Posts Tagged ‘Emile Zola’

Dec
10
2010

Paul Cézanne

Post-Impressionist Artists: Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906)

Famous for wanting to reform Impressionism, Paul Cézanne approached nature in quite a fashion that distinguished him from the Impressionists and the other Post-impressionists.  Like Paul Gauguin, he understood the need to order nature, like Vincent van Gogh, he responded emotionally to the world around him, and like the avant-garde artists of his generation, he was faced with the problem of representation. For Cézanne, the solution was found by walking a tightrope between his mind and his feelings, between his “optique” and his “logique,” between the past and the future.  He returned the classical French tradition, the Grand Manner of Nicholas Poussin, to the avant-garde by restoring the importance of   the object, just as surely as the Symbolists restored the significance of the subject. Unlike the Impressionists, Cézanne did not accept the world of chaos and flux but attempted to render its permanent and solid qualities, to find structure and order. Unlike Gauguin, he did not impose abstract patterns upon nature but by swept away incidentals and details in search of an organizing rhythm and unity. Unlike Vincent van Gogh, Cézanne did not seek to animate the object but to contemplate it, to seek its inherent and essential structure, to connect it to its surroundings, to reveal the inner harmony of nature.  Art had to reflect this natural harmony. Thus, art, too, must be as seamless and as unified in its materiality.

But Cézanne is not important to art history because he distinguish himself from his predecessors and his colleagues.  The painter is considered significant because his art acted as a gateway to the Twentieth-century.  Gauguin and van Gogh were both concerned with how to render their feelings, their emotions and reactions in relation to nature.  Seurat attempted to see nature through the lens of science, reordering his colors according to the laws optical mixing.  Georges Seurat was closer to Cézanne in the sense that both artists were concerned with the process of seeing and with how the artist’s (and the viewer’s) perception coincides with the traditional language of painting.  Compared to Gauguin and van Gogh, these other Post-Impressionists were more objective. Reading Cézanne’s letters lead to the conclusion that he literalized what he saw, calling the transference of light to his eyes to his brain, his “sensations.”  The problem that Cézanne gave to himself was how to translate what is a physical process into an art that expressed, not a worn-out set of artistic conventions, but a new visual language that explained, not expressed, what was actually seen, not what was known.

The accomplishment of Cézanne was his creation of a new language, a new set of marks, which recorded only what he saw: his “sensations.”  We “know” that when we look out over a landscape that there is space between the objects that are close and the objects that are far away, but we don’t “see” these spaces.  Renaissance perspective was an abstract diagram, which “mapped out” the space that existed but could not be seen.  Over the centuries, as the art historian, Erwin Panofsky, pointed out, those of us in the West have become so accustomed to the invention of Renaissance architects, Alberti and Brunelleschi, that we believe that we actually see in terms of perspective. Cézanne figured out that perspective was a code with a signifying function, based upon knowledge.  The diagram or abstract design got in the way of real seeing or the actual process of looking.  He also realized that perspective depended upon an ideal and impossible condition: the viewer had one eye, stood in one place, at one point in time.  But we have two eyes, we move, and time passes.  How can the painter account for  this “natural vision?”  This question would absorb the artist for thirty years, but the younger generation would be able to build upon his research.  The lessons of Cézanne can be summed up in a few sentences.  Nature is represented and interpreted artistically and art became parallel to nature.  Art can represent nature only through artistic means; art cannot reproduce nature.  These are the ideas which led to the new art of the new century.  The  “Modern” is said to begin in 1880 when Cézanne exiled himself in Aix to solve the great riddle of how to strip knowing from seeing—how to paint perception.

Paris – 1860s

Cézanne’s awareness of the role of color in determining the structure and depth of natural objects and his awareness of the role of brush work on a flat surface, set him apart from his century and catapulted his art into the next century. In many ways, the artist took an artistic journey into self-denial and redemption.  His early works were marked by subject matter full of violence and sex, displaying a deep confusion about women and a consequent anger toward their sexuality. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty remarked, “His first pictures up till about 1870 are dreams in paint: a rape, a murder…” In 1991, art historian, Robert Simon, noted the connection between these paintings of violence against women and the popular imagery of the day, “The cheap, quickly made, sensational news bulletins known as canards…a sort of low journalism.”  In other words, Cézanne was inspired by a combination of his own psychological dis-ease and was given “permission” to express his anxieties by the equivalent of  ”The National Enquirer.”

Upon viewing The Murder of 1867 and A Modern Olympia (1872 – 3), boyhood friend, Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) described this disturbing phase of his art:

It was a chaste man’s passion for the flesh of women, a mad love of nudity desired and never possessed, an impossibility of satisfying himself, or creating as much of this flesh as he dreamed to hold in his frantic arms.  Those girls whom he chased out of his studio, he adored in his paintings; he caressed or attacked them, in tears of despair at not being able to make them sufficiently beautiful, sufficiently alive.

The writer had grown up with Cézanne in the southern town of Aix and had suggested that the artist come to Paris. Zola defended Manet by ignoring the issue of subject matter and concentrating on the artist’s formal innovations.  Beauty, Zola, insisted was not a verifiable or universal phenomenon, but was entirely personal and internal. Cézanne landed in a very sophisticated art world, where artists gathered together and debated theories.  Cézanne’s parents had wanted him to become a lawyer, but, like the typical avant-garde artist, he rebelled against family expectations.  His family, connected to banking, was solidly middle-class and his father reluctantly supported his son’s ambitions to be an artist.  The decade that Cézanne spent in and out of Paris is one of deliberately provocative art hurled at the establishment, guaranteed a rejection in the Salon.

The artist was as deliberately confrontational himself.  “All my compatriots are ass holes compare to me.”  Elegant and chic, Manet despised the uncouth provincial with the awkward accent. Cézanne in turn was hardly respectful to the revered master by saying that he would not shake hands with Manet because he (Cézanne) had not bathed for a week.  Clearly, Cézanne needed someone to temper his misdirected and unguided temperament.   That person was the “father” to the younger generation, Camille Pissarro ((1830 – 1903). Cézanne met Pissarro at the Académie Suisse, where he claimed to be “painting with one’s balls.”  By the 1870s, his riotous and unruly style was disciplined with heavy black contour lines, suggesting that he needed for Impressionism to become more structured.

Estaque and Pontoise and Melun – 1870 – 1880

This decade was the last era in which the traditional Salon system really mattered.  Thanks to the critics, such as Zola, who said, “the Salon of our days is not the work of artists; it is the work of a jury…” and to the Impressionist exhibitions, the old order was a dying one.  But Cézanne’s early years in Paris as a follower of Manet and as an “Impressionist” were years of rejection by the Establishment followed by a self-imposed exile in southern France.  In   between Paris and Aix, he learned a great deal from Pissarro.  The older artist removed Cézanne from the futile exercise of trying to force the Salon to change and taught him to not define himself negatively.  Pissarro’s contribution to the volatile younger artist was to teach him that each individual had a unique vision or way of seeing, called “sensation.”  The artist had only to execute to create: paint what he saw and an individual vision would emerge naturally.  Maurice Denis, also a painter, stated, “…each one takes the law unto himself…we love order passionately, but the order that we create, not the order we receive…”

Writing in the 2009 catalogue for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Beyond Cézanne,” art historian, Richard Shiff, quoted a comment made by the artist to Maurice Denis, “Sensation above all else.”  Shiff also quoted Charles Morice, an art critic, who in 1907 said, “We hardly dare say that Cézanne lived.  He painted.” Shiff then went on to define “sensation,” as “Every sensation that Cézanne felt, no matter what the cause, would be the equivalent f a painting sensation: every physical gesture, a potential paint mark…”

In contrast to today’s assumption that only the “young” artist is capable of making exciting art, artists of this generation took decades to mature. Cézanne was forty before he became “serious.” Working with Pissarro in the small towns along the river Oise, Cézanne began to paint, not what he felt, but what he saw, and he saw, he stated, “ only patches.” Cézanne had learned from the Impressionists to apply paint in patches of color, but they thought in terms of color-as-light. Cézanne began to think of color-as-form or color-as-object.

Whatever Cézanne may have thought of the avant-garde artists in Paris, the Franco-Prussian War ended his time in the city.  He had met a docile and submissive women, Hortense Figuet, gotten her pregnant, had a child by her, before he eventually married her.  He sent her to Estaque for safety during the Franco-Prussian war.  Finished with Paris, he painted in Estaque and put himself under the tutelage of Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers.  It is in Estaque that we see Cézanne absorbing the lessons learned from Manet—using color to eliminate depth. (“View of L’Estaque and the Château d’If,” 1883 – 5)  Working against distance, Cézanne pushed the sea away by using deep blue but pulled the distant shore forward with lighter colors (“The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque,” 1876 – 79).  The compositions of Estaque were broad and simple and clearly showed the basis of his structure: Cézanne’s paintings can almost always be divided down the horizontal middle, as if the two parts, top and bottom, were hinged. (“Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley,” 1882 – 85) The Post-modern painter, Mark Tansey took advantage of Cézanne’s manner of composition as division in his re-visions of “Mount Saint-Victoire” in the 1980s.

Working in situ with the older artist, Cézanne eliminated contours for the moment. The countryside of the Oise valley lay stretched out before the artists, crowded with small red-roofed houses.  Edges were defined by placing contour-to-contour, patch-to-patch, form-to-form, leaving blank spaces to complete the definition.  Drawing was eliminated and forms were constructed or built by laying on blocks of color, which were built up, the way a bricklayer creates a wall, into a series of “sensations.”  (“The Pont de Maincy, 1879) By leaving breathing spaces or blank areas between the patches, the artist was painting in reverse or taking the negative into account.  The entire composition was built, constructed, literally through rhythmic strokes of paint that knitted the landscape into an all over unity (“Large Pines and Red Earth,” 1890 – 95).

Although Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874, he left Paris and returned to Aix and seemed to find psychic peace in his rigorous study of nature. He took with him the lessons learned from Pissarro–a clarified palette, the knowledge that form could be achieved by color.  He began to paint with heavy layers of color in an effort to capture every nuance, like the building of a mosaic.  He observed that there were no lines in nature—”Pure drawing is an abstraction.”—and that there were no shadows without color.  However, Cézanne was convinced that observation alone was never enough and that thought was essential.

Aix-en-Provence – 1880 – 1906

There are ample indications that Cézanne was a borderline personality.  Eccentric to the point where normal relations were difficult, Cézanne spent the rest of his life in a self-imposed exile.  He was tormented by the extended infantilism of his financial dependence upon his father.  He hid his mistress, keeping her in the shadows for fifteen years.  But his reluctance to interact with the Parisian art world resulted in a barrage of letter writing, especially to the young and impressionable Émile Bernard. Cézanne apparently needed only a kind father, Pissarro, and unthreatening admirers, Bernard, and his solitude to thrive.  Like the letters of Vincent van Gogh, Cézanne’s letters are his legacy to the art world.  His musings constitute a theory of painting.  “There are two things in the painter: the eye and the brain. The two must cooperate,” he wrote.  Cézanne wished to reform a now waning Impressionism, “to become classic again through nature, that is to say, through sensation…” “…to revive Poussin through contact with nature…” “…one must interpret it…by means of plastic equivalents and color…” he declared.

Isolated in Aix by 1890, Cézanne assumed the task of “making out of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums…” A small measure of success in Paris came to him as the result to an exhibition given of this art in 1895 by Ambroise Vollard but he remained in the south to paint at his home, “Jas de Bouffan,” until it was sold in 1899, after his mother’s death. His last years were spent painting the Bidémus quarry and the Chateau noir. The artist painted selected motifs and the quarry and the mountain, Mont Saint-Victoire became part of his obsessive quest.  Later he was to say, “It took me forty years to find out that painting is not sculpture.” Renoir echoed this discovery by saying of the paintings of Cézanne that “Later, his study brought him to see that the work of the painter is so to use color that, even when it is laid on very thinly, it gives the full result.”

Cézanne used the quarry as part of his pattern of construction.  Because the quarry had been mined for centuries, human activity had regularized the steep sides, which showed the linear marks of carving out large blocks.  The patters left on the walls of the quarry were reflections of his method of painting in patches.  By the 1880s, the artist had gained enough confidence to turn Manet’s play with color into his own personal method, called “passage,” by art historians. Cézanne also felt fee to distort the landscape and to force it to submit to the demands of composition and structure.   Mont Saint-Victoire was a huge looming triangular shape, dominating the countryside, but Cézanne shrank the mountain to a small triangle hovering above the edge of the quarry.   The walls fall straight down, below the center hinge of the canvas. (“Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry,” 1887) The tops of green pine trees project upwards, growing form a ground unseen in the bottom of the quarry.  The blue of the sky above the triangle pours onto the sides of the mountain, down the walls of the quarry, spills into the green of the pines.   The green and oranges of the trees and stone climb upwards, advancing along the slope of the mountains and into the blue and white sky above.

This method of composing and creating forms and working out the inherited problem of Renaissance perspective placed Cézanne in the position of “fathering” the 20th century.  His studies of Mount Sainte-Victorie became increasingly abstract: planes were faceted into geometric shapes, surface was turned into patterns of lines and colors and his techniques drew awareness to the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane. The flattening of the picture plane was based upon his study of the motif in nature, which was received flat to his eye.  His essential aim was to represent what “pure” vision could discover about the visible world.  This is a world of everyday things, this is a vision cleansed of allegory, symbolism, emotion and intellect.  The viewer, like the artist, must see nature in a state of complete dissociation and disinterestedness–a pure act of perception.  In this personal conception of space, Cézanne attempted to show objects linked to each other in such a fashion that perspective developed as the result of the halting of movement.  In his 2009 essay, “Lucky Cézanne (Cézanne ‘Tychique’),”  Richard Shiff also described the “motif” in terms of movement,

“Appropriately, the term motif connotes movement. Cézanne’s motif could not be Mont Sainte-Victoire regarded solely as a concept or an ideal; it was instead a movement associated with a particular experience of he mountain as his experience played out in an active process of painting…it merely feels like an instant or a moment, that, is, it feel momentary, transient, changing….”

In the decade of the 1880s, contours returned to Cézanne’s art, but the outlines were new.  We see the new use of outline clearly in his still lives.  Confined to his studio, the artist could study the act of seeing in isolation.  If the landscapes were flattened into stillness by the way in which he recorded his “sensations,” then Cézanne’s still lives were put in motion.  The artist seemed to understand that the movement of the viewer or the painter had to be incorporated.  The time spent in working produced shifts in perspective what also had to be accounted for.  He eliminated, as far as he could, any indication of a horizon line or a level place for the eye to rest. Patterned wallpaper stops the backward movement into the room. Cloth backdrops were used to obscure the flat surfaces for the still life objects (“Still Life with Apples,” 1893 -94).  The objects are shown from many different perspectives, as though the artist sat down, stood up, leaned to the side, as he examined his set up.  Bright patches of color, dappled here and there, indicated where the light source had touched to object.  The sheer motion of looking was signaled to the spectator by the uneasy and unsettled contours, which were slightly separated from the edges of the forms.   The result is that the forms quiver slightly as though they are unsteadied by innate movement.

Only when we view Cézanne’s paintings of human figures do we realize the other accomplishment of the artist: that of removing the hierarchy from painting.  Human beings are treated the same way as inanimate objects.  In her stolid stillness, the expressionless artist’s wife, Hortense, resembles the coffee pot next to her (“Woman with Coffeepot,” 1895), the nudes of the “Bathers” series are forced to bend and reshape themselves to conform to Cézanne’s composition.  In “The Large Bathers” (1906), the artist grouped the nude women, shaped like the trees that surround them, into a triangular group, located inside a rectangular landscape.  As early as the 1870s, the artist began to tone down his palette, eliminating a wide range of colors and damping down the intensity of his hues in favor of a limited selection of tones of blues, greens, and ochre buffs (“Chateau Noir,” 1900 – 1904).  On one hand, the artist was painting the bleached out stone ridden landscape of Provence, on the other hand, he had created a new palette that would end Fauvism’s bright colors and the monochrome suggestion would be taken up by the Cubists.

Cézanne in History

The artist remained in exile and, over the years, became a legend as in the late 1890s exhibitions increasingly influenced younger painters.  The shop of Père Tanguy was the one place in Paris where his art could be purchased and studied.  As Émile Bernard, Cézanne’s faithful correspondent, stated, “One went there as to a museum, to see the few sketches by the unknown artist who lived in Aix…” The critic, Gustave Geffroy, noted, “For a long time, Cézanne has had a curious fate. He might be described as a person at once unknown and famous, having only rare contact with the public yet considered influential by the restless and the seekers in the field of painting…” Yet it was through his correspondence with Bernard that the older artist formulated his theory of art and he advised the former follower of Gauguin “to see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything in proper perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point.”

The legend of Paul Cézanne grew as his exile lengthened.  Had he been truly isolated and out of touch, the artist would have been forgotten.  But, in contrary to the legend of the neglected artist who was discovered due to his shining “genius,” Cézanne was very aware of his place in the art world and in history itself.  His voluminous correspondence with well-placed individuals and the tantalizing inaccessibility of his paintings added to the myth of the reclusive artist who was changing art.  Coupled with the aura surrounding Cézanne and the important exhibitions of his work, late in his life, the only solidified his reputation.  For the young generation of artists, he vanquished the lingering influences of Impressionism, swept aside the curves of Art Nouveau, and vanquished Fauvism’s intense, expressive colors.  Immediately the color palette of the artists narrowed and dulled, the forms sharpened, and composition returned.

Cézanne’s study of planes and volumes attempted to express a consciousness of structure. Beneath the colored surface presented by nature laid the forms of nature.  “The main thing is the modeling; one shouldn’t even say modeling, but modulating.” Cézanne built forms with color and the lines that could have described these forms hovered tentatively around the objects, activating them.  Even though his compositions were grid-like in their rigidity, his paint handling kept the surface lively, the trademark hatch marks knitting the surface together, pulling distance to the foreground.  To the new artists, his lively surfaces, always active and always in motion, Cézanne’s work suggested shifts in space and time, as shifting forms were distorted and light skimmed surfaces, skipping from place to place.  Regardless of Cézanne’s intentions, the young artists saw the end of the Western tradition of perspective.  Building on the three decades of Cézanne’s work, their responses were  sometimes awkward and tentative, but Picasso and Braque and the other artists persisted and something called “Cubism” began to emerge around 1910.

Cézanne was considered the “great divide” in art.  His work was determined by many art historians to be the beginnings of modern 20th century painting because he dismantled the Renaissance conception of intellectualized space.  Composition, with Cézanne did not exist prior to its contents and construction depended upon its objects. His last and greatest portrait was of his gardener, Vallier, worked on until his death in October of 1906.  “If I succeed with this fellow, it will mean that the theory was correct,”  Cézanne said.  And Matisse said, “If Cézanne is right, I am right.   A year after “the master” died, Picasso would paint “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907.  The Nineteenth Century was over and the Twentieth Century could begin.

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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Oct
29
2010

Impressionism and the Art Market

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE QUESTION OF CAPITALISM

“Great art,” Honoré Balzac wrote, “is impossible without large fortunes, without secure and private means.”  Emile Zola also bowed to the power of money, saying, “…money has emancipated the writer; money as created modern letters…One must accept without regret or childishness, one must recognize the dignity, the power and the justice of money….”  Although Bohemia is often associated with starving artists, dying in unheated attic garrets, thanks to Henri Murger’s La Bohème, the most successful artists and writers were protected from poverty by money. This fact flies in the face of the myth of the avant-garde, which supposedly insisted on separating art from money.  At first the accepting attitude of supposedly avant-garde artists towards money may seem hypocritical, but their stance towards the financing of art making is more nuanced.  Money, in fact, makes art free from depending upon the traditional patrons, the church and the state.  Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet were eager to sell their art, but both were afforded (pun intended) artistic freedom due to the independent wealth of their families.  What the avant-garde artists sought were old-fashioned patrons, such as the enlightened elites of the Renaissance or like those sophisticated aristocrats who vanished with the French Revolution.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in the Art Market

During the period of Realism, the Salon still dominated and controlled access to success.  The inability of this system to accommodate the ever-larger number of candidates can be measured by the growth and development of an independent artist-dealer system. The more money the avant-garde artist possessed, the more this artist could explore alternatives to a Salon jury, dedicated to maintaining the status quo.  Both Courbet and Manet attempted one person shows during their careers on the occasion of the two Expositions Universelles in 1855 and 1867. Both artists financed their entrepreneurial ventures privately, but the time wasn’t right for the artist to attempt to show outside of the Salons.  Even though the public could not grasp the radical gestures or the radical art, Manet’s followers could.  And in 1874 the “Impressionists” held their first group exhibition.  Like Courbet and Manet, this younger generation was seeking the open-minded vanguard collector and the dealer who was willing to take a chance on contemporary art and new artists.

Those individuals had already emerged, Louis Martinet’s gallery daringly showed Manet’s radical works for public viewing before the Salon of 1863 and a decade later, Paul Durand-Ruel, made two separate trips to Manet’s studio and purchased a large number of works.  It was to this dealer that the Impressionists turned.  But the group followed in the footsteps of Courbet and Manet and organized their own exhibitions.  But there are significant differences between Manet and his followers.  First, Manet never wanted to break free of the Salon.  It was there, he contended, that the real battles took place.  If he was referring to the argument between the ancients and the moderns in the Salon, Manet was correct.  But the Impressionists found that when they attempted to assault this citadel, they were constantly pushed back, rejected by the juries.  Unlike Manet and Courbet, the Impressionists could not find an opportunity to get publicity or notoriety—-no Salon of 1849, juried by artists, no Salon des Refusés, only invisibility. The other difference was that the Impressionists were not wealthy.  Although Cassatt and Morisot were financially secure, as was Caillebotte, the rest were working class (Renoir) or lower middle class (Monet, Pissarro) or middle class (Sisley) or dependent upon an unwilling parent (Cézanne). Quite simply they needed to make money, and because they had traveled too far from official art to please the art pubic, they had to appeal to the mythical collector who was willing to buy avant-garde art.

Some historians place the beginning of the avant-garde at this point in time with the conscious attempt on the part of the Impressionists to exhibit independently and to enter into the emerging art market under the protection of dealers. The avant-garde artists, from this time on, were considered to be ahead of their time and ahead of the public who were incapable of understanding advanced and experimental art.  During the Nineteenth century, these avant-garde French artists challenged several hierarchies.  To begin with the Salon’s ruling power was undermined, if only by the appearance of new opportunities of exhibition in the art galleries. The rise of the dealer system meant the end of the power of the Academic jury, for the artist could go elsewhere and appeal directly to the public.  The Academy and its supporters were fighting a loosing battle by the end of the end of the century, but this “death” was long in being realized.  By the Twentieth century, the traditional academic Salon system had splintered into three separate exhibition entities.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in Display

It was the Exposition artistique des oeuvres refusées, May 15, 1873, which convinced the Impressionists that they had to find another way to show their art.  The alternative to the official salon was due to numerous protests at jury rejections.  It was history repeating itself, a decade later and the Impressionists were convinced that the Salon jury would never liberalize.  Led by Edgar Degas, an arch trouble-maker, the various and sundry followers of Manet came together thanks to a suggestion by Pissarro, as an independent exhibiting group, a joint stock company of artists.  Their founding charter originally named the Impressionists as the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., as of December 27, 1873.   The first attempt to gain public recognition and to capture the attention of adventurous collectors took place on April 15, 1874.  Titled the Première exposition de la Société anonymne des artists, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., the exhibition included Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Béliard, Guillaumin, Lepic, Levert, and Rouart.   The exhibition opened two weeks before the Salon to avoid association with Salon des Refusés.

The group exhibited in the rooms, which had been recently vacated by the portrait photographer, Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines, near the studio of the inventor of the carte-de-visite, Disderi—photography territory.  Renoir’s brother painted the walls a dark russet red to replicate the domestic interiors of possible buyers.  Degas’ friend, the American artist, James Whistler, had developed a new way of showing paintings—on the eye line, rather than salon style, and the works were arranged in alphabetical order. Working in London, Whistler had revolutionized gallery installation by creating, first, an upscale interior setting, the kind that might be found in the home of an art collector and second, a total work of art.  The entire décor was color-coordinated with the paintings on view, from the color of the walls, to the upholstery on the chairs, to the color of the servants’ livery.  The artists were, in fact, showing the buyers how to hang their purchases, utilizing the display techniques of the department store: entice and educate.

Another innovation of the exhibition was the refusal of the artists to accept the traditional frames for paintings with their Baroque carving and gaudy gilding.  These innovations, which we take for granted today were, in fact, rebukes to the Salon system.  First, by showing the paintings on one line, the Impressionists eliminated the hierarchy of judgment where the least favored entries were “skied,” or hung too high to be viewed.  Second, the frames were plain, simple and often white, drawing attention to the elements inside the frame and on the canvas itself.  In 2006, Leo Carey wrote an interesting article “Frame Game” for the New Yorker Magazine and names Degas and Pissarro as the leaders in frame innovation. Carey pointed out that Pissarro thought the gilt frames “stank of the bourgeois.” According to Carey,

White frames quickly became associated with Impressionism. The Salon, the dominant institution in French art at the time, made conservative stipulations abut how works should be presented and in this context, white frames were a radical departure.

Some Impressionists, searching for an alternative to gold, developed framing styles rooted in the same scientific thinking that inspired their paintings.  Many of them were influenced by the notion of “complementary colors” advanced by Michel Eugène Chevreul…Mary Cassatt mounted her pictures in red and green frames, not a single one of which survives…In the third Impressionist exhibition, Pissarro and Degas both put their pictures in plain white frames…although most of the Impressionists used white frames at one time or another, not more than a handful exist today…none of Pissarro’s frames have survived.

Carey described an attempt made at MoMA to replicate one of Pissarro’s frames:

The immediate impression was that of informality.  The expanse of wood in the sides of the frame implied something rustic.  The bright white strip next to the canvas picked up the color of white-washed houses in the middle distance, and the shallow step in the wooden section drew the eye inward, guiding it through the trees to the roofs beyond.

The Impressionists made no compromises in their art or in the display of their art but did attempt to accommodate the public with the hours the gallery was open, from 10 a. m. to 6 p. m. for those who were free during the day and, for those who were not, from 8 p. m. to 10 p. m.  The hours and the availability of the art did little to placate the viewers who were repelled and amused and complained of the lack of “finish.” The artists were rightly perceived to be rebelling against the expected norms, but wrongly accused of being political rebels.   The connection between art and politics was to be expected during this period, perhaps explaining why the Impressionists’ content was so carefully apolitical and un-provocative.   The artists were aiming for the living room, the drawing room, and the dining room of middle class interiors, as the small to medium sized canvases attest.   Despite the openness to the art audience, the Impressionists were not really reaching out to the conservative spectator in search of sensation. Their real audience was the art dealers.  The Impressionists continued to exhibit, looking for the art market.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in Definition of Artist

These exhibitions mark another rupture with the Salon, namely, a concerted attempt to break the power of the Salon as an exhibition venue and to end the importance of the Academy as a place of learning.  First, the Impressionists challenged the monopoly of the Salon through the artist-dealer system, then in its infancy.  Rather than depend upon Salon juries, the Impressionists depended upon their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, often begging him for money.  When times were good, Durand-Ruel could sell the work; but when times were bad, everyone suffered.  Durand-Ruel had little luck with French buyers who remained staunchly opposed to everything avant-garde, but he did quite well with wealthy Americans who wanted to purchase everything “French.” Americans did not distinguish between Bouguereau and Renoir and would feely buy both artists.  Although the new system was subject to economic ups and downs of the external market, the idea of the artist being supported by a sympathetic dealer, selling to sensitive and brave collectors would prove to be an attractive one, both to dealers and to artists.

The second bastion to fall was the bastion of education. The Impressionists were, for the most part, untrained. Only Cassatt and Degas possessed the required academic training. Monet studied informally under Eugène Boudin, Renoir spent some time in the atelier of Charles Gleyre.  Most of the Impressionists artists had some kind of formal training, but academic rules were of little use to artists who painted colored light or who painted modern life.  The Impressionists opened the door for other self-taught artists with their own ideas about how to make art. The rigors and strictures of the academy had limited value and few of the major artists of the 20th century had that kind of training.  Matisse, for example, studied in the atelier of a very permissive and experimental master, Gustave Moreau.  Picasso studied under his father whom he surpassed when he was still a child.  In fact, academic training would not return as a “requirement” to be an artist until the 1950s, almost one hundred years after the Impressionists upended the rulebook.

Impressionist Exhibitions

The Second Exhibition took place in 1876 and by the Third Exhibition of 1877, that artists officially adopted name “Impressionist.”  However, this term was pejorative and the Fourth Exhibition of 1879 was called “Independent” on the suggestion of Degas as a more neutral term. Gustave Caillebotte and Mary Cassatt who would be of crucial help to the artists joined the group.  Cassatt, who was a wealthy American, knew many others of her kind and she advised her friends to buy the contemporary art of her colleagues.  Caillebotte took over from Degas as the prime organizer and also acted as the major funder for subsequent exhibitions.

By the time of the Fifth Exhibition of 1880, Renoir had found patrons and was a successful portraitist and Monet had drifted away.  Pissarro’s student, Paul Gauguin, joined Degas and his friends, including Morisot, who showed at every exhibition. But for Sixth Exhibition of 1881, the veterans abstained and many of the exhibitors were newcomers, who were divided from the “pure Impressionists,” such as Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Morisot.  The Seventh Exhibition of 1882, was noteworthy for the return of the “pure Impressionism,” or pure outdoor painting and color experimentation and broken brush work, in contrast to the Eighth Exhibition of 1886 when Degas and associates returned and were joined by a new generation, Redon, Signac and Seurat.  The exhibition of 1886 was to be the last, ending a remarkable run of shows for a group that held together quite well, given that artists’ groups were a new concept.

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

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Sep
17
2010

Manet and the Nude

ÉDOUARD MANET AND “THE (FEMALE) NUDE”


“The leading characteristic of our century is its historical sense.

This is why we have to confine ourselves to relating the facts.”

Gustave Flaubert, 1854

“The wind blows in the direction of science.

Despite ourselves, we are pushed toward the exact study of facts and things.”

Emile Zola, Salon of 1866

“Il faut être de son temps.”

Honoré Daumier

Unlike his predecessor, Gustave Courbet who carefully directed the critical discourse around his art, Édouard Manet was far more taciturn.  When he spoke, it was in fragments, causal remarks, rarely buttressed by explanations about his paintings.  Against this silence, art historians constructed many frameworks for understanding.  First there is Manet the Formalist, as put forward by Clement Greenberg, as the progenitor of Modernism.  Next, there was the Manet of the Marxists, put forward by writers such as T. J. Clark, followed by Manet of the feminists, such as Griselda Pollock, and then there was the Manet examined by the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.   There is validity to all of these approaches, each illuminating the complex artist who ushered the modernité of his friend, Charles Baudelaire, into the world of avant-garde art.  How Manet created a final rupture between the modern realists and the traditional Academy is less interesting than why.   What were his strategies of attack, what were his tactics of provocation?

Manet, who was a child of privilege, born to a comfortable, even wealthy, haute bourgeois family, was typical of the rebellious son of a professional—-supported in his rebellion and cushioned in his insurrection by his father’s fortune.  Manet was never a successful artist, in the sense of sales, during his lifetime.  His financial independence would be crucial to his artistic independence.  He could afford, quite literally, to take risks and to continue without reward.  Part of the dominant class, Manet had no particular reason to destroy the bourgeois source of his position, and he never stopped vying for recognition in the Salon, always needing the rewards doled out by the State.   The artist was less of a rebel than a careerist, seeking a way to get noticed among a crowded field of aspirants.  The career of Gustave Courbet provided an excellent model: find your crowd of supporters among art critics and writers of the literary world, create a recognizable persona, and attract attention to your art through shock and awe.  Like the career of Courbet, the paintings of Édouard Manet cannot be understood without acknowledging the power of the press and the importance of publicity and the new avenues that mass media opened up to the artist.

The Second Empire was a peaceful period, marked by intellectual cynicism and resignation, following a failed revolution.  Open rebellions would fail, rebels caught in the crossfire would get crushed, so the smart move was to retreat to the safety of intellectual dissent.  Literary and artistic language evolved into a subtle network of overt condemnation of the hated middle class and its self-satisfied complacency.   The direct confrontation of a Courbet gave way to the visual ambiguities of a Manet.  Courbet’s paintings were battering rams on the barred gates of the Academy, intended to break in and to reform the wrong-headed taste for the classical.  Manet, with impeccable credentials, direct from his long tutelage under the fine academic artist, Thomas Couture, was already an insider.  His task was not to storm the barricades but the find a way out of the fortress of the Academy.   Manet inherited a group of literary supporters from the avant-garde, such as Emile Zola, and the ready-made role of “the Dandy,” popularized by Baudelaire.  Handsome, elegant, well-dressed, and cynical man about town, Manet succeeded Courbet as the leader of the insurrectionists.  But Manet was a very different kind of “Realist.”

It could be asked if Manet’s work was the Naturalism of his literary counterparts, Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. According to the critic Jules Castagnary, “…its (Naturalism) only object is to reproduce nature and lead it to its greatest power and integrity…the Naturalist school reestablishes the severed relationship between man and nature…” Far more than any other artist of   his time, Manet was a link between the tradition of historical painting and the need to paint new objects in a new fashion.  Less of a history painter and more than a painter of the history of painting, Manet’s representational mode was not that of copying nature but of observing human nature with a shrewd and jaundiced eye.  His highly stylized subjects were presented to the viewer, and this audience—assumed to be white, male and heterosexual and urbane and wealthy—was taken into account and the male viewer was drawn visually and metaphorically into his works. Like his predecessor, Courbet, and his teacher, Thomas Couture, Manet’s work is pastiche-like in its collage approach to putting together many elements, which may or may not fit together.

This pictoral collaging of flattened units, so evident with Courbet, becomes almost a conceit with Manet. Echoing Courbet’s mockery of the rhetoric of academic poses, seen in The Bathers (1853), Manet exploited the customary practice of putting academic poses and postures together into huge history paintings, as was seen in Courture’s Romans of the Decadence (1847). Manet extended the convention of academic visual discourse to its logical extreme, by exposing its inherent artificiality.  In the face of Naturalism and Realism, Manet’s works of art were about other earlier works of art, high and low, serious and commonplace, historical and current.  The result was a series of anti-academic paintings that pushed the Romantic dictum of “art-for-art’s sake” to its logical conclusion, making the artistic statement that art is an artificial product, a cultural artifact that is about reality but that does not mirror reality.   If art is severed from its traditional task of reflecting the world and/or being in the service of society, then art has no purpose other than an existential one: art existed for its own sake alone.

In The Rules of Art (1992), the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, made a distinction between the successive avant-gardes in Paris: the first avant-garde in of the 1830s, the original la bohème, and the second avant-garde, which engendered the collaboration between the artists and the writers, such as the partnership between Courbet and Champfleury.  The last avant-garde, according to Bourdieu was the art-for-art’s-sake position, held by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert and carried on by Édouard Manet.  The difference between Courbet’s socially active art and Manet’s socially apolitical art can be summed up in the difference between Courbet the Country Bumpkin and Manet the Dandy.  The Country Bumpkin was a construct in contrast to the sophisticated Parisian, while the Dandy was uninvolved, aloof, alone and apart.  It is this disinterested detachment that allows the new avant-garde artist to separate himself from the “rules of art” and to forge a separate path.  The contrast also explains Baudelaire’s antipathy to Courbet’s politically engaged painting, which kept art in the service of society.  Baudelaire selected Constantin Guys as his “painter of modern life” for a reason—Guys was an outsider who was uninterested in the art world, without a stake in the Academic game.  The poet was saying very clearly that the “painter of modern life” had to be a disinterested observer of society and could not be a participant in that society, thus privileging the alienation of the artist.

For many art historians, Manet was Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life;” but the poet, who died in 1867, did not live to see his friend become successful or at least renowned. Nevertheless, it was Manet who began to capture the essence of modernité, a quality the critic called “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life…” La vie moderne was based in the city, the heart of darkness of the century, a place of anomie and indifference. Wiped clean of anecdote and symbolism and of meaning, Manet’s art becomes a synedoche, a slice of life but a very particular kind of life.  Like his friend, Edgar Degas, Manet was a man about town who knew well the pleasures of the boulevards and brothels and cafés and cabarets and bars.  Life in Paris had a duality and a hypocrisy: a bourgeoisie respectability on one hand and an underground, Baudelaire’s “floating existences,” of marginalized people living on the fringes of respectability or far beyond social redemption.  In Manet’s art, as in Courbet’s later works, women were the main commodities of the era.  Forced into prostitution by economic conditions beyond their control, women were bought and sold, everywhere available to the highest male bidder.  Women, or to be more precise, the “fallen woman,” became the visual images upon which the Second Empire depicted itself as the all-consuming bourgeois male in power.

Did Manet reiterate the conditions of this male-dominated society to simply record, or to comment, or to critique, or to scandalize the male viewer? From viewing his works, it seems that the hero of modern life in the Second Empire was a man with money to spend on women, a member of the haute bourgeoisie who pursues the dubious pleasures of the demi-mondaine.   The artist occupied the protected position of an observer who could slum and escape, retreating to the sanctity of the studio where his adventures could be captured.    But the presence of a suffering urban proletariat in the works of Edouard Manet cannot be considered a critique.  Their misery is presented as a simple accepted fact, which is ironically manipulated through the lenses of art history.  The Old Musician (1862) is a pendant to Music in the Tuileries (1862), as an implied contrast between the lower and upper classes. The Old Musician borrowed from Spanish painting and from the works of the Le Nain Brothers, while Music in the Tuileries was an artist’s attempt to paint the crowd—albeit an upper class one—in the modern city.  Both paintings are group portraits of urban types, but Manet’s lower class people–the ragpicker and the destitute children and the old people–were overwhelmed with allegory and appropriation, used for the artist to mock the tradition for history painting. The presence of the lower classes, displaced by Haussmann’s destruction of the Old Paris, was entirely new subject matter in the Salon.  But any social comment was absorbed into elitist allusions to the history of art, appealing to the well-educated male connoisseur as a series of insider commentary.

But the pair of paintings took their place only as preludes for the seminal works of 1863, two paintings of the “modern nude,” who could only be the prostitute.  The urban poor, inherently unattractive, quickly disappeared from Manet’s work, and attractive women of ill-repute emerged as his major preoccupation by the mid 1860s.  These women, who could be owned by males, were presented with a specifically masculine way of looking: a proprietorial gaze, which implies unmediated and unquestioned power.  As John Berger remarked, men look and women are constructed to be looked at.   The only clue to Manet’s intentions as to why he painted (Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe) Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, both of 1863, is that the “nude,” by now always female, was the path to fame and fortune in the Salon.  Manet is said to have signed and accepted the inevitable—-to become noticed, he had to stoop to hackneyed subjects.   “It seems I must paint a nude.  Very well,” he said, “I shall paint one.”  The question was how to update the female nude?  Manet was clear that he meant to include “…people like you see down there,” meaning that he was familiar with the people who bathed in the Seine.  These would have been the urban poor who had no other recourse for cleanliness or recreation than the city’s river.  Manet was also familiar with Giorgione’s Fête champêtre (1508), a country or rustic scene with a theme of humans living in harmony with nature.  Apparently, Manet combined the ideal rustic scene with the actual and current way in which ordinary people used nature.

“The public will rip me to shreds but they can say what they like…”  Manet said bravely.  We know that after he was “ripped,” he felt considerable pain but received no sympathy from Baudelaire who was dying in Belgium and blooded by the Empire’s censors.   Manet began a painting named Le Bain, which could be thought of as the beginning of his mature career.  His father had died the year before (of syphilis) in 1862, freeing the son to be his own man.  Updating the nude meant not only making the nude a contemporary one but also to free the nude from symbolism and metaphor and allegory.  The woman most likely to have a kind of “public” nudity would be the prostitute.  The strategy had to be to mask the inherent vulgarity of the prostitute and to avoid the impropriety of presenting the respectable woman by using canonical art historical examples from past times.  In the painting, later renamed Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe, Manet appropriated Giorgione and Titian and Goya and Raphael and mined their art for poses, precedents and legitimacy.  By filtering the nakedness of the modern woman through art history, Manet escaped the trap of Naturalism, that of passively recording reality.  These paintings were artificial and arbitrary and willful in their irony and sarcasm.  While Manet’s work seems satirical, the paintings were also a gamble, as if he bet everything on one throw of the dice.  His goal was probably to be noticed among a sea of earnest and pornographic female nudes, disguised as goddesses.

Courbet’s success owed a great deal to the open Salon of 1848 which allowed him to summarize and end the first stage of his career and to the Salon of 1849, juried by artists, which allowed his Dinner at Ornans to be shown and awarded a second-class medal.  Manet’s success would equally hinge on politics, this time on art politics.  Manet had hoped to soften up the jury by preempting their judgment with a show of is new works at the Louis Martinet gallery.  As would often happen, Manet’s hopes for public acceptance were dashed and the Salon jury was no better disposed towards his work.  The jury for the Salon of 1863 was unusually harsh, an outcome during the censorious Second Empire, which meant that the level of rejection was nothing short of extreme.  Deprived of the right to be seen and, thus of the right to earn a living, the rejected artists protested so much that the Emperor intervened and ordered a second salon, the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863.  Many artists simply slunk away, not wanting to exhibit with the losers, but the more opportunistic painters, such as Manet and his friend, James Whistler, participated.  The Salon des Refusés overshadowed the Salon of the Accepted Ones, and the two artists were the most scandalous painters presenting.  To paraphrase Flaubert, now that Manet was attacked, he now existed in the minds of the art public, which was primed and ready to be horrified at his next offering, Olympia, another modern nude, at the Salon of 1865.  “I render as simply as possible the things I see.  What could be more naïve than Olympia?” Manet protested, perhaps a bit disingenuously.

By layering Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe with references to two paintings by Raphael, to Giorgione’s Fête Competre, to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Olympia with quotations from Titian and Goya, Manet seemed to ask why couldn’t he be allowed to do the same kind of art as his predecessors?  But his art was not the same. Manet did more than Michel Foucault claimed when he remarked that the artist was the first to paint a “museum painting,” that is a painting that would be comprehensible only to the art educated public.  The paintings Manet borrowed from were all set in poetic spaces, not in real time or in real places.  Only Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the model for Olympia, was contemporary, a private commission, about as high-minded as Courbet’s The Sleepers. But Titian’s “Venus” was demurely distanced from the kind of provocative modernité demonstrated by Manet. Titian’s painting was a private offering to a princely patron; Manet’s paintings were public assaults, exposing the sexual pastimes of the well-heeled male, indiscretions to which the law turned a blind eye.  That willed blindness was pierced by the strident gaze of Manet’s model, the high-priced courtesan watchfully regarding the male interloper, who had apparently interrupted a sexual tryst.  The tactic of breaking through the “fourth wall” of the picture plane predicted the theatrical practices of Berthold Brecht—-the direct address of the actor to the audience, the refusal to accept the rules of virtual reality.  By forcing the Second Empire audience to become part of its own sordid hidden lives, Manet achieved his intention to “do the nude” and to become noticed.  Scandal equaled success and established Manet’s reputation as the leader of the new avant-garde, and freed him from conventional subject matter.  But Modernité would not be the conflation of art history and art present, but the capture of all that was contingent and fleeting, the ephemeral drifting fragments of Paris: the next stage of Manet’s career.

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

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

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Jul
02
2010

Realism and the Role of the Realist Artist

The Role of the Realist Artist in the Contemporary World

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

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Jun
25
2010

Realism and Naturalism in 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. Taking note of the funeral attire, the black suits of the bourgeoisie males, Charles Baudelaire argued that there was a unique kind of “modern” heroism of everyday life. In the Salon of 1946, he wrote,

But to return to our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions, I observe that the majority of artists who have attacked modern life have contented themselves with public and official subjects – with our victories and our political heroism. Even so, they do it with an ill grace, and only because they are commissioned by the government which pays them. However there are private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.

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 and the hand of the artist.  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.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter, 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, conventional composition and chiaroscuro were disregarded and color became local rather than emotional or formal.  Like philosophy, art came to increasingly rest upon empiricism and close observation.  However, there was a genuine desire on the part of the artist to throw off the weight of the dead history of classical art (to paraphrase Karl Marx) and to defy the authority of the previous generation.

The role of the Realist artist was to tell the truth.  Reasons for telling the truth and for making objective art varied.  Some artists, such as Ernst Meissonier, used the idea of photographic realism to recreate a historical scene with accuracy.  Some artists, such as Rosa Bonheur, used realism to celebrate the working animals of the rural life of her country, la belle France.  It would be incorrect to assume that those two artists were not political, for both were very nationalistic in their intentions to celebrate France and its heritage.

Other  Realist 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 of rigid class stratifications.  Millet’s The Gleaners of 1857 showed the plight of the landless peasant in the age of the collective corporate farm.  In England, Holman Hunt took up the theme of the “fallen woman,” 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, a smiling courtesan inspired by Emil Zola’s novel of the same name.

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 with his 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 groups, 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.   Although there 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.

When examining the critical reception of the Realists, it seems that even provocative content could be somewhat tolerated as long as some semblance of recognizable “skill” was visible.  When painterly technique diverged too radically from the academic standards, the audience was scandalized, regardless of the subject matter.  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.  It is here with this last generation of the Realist artists, that the avant-garde matured with Impressionism.

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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