realism and impressionism

courbet

"show me an angel, and i'll paint you one."

louis Daguerre still life in studio (realism) 1837, photography

- Daguerre invented the first camera. - a merge of style and art. - - The process captured every detail—the subtle forms, the varied textures, the finely graduated tones of light and shadow—in Daguerre's carefully constructed tableau. The three- dimensional forms of the sculptures, the basket, and the bits of cloth spring into high relief. The inspiration for the composition came from 17th-century Dutch vanitas still lifes. Like Claesz, Daguerre arranged his objects to reveal their textures and shapes clearly. Unlike a painter, Daguerre could not alter anything within his arrangement to create a stronger image. However, he could suggest a symbolic meaning through his choice of objects. Like the skull and timepiece in Claesz's painting, Daguerre's sculptural and architectural fragments and the framed print of a couple embracing suggest that even art is vanitas and will not endure forever.

the impact of Salons, the French Royal Academy, and the Salon of the Rejected

- These academies provided instruction for art students and sponsored exhibitions, exerting tight control over the art scene. The annual exhibitions, called "Salons" in France, were highly competitive, as was membership in these academies. Subsidized by the government, the French royal Academy supported a limited range of artistic expression, focusing on traditional subjects and highly polished technique. Because of the challenges that modernist art presented to established artistic conventions, the juries for the Salons and other exhibitions routinely rejected the works that more adventurous artists wished to display, thereby preventing the public from viewing any art other than the officially sanctioned forms of expression.

symbolism

- a reaction against realism. - does not refer to paintings that are allegorical or symbolic in meaning. - instead, focus on spirituality, imagination, and dreams. - a fin-de-siecle(end of the century) style, characterized by ennui and a revolt against materialism, rationalism and bourgeois society. - ARTISTS EXPRESS DEEP SENSITIVITY AND INCORPORATE FREE USE OF COLOR. ennui: boredom.

daumier nadar elevating photography to the height of art 1862, lithograph (realism)

- a satire that there is so many photographies - raised questions of government surveillancee how does Daumier portray the famous photographer Nadar? - a mad scientist or absent-minded professor. - famous for taking first aerial photography of Paris, Nadar also addressed debate whether photography is art? -to show it's everywhere; to emphasize the ability to make multiple copies; perhaps a criticism of the accelerated growth, industrialization and cultural changes in French society. might foreshadow a modern surveillance society, intrusiveness -

gustave Courbet the stone breakers 1849, oil on canvas. Realism. french. (impasto)

- a sense of isolation. - people are doing real-life labor. - two people are working on a road. - breaking out rocks into stone. they have to do it themselves without machines. - plain, the lives of the everyday people really matters than made up stories. - not showing their faces, glorifying the peasants. - everyday life, not gods and doggesses or idealized women. - peasants preferred over angels. - disapproval of fictional subjects: they're not real and visible. painted in 1849: one year after publication of communist manifesto. after one year after the 1848 rebellion of laborers demanding better working conditions and redistribution of property. a boy too young and a man too old back-breaking work. no heroism here, instead, the all-too-real hardships of many men. - rough brushstrokes(impasto), like the rough stones. - no dramatic composition. - ripped and tattered clothing. - figures trapped by their ecnomic status. - just as much attention paid to rocks as to faces. - conscious rejection of polished neo-classical style.. and rejection of idealized romantic style. - The Realists' sincerity about scrutinizing their environment led them to paint mundane and trivial subjects that artists had traditionally deemed unworthy of depiction—for example, working-class laborers and peasants, and similar "low" themes. Moreover, by depicting these subjects on a scale and with a seriousness previously reserved for historical, mythological, and religious painting, Realist artists sought to establish parity between contemporary subject matter and the traditional themes of "high art." - nonheroic act of breaking stones to provide paving for provincial roads. Traditionally, this backbreaking, poorly paid work fell to the lowest members of French society, as the stone breakers' tattered garments and utensils for a modest meal of soup confirm. By juxta- posing youth and age, Courbet suggested that those born to poverty will remain poor their entire lives. - presented a glimpse into the life of rural menial laborers. Courbet represented in a straightforward manner, and nearly at life size, two men—one about 70, the other quite young—in the decidedly

the later 19th century

- an age of revolutionary changes. - industrial revolution "revolutionary" scientific idea: charles darwin. - origin of species: ideas still debated. - theory of evolution. - survival of the fittest. political revolutions - new political systems replacing monarchies. - rise of democracies. - socialism: karl marx. "god is dead" bold statement. - nietszche.

paul guanguin where do we come from? what are we? where are we going? 1897, oil on canvas (post-impressionism)

- gauguin indicated the painting should be read from right to left. - he lived among people who do not live run on clocks. - right: this scene represents the beginning of life and poses the first question. - figures are flat looking. - this is avant-garde - having trees that are purple/blue. middle: this scene represents the daily existence of young adulthood and poses the second questions. right: this scene represents approaching death and poses the third question. gauguin said the bird represents fertility word. - very diverse skin-tones, the blue idol may represent what gauguin referred to as "the beyond" - Where are we going? represents the artist's painted manifesto created while he was living on the island of Tahiti. - gauguin completed Where are we going? at a feverish rate, allegedly within one month's time, and even claimed to de Monfried that he went into the mountains to attempt suicide after the work was finished. Gauguin—ever the master of self-promotion and highly conscious of his image as a vanguard artist—may or may not have actually poisoned himself with arsenic as he alleged, but this legend was quite pointedly in line with the painting's themes of life, death, poetry, and symbolic meaning. - Not only does Gauguin's text clarify some of the painting's abstruse, idiosyncratic iconography, it also invites us to "read" the image. Gauguin suggests that the figures have mysterious symbolic meanings and that they might answer the questions posed by the work's title. And, in the manner of a sacred scroll written in an ancient language, the painting is to be read from right to left: from the sleeping infant—where we come from—to the standing figure in the middle—what we are—and ending at the left with the crouching old woman—where we are going. - Stylistically, the composition is designed and painted to recall frescoes or icons painted on a gold ground. The upper corners have been painted with a bright yellow to contribute to this effect, and the figures appear out of proportion to one another—"deliberately so" as Gauguin wrote—as if they were floating in space rather than resting firmly upon the earth. These stylistic features, along with Gauguin's enigmatic subject contribute to the painting's "philosophical" quality. And as is common with other Symbolist works of this period, precise, complete interpretations of Where do we come from? remain out of reach. The painting is a deliberate mixture of universal meaning—the questions asked in the title are fundamental ones that address the very root of human existence—and esoteric mystery. Although Where do we come from? is painted on a large scale similar to the decorative public panels created by the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (an artist Gauguin admired), Where do we come from? is essentially a private work whose meaning was likely known only to Gauguin himself. A few months after completing the painting, Gauguin sent it to Paris along with several other works of art, intending that they should be exhibited together in a gallery or an artist's studio. The concern Gauguin reveals in the details indicates his continued awareness of the Parisian art market, which remained a central focus even as he exiled himself on a small tropical island on the other side of the globe.

edvard munch the scream 1893, oil, pastel and casein on cardviard (symbolism) tempera and pastels on cardboard. avante-garde)

- his inner state reflected in the landscape. - Its androgynous, skull-shaped head, elongated hands, wide eyes, flaring nostrils and ovoid mouth have been engrained in our collective cultural consciousness; the swirling blue landscape and especially the fiery orange and yellow sky have engendered numerous theories regarding the scene that is depicted. The Scream has been the target of dramatic thefts and recoveries. - The Scream's composition exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. The various renditions show the artist's creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work's subject matter fits with Munch's interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread. - The Scream is in fact a surprisingly simple work, in which the artist utilized a minimum of forms to achieve maximum expressiveness. It consists of three main areas: the bridge, which extends at a steep angle from the middle distance at the left to fill the foreground; a landscape of shoreline, lake or fjord, and hills; and the sky, which is activated with curving lines in tones of orange, yellow, red, and blue-green. Foreground and background blend into one another, and the lyrical lines of the hills ripple through the sky as well. The human figures are starkly separated from this landscape by the bridge. Its strict linearity provides a contrast with the shapes of the landscape and the sky. The two faceless upright figures in the background belong to the geometric precision of the bridge, while the lines of the foreground figure's body, hands, and head take up the same curving shapes that dominate the background landscape. The screaming figure is thus linked through these formal means to the natural realm, which was apparently Munch's intention. A passage in Munch's diary dated January 22, 1892, and written in Nice, contains the probable inspiration for this scene as the artist remembered it: "I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun went down—I felt a gust of melancholy—suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death—as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city—My friends went on—I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I felt a vast infinite scream [tear] through nature." The figure on the bridge—who may even be symbolic of Munch himself—feels the cry of nature, a sound that is sensed internally rather than heard with the ears. Yet, how can this sensation be conveyed in visual terms? Munch's approach to the experience of synesthesia, or the union of senses (for example the belief that one might taste a color or smell a musical note), results in the visual depiction of sound and emotion. As such, The Scream represents a key work for the Symbolist movement as well as an important inspiration for the Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. Symbolist artists of diverse international backgrounds confronted questions regarding the nature of subjectivity and its visual depiction. As Munch himself put it succinctly in a notebook entry on subjective vision written in 1889, "It is not the chair which is to be painted but what the human being has felt in relation to it." Since The Scream's first appearance, many critics and scholars have attempted to determine the exact scene depicted, as well as inspirations for the screaming figure. For example, it has been asserted that the unnaturally harsh colors of the sky may have been due to volcanic dust from the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which produced spectacular sunsets around the world for months afterwards. This event occurred in 1883, ten years before Munch painted the first version of The Scream. However, as Munch's journal entry—written in the south of France but recalling an evening by Norway's fjords also demonstrates—The Scream is a work of remembered sensation rather than perceived reality. Art historians have also noted the figure's resemblance to a Peruvian mummy that had been exhibited at the World's Fair in Paris in 1889 (an artifact that also inspired the Symbolist painter Paul Gauguin) or to another mummy displayed in Florence. While such events and objects are visually plausible, the work's effect on the viewer does not depend on one's familiarity with a precise list of historical, naturalistic, or formal sources. Rather, Munch sought to express internal emotions through external forms and thereby provide a visual image for a universal human experience.

gustav klimt the kiss 1907-1908, oil on canvas. austrian/symbolist

- influenced by byzantine. - klimt traveled to ravenna, where he was influenced by byzantine mosaic. - Klimt depicted a kneeling couple locked in an embrace. The setting is ambiguous, an indeterminate place apart from time and space, perhaps a garden of flowers. Moreover, all the viewer sees of the embracing couple is a small segment of each body—and virtually nothing of the man's face. The rest of the canvas dissolves into shimmering, extravagant flat patterning. This patterning has clear ties to Art Nouveau and to the Arts and Crafts movement and also evokes the conflict between two- and three-dimensionality intrinsic to the work of Degas and other modernists. In The Kiss, however, those patterns also signify gender contrasts—rectangles for the man's garment, circles for the woman's. Yet the patterning also unites the two lovers into a single formal entity, underscoring their erotic union.

mary cassatt the coiffure 1890-91, drypoint and aquatint etching on paper oil on canvas (impressionism)

- intricate designs - her body is smooth, no texture. - an intimate moment This drypoint etching, The Coiffure, of a woman adjusting her hair. It was inspired in part by a woodblock print in her personal collection, Kitagawa Utamaro's boudoir image of the daughter of a prosperous Edo businessman, Takashima Ohisa Using Two Mirrors to Observe Her Coiffure. La Coiffure also has its art historical roots in Old Master paintings of women bathing and the odalisque though it departs from those conventional models to become a tightly crafted exercise in form and composition. The word "la coiffure" evokes a precise image, one of wealthy women in glamorous settings. The ritual of grooming, dressing, and preparing one's hair from the seventeenth and eighteenth century court days of Anne of Austria and Marie Antoinette was passed down to nineteenth-century ideals of femininity and beauty. "La coiffure" was part of a specific lifestyle. Yet the woman in Cassatt's print is tending to her hair alone. Perhaps what we are seeing is a working woman getting ready to start her day. The counterpoint of the print's title and the reality of its subject matter characterizes the ironic tension within the image. The woman in Cassatt's La Coiffure sits in a plush armchair in front of mirror, her head focused downward, her back arched, as she adjusts her bun. The voyeuristic element to the scene is drawn from precedents in works by Rembrandt (Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654) and Ingres (La Grand Odalisque, 1814), which Cassatt studied at the Louvre when she was a young student in the mid 1860s. The woman in La Coiffure, unlike Rembrandt's Bathsheba or Ingres' Odalisque, is not sexualized. Though her breasts are exposed, her chest and the details of her body are deliberately muted into an overall structure of curves and crisp lines. This is an exercise in clarity and tone where the subject, the woman's body, is a compositional element in the picture—as vividly realized as the other significant patterns of the room—the wallpaper, the fabric of the armchair, and the carpet. As the viewer, we are placed at a slight leftward angle from the woman in the chair so that we see her through her reflection in the mirror while she is looking away from it. The downward gaze is similar to that of the model in the Utamaro, is done partly in homage to the modesty of the female subject in the ukiyo-e prints (artists were always aware that their works were made for a male-dominated market and designed them to be enticing) and partly as a study of shape and line, so that the viewer, realizing that he or she is not looking at a psychological portrait, could focus more intently on the compositional elements of the work. The curve of the woman's sloping back and neck echoes the curves of the chair which stand in contrast to the vertical lines of the mirror—a compositional counterpoint that further enhances the tension within the tight composition. The limited color palette of shades of rose, brown, and white, enables us to focus closely on the form and clarity of line. It also mimics the quality of pastels, which Cassatt, like her friend Edgar Degas, often liked to use. Through the process of the drypoint and aquatint etching, La Coiffure combines Cassatt's propensity for hazy shading and soft tones with a bold sharpness in line allowing the artist to integrate the qualities of two disparate media. Her desire to emulate the haziness, sensual, and suggestive possibilities of pastels is what motivated Cassatt not to use woodblock printing but intaglio. First, Cassatt carved her designs onto a smooth copper plate with a fine metal needle. Then the plate would be dusted with a powdered resin and heated until the resin melted in tiny mounds that hardened as they cooled. Acid was then added on to the metal plate biting the channels along the resin droplets. The deeper penetration of acid produced richer, darker tones, while a lighter application of acid produced lighter shades of color and a variety of nuanced gradients could be generated within a single print. Once Cassatt had replicated a certain number of images from a plate, she would incise the plate with a needle so that no one could use the same image again.

eadweard muybridge horse in motion 1878, photograph (realism)

- invented a machine, all 4 hooves are off the ground when running. - what he invented, the basic idea, movie is invented. By 1867 a dry glass plate was invented, reducing the inconvenience of the wet collodion method. Prepared glass plates could be purchased, eliminating the need to fool with chemicals. In 1878, new advances decreased the exposure time to 1/25th of a second, allowing moving objects to be photographed and lessening the need for a tripod. This new development is celebrated in Eadweard Maybridge's sequence of photographs called Galloping Horse (1878). Designed to settle the question of whether or not a horse ever takes all four legs completely off the ground during a gallop, the series of photographs also demonstrated the new photographic methods that were capable of nearly instantaneous exposure. - Muybridge presented his work to scientists and general audiences with a device called the zoopraxiscope, which he invented to project his sequences of images (mounted on special glass plates) onto a screen. The illusion of motion in Muybridge's photographic exhibits was the result of a physical fact of human eyesight called "persistence of vision." - Thus viewers saw a rapid succession of different images merging one into the next, producing the illusion of continuous change. This illusion lies at the heart of the motion-picture industry that debuted in the 20th century. Thus, with Muybridge's innovations in photography, yet another new art form was born—cinema.

impressionism

- ligther, brighter color palette - painted in dabs - the subject is light - painted a slice of life, a transitory moment.

alfred stieglitz the steerage 1907, photograph

- money people and poor people contrast. - he's just like any other artist - interested in shapes, textures, patterns, feeling, human experience STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY - a photo that objectively portrays the reality of the world, without manipulating it after it has been produced The Stieglitzes departed for Paris on May 14, 1907, aboard the first-class quarters of the fashionable ship Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although Emmeline looked forward to shopping in Paris and to visiting her relatives in Germany, Stieglitz was anything but enthusiastic about the trip. His marriage to status-conscious Emmeline had become particularly stressful amid rumors about his possible affair with the tarot-card illustrator/artist Pamela Coleman Smith. In addition, Stieglitz felt out of place in the company of his fellow upper-class passengers. But it was precisely this discomfort among his peers that prompted him to take a photograph that would become one of the most important in the history of photography. The Steerage encapsulated his career's mission to elevate photography to the status of fine art by engaging the same dialogues around abstraction that preoccupied European avant-garde painters. Stieglitz argues with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight that The Steerage suggests that photographs have more than just a "documentary" voice that speaks to the truth-to-appearance of subjects in a field of space within narrowly defined slice of time. Rather, The Steerage calls for a more complex, layered view of photography's essence that can accommodate and convey abstraction. (Indeed, later photographers Minor White and Aaron Siskind would engage this project further in direct dialogue with the Abstract Expressionist painting.) Stieglitz is often criticized for overlooking the subjects of his photograph in this essay, which has become the account by which the photograph is discussed in our histories. But in his account for The Steerage, Stieglitz also calls attention to one of the contradictions of photography: its ability to provide more than just an abstract interpretation, too. The Steerage is not only about the "significant form" of shapes, forms and textures, but it also conveys a message about its subjects, immigrants who were rejected at Ellis Island, or who were returning to their old country to see relatives and perhaps to encourage others to return to the United States with them. Ghastly conditions As a reader of mass-marketed magazines, Stieglitz would have been familiar with the debates about immigration reform and the ghastly conditions to which passengers in steerage were subjected. Stieglitz's father had come to America in 1849, during a historic migration of 1,120,000 Germans to the United States between 1845 and 1855. His father became a wool trader and was so successful that he retired by age 48. By all accounts, Stieglitz's father exemplified the "American dream" that was just beyond the grasp of many of the subjects of The Steerage. Moreover, investigative reporter Kellogg Durland traveled undercover as steerage in 1906 and wrote of it: "I can, and did, more than once, eat my plate of macaroni after I had picked out the worms, the water bugs, and on one occasion, a hairpin. But why should these things ever be found in the food served to passengers who are paying $36.00 for their passage?" Still, Stieglitz was conflicted about the issue of immigration. While he was sympathetic to the plight of aspiring new arrivals, Stieglitz was opposed to admitting the uneducated and marginal to the United States of America—despite his claims of sentiment for the downtrodden. Perhaps this may explain his preference to avoid addressing the subject of The Steerage, and to see in this photograph not a political statement, but a place for arguing the value of photography as a fine art.

Post-Impressionism (generally 1880's)

- more meaning in post-impressionist. - all people were impressionist for a short time... then converted to post-impressionism. - wants to make something that has significance.

realism (generally 1850s-60s)

- the camera, make convincing pictures of people, places, and things. Photography also perfectly suited an age that saw the emergence of Realism as an art movement and a pronounced shift of artistic patronage away from the elite few toward a broader base of support. The growing and increasingly powerful middle class embraced both the comprehensible images of the new medium and their lower cost. - 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 welcomed photography as a helpful auxiliary to painting. Other artists, however, feared that the camera was a mechanism that would displace the painstaking

paul cezanne mont sainte-victoire 1902-1904, oil on canvas (post-impressionism)

Cézanne evokes a deep, panoramic scene and the atmosphere that fills and unifies this space. But it is absolutely characteristic of his art that we also remain acutely aware of the painting as a fairly rough, if deftly, worked surface. Flatness coexists with depth and we find ourselves caught between these two poles—now more aware of one, now the other. The mountainous landscape is both within our reach, yet far away. Take the left side of the mountain. Though the outermost contour is immediately apparent, inside of it one can also discern a second line (or, more accurately, a series of lines and edges). The two converge just shy of the mountaintop. The area between this outer contour and the interior line or ridge demarcates a distinctive spatial plane; this slope recedes away from us and connects to the larger mountain range lying behind the sheer face. Attend to this area, and the mountain seems to gain volume. It becomes less of an irregular triangle and more of a complicated pyramid. Or look again at the painting's most obvious focus of interest, the top of the mountain. Cézanne's other works show that the mountain has a kind of double peak, with a slightly higher point to the left side and a lower one to the right. At first glance, the Philadelphia canvas seems to contradict this: the mountain's truncated apex appears to rise slightly from left to right. But a closer look reveals that Cézanne does respect topography. The small triangular patch of light gray—actually the priming of the canvas—can be read as belonging to the space immediately above the mountain or perhaps as a cloud behind it. Thus it is the gray and light blue brushstrokes immediately below this patch that describe the downward slant of the mountain top. Curiously, in one respect, our point-of-view is actually a little misleading. At an elevation of 3104 feet (946 meters), the left peak is not the highest point, but merely appears to so from Les Lauves. A huge iron cross—la croix de Provence—was erected on this spot in the early 1870s, the fourth to be placed there. Though visible from afar, the cross appears in none of Cézanne's depictions of the mountain. Cézanne had presumably stood on this summit, or these summits, several times. He had thoroughly explored the countryside around Aix, first during youthful rambles with his friends and later as a plein-air artist in search of motifs. And we know for certain that he had climbed to the top of the mountain as recently as 1895. Armed with these experiences, he could have estimated the distance from Les Lauves to the top of Mont Sainte-Victoire with some accuracy—it's about ten miles (16 kilometers) as the crow flies. When he stood on the mountain in 1895 Cézanne had, so to speak, entered into one of his own landscapes. As he stood there, perhaps he paused to recall some of the paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire he had already made. But, to return to Gauguin's language, could he possibly have dreamt of the works he would go on to paint in the following decade—works like the Philadelphia landscape, with its high horizon, intense blues, and astounding vibrancy? - ""I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in museums.... The painter should treat nature in terms of the cylinder and the sphere and the cone." -Cezanne "

auguste rodin burghers of calasis 1884-1889. bronze oil on canvas (impressionism)

burgher: a member of the council - england was fighting with France, 100 yrs war. - despair - these people lost their lives to save their people - rejected by the city - probably rejected because it is not up on a high pedestal - these six figures are different - must face death in your own way - rough and crude rodin worked with clay, - Rodin was commissioned by the French city of Calais to create a sculpture that commemorated the heroism of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, a prominent citizen of Calais, during Hundred Years' War between England and France - six men covered only in simple layers of tattered sackcloth; their bodies appearing thin and malnourished with bones and joints clearly visible. Each man is a burgher, or city councilmen, of Calais, and each has their own stance and identifiable features. However, while they may stand together with a sense of familiarity, none of them are making eye contact with the men beside them. Some figures have their heads bowed or their faces obscured by raised hands, while others try to stand tall with their eyes gazing into the distance. They are drawn together not through physical or verbal contact, but by their slumped shoulders, bare feet, and an expression of utter anguish. King Edward III made a deal with the citizens of Calais: if they wished to save their lives and their beloved city, then not only must they surrender the keys to the city, but six prominent members of the city council must volunteer to give up their lives. The leader of the group was Eustache de Saint-Pierre, who Rodin depicted with a bowed head and bearded face towards the middle of the gathering. To Saint-Pierre's left, with his mouth closed in a tight line and carrying a giant set of keys, is Jean d'Aire. Unbeknownst to the six burghers, at the time of their departure, their lives would eventually be spared. However, here Rodin made the decision to capture these men not when they were finally released, but in the moment that they gathered to leave the city to go to their deaths. Instead of depicting the elation of victory, the threat of death is very real. Furthermore, Rodin stretched his composition into a circle causing no one man to be the focal point which allows the sculpture to be viewed in-the-round from multiple perspectives with no clear leader. In fact, the fabric appears to almost fused to the ground—conveying the conflict between the men's desire to live and the need to save their city. Rodin included raised portions of the floor under the men's feet which would have, ultimately, made some of the men appear higher than others, yet they are all sculpted to be around the same height, that of an adult male. The burghers were not meant to be viewed in the form of a hierarchal pyramid with Eustache de Saint-Pierre at the top, which would have been typical in a multi-figure statue, but as a group equal in status. By bringing these men down to 'street level,' Rodin allowed the viewer to easily look up into the men's faces mere inches from his/her own; enhancing the personal connection between the viewer and the six men. Because the patrons wanted a heroic quality, with a raised pedestal that would place the figures in a God-like status high above the viewers, Rodin presented the city of Calais with The Burghers of Calais complete with a pedestal. However, the raised pedestal did not allow an audience to view the work of art as Rodin had intended. Therefore, he created a second version, one lacking a pedestal, to be placed at the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron in Paris. Rodin's goal was to bring the audience into his sculpture of The Burghers of Calais, and he accomplished this by not only positioning each figure in a different stance with the men's heads facing separate directions, but he lowered them down to street level so a viewer could easily walk around the sculpture and see each man and each facial expression and feel as if they were a part of the group, personally experiencing the tragic event.

edouard manet olympia 1863, oil on canvas Academic Art / French Salon (not Manet) Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Refused) (Manet)

comparison of venus of urbino. - much more real, olympia is a prostitute. - olympia canvas was rejected, "she owns you." she is the one who makes the decision, the power. - cats are independent, has her back up. the cat is also black. the reference of cat is to her prostitution. no sense of shame that the artist has about her. - flattening the surface of the surface. salon of the refused - the paris salon: sponsored by french government, took place annually. showcased best academic art. - the rejected artists protested. the emperor permitted the salon of the refused. - - painted the same year and also loosely based on a painting by Titian—Venus of Urbino Manet's subject was a young white prostitute. (Olympia was a common "professional" name for prostitutes in 19th-century France.) She reclines on a bed that extends across the full width of the painting (and beyond) and is nude except for a thin black ribbon tied around her neck, a bracelet on her arm, an orchid in her hair, and fashionable slippers on her feet. Like the seated nude in Le Déjeuner (Victorine Meurent served again as Manet's model), Olympia meets the viewer's eye with a look of cool indifference. The only other figure in the painting is a black maid, who presents Olympia a bouquet of flowers from a client. - Olympia horrified the public and critics alike. One reviewer of the Salon of 1865 (remarkably, the jury accepted Manet's painting for inclusion) described the painter as "the apostle of the ugly and repulsive."Although images of prostitutes were not unheard of during this period, the shamelessness of Olympia and her look verging on defiance shocked viewers. The depiction of a black woman was also not new to painting, but the French public perceived Manet's inclusion of both a black maid and a nude prostitute as evoking moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality. The contrast of the black servant with the fair-skinned courtesan also conjured racial divisions.

post-impressionism

democracy and socialism are two new ways of political systems. the monarchies are going away. scientific revolution: 1857, charles darwin: evolution of species. the idea that god did not create the universe, we evolved from earlier life forms. avant-garde: on the cutting edge.

japonisme

fascination with anything japanese - ukiyeo: art of the fleeting world. - The Japanese presentation of space in woodblock prints (see "Japanese Woodblock Prints," page 1007) intrigued these artists. Because of the simplicity of the woodblock printing process, the Japanese prints feature broad areas of flat color with a limited amount of modulation or gradation. This flatness captured the imagination of modernist painters, who were seeking ways to call attention to the picture - The decorative quality of Japanese images also appealed to the artists associated with the Arts and crafts movement in England. Artists found Japanese prints attractive because those artworks intersected nicely with two fundamental Arts and crafts principles: art should be available to the masses, and functional objects should be artistically designed. - - The Japanese presentation of space in woodblock prints (see "Japanese Woodblock Prints," page 1007) intrigued these artists. Because of the simplicity of the woodblock printing process, the Japanese prints feature broad areas of flat color with a limited amount of modulation or gradation. This flatness captured the imagination of modernist painters, who were seeking ways to call attention to the picture - The decorative quality of Japanese images also appealed to the artists associated with the Arts and crafts movement in England. Artists found Japanese prints attractive because those artworks intersected nicely with two fundamental Arts and crafts principles: art should be available to the masses, and functional objects should be artistically designed.

photography

pin-hole camera.

claude monet saint-lazare train station 1877, oil on canvas (impressionism)

plein air painting: painting outdoors, rather than in the studio - very modern, the effect of steam and light` - he Gare Saint-Lazare (also known as Interior View of the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Auteuil Line), depicts one of the passenger platforms of the Gare Saint-Lazare, one of Paris's largest and busiest train terminals. The painting is not so much a single view of a train platform, it is rather a component in larger project of a dozen canvases which attempts to portray all facets of the Gare Saint-Lazare. The paintings all have similar themes—including the play of light filtered through the smoke of the train shed, the billowing clouds of steam, and the locomotives that dominate the site. Of these twelve linked paintings, Monet exhibited between six and eight of them at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, where they were among the most discussed paintings exhibited by any of the artists - - Most of the Impressionists painted scenes in and around Paris, the heart of modern life in France. Monet's Saint-Lazare Train Station depicts a characteristic aspect of the contemporary urban scene. The expanding railway network had made travel more convenient, bringing large numbers of people into Paris and enabling city dwellers to reach suburban areas. In his "impression" of the Saint-Lazare railway terminal, Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris's modern transportation hub. The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape. Monet's agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life.

vicent van gogh starry night 1880, oil on canvas IMPASTO post-impressionism

post impressionist. - imposto: rembrant, corva - slap paint onto the canvas - had a pantheistic view: god is everywhere. - earth, air, fire, water avant-garde; art on the edge. - thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors. The Starry Night, his own subsequent "night effect," became a foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting in Van Gogh's oeuvre. - In Starry Night, the artist did not represent the sky's appearance. Rather, he communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it. The church nestled in the center of the village is, perhaps, van Gogh's attempt to express or reconcile his conflicted views about religion. Although the style of Starry Night suggests a very personal vision, this work does correspond in many ways to the view available to the painter from the window of his room in Saint-Paul- de-Mausole. The existence of cypress trees and the placement of the constellations have been confirmed as matching the view visible to van Gogh during his stay in the asylum. Still, the artist translated everything he saw into his singular vision.

reaction against romanticism

realism and impressionism.

fin-de-siècle

which literally means "end of the century," to describe European culture of the late 1800s refers to a certain sensibility. At that time, the increasingly large and prosperous middle classes were aspiring to gain the advantages that the aristocracy traditionally enjoyed. The masses, striving to live "the good life," embraced a culture of decadence and indulgence. Characteristic of the fin-de-siècle period was an intense preoccupation with sexual drives, powers, and perversions. People at the end of the century also immersed themselves in the exploration of the unconscious. This culture was unrestrained and freewheeling, but the determination to enjoy life masked an anxiety prompted by significant political upheaval and an uncertain future. The country most closely associated with fin-de-siècle culture was Austria.