The art of Eugene Delacroix was uniquely suited to his time. In an era of imperialism and colonialism through conquest, his exciting art captured the violence of a turbulent age. Like all artists of the Romantic era, Delacroix was fascinated by the mystery of the Middle East. Although much of the art of his later career was government sponsored, Delacroix also acted as a reporter and visited the French possession of Algeria and captured, first hand, the allure of the Other.
Posts Tagged ‘avant-garde’
Jan
15
2010
The Definition of the Avant-Garde
The Definition of the Avant-Garde
In his book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger stressed the historical basis of the avant-garde. The rise of the avant-garde was directly linked to the rise of the middle class. The main role of the avant-garde is the critique of the middle class by detaching it self from it. Bourgeois totalizing institutions, such as the institutions that are the “art world” must also be critiqued and defied. The kind of critique Burger discussed was a Marxist style critique, which, because it was delivered from a detached perspective, was far more radical than conventional criticism. The Marxist approach was, of course Kantian in origin in its stance of disinterest, but Marxist in its focus on bourgeois practices.
The radicality of the avant-garde position rests upon its freedom from having to “take sides” or obligation to maintain a position. The freedom to detach from an ideology is also the freedom to find an entirely unexpected stance. The avant-garde critique of the capitalist mode of production and its impact upon cultural producers has many consequences. First, the avant-garde artist is always alienated from the audience, outside the mainstream of traditional art and scornful of the middle class and its utilitarian preferences. The bourgeois saw little use for pure art in the service of the intellect or beauty or aesthetics, and understood only that art could be useful to reinforce their own social and political power, a lesson learned from the once powerful church and state. The middle class audience was unsympathetic with art, which lay outside what was familiar, traditional and recognizable. Thus, the artist, who felt constrained by bourgeois restrictions and by the low level of middle class taste, took on a defiant, rebellious stance, upholding the right of the artist to express him/herself artistically. Delighting in shocking the art public, the avant-garde artist is confrontational, refusing to meet the expectations of the middle class audience.
Instead of striving for acceptance, the avant-garde artist remains outside and alienated in order to critique middle class values, which placed money above love, status above mercy, work above play, and matter over mind. Avant-garde art, in challenging middle class pragmatism, challenged middle class power. Often this art directly or indirectly exposed middle class hypocrisy. Sunny and beautiful on the surface, many Impressionist paintings actually depicted well-known meeting places of scandalous encounters between prostitutes and their clients. Although today the meaning of these paintings may be lost on today’s viewers, the audience of the day was fully aware that the subjects of these artists were less than respectable. Starting with the proto-Romanticism of Jean-Antoine Gros and Théodore Géricault, the reality of current events were used to confront the public with the unpalatable truth, as shown by Gustave Courbet, or simply with ordinary every day life, as displayed by the Impressionists. The public literally could not read the broken brushwork of the Impressionists and reacted with anger and derision.
The activity of critique places the avant-garde artist outside of conventional ways of thinking. But this artist is also in front of the crowd and thus is making the future of art. The first separation within the art world can be seen during the Romantic period when certain artists began to represent current events. This shift to reality was an important one. Previously, the Neoclassical approach was an allegorical one, making statements about the present by using past events or using ancient examples to teach lessons for the present. The split between the ancients and the moderns is not simply a stylistic one, from the linear to the painterly, but most significantly, from the past to the present. The avant-garde artists refused to look back to a past that was increasingly irrelevant and insisted upon recording the present. Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) was perceived, not so much as a heroic rendering of a major event in recent French history, but as a political statement valorizing rebellious uprisings. Compared to Neoclassicism, which displaced politics to the past, Romanticism and Realism, were political simply in presenting the present. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the avant-garde had become political and dangerous to the established powers.
By the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde artists were totally separated from the mainstream art world. The art world in France and England had become splintered into factions: the very conservative, the conservative or official art, the conservative avant-garde, and the radical avant-garde. For example, the Salon des Indépendants was conservative compared to the Salon d’automne. Avant-garde artists were completely isolated from mainstream art audiences and these artists followed the lead of the Impressionists and relied more and more upon sympathetic art dealers and understanding collectors for survival. The audience for the avant-garde artists was very small, often consisting of art critics who were crucial in writing the first accounts of indecipherable art.
This so-called “difficult” art was made by an artist, who was outside of official art and beyond public approval. Avant-garde art tended to engender yet another generation of art, even more difficult. For example, Monet was succeeded by his colleague, Cézanne, who was, in turn, was studied by the Cubists, Picasso and Braque. Picasso and Braque were typical of the avant-garde artists of the Twentieth Century. Working alone and unrecognized, supported by their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Living in dire poverty, these two artists, like other avant-garde artists, were totally dedicated to their vision and to their belief in their art. Art historians depicted these artists as “heroes,” struggling to maintain personal and artistic integrity in the face of a life without honor and success, understood only by those educated few.
The emergence of the avant-garde artists and the theory of “art-for-art’s sake” emerged at the same time in France. Due to historical and economic forces, the avant-garde and aesthetics was dependent upon one another. The public did not approve of either the style or the content of avant-garde art, and in order to defend and explain this new art, critics often put forward an appeal for a formalist reading. When Emile Zola demanded that Edouard Manet’s work be understood in terms of its stylistic innovation, the writer was also insisting that the viewer look away from the subject matter and to the way in which the artist handled the formal elements. Looking at art from a formal and/or disinterested perspective required a new kind of “eye.” The purpose of avant-garde art was, by necessity an aesthetic one. But as Bourdieu explained in The Rules of Art,
“Although it appears to itself like a gift of nature, the eye of the nineteenth-century art-lover is the product of history…the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention, itself indissociable from the emergence of an autonomous artistic field capable of posing and imposing its own goals in the face of external demands and it is also inseparable from the corresponding appearance of a population of ‘amateurs’ or ‘connoisseurs’ capable of applying to the works thus produced the ‘pure’ gaze which they call for.”
Although, as Bourdieu contends, the avant-garde was created as much by material forces as by aesthetic ideals, the avant-garde would have been impossible without the theory of “art-for-art’s sake.” This timely idea, borrowed from the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, took half a century to come to fruition in France.
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
Jan
01
2010
French Romanticism: Subject Matter and the Artist
French Romanticism: Subject Matter and the Artist
The Romantic was Janus-faced, facing the present and commenting upon it while turning away for current events in order to yield to the lure of fantasy, legend, myth, and exoticism. On one hand, Jean-Antoine Gros called attention to the human costs of Napoléon’s brutal wars in Napléon at Eylau in 1818, and, on the other hand, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres retreated into Nordic myth in his Dream of Ossian of 1813 and his charming paintings of troubadour legends. On one hand, Girodet produced a reverie of eroticism with his Sleep of Endymion in 1791 as the opening volley of Romanticism and Géricault explored the limits of Romanticism with his portraits of insane people and his renditions of severed limbs. One did not have to be an avant-garde artist to be “Romantic,” for the avant-garde was just beginning to form. One did not have to challenge Academic standards to be Romantic, for the Academy could very well accommodate exciting contemporary narratives, as long as they were correctly painted or sculpted. Although associated with bold color and visible brushstrokes, Romanticism is not a style, nor is it a particular content, nor is it a rebellion against authority. The successful and celebrated Romantic artists wanted to be accepted by the academic powers and vied for position and honors within the Salons. For many of these artists, their reputation as “romantic rebels” rests upon a few works of art. Most of the Romantic artists were part of the establishment and did not live the life of an outside artist, unappreciated and scorned by the forces of the status quo. The myth of the Romantic artist has been entangled anachronistically with that of the avant-garde, and the full-blown outsider movements of Realism and Impressionism were decades away.
The so-called rebelliousness of the Romantic artists is less political than entrepreneurial, linked more directly to the loss of traditional patrons: church, state, and aristocrats. The Romantic artist acted as an opportunist or a performance artist who sought to both slide past the conservative jury of the Salon and also to shock the spectators with spectacular and entertaining art. The art audience had become more and more middle class, which attended the Salons in large numbers. The bourgeoisie, the crowd, the mob must be addressed in some fashion. Fueled by fashions, literature and restless aggressive politics, the public developed a taste for scenes of sex and violence unsanctioned by the Academy and swooned over the newly discovered beauties of Nature. The public had little interest in erudite academic subject matter and gravitated towards the familiar and the market for genre painting and landscape painting began to develop, inspiring artists to concentrate their efforts in these areas that were not supported by the academic hierarchy and hence were open professional territories for ambitious artists.
Landscape painting began to free itself from its traditional role as a backdrop for a narrative in the foreground, and “pure” landscape, painted for pure pleasure and free of moralizing became more and more popular. Like still lives, landscapes could fit into any home and was acceptable to any taste, and did not offend any political opinions. The so-called lower genres were directed not so much towards the academy but to a public that was inclined to buy decorative art. The most important group of landscape painters was the Barbizon School, located in the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fountainebleau. Artists such as Theodore Rousseau and Narcisse Diaz sketched in situ but finished the paintings in their studios. They shared, along with many Romantic painters, a new concern for direct observation of Nature at its most natural and most accurate. The Barbizon artists followed the Claudian precepts of the beautiful but they were distinctly modern in their refusal to include narrative in the painting. These artists, such as Constantin Troyon, produced “pure landscapes.” At the other end of the spectrum from marketable landscapes, the public taste for the strange and the exotic was also linked to economics. The “Orient”, the “East” became open territory to be subdued and conquered by the Western Europeans who were beginning another phase of unchecked imperialism. The delight in the themes of sex and violence, imagined by the European to be part and parcel of the Middle East, was fueled as much by sexual desires as by imperial pride. A large number of artists, called “Orientalists” imagined the mysterious East as a place of harems and beheadings, inhabited by an alien and violent people who could only benefit from benevolent French rule.
Although the aristocrats, old and new, were restored to power during Napoléon’s rule and after the Restoration of Louis XVIII, the new audience for art was largely middle class. The Romantic artist was sundered from traditional conservative artistic styles, separated from traditional patronage, and stripped of the historical social role as servant to higher powers. From the fall of Napoléon on, the artist was forced to re-invent him/herself as a social being and was forced to re-create a new cultural place and new purpose for unsanctioned art. The imported German idea of “art-for-art’s-sake” fulfilled multiple purposes, providing art and the artist with a new and exalted role in society. The artist had to be a free and independent creator who was an innovator and pushed art to change. As the new aesthetic theories gained a following, the art world began to splint between the avant-garde who rebelled and displeased the public and the academics who conformed and pleased the audience. By 1835, the writer and art critic, Théophile Gautier attacked conventional critics for their adherence to ideas of decorum and good taste. In the preface to Madamoiselle de Maupin, Gautier advocated for beauty and art for their own sakes. For the artist to be free to express original and personal feelings, art should have no useful purpose. Although these ideas give new impetus to art and a new place in society to the artist, they also begin the separation between the artist and the public that will be accelerated by the Revolution of 1848 in France.
Seen in the literary and the visual arts, Romanticism was an international movement and a cultural rejection of the Enlightenment and its stress on objective reason and rational thinking. Romanticism was subjective and the ultimate truth was individual emotions, feelings, and expression. This shift from the objective to the subjective, from object to subject, or the individual, as the source of truth was a radical transformation in Western thought, perhaps the logical consequence of Protestant emphasis on individuality and European hopes for a political democracy. The artist became important to society in a new way: not as an explicator of moral ideals, but as a “genius,” a seer who brought, through art, new insights into life. Although a new critical vocabulary was created as aesthetics moved to the center as artistic concern, the Romantic artists offered no coherent programme nor did they have a common goal. Wrapped up in their sense of individuality, artists produced works of art that proclaimed individual personalities and the originality that was the prerogative of the genius. Romanticism, as a challenge to academicism, was associated with forces of disorder and anarchy and revolution. As an extension, drawing and low key color, disciplined stylistics, and a smooth “licked” surface in painting and sculpture, characteristic of Neoclassicism, became politically tied to the state. Color, rough painting or impastoed facture became politically tied to the emotions that might lead to unrestrained social behavior. Politics aside, most so-called Romantic artists, such as Delacroix, were actually politically quiet conservative, as are most artists because social and political stability are necessary for art making to be possible.
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
Nov
27
2009
Podcast 8 Formalism and Romanticism
This podcast delineates the connections between the art historical methodology of Formalism, as developed by Heinrich Wolfflin, and the concept of Romanticism as being the movement in which the technique of painting changed from “academic” to “modern.” Until New Art History reintroduced the importance of context, the approach of “art history without names” reigned supreme. How did the uneasy mix of history and methodology change the history of art? What recent corrections were made to retell the history of art history?
Nov
13
2009
Podcast 7 The Academy and the Avant-Garde
The artists of the French Academy and the artists of the French Avant-garde are often presented as being protagonists, but, in fact, each group defined itself in terms of the other. The French Academy was the bastion of the establishment, of rules and regulations and of order. The Avant-Garde bohemians were the original outsider artists, misfits without credentials, who were able to break the rules of art and change the course of art. But the Academy absorbed and co-opted and softened the concepts and techniques of the avant-garde artists, making the “radical” changes acceptable to the general public.