Rebellion and Revival Quotes

Emile Zola on 'The Birth of Venus'

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

Cezanne on his 'Lac d'Annecy'

"treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the one"

Meyer Shapiro on 'The Stonebreakers'

"The two characters are drawn as if Courbet was tracing a complicated shape for the first time"

Gilchrist on 'Pegwell Bay'

wrote about the nobility of the painting and Dyce's faithful appreciative approach to the painting

Gilbert on 'Shaftesbury's Memorial Fountain'

choice of Anteros was to represent the "reflective and mature love, as opposed Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant"

The Times on 'Daedalus and Icarus'

"the contrast of dark and pale skin was a stale device"
"failure to show Icarus's pectoral muscles suggested instead: 'the soft, round contour of a feminine breast''

Goncourt Brothers on cafes such as the one in the 'Bar at the Folies-Beregeres'

"These people need publicity daylight, the street, the cabaret, the cafe, the restaurant... we like to pose, to make a spectacle of ourselves."

Baudelaire on Parisian life

"rich in poetic and marvellous subjects"

Louis Auvray on 'Olympia'

"Never has a painting exited so much laughter, mockery and catcalls as the Olympia"

Dumas on 'Olympia'

"We are on our way to universal prostitution"

Gatier on 'The Dead Christ with Angels'

he talked about the dirtiness of Christ and he "seems never to have known the use of washing"

Baudelaire on 'The Dead Christ with Angels'

"give the malicious something to laugh at"

The Literary Gazette on 'Christ in the House of his Parents'

'it's an atrocity in which there is neither taste, drawing, expression or genius'

Darwin on 'Christ in the House of his Parents'

"so horrible in her ugliness [...] that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France"

The Times on 'Christ in the House of his Parents'

"attempt to associate the Holy Family with the meanest details of a carpenter's shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease, all finished with loathsome minuteness, is disgusting."

Moreau on his 'Oediphus and the Sphinx'

describes the sphinx as vile and bewitching

Ruskin on the carving of the 'Oxford University Museum'

He says if you don't allow the craftsman to express themselves they end up as machines almost inhumane

Garnier on his 'Palais Garnier'

"Everything that happens in the world is but theatre and representation."

Quote on the 'Monument to Balzac'

'He's imagining Balzac in his study breathless, hair in disorder, eyes lost in a dream, somebody who never rests, somebody who turns night into day and who drives himself vainly to fill the holes left his debts

William Morris on houses

'Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful'

Manet about Impressionist painting

"Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace,"
"for nature will never give you more than information"

Into modernism/Edouard Manet Article by Time 1983

""slow" and "fast" passages of paint is what gives Manet's surface its probing liveliness."
"one sees him inventing the image of the "modern" women."

Brown on plant seller in 'Work'

"ragged wretch who has never been taught to work." - talking about the woman holding the flowers

The Salon of 1846 XVII: On the Heroism of Modern Life by Meyer Schapiro - on Impressionism

"Although painters will say again and again that content doesn't matter, they are curiously selective in their subjects. They paint only certain themes and only in a certain aspect."

The Salon of 1846 XVII: On the Heroism of Modern Life by Meyer Schapiro - on beauty

'All centuries and all people have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours.'
Saying beauty could exist in any age

Courbet quote on realism

‘the art of painting can only consist of the representation of objects which are visible and tangible for the artist’.

Theophile Thore-Burger on modern subject matter

‘The portrait of the worker in his smock is certainly worth as much as the portrait of a prince in his golden robes.’

Courbet on the figures who inspired ‘The Stonebreakers’

‘the most complete expression of poverty’’

Carlyle's belief

“there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work.”

Brown on ‘Work’

‘At that time extensive excavations, connected with the supply of water, were going on in the neighbourhood, and, seeing and studying daily as I did the British excavator, or navvy in the full swing of his activity (with his manly and picturesque costume, and with the rich glow of colour which exercise under a hot sun will impart), it appeared to me that he was at least as worthy of the powers of an English painter as the fisherman of the Adriatic, the peasant of the Campagna, or the Neapolitan *lazzarone*. Gradually this idea developed itself into that of *Work* as it now exists, with the British excavator for the central group, as the outward and visible type of *Work*.’

Brown on foreground figures in ‘Work’

“Ragged dirty brats, who get in the way and make a noise.” 

Lina Nochlin on the city

The heart of contemporary darkness - exciting, rich in potentiality for the ambitious, threatening to the weak, destructive of traditional mores, creator of novelties, of anonymity, breeder of the pervasive modern diseases of anomie, alienation and ennui. (1970)

Baudelaire on Manet and the city

‘To enjoy the crowd is an art’ - Baudelaire. Manet developed the art to an extraordinary degree. It is with him that the city becomes the source of a pictorial viewpoint.

Zola on ‘The Street Singer’

‘nature which seems to me to have been analysed with extreme simplicity and exactitude…one senses in it an acute search for the truth, the conscientious work of a man who wants, above all, to state frankly what he sees’.

Thore on the mission of art

‘the mission of art…is precisely to create plastic forms adequate to the ideas and mores of each era’. (1865)

Baudelaire on Manet’s ‘Music in the Tuileries Garden’

The participants in Manet’s painting are dressed a la mode in fashions which will be deeply unfashionable next season.

‘In order that any particular modernity may be worthy of eventually becoming antiquity, it is necessary that the mysterious beauty involuntarily lent to it by human life should be distilled from it.’ (Baudelaire) 

Zola on ‘Olympia’

‘that girl of our day, whom we have met on the sidewalks.’

Castagnary on ‘The portrait of Emile Zola’

‘one of the best portraits in the Salon’

Odilon Redon on ‘The portrait of Emile Zola’

‘it is rather a still life, so to speak, than the expression of a human being’.

Zola on being painted by Manet

‘He forgot about me, he no longer knew that I was there, he was copying me as he would have copied any human beast whatsoever, with an attentiveness, an artistic conscientiousness I have never seen elsewhere’.

Zola on Manet

* ‘looking at nature as it is, without seeing it through the works or opinions of others.’
* Manet analysed nature ‘with care’ and that his works have ‘the charm of a precise description made in an original and human language.’
* What interests me…is to find within each \[artwork\] an artist, a brother, who shows me nature with a new face, with all the power or gentleness of his personality’.
* ‘an extremely delicate accuracy in the relationships between hues’.
* ‘His paintings are blond and luminous; they have a firm and solid paleness.’
* ‘in terms of large areas of interrelated colour..From this derives a great simplicity, almost without details, an ensemble of accurate and delicate areas of colour which at a few paces give the painting its powerful relief’.
* ‘a slightly dry, but charming gracefulness’.
* Manet must be judged not ‘as a moralist or writer but as a painter.  ’

John Berger 1972

‘’Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it.’

The Goncourts, 1865

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on Tradition

‘It is true that the great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established.’

He believes there are some artists who could establish it.

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on Beauty

‘...all centuries and all peoples have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours.’

He believed beauty could exist in any age

‘All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and the particular. Absolute  and eternal beauty does not exist….’

Transitory means the fleeting - something that is impermanent.

Karl Marx (1848)

‘what characterises this moment is the constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty’ 

Theres always something new.

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on the suffering age

‘Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol of a perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders?’

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on Recording Heroism

‘The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences - criminals and kept women - which drift about in the underworld of a great city…. All prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognise our heroism.’

Artist aren’t responding to the natural world thy should be recording heroism, things like fashionable lives and the world of criminality or of a courtesan.

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on the city

‘The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous, but we do not notice it.’

Fascinated by the city and it’s subjects but saying we don’t notice them.

On the Heroism of Modern Life: Baudelaire on the nude

‘The nude - that darling of the artists, that necessary element of success - is just as frequent and necessary today as it was in the life of the ancients; in bed, for example, or in the bath, or in the anatomy theatre.’

Saying we can still find great subjects but just elsewhere.

The Painter of Modern Life (1863) (1860) - Baudelaire on a great artist

‘The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk….But genius is nothing more nor less that childhood recovered at will.’

He believes a great artist is like a child, fascinated by all that it around them.

The Painter of Modern Life (1863) (1860) - Baudelaire on Constantin Guys

‘I might perhaps call him (Constantin Guys) a dandy.  He is a master of that only too difficult art of being sincere without being absurd.’

A dandy is someone who’s very established but not connected to anything, they float around the world.

The Painter of Modern Life (1863) (1860) - Baudelaire on subject matter of artists

‘The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.’

Writing about Guys but the insight can be matched to Manet.

\

‘By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent….’

Ephemeral and fugitive is the fleeting. The contingent is the thing that happens unexpectedly

Walter Benjamin on the flaneur

‘The street became a dwelling place for the flaneur…he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.’

Both Baudelaire and Manet adopted the stance of the flaneur, the perpetual idler, the browser, the window shopper.

Robert Hughes on conciseness

‘Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace.’

\
‘Cultivate your memory; for nature will never give you more than information….No set pieces! Please, no set pieces.’

Delacroix on ‘Afternoon in Ornans’

‘Have you ever seen anything like it, anything so strong, with no dependence on anyone else?’

Castagnary on …

‘sterility…arbitrariness…he distributes his personages haphazardly….uncertainty and often the obscurity of his thought.’

Mantz on …

‘this mindless painting.’

Chaumelin on …

‘no expression, no feeling, no composition.’

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on modernist writing

‘Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain.’

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on the unique in art

‘The unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.’

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on purpose of Modernism

‘Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on Manet

‘Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.’

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on flatness

‘Flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art.’

‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): Greenberg on what is seen first

‘Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first.’

Mallarme (1876)

“The participation of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France is a social fact that will honour the whole close of the nineteenth century. A parallel is found in artistic matters, the way being prepared by an evolution which the public with rare prescience dubbed . . . Intransigeant, which in political language means radical and democratic.”

Meyer Schapiro on painters themes

Meyer Schapiro on subject matter

‘First, there are natural spectacles, landscapes or city-scenes, regarded from the viewpoint of a relaxed spectator, a vacationist or sportsman, who values the landscape chiefly as a source of agreeable sensations or mood.’

‘artificial spectacles and entertainments – the theatre, the circus, the horse-race, the athletic field, the music-hall’

Meyer Schapiro on typical subjects of modern painting

‘situations in which we are consumers and spectators; objects which we confront intimately, but passively or accidentally, or manipulate idly and in isolation – these are typical subjects of modern painting.’

‘realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing atmospheres’

Meyer Schapiro on Impressionist techniques

‘And in the new Impressionist techniques which broke things up into finely discriminated points of colour, as well as in the ‘accidental’ momentary vision, he found, in a degree hitherto unknown in art, conditions of sensibility closely related to those of the urban promenader and the refined consumer of luxury goods.’

It’s not just about the things they’ve painted but also the way they painted them.

Greenberg on Pissarro’s work

Talks about the tendency of Pissarro’s work ‘toward monotony, its frequent lack of incisiveness and motion.He allowed his perception of the free atmospheric diffusion of light to hush and merge all salient features…and would mistake uniformity for unity.’

Maurice Denis on the essence of a painting

"Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order." (Art et Critique August 1890)

David Sylvester on Cezanne’s way of painting

* ‘An anxiety that things should be kept at arm’s length could be placated by using the act of painting to ascertain and map precisely where things out there were.’
* ‘his interest in doing it could be sustained only if things were given a right to live, to vibrate, to dance, to threaten to jump out of place’

Consider **Still Life with Apples and Oranges**, c.1898

David Sylvester on Cezanne’s ‘Still Life with Apples and Oranges’, c.1898

* ‘a heavy patterned textile pushed and pulled so that it resembles a range of hills
* ‘those animated spheres seem to be moving towards us as if threatening to spill over the edge of the cliff’

David Sylvester on Cezanne and Poussin’s placement

Cezanne and Poussin seem unable to make an image that isn’t ‘imbued with gravity’.

‘everything in the picture seems to be in a place ordained for it’

Consider **Great Bathers**, 1898-1906.

David Sylvester on ‘Great Bathers’, 1898-1906

‘a figure-composition by the mature Cezanne looks as if the artist had focused entirely on questions of form, leaving the content to look after itself.’

Charles Blanc on colour

‘Colour, which is controlled by fixed laws, can be taught like music’ Charles Blanc, *Grammaire des arts du dessin* (1867).

Felix Feneon on neo-impressionism

The warmly supportive critic Felix Feneon coined the word ‘neo-impressionists’ although Seurat would have preferred ‘chromo-luminarists’.

* ‘To synthesize landscapes in a definite aspect which will preserve the sensation implicit in them is the neo-impressionists’ endeavour.’

Gustave Kahn on Seurat’s ‘Chahut’

‘If you are looking at all costs for a symbol, you will find it in the contrast between the beauty of the dancer, an elegant and modest sprite, and the ugliness of her admirer; in the hieratic structure of the canvas and its subject, a contemporary ignominy’

Meyer Schaprio on Puvis’s influence on Seurat

Puvis’ **Doux Pays** was shown in the 1882 Salon. His work is monumental, stable, austere and harmonious

Seurat ‘converted the idealised imagery of Puvis into a corresponding modern scene which retained, however, something of the formality of a classic monumental style.’

Meyer Schapiro on Bathers at Asniere

* ‘Marvellous delicacy of tone, the uncountable variations within a narrow range, the vibrancy and soft lustre….’
* ‘Solid masses emerge from an endless scattering of fine points…’
* ‘artificial micro-pattern serves the painter as a means of ordering, proportioning and nuancing sensation’
* ‘The picture as a finely structured surface made up of an infinite number of superposed units attached to the canvas’
* ‘His touch is completely candid’

Meyer Schapiro on ‘A Sunday at La Granda Jatte’

* ‘In the **Grande Jatte** we move with the crowd from right to left, placing ourselves on the eye-level of each successive figure in the foreground.’


* The main figures ‘are a secular congregation, grave and ceremonious, in their holiday communion with the summer light and air.’

Ernst Bloch on Seurat’s painting

Describe it as

* ‘the negative foil to Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe’,
* ‘its mood of gaiety gone sour’.
* ‘This picture is one single mosaic of boredom’. ‘Empty-faced people rest in the foreground; most of the others have been grouped into wooden verticals like dolls from the toy box, intensely involved in a stiff little walk’. He says there is a ‘a great load of joyless leisure in the image’.

Paul Adam on Seurat’s ‘La Grande Jatte’

The expressionless faces, isolated stances, and rigid postures in Seurat’s painting.

Paul Adam equated the stiff outlines and attitudinizing postures of the figures with the modern condition:

‘Even the stiffness of these people, their punched-out forms, help to give the sound of the modern, to recall our badly cut clothes, clinging tight to our bodies, the reserve of our gestures, the British cant we all imitate.’

Gauguin on his ‘The Spirit of the Dead Watching’

‘General harmony, sombre sad, fearful, intoning in the eye like a death-knell: violet, dark blue and orangey yellow.’ 

Roger Fry on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

‘These artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.’

Felix Feneon on A Sunday Afternoon on

The Lesser Arts, William Morris, 1878

‘Unless something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest for the mind in the aspect of their own and their neighbours' houses, until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful places, whose education enables them, in the contemplation of the past glories of the world, to shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men move in. Sirs, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this and say that on such terms I do not wish her to live. I protest that it would be a shame to an honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled up to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to sit and eat dainty food amongst starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort.’

William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts’, 1878

Whistler at his 1878 libel trial

‘I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in my work, divesting the picture from any outside sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it.  It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first, and I make use of any incident of it which shall bring about a symmetrical result.’

English Art and Modernism, Charles Harrison, 1900-1939 (1981)

\

Frith’s friend on ‘Ramsgate Sands’

\
‘a piece of vulgar cockney business unworthy of being represented even in an illustrated paper.’

Holman Hunt on aim of the Pre-Raphaelites

\
‘It is simply fuller Nature we want. Revivalism, whether it be classicism or mediaevalism, is a seeking after dry bones’

Ruskin on ‘The Awakening Conscience’

‘There is not a single object in all that room, common, modern, vulgar…but it becomes tragical if rightly read. Painting takes its proper place beside literature.’ - The Times 25 May 1854 (Ruskin)

Maxime du Camp on Oedipus and the Sphinx

‘Each part of his painting is reasoned and pondered with serious concern.’

Saint-Victor on Oedipus and the Sphinx

‘Everything is concerted and premeditated … not a useless feature, not a detail that does not bear the imprint of reflection.’

Gustave Moreau on imagination

‘I believe only in what I do not see and solely in what I feel.’

He creates spaces of the imagination

Sidney Colvin (1867) on beauty

\
‘Pictorial art addresses itself directly to the sense of sight; to the emotions and the intellect only indirectly, through the medium of the sense of sight. The only perfection of which we can have direct cognizance through the sense of sight is perfection of forms and colours; therefore perfection of forms and colours - beauty, in a word - should be the prime object of pictorial art.’