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Jul
30
2010

Avant-Garde Realism in England

Avant-Garde Realism in England

At mid-century, young English artists were prepared for the Royal Academy in a system called the “schools,” or preparatory schools, such as Sass’s Academy and Heatherley’s School of Art.  But the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds seemed less relevant to new artists, as a newly restive lower class demanded a voice in government and newly rich industrialists began to collect art.   After the Reform Bill of 1832, the climate of English art changed and the shift away from ancient times and Renaissance models and towards a new interest in the great social and economic changes taking place in Britain. A group of young artists, some graduates of the “schools,” initiated a modern realism in England at the same time Gustave Courbet was preparing for his bold move to political realism.  In 1848, the artists of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood established a style and content that was so successful and so beloved that the “realism” of this group lasted as an English tradition well into the Twentieth Century.  The movement was complicated, combining vestiges of Neoclassicism, with careful drawing and historical content, and Romanticism, with a fascination with the Medieval past, and Realism, with a new emphasis on urban subject matter.

Debuting in   the revolutionary year of 1848 under the mysterious acronym “PRB,” the paintings showed a virtuoso demonstration of technical prowess in painting and bright colors patterned after the original “pre-Raphaelites” of the Early Renaissance.  To borrow Erwin Panofsky’s description of the artists of the Northern Renaissance, the realism of the PRB was based upon a vision that was both “microscopic” and “macroscopic.” In other words, the artist saw through both a microscope and a telescope, perfect vision, both near and far: the world revealed in all its manifest detail. With the Pre-Raphaelites, the attention to detail was nothing short of obsessive.  The labor-intensive painting practices were based upon a morality of work and diligent labor that gave their works an aura of the medieval, as was intended. Pre-Raphaelite art acted as a rebuke to the lazy habits of the academic artist who copied, not nature, but artistic conventions.  The influential art writer, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, called their academic practices “laborious idleness.”  Although the PRB was rebellious against academic theories and practices, there were limits to the rebellion of these middle class men.  The group resembled a boy’s club, for the men involved were quite young, and the women later associated with the PRB remained peripheral and played a larger role as models than as associates.

Art history has exorcised Pre-Raphaelites from the canon of correct art but the PRB was the first group to self-consciously declare themselves avant-garde artists.  They issued a literary manifesto, published their own journal, The Germ, for four issues, opposed the kind of academic art that based upon Raphael, painted en plein air, and organized their own exhibitions three decades before the Impressionists.  There were two main groups.  The founding group, the “PRB,” was organized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848 and included John Millais, who entered the Royal Academy at the age of eleven, and William Holman Hunt.   All members selected by Rossetti, this group included lesser known painters and writers, Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and Frederick George Stephens. Meeting for the first time in 1848 in the studio of Millais, the original group were inspired by the German Nazarene artists and determined that three elements were necessary for them to establish a new kind of art.   First, they had to be a disciplined group, which, second, produced a distinct doctrine, disseminated, lastly, by their own journal.

The idea of discipline and doctrine would have pleased Sir Joshua and the journal was designed to preempt the power of the art critics.   However, the President would not have been pleased by the PRB’s refusal to take classical art as their model.  Instead the Pre-Raphaelites rebuked the notion of “style” and formulas and looked to nature in a desire to retrieve a naïve vision.  Clearly, the English idea of Realism was close to the French concept.  Based upon science and a close study of nature, Realism in both nations sought to regain an innocent eye and to eliminate self-conscious style in favor of objective observation. Both the French and British Realists were part of a movement that was deliberately avant-garde and in rebellion against their respective academies.  Both groups used realism, as approach and as content, to position their art to counter the stranglehold of the establishment. There were important divergences, however.

It would be more appropriate to say that the Realism of the French was a response to contemporary scenes of life in France, particularly life among the lower classes.   The English Realists were more intent in precisely copying nature and losing themselves in the welter of details.  For them, Realism was linked to an absolute and moral fidelity to Nature and their content was simply “English.”  The “Englishness” of English art could be found both in the past and present in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites who were inspired by English literature and poetry and by the social problems in an industrial society.  In contrast, the second group of Realist artists in England could also be termed “artisans,” whose realism was to be found in their exactitude of execution.   This second group used precision to evoke the past.

Just as the first group of mid-century English artists were self-consciously archaic, so too did the second group also look back to Medieval art and its standard of excellence and pride in individual craft.  This group, which formed around Rossetti and included, the painter, Edward Burne-Jones and the designer, William Morris, the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the artist, Ford Maddox Brown. These men came together in 1852 in reaction to the horrors of mass manufacturing revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851. They came, not from London, but from Oxford’s Exeter College and were unaware of the Pre-Raphaelite group until 1854.  Once again, this is a male brotherhood in rebellion against the status quo.  The Oxford Group rejected the “canon” of literary reading and looked to the Romantic English poets, such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  But, typical of the Victorian period, they particularly admired Chaucer’s Medieval poems and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poems of King Arthur.

Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (1856 – 85) was an updating of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1470), discovered by the Group in 1855.  Like the German Romantics before them, these men looked to Gothic architecture for inspiration and traveled to Italy to see the early Renaissance murals.  The only way, they surmised, to counter the pernicious influence of manufactured aesthetics was to become visual artists themselves.  William Morris became an architect and interior designer and Edward Burne-Jones became a painter.  The Oxford Group connected with the Pre-Raphaelites when Burne-Jones introduced himself to Rossetti.  Also joining the Group were Arthur Hughes, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Valentine Cameron Prinsep, John Hungerford Pollen, and sculptor, Alexander Munroe.  Together they painted murals of the life of King Arthur in the new building for the Oxford Debating Society.

Both the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Oxford Group had many followers and a long life span that dominated artistic and aesthetic life in England well into the Twentieth century.  Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have been pleased to learn that the “English” style or “English school” of painting would never be established by chasing the classicism of the Italians or the English, in other words, “modeling,” but by a careful rendering of nature and a relentless observation of human behavior.  The Pre-Raphaelites and their followers created “English” art precisely by defying Sir Joshua and his Discourse.

The Oxford Group began the Arts and Crafts Movement that merged effortlessly into the   English version of Art Nouveau and its Liberty fabrics and designers, such as Archibald Knox and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  The seven men of the Oxford Group were, as founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the precursors of  Art Nouveau in France.  Both movements were dreams of restoring respect for hand-crafted goods to counter bad middle class taste.  However beautiful and popular these styles were, both Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau were to expensive and too elitist to be accessible to the middle class the movements were trying to reform.  And yet, today, these avant-garde English styles are still living and still popular and still in use, having long since been assimilated into contemporary life.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Jul
23
2010

Royal Academy in England

Royal Academy in England

Although the Royal Academy in England was established one hundred years later than the Royal Academy in France, England’s academic system was part on an ongoing rivalry for dominance between the two nations.  By the late Eighteenth Century, when the Royal Academy was established by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1768, the idea of national identity was being formed.  Along with colonial and military power and economic power, artistic achievement was also becoming part of a nation’s demonstration of superiority.  The Royal Academy in France was founded for the purpose of creating a cultural hegemony over Europe, and, regardless of aesthetic shifts and political changes, the French reigned supreme over the English in the decorative arts, fashion, and the fine arts until the 1960s when the Beatles and Mary Quant finally took down the French.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was president of the Royal Academy until his death in 1792 and for over fifty years, his discussion of art and aesthetics, Discourses, (1769 – 90) was the main source for understanding art in England.  Sir Joshua was succeeded by the American, Benjamin West, who remained loyal to King George III. The purpose of the Academy was the same as its counterpart in France: to maintain the quality of training in order to improve the status of the arts and crafts. Sir Joshua set up the hierarchy of painting with history painting on top and genre and still life painting at the bottom.  Although Reynolds referred to the “cold painter of portraits,” portraiture enjoyed greater prestige in England than in France, not the least because Reynolds was a portrait painter, along with his colleague Thomas Gainsborough. In another deviation from the French, the Royal Academy’s founding members included two women, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser.  However, it would be 150 years before another woman would be allowed to cross the Academy’s portals.

Following the French example, the English set up free exhibitions of paintings in order to encourage an English school of painting.   The need to have a specifically “English” art was, of course, a challenge to the French who transcended the idea of a national school so great was their complete dominance in the arts.  The Louvre Museum was instituted, first, to give the new “citizens” of the French Republic access to art, and second, to display the treasure trove of Napoléon’s loot for the public.  In contrast, the National Academy in England was specifically begun to encourage an “English” school of painting.  The National Gallery was founded in 1824, based upon the collection of paintings owned by John Julius Angerston.   For decades the collection of the National Gallery grew from large bequests from other collectors, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and Sir Robert Peel, with Charles Eastlake augmenting the private collections with acquisitions from Europe.  In 1897, thanks to Henry Tate, the Gallery moved to its permanent location at Trafalgar Square.

Sir Joshua Reynolds followed the French example by using classicism as the norm in the Royal Academy.   Classicism, in this late Baroque or Rococo period, was based upon the Italian grand manner art, or gusto grande, based upon the art of Raphael (spelled “Raffaelle” in the time of Reynolds).  Although based in nature, classicism refined, idealized and transcended nature.  Like at the French Academy, the role of high art was to elevate and educate the viewer as to the proper moral state of mind. Young men would be educated in the Academy to produce this classically styled art by older masters.  The “directors,” who would guide the “boys,” as he called them, away from “negligence,” “frivolous pursuits,” “corruption” (from foreign sources), “sloth” and towards “diligence” and “scrupulous exactness.”

The educational program included, not so much copying directly from the masters, but learning from models from the Italian and Flemish schools.  Like their French counterparts, the English students of the Academy were sent to Italy where they could study Italian grand manner art in situ.  Once they were established as painters, the artists would show at exhibitions where their “Diploma” work, destined to become part of the Academy’s collection, would be shown.  The artist then rose through the ranks to an Associate Royal Academician to a Royal Academician, a status where fame fortune and knighthood could be obtained.

In many ways the seven Discourses of Reynolds were based upon the Academy’s collection of drawings of Raphael—mentioned over and over—as examples for the students to study.  For Sir Joshua true Beauty was based upon “a correct and perfect design,” which subordinates “minuteness” and “smallness” and ornamentation.  The “grand manner” of Reynolds aimed to treat the high-minded content in a generalized (or universal) fashion, with details subordinated.  Reynolds discussed “genius” and “taste,” but not with the notion of artistic freedom or contemporary life but within the realm of antiquity and Renaissance artists.  He recommended Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, both classicists, as artists who continued the grand manner.  Until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds dominated the English art scene and academic art in Great Britain was always based upon classicism.  Only the writings of the art critic, John Ruskin, who published Modern Painters (1843 – 1860), which reflected the “modern” and the inevitable changes in art were capable of challenging the first President of the Royal Academy.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Jul
16
2010

Avant-Garde Realism in France

Avant-Garde Realism in France

In 1845, The art critic, Théophile Thoré (who “discovered” Vermeer) complained that French art was “..without system, without direction, and abandoned to individual fantasy.” According to another critic, Eugène Fromentin, “We revolve in a viscous circle. Public taste in injured; that of the painters is no less; and we vainly seek to know which of the two should seek to elevate the other.  Sometimes we say that the opinion ought to act as the quality of the work and elevate it; and again, according to a new idea, it must be the works themselves that must act upon opinion and convert it by good example.” Echoing the complaints of other observers, the famous Salon artist and Academic teacher, Thomas Couture. stated, “Alas, we have fallen low..Art has become small and commercial.”  The social changes across Europe combined with the lack of purpose within the art world itself appear to have combined to give art a new goal, that of social critic and social revolutionary, as artists began to take notice of the neglected peasant, laborer, and the inherent morality of the “timeless” countryside. This new approach, focusing on “low” subjects was called Realism.

Realism can be broken down into two phases in France.  The first phase was diverse, including the censored and outspoken political cartoonist and painter, Honoré Daumier, the cautious Socialist, Jean François Millet and his careful social landscapes and the radical lesbian Socialist, Rosa Bonheur and her patriotic celebrations of Second Empire prosperity. Realism developed out of Naturalism and became more radical after the Revolution of 1848 with the art of Gustave Courbet. In the beginning, his sympathies were with the petit bourgeoisie, the small town dwellers outside of Paris in  provinces considered provincial by the Parisians. Courbet came from just such an environment, a small town called Ornans, and migrated to the sophisticated urban milieu of Paris where he stressed his “country bumpkin” origins. After a decade of being on the fringes of the closed and rarified world of the Salons, Courbet ushered himself in to history in the unjuried Salon of 1849.  His strategy was to celebrate the everyday world of the inconsequential petit bourgeois, not in small sized genre paintings but in large sized canvases, heretofore reserved for history paintings. In his paintings in 1850, such as the Funeral at Ornans and the Stonebreakers, Courbet asserted the social importance and historical significance of a class that lost the revolutions of the past four decades.

To back up these unconventional subjects, Courbet and his supportive critic, Champfleury, co-wrote their “Realist Manifesto.”  The Manifesto was a statement against Romanticism and idealism, against exoticism and fantasy, and elitist politics.  It was a statement for the ordinary and everyday, for what was apprehensible to the senses alone, even if what was real was unaesthetic to the Salon sensibilities.  For five years, Courbet painted what he preached but in 1854, he redid his manifesto as a painting, titled An Allegory of the Last Seven Years of My Life. That The Artist’s Studio was subtitled as an “allegory,” was a signal that Courbet had abandoned optical realism and was allowing ambiguity, allusion, and symbol to infiltrate his work.  This work is an homage to his success in the art world, a masterful exhibition of egoism, a confounding statement about his political concerns and the beginning of a new phase of his career as an Insider Artist. As the artist acquired more important patrons his subject matter became less confrontational and more conservative, veering often towards pornography. By 1858, Courbet had serious disagreements with early supporters, his patron, Bruyas and his best critic, Champfleury, over his suggestive paintings and patrons in Germany were demanding princely themes, such the hunt, and other pursuits preserved for the wealthy.

Courbet’s political conscience reasserted itself in the aftermath of the Franco- Prussian War in 1870 with his involvement with the short-lived and ill-fated Commune. In the post-war confusion, radical socialists attempted to seize power and bring about some kind of social equality, but the Communards were ultimately defeated by the French government.  Courbet was one of the many sympathizers who were punished after order was restored. He was implicated in the infamous incident of the felling of the Vendôme Column and was made an example of the government’s reassertion of authority. After his downfall, following the failure of the Commune, the politically naïve Courbet spent the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland, painting for aristocrats, finally abandoning his Realist subject matter for elitist pictures.  Courbet, like David, lived in difficult times that were marked by political changes and, like David, he had to be able to invent and reinvent himself in order to survive, no matter how sincere his democratic principles were.

Whatever Courbet’s intentions towards his patrons and the art public, the socially radical subject matter equated to artistic damage that had been done and the more “advanced” artists were sundered from the public and severed from the Academy.  There was no going back.  The failure of the Revolution caused a cleavage in the French culture as democratic ideals fell victim to the new Emperor Napoléon’s support of finance capital and big industry. Enjoying the high tide of economic prosperity, Courbet’s successor to the mantle of Realism, Edouard Manet, seems to have been able to negotiate the political shoals with more ease, but he encountered trouble in the Academy.   Courbet disturbed the status quo by insisting on elevating the common people to social and moral importance, a rebuke to the middle class for abandoning its own origins (according to the art historian, T. J. Clark). Manet disturbed the powers that be by attempting to update timeless and classic subject matter and, in the process, exposing the emptiness of academic conventions.  Between Courbet and Manet, Realism is divided, in the timeless manner, between the country (Courbet) and the city (Manet).

The Revolution of 1848 allowed Courbet the opportunity to present scenes of country life but the same Revolution also extinguished the hopes of the oppressed and the interests of the culture shifted decisively away from the country to the new and exciting modernism of the city.  When artists return to the country, they do so in the 1880s and paint its sights as tourists and anthropologists, recording the vanishing life of another species–an attitude that would later be called “primitivism,” but which is more aptly thought of as a kind of nostalgia.  The day and time of Courbet was long past and the era of the flâneur, the dandy and the courtesan and the consumer world predicted in the  Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 had come into being. Modernité was a fact of life and the question was–how should the artist react to the moderne?

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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Jul
09
2010

Salon Realism

Salon Realism

Realism had many faces.  As an international impulse seen in European and American art, Realism was not so much a style or a look as a new approach to art, overtaking the old ideas of exhausted Romanticism. By the 1840s, due to the impact of science and technology, a more materialistic and positivist approach to philosophy emerged.  Idealist philosophy, based upon abstract principles and models gave way to empiricism and pragmatism. Social change accelerated and demanded serious attention from progressive thinkers. In an age of growing discontent over the failures of the Revolutions in France, there was a growing interest in the arts with the problems of contemporary life there was a growing interest in the arts with the problems of contemporary life. Universal enfranchisement to all citizens was still a dream. The failure to alleviate the economic imbalance between the classes and to grant political power and rights to the lower classes meant that both France and England were faced with the choice between reform or repression.  England would grant reforms to the lower classes by carefully calibrated degrees, staving off serious unrest and outright rebellion.  The French, ever wary of the dangerous classes, suffered yet another Revolution in 1848 and went through another political upheaval.

In addition to philosophical and social forces that ended Romanticism, the rise of Realism was very much linked to the rise of the Middle Class as a major force in society.  By mid-century the bourgeoisie has become the dominant cultural force.  Unlike the traditional upper classes, the status of the middle class was based upon wealth and a distinct value system.  It was the middle class that divided the genders and subjugated women to the rule of men.  For the newly wealthy males, it was important that their wives were shown to be at leisure, like an aristocratic woman, and it was important to him to have power over his own family.  This new class was not widely read, nor was their taste particularly refined, but they were eager to make their influence felt in the realm of culture.  Because it was easy to understand and accessible, the middle class art public preferred the kind of art that was legible or realistic.  For the bourgeoisie the mark of artistic talent was not creativity but the ability to copy nature.  Artistic experimentation and innovation was not appreciated, and the public shied away from extreme Romanticism and Realism, seeking an art that was more “middle of the road” or juste milieu.

The art public was trained to appreciate academic art and approved of the precise delineation and the entertaining stories. But, like any dominant class, the bourgeoisie wanted to see themselves reflected in art.  Greek and Roman scenes might be exciting and full of beguiling female nudes, but the audience could not recognize itself in the history paintings.  As an artist knows, it is important for the audience to invest in the art.  The viewer must identify with the painting or the sculpture for the work to be successful.   The art dictated by the Academy was not in tune with the modern age and was remote in time and ultimately unresponsive to middle class needs.  The academic art referred back to the classical past of Greece and Rome and only a well-read person could grasp all the classical illusions.  The audience gravitated to realism on two levels.  First, people liked to see genre scenes of ordinary everyday life, preferably with an interesting narrative.  Second, the average spectator preferred realism over expressionism in terms of how the artist should render the subject.  Another important factor in the rise of Realism was the invention of photography.  Photography was a hugely popular art form and the public avidly flocked to photographic studios to have themselves immortalized.  Photography was, of course, an accurate mirror of nature, an exact copy.  The public liked the precision of the daguerreotype to the fuzzy surface of paper photography and began to expect the artist to live up the photograph.  Artists were at the mercy of this new public and had the choice to comply with its demands or to drift into the avant-garde where another type of Realism was being developed.

The artists who wanted to succeed steered a middle course between Romanticism and Realism and between academic art and photography.  The result was a form of art that was both popular and official called juste milieu. Early on, juste milieu art, fulfilled the need of the growing middle class audience for a popular art and for subject matter that was about them and that was easy to understand.  This art was “easy,” rather like today’s television: realistic and entertaining and enjoyable, giving the audience what Roland Barthes called “the effect of the real.”  The juste milieu artists were successful and rich and respected and were often the implacable foes of the avant-garde.  They found the right formula to please audiences.  The subject matter really wasn’t “modern” or about the current age.  Indeed, given the current political climate in France, the juste milieu artists tended towards historical escapism or idealized depictions of the countryside and its inhabitants.   The middle class favored landscape painting, once considered a “low” genre of art.  But landscape painting was well suited to middle class needs for interior decoration: it was pretty to look at and avoided any unsuitable or controversial content.

The size of painting began to change.  The successful artist was well advised to divide his or her time between the large paintings, destined for the Salon, and smaller works, designed for the bourgeois home.  Sculpture suffered during the waning of classicism and academic art.  Like history painting, classical sculpture was not well-suited to the modern era and sculptors struggled to translate contemporary life into bronze and marble.  For the Nineteenth Century, photography, with its intense realism, was the exemplary art form.

It is important to understand how the juste milieu artists approached their subject matter. Paul Delaroche, Jean-Léon Gérome and Ernst Meissonier were all respected and wealthy painters by the 1860s and they rejected the tradition of academic history painting.  However, these artists were painters of history. Gérome was particularly successful with a new art form: the historical genre painting or scenes of everyday life from the distant past.  The art public enjoyed Gérome’s depictions of ancient Romans living in a way that seemed to resemble their own lives.  But Gérome also gave the audience thrilling scenes from the past, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar and gladiatorial contests in the Colosseum.  To today’s viewer, Gérome’s paintings are eerily like a Hollywood production, and, indeed, Gérome was typical of his time in his rigorous attention to historical detail and accuracy.

Paul Delaroche is famous in the history of photography because he greeted the invention of photography with the cry, “From today, painting is dead!” Delaroche actually mentored many painters who became photographers and his work, like that of Gérome had that intense realism that resembles the high gloss of a movie. Delaroche is best known for his dramatic scene of the beheading of Lady Jane Grey in 1833.  As might be expected, beheading was a sensitive topic in France, and many art historians have suggested that Delaroche’s painting allowed the public to consider the execution of a ruler from a distance of time.  The painting is well-executed (no pun intended), as are all the works of the juste milieu artists, and dramatically effecting.

Ernst Meissonier was also a history painter, but his works were about French history and small in size.  His popular specialty was scenes of the first Emperor, Napoléon, around whom a cult of nostalgia had formed.  A contemporary of the Realist painter of peasants, the unpopular, Jean-François Millet, Meissonier was one of the most successful and respected history painters of his time.  Renowned for adherence to accuracy—he even owned one of the Emperor’s saddles—-won him the adulation of the art public and the scorn or the avant-garde critics.

By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the art world had split into opposing segments, the conservative, the juste milieu, and the avant-garde—all of which had a stake in Realism.  Avant-garde Realism, which is covered in another chapter, did not use a realistic style to make history look “real,” instead the Realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet was contemporary, of its own time, and provocative.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Jul
02
2010

The Role of the Realist Artist

The Role of the Realist Artist

For the Realist artist, the world is a given and the sole aim of the artist is to describe this world.  In attempting to see the world without the subjective, the artists were acting like Positivist philosophers.  Idealism was rejected and ugliness was accepted.  For Realist artists, such as Gustave Courbet, it was unethical to depict that which did not exist, giving Realism a moral dimension.  In 1855, Courbet set up his own Pavilion of Realism and issued his “Realist Manifesto,” which stated that he was rejecting the acts of copying and imitation, on one hand, and, at the other extreme, art-for-art’s-sake.

“To know in order to create, that was my idea.  To be capable of depicting the manners, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see it, in short, to produce living art, that is my goal…”

Writing fifteen years later in 1880, Emile Zola described the “naturalist” novel.

“I have said that the naturalistic novel is simply an inquiry into nature, beings, and things.  It no interests itself in the ingenuity of a well-invented story, developed according to certain rules.  Imagination has no longer place, plot matters little to t the novelist, who bothers himself with either development, mystery, nor dénouement; I mean that he does not intervene to take away from or add to reality; he does not construct a framework out of the whole cloth according to the needs of a preconceived idea.  You start from the point that nature is sufficient; that you must accept it  as it is, without modification or pruning; it is grand enough, beautiful enough to supply its own beginning, its middle, and its end…you should simply take the life study of a person or a group of persons, whose actions you faithfully depict.  The work becomes a report, nothing more….”

Zola was rejecting literary or artistic practices.  For centuries painting had been based upon a number of conventions or schema or art devices, developed by artists over time, which stood for reality and operated like signs.   These signifiers could be read by the spectator, reinforcing the fact that art was a language with its own grammar and syntax and its own complex vocabulary.  Perspective was invented in the Renaissance, provided, through the use of orthogonals converging at a vanishing point, an illusion of space, a space ample enough to contain volumetric figures and objects.  Chiaroscuro gave them three dimensional objects the illusion of volume on a two dimensional plant, similar to the appearance of sculpture, especially that of bas relief sculpture, through a system of lights and darks.  The gradation of tone creates the illusion of a form that is advancing and receding.

Chiaroscuro not only provides the means of volumetric illusion for not only single objects but also for the composition as a whole.   Important areas are highlighted and as the composition moves inward from dark edges to a light filled center, focusing the viewer’s attention on the subject.  This hierarchy of elements in the composition is further reinforced by the use of aerial perspective in which the outlines of objects far away are blurred, compared to those close at hand which have sharp outlines and contours. This play between blurred and sharp contours also works within the composition as a whole, regardless of distance, to focus the viewer’s attention on important details and parts.

Thus the viewer is directed through use of conventions of artistic devices in the reading of the painting from less important to more important hierarchy of detail and parts, adding up to a unified whole of chiaroscuro, lights and darks, within a structured composition composed according to the rules of perspective.   The vocabulary of art includes, in addition, a series of gestures, poses, and postures called by avant-garde artists “rhetorical,” which stood for feelings and emotions and actions and could be decoded by the audience.  The entire system of conventional painterly devices and signs was challenged by the so-called “advanced” artists in the Nineteenth Century, struggling to replace what can be called an academic or conventional realism, which depended upon schemata.   The Realist artists sought a fresh look at nature and the world around them.

The English critic, John Ruskin rejected classicism because it was art about art and thus removed from nature itself.  Although Ruskin’s equation of nature, God, and truth was not shared by all artists, his call to artists to turn away from conventional realism to nature itself was widely shared and heeded.  The avant-garde artists were consciously attempting to forge a new artistic language that was not dependent upon art itself but was derived from nature, the real world, not an improved fantasy, but a new vocabulary that would express a truer reality, free of artistic schemata, conventions and devices accepted in the past as representing reality.

The history of Nineteenth Century art is the story of a struggle against schemata.  The only remedy was a careful study of nature.  Nature was seen as a source of objective truth.  For the Realist artists, science and history became the models for a new mode of action.  It was assumed that history was a “science” based upon careful and impartial observation of the facts and evidence, and that science was a procedure that rejected metaphysics and belief systems.  The Realist artists had to follow an unconventional and non-academic methodology, based upon empiricism, unsupported by artistic techniques.  The result was the necessity to render only what could be seen, eliminating content that could not be witnessed, whether the past or fantasy.  Although the Realist artist could respond only to the contemporary, an entirely new world of content opened up, as suddenly the ordinary and the everyday became accepted subject matter.   Realism stood for a rejection of all that was false in art, from imaginary content to time worn conventions of illusionism.  Truth became equated with authenticity and sincerity, the prime motivations of the Realist artist who rejected the poncif of training and learned technique.

The Realist artists startled audiences, not by a careful copying of nature, but by the choice of content.  Often these artists selected the lower classes as their focus of attention, not as objects to be studied, but as content to be elevated.  The notion that marginalized people and places were worthy of artistic attention convinced conservative art audiences that the Realists artists were not only discarding artistic conventions but that they were also deliberately provoking public disapproval. For the Realist artist, the only answer was that the world was a given and that the role of the artist was to respond non-judgmentally to it without preconceived ideas.

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Jun
25
2010

Realism in Mid-Century Art

Realism in French and English Art

The main goal of a Realist artist in France was to create an objective and detached description of banal reality, as it existed, in all its ordinariness.  Realism, tended to adhere to a particular social point of view that of championing the poor or the lower classes.  Depending upon the artist, Realism could be very confrontational, like the art of Gustave Courbet or very conservative, like the paintings of Rosa Bonheur.  Basically Realism, expressed a modern desire to look at that which existed in the here and now, rather than re-create a dead world in a dead language, such as Neoclassicism, or to imagine a fantasy world, in the way of Romanticism.  Realism demanded, not only new content, but also a new way of making art, based upon the question of how to see, really see, and to look at the “real.”  The result of these Realist experiments was a certain consistency in subject matter but a variety of approaches to executing a response to the world, as it existed. But Realism was far too complex from nation to nation to be reduced to a simple-minded contrast to Romanticism.

Like Romanticism, Realism was never a style and was never uniform in content.  Full of contradictions, Realism could include, in France, the daughter of a Saint-Simonist, Rosa Bonheur, the petit-bourgeois painter, Gustave Courbet, the narrator of amusing tableaux of middle class life in America, Lily Martin Spencer, the elegant portraits of British society by James Tissot, and the international provocateur par excellence, international artist, James Whistler. Realism incorporated a number of artistic and literary impulses, including Naturalism and Impressionism, and would be a longer movement, lasting at least forty years until the 1880s.  Although the Romantic imagination is often compared to Realist observation of every day life, Realism contained elements of escapism, just as Romanticism had contained elements of Realism.  France continued its dominance in the world of the arts, but Realism was far from a French phenomenon.  Realism begins, in fact, in England in 1848 with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  The PRB was founded while the rest of Europe was embroiled in yet another Revolution.  The Brotherhood was inspired by the events on the continent but concentrated, at first, on religious subjects.

Perhaps because the artists in France experienced the uprising directly, their artistic response was more political and more politicized by the art audience.  The Revolution of 1848 was the final blow to Romanticism and all illusions of the French Revolution of 1789 died on the barricades.  The impact of the Revolution of 1848 is the chief reason why realism in America is a special case and why when the term “Realism” is used in art history, the speaker often thinks of England or France, and especially France.  First, Realism was a revolt against the Academies in both England and France, where classicism still ruled.  For the Realist artist, the transcendence of time seen in the academic worship of the past should be—had to be—replaced by the particular and observable events of the contemporary era.   The universal event was replaced by the unique event, taking place in a fleeting moment of time.  In Academic art, “history” signified an entire narrative that had moral and ethical importance.  Within Realism, the anti-academic approach told no story and imparted no significance to the depicted scenes. Contemporary history was approached with the same deadpan viewpoint used for more banal moments.  There is nothing romantic or glorious about Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1867), only embarrassment and tragedy.  Realism was also anti-Romantic by rejecting the escape into the unreal.  The Romantic artist’s struggle for self-expression was replaced by the desire to depict one’s own time.  Honoré’s statement, “Il faut être de son temps” was the battle cry of the Realists who preferred humble subjects compared to the exotic and fantastical narratives of the Romantics.  The rejection of both Academic art and of Romantic ideals signaled a new understanding that even the ordinary is important and should be rendered as seriously as a noble deed from the past.

Realism also turned away from the concept of style, particularly as a personal trait that expressed one’s personality.  Delacroix and Ingres asserted themselves by flouting or by exaggerating the academic style.  The Realist artist resisted academic conventions and rejected the influence of the trained artistic eye that came between an honest depiction of reality.  Many Realist artists expressed the desire to see as innocently as a child and this need for nonconventional innocence resulted in a challenge to the received techniques of the Academy.  John Millais obliterated academic style with his obsessive delineation of closely observed nature.  Gustave Courbet mimicked the clumsy and naïve approach of outsider artists.  The result, as Emile Zola expressed it, was “nature seen from the corner of a temperament.”  In order to see freshly, composition and chiaroscuro were disregarded and color became local rather than emotional or formal.

The role of the artist was to tell the truth.  Reasons for telling the truth and for making objective art varied.  Some artists, such as Ernst Meissonier, used realism to realistically recreate a historical scene with accuracy.  Some artists, such as Rosa Bonheur, used realism to celebrate the working animals of her country.  It would be incorrect to assume that those two artists were not political, for both were very nationalistic in their intentions to celebrate France.  Other artists, such as Jean-François Millet or Gustave Courbet were considered to be “political,” “Red,” or “communist,” because they did not uphold the existing artistic order and challenged its social preconceptions.  Holman Hunt took up the theme of the “fallen woman,” or the social problem of the Victorian era and presented a morality tale to the audience with The Awakening Conscience. Edouard Manet had no such moral pretentions in his equally graphic images of the woman in her fallen state, such as Nana.

Whatever the artist’s motivations, Realism was based upon the scientific method.  Like scientists, they observed nature and recorded it faithfully.  Like scientists, they supposedly sat passively before nature and copied it without comment or judgment.  But the vaunted objectivity of any of these artists should not be taken literally, for no human is ever completely objective or nonjudgmental.  Courbet had every intention of confronting bourgeois complacency and used realistic depictions of ordinary life among the petit bourgeois of his home territory of Franche-Comté.  The later accusations of passivity that were leveled against the Impressionists especially do not reflect the fact that artists are actively selecting their content.  The Impressionists who extended Realist to its logical outcome painted their optical impressions of light and color.  But the Impressionists eschewed the provocative content of their predecessors and did not confront the audience with social challenges.  The last of the Realist group, the Impressionists selected suburban scenes of middle class life, where the sun always shone and the skies were always blue and the people were always joyous.

Keeping in mind that “impressionism” was a derogratory term, it is also important to be aware of the reception of the Realist artists.  The art audience was often hostile towards Realist art in terms of subject matter while accepting, however, grudgingly the talents of the artist.   while thee were those who objected to his workman-like use of the palette knife, Courbet’s painting skills were universally acknowledged.  Manet, on the other hand, would be roundly condemned for is complete abandonment of academic technique. And the Barbizon School and the Impressionists would be excoriated for their neglect of the rules of academic “finish” when it came to completing a painting in the appropriate manner.   It is with the last generation of the Realist artists, that the avant-garde matured with Impressionism.  Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, both transition artists, would be the last of their kind in their quest for Salon acceptance and the recognition of the Academy.  The Impressionists would completely reject the academic system and would make their case to the avant-garde collector.

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Jun
18
2010

Realism in England, France and America

Realism in England, France, and America

At the end of the Napoléonic wars, the French were able to take a good hard look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution, going full speed ahead in Britain.  Appalled at the misery of the lower classes, the industrial smog of London, and the blighting effects of technology, the French made the decision to approach modernism with caution.  Although the British worker was actually better off than the French worker, and English people were more educated and more productive than the French, the costs were too high.  In contrast to England, where the nation transformed itself from a rural to an urban society and from an agrarian to an industrial country, France slowed down industrialization.  According to That Sweet Enemy. Britain and France: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, by 1840 England’s industries had overtaken agriculture in prominence, but until 1950 the rural way of life predominated in France.  As the result of its economic policies, France was spared the industrial pollution that made life in England a dark and shrouded nightmare.  The contrasting economies of the two nations also explain the difference in artistic content between the English and French Realist artists.

Most artists and writers were middle class and were financially secure enough to criticize the prevailing establishment by depicting their own age. They wrote and painted from a position of protected privilege.  The lower classes did not represent themselves; they were represented in terms of the attitudes and needs of the dominant class.  For example, in France, Georges Sand, the novelist, and Jean-Françoise Millet, the painter, both from wealthy or well-to-do backgrounds, concentrated on peasant life.  In contrast, in England, John Millais and Ford Maddox Brown, turned their attention to “modern problems,” or life in an urban culture.  The Pre-Raphaelites were certainly painting from a position of social privilege but their content was frequently urban, reflecting the realities of life in London at mid-century.  The French artists concentrated to rural subjects for several reasons.  First, peasants still existed in large numbers in that nation and rural life was a significant factor in French culture.   Second, modernization, as moderate as it was in France, set off waves of nostalgia about the supposedly untouched agricultural sectors.

In France, however, depicting peasants, however benignly, was rife with risk.  Outside of Paris, the lower classes were resistant to the new forms of government following the revolution, with the “White Terror” of the Vendée revolts in the countryside continuing into the Twentieth Century.  By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the “peasant” in France came to symbolize the lower classes in general. Peasant paintings tended to function in a socially reassuring fashion, by displacing middle-class anxiety away from the ever-troublesome proletariat to the more distant peasant, isolated in the countryside.  The idealization of the peasants and rural life calmed bourgeois fears, while a more realistic approach had effect of drawing bourgeois attention to those left behind by the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 in pre-Industrial conditions.  In France, artistic depiction of the lower classes was a political act that could easily be construed as a critique of bourgeois power.  In England, the plight of the lower classes was conveyed in terms of an artistic narrative of reform that was a positive echo of the effort by the British government to bring about peaceful changes in society.

In America, “realism” was a more amorphous impulse.  Not so much a movement as a choice of subject matter and the employment of a certain technique, realism in America often crossed paths with American Romanticism.  Romanticism lingered much longer in America because it continued to serve cultural needs.  Romanticism, from the very beginning, was allied to landscape painting, which was used to create a sense of nationhood. One of the tasks of the landscape painter was to reveal the wonders of American scenery.  As the frontier moved from East to West, Romantic landscape painting moved with it, but the paintings that resulted were highly realistic in their naturalistic details.  Frederich Church and Albert Bierstadt competed to see whose work was the most accurate in the rendition of nature.  Indigenous American art had a much older tradition of realism and genre painting that could be applied to the Romantic tradition.

George Caleb Bingham’s scenes of everyday life on the frontier were sometimes reflective of Romanticism, especially its close American relative, Luminism, in his scenes on the Mississippi. On the other hand, he paintings could be completely anecdotal and full of a nationalistic narrative.  In contrast to French Realism, American realism was more akin to the English Pre-Raphaelites with their preference for storytelling conveyed through a multitude of details.  Realism, in America, was coincidence with realistic rendering, often a specific technique learned in Düsseldorf and imported to America.  After the 1850s when the frontier moved West of the Mississippi, realism became more urban and romanticism continued to be aligned to landscape painting.  Like Romanticism, Realism lingered in America, long after its European counterparts had become exhausted.

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Jun
11
2010

Podcast 22 Romanticism and Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich personified German Romanticism, producing paintings that became icons of the movement.  Working in a nation under alien occupation, Friedrich found the intersection between pantheism and the alienation of human beings in a new and modern world.  The serene and severe German landscape around Dresden and at the edge of the North Sea create a paradox between tragedy and hope.

 

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Jun
11
2010

Marxism, Art and the Artist

Marxism, Art and the Artist

In his anthology, Marxism and Art, Maynard Solomon recounted that although both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were interested in the literary arts early in their respective careers, they both were distracted by philosophy.  As a result, “There is no ‘original’ Marxist aesthetics for later Marxists to apply.  The history of Marxist aesthetics has been the history of the unfolding of the possible application of Marxist ideas and categories to art and to the theory of art.”  The same can be said of art history, which has also applied the Marxist idea of a critique of the social and economic system by utilizing a Marxist analysis of a work of art to show the workings of the mode of production upon the artist.  In contrast to the fragments written by both men, what is more interesting is how the ideas of Marx could be used in relation to art.

According to Karl Marx, art is part of the superstructure and is inescapably determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  Capitalism produces commodities, each one of which is a “fetish,” or an object with abstract value.  Fetishism is the projection of human nature and of human desires projected upon an external object.  If one accepts the proposition that all art is commodified, (and art must be a commodity in a capitalist society), then certain consequences logically follow.  All artists are cultural producers, laboring in a capitalist system for the benefits of the market.  All art made within this system is a commodity to be bought and sold as objects of desire upon which human feelings are projected. The work of art in a capitalist society must be a consumer object and therefore must also be an object of desire, a fetish.

The ideology of the market, a place where commodities are bought and sold, is a lived experience in the consciousness of every artist. The mind of the artist is imprinted with History and cannot escape his or her own time. Marxism would   oppose the thesis of a transcendent avant-garde that projects to the future and detaches itself from society.  From a Marxist point of view, art is always about society and the artist is always a part of the culture, art is never independent or absolute. Because the artist has been abandoned by God, modern art can only be ironic in the sense suggested by Schiller. In the contemporary era, modern art can exhibit only human alienation.  With nothing left to symbolize, symbolism gives way to allegory.  The use of symbols directly communicates meaning, but allegory is an indirect cluster or collection of meanings.  As a result of the break down of the union of humans with a sense of spirituality, modern art is always indirect and referential because modern art is tied to capitalist ideology, which is merely bourgeois thought, an illusion that conceals the facts of construction of beliefs.

In the 1939 essay “Avant-Garde Art and Kitsch,” the American art writer, Clement Greenberg, proposed that socialism would provide the freedom the avant-garde artist needs, because the capitalist system rewards the artist for responding to the demands of society, which is under the influence of ideology.  The ruling classes produce an ideology in its own self-interest but put the ideology forward in a way to make ideology seem “real.”  We refer to this operation of reification as the naturalizing effects.  Far from being “natural,” what ideology constructs, whether beliefs or art, is cultural. Through the mechanisms of ideology, that which is cultural becomes natural.

Social relations are presumed to be “natural,” and, hence, people do not recognize or even realize that the ways they interact are “cultural.” Ideology remains unseen.  A work of visual culture expresses the prevailing ideology, not just in terms of what a work of art expresses but also what the work of art does not say. Art bears an imprint of the history of its own time and is not timeless and transcendent.  Far from being free or independent, the avant-garde artist is reconstructed, from a Marxist perspective, is an intellectual servant in the pay of the system.  As Marx remarked,

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.  It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-laborers…(intellectuals) live only as long as they find work, and…find work only as long as their labor increases capital.  These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market…”

Far from being a rebel, the artist is a cultural worker without a “halo.”  The artist who does not recognize the workings of ideology is complicit with an oppressive system.  From a socialist perspective, what is the role of the informed and aware artist?  According to Comte, art rises from the study of nature and should facilitate the contemplation of moral values.  The position of Comte, that art is the ideal representation of reality, is essentially the academic perspective that prevailed in his era.  Writing decades later, Proudhon suggested a more specific role for the artist in Du principe de l’art of 1865.  Realism and naturalism had overtaken Romanticism in the 1860s and Proudhon saw art as having a social role, which should subordinate art to political and social ends.  What distinguishes Proudhon’s position is that these “ends” were those of a critique of society and its unjust practices.

In acting as a critic of his or her own time, the artist becomes a prophet for humanity who must condemn current society and who can foresee a better future.  From a socialist standpoint, the artist is a servant of society who has the moral role to reveal the workings of ideology by pointing to the truth.  While it is not correct to state that all Realist artists and writers were socialists, it is correct to say that the mission of the Realists in France and England was to show contemporary life.  Revelations of the realities of modern times would often be considered political by the forces that functioned best when these “truths” were kept veiled by ideology.

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Jun
04
2010

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

As philosophers who inherited the goals of the Enlightenment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the main theme was freedom, freedom to become a full human being, creating oneself through free choices.  They attributed a high value to the human personality and believed that making a life was distinct from making a thing.  The concern for the alienated human under capitalism can be found in a number of remarks made by Marx and Engels:

“..devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things..”

“Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…”

”…the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object…”

“…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…”

By the Nineteenth Century, the economic and social conditions that created what Walter Benjamin would call “high capitalism” were the result of numerous factors that converged over several centuries. World markets emerged and production and consumption became international and cosmopolitan. Local industries collapsed under the stress of factory goods and imports.  The result was that     capitalism or capital was concentrated in a few hands due to centralized production.  These centers of production attracted workers and the uprooted poor poured into cities and cities, such as London, grew astronomically overnight.

The globalization of the Nineteenth Century was halted by the incessant wars of the Twentieth Century, and it is only in the past decade that we have returned to the levels of globalization that Marx witnessed.  During the Nineteenth Century, national states arose and accumulated great power over the people, but state power was undermined by capital’s international scope.  The fortunes of the nation state, as Adam Smith predicted, became entangled with capitalism, which was in the position of making or breaking the stability of the state through finances.

Power shifted from a small privileged class that presided over land, but did not produce products to the middle class, which based its power upon the kind of wealth that could grow exponentially. The bourgeoisie was first ruling class based, not upon ancestors, but on what they actually did which was to produce, but production had the tendency to outstrip demand or need.  In order to make sure that adequate demand for commodities continued, the bourgeoisie economy had to be based on competition for the new or novel product. The producers were forced to innovate, and, in order to compete, the means of production must constantly be revolutionized and the objects produced must constantly change.  As Marx commented,

“The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together…”

“The bourgeois society has resolved all personal honor and dignity into exchange-value; and in place of all the freedoms that men have fought for, it has put one unprincipled freedom—free trade…”

Therefore the lives of ordinary people are controlled by the ruling class, which has vested interests invested in the capitalist system.  This class is in change and uses economic chaos and social crisis to its own advantage, seeing and seeking lucrative opportunities for further profits.  Capitalism is thus characterized as needing a permanent revolution, or a yearning for change. The “revolution” is not, of course, a political, social, or economic one, for real change threatens the status quo of the dominant class.  Instead, the impulse for “revolution” and “change” is transferred or displaced towards commodities.  Capitalism forces individual self-development but only in restrictive and distorted ways, because everything bourgeois society builds will only to be torn down.  In perhaps his most famous and often quoted remark, Marx perceptively described the conditions of capitalism:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face…the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men…”

According to Marx, the middle class is most violently destructive ruling class in history.  The   bourgeois class does not efface old structures but absorbs them and incorporates them into the market and new life becomes the new commodity to be consumed.  Capitalism manages to co-opt and absorb all challenges to its authority.  Marx pondered the impact of this new social condition upon human beings and commented,

“The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life.. Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness…”

Human consciousness alters with every change in conditions of material existence in social relations or social life. Even society’s moral and ethical standards determined by monetary considerations.  Is it moral to appropriate the labor of others?  Is it ethical to exploit the desperation of human beings?  Why does labor allow such exploitation?  Under capitalism, dissimulation will silence these questions and will not allow the answers to be heard, thus, solidifying the “false consciousness” of ideology. The social mind is malleable to the forces of social persuasion, responding to the needs of the dominant class to further their position.

To reify the power relations already in place, the forces of legitimation work ceaselessly.  The elements of the superstructure are called into play to legitimate the status quo or the “natural,” whether the functions of the superstructure are education or the law or art.  Art and Law are commodities and the cultural workers produce in the name of the power relations with which they are complicit.  The artist, along with other intellectuals and poets, has lost his/her halo and has become a wage-laborer.  The artist is but a producer of ideas into material works of art, which are a form of perception or consciousness formed by capitalism.

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