Posts Tagged ‘Revolution of 1848’

Sep
03
2010

Gustave Courbet

AVANT-GARDE REALISM IN FRANCE: COURBET

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

For the Realists, art had to be “sincere.”  By “sincere,” the artists and writers meant that art had to be of its own time in content, as opposed to imaginary scenes of events that never happened. To sincerity, one can add “authentic.”  Art had to be real.  Realism can be broken down into two phases in France.  The first phase was diverse, including the censored and outspoken political cartoonist and painter, Honoré Daumier, the cautious Socialist, Jean François Millet and his careful social landscapes and the radical lesbian Socialist, Rosa Bonheur and her patriotic celebrations of Second Empire prosperity. Realism developed out of literary Naturalism and became more radical after the Revolution of 1848 with the art of Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877).

In the beginning of his career, Courbet’s sympathies were with the petit bourgeoisie, the small town dwellers outside of Paris in provinces considered “provincial” by the Parisians. Courbet came from a small town in the undefined middle of the country, called Ornans, and migrated to the sophisticated urban milieu of Paris, where he stressed his “country bumpkin” origins.  As a wily outsider artist, with little training, Courbet took what were deficiencies—his accent and his relative lack of training—and transformed them into virtues—only an “outsider” could reform the Academy.  The academic artists and their traditional ways were being tested by social and political changes, which were bringing new ideas and new people into the capital, and Courbet was a harbinger of challenges to come.

After a decade of being on the fringes of the closed and rarified world of the Salons, Courbet witnessed, from the safety of the sidelines, the fall of the regime of Louis Philippe and the Revolution of 1848. This Revolution was the moment that Louis Napoléon had been waiting for and the nephew of the Emperor Napoléon returned from exile in London to establish himself as the new head of government.  But the Revolution was an opportunity for Courbet as well, because this was the year that the artist changed his entire approach to art.   When Courbet arrived in Paris, Romanticism was breathing its last and a nascent realism devoted itself to accurate genre paintings.  At first Courbet did not seem inclined to follow the example of Honoré Daumier and use the possibilities of painting contemporary life in order to critique the government.

According to the art historian, Petra Chu, in The Most Arrogant Man in France (2007), Courbet took advantage of the presence of journalism and the spread of newspapers to generate publicity for himself and his art, which was very mainstream. He also made himself a virtual presence through a series of self-portraits that were acceptable and inoffensive.  It might seem as if Courbet had built his career backwards: he had a persona, an established identity, he had supporters, but the artist was a man in search of a purpose and a style.  However, the inoffensive late Romanticism of his art proved to be a good training ground for the shift in style that would be responsible for his sensational success.

The breakthrough for Courbet came in 1847 when he visited Holland in search of the newly discovered Dutch paintings of the Seventeenth century.  The Dutch artists provided an important precedent, and, indeed, the only possible precedent, for an art of the middle class.  Painting outside of Holland was classical, devoted to Europeans courts, but the Netherlands was a new country, independent of the domination of the Spanish crown.  The Dutch ruled themselves in  republic free of class and devoid of aristocrats.  Adventurous sailors and tenacious traders, they became prosperous, forming the first European middle class, who created an identity through art.  It is perhaps less important to know what the Dutch artists actually intended than to understand what the French artists made of the art.

What the French artists needed was a way out of academic subject matter and a way in which to address the reality of their own lives, from an objective perspective.  What the French artists saw in Dutch were paintings of contemporary life, a kind of realism of the ordinary.  Without an overt narrative, the Dutch artists captured frozen moments in time, enriched by carefully observed detail, which created a portrait of a particular group of people at a specific point in time.  What was especially compelling to the French artists was the sheer ordinariness of the everyday lives of simple people who were unremarkable and unpretentious.  Above all, for the French artists,  Dutch art was an alternative to Romanticism and a doorway to a new form of Realism.

Courbet used the occasion of the Salon of 1848 to present a summation and a closure to his outmoded Romanticism, and by the time of the Salon of 1849, Courbet was ready to take advantage of his next opportunity: this Salon was juried by his peers—artists who knew him and how understood that he was a good painter.  If this salon had been juried by the gatekeepers of the Academy, the painter would have been a modest footnote in art history with his mild romantic paintings. But Courbet’s previous paintings did not prepare the Salon audiences for the work that took the Salon of 1849 by storm: After Dinner at Ornans.  Based upon Dutch painting, the genre scene was dark in tone and ordinary in content.  It was not the sight of country folk listening to music that was impactful, but the artistic tactics, read as political after the Revolution, caused a sensation.

The strategy of Courbet was to celebrate the everyday world of the inconsequential petit bourgeois, not in small sized genre paintings but in large sized canvases, heretofore reserved for history paintings.  That said, the content was neutral enough for Courbet to win himself an award of being hors concours or out of combat.  Although technically, this honor meant that his art could not be excluded from the Salon, some of his later works, judged to be pornographic, were refused.  But his status allowed, the admission of paintings that were more overtly political in the next Salon.  In the Salon of 1850 (which actually took place in 1851), life sized paintings, such as the The Funeral at Ornans, The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, and The Stonebreakers (destroyed during the bombing of Dresden), asserted the social importance and historical significance of the petit bourgeois class and the sans coulottes.  Unlike the middle class elites, these classes had lost all the revolutions of the past four decades, especially the one of 1848.

It would be incorrect to think of Courbet as a “peasant painter,” such as Millet or Jules Bastien-Lepage.  The Parisian audience of the Salon was more accepting of traditional labor, especially if the images were sentimentalized, like Jules Breton.  The Salon goers liked the images of peasants toiling, where they belonged, in the country, consumed with timeless labor.  Instead of maintaining the traditional myth of the countryside as a classless society where all lived in harmony with nature, Courbet revealed the social changes that had transformed the provinces.   As a painter of the lower middle class in a small village, Courbet used his own family as models for the newly empowered and newly upwardly mobile petit bourgeois.  The Courbet family was typical of the kind of people who had marginally gained from the social changes, wanted no further disruptions, and were, therefore, conservative and apolitical.

But, as T. J. Clark pointed out in his book of 1999, Image of the People, the sophisticated city dwellers were distressed at the sight of the pretentions of the villagers who played at being “upper class.” Although the Dutch of the Seventeenth century had lovingly and unsparingly depicted the lower middle classes, the precedent mattered not to the offended Parisians.  Courbet was acknowledged as a great painter but his paintings were condemned as “ugly,” that is, the people he rendered were unattractive and badly dressed. Funeral, a long horizontal painting, crowed with mourning villagers in black and white, was an unlikely combination of a Roman sarcophagus and a Dutch group portrait.  Devoid of drama, the sheer boredom of the content was broken only by the open grave at the bottom of the canvas. Perhaps most offensive to the audience was the lack of story and the absence of the opportunity to identify with any of the characters in his paintings.  The man and the young boy in The Stonebreakers are in profile to the viewer and no narrative is offered.  Instead of eliciting sympathy, the artist presented blunt facts of social deprivation and the toll of unending labor.

Equally disconcerting to the Parisians were the “primitive” techniques employed by the artist, who based his compositional devices upon popular images.  The images d’Epinal were widely circulated in the French countryside, made by untrained printers for an unsophisticated reader. The Stonebreakers deliberately failed to integrate the bleak figures into the un-scenic background.  The same disregard for the convention of Renaissance perspective was present in Funeral, where the bleak landscape of Ornans stretched out behind the isocephalic composition, like a backdrop in a theater.  But these paintings were at least well-organized compared to the deliberate disorder of The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, which was a clutter of stolid peasants and their equally unremarkable animals.  None of these paintings accounts for spatial distances and all ignore academic conventions.  Using popular imagery, Courbet succeeded in discarding outmoded training and insisted on the artist’s liberation from tradition.

To back up these unconventional techniques and subjects, Courbet and his supportive critic, Champfleury (Jules Husson), co-wrote their “Realist Manifesto” as the catalogue for his independent exhibition of 1855.  Excluded from the Second Empire extravaganza, the Exposition Universalle, Courbet set up his own Pavilion of Realism in opposition to the “official” artists, Delacroix and Ingres. “I have simply wished to base upon a thorough knowledge of tradition, the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality,”  he said.  The Manifesto was a statement against Romanticism and idealism, against exoticism and fantasy, and elitist politics.  It was a statement for the ordinary and everyday, for what was apprehensible to the senses alone, even if what was real was unaesthetic to the Salon sensibilities. “To be able to translate the customs, idea, the appearances of my epoch…in a word to create living art, that is my goal,” he stated.  Courbet was very modern in the way in which he built his artistic career.  First, he created a persona, created a series of artistic scandals, and, finally, in a rare move, he set up his own independent exhibition in 1855.  Although the show could hardly be called a financial success, Courbet had asserted himself against the forcible artistic controls of the Second Empire.

For five years, Courbet painted what he preached but in 1854, he once again summed up a phase in his career, with a painting, titled An Allegory of the Last Seven Years of My Life. That The Artist’s Studio was subtitled as an “allegory,” was a signal that Courbet had abandoned optical realism.  The Artist’s Studio was a testament to his success in the art world, a masterful exhibition of egoism, a confounding statement about his political concerns, and the beginning of a new phase of his career as an Insider Artist.  The Artist’s Studio featured Courbet himself in the center, painting a bright and natural landscape.  He is surrounded by allegorical figures: “the nude,” a female model and “the innocent eye,” two small boys.  Other allegorical figures are arranged on the left, while on the right, he gathered together his friends and patrons.   The iconography of this work is complex, signaling the artist’s next career move.

As the artist acquired more important patrons, his subject matter became less confrontational and more conservative, veering often towards pornography. The lesbian theme of The Sleepers was part of the discourse of la bohème, but outside of the demimonde, the works that were sexually explicit, such as Woman with a Parrot and the very private, The Origin of the World brought Courbet into conflict with the Salon and the public and his friends.  By 1858, Courbet had serious disagreements with early supporters, his patron, Albert Bruyas and his best critic, Champfleury, over his suggestive paintings. Meanwhile aristocratic patrons in Germany were demanding princely themes, such the hunt.  For many of his former supporters, it seemed that Courbet had lost his way.

Courbet’s political conscience reasserted itself in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 with his involvement with the short-lived and ill-fated Commune. In the post-war confusion, radical socialists, or the “Reds,” attempted to seize power and bring about some kind of social equality, but the new French government, the Third Republic, defeated the Communards in a long and bloody massacre.  Courbet was one of the many sympathizers who were punished after order was restored.  Given that thousands were slaughtered, Courbet, who had had the bright idea of toppling the Vendôme Column, got off easy.  He was put on trial for  the felling of the Vendôme Column and  the government made an example of him in its reassertion of authority.  Forced to pay the expenses for repairing the Column, the politically naïve Courbet spent the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland, painting for aristocrats, finally abandoning his Realist subject matter.  In one of his last works, he painted a Trout, which was helplessly caught on a hook.  Less of a hunting picture and more of an autobiography, Trout summed up those last years before Courbet’s time ran out.

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
27
2010

Podcast 28: Gustave Courbet, Part One

GUSTAVE COURBET, PART ONE

As a self-proclaimed “Realist” in a highly charged political atmosphere, Gustave Courbet challenged the conventions of the French Salon system.  During the 1850s, Courbet confronted the bourgeoisie audience with the realities of small town French life on large scale canvases.

 
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Aug
06
2010

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelites in England

The Pre-Raphaelite (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) artists established a style and content in 1848 that was so successful and beloved that the “realism” of this group lasted as a British tradition well into the Twentieth Century.  The movement was complicated, combining vestiges of the content of Neo-Classicism and Romanticism with virtuoso demonstrations of technical prowess. Art history has exorcised Pre-Raphaelites from the canon of “correct” Modern art, but the PRB was the first group to self-consciously declare themselves avant-garde artists.  They issued a literary Manifesto, opposed Academic art (based upon the classicism of Raphael), painted en plein air, and organized their own exhibitions—three decades before the Impressionists.  There were two main groups of visual artists.  One was organized around the young precocious painter, John Millais in 1848 and included other painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt. This group included lesser known painters and writers, Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and Frederick George Stephens. The second group formed around Rossetti and included, the painter, Edward Burne-Jones and the interior designer, William Morris, the leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the artist, Ford Maddox Brown.  The two groups developed almost twenty years apart but, in the public mind, were connected through subject matter and the devotion to medieval ideals of craft and morality.

The PRB were at first not known as individuals.  In their debut exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1848, the artists were designated collectively, through their “PRB” signature on their paintings.  The were at first savaged and attacked by the press, so badly that Gabriel Rossetti did not show publically again for a decade.  However, their moral stance towards art as craft and elevated labor and the moral and religious content of their subject matter found a defender in England’s most powerful art critic, John Ruskin, who also felt that art should have a moral purpose.  As the artists found support, they emerged from anomnymity. But the Pre-Raphaelites differed from their French counterparts in significant ways.

The Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the paintings from the pre-Raphaelite artists of the Early Renaissance: those painters who preceded Raphael.  By opposing Raphael, the artists opposed the Royal Academy and the traditional classicism that was a hundred years old, out of date in content, and, to the minds of the young men, thoroughly degenerate.  The PRB was a reforming group with the goal of returning painting to the medieval values of careful craft.  There was a moral stance in their adherence to craft.  In the meticulous attention to the infinite detail of nature, the artists were recording the moral presence of God in nature.  This tradition of intense description can be traced back, not only to the Italian Renaissance but also to the medieval paintings of Northern Europe.  In England, one could point to the meticulous art of Hans Holbein.  To borrow Panofsky’s description of the artists of the Northern Renaissance, the realism of the Pre-Raphaelites was based upon a vision that was both “microscopic” and “macroscopic.”  In other words, the artist saw as through a microscope and a telescope, perfect vision, both near and far: the world revealed in all its manifest detail.

Compared to their secular French counterparts, the PRB—Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—had a distinctly religious cast with Christianity of the New Testament providing inspiration as a source of spiritual value.  They modeled themselves on the early Nineteenth century group, the Nazarenes, who also sought a more authentic art through a more “primitive” approach to art making.  The young, all-male community of the PRB believed that art should deal with serious issues and made their debut in 1849 under a cloak of anonymity, hiding their individual identities under the signature “PRB.” Paintings, such as Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! which demonstrated the naïve traits of early Renaissance art, shrill colors, intense details broken into fragments and ignored pictorial order.  “Disease,” “deformity,” “dissection,” “ugliness” were some of the charges against the art of the PRB.  Queen Victoria sent for Millais’s offending painting and poor Rossetti never exhibited in public again.  But from 1852 on the Brotherhood found valuable support from Ruskin who celebrated the “actual facts” and the “truth to nature” that took painting back to fundamentals.  The PRB produced a revolution in taste and caused a new appreciation for Early Renaissance art.

The first group of the Pre-Raphaelites followed their predecessors of the Fifteenth century by painting on white ground, using bright and pure colors, and painted directly from the careful study of nature.  The brightness of the hues, after centuries of subdued tones and deliberately darkened colors, came as a shock to the audiences of London who were blinded by this new light.  The historically accurate detail was rendered at a level of the daguerreotype and the content of the painting was literary and contemporary, Biblical and mythological, and always with moral content and didactic lesson. It is often said that the English were a literary race, and that the French were more attuned to the visual arts.  Although this comparison is simplistic, the English allowed and welcomed literary content while the French gradually removed narrative from the visual arts. While it is true that the PRB artists enjoyed painting literary subjects, from the Bible to Shakespeare to tales of King Arthur, all from English literature, the Pre-Raphaelites were very popular in France and, because of their contemporary subject matter, were often an inspiration for the Naturalists. As the leader in the Industrial Revolution, England was a society split between the future and the past, cherishing its own native heritage which, at the same time, destroying the past. Pre-Raphaelite art was similarly Janus-faced, looking to the past while examining the present.  The Pre-Raphaelites told stories from the Bible and evoked a pre-modern Britain of King Arthur and fairies as an antidote to modern times.  But, by the 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelites shifted their gaze to modern London and the modern problems of industrialization and modernization.

The Pre-Raphaelites were socially aware but not politically active, but, in their youth, they were rebels with a cause, announcing their presence in 1848.  By returning the artists of the Early Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites found a primitive and pious sincerity in content and a sharp edged observation in technique that gave sacred stories an intense gloss of convincing detail.  Unlike many of the avant-garde groups in Europe, the Pre-Raphaelites were not as overtly political or critical of the state.  There is no question that witnessing, albeit at a distance, the Revolution of 1848, impacted the interest of the Pre-Raphaelite artists in the nation’s poor. England had lived through one revolution in the Seventeenth Century and had no desire to live through another.  The English desired equilibrium over all things, particularly after witnessing the horror of the French Terror, and staved off a rebellion of the lower classed with small measures of Reform. Chartism, a reform movement, rather than a revolutionary movement, finally succeeded in securing universal male suffrage in 1867.  Until then, according to French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, there was a real “affection” by the lower classes for the upper classes.  Other English artists, such as the American, James Abbot McNeill Whistler and the French artist, James Tissot, painted the wealthy and privileged middle class in Great Britain, the PRB pioneered in the “problem picture,” or paintings that dwelt on the problems of modern life in the city, especially those faced by the lower classes.

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
30
2010

Podcast 26 Realism in Europe, Part Two

REALISM IN FRANCE

Although Realism is usually associated with its principle figures, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, there were many important Realist artists in France whose ideas about art and whose realist principles were quite varied.  For decades, the broader movement of Realism produced works of art that were supportive of the dominant forces in society or that interrogated the prevailing norms.  The podcast discusses Realism in the context of the political and social conditions in late nineteenth century France.

  FRENCH

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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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Jul
09
2010

Salon Realism in France

Salon Realism of the 1850s

Realism had many faces.  As an international impulse seen in European and American art, Realism was not so much a style or a look as a new approach to art, overtaking the old ideas of exhausted Romanticism. By the 1840s, due to the impact of science and technology, a more materialistic and positivist approach to philosophy emerged.  Idealist philosophy, based upon abstract principles and models gave way to empiricism and pragmatism. Social change accelerated and demanded serious attention from progressive thinkers. In an age of growing discontent over the failures of the Revolutions in France, there was a growing interest in the arts with the problems of contemporary life there was an increasing interest in the arts with the problems of contemporary life.

Universal enfranchisement to all citizens was still a dream. The failure to alleviate the economic imbalance between the classes and to grant political power and rights to the lower classes meant that both France and England were faced with the choice between reform or repression.  England would grant reforms to the lower classes by carefully calibrated degrees, staving off serious unrest and outright rebellion.  The French, ever wary of the dangerous classes, suffered yet another Revolution in 1848 and went through another political upheaval.  This Revolution was eventually brutally suppressed and all hopes of reform were snuffed out when Louis Napoléon, nephew of the Emperor, returned to France and seized power in 1850.

When the Nephew crowned himself Emperor Napoléon III,  any traces of Romanticism evaporated.  In addition to philosophical and social forces that ended Romanticism, the rise of Realism was very much linked to the rise of the Middle Class as a major force in society.  By mid-century the bourgeoisie has become the dominant cultural force.  Unlike the traditional upper classes, the status of the middle class was based upon wealth and a distinct value system which was based upon social mobility.  It was the middle class that divided the genders and subjugated women to the rule of men.  For the newly wealthy males, it was important that their wives were shown to be at leisure, like an aristocratic woman.  Each man wanted his home to be his castle, and it was important to him to have power over his own family.

This new class was not widely read or particularly well-educated, nor was its taste particularly refined, but the bourgeoisie were eager to make its influence felt in the realm of culture.  Because it was easy to understand and accessible, the middle class art public preferred the kind of art that was legible or realistic.  For the bourgeoisie the mark of artistic talent was not creativity but the ability to copy nature.  Artistic experimentation and innovation was not appreciated, and the public shied away from extreme Romanticism and Realism, seeking an art that was more “middle of the road” or juste milieu.

As the result of the insistence on technical skills in painting demonstrated in “academic art,” the mid-century art public was trained to appreciate approved Salon art and looked for  precise delineation and  entertaining stories. But, like any dominant class, the bourgeoisie wanted to see themselves reflected in art.  Greek and Roman scenes might be exciting and full of beguiling female nudes, but the audience could not recognize itself in the history paintings.  As an artist knows, it is important for the audience to imaginatively and emotionally invest in the art.  The viewer must identify with the painting or the sculpture for the work to be successful.   Being remote in time, the art dictated by the Academy was not in tune with the modern age and was ultimately unresponsive to middle class needs.  The preferred art of the Academy referred back to the classical past of Greece and Rome and only a well-read person could grasp all the classical illusions.

The audience gravitated to realism on two levels.  First, people liked to see genre scenes of ordinary everyday life, preferably with an interesting narrative.  Second, the average spectator preferred realism over expressionism in terms of how the artist should render the subject.  Another important factor in the rise of Realism was the invention of photography in 1839.  Photography was a hugely popular art form and the public avidly flocked to photographic studios to have themselves immortalized.  Photography was, of course, an accurate mirror of nature, an exact copy.  The public liked the precision of the daguerreotype better than the fuzzy surface of paper photography and began to expect the artist to live up the process of Dauguerre.  Artists were at the mercy of this new public and had the choice to comply with its demands or to drift into the avant-garde where another type of Realism was being developed.

The artists who wanted to succeed steered a middle course between Romanticism and Realism and between academic art and photography.  The result was a form of art, called juste milieu, that was both popular and official. Early on, juste milieu art, fulfilled the need of the growing middle class audience for a popular art and for subject matter that was about them and their lives and that was easy to understand.  This art was “easy,” rather like today’s television: realistic and entertaining and enjoyable, giving the audience what philosopher, Roland Barthes called “the effect of the real.”

The juste milieu artists were successful and rich and respected and were often the implacable foes of the avant-garde.  They found the right formula to please audiences.  The subject matter really wasn’t “modern” or about the current age.  Indeed, given the current political climate in France, the juste milieu artists tended towards the historical escapism of Jean-Léon Gérome or idealized depictions of the countryside and its inhabitants from Jules Breton.   The middle class favored landscape painting, once considered a “low” genre of art.  In an age of social turmoil a scene of unscathed countryside or untouched forests were soothing and non-political.  And landscape painting was well suited to middle class needs for interior decoration: it was pretty to look at and avoided any unsuitable or controversial content.

The size of painting began to change.  The successful artist was well advised to divide his or her time between the large paintings, destined for the Salon, and smaller works, designed for the bourgeois home.  Sculpture suffered during the waning of classicism and academic art.  Like history painting, classical sculpture was not well-suited to the modern era and sculptors struggled to translate contemporary life into bronze and marble.  Like the painters, the sculptors had to divide their endeavors between large-scale public commissions and small scale works, destined for the private market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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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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May
07
2010

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

The post-Revolutionary philosophers of the early Nineteenth Century were prescient in foreseeing the social problems of the Industrial Age.  By mid-century, the philosophical emphasis had shifted from social reform to epistemological reform of philosophy itself, shifting philosophy away from idealism to materialism. New philosophers began to base their ideas upon empirical ideas and objective reasoning borrowed from science.  Even Hegel, one of the last of the idealist philosophers, stated that, “Philosophy must assume a regular structure as teachable as geometry,” and he wanted philosophy to be based upon a “definite methodical procedure.”

Auguste Comte was a disciple of Saint-Simon who shifted from Utopian thinking about society to a scientific study of society.   As the founder of “sociology,” Comte rationalized the study of human behavior by using scientific methodology.  People and their actions could be examined, facts could be gathered, hypothesis could be formed, and theories could be put forward and tested.  The goal was to study society as it was and not to imagine society, as it should be.  The importance of the Positivism of Comte is that the philosopher stressed actual observation and careful study of society.  In contrast to Comte’s more scientific approach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was more political in his critique of society in his What is Property? (1840) and The Philosophy of Poverty (1846).   Rather than putting forward utopian ideals, Proudhon anticipated Marx by examining society and expressing outrage (“Property is theft.”) at the growing class stratification, as the industrialist class enjoyed runaway wealth and the lower classes enjoyed endless repetitive labor.  Like Saint-Simon, Proudhon imagined the disappearance of the state, but he wanted to substitute the authority of the state with the direct participation of the people who would decide their own affairs.

Although Proudhon sounded a bit less totalitarian than Hegel who believed that the nation and the state were one and the same and morally superseded the community, he, too, was an authoritarian.  Women, he believed, should be submissive to men and take care of them, and while, serving men, women should also should have children and nurture them as well.  He was typical of men of his age in his ideas about women and the use of authority.  Proudhon, as a non-too-successful professional publisher and writer, also had strong opinions about accumulated wealth.  He equated slavery with murder and property with robbery.  As Proudhon stated in What is Property? “..property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded or rather usurped in the name of superior talent or service, in inequality and extortion…”

Most socialists (and anarchists) defined socialism as direct government achieved through suffrage.  Putting aside the fact that women and people of color could not vote, suffrage had its problems, because the mass of people were not well-educated or informed, they would not know how to vote for their own interests.  Proudhon preferred to create a form of government that would create an equilibrium between freedom of the people and the role of the government.  Arrested during the Revolution of 1848, sent into exile to Belgium during the Second Empire, Proudhon took the idea of equilibrium and applied it to war, advocating force to bring about equilibrium among nations, much to the dismay of his admirers.  “Reforms always,” he stated, “Utopias never,” announcing pragmatism and positivism.  A prolific letter writer and self-publisher of his many works, Proudhon was a native of Besançon, in Franche-Comté, the territory of Gustave Courbet.  Sometimes writing as an art critic, Proudhon published his ideas about Courbet’s paintings of a region that was very familiar to him.   Proudhon is perhaps better known for his association with Courbet than for his philosophical ideas today, because he was overshadowed by his one-time colleague, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx brushed Proudhon aside as a “bourgeois socialist” who would not advocate revolution.  It is difficult today to ascertain Proudhon’s knowledge of German philosophy.   Hegel had yet to be translated into French, however, Victor Cousin was teaching about Kant, for example, at the Sorbonne, and, from Proudhon’s own words, it would seem Cousin would have been his source of German thought.  However, the main difference between Kant, Hegel and Marx and the socialists was that the Germans created structured models for their philosophical thought and the socialists were less systematic.

The social philosophers were futurist; they looked forward, envisioning a better life.  They were less idealist than materialist in that they dealt with real social problems in a relatively practical fashion.  Hegel and Marx, in contrast, were determinists.  The future they posited was determined by the triadic forces of the dialectic.  It was Marx, who dominates the discussion of social theory and philosophy today with his application of the Hegelian dialectic to economics, to the “secret engine” of culture. As Marx stated,

“…New relations in production, superior to the former ones, never come into being before their material reason for existence has developed in the womb of old society.  Humanity puts to itself only the riddles that it can solve, for on looking closely at the matter, one will find that the riddle is put only when the material conditions of its solution already exists…”

Although Karl Marx 1818 – 1883) wrote often with Frederic Engels, (1820 –95) it is Marx who is the better-known philosopher.  Together Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, 1846 and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1846.  On his own, Marx wrote Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, Wage-Labor and Capital, (usually referred to as Das Capital) 1849, The Eighteenth Brumarie of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Grundrisse, 1857-88, Wages, Price and Profit, 1865, The Civil War in France, 1871, and Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.  Although Marx would live in bourgeois comfort in suburban London, his place of exile, and spent his days writing in seat G7 in the British Museum Library, he wrote movingly on the plight of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.  By the time Marx was forced out of his native Prussia for his revolutionary ideas, industry and capitalism had been the basis of modern society for over one hundred years and its consequences were plain to see.

Vast new wealth had been accumulated by the new commercial class, and an abyss of poverty subjugated the lower classes.  Like many observers of his time, Marx foresaw a pending social and economic revolution—for human misery can be contained only so long.  As a German national living in England, Marx would have witnessed the activities of Reformists, politicians and writers, such as Charles Dickens, and philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham.  The British thinkers repeatedly warned of the consequences of the environmental and social horrors that had descended upon the so-called “advanced” industrial nations.

Kant and Hegel are considered idealists, reaching towards some kind of absolute or universal.  Marx, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing materialist: for him, reality was grounded in existence, knowledge was the result of reality, and therefore the mind could never be independent of history.  If the mind constructed reality, then the constructions must always be changing, along with history.  If this was the case, then consciousness could never be absolute or universal and must be subjected to changing conditions.  For Marx, these conditions were capitalism, the greatest social change since the breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudalism, and the middle class, the first new class since the beginning of human history.  Capitalism had created a society based upon the abstraction of money, labor, goods, value, and, ultimately—human beings.

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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