Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867, marble, 3’5” H, fig. 12-21

Realism – From the Subjective to the Objective

Dates and Places: • Mid-19th century • France, USAPeople:• Radical politics in era of

reform (populism)• Concern for workers

(labor reform)• Trust only what can be

empirically observed

(positivism)

ÉDOUARD MANET, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on

the Grass), 1863. Fig. 12-17.

Realism – The “Painter of Modern Life”

Themes:• Everyday life (rejection of

historical and mythological subjects)

• Laborers & peasants • Contemporary themesForms:• Un-idealized figures • Monumental rendering of

real people• Ennobling the common

man

WINSLOW HOMER, Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Fig. 12-19.

Realism

GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone Breakers, 1849. Fig. 12-14.

Realism• On grand scale of

academic history painting• Paints the things he sees

(laborers young and old)• Following failed worker

uprising in 1848• Committed socialist• Coarse, monochromatic

palette (applied with palette knife)

• Rejected from Salon of 1855

• First artist to stage private exhibition of own work

GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone Breakers, 1849, 8’ x 6’ Fig. 12-14.

“I have never seen an angel.Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one.” - Gustave Courbet

Realism & The Plight of the Laborer

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1935

Lewis Hine, Girl Worker in Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908

Realism

• Member of group of French painters of country life (Barbizon School)

• Gleaners lowest level of peasant society (foraged for last wheat scraps)

• Sentimental treatment of subject

• Criticized for favorable depiction of poor (seen as dangerous by middle class)

• During era of advocates for poor (Marx, Dickens, etc)

Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners1857, oil on canvas, fig.12-15

The Gleaners and I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKgjjEJvMbM

Agnes Varda, 2000

Realism & The Female Nude

• Realistic rendering of indifferent prostitute (archetype of modern woman)

• Reclining female nude from Venetian painting

• Horrified public and critics (model described as a “cadaver”)

• Flattening space (palette knife and thick paint, not softened)

• Proto-Impressionist• Deliberately engaging the history

of art

ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863

Yasumasa Morimura, Daughter of Art History, ca.1990

Renaissance vs.

Modern Art

How does Manetmodernize the traditional reclining nude?

Realism &The FemaleNude

Photography – “Drawings by Light”

• First photographs • Daguerrotype (single

positive) • Soon used for portraits

(Nadar) • Artist’s tool (easier than

camera obscura or camera lucida)

• Threat to painting?• Painterly treatment of

photograph • Talbot’s calotype (single

positive)

DAGUERRE, Still Life in Studio, 1837. Fig. 12-26.

Photography – The Real “Disasters of War”

TIMOTHY O’SULLIVAN, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863. Fig. 12-27.

Photography

• New ability to capture events (Crimean War & Civil War)

• Wet-plate technology• The dead (and undead)

some of first subjects • New perspective on war• Exhibited publicly (but

not yet reproducible in newspapers, etc)

• Documentary photography?

TIMOTHY O’SULLIVAN, A Harvest of Death,

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863.

William Mumler, spirit photographyca.1860

Japan in the Modern EraThe Edo Period and Beyond

Where you would ordinarily expect a line or a mass or a balancing element, you miss it, and yet this very thing awakens in you an unexpected feeling of pleasure. In spite of shortcomings or deficiencies that no doubt are apparent, you do not feel them so; indeed, this imperfection itself becomes a form of perfection. Evidently, beauty does not necessarily spell perfection of form. This has been one of the favorite tricks of Japanese artists – to embody beauty in a form of imperfection or even of ugliness.

-D.T. Suzuki, from Remarks on Japanese Art Culture

(detail from Takashi Murakami’s Army of Mushrooms)

Modern Japan – Architecture

Tadao Ando, Ando Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1992

Japan

HASEGAWA TOHAKU, Pine Forest, Momoyama Period, late 16th c. Fig. 18-13.

Kogan, tea ceremony water jarMomoyama period, late 16th centuryShino ware with underglaze, 7”

Wabi = refined rusticity, austerity

Sabi = value in the old and weathered

JapanDates and Places: • Edo Period (1615-1868) and

beyond • Capital from Kyoto to EdoPeople:• From openness to isolation• Militaristic (shogun & daimyo) • Rigid social order• Zen Buddhism supplanted by

Neo-Confucianism (loyalty to state)

• Growing merchant class, literacy rate, artistic patronage

• 250 yrs peace and prosperity

Map of Japan, fig.18-1

Ogata Korin, White and Red Plum Blossoms, 1710-16, one (right) of pair of folding screens, ink, color and gold leaf on paper,

each 5’ x 5.5’. Fig. 1-8

JapanThemes:• Secular themes• Landscape • Everyday life (entertainers)

Forms:• Abstracted, decorative form• Patterning & design• Flattened space• Fine counter line, flat color• Conceptual approach• Disregard for Western

perspectival methods

Ogata Korin, White and Red Plum Blossoms, 1710-16, one (right) of pair of folding

screens, ink, color and gold leaf on paper, each 5’ x 5.5’. Fig. 1-8

SUZUKI HARUNOBU, Evening Bell at the Clock,

Edo period, ca. 1765. Fig. 18-16.

Japan

Ukiyo-e - “Pictures ofthe Floating World”

Japan – Edo • Colored woodcut print• Multiple blocks for colors and

lines• Prints cheap & readily

available • Ukiyo-e (pictures of the

floating world)• Transience and ephemeral

life• Genre themes (actors,

geishas)• Flat color, patterning &

decoration, strong contour lines, asymmetry

SUZUKI HARUNOBU, Evening Bell at the Clock, Edo period, ca. 1765.

Fig. 18-16.

Japanese Woodblock Printmaking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF3kbHJMVZg&feature=fvw

Japan

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Edo period, ca. 1826–1833. Fig. 18-17.

HokusaiSelf Portrait as an Old Man

Japan• One of the great ukiyo-e

printmakers• From the series Thirty-Six

Views of Mount Fuji• Colored woodcut print• Experimented with western

perspective, western materials

• Here incorporates Western

hue, Prussian blue• Graphic form

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Edo period, ca.

1826–1833. Fig. 18-17.

East Meets West

Hokusai’s Manga

Japonisme

Ando Hiroshige, Sudden Shower on the Ohashi Bridge & Vincent van Gogh, Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige)

Watch Clip from “Crows,” from Dreams (Yume), 1990, Akira Kurosawa

Europe and America, 1870-1900

Impressionism – Finding Perfection in Imperfection

Dates and Places: • 1870 to 1890 • France, England, US

People:• Industrialization,

urbanization • Leisure• Self-conscious modernity

and modernismJAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL

WHISTLER, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), ca.

1875. Fig. 13-1.

ImpressionismThemes:

• Landscape, cityscape

• Urban life

• Leisure activities

Forms:

• Fleeting effects of light

• Unblended brushstrokes

• Plein air (outdoor) painting

• Influence of Japanese prints

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876.

Fig. 13-4.

Group Activity “The Painter of Modern Life”

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the-eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; the majority of the fine portraits that remain to us from former times are clothed in the dress of their own day. They are perfectly harmonious works because the dress, the hairstyle, and even the gesture, the expression and the smile (each age has its carriage, its expression and its smile) form a whole, full of vitality…In short, in order that any form of modernity may be worthy of becoming antiquity, the mysterious beauty that human life unintentionally puts into it must have been extracted from it.

-Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter

of Modern Life, 1863

The Lumiere Brothers’First Films, 1895

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s

Impressionism – Groups 1 & 2

CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Fig. 13-2.

• Name derived from painting title

• Formed society & exhibited own works, from 1874 - 1886

• Coined as derisive term by critic who thought paintings looked unfinished, haphazard

• Honesty of materials• Capture sensations of moment• Painted outdoors (en plein air)• Success of movement credited

to expanded art market and

aggressive art dealers

CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Fig. 13-2.

Impressionism – Groups 1 & 2

Impressionism – Groups 3 & 4

EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, 1874. Fig. 13-5.

• Leisure activities of city dwellers

• Influence of imported Japanese prints

• Japanese composition, viewpoint

• Photography for preliminary studies

EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, 1874. Fig. 13-5.

Impressionism – Groups 3 & 4

Impressionism-Groups 5 & 6

MARY CASSATT, The Bath, ca. 1892.

Fig. 13-6.

Impressionism- Groups 5 & 6

• One of two women who exhibited regularly with the Impressionists

• Most of her subjects were women & children

• Figures have solidity, surroundings more gestural, flattned

• Influenced by Japanese printmaking

MARY CASSATT, The Bath, ca. 1892.

Fig. 13-6.

Post-ImpressionismDates and Places: • 1890 to 1905• France

People:• Urbanization• Café society • Colonization

GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886.

Fig. 13-8.

Post-ImpressionismThemes:• Urban life • Landscape• Exotic themes

Forms:• No single approach• Rejection of illusionism, window

onto the world • Expressive use of color, line,

brush stroke• Individual exploration of feeling,

mental state

VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night, 1889. Fig. 13-10.

Clip from Schama’s Power ofArt, “Van Gogh: Painting fromInside of the Head”, 2007

Post-Impressionism – Groups 7 & 8

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895. Fig. 13-7.

• Bohemian Parisian nightlife (Montmarte)

• Influence of Japanese prints• Expressive exaggeration of

forms, lines• Oblique and asymmetrical

composition• Expressive use of non-local

color (garish, artificial)

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895, Fig. 13-7.

Post-Impressionism – Groups 7 & 8

Post-Impressionism

PAUL GAUGUIN, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897. Fig. 13-12.

Post-Impressionism

• Despised civilized Parisian life & longed for unspoiled, “natural” environment

• Paints as exotic, primitive people (fantasies, myths)

• French colonialism in Tahiti• Subjective expression• Flat non-local color, outlines• Allegory (cycle of life?,

search for knowledge)

PAUL GAUGUIN, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We

Going? 1897. Fig. 13-12.

Symbolist & Fin-de-Siecle Painting

Dates and Places: • End of 19th century • Western Europe

People:• Hedonism,

pessimism, escapism at the end of century

• Influence of psychiatry and study of mind

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-08, oil on canvas, 6’x6’

fig. 13-17

Themes:• Fantasy, dreamlike

images• Mysterious, exotic• Nightmarish

Forms:• Not a unified style • Expressive use of form

and color • Rejected illusionism

Symbolist & Fin-de-Siecle Painting

HENRI ROUSSEAU, Sleeping Gypsy, 1897. Fig. 13-15.

Symbolist Painting

EDVARD MUNCH, The Scream, 1893. Fig. 13-16.

Symbolist Painting

• Angst of modern, urban life

• State of mind, madness

• Expressive distortion of form

• Expressive non-local color

• Circular movementEDVARD MUNCH, The Scream,

1893. Fig. 13-16.

Sculpture

AUGUSTE RODIN, Burghers of Calais, 1884–1889. Fig. 13-18.

Sculpture

• Expressive use of light and shadow

• Emphasis on human emotion to tragic event

• Treatment of surface emphasizes reality, not smoothness AUGUSTE RODIN, Burghers of

Calais, 1884–1889. Fig. 13-18.

Architecture 1870-1900

• Created for exhibition

• Honesty of structure and purpose

• Skeleton exposed

• Transparent

ALEXANDRE-GUSTAVE EIFFEL, Eiffel Tower, 1889. Fig. 13-19.

Architecture 1870-1900• New material: steel

• Skyscraper, open work spaces

• Rejects traditions

• “Form follows function”

• Limited ornament

• Honesty to interior organization

LOUIS HENRY SULLIVAN, Guaranty (Prudential) Building, 1894–1896.

Fig. 13-20.