Arts in 19th-Centruy Europe

Enlightenment Stream

- Based on Empiricism, rhe senses are the only thing that shows us truth
- Painting should only show what the eyes see
- Paintings: Assassination of Monks, The Third of May, 1814, Execution of Emperor Maximilian

Enlightenment Stream Arts

Christian Realism, Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism

Christain Realism

Christain Realist painters were a group of painters who wanted to express dignity and importance in simple, everyday life

Jean Francois Millet

A devout catholic who wanted to paint peasants with dignity because most paintings had been of rich people

Henry O. Tanner

He was a Christain artist who complained that many of the artists who have represented negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it. He subverted stereotypes with beautiful moments, like in his paintings, The Banjo Lesson (1893)

Impressionism

- Practice of painting on the spot
- There was an analytic rationalist force behind the movement
- Impressionists learned about the science of light and optics to better understand vision
- Manet a famous impressionist said when painting, forget whats before you, merely think and hear

Impressionist Artists

1) Camille Pissaro - The Boulevard Montmarte at Night
2) Edgar Degas - Ballerina and Lady with a fan (1805)

Cubism and Futurism

- rationalism inspired the use of geometric forms
- art wasn't about portraying something realistic but investigating the pure form of the subject
- Futurism: celebrated the new industrial world
- Kasimir Malevich: The Knife Grinder

Cubism and Futurism Artists

Pablo Picasso, Man with a Guitar (1912)

Romantic Stream

Romanticism takes its inspiration from the "upper story" of moral freedom. Art became a means of protest against rationalism

Symbolism

- Symbolist painters would paint what they imagined, things that pointed to a higher spiritual reality
- As opposed to Impressionism, symboism art was made of symbols
- Arnold Bocklin: Isle of the Dead, 1880

Symbolism Artist

Carlos Schwabe: Death of the Grave Digger, 1895

Expressionism

- Focused on capturing feelings and emotions, rather than what the subject looks like
- vivid colors and bold strokes are used to exaggerate those emotions
- the image of reality is distorted to make it expressive of the artists inner feelings
- Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night, 1889

Expressionist Artist

Edvard Munch - The Scream, 1893

Biomorphic Abstraction

- Organic and abstract things
- Wassily Wadinsky the originator of abstract art

Biomoprhic Abstraction artist

Wassily Wadinsky - Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), 1927

The Noble Savage

- A romantic literary trope where the idea is that civilization corrupts people.
- "The Savage" is a character who embodies the wild human, who has not been corrupted by civilization
- Reflection of romantic/anti-progress ideas

Nationalism in the Arts

- The idea that a state gets its identity from the nation
- In the impressionist period of the 19th c., people began celebratin their folks culture
Impact: Unification of Italy and Germany
- Grimms Fairy Tales became popular and national epics like Beowulf
- There was Italian opera (Veralti)
- people began to find identity in the nation and culture

Unification of Italy

- Italy didn't really have a common culture, each region had its own
- Through "realpolitik" the Sardinian PM managed to rope the rest of Italy into unifying in 1861

Unification of Germany

- German regions in conflict with Austria
- Otto van Bismarck, a Prussian, knew he had to gain control of the smaller German provinces
- Improved Prussian armies
- Bismarck used realpolitik to manipulate the situation
- Protestant north and Catholic south
- After unification, Bismarck had diffuculties with local princes