ARTH 205 - Intro to Modern Art

Lecture 1 - Modernism

Modernist Trinity

Authenticity, Autonomy, and Originality

Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936. Cover of exhibition catalogue, MoMA, 1936.

• Linear perspective of art history

• First time someone laid out different movements like this

Modernity

Refers to the ensemble of conditions that follow the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment-era social, scientific and psychological transformations

• Literal events and actions that are “modern”

Modernism

An “attitude” or cultural expression of modernity’s conditions concerned with novelty (NEW) and progress

• The set of beliefs relating to modernity

Modern Art

Art that represents a modernist perspective

• Really depends on what is defined as modern

• Post-modernism is easy to identify, modernism less so

Arts & Crafts

Crafted arts that have a domestic purpose

• Excluded from the definition of modern art that prioritizes “flatness,” since that limits modern art to painting.

Avant Garde

“Advanced Guard,” Military term meant to describe the first group sent to battle

• An Avant Garde artist is an artist doing something new with art that has never really been done

Lecture 2 - Foundations of Academic Art: Neoclassicism

Anton Raphael Mengs, Parnassus, 1760-1761. Fresco, Villa Albani, Rome

• Revolutionary → made statement about new art

• Commissioned to decorate ceiling of room in Rome

• Made like a way mural, even if on ceiling

• Strictly symmetrical

• Trying to break from Rococo, create new high style

Joseph-Marie Vien, The Seller of Cupids, 1763, Oil on canvas

• Simplistic and minimal, like neoclassical art strived to be

• Still scandalous like Rococo, actually more scandelous

  • Cupid showing TALLYWHACKER length with his arm

• Depicts the selling of BUTTERING THE MUFFIN to rich roman ladies (scandalous!!!)

Angelica Kauffman, Zeuxis Selecting Models for his Painting of Helen of Troy, c. 1778. Oil on canvas

• Idealism!!!!!!

• Roman story, Zeus commissioned to paint Helen of Troy, picks 5 models and uses their best features in the painting

• Shallow space like neo-classical, chiaroscuro like rococo, sfumato (fuzzy) outlines, like 16th century painting

  • Meant to be a bridge between rococo and neoclassical

• Made specifically to be printed and used as decor for middle class families

Guilds

Professional associations for different trades, specific to each city

• Not optional, had to be in guild to sell

• Kind of like unions

• Guild system protected artists

• Regulated wages and pensions

• Excluded through strict access

  • Women not allowed in particular guilds except for one in France

Rome Prize

Funded students trips to Rome to study the greats

Classicism

System of ideas derived from the veneration of the philosophical, literary, and artistic productions of the ancient Greeks and Romans

“Antique” School

Drawing after ancient Greek and Roman sculptures

• Would take plaster casts of sculptures and study them

  • Did this with everything (including Trajan’s Column!)

• To graduate you needed to submit a drawing of sculpture and board would judge if it was good enough

School of Life

Art academy dedicated to learning anatomy

• Learned from dissections, cadavers, plaster casts, and models

• Judged on how accurately you can render the human body

Johan Zoffany, The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy. ca. 1771–72, Oil on canvas

• Different directors and founders of the academy

  • Showing why academy is important

• Idealized → students aren’t wearing evening wear while drawing

• DOES NOT SHOW EVERYONE

  • Angela Kaufmann and Mary Moser both were founders of the academy

  • Women were not allowed to enter modeling rooms, seen as indecent

  • Their portraits are on the wall to still somewhat honor them

• In the corner there’s a guy who was almost not allowed bc he was with lots of women

  • Depicted as stabbing a mannequin of a woman’s torso with his cane

Hierarchy of genre

1. History painting (large, complex compositions, and needed intellect

2. Portraiture

3. Genre scenes (images of everyday life)

4. Landscape

5. Animal painting

6. Still-life

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Queen Marie-Antoinette and Her Children, 1787. Oil on Canvas

• Combined styles of neoclassical and rococo

• Less decoration, more minimalist and conservative

• Very state sponsored, always has agenda

• Acknowledging that Marie is connected to French Royalty bad past but is looking away

• Children are her focus, devoted mother

• Humanizing her, referring to recently deceased daughter

  • She is human too going through hardship

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784. Oil on canvas

• Lots of lines (straight lines show you apex of narrative)

• Pyramid composition

• Commissioned by King (Louis XVI)

  • Wants to show loyalty>family, promotes oath to France over family

  • Patriotism and fraternity

• Still perceived as supporting revolution, focus on choosing sides kinda (Loyalty to France not a King) (since Rome was not a republic when the story took place)

• HUGE painting trying to appeal to upper class who could afford painting of that size

Jacques Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas

• David is trying to make Marat a martyr

• Depicted him as writing law to give money to soldier’s widows

• In bath because of disability, devoted to his work despite that

• Reference to the pieta, making him look like Jesus

Jacques Louis David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817. Oil on canvas

• Not playing on the usual narrative

• Cupid is awake, sunrise, Cupid is going to wake up Psyche rather than vise versa

  • Cupid is irresponsible, putting Psyche on trial on purpose

• Makes references to his own history

  • Red, white, and blue stacked

  • Yellow/orange fabric reference to Napoleon Horse portrait

• Metaphor, David is Psyche

Lecture 3 - The People’s Revolutions & Realism: Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849–50, oil on canvas

• Friend of Baudelaire and art reflected his writing

• Depicts a middle class funeral procession

• Unlike previous works depicting death (David’s Death of Socrates), Courbet does not dramatize

• Brings back Medieval ideas about death (the great equalizer, both the king and the pauper will die)

• Men in painting represent France’s new voting population after suffrage expanded to all men

Thomas Couture, Romans of Decadence, 1847. Oil on canvas

• After a night of partying everyone is sick and tired

• One of the few still-energetic partiers climbed up a statue of Roman hero and mockingly offers drink

• Use of classicism and romanticism to critique the new rich of the july monarchy

• “Courbet’s Burial was the post-revolutionary answer to Couture’s work”

• Classical symmetry combined with romantic dynamism

Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850. Oil on canvas

• Peasant casting seed from cloth bag

• “Anonymous” face turned away and dark

• Men only valued for labour

• Figure of power and respect

  • Not pity like stonebreakers

• This and stone breakers force salons to look at french lower class

• Criticized for being “socialist” and praised for having “social responsibility”

Honoré Daumier, The Heavy Burden, c. 1850–53. Oil on Canvas

• Suggests poverty is inescapable through mother and child

  • Like stone breakers

• Highly simplified

• Limited palette

• Exaggerated bodily forms and gestures

  • Suggests a tortured life

Honoré Daumier, The Fugitives, c. 1862–78, Relief in patinated plaster

• Lots of refugees in this time period (from France and general Europe)

• Depicts refugees trudging through desolate landscape

• Shapelessness creates doom

• “The Human Condition”

Designo

Line

• Careful design and plan, shows skillsmanship

• Lots and lots of planning

• Typical of fresco, since it requires intense planning since its a difficult medium

Colore

Colour

• Not working from base of drawing, straight paint on canvas

• Less line work, example of dog leg in venus of urbino

• Typical of oil painting, since it takes hella long to dry and can be altered a bunch after putting paint down

Theodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. Oil on Canvas

• Massive scale

• Considered the first great romantic

  • He did not identify himself as that

• Géricault was self-trained, free from the academy

• Story:

  • Shipwreck off coast of africa, officers get lifeboat, everyone else on a raft, lifeboat is connected by rope to raft, lifeboat wasn’t going fast enough so cuts rope, raft is left stranded, raft is suffering, 10 of the original 150 men survived back to France

• Big scandal

  • Return of Bourbon monarchy

  • Ship captain in charge of Medusa was not an accomplished captain, just a friend to the king

  • Shipwreck would’ve been avoided if captain was actually capable

  • Also king runs the salon again

• Shows people with emotions, not just emotionless canibals

• Géricault studied real corpses so he could depict shipwreck, also interviewed survivors

• Still idealized, everyone is muscular even though they were starving and disfigured by sunburn

The Sublime

Edward Burke

• Pleasure and pain are additive emotions

  • You start at neutrality, and then pleasure and pain are added

  • Pleasure cannot exist without pain, and vise versa

  • Without pleasure, you experience delight, not pain????

  • Something analogous of terror that is not real terror makes feeling of sublime

    • Dependent on proximity

    • Protected by paint

Essentially someone can have the feeling of the sublime from looking at something horrible in a painting because it is in the form of a painting, and you are separated from the atrocity you are looking at by the paint

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas

• Studied with Gericault

• Overthrow of the monarchy (again)

  • Piece completed same year as the event

• Marianne is female symbol of the Republic of France and revolution

  • Allegory

  • Activated allegory since she’s actually with the people in the piece

  • Reflected reports of women fighting with the barricades

    • Barricades were cobblestone ripped from ground to create walls protecting from soldiers

  • Pushing over barricade toward viewer

  • Marianne wearing cap representing freedom from slavery

• Every class is represented

• Feeling of sublime with dead and dying soldiers

• Different type of heroism than Marat

  • Commitment of the civilian working as soldier because they chose to

• Displaying the modernist trinity

Allegory

Embodied version of an idea

realism

Accurate rendition of something, making it look as accurate as possible

LOWERCASE “r”

Realism

The artistic movement rejecting classicism and focusing on everyday conflict

UPPERCASE “R”

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Death of Caesar, 1859–1867. Oil on canvas

• Depicting real event

• realism

  • Linear perspective

  • Realistic lighting

  • Tiny details part of the narrative they’re trying to show

  • Obviously not real because he was not alive to witness it