19th-Century Avant-Garde Critics

Zola, on the Birth of Venus

“the goddess, drowned in a sea of milk, resembles a delicious courtesan, not made of flesh and bone - that would be indecent - but of a sort of pink and white marzipan”

Nochlin, on Stonebreakers

“unvarnished” and “implied nothing”

Champigneulle, Burghers of Calais

Burghers of Calais represented the first step towards Modernism

Kenneth Clark, on Monument to Balzac

Rodin was the “greatest since Michelangelo”

Le Cobusier, on Paris Opera

embodies the “architecture of the grave”

Morris, on Red House

an “escape from this accursed age”"

T. J. Clark, on Manet’s themes

was able to “give “flatness” overhwelmingly “complex and compatible values” from “elsewhere than art”

Manet’s art is an “implicit criticism of symbolic social and domestic formalities”

T. J. Clark, on Manet’s influences

he “looked back” to the old masters such as “Velasquez and Hals” for inspiration, but drew upon their “palpable and frank inconsistency” rather than their supposed immortality

T. J. Clark, on Manet’s impact

influenced a “decisive” shift towards a “scepticism, or at least an unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art”

Sir Joshua Reynolds, on the RA’s purpose and advantages

to act as a “repository for the great examples of the art”

the knowledge and techniques of the old masters “may be at once acquired” through close study of the canon

suggestion that “men of great natural abilities” can only fulfil their potential by imitiating and drawing upon canonical works respected and accepted by the Royal Academy

Baudelaire, on modernity

“modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”

Baudelaire, on the flaneur

“the lover of life, may be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd: to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness”

for “businessmen”, the “fantastic reality of life becomes strangely blunted” whereas M. G. “registers it constantly”

Baudelaire, on Renaissance imagery

suggests that it is “more convenient” for the Salon to declare that “everything is hopelessly ugly in the dress of the current period than to apply oneself” to “extracting the mysterious beauty that may be hidden” in contemporary life

“we shall be struck by the general tendency of our artists to clothe all manner of subjects in the dress of the past. Almost all of them use the fashions and the furnishings of the Renaissance”

Nochlin, on immediacy

Realism depicts “immediate experience” at the cost of “continuity and coherence”

Nochlin, on observation

Realist artists presented a “truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life”

Nochlin, on the worker

“the worker became the dominant image” and was “partaking of both the grandeur of myth and the concreteness of reality”

Nochlin, on materials

artists strove to show “truth and honesty” that later became “truth to the nature of materials”