Art History Unit 3

Antonie Watteau, The Pleasures of the Ball (Les Plaisirs du Bal), c. 1715-17, oil on canvas, 65.2 × 52.5

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: lose feathery brushwork (trees not very defined), emphasis on pastel hues, very light, lack of interest in symmetry (arches not centered + no specific focal point, early rococo!

Function: seeks to have the viewer imagine the sensory issues of the scene, allows for an understanding of the cultural station at the time (shows that the french were able to have slaves in their houses), and draws attention to the alienation of black people)

Content: outdoor terrace, group of men and women expensively + colorfully dressed; scene to left shows couple dancing, people talking, people drinking; references to the cost of this pleasure with the two young black men (one watching from above the other almost swallowed in the crowd) wearing striped outfits to represent that they are servents (one is wearing a turban → shows exotisim)

Context: would have been placed outside, shows leisure activities; Watteau considered the father of rococo, lots of his commissions were for colonial investors (probably all had slaves)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, oil on canvas, 1767

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: Uses iconography, old man looking at younger woman who is looking at younger man who is looking back at her (makes a V), loaded symbols

Function: commissioned by a wealthy man to be put up in his country house, made to be look at intently

Content: enclosed garden (wall + gardening tools), three subjects: young man in bushes (secret lover), young woman on swing (wife), older man pulling the swing (husband); a dog (symbol of loyalty, barking angrily = knows of infidelity) and angel sculptures shushing/glaring at the dog

Context: later rococo, more innuendo and erotic undertones

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784, oil on canvas, 3.3 × 4.25 m

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: 3 rounded arches (brothers on left, father in middle, women in final arch), brothers and father very rigid, whereas the movement in the women shows emotion; classical style (interest in the accuracy of the anatomy of the body)

Function: shows the moment before the battle between the Horatii (rome) and Coratii (alba) where the father of the horatii brothers is making them swear to fight for rome or die, history painting, supposed to show the viewer to protect their country (to resonate with the people at the time as we are nearing a revolution), comes from a roman legend

Content: three sons their father in the horatii family (from rome), and the weeping and distraut women are interconnected between the Horatii and the Coratii family (from the warring country alba) by either blood or marraige (so no matter who wins someone loses), shown as more complacent and like they can’t do anything to stop it (reflective of the time’s ideals that women couldn’t think outside the personal or familial)

Context: David has a classical education + traveled to rome for study; this work would have been displayed in the salon of the french academy (allowed for art to be displayed to gain potential patrons and criticism) that had to be open past its closing time because it was so busy

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770, oil on canvas, 1526 × 214.5 cm

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: dramatic (clouds and lighting), Wolfe focal point

Function: history painting (though it departs from the norm with an almost contemporary event from the 7 years war)

Content: shows General Wolfe on a battlefield mortally injured, very carefully composed (wolfe almost posed like christ), surrounded by men (only one man was there when he actually died), native american posed like the thinker next to him, a person running in from the left side

Context: west was born in the americas then moved to italy to learn how to paint in european tradition, he found success in london; this is his most iconic painting

Academy

the french royal academy emphasized classical traditions, heirarchical genres of art, and presion in drawing, rejecting avant-garde tendencies

Heirarchy of Genres

1. History paintings: classical tradition, biblical, or allegorical subjects

2. Portraiture: likenesses

3. Genre Painting: scenes from everyday life

4. Landscapes: representations of real or imagined rural topography

5. Still life paintings: inanimate objects

Enlightenment

an intellectual movement where ideas around god, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview, instigating developments in art, philosophy, and politics

Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, oil on canvas, 12 ft 10 in x 16 ft 3 in. (3.92 x 4.96m)

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: romanticism, massive canvas, dominated by the color red, space full of objects and people, diagonals (the bed), and foreshortening (everything spilling towards the viewer)

Function: Shows corruption, death, and destruction; shock effect, very different from neoclassicism, not structured

Content: subjects from a play (story of the last Assyrian king who decides to kill himself and everything he finds pleasure in), king looking down on everything with indifference

Context: exhibited at the salon

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Snake Charmer, c. 1879, oil on canvas

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: orientalism (merges diverse eastern cultures into a monolith), very realistic

Function: fictional but implies that it actually happened (with realism), exoticised and sexualized fantasy of what would actually happen

Content: naked boy (the orient) holding a serpent on a praying rug, older man holds a flute, arabic inscriptions on the walls and prayer rug suggest this takes place in a mosque (unrealistic)

Context: created from his immagination, drawn to seem like a real image

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, begun late summer 1849, completed 1850, 124 x 260 inches, oil on canvas

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: historical painting, very large

Function: defies academic expectations (realistic, no transcendance, shows a funeral as it really was), raises the status of everyday citizens

Content: funeral, most figures in grey or black, priest, box, dog, mourners, chalky cliffs frame the scene, grey sky

Context: one of the first works to show ordinary people on the scale typically reserved for the divine; calls back to baroque era; asserted that everyone was a subject for art as long as the realities of life were reflected

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: she is not drawn idealized, shows an everyday individual, wearing/laying upon expensive items

Function: shows + humanizes a parisian prostitute, breaks down social and class barriers

Content: olympia is looking directly at us, judging + acknowledging that we are invading her space (viewer is also her guest), her servant is holding flowers (high level of income), startled cat at the edge, she is not enjoying herself (flat hand hiding her crotch), seems bored and sad

Context: inspired by Venus of Urbino, based on classical figures, more realistic (not named venus, could be anyone), very critiqued in the news (caricatures of it drawn)

French Revolution

a period of political + societal change in france, beginning in 1789 and ending in 1799

Orientalism

the western academic/artistic portrayal of eastern cultures (very stereotypical), shows cultural superiority and the binary distinction that positions the “Orient” as backwards and exotic compared to the “Occident”

Industrial Revolution

period of scientific + technological development in 18th century, transforming rural societies (especially in europe and north america) into urban and industrialized ones

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1873

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: visible brushstrokes, not blended, painted quickly + outdoors to capture the moment

Function: catches a snapshot of a moment (what he could see)

Content: a sunrise over a shipyard

Context: made fun of for not being “finished” when the piece was first released

Mary Cassatt, Woman in a Loge (At the Opera), 1879

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: impressionism (loose brush work) with some divergence (a little less bright), handled quickly

Function: paints a subject she has access to (domestic, social life of women), depicts leisure

Content: intermission at the opera (chandelier has descended, brightening the audience), woman is looking around (she is being looked at by a man in the background and us)

Context: opera was developed from haussmanisation; cassatt was an american (traveled to europe and stayed)

Georges Seurat, Saturday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, 1884-6

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: uses carefully placed dots of color next to each other (forces the eye to blend them), very careful and painstaking, still + flat subjects

Function: explores different facets of the boundaries of impressionism

Content: upper middle class leisure, enjoying green space

Context: influenced by optical color theory → combined w/impressionist color experiences = pointillism

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte- Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm

What are the piece’s form, function, content, and context?

Form: not perfectly rendered, almost flat, abstract, large blocks of color, almost looks unfinished, visible brush strokes, looks in movement

Function: plays around with how the world is perceived as we walk through it, a scene that accepts itself as a painting

Content: the houses and valley before Mont Sainte-Victoire

Context: Mont Sainte-Victoire is a site he frequently revisited, this was painted in the last few years of his life

En plein air

refers to the practice of painting outdoors

Haussmanisation

the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the mid-eighteenth century

Japonisme

experimentation with a wide range of pictorial modes and printmaking coincided with the growing popularity of Japanese woodcuts during the 1890s (often included aspects of japansese woodcuts in works)

Pointilism

painting technique using tiny dots of various pure colors which become blended in the viewer’s eye