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?”
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, The Cellist, Self-Portrait, 1847, Oil on canvas
46 1/8 x 35 1/2 in (117 x 90 cm) Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Courbet, Portrait of the Artist (Wounded Man) 1844-54 Oil on canvas
31 7/8 x 38 1/4 in (81 x 7 cm) Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Courbet, Man With a Pipe, 1946
Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with Dog, 1842
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849 (destroyed in WW II)
"It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of
poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting.
I told them to come to my studio the next morning."
Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Proudhon and his Children, 1853
”Anarchy is Order Without Power”
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans 1849-1850, oil on canvas, 10' 3’ x 21'
9" Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
What is ‘avant-garde modern’ about this painting in form and content?
Thomas Couture (French Academic painter), Romans of the Decadence, 1847
Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849 compare with
Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin,
Grace at Table, 1740 (19"/15")
Louvre, Paris
Genre painting was a traditional
category in European academies
of art, which enforced a strict
hierarchy of genres that
determined a painting’s value:
first history, then portrait
painting followed by genre,
landscape, and still life. Note
relatively small size of Chardin’s
painting. Courbet’s Burial at
Ornans is 10' 3’ x 21' 9"
William Bouguereau
(left) Mother and Children, The Rest, 1879
(right) Home from the Harvest, 1878, Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville,
Florida
Honoré Daumier (French) , Third Class Carriage, o/c, 1862, c. 25“ x 35"
Honoré Daumier, The Uprising, 1849, oil on canvas
Gustave Courbet, The Studio: An Allegory of Seven Years of the Artist's Life, 1855, oil on
canvas, over 20 feet wide, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
“I have studied, outside of any system and without prejudice, the
art of the ancients and of the Moderns. I no more wanted to
imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my
intuition to attain the trivial goal of art for art's sake. No! I simply
wanted to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition
the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own
individuality"
"To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in
a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of
my epoch, according to my own estimation: to be not only a
painter, but a man as well: in short, to create living art - this is my
goal.“
Gustave Courbet, statement for his Pavilion of Realism,
build next to the Paris International Exhibition of 1855
(left) Destruction of Paris following the Franco-Prussian war, siege of Paris, and
(right) the Commune 1871, Communards shot by firing squad of French
soldiers in the streets of Paris
Courbet, the Communard, and the destruction of the Vendome column, symbol of
Napoleonic (French) imperialism
"Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value,
tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past
imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen
Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise
him to disassemble this column.“ – Courbet
Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pelagie, 1872
Last self-portrait as prisoner (6 months) for Communard activities.
Henri Fantin-Latour. Portrait of Édouard Manet. 1867, oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Parisian dandy, flaneur, and “Painter of Modern Life”
Édouard Manet, At the Café, lithograph, 1869
Édouard Manet, Concert at the Tuileries, 1862 o/c, c. 46 x 30,” National Gallery, London.
Two portraits of Charles Baudelaire by Manet on left, 1865
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half
of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
- Charles Baudelaire
Édouard Manet, Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herb (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1862
Titian, Concert Champêtre (Italian Renaissance) 1510
compare with Édouard Manet (French Realism), Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862
Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgment of Paris, (engraving after Raphael), 1520
compare with Édouard Manet, Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51 x 74¾ in
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Titian or Giorgione, Venus of Urbino, 1510 (Louvre)
source for Manet’s Olympia 1863
Alexandre Cabanel (French Academic Painter, 1823-1889)
The Birth of Venus, 51 x 88 inches, 1863
Jean-Léon Gérôme (French Academic painter), Phrynee Before the Judges, 1861
Honoré Daumier cartoon: “Venuses Again, Always Venuses”
William Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1879 and Paul Baudry, Venus and Cupid, c. 1857
Édouard Manet, Universal Exposition of 1867, 1867, o/c
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,
1867 Paris International Exhibition
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris:1853-1869
Contemporary view of Blvd. Haussman
with Galeries Lafayette, one of the first
department stores: commodity culture
Édouard Manet, Civil War in Paris (the Commune) 1871, lithograph
Édouard Manet, The Bar at the Folies Bergere, 38 x 51 in, 1881, Courtauld, London
(left) Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl, c. 1865, oil on canvas, 21 x
26 in. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Realism
(right) James McNeil Whistler (US), Symphony in White, 1864, Japonisme,
aestheticism. Same model, Jo Hiffernan
James McNeill Whistler (United
States expatriate) Nocturne in
Black and Gold: The Falling
Rocket, c. 1875, oil on panel, 23 x
18 in, Detroit Institute of Arts
“Oh, I knock one off in a couple of
days.” (Whistler)
Why is a painting made so quickly
so highly valued?
What are the issues around “art for
art’s sake” raised by the Whistler
vs. John Ruskin trial? How are
they “modern”?
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
Top: Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1851
Below right: Charles Barry (1795–1860) A. W. N Pugin (1812–52), Houses
of Parliament, London, Gothic Revivalism, largely completed by 1858
Contemporaneous English buildings:
one emblematic of the future, one
emblematic of the past.
The House of Lords in the
Palace of Westminster
(Houses of Parliament),
London, designed by
A.W.N. Pugin. Neo-Gothic
interior design
Britain’s Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901
Her name and values identify the Victorian era in Europe
Edwin Landseer (British), Windsor Castle
in Modern Times, 1841-5, oil on canvas
44 x 56” Victoria and Albert “at home”
Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869)
The Queen and the Prince, wet plate
1854
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 with prefabricated truss
Building The Crystal Palace from prefabricated iron parts
“Waiting for the Queen,” Orientalist décor of Crystal Palace,
Illustration by Joseph Nash for Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of
the Great Exhibition of 1851
Ornamental cover
for joints of girders
(disguising modernity)
Cartoon from Punch, British satirical magazine
Crystal Palace Science Exhibit:- Envelope Machine
Compare bed and new railroad cars exhibited at
Great Exhibition of 1851 (Crystal Palace)
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4
o/c, arched top, 30/22” Tate Britain, Pre-Raphaelite
William Morris, La Belle Iseult, 1858, Jane Burden (future Jane Morris) in
medieval dress, Pre-Raphaelite. Morris’s only surviving oil painting, Tate,
London
Red House designed by Philip Webb for William and Jane Morris. Designed 1859;
completed 1860. Bexley heath (near London). neo-Gothic eclecticism, meant to be
a “palace of art” for artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement. Inspiration for the Arts & Crafts movement and the assertion of
an“authentically” English tradition. The interior surfaces of the Red House were
covered with pattern: floors, walls, ceilings.
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/webb/1c.html
William Morris, “Pimpernel” wallpaper,
1876. For repeating pattern on wallpaper
and fabric, Morris used the ancient
technique of hand woodblock printing in
preference to roller printing which had
replaced it for commercial uses.
William Morris, designer, pages from The Kelmscott Chaucer (14th century
texts), finished in 1896, figures by Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward BurneJones
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