Modern Art 109
From mid-19th century to mid-20th century
(left) Édouard Manet (French Realist painter, ‘father’ of the avant-garde),
photograph by Nadar, 1867
(right) Jackson Pollock (American ‘Action’ painter, 1949 Life magazine photo for
article, “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”
From lecture and reading, Marshall Berman, “The
Experience of Modernity,” know how to define:
1) the avant-garde
2) modernity
3) modernism
Realism and the Origin of
the Avant-Garde in Paris
Gustave Courbet
and
Edouard Manet
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) Self-Portrait, c. 1845
Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849 compare with
Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847
Henri Fantin-Latour. Portrait of Édouard Manet. 1867, oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Parisian dandy, flaneur, and “Painter of Modern Life”
(left) Titian (or Giorgione), Venus of Urbino, 1538 (Uffizi)
source for (right) Edouard Manet’s Olympia 1863
Jean-Léon Gérôme (French Academic painter), Phrynee Before the Judges,
1861
Honoré Daumier (French) cartoon: “This year Venuses Again, Always
Venuses,” satirical cartoon, c. 1864
Alexandre Cabanel (French Academic Painter, 1823-1889)
The Birth of Venus, 51 x 88 inches, 1863
William Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1879 and Paul Baudry, Venus and
Cupid, c. 1857
Édouard Manet, Universal Exposition of 1867, 1867, oil on canvas
The Painter of Modern Life
Emperor Napoleon III by Hipolyte Flandrin (Salon of 1863) with Plan of Paris
– radical urban renewal of Paris 1853-1869 designed by Baron Haussmann,
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris:1853-1869
Contemporary view of Blvd. Haussmann
with Galeries Lafayette, finished in 1912,
one of the first department stores.
Interior of Galleries
Lafayette finished
in 1912.
Modern Versaille
of middle-class
consumerism
Architecture as Emblem of Modernity
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive,
the contingent, the half of art, of which
the other half is the eternal and the
immutable. . . .
Charles Baudelaire
The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889
Centennial of the 1789 French Revolution
The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton architect,
Hyde Park, London, England 1851, moved to Sydenham in 1852, burned
down in 1936
Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,
London in 1851
Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, 1851, detail of exterior structure
Building The Crystal Palace from prefabricated iron parts
Cartoon from Punch, British satirical magazine
Crystal Palace Science Exhibit: Envelope Machine
Announcing the invention of photography (the daguerreotype) at The Joint
Meeting of the Academies of Science and Fine Arts in the Institute of France,
Paris, August 19, 1839, unsigned engraving
Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An
Introduction to Global Modernisms
“. . . .every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe
should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its
name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to
do otherwise.”
Holland Cotter
NYTimes, 2012
Open link below to follow the geographical history
of European colonialism, 1492-2008
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Colonisation2.gif
(left) Unknown, The Miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory, Mexico City, 1539, feather on wood,
26 x 22,” commissioned by the first colonial governor of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) as a gift
for Pope Paul III
(center right) Giovanni Pietro Birago, Mass of Saint Gregory, painting, Milan, c. 1490 , typical
source for feather painting
(corner right) Pre-Conquest Aztec feathered shield, c. 1500 CE
(left) Ando Hiroshige, Kameido Ume (Japanese apricot) Garden, woodcut, ink on paper,
1857, from the series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
(right) Vincent Van Gogh, Plum Tree in Bloom (after Hiroshige), oil on canvas,1887
Yoshikazu, Picture of
Foreigners Enjoying a
Banquet, December
1860, Yokohama,
color woodblock
Children dance at the May
Festival Ball given in honor
of the Japanese
ambassadors
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, June 6, 1860
(left) Yorozu Tetsugoro, Self Portrait with Red Eyes, oil on canvas, 1912 –
Expressionist / Cubist / Futurist / Global avant-garde modernism
(right) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German Expressionist, 1880-1938), Self
Portrait with Model, oil on canvas, 1910
Transformative influence of African tribal sculpture
Picasso’s epiphany in June 1907 at the ethnographic museum in Paris
Georges Braque: “It is as if someone had drunk kerosene to spit fire."
“My first exorcism painting….
For me the masks were not just
sculptures. They were magical
objects...intercessors...against
everything - against unknown
threatening spirits....They were weapons
. . . to keep people from being ruled by
spirits. To help them free themselves. .
. . If we give a form to these spirits we
become free."
(left) Aina Onabolu (Yoruba-Nigerian, 1882-1963), Portrait of a Lawyer, oil on
canvas, 1910
(right) Egungun Mask, unknown Yoruba carver, Nigeria, late 19th/early 20th
century
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, icon of Western avant-garde painting
(left) Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), oil on canvas, 1954
(right) Onabolu, Nude Study, drawing, 1920(?)