Chap31notes

Editor's Notes

• #2 The momentous Western developments of the early 19th century- industrialization, urbanization, and increased economic and political interaction worldwide- matured quickly during the latter half of the century. The industrial Revolution in England spread to France and the rest of Europe and to the United States. Because of this dramatic expansion, historians often refer to the third quarter of the 19th century as the second Industrial Revolution. Whereas the first Industrial Revolution centered on textiles, steam, and iron, the second focused on steel, electricity, chemicals, and oil. The discoveries in these fields provided the foundation for developments in plastics, machinery, building construction, and automobile manufacturing and paved the way for the invention of the radio, electric light, telephone, and electric streetcar
• #3 The rise of the urban working class was fundamental to the ideas of Karl Marx, one of the era’s dominant figures. Marx, a German moved to Paris and met a fellow German Friedrich Engels, who became his lifelong collaborator. Together they wrote the Communist Manifesto which called for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system. Marx believed that scientific, rational law governed nature and, indeed, all human history. Marx’s ultimate goal was to create a socialist state in which the working class seized power and destroyed capitalism. Marxism held great appeal for the oppressed as well as many intellectuals. Equally influential was the English naturalist Charles Darwin whose theory of natural selection did much to increase interest in science. The social Darwinists provided Western leaders with justification for the colonization of peoples and cultures that they deemed less advanced. The French had colonized most of North Africa and Indochina, while the British occupied India, Australia, and parts of Africa.
• #4 The combination of extensive technological changes and increased exposure to other cultures, coupled with the rapidity of these changes, led to an acute sense in Western cultures of the world’s impermanence. Darwin’s ideas of evolution and Marx’s emphasis on a continuing sequence of economic conflicts reinforced this awareness of a constantly shifting reality. These societal changes in turn fostered a new artistic approach that historians call modernism. Modernist seek to capture images and sensibilities of their age, but transcends the simple present to involve the artist’s critical examination of or reflection on the premises of art itself. Impressionism was an art of industrialized, urbanized Paris, a reaction to the sometimes brutal and chaotic transformation of French life that occurred during the latter half of the 19th century Impressionist works represent an attempt to capture a fleeting moment- not in the absolutely fixed, precise sense of a Realist painting but by conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.
• #5 A critic applied the derogatory term “impressionism” to this painting in 1874 because of its sketchy quality and clearly evident brush strokes. Monet and his circle embraced the label around 1878 for their movement. Artists and critics had used the term before, but only in relation to sketches. Impressionist paintings do incorporate the qualities of sketches- speed and spontaneity. This is apparent in Impressionism sunrise, in which Monet made no attempt to disguise the brush strokes or blend the pigment to create smooth tonal gradations and an optically accurate scene. This concern with acknowledging the paint and the canvas surface continued the modernist exploration that the Realists began. In sharp contrast to traditional studio artists, Monet painted outdoors, which sharpened his focus on the roles light and color play in capturing an instantaneous representation of atmosphere and climate. After scrutinizing the effects of light and color on forms, the Impressionists concluded that local color- an object’s true color in white light- becomes modified by the quality of the light shining on it, by reflections from other objects, and by the effects juxtaposed colors produce. Shadows do not appear gray or black, but are composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions.
• #6 Monet’s intensive study of the phenomena of light and color is especially evident in several series of paintings he made the same subject. In one series he painted some 40 views of Rouen Cathedral, northwest of Paris. For each canvas in the series, Monet observed the cathedral from nearly the same viewpoint but at different times of the day or under various climatic conditions. In the painting illustrated here, Monet depicted the church bathed in bright light. With scientific precision, he created an unparalleled record of the passing of time as seen in the movement of light over identical forms. In fact, the real subject of Monet’s painting is not the cathedral, which he shows only in part but the sunlight on the building’s main portal. Later critics accused Monet and his companions of destroying form and order for fleeting atmospheric effects, but Monet focused on light and color precisely to reach a greater understanding of the appearance of form.
• #7 In Saint Lazare train station Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris’s modern transportation hub. The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape. Monet’s agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life.
• #8 Other Impressionists also represented facets of city life, although not always using Monet’s impressionistic brush strokes. The setting of Paris: A Rainy Day is a junction of spacious boulevards that resulted from the redesigning of Paris that began in 1852. To accommodate the population growth of Paris. The demolition of thousands of old buildings and streets, transformed medieval paris into the present modern city with wide streets for the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Caillebotte chose to focus on these markers of the city’s rapid urbanization.
• #9 The artist recorded the blurred dark accents against a light ground that constituted his visual sensations of a crowded Paris square viewed from several stories above street level. The moment Pissarro captured in this painting is not so much of fugitive light effects as it is the street life, achieved through a deliberate casualness in the arrangement of figures. Parallels a photograph = cutting off of figures at the frame’s edge and the flattening of space achieved by the high viewpoint
• #10 Another facet of the new industrialized Paris that drew the Impressionists’ attention was the leisure activities of its inhabitants. Scenes of dining, dancing, the opera, the ballet, and other forms of urban recreation were mainstays of Impressionism. With the advent of set working hours, people’s schedules allowed them to plan their favorite pastimes. Renoir depicts a gathering of people at a popular Parisian dance hall. Some crowd the tables and chatter, while others dance energetically. So lively is the atmosphere that the viewer can virtually hear the sounds of music and laughter. The painter dappled the whole scene with sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce just the effect of floating and fleeting light the Impressionists so cultivated. Whereas classical art sought to express universal and timeless qualities, Impressionisim attempted to depict just the opposite- the incidental, momentary, and passing aspects of reality.
• #11 The fascination Edgar Degas had with patterns of motion brought him to the Paris Opera and its ballet school. There, his great observational power took in the formalized movements of classical ballet. In this work Degas used several devices to bring the observer into the pictorial space. The frame cuts off the spiral stair, the windows in the background, and the group of figures in the right foreground. The figures are not at the center of a classically balanced composition. Instead, Degas arranged them in a seemingly random manner. The prominent diagonals of the wall bases and floorboards carry the viewer into and along the directional lines of the dancers. Finally, as is customary in Degas’s ballet pictures, a large, off center, empty space creates the illusion of a continuous floor that connects the observer with the pictured figures.
• #12 Whistler shared the Impressionists interests in the subject of contemporary life and the sensations color produces on the eye. To these influences he added his own desire to create harmonies paralleling those achieved in music. More interested in conveying the atmospheric effects than in providing details of the scene, whistler emphasized creating a harmonious arrangement of shapes and colors on the rectangle of his canvas, an approach that appealed to many 20th century artists. British critic John Ruskin responded to this painting with a scathing review accusing Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” with his style. In reply, Whistler sued Ruskin. Whistler won the case however he was only awarded less than a penny in damages and was required to pay all of the court costs which left him ruined financially.
• #14 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec deeply admired Degas and shared the Impressionists’ interest in capturing the sensibility of modern life. His work, however, has an added satirical edge to it and often borders on caricature. Genetic defects that stunted his growth and in part crippled him led to Toulouse-Lautrec’s self exile from the high society. He became a denizen of the night world of Paris consorting with other social outcasts. Toulouse-Lautrec’s scene is nightlife, with its glaring artificial light, brassy music, and assortment of corrupt, cruel, and masklife faces. Such distortions by simplification of the figures and faces anticipated Expressionism, when artist’s use of formal elements – like brighter colors and bolder lines- increased the impact of the images on observers
• #15 Seurat devised a disciplined and painstaking system of painting that focused on color analysis. Seurat was less concerned with the recordings of immediate color sensations than he was with their careful and systematic organization into a new kind of pictorial order. He disciplined the free and fluent play of color that characterized Impressionism into a calculated arrangement based on scientific color theory. Seurat’s system, known as pointillism involves carefully observing color and separating it into its component parts. The artist then applies these pure component colors to the canvas in tiny dots. Thus, the shapes, figures, and space in the image become totally comprehensible only from a distance.
• #16 Son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, van Gogh believed he had a religious calling and did missionary work in Belgium. Repeated professional and personal failures brought him close to despair. Only after he turned to painting did he find a way to communicate his experiences. When van Gogh died of a self inflicted gunshot would at age 37, he considered himself a failure as an artist. He felt himself an outcast not only from artistic circles but also from society. Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime. After relocating to southern France in 1888, van Gogh painted Night Café. Although the subject is calm, van Gogh invested it with a charged energy. The proprietor rises like a specter from the edge of the billiard table, which the painter depicted in such a steeply tilted perspective that it threatens to slide out of the painting into the viewer’s space. Van Gogh communicated the “madness” of the place by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposition augmented their intensity.
• #17 Van Gogh painted starry night in 1889 the year before his death. At this time, van Gogh was living in Saint-Paul- de-Mausole, an asylum in Saint-Remy where he had committed himself. In starry night the artist did not represent the sky’s appearance. Rather, he communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars and galaxies of stars, the earth and humanity huddled beneath it. The church nestled in the center of the village is perhaps van Gogh’s attempt to express or reconcile his conflicted views about religion. Although the style in Starry Night suggests a very personal vision, this work does correspond in many ways to the view available to the painter from the window of his room in Saint- Paul- de-Mausole. The existnce of cypress trees and the placement of the constellations have been confirmed as matching the view van Gogh would have bad during his stay in the asylum. Still, the artist translated any visible objects into his unique vision.
• #18 Instead of employing the Impressionsts’ random approach when he was face-to-face with nature, Cezanne developed a more analytical style. He sought to order the lines, planes, and colors that comprised nature. He constantly and painstakingly checked his painting against the part of the real scene he was studying at the moment. With special care, Cezanne explored the properties of line, plane, and color and their interrelationships. He studied the effect of every kind of linear direction, the capacity of planes to create the sensation of depth, the intrinsic qualities of color, and the power of colors to modify the direction and depth of lines and planes. The create the illusion of 3 dimensional space, Cezanne focused on carefully selecting colors. He understood that the visual properties- hue, saturation, and value of different colors vary.
• #19 The Impressionists and Post Impressionists believed their emotions and sensations were important elements for interpreting nature, but the depiction of nature remained a primary focus of their efforts. The tasks of symbolist visual and verbal artists was not to see things but to see through them to a significance and reality far deeper than what superficial appearance gave. The subjects of the symbolists became increasingly mysterious, dreamlike and fantastic. Not coincidentally, contemporary with the Symbolists, Sigmund Freud began the age of psychiatry with his book Interpretation of Dreams, an introduction to the concept and the world of unconscious experience.
• #20 Redon projected a figment of the imagination as if it were visible, coloring it whimsically with a rich profusion of hues adapted from the Impressionist palette that he harmonized with the mood he felt fitted the subject.
• #21 Gauguin had journeyed to the South Seas in search of primitive innocence. Rousseau was a “primitive” artist without leaving Paris- an untrained painter. Rousseau produced an art of dream and fantasy in a style that had its own sophistication and made its own departure from the artistic currency of the time. He compensated for his apparent visual, conceptual, and technical naivete with a natural talent for design and an imagination teeming with exotic images of mysterious tropical lanscapes. In sleeping gypsy the figure occupies a desert world, silent and secret, and dreams beneath a pale, perfectly round moon. In the foreground, a lion that resembles a stuffed but some how menacing, animal doll sniffs at the gypsy. A critical encounter impends- an encounter of the type that recalls the uneasiness of a person’s vulnerable subconscious self during sleep.
• #22 Norwegian painter Edvard Munch felt deeply the pain of human life. His belief that humans were powerless before the great natural forces of death and love and the emotions associated with them- jealousy, loneliness, fear, desire, despair- became the theme of most of his art. Because Munch’s goal was to describe the conditions of “modern psychic life,” as he put it, Realist and Impressionist techniques were inappropriate, focusing as they did on the tangible world. In the spirit of symbolism, Munch developed a style of putting color, line, and figural distortion to expressive ends. The Scream exemplifies his style. The image- a man standing on a bridge in a landscape- comes from the real world, but Munch’s treatment of the image departs significantly from visual reality. The man in the foreground, simplified to almost skeletal form, emits a primal scream. The landscape’s sweeping curvilinear lines reiterate the curvilinear shape of the mouth and head, almost like an echo, as the cry seems to reverberate through the setting. The fiery red and yellow stripes that give the sky an eerie glow also contribute to this work’s resonance. Appropriately the original title of this work was Despair
• #23 The effects of industrialization were impossible to ignore, and although many artists embraced this manifestation of “modern life” or at least explored its effects, other artists decried the impact of rampant industrialism. The latter response came from the Arts and Crafts moment in England. This movement which developed during the last decades of the 19th century, was shaped by the ideas of John Ruskin, the critic who skewered Whistler’s Nocturne. Whistler advocated an art made by the people for the people as a joy for the maker and the user. This condemnation of capitalism and support for manual laborers were compatible with socialism, and many artists considered themselves socialists and participated in the labor movement. Members of this movement dedicated themselves to producing functional objects with high aesthetic value for a wide public. The style they advocated was based on natural, rather than artificial, forms and often consisted of repeated designs of floral or geometric patterns. High quality artisanship and honest labor were crucial. Art nouveau- An important international architectural and design movement that developed out of the ideas the arts and crafts movement promoted was art nouveau (new art). The art nouveau style adapted the plant form to the needs of architecture, painting, sculpture, and all of the decorative arts.
• #24 Tiffany’s lamps are constructed of leaded glass, which he patented. Intended for wealthy buyers, this was the most expensive lamp Tiffany studios produced in 1906. Because of careful attention to detail required to produce lamps of this type, Tiffany’s workshop could make only one at a time. This ensured the high quality artisanship the arts and crafts movement so prized.
• #25 In the later 19th century, new technologies and the changing needs of urbanized, industrialized society affected architecture throughout the western world. Since the 18th century, bridges had been built of cast iron, which permitted engineering advancements in the construction of larger, stronger, and more fire resistant structures. Steel, available after 1860, allowed architects to enclose ever larger spaces, such as those found in railroad stations and exposition halls. The elegant metal skeleton structures of the French engineer-architect Alexandre Gustave Eiffel constituted responses to this idea and were an important contribution to the development of the 20th century skyscraper. Eiffel designed his best known work, the eiffel tower for a great exhibition in paris in 1889. Originally seen as a symbol of modern paris and still considered a symbol of 19th century civilization, the elegant tower rises 984 feet above the ground. The tower rests on four giant supports connected by gracefully arching open frame skirts that provide a pleasing mask for the heavy horizontal pieces needed to strengthen the legs. Visitors can take two elevators to the top or use a staircase. The transparency of Eiffel’s structure blurs the distinction between interior and exterior to an extent never before achieved or even attempted.