Posts Tagged ‘Romanticism’

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Mar
19
2010

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

“Art” and what the term means and how the object is apprehended and the discourse that surrounds its objects emanates out of aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.  The discourse about art, art criticism, art history, and art theory all are variations on philosophy.  Kant’s use of aesthetics was to establish the grounds for the viewing of art—disinterestedness—the grounds for beauty—necessity—and absolute universality of aesthetic criteria.  In many ways, his philosophy is divided.  On one hand, there is absoluteness and rules of judging; but, on the other hand, there is the new Romantic artist who is called upon to “play” and to create new “rules” for art by breaking rules through creative invention.  It will be up to Friedrich Schiller to expound upon this gap in Kantian philosophy by concentrating on the artist.

Schiller was writing his essays at a pivotal moment in time.  Germany was not yet a unified or modern country, nor did it have a powerful middle class.  As a nation it had yet to be industrialized and faced another century and a half of autocratic rule, and, yet Romanticism with its emphasis on the individual somehow managed to thrive in artistic circles.  Schiller died four decades before Marx would re-define alienation but the poet foresaw what the philosopher would witness, the splitting of the modern personality, rent between intellect and emotion.  Schiller’s stress on the emotional aspects of alienation is best understood in response to the subjectivism of the Romantic era and as an answer to the highly artificial age of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason and rationality in the name of nature, creating an overly mannered society through rules.  Acutely aware of the modern agony of alienation, Schiller sought to lead humans towards wholeness through art, where intellect and emotions could be resolved into a healthy and united whole.  Art allows all aspects of the mind to indulge in “free play” and creates a place where reason and passion can become balanced into a perfected form.

If Kant is the “head” or “intellect” of aesthetics, then Schiller is the “heart” of art philosophy.  While Kant’s discussion of art was strictly conceptual and abstract, Schiller was a poet himself and knew of the problems and rewards of creation.  But Schiller was also a playwright and a philosopher who was aware of his condition as a “hermaphrodite” or a hybrid creature: the artist who was also a philosopher.  But Schiller the artist appeared in his philosophical writings only in his poetic and rhetorical tone, for he rarely wrote on art itself.  Schiller followed not just the lead of Kant but also the lead of Baumgarten in writing aesthetics for the Romantic period.  Kant wrote of the abstract arabesque as his ideal form of the beautiful, but Baumgarten had envisioned art as having a more central role in human life and so did Schiller.  “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1795, concerns itself with the importance of the “aesthetic” that is the sensuous as a counterpoint to the intellectual for the development of the human being.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment was the capstone of his epistemological theory, but Schiller was concerned less with theory and more with the predicament of modern life.

“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” was written as a series of letters to the Duke of Augustenburg and was published in 1795 and 1801.  “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was also written in 1795 as a response to his friendship with Germany’s most celebrated Romantic poet, Göethe, comparing himself as a poet to his friend as a poet.  Johann Wolfgang von Göethe had written the quintessential work of German Romanticism, the rather overwrought, Sorrows of Young Werther, the fictional version of many youthful love affairs.  However, as he matured, Göethe assumed a mantle of dignity, of near-Olympian calm, and repudiated Romanticism as “sick” and extolled (neo) Classicism as “healthy”.  The famous friendship got off to a rocky start.  Göethe spurned the advances of the younger poet whose dramatic plays were associated with Romanticism.  And Schiller, for his part, viewed Göethe with antipathy, distrusting the apparent ease with which poetry apparently flowed from this distinguished inhabitant of Olympia.  Nevertheless, the younger poet who experienced creative agonies and self-doubts was driven by a need to understand Göethe and pursued the poet.  The two men eventually succeeded in achieving a meeting of the minds and their consequent correspondence and collaboration is of great importance to German literature.

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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Mar
19
2010

Podcast 16 Romanticism in England, Part One

THE WRITING OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Like Neo-Classicism, Romanticism was an international movement, but, unlike the earlier movement, Romanticism differed from country to country. In England, Romanticism established an aesthetic that was reflective of national conditions. The British Romantic artists were closely aligned to the Romantic poets and a new group of philosophers and art writers emerged to explain this new national form of English Romanticism.

 

 

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Mar
12
2010

Kant, the Artist, and Artistic Freedom

Kant,  the Artist and Artistic Freedom

The modern artist of the Nineteenth Century faced an aesthetic landscape that was quite different compared to that of the previous century.  The definition of “art” in the Eighteenth Century was that, which was sanctioned by the Church, the State or the aristocracy.  The definition of the “artist” in the Eighteenth Century was a trained technician who produced commissioned objects for these powers.  The definition of “subject matter” or “content” in a work of art was that which had been approved of by the client or patron.   Within these definitions of “art” and “artist” the cultural producer had a certain freedom of interpretation, but, ultimately, most artists were answerable to those who controlled the sites for art.

By the Nineteenth Century, the artist had lost a great deal of the traditional support system and faced a changing definition of the “artist” as a free and independent “genius.” The idea of a genius is a product of the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a free and independent human being who is allowed freedom of speech and expression as “natural rights.”  The role of the artist within Kant’s concept of aesthetics is that of a maker who must create new forms.  The artist is now free of any external “commands” from patrons or the audience.  His/her only role is that of being a “genius,” who gives free range to the imagination.  The result of Kantian philosophy is the elevation of the artist to “creator” and the exaltation of artistic originality.  There is a new value to artistic experience as such and a new affirmation of emotional aspects of art.  The notion of the expressive function of art is not unrelated to the new definition of “sensibility,” as an ability to feel and to express oneself.  In addition, there was a new importance attached to the invention of a fiction about the new Romantic artist, who was now the hero, the god, and the genius.  The genius is the one with exceptional intellectual and spiritual endowments, the one who breaks the rules and who creates breakthroughs to new possibilities for subsequent artists.

Genius, according to Kant, is that “natural endowment of mental aptitude which gives rule to art”.  Fine art is possible only as a “product of genius,” which produces essentially original art.  Originality or the ability to be original sets the genius apart from the need to imitate either other works of art or the  real world itself.   The artist or genius also has no need to respond to communal needs.  Thus art and beauty ceased to be communal or traditional, but instead became ideas, molded by the exceptional individual.  This exceptionalism alienates the artist from the rest of society and the artist is now no longer an integrated member of society and it is the artist him/herself who is the real subject of every work of art.

Suddenly, the artist is no longer the artisan working at the beck and call of an autocratic patron, suddenly the artist is no longer the illustrator of the message of the patron, suddenly the artist is no longer and interior decorator.  The artist has been recreated as a “genius,” who is required to play.  Play becomes a major concept within Kantian aesthetics.  Play, in art, performs the same role as technology in the Industrial Revolution in that playing produces constant “progress” or change in art.  Like technology, art responds to itself and evolves according to its own rules.  By mid-Twentieth Century, art critics and art historians have incorporated the implied notion of teleology—art progresses and evolves towards a goal.  Kant’s ideas were reinterpreted for another century, a century that developed the concept of evolution and continued to believe in the optimism of the Enlightenment.

A true child of Romanticism, the Kantian artist is a rule-breaker, not the rational rule follower of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution, a product of political reason but the end of the faith in rationalism.  The sight of mob rule, the experience of government by rabble-rousers, and the blood soaked Terror was the end of Enlightenment optimism and faith in human nature.  But the ideals of the Enlightenment—freedom and individuality lived on long after the culture’s disillusionment over the failure of reason.  If humans could not be rational, as was hoped, then they must be constrained by laws. France became an empire under an Emperor, trading equality and fraternity for order.  The artist becomes the one truly liberated member of Nineteenth Century society, detached and free, like a homeless person—ultimately dangerous in an increasingly regulated society.

Aesthetics was split between rule and play.  The Critique of Judgment set in motion an idea of the autonomy of a work of art, an idea that spread beyond philosophy and permeated the artistic community.  For artists, Kantian concepts gave them a new reason to make art; for critics, Kantian concepts gave a new way to talk about art.  One half of the Critique, that which concerns itself with rules, becomes linked to the Academy, especially in France and England.  Following the rules meant following the dictates of ancient art and copying the antique masters. The other half of aesthetics—play—belonged to the independent artist and survived into the Romantic Era and, indeed, characterized the period.  Play, like technology, is coupled with progress and evolution, because play leads to innovation and change which results in “progress” for art.  The new concept of play and invention was linked to the free play of the artistic  imagination, putting the artist in a position of dominance over the demands of the academy.  If art was to “progress,” rules would have to be broken by the artist.  But for the artist to break the rules, s/he must have artistic freedom.  Artistic freedom was not a new idea, for artists had always struggled against the demands of troublesome clients (Michelangelo’s assertion of autonomy over  Pope Julius II comes to mind).  However, Kantian aesthetic philosophy constructed a set of concepts that articulated the ideas that would form Romantic thinking: genius and artistic freedom.  The idea of artistic change, led to multiple art movements and “isms” throughout the Nineteenth Century and into the next, the Twentieth, until the challenge of Postmodernism.

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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Mar
05
2010

Kant and Art for Art’s Sake

Kant and “Art for Art’s Sake”

The beautiful, for Kant, is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.”  The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness.  Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties.  Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art.  Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day.  With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose.  Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.

“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics.  These terms: “art for art’s sake,”  “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable.  Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England.   English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value.  Late Nineteenth Century  Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty.  “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement.  The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect.  Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.

The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art.  Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion.  The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world.  Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe.  Art was autonomous and free.  Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State.  Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.

The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis.  What does an artist do?  How does an artist make art and why?  Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?”  What are the common characteristics of these objects?  What is their “art-ness?”  Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism.  Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron.  But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas.  For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art.  The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.

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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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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Feb
19
2010

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

 

While Kant was writing the Critique of Judgment, 1790, the answer of the role of the artist in society was increasingly unclear, and the social and cultural situation was increasingly unstable.  The artist was looking at an abyss, gazing into the unknown of a new era, when Kant solved the problem of art and shaped its definition for the next two centuries.  Kant began with assumptions common to his time: we can recognize “art” and we know what “art” is and that “art” is something we can see.  He also assumes “beauty” and its existence. Kant never dealt with specific works of art and thus was removed from the current taste and vogue for classical art.  Neo-classicism was the new art in Kant’s time, and it was, briefly, a revolutionary art movement denoting (Greek) freedom and democracy and the promise of individuality, along with (Roman) gravitas and stability.  But Neoclassicism was quickly co-opted by post-Revolutionary Academicism.  A once-revolutionary movement became a forced and regulated status quo.  The Neo-Classical ideal of beauty, before the ideals became rules, was associated with the art of ancient Athens, considered eternal and transcendent.  As Keats best expressed it, in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

….

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats (1795 – 1821)

Although Emmanuel Kant did not invent aesthetics, he formalized the philosophical concept and elaborated aesthetics into a new notion of art that turned out to be uniquely suited to the new century.  “Aesthetics” was that which is sensuous or the perception of sense data.  Aesthetics has evolved into a more inclusionary definition that is applied to the arts but in the middle of the Eighteenth Century when A. G. Baumgarten founded a “new science” and published Aesthetica in 1750, aesthetics connected art to life.  For the first time “art” became a distinctive value in life and was considered a mode of knowledge, called aesthetics or feelings registered by the subject/viewer in response to the stimulus of an art object. Regardless of the intent of the client or of the artist, the art object is a unique object in that it is contemplated for insight and delight.  Baumgarten widened the field of aesthetics from art to human conduct, opening possibilities for another philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, who would build upon Kantian aesthetics.  Aesthetics is a middle ground, existing somewhere between reason and morality.  Aesthetics concerned itself with that which was material or sensuous or plastic—physical life.  Like other aspects of human experience, aesthetics needed to be brought into the Kantian epistemological system.

Aesthetics is a dualistic concept, a philosophical play between the artist and the art critic or philosopher.  Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy is not concerned with particular works of art but is more concerned with the question of “art” itself.  Aesthetics like any other branch of philosophy, attempts to determine the grounds of “art,” its ontology, and the system of knowledge that produces and constructs the mode of judgment or contemplation of art, its epistemology.  Once art had been justified as an activity legitimated by its role in society as teacher and instructor and educator, working for the benefit of the community.  In the modern period, art needed two things.  First, a reason for being: ontology, and second, a definition: epistemology.  Although it was not Kant’s precise intention to create a new meaning and purpose for art, the effects of his philosophy was to link art to personal expressiveness and individual freedom. It was Kant who ushered in Romanticism by devising a theory of aesthetics that perfectly suited the times.

Given that aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, Kant proceeded by putting art into his transcendental system.  As is characteristic of his system, the idea of art was divided into two parts that correspond to self and object, that is, contemplation by the viewer of the work of art itself.  The ontology of a work of art is not the object, not even the artist, but the recognition of “art” which is a perceptual and conceptual act.  Too see is to judge/contemplate.  Art vision, like any vision, is never raw; it is always tempered and educated and acts according to (Kantian) rules.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) was the third in his trilogy of epistemology.  In his first two Critiques, Kant established new ground for reason and morality and the third Critique had to establish a universal and transcendent basis for making a judgment.

What did one have the occasion to judge?  To select the judgment of art as the centerpiece of this critique was a very modern move on the part of a man who had little experience of art himself.  But art was not amenable to judgment under a system of laws from the state and did not fall within the sphere of morality.  Simply by removing art from the rule of law or morality was to free it from its age-old tutelage at the hands of the powerful or the religious.  Like the rest of society, art had become secular, and, in becoming secular, had lost its place in society.  Coincidentally, Kant was writing at the precise time the artist was losing the class that had been the traditional patrons, the aristocrats, to the guillotine in France.  In the Nineteenth Century, the purpose of art and the role of artists were questions, and, regardless of his intentions, Kant’s aesthetics proved to be the new answers.

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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Feb
19
2010

Podcast 14 French Romanticism: Delacroix, Part One

DELACROIX THE ROMANTIC

A member of the famous Bohemian crowd of French avant-garde art, Delacroix was considered the rebellious leader of French Romanticism. Like all artists of his generation, he had missed out on Napoléonic glory but found excitement in the clash of civilizations between the Europeans and the Muslims. The paintings of Delacroix followed the struggle for democracy among the Greeks abroad and the lower classes at home. The painting of “Liberty” leading the “People” was so stirring that it was decades before it was permitted by the French state to be displayed in a public museum.

 

 

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Feb
05
2010

Podcast 13 Romanticism: Ingres, Part Two

INGRES, THE NUDES, AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

By the middle of his artistic life, Ingres had reached the pinnacle of his career as the ruler of the Academy in France. Although the artist claimed to uphold the principles of classical art, his artistic content was divided between escapist fantasies and the fashions of the day. Ingres represented the French taste for the exotic in his dreams of the Orient, while at the same time reflecting the new imperialism in the Middle East. Closer to home, the fashion-obsessed painter scrupulously crafted the conspicuous consumption of High Capitalism in mid-century

France. 

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Jan
22
2010

Podcast 12 French Romanticism: Ingres, Part One

THE MODERNISM OF INGRES

Often assumed to be the bastion of conservatism in French art, Ingres was actually an astute observer of his own time and was, therefore, thoroughly modern. Like Gros and Girodet, Ingres had to find his own way past both David and Neo-Classicism and into the new movement, Romanticism. This part of a two part podcast deals with the early career of an artist so original and so reviled he spend nearly two decades in Rome, only to return triumphantly to Paris as the champion of all things Academic.

 

 

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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.

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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