Whistler the Realist
One of the most overlooked avant-garde pioneers was the American in Paris (and London), the expatriate, James Whistler. Although overshadowed in art history by his good friend, Édouard Manet, Whistler was the other scandal in the Salon des Refusés and instituted installation techniques later adopted by the Impressionists. Always controversial, Whistler’s art, like that of Manet, established Modernist tenets with his groundbreaking paintings.
JOHN CONSTABLE AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
Less famous and dramatic than his British rival, Joseph Turner, John Constable preferred the humble English countryside of his native Stour Valley. In his humble rural paintings, Constable captured his “careless boyhood” on the eve of the Industrial Revolution and froze these scenes in a nostalgic time, creating a much-loved “Constable Country.”
JOSEPH TURNER AND ENLISH ROMANTICISM
Joseph William Mallord Turner was the most famous exponent of English Romanticism. A product of an era of war with Napoléon, the artist celebrated the rise of the British empire. Although many of his landscapes featured classical and ancient subject matter in the foreground, Turner was fascinated with the dramatic modern events. His manner of painting was innovative and unprecedented but his patriotic and often moralizing content won Turner the support of England’s most powerful art critic, John Ruskin.
THE ACADEMY AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN FRANCE
The artists of the French Academy and the artists of the French Avant-garde are often presented as being protagonists, but, in fact, each group defined itself in terms of the other. The French Academy was the bastion of the establishment, of rules and regulations and of order. The Avant-Garde bohemians were the original outsider artists, misfits without credentials, who were able to break the rules of art and change the course of art. But the Academy absorbed and co-opted and softened the concepts and techniques of the avant-garde artists, making the “radical” changes acceptable to the general public.
The Origins of Neoclassicism
The example of ancient virtue, especially Roman virtue of the early days of the Republic, provided an alternative for the French politicians to the current decline in the social standards of the nobility. Italy was already part of what was called The Grand Tour, taken by well-heeled Europeans, especially the British, who wanted to visit their origins. The Roman ruins were especially compelling as crumbling lessons of morality. Roman virtue was more than a dream, for Rome–ancient Rome–had become the climax point of every Grand Tour. Scholars and tourists inspected the ruins, and artists, such as Hubert Robert and Canaletto, responded to the demand for Italian vistas with view paintings. Archaeologists explored and discovered the remains of classical civilizations and these recoveries were made available to the public and to artists through carefully engraved reproductions. Antiquity, from the reading of Homer to the use of the ancient as a suitable subject for artists, became the order of the day from the mid-Eighteenth Century on. Pompeii (1748) and Herculaneum (1738) were being excavated, a process that continues to this day.
Spurred by the discovery of a perfectly preserved ancient civilization, there was a fortuitous confluence between reason, antiquity and science that pitted these new ideas against those of the ancien régime, now equated with immorality, decadence and superstition. In addition to this moral divide there is a social and gender divide as well in which men are equated with reason and women with decadence and frivolity with a consequent loss of power for women. In England, Lord Shaftesbury linked art that appealed to the senses to taste and to the feminine and called for art that was elevated morally, masculine, based in nature and in truth. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his lectures to the Royal Academy echoed these ideas, which severed the female from the future that changing social and economic forces were incurring. Reynolds called for a celebration of grand themes and the exclusion of the detail and of decoration in the arts. Although two women were included among the founding artists of the Academy, women would have to wait two hundred years before another female would be invited to join. The artist was to be male and was to be an educator of the people and high art was to be moral. So-called minor or genre artists, such as William Hogarth in England and Chardin in France, ranked lower than history painters, were not only crowd favorites but also dignified labor and ordinary life and criticized those who were not decorous in their behavior. Women, after the Neoclassical painter, Angelica Kauffmann, who was a member of the Royal Academy, were relegated to the genres of still lives and portraiture and were not allowed to attend the art academies.
Preference for classical art was articulated by Johann Winckelmann, the first modern art historian, who recommended copying the ancients in order to study nature more thoroughly. In 1755, Winckelmann, the secretary and librarian to Cardinal Albani in Rome, published Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, which was an attack on Rococo and an assertion of the superiority of the art of the Greeks. Winckelmann established the idea that art was created within a particular cultural and social context. The writer concluded that the temperate climate of Greece and the Athenian emphasis on outdoor sports (in the nude) fostered ideals of noble calm and simplicity. Using Cardinal Albani’s collection of antique art, Winckelmann wrote his History of Ancient Art in 1764 in which he conceived of the development of Greek art in successive phases within a political, social, and religious context. Winckelmann put forward the idea that art evolved within a society in a theological fashion, reaching a peak of perfection. For the art historian, the peak was the art of Classical Greece, and the modern artist could do no better or no more than to emulate the Greeks.
Two years later, an Englishman, Sir William Hamilton, envoy extraordinary to the court of Naples, published a four-folio volume of antiquities as a result of his participation in excavations. Although the text was in English, the illustrations were of great influence on Josiah Wedgwood, John Flaxmann, Henry Fuseli, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-August Dominique Ingres. Continuing his efforts to revive interest in ancient art, Hamilton published another set of folios, illustrated by Johann Heinrich Tischbein in 1791. This burgeoning historicism allowed identification with an ancient past that could be understood in relation to contemporary political goals. To Europeans, Rome was far more accessible as the source of ancient art. Greece, dominated by the Ottoman Empire, was cordoned off, making it difficult to travel to the territory. Actual ancient Greek was virtually unknown to most Europeans. But in a remarkable act of cultural imperialism, an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, a native of Scotland, Lord Elgin, convinced the Sultan in charge of the Parthenon to allow him to take all the sculptures to England. The Athenians were using the stones of the Parthenon to build their own houses and the building was being slowly dismantled. But Elgin was not interested in the building; he wanted the sculptures, because the French wanted the sculptures.
Due to the shifting alliances during the Napoléonic wars, the French were shut out of Greece long enough for Elgin to spring into action and was granted permission to acquire the art of the Parthenon. The Muslims in charge did not care about Western relics and watched while the priceless works of art were removed from the building and shipped to England. Even at the time of these actions, cries of “vandalism” could be heard, but Elgin claimed he was protecting the sculptures for their own good. The cost of removing the sculptures and transporting them to England was astronomical and bankrupted the family. The British government, which eventually acquired the sculptures, never paid Elgin back for his troubles. The English public was stunned at the realism of these actual works by the workshop of Phidias himself. It would take years before the artists could reconcile the abstraction of the Greek vases, illustrated by Tischbein, and the physicality of the “Elgin Marbles” still on view in the British Museum today.
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The Enlightenment and the Art Public
Spanning the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the Enlightenment produced greater philosophical thinking than it did fine arts. That said, the Enlightenment was crucial for a new way of thinking about art and art making. In the beginning, the production of visual art was under the protection and sponsorship of the State, since the establishment the Royal Academy in 1648. This Academy was a model followed by other major nations, which were aware of the need to monopolize the arts and to harness them to the needs of the government. Because the people of France paid for the education of artists, the French government, the major sponsor of art, held Salons, or public exhibitions of state-sponsored art, outside on the grounds of the Palais Royale the new home of the Duc d’Orleans, who had an appetite for beauty and pleasure. But after the first show in 1704, this site of balls and fêtes proved unsuitable for large exhibitions and the later salons were held at the Palace of the Louvre. Here in the palace the works of art could be protected from the weather and displayed to their best advantage. The Salons were held after 1737 every year or every other year on August 25th in the Salon carré of the Louvre and ran ten days to four weeks, attracting the art public and the art critic, both new social entities.
The concept of a “public” for art was a new one as was the idea of publicaly exhibiting art, and inevitably, someone from the “public” would emerge with an opinion. This opinionated member of the public who dared to speak and write an to publish his views, much to the dismay of the artists, was the “art critic.” By exposing the artists to the public, these salons opened the artists to public scrutiny and public criticism and the new species, the art critic, demanded that the artist be accountable to the public. Artists, previously answerable only to elite groups of collectors and fellow artists, now needed public approval to succeed. The public, then as now, encompassed all levels of social and economic classes and all levels of education and constituted a community of interest, breaking social hierarchies down into the new notion of a “public,” explored in 1985 by Thomas Crow in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris. The creation and existence of this public brought with it new problems for the artist: what to represent in terms of subject matter; how to represent in terms of style; and who should be allowed to represent and who was allowed to speak to and for the public?
Also new were the private art collectors who became the chief patrons of modern artists. Patronage was split between the aristocrats such as Madame de Pompadour and the newly rich middle class who preferred genre painting, that is scenes of everyday life, over the more prestigious history painting, depicting noble heroes of the distant past. Art collecting became a sign of wealth and taste, and during this period, several important large collections came on the market, such as the works owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, acquired by the French banker and art connoisseur, Pierre Crozet. French artists were exposed to a historical spectrum of Western art and had a wide range of artistic possibilities to choose from. Despite the presence in France of the classical Baroque styles, the Baroque was systematically toned down in its dramas and was softened for the civilized and essentially domestic style of Rococo. Although much of Rococo art was produced for the aristocrats and rulers of Europe, the style was paradoxically involved with the concept of the “natural,” a reaction against the formality of society and its artificial and unnatural mores. The pastel colors and gentle brushwork of the Rococo artists and the romantic themes made the paintings ideal for the domestic interiors of those who could afford them. But during the same period, the public taste for middle class scenes made genre artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, famous for their depictions of everyday life.
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