INFO - 18th and 19th Century Art in Europe

Pomona

Context: Pomona is the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees

Message: Ideal beauty in dialogue with high-minded Victorian paintings

Details: Hair loose, triangular composition conveys authority.

Style: Camera is brought close

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The Bath

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Message: Asks the question: what about these nudes makes them not ok.

Details: Outdoor excursion of students in nature contrast with prominent naked woman, head towards spectator which invites shock. Interactions between figures are blase.

Style: Looked unfinished in some parts.

Continuity: Still life of food in the front. Composition from Titian

Change: Apart from salon (rejected), striking nude. Huge canvas for subject.

Olympia

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Message: Sets bourgeois on edge- sex and capital, struggle between sex and classes (she should be poor why does she have a maid), metamorphic ownership of female body

Details: Space is constructed, smug gaze, flesh is not beautifully rendered ==> not soft. Black woman = primitive sexuality.

Style: Not idealized (small breasts, body hair), rendering is smudged and grimy

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Change: Most forthright image of sex worker, transgression of social class (servant is being served)

The Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Context: Manet creates contemporary art about Paris. He wants to undermine the idea that the canvas reflects the world in a true sense.

Message: Aspect of urban experience, mind reclaiming self in busy world

Details: Not a type of person was can categorize with certainty. Is she available? Bar separates her. According to the angle we are the man in the top hat. Pensive, highlighted by flat white lights.

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Impression, Sunrise (Port of Le Havre)

Context: Shocked critics who saw it

Message:

Details: Loosely conceived. Fleeting. Blurring intensifies light.

Style: Boats in a diagonal line to show perspective is from Japanese prints.

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Basin at Argenteuil

Context: Weekend haunt for Parisians. Sense of transient light is what really matters. Landscape was changed by tourism.

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Style: Painting captures different effects of light and color than black and white photography of the time did.

Continuity: Leisure in Impressionism. Rococo energy.

Change: Impressionism: No contour lines, no sense of three-dimensionality

Grainstack (Sunset)

Context:

Message: Grain stacks are protective forms; endurance of French agricultural life remain season to season. Instantaneous.

Details: Rendering of experience.

Style: Only becomes clear at a distance. Paint is very built up.

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Change: Fusion of touristic image

Women at the Cafe Montmartre

Context: Reality can’t be organized because of the disorder (random columns, chairs in our space, casual ungraceful women)

Message:

Details: Chance encounter, working class facial type to scientific theories of Darwinism (protruding lower jaw, etc), transfixing on crudeness and ugliness

Style: Aimless because it reflects the subject

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The Tub

Context:

Message: Almost voyeuristic

Details: Embryotic pose.

Style: Cropped. Strange angles. We are blocked by the contour.

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Change: Doesn’t conform to idealizing type of female body

The Cradle

Context:

Message: Feels like we are trespassing

Details: Playing with curtain. Woman is contemplative. Geometric entrapment.

Style:

Continuity: A sort of Madonna and Child

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Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Context: Scientific projection on Impressionist brushwork. “Optical mixture”

Message:

Details: No interactions between people

Style: Static, posed. Illusion of space.

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Change: Very composed

The Night Cafe

Context:

Message: Nervous

Details: Passions of humanity in red and green - emotional discord

Style: Thick pigment

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Starry Night

Context: From window of insane asylum

Message:

Details: An invented landscape (new to him)

Style: Thick impasto

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Vision After the Sermon (Jacob and the Angel)

Context: Wanted to find something less civilized, closer to nature.

Message: Depicted internal experience of faith

Details:

Style: Synthetism, inspired by ukiyo-e prints (flattening of space). Didn’t want it to look real- suppressed the use of shadows.

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Change: Red background breaks with impressionism and flattens pictorial space —> mystical atmosphere.

Manao tupapau

Context: Goes to 1889 world’s fair. “I am savage.” Title means watching the spirit of the dead.

Message:

Details: GF was scared of tupapaus (Gauguin was like they are just glowing fungus)

Style: Used colors to arouse emotion (purple was to instill terror). Woman’s form is simplified (carved statue?)

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Change: Marrys Christian elements with native fables/rituals

The Scream

Context: Symbolist movement. A scream through nature. Synesthesia?

Message: Primal scream

Details: A remembered sensation rather than perceived reality

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Mont Sainte-Victoire

Context: By his house. Returned to the subject many times.

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Style: Geometric, flattens depth

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The Large Bathers

Context: Foundation for Cubism

Message: How do you paint the modern nude?

Details: Plastic arch of trees in conversation with human forms

Style: Distortion of human form. Feels unfinished.

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