Week 4 - Modernism I: Realism, Impressionism, Class Culture

Required Readings:

“Realism”, extract from chapter 30, p798-804

• School painters worked in the 1860s during the civil war be their paintings did not show any evidence of the wars

• Landscape paintings were popular is the late 18th and early 19th centuries largely because of the breath taking and sublime spectacles of nature.

• “landscape painting became the perfect vehicle for artists (and the viewing public) to “naturalise” conditions, rendering debate about contentious issues moot and eliminating any hint of conflict.”

• positivism (look up)

• Gustave Courbet, leading figure of the realism movement known for painting and portraying the working class and the mundane -things that wouldn’t been seen as note worthy-

• Stone Breakers - using dirty colours and greys to convey the real conditions of the work.

• He was rejected from the Salon on the premiss that the paintings were to ‘coarse’ -very socialistic- and too large -there were bigger paintings in the Salon-, they depicted those who were not of a higher class and instead depicted the everyday worker of someone in the working class

• “I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”, he liked to paint things that he has lived through and only paint things that are real and exist. he believed that paintings should show things that are tangible and concrete

• “In place of the heroic, the sublime and the dramatic, Courbet aggressively presents the viewer with the mundane realities of daily life and death”

• The Gleaners - French word for people that come after a harvest and pick up the scraps of fruit that is not used to clean and find food

• Depicting a black maid next to a a white prostitute, racial divisions, moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality

“The Rhetoric of Realism”, p368-372, 377-384

• …

Chosen artist/artwork

Alexandre Cabanel, The Fallen Angel, 1847

• seems like + this is what a historian thinks, for q7

• refer back to the first lecture and fourth lecture (description of modern and modernism), for q9

• modern not modernist, both, or neither, for q9

• you can have a wrong answer

• sources from lectures*, tutorials*, and required readings (i.e. referencing words and definitions from lectures/tutorials)

• you have to Monash recourses

• full stop then citation

• scale of history

• Socio, cultural, political, economic, religious historical contexts (focus on religious fallen angel is a bible painting)

• placing the artwork in a place in history

• challenges an artistic movement (he did)

• -every edgy 14 year olds favourite artwork-

Tutorial notes:

definitions:

Flaneur: common man that walks around, a-political

Realism: the movement

realism: the description (you could walk into the artwork)

avant-garde: (solider that lead the army) artists that try to use their art to prompt viewers to change society for the better

Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1863

• expressive woman seems quite relaxed

• pagan gods

• look at female nude

Mary Cassatt, At the theatre (au theatre), in the loge, ca. 1879, Pastel with gold metallic paint on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art

• Class, use of gold, Depicting the higher class, seen in the use of reds and golds -quite literally using gold metallic paint- (mostly what she is wearing is a high class colour such as yellow/gold)

• leisure, high class activity -worthy of depiction-

• Object of the fan is remnant of orientalism

• Rough marks

• very bright colours

mostly outside, french