Posts Tagged ‘Eugene Delacroix’

Nov
26
2010

Georges Seurat

Post-Impressionist Artists: Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891)

Georges Seurat began as an “Impressionist,” or, at least he appeared in one of their last shows, but his goal was to reform Impressionism.  In comparison to the older artists’ more direct approach to art, Seurat’s paintings are complex in source and in execution.  In his attempts to extend the implications of Impressionism Georges Seurat also attracted his own band of followers, including Paul Signac. What made Seurat’s art compelling is his combination of the ancient and the modern, science and popular culture, and history and the present.  A product of the traditional École des Beaux-Arts, Seurat admired Ingres and studied under one of his pupils, Henri Lehman,  but he rebelled against the narrowness of the Academy.  That said, Seurat took what he had learned from tradition and, instead of discarding it, used time-honored ideas to update Impressionism.  Using an unlikely combination of classicism and science, Georges Seurat reconciled the constant change of Modernité with the need of Third Republic society to find its cultural center.

Sources

As a young student of contemporary life, Seurat studied the Goncourt brothers, who wrote acid-tongued observations of Paris and the exquisite line drawings of Hans Holbein. Learning from the preternatural calm of Holbein, Seurat followed the Impressionists in their interest in contemporary city life but he returned to structure and defined form. Well-versed in the art history written by Charles Blanc, Seurat observed the brushwork of Delacroix’s murals in the Chapel of Sainte Agnès at Saint-Sulplice (1861), noting the large separate brushstrokes. These painted marks made by Delacroix would become the technique favored by Seurat for his early works and for his sketches done from nature.  The final application, however, consisted of thousands of dots of primary and complementary colors, contained within rigid shapes.  Like many of the artists of the Post-Impressionist decades, the artist was interested in the so-called “primitive” art and ancient art, struck by the outlined forms, the static calm poses, and strong and simple compositions.  The Louvre was a great art warehouse of Egyptian and Assyrian art, impervious to changing times and powerful over the centuries.  It was this universal quality Seurat sought.

Seurat also looked towards a more scientific direction, than the other Post-Impressionists, exploring the implications of theories of color and light, suggested by Impressionist techniques of observation. The Impressionists used their brushes loaded with color to stand for colored light.  On occasion, Renoir would occasionally use a brush with two colors.  In contrast, Seurat made a long and careful study of the properties of color itself. During the decade of the 1880s a number of scientific books, both old and new, became available: Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Theory of Colors, Michel Eugène Chevreul’s On the Principles of Harmony and Contrast, Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics, David Sutter’s Phenomena of Vision and Charles Henry’s Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetics.   Delacroix had separated his colors, putting color opposites next to each other to heighten chromatic intensity.  Seurat took his idea of separating colors one step further and, instead of mixing colors; he placed colors that would optically mix together.  For example, blue next to yellow mixes to green in the eyes.  The idea of mixing color—mélange optique—came from Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin. Without getting too technical, there are several kinds of contrasts, simultaneous and successive, and the after image—all of which were exploited by Seurat.

Seurat created his own version of optical blending of color called pointillism, based upon laws of contrasting colors.  The term pointillism came from the term “point,” meaning a stitch, in tapestry weaving.  Delacroix could say that the “purity of spectral element being the keystone of my technique,” but Seurat and his followers, “purity” was relative. Unfortunately for Seurat, the colors of his time, particularly zinc yellow, were unstable, a condition that could be masked if colors were mixed, but if pure color was used, then deterioration would be noticeable within months.  We appreciate Seurat’s craft, his careful method of application, and, yes, even his colors; but we cannot see his art the way it looked with he originally painted it.  Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte was retouched a number of time in his lifetime and the Bathers at Arsnieres was completely repainted in 1887.  Nevertheless, Seurat’s methods attracted a number of followers, Paul Signac, Maximilian Luce, Henri Cross, and even, for a time, Camille Pissarro.  Most of these artists used larger points of colors than Seurat’s technique, which was called “divisionism” or “neo-Impressionism.”

Subject Matter

Charles Baudelaire pointed out that the Romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix thought of nature as a “dictionary,” that is the artist selected elements from the real world (words) and put them together into a total work of art (a sentence, a story).  But the modernism of Baudelaire was a single word, not a complete sentence.  Seurat would have grown up with Baudelaire’s definition of modernity, but he was in a position to see the weak points of naturalism.  First, naturalism was revealed to be limited and constrictive, forcing the artist to use the “innocent” eye and to be subservient to nature.  The artist turned to science, understanding that science was more than mere observation: science was the creation of a theory, based upon the summation of particulars.  Second, Seurat attempted to correct Naturalism/Impressionism by collecting the details and putting them together, or synthesizing them, into a whole that stood for a universal.

The change from the Impressionist movement and the fleeting instant was significant and can be seen in the majestic Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte (1884 -1886), now at the Art Institute of Chicago.  A large scale Golden Rectangle, this portrait of modern life in the Third Republic, presents a frozen moment in social history.  Seurat worked from sixty sketches, called croquetons, for two years, showing the painting first as a pure landscape.  Later he added in the figures, transferred and organized on a grid.  All of the social types spread out in a frieze—this was an updating of the Parthenon frieze.  The artist had seen a cast of the dignified Athenians marching towards their Goddess and, from the Louvre, he would have been familiar with the processional qualities of Egyptian art.  Only at the center of the painting are they any figures seen from the front.  All the rest are seen from behind or in profile.  As with Gustave Courbet, individuality was wiped out and identification was impossible, creating a sense of timelessness. Only the mother and daughter, who are dressed in white, offer a point of contact for the viewer.

There was another artist in Paris who was also looking backwards, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes whose specialty was mural painting.  “Puvis,” as he was called, was an approved official artist, given allegorical or historical subject matter, from Paris to Boston.  However, Puvis created a striking new approach by archaizing his forms, returning to severe classicism combined with soft modulated colors.  Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision was a typical recreation of the longed for Arcadia. Seurat’s scientific method of applying colors in small points or dots was combined with an appreciation of classical forms, copied from Puvis whose studio he visited. For Seurat, the island of the Grand Jatte was the modern Arcadia, a place where nature and humans could exit together in harmony. The art historian, Stephen Eisenman, has suggested that the utopian social harmony, the class mixing, seen in the painting, was a reiteration of the color mixing of pointillism.  And vice-versa.

However, there is an added element to Seurat’s painting and that is the contemporary taste for the Rococo.  Sunday Afternoon has the look of a Antoine Watteau, a fête campetre, where the idle classes are depicted at play.  In the time of Seurat, however, leisure for the middle or even lower classes, was a novel concept and an earned privilege.  The Bathers at Asnieres (1883 – 84)—now at the National Gallery in London—showed lower class men taking a swimming break in their busy day.  Ansieres was a suburban town on the Seine and the spot selected by Seurat was the place where animals would be led for a good cleaning. This painting was submitted to the Salon of 1884 and was, of course, rejected.  He removed the horses and changed a working scene to a scene of leisure.  The Bathers takes place in a designated baignade, a bathing area.  Like Gustave Caillebotte, Seurat updates the theme of bathing, regenders it as male, and, in the process, created, in the manner of Puvis, an allegory of summertime.

Although the pointillist effect was obtained through scientific ends, Seurat sketched and drew on the spot, bringing together a number of fragments into large carefully executed paintings: peintre au point. The synthesis of the particulars derived from these individual sketches and the final composition was done according to the laws of art, as imposed by the artist.  The artist was in control of nature, reshaping it to his own formal ends.   “Art-for-art’s-sake” had acquired a new meaning, redefining artistic freedom.  The artist was now the creator, in total control, and nature was mastered and put in the service of a universal meaning.  Lest Seurat’s art sound too solemn, it should be pointed out that the content of the artist was mostly that of popular culture and the lower classes. Once again, the composition is based upon a classical Golden Triangle, also seen in Parade de Cirque of 1887 – 1888.  Even when a painting, like the Cirque (1891) shows action, there is a sense of action frozen, or forms being generalized into typical poses, while the artist made very specific statements of life among the lower classes.

Seurat’s father had been a collector of popular prints, imagerie popularie, and many of his late figure paintings reflect the interest in posters made by artists such as Jules Cheret.  However, Cheret’s posters and full of centered and suspended action and frentic linear activity; Seurat stilled all action, and used strongly shaped forms to congeal activity.  It should be noted that regardless of Seurat’s desire for class equality, he was independently wealthy and stood resolutely outside of his paintings and apart from his subjects.  He eliminated the “being there” quality, so characteristic of Edouard Manet and replaced the spontaneity of modernité with the Renaissance window on the world, with color theory being substituted for perspective theory.  There is no atmospheric perspective in Seurat’s work.  All forms are equally clear and concise, containing the precise verticals and horizontals, which structure a grid composition.  The viewpoint of the omnipotent observer, learned from Naturalism, remained intact, and Seurat took the part of the upper class male controlling nature and all its varied inhabitants.

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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Aug
13
2010

Charles Baudelaire and Art Criticism

BAUDELAIRE AS ART CRITIC

“We are going to be impartial.  We have no friends—that is a great thing—and no enemies.”  Thus Charles Baudelaire began his career as an art critic with the Salon of 1845.  With a tone we suspect to be sardonic, the young writer addressed himself to the bourgeoisie, “a very respectable personage; for one must please those at whose expanse one means to live.”  The poet completed his introduction, which is his manifesto of art writing, by saying, “We shall speak about anything that attracts the eye of the crowd and of the artists; our professional conscience obliges us to do so.  Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing, and to scorn the throngs of those that have gone astray is no way to bring them back to where they ought to be.”  In the Salon of 1846, the writer again targets the middle class art audience, stating that, “…any book which is not addressed to the majority—in number and intelligence—is a stupid book.”  In other words, Baudelaire, a member of la bohème, would not be writing to the artistic reader but to those who were woefully in need of education, the middle classes.

Baudelaire followed the traditional format of the art critic, a walk through a huge salon exhibition, pausing here and there, giving some artists an entire page and others a mere sentence.  Interspersed were pages of commentary on the state of the arts, which, combined over time, created a description of the culture of two decades in Paris.  The art writer was a product of the Romantic period.  Reading his reviews of the Salons, it is plain that he was imbued with the tenants of Romantic thought, but by the time his career began, Romanticism was on the wane and new ways of thinking about art were being developed.  Although Eugène Delacroix was making official art for the establishment, Baudelaire worshiped him and despised his great rival, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres.  “M. Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of ancient or of modern times…M. Delacroix is not yet a member of the Academy, but morally he belongs to it.”  Baudelaire refers to the painter as “a genius who is ceaselessly in search of the new.”

In The Salon of 1846, Baudelaire wrote some of the most definitive words on Romanticism.  “…if, by romanticism, you are prepared to understand the most recent, most modern expression of beauty—then…the great artist will be he who will combine with the condition required above—that of the quality of naïveté—the greatest possible amount of romanticism.”  As will pointed out in the text, “Baudelaire and Modernité” (Art History Unstuffed), the writer was obviously familiar with Friedrich Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in which the poet compared two artistic types.  Schiller’s “naïve” poet (artist) who was “childlike,” and allowed nature to flow through spontaneously creating art through an individual sensibility was the precursor to artistic individualists like Delacroix.  “Romanticism,” Baudelaire echoed, “is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.  They looked for it outside themselves, but it was only to be found within.  For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the latest expression of the beautiful.”

And yet, in the same Salon, Baudelaire acknowledges the pressing conditions of the urban present.  For him, and for many artists, Romanticism was the very expression of all that was modern: artistic freedom and the expression of individuality. But in the writer’s section “Of the Heroism of Modern Life,”  there are passages that prefigure The Painter of Modern Life. In order to understand the importance of Baudelaire’s writing at this point, it is necessary to remember that the Romantic artists, especially during the time of this Salon, were often involved in historical subjects.  Unknowingly working against waning Romanticism and predicting Realism, Baudelaire made a case for modern subject matter.

Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all people have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours…

All forms of beauty,” the writer continued, “…contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and the particular.  Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of different beauties.  The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions; and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

The notion of “beauty” is already an old fashioned one, inherited from the Ancients, would will soon be replaced by a bracing does of realism and the introduction of “ugliness.”  Here we see the appearance of Baudelaire’s fascination with fashion that would emerge in The Painter of Modern Life.  In contrast to the colorful attire of the past, contemporary fashion for men had become democratized by the uniform of the black suit, which, according to Baudelaire, “…not only posses their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality.”  After reassuring the reader that artists were capable of capturing shades of blacks and grays, something Èdouard Manet would excel at, he continued, “…our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…” and urges the artists to look away from “public and official subjects” to “private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.”

Indeed, Baudelaire moved directly to the world he knew best, the world inhabited by the disenfranchised, including artists and writers, “the pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of a great city….all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism.”  It is in this underworld where modern life existed.  Indeed, as Baudelaire pointed out, the comfortable bourgeoisie cannot be a hero; that status is reserved for those who deserve it—those of  “floating existences,” the men and women struggling to keep alive in a hostile city.  The need for this new kind of heroism intensified, for the gaps that appear in his art writing coincide with the Revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Empire, events that brought about the very “modern life” he predicted.  For years, Baudelaire the art writer went dark, while he translated the American poet Edgar Allan Poe and wrote his ill-fated book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).

Baudelaire’s silence and withdrawal are interesting.  On one hand, one could speculate that the writer was confounded by the death of Romanticism, but, on the other hand, he had been on the cutting edge by predicting the coming of an art that demanded contemporary subjects.  But the kind of realism that developed after the Revolution of 1848 was based upon observation of the base and the banal, the ordinary world according to Gustave Courbet.  The natural world of the petit bourgeoisie did not appeal to Baudelaire, who, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “hated and regretted”  “naturalness.”  “Baudelaire’s profound singularity,” Sartre wrote, “lay in the fact that he was the man without ‘immediacy.’”  The art critic is silent during the first decade of the Second Empire until the occasion of the Exposition Universelle in 1855.  Picking up his earlier thoughts, Baudelaire returns to the subject of beauty.  “The Beautiful is always strange,” he said in one of his most famous statements.  “…it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and it is that touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.”

Oddly Baudelaire devotes his review of the Exposition to the dialectic of the display of Ingres and Delacroix as the official artists representing France, ignoring the outsider Courbet, his Realist Manifesto, his innovative Pavilion of Realism, and the two decades of works it contained.  Halfway into the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote of “The Modern Artist” and “The Modern Public and Photography” in The Salon of 1859.  In writing of photography, Baudelaire also expresses his horror of the new tendencies towards objectivity and of scientific observation.  “Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.” “…it is happiness to dream,” the poet protested and, in the next section, wrote on Imagination, “The Queen of the Faculties.”  Once again, Baudelaire uses the opportunity to repudiate Realism.

In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand and different ways, “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and to poetry.  To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me.  Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.

Baudelaire dismissed the realists, “…let us simply believe that they mean to say, ‘We have no imagination, and we decree that no one else is to have any.’ He continued, “How mysterious is Imagination, that Queen of the Faculties! It touches all the others’ it rouses them and sends them into combat.” “…Without imagination, all the faculties, however sound or sharpened they may be, are as though they did not exist…” Speaking of Delacroix (without naming him), Baudelaire elaborated upon the painter’s dictate, “Nature is but a dictionary,” in order to compare the artist to the realists. Earlier the art critic had written of Delacroix that, for the painter, “The entire universe is only a dictionary of images and signs.”  “Painters who are obedient to the imagination seek in their dictionary for which the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform…”

The concept that nature was a dictionary, seen by the artist as a symbolic, not literal, source for ideas was echoed in his poem, “Correspondences” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857):

La Nature est un temple oû de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passé à travers des forêts de symbols

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Writing in 1990, the critic, Jonathan Culler, translates Baudelaire’s “forest of signs” as a doctrine of Correspondences in which the poet “seems to disrupt the one-to-one correspondence between natural sign and spiritual meaning that the others promote.”  In other words, Baudelaire caused a rupture between the word and the thing, between the act of transcribing and the object recorded.  The so-called “correspondences” are arbitrary, making the signs into symbolic substitutes that do not name but suggest.  By continuing to insist upon the primacy of the imagination, Baudelaire founded a modern poetry of nuance.

Baudelaire ends his work as an art critic by paying homage to his friend Courbet, “we must do Courbet this justice—that he contributed not a little to the re-establishment of a taste for simplicity and honesty, and of a disinterested, absolute love of painting.” And Baudelaire included a nod to Manet who had yet to become the artist he would be.  And so, with the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire moves on to other forms of writing.  Somewhere along the way, Baudelaire seemed to find a balance between poetry and prose with his “prose poems” in Paris Spleen in 1869.  Waiting almost a decade after his last Salon, Baudelaire seemed to come to terms with Realism, but not in terms of “simplicity and honesty,” but in terms of the artificiality that Sartre insisted Baudelaire preferred.  The poet realized that the next life for art would be not in the country scenes of the painters of the lower classes but in the interpretation of “the heroism of modern life” he discussed in The Painter of Modern Life.

See also “Baudelaire and Modernity” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”

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

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

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Jul
16
2010

Podcast 25 Realism in Europe, Part One

EUROPEAN REALISM, PART ONE

Although Realism is usually associated with the artistic movement in France, Realism was an international movement that was both visual and literary.  Realism in the nineteenth century was not just a political or social impulse, it was also a set of concepts that challenged and replaced the rubrics of Romanticism.  This podcast examines the principles of the Realists artists.

  EUROPEAN

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Mar
05
2010

Podcast 15 French Romanticism: Delacroix, Part Two

DELACROIX THE CONSERVATIVE

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.

 
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Jan
22
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.  Eugene 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

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Jan
15
2010

French Romanticism and the Avant-Garde

French Romanticism and the Avant-Garde

The term “avant-garde” is a military one, borrowed from the French phrase, denoting the advance body of the army.  This small group of soldiers goes out in advance of the main group to scout the territory beyond with the aim of reporting back as to the conditions awaiting the other soldiers.  In American parlance, these soldiers are called “F.O’s” or forward observers, and they account for the highest casualty rate, for they are always on the line and out in front. The artists that are historically considered the avant-garde were also “out in front of” the main body of more conservative artists and the recalcitrant public, putting their careers and their lives on the line in order to find new ways of making art.  As Renato Poggioli in The Theory of the Avant-Garde put it,

“…the avant-garde…functions as an independent and isolated military unit, completely and sharply detached from the public, quick to act, not only to explore but also to battle, conquer, and adventure on its own…”

The avant-garde as a conscious and deliberate artistic activity is mainly a mid to late Nineteenth Century phenomenon, probably pioneered by the Impressionists who intentionally refused to placate public taste and who deliberately exhibited work outside of the expected channels of the large and popular public Salon exhibitions.  According to Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art, the avant-garde was a sociological affair, born of rising middle class aspirations and the inability of the culture to satisfy talented people.  The Academy controlled entrée to school art school training and had the power to grant access to the Salon.  Although the intention of the academically minded juries may have been to maintain the high level of quality in art, the effect was to restrict economic opportunity, forcing artists outside of the system.  As Bourdieu said,

“…bohemia…grows numerically and as its prestige (or mirages) attracts destitute young people, often of provincial and working-class origin, who around 1848 dominate the ‘second bohemia.’  In contrast to the romantic dandy of the ‘golden bohemia’ of the rue de Doyené, the bohemia of Murger, Chapmpfleury or Duranty constitutes a veritable intellectual reserve army, directly subject to the laws of the market and often obliged to live off a second skill…in order to live an art that cannot make a living.”

The avant-garde grew out of a group of creative people who gravitated to Paris and lived in low-income quarters, suffering from neglect and poverty.  Outside the mainstream and lacking the outlets that would have perhaps earned them a living, these artists and writers could only gather together and form an ideology of failure.  They had failed, they consoled themselves, because they were so “advanced” that the unenlightened public misunderstood them.   Simply put, their art was too good, too “avant.” Success was inverted in to an indictment of failure and failure was transformed into a badge of honor.   It is doubtful that these defiant members of the avant-garde were particularly talented or gifted, for there were member of La Boheme who were quite successful, such as George Sand and Eugène Delacroix. But the formula was high-minded and allowed those who never made a breakthrough an honorable cover for their failure.  The avant-garde artist, then, was a mythic creature who was not appreciated or understood by the masses, one who chose to live and work in obscurity and poverty, believing that one day his/her art would be recognized by an educated art audience either in the near present or in some unforeseeable future.  Savvy and strategic Bohemian artists fueled the myth of the avant-garde by shocking the a public that was very easy to shock.  The rallying cry of the avant-garde was, “Épater le bourgeoisie!” but the idea was to gain attention, not to repel collectors.  Avant-garde artists needed to make a living and used the unexpected as  a strategy to shock and awe the crowd.

Without the church and state and their once limitless funds, without the taste and sophistication of the aristocrats, the artists were faced with the middle class as their main audience. This was an audience that wanted to be entertained and were treated by the artists to large paintings that were precursors to modern day movies—-the grand machines or huge paintings that enthralled them with exciting stories. The new audience was composed of the masses, high and low, average people, undereducated, unsophisticated, but not uninterested in art.  The kind of art they wanted was that which was easily accessible, easy to understand, entertaining and attractive to look at; something like today’s television programs, that reflected themselves and their interests.  For many artists, this new middle class audience was no problem. For other artists, the bourgeoisie was an opportunity.   Although the art viewers were trained to admire the large history paintings, the serious minded displays of ancient virtues and obscure myths were not necessarily what the public actually wanted to see.

Academic art was based upon time honored Greek and Roman art which glorified the human being, divinely beautiful preferably nude, engaged in noble deeds.  Members of the Academy acted as jurors to the annual (or biannual) salons, restricting style and subject matter to that which reflected their teachings and the official preferences of the State. Preferred subject matter favored history and myth with an eye to teaching the unruly public morality, through the lessons of the past. While such allegorical approaches had been very effective in the early years of Neoclassicism, the moral and political fervor had quickened succumbed to the status-quo demands of the State, which wanted to entertain the public and distract it from the problems of the present. Until the end of the Second Empire, artists found success only by positioning themselves within the establishment, if only to fight against it, like Irgres and Delacroix. But as the century progressed, social and political issues became increasingly pressing, forcing the artistic gaze away from the present and towards eroticism and exoticism and the problems of contemporary times. For the avant-garde artist, the historical past was past.  “Il faut être de son temps,” (“It is necessary of be of one’s time.”) the artist Honoré Daumier exclaimed.  A growing number of artists sought new ways to make art, which would reflect the new modern way of life.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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Jan
08
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.
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Jan
01
2010

French Romanticism: The Historical Context

French Romanticism: The Historical Context

Neoclassicism was a historicist revival of an ancient style that acquired political and social implications during a time of turbulent change.  Calm and serene, Neoclassicism lent itself well to noble subject matter that depicted the ideals the French public should emulate.  Despite the classical harmony of Neoclassicism, the style was developed during a decade of chaos.  Ironically, Romanticism, which in contrast, was a dramatic and dynamic style matured during a decade of peace and calm. The Romantic artists looked back to the Napoléonic age of empire and glory with disappointment and depression that they had been born too late to participate in the great adventure.  Although these artists challenged the Salon system that maintained the status quo and the academic style, they did so in a society that was busy turning back the clock of liberalism. Under Napoléon, traditional powers were reinstalled, an emperor took the place of a king, the Catholic Church was restored, and the Code Napoléon, while an efficient legal structure, set the cause of equality back for decades to come. Napoléon reinforced the backward look to his regime by adopting the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne as his model to reinforce the concept of “France,” which was a “modern” nation with a long tradition.  On the other hand, Napoléon fought “wars of liberation” to spread the French Revolution over Europe and wound up presiding over an Empire. Once a force of the “liberation” of Europe, the Grande Armée became a force of conquest, control, and occupation, all in the name of “freedom.”

Romanticism, in France, evolved out of Neoclassicism’s grand manner as Napoléon’s artists responded to commissions that demanded glorification of his military adventures and martial victories.  But the building of an empire was often a dark and dirty business.  Hiding beneath the mask of glory was a very real cost in human life and suffering that demanded a new and sometimes uncomfortable realism. Jean-Antoine Gros glorified Napoléon but could not ignore the reality of war.  The growing unease with Napoléonic wars can be traced through the works of Baron Gros.  From Napoléon at Arcole (1796) to Napoléon at the Pesthouse of Jaffa (1804) and Napoléon at Eylau (1806).  In the decade, the depiction of Napoléon had gone from heroic young leader to noble healer to solemn general leading his horse slowly among the dead.  Gros and the other Napoléonic artists could not resort to classical allegory and were forced, by their Emperor’s demands, to represent the contemporary era. Current events seemed far more relevant than ancient deed from an antique past.  Any lessons the classical era might have had seemed meaningless in the face of modern times of industrialization and total war.  The break between Neoclassicism and Romanticism can be clearly seen in the time when France dominated the Continent and plunged Europe into ten years of war.  While many artists continued to explore the possibilities of the Neoclassical, artists such as Gros were drawing a distinctive dividing line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism—the new interest in the contemporary and a new concern with one’s own time.

The age of Napoléon was a great age for art and for artists in France.  The Emperor threw himself into a well-organized orgy of looting the cultural heritage of Europe.   He stripped European nations of their patrimony and brought thousands of art treasures, large and small, significant and less well known to Paris and installed them in the Louvre, now a public museum.   The challenge to Neoclassicism from new artists and unfamiliar art was part of the origin of Romanticism.  To be able to see actual paintings by Rubens, his bold brushwork, his bright colors, his restless and dynamic forms was a revelation to French artists.  To the new Romantic generation, the French academy ceased to the sole source of artistic ideals.  The French people accepted, as their due, this artistic tribute from other countries.   They had few moral qualms about the wholesale stripping and transportation of European culture to Paris.  In addition to the unprecedented availability of Continental art, the fall of the French aristocracy had brought a number of important private collections to the market.  Most of this art found its way to England, where it was safe from Napoléonic looting.  But the looted collections added to the Louvre were returned to their countries of origin, with the exception of a few prize Italian works, still in France.

After the fall of Napoléon in the first abdication of 1814 and the final fall in the second abdication of 1815, France returned to a conservative political mode. Napoléon himself had certainly been reactionary when it came to women and the lower classes and he reinstated the Catholic Church, bringing back religious traditions, albeit under state control.  His successor, the Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII did little to change the France Napoléon left behind, continuing his policy of inviting the émigrés back and restoring the old order, while opening the doors to men of merit.  Louis agreed to a constitutional monarchy, modeled after that of Britain, while his successor, Charles X, chafed under such restrictions.  Although the French people had nostalgic memories of Napoléon, they had little patience with the simple-minded kind and revived the old revolutionary fervor in the “July Days” of 1830.  Charles X was summarily overthrown in a few short days, called “Days” as a reflection of the “Days,” also in July when the first Revolution began in another July in 1789.  The next king who stepped into the vacant throne, Louis-Philippe, was careful to not repeat the mistakes of Charles X and called himself the “Citizen King.”  During the span between Napoléon and Louis-Philippe, Romanticism in France and its counterpart, the avant-garde, was created.

Near the conclusion to his classic history, The Age of Napoléon, J. Christopher Herold quoted Napoléon,

“’Greatness has its beauties, but only in retrospect and in the imagination’: thus wrote General Bonaparte to General Moreau in 1800.  His observation helps to explain why the world, only a few years after sighing with relief at its delivery from the ogre, began to worship him as the greatest man of modern times. Napoléon had barely left the scene when the fifteen years that he had carved out of world history to create his glory seemed scarcely believable. Only the scars of the war veterans and the empty places in the widows’ beds seemed to attest the reality of those years, and time soon eliminated even these silent witnesses.  What remained, in retrospect and in the imagination, was legend and symbol.”

The generation of Romantic artists who matured under the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X had to be content with a petit revolution and regretted not having experienced the true glory of life under Napoléon.  Artists, such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, spent their early careers dealing with the contemporary. Géricault who, like Gros, measured the Napoléonic wars with two paintings of dashing French cavalry officers, both resplendently dressed, but each portrait of a warrior was very different.  The Charging Chasseur (1812) and the Wounded Cuirassier (1814), separated by two short years, span the gap between the glory years just before the disastrous Russian campaign and the year of defeats at the hands of the Alliance of European armies.  Part of a transition generation between David and Delacroix, Gros and Géricault swerved away from the Davidian tradition of heroic Neoclassicism, as seen in Napoléon Crossing the Alps, and into a hybrid of Romanticism combined with realism, overlying classicism.  Under the reign of Louis XVIII, artists were not bound to producing propaganda and were freed from Napoléonic censorship. Géricault pointedly criticized the new and incompetent government with his Raft of the Medusa, seen in the Salon of 1819.  The theatricalized scene, which included a young Delacroix, posing on the raft, was dramatically Romantic, contemporary, and political.  Arriving at the end of France’s time of glory and honor, Géricault’s Raft revealed how dangerous and how forceful art, freed of the dictates of the state, could be.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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Dec
11
2009

Podcast 9 Romanticism in France

FRENCH ROMANTICISM

Romanticism in France was an artistic movement that was born of the excitement of Napoleonic art and its depictions of the glory and horrors of total war.  But after the Emperor was deposed, the new generation of artists could find “liberty” only in the refuge of art-for-art’s-sake and freedom existed only in bohemia.  It was in the quarters of unknown artists that the avant-garde was born, but the most successful Romantic artists in France were, in fact members of the establishment.  Although Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres were often considered as Romantic opponents, they both were chroniclers of their times, depicting an image of an age caught between past glories and the future of industrialism.

 

 

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Oct
31
2009

Podcast 6 Romanticism

ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM

Although Romanticism was supposedly subjective, or based in the individual sensibility of the artist, this movement was an international movement with characteristics unique to each nations.  The Romantic Movement is discussed in comparative terms, assessing the differences among the movements in France, England, America and Germany.

 

 

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