation that took place even within the academy. -Carpeaux, who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under the Romantic sculptor François Rude (see fig. 30-56), was commissioned to carve a large sculptural group for the façade of Garnier's Opéra. -His work, the dance (fig. 31-6), shows a winged male personification of Dance leaping up joyfully in the midst of a compact group of mostly nude female dancers, an image of uninhibited Dionysian revelry. Like Cabanel's Birth of Venus, the work imbues a mythological subject with an erotic charge. -Unlike Cabanel's figures, Carpeaux's were not smooth and generalized in a Neoclassical manner, and this drew criticism from some academicians. -The arrangement of his sculptural group also seemed too spontaneous, the facial expressions of the figures too vivid, their musculature too exact, and their bone structure and proportions too much of this world, rather than reflections of an ideal one. -Carpeaux's work signaled a new direction in academic art, responding to the values of a new generation of patrons from the industrial and merchant classes. These practical new collectors were less interested in art that idealized than in art that brought the ideal down to earth.

Fig. 31-47 Victor Horta STAIRWAY, TASSEL HOUSE, BRUSSELS

-The artist most responsible for developing the Art Nouveau style in architecture was the Belgian Victor Horta (1861-1947). After academic training in Ghent and Brussels, Horta worked in the office of a Neoclassical architect in Brussels for six years before opening his own practice in 1890. -In 1892, he received his first important commission, a private residence in Brussels for a Professor Emile Tassel. The result, especially the house's entry hall and staircase (fig. 31-47), was strikingly original. The ironwork, wall decoration, and floor tiles were all designed in an intricate series of long, graceful curves. Although Horta's sources are still debated, he was apparently impressed by the stylized linear designs of the English Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1880s. -His concern for integrating the various arts into a more unified whole, like his reliance on sinuous decorative line, derived in part from English reformers such as William Morris.

Fig. 31-15 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot FIRST LEAVES, NEAR MANTES

-The landscape paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) take a more romantic and less political approach to depicting rural life. -After painting historical landscapes early in his career, Corot steadily moved toward more naturalistic and intimate scenes of rural France. first leaves, near mantes (fig. 31-15) depicts a scene infused with the soft mist of early spring in the woods. -Corot's feathery brushwork representing soft, new foliage contrasts with the stark, vertical tree trunks and branches and together with the fresh green of the new undergrowth evokes a lyrical mood. -A man and woman pause to talk on the road winding from left to right through the painting, while a woman labors in the woods at the lower right. -These images of peaceful country life held great appeal for Parisians who had experienced the chaos of the 1848 revolution and who lived in an increasingly crowded, noisy, and fast-paced metropolis.

Fig. 31-27 James Abbott McNeill Whistler NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD, THE FALLING ROCKET

-The most controversial painting in Whistler's 1877 exhibition was nocturne in black and gold, the falling rocket (fig. 31-27), and Ruskin's objections to it set off one of the most notorious court dramas in art history. Painted in restricted tonalities, at first glance the work appears completely abstract. -In fact, the painting is a night scene depicting a fireworks show over a lake at Cremorne Gardens in London, with viewers vaguely discernible along the lake's edge in the foreground. After reading Ruskin's review, Whistler sued the critic for libel (see "Art on Trial in 1877"). -He deliberately turned the courtroom into a public forum, both to defend and to advertise his art. On the witness stand, he maintained that art has no higher purpose than creating visual delight and denied the need for paintings to have "subject matter." While Whistler never made a completely abstract painting, his theories were integral to the development of abstract art in the next century. -The judge ruled in Whistler's favor; Ruskin had indeed libeled him. But he awarded Whistler damages of only one farthing. Since in those days the person who brought the suit had to pay all the court costs, the case ended up bankrupting the artist.

Fig. 31-17 Édouard Manet LUNCHEON ON THE GRASS (symbolism)

-The most scandalous aspect of the painting was the "immorality" of Manet's theme: a suburban picnic featuring two fully dressed bourgeois gentlemen seated alongside a completely naked woman with another scantily dressed woman in the background. Manet's audience assumed that these women were prostitutes, and the men their customers. - Equally shocking were the painting's references to important works of art of the past, which Académie des Beaux-Arts artists were expected to make, combined with its crude, unvarnished modernity. In contrast, one of the paintings that gathered most renown at the official Salon in that year was Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus (see fig. 31-5), which, because it presented nudity in a conventionally acceptable, Classical environment and mythological context, was favorably reviewed and quickly entered the collection of Napoleon III. -Manet apparently conceived of Luncheon on the Grass as a modern version of a Venetian Renaissance painting in the Louvre, The Pastoral Concert, then believed to be by Giorgione but now attributed to both Titian and Giorgione or to Titian exclusively (see fig. 21-27). -Manet's composition also refers to a Marcantonio Raimondi engraving of Raphael's The Judgment of Paris, itself based on Classical reliefs of river gods and nymphs. Presenting the seamier side of city life in the guise of Classical art was intentionally provocative. And the stark lighting and sharp outlining of his nude, the cool colors, and the flat quality of his figures, who seem as if they are silhouetted cut-outs set against a painted backdrop, were unsettling to viewers accustomed to traditional, controlled gradations of shadows modeling smoothly rounded forms in perspectivally mapped spaces.

How does photography establish itself as a new art form?

-The nineteenth-century desire to record the faces of the new mercantile elite, their achievements and possessions, and even the imperial possessions of nations, found expression in photography. Since the late Renaissance, artists and others had sought a mechanical method for drawing from nature. -One early device was the camera obscura (Latin, meaning "dark chamber"), which consists of a darkened room or box with a lens through which light passes, projecting an upside-down image of the scene onto the opposite wall (or box side), which an artist can then trace. -By the nineteenth century, a small, portable camera obscura or even lighter camera lucida had become standard equipment for artists. Photography developed as a way to fix—that is, to make permanent—the images produced by a camera obscura (later called simply a "camera") on light-sensitive material. -Photography had no single inventor. Several individuals worked on the technique simultaneously, each contributing some part to a process that emerged over many years. Around 1830, a handful of experimenters had found ways to "record" the image, but the last step, "stopping" or "fixing" that image so that further exposure to light would not further darken the image, was more challenging. **watch black and white photography video*

Art Nouveau

-The swirling mass of drapery in Claudel's The Waltz has a stylistic affinity with Art Nouveau (French for "new art"), a movement launched in the early 1890s that permeated all aspects of European design for more than a decade. -Art Nouveau embraced the use of modern industrial materials but rejected the functional aesthetic of works such as the Eiffel Tower (see fig. 31-1) that showcased exposed structure as architectural design. -Art Nouveau artists and architects drew particular inspiration from nature, especially from vines, snakes, flowers, and winged insects, whose delicate and sinuous forms were consistent with the graceful and attenuated aesthetic principles of the movement. The goal was to harmonize all aspects of design into an integrated whole, as found in nature itself.

Fig. 31-5 Alexandre Cabanel THE BIRTH OF VENUS

-The taste that dominated painting and sculpture in the Académie des Beaux-Arts by the mid nineteenth century is well represented by this, Cabanel is one of the leading academic artists of the time (fig. 31-5). -After studying with an academic master, Cabanel won the Prix de Rome in 1845 and garnered top honors at the Salon three times in the 1860s and 1870s. In his version of this popular mythological subject (compare fig. 20-35), Venus floats above the waves as flying putti playfully herald her arrival with conch shells. -Cabanel's technical mastery of anatomy, flesh tones, and the rippling sea derives from his academic training. But the image also carries a strong erotic charge in the languid limbs, arched back, and diverted eyes of Venus. -The combination of mythological pedigree and sexual allure proved irresistible to Napoleon III, who bought The Birth of Venus for his private collection.

Fig. 31-34 Edgar Degas THE TUB

-Whereas Degas's ballet paintings highlight informal moments associated with public performance, his later images of bathing women are furtive glimpses of intimate moments drawn from private life, usually rendered in the medium of pastel, which only heightens their sense of immediacy. - the tub of 1886 (fig. 31-34) represents a crouching woman perched within a small tub, washing her neck with a sponge. Initially, this may seem to be two separate pictures: at the left the compactly posed woman, balanced precariously on the steep floor of a receding interior space, and on the right a tipped-up table with a still life of objects associated with bathing. But when coordinated, they establish the viewer's elevated, domineering vantage point. -The dramatic, flattened juxtaposition, as well as the compression and cropping of the close frame, are further examples of the impact of Japanese prints and photography on Degas's art.

Gustave Fig. 31-12 Gustave Courbet THE STONE BREAKERS symbolism

-[N]ear Maisières [in the vicinity of Ornans], I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on the highway. It's rare to meet the most complete expression of poverty, so an idea for a picture came to me on the spot. -I made an appointment with them at my studio for the next day.... On the one side is an old man, seventy.... On the other side is a young fellow ... in his filthy tattered shirt.... Alas, in labor such as this, one's life begins that way, and it ends the same way. -Two things are clear from this description: Courbet set out to make a political statement, and he invited the men back to his studio so that he could study them more carefully, following academic practice. -By depicting labor at the size of a history painting—the canvas is over 5 by 8 feet—Courbet intended to provoke. In academic art, monumental canvases were reserved for heroic subjects, so Courbet was asserting that peasant laborers should be venerated as heroes. -Bypassing the highly finished style and inspiring message of history painting, he signifies the brutality of modern life in his rough use of paint and choice of dull, dark colors, awkward poses, and a stilted composition. -The scene feels realistically gloomy and degrading. In 1865 his friend the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) described The Stone Breakers as the first socialist picture ever painted, "an irony of our industrial civilization, which continually invents wonderful machines to perform all kinds of labor ... yet is unable to liberate man from the most backbreaking toil." Courbet himself described the work as a portrayal of "injustice."

Fig. 31-3 Charles Garnier OPÉRA, PARIS

-a city opera house designed by Charles Garnier (1825-1898) that is still a major Parisian landmark, was built at an intersection newly created by Haussmann's grand avenues. Accessible from many directions, the Opéra was designed with transportation and vehicular traffic in mind and had a modern cast-iron internal frame; yet in other respects it is a masterpiece of historicism derived mostly from the Baroque style, revived to recall an earlier period of greatness in France. -The massive façade, featuring a row of paired columns over an arcade, refers to the seventeenth-century wing of the Louvre, an association meant to assert the continuity of the French nation and to flatter Napoleon III by comparing him favorably with Louis XIV. The building's primary function—as a place of entertainment for the emperor, his entourage, and the high echelons of French society—accounts for its luxurious exterior detail. - The interior, described as a "temple of pleasure," was even more opulent, with neo-Baroque sculptural groupings, heavy gilded decoration, and a lavish mix of expensive, polychromed materials. More spectacular than any performance on stage was the one on the grand, sweeping Baroque staircase (fig. 31-4), where members of the Paris elite displayed themselves. As Garnier said, the purpose of the Opéra was to fulfill the human desire to hear, to see, and to be seen -**watch video in text*

Gauguin

-art was inspired by sources as varied as medieval stained glass, folk art, and Japanese prints; he sought to paint in a "primitive" way, employing the so-called decorative qualities of folk art, such as brilliantly colored flat shapes, anti-naturalist color, and bold, black outlines. -Gauguin called his style "synthetism," because he believed it synthesized observation and the artist's feelings in an abstracted application of line, shape, space, and color.

Fig. 31-12 Gustave Courbet THE STONE BREAKERS

-depicts a young boy and an old man crushing rock to produce the gravel used for roadbeds. Stone breakers represent the disenfranchised peasants on whose backs modern life was being built. -The younger figure strains to lift a large basket of rocks to the side of the road, dressed in tattered shirt and trousers but wearing modern work boots. His older companion, seemingly broken by the lowly work, pounds the rocks as he kneels, wearing the more traditional clothing of a peasant, including wooden clogs. -The boy thus seems to represent a grim future, while the man signifies an increasingly obsolete rural past. Both are conspicuously faceless.

Fig. 31-31 Pierre-Auguste Renoir MOULIN DE LA GALETTE

-focused on middle class at leisure landscapes -for example, Renoir depicts a convivial crowd relaxing on a Sunday afternoon at an old-fashioned dance hall—the Moulin de la Galette (the "Pancake Mill") in the Montmartre area of Paris, which opened its outdoor courtyard during good weather. -Renoir glamorizes the working-class clientele by placing his attractive bourgeois artist friends and their models among them, striking poses of relaxed congeniality, smiling, dancing, and chatting. -He underscores the innocence of their flirtations by including children in the painting in the lower left, while emphasizing the ease of social relations through the relaxed informality of the scene. -The overall mood is knit together by the dappled sunlight falling through the trees and Renoir's soft brushwork weaving blues and purples through the crowd and around the canvas. -This naïve image of a carefree life of innocent leisure—a kind of bourgeois paradise removed from the real world—encapsulates Renoir's idea of the essence of art: "For me a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty—yes pretty! There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need for us to manufacture more."

Fig. 31-33 Edgar Degas THE REHEARSAL ON STAGE

-for example, is a contrived scene based on such studio studies, calculated to delight the eye but also to refocus the mind on the stern realities of modern life. Several of the dancers look bored or exhausted; others stretch, perhaps to mitigate the toll this physical work took on their bodies. -Because ballerinas generally came from lower-class families and showed their scantily clad bodies in public—something that "respectable" bourgeois women did not do—they were widely assumed to be sexually available, and they often attracted the attentions of wealthy men willing to support them in exchange for sexual favors. -In the right background of this painting slouch two well-dressed, middle-aged men, each probably a wealthy "protector" of one of the dancers. *watch closer look video*

The Académie des Beaux-Arts

-founded in 1816 to replace the disbanded Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and its official art school, the École des Beaux-Arts, continued to exert a powerful influence over the visual arts in France during the nineteenth century. -Academic artists controlled the Salon juries, and major public commissions routinely went to academic architects, painters, and sculptors. It was to Paris that artists and architects from Europe and the United States came to study the conventions of academic art.

Fig. 31-18 Édouard Manet OLYMPIA

-its title alluding to a socially ambitious prostitute of the same name in a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas the Younger. Like Luncheon on the Grass, Manet's Olympia was based on a Venetian Renaissance source, Titian's "Venus" of Urbino (see fig. 21-30), which Manet had earlier copied in Florence. -At first, his painting appears to pay homage to Titian's in its subject matter (at that time believed to be a Venetian courtesan) and composition, but Manet made his reclining nude the very antithesis of Titian's. Titian's female is curvaceous and softly rounded; Manet's is angular and flattened. -Titian's colors are warm and rich; Manet's are cold and harsh. Titian's "Venus" looks coyly at the male spectator; Manet's Olympia appears indifferent. And instead of looking up at us, Olympia gazes down at us, indicating that she is in the position of power and that we are subordinate, like the black servant at the foot of the bed who brings her a bouquet of flowers. Olympia's relationship with us is underscored by her cat, which—unlike the sleeping dog in the Titian—arches its back at the viewer. -Manet overturns the entire tradition of the accommodating female nude. Not surprisingly, conservative critics vilified Olympia when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1865.

Fig. 31-16 Rosa Bonheur THE HORSE FAIR

-painted in 1853, was based on a horse market near Salpêtrière, but was also partly inspired by the Parthenon marbles in London and by the art of Géricault. The scene shows grooms displaying splendid Percheron horses, some walking obediently in their circle, others rearing up. -Some have interpreted the painting as a commentary on the lack of rights for women in the 1850s, but it was not read that way at the time. Although unusually monumental for a painting of farm animals, it was highly praised at the 1853 Salon. -When the painting later toured throughout Britain and the United States, members of the public paid to see it, and it was widely disseminated in print form on both sides of the Atlantic. -In 1887, Cornelius Vanderbilt purchased it for the new Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bonheur became so famous working within the Salon system that in 1865 she received France's highest award, membership in the Legion of Honor, becoming the first woman to be awarded its Grand Cross.

Frederick Scott Archer

a British sculptor and photographer, took a major step in the development of early photography. Archer found that silver nitrate would adhere to glass if it was mixed with collodion, a combination of guncotton, ether, and alcohol used in medicinal bandages. When wet, this collodion-silver nitrate mixture needed only a few seconds' exposure to light to create an image. The result was a glass negative, from which countless positive proofs with great tonal subtleties could be made.

Rosa Bonheur

was one of the most popular French painters of farm life. Her success in a male domain owed much to the socialist convictions of her parents, who belonged to a radical utopian sect founded by the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) that believed not only in the equality of women but also in a future female Messiah. Bonheur's father, a drawing teacher, provided most of her artistic training. Bonheur dedicated herself to accurate depictions of modern draft animals, which were becoming increasingly obsolete as technology and industrialization transformed farming. She studied her subjects by reading zoology books and making detailed studies in stockyards and slaughterhouses; to gain access to these all-male preserves, she had to obtain police permission to dress in men's clothing. Her professional breakthrough came at the Salon of 1848, where she showed eight paintings and won a first-class medal