Assignment 1: The Critic’q s Choice Points: 120 Meets Minimum Expectations Criteria Unacceptable Below 60% F 60-69% D 70-79% C 80-89% B 90-100% A 1. Describe the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Did not submit or incompletely described the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Did not submit or incompletely classified the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Insufficiently described the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Partially described the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Satisfactorily described the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Thoroughly described the artwork in terms of subject, medium, composition, and use of color. Insufficiently classified the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Partially classified the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Satisfactorily classified the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Thoroughly classified the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Did not submit or incompletely analyzed the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Did not submit or incompletely explained your personal view of the work and made a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. No references provided Insufficiently analyzed the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Partially analyzed the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Satisfactorily analyzed the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Thoroughly analyzed the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Insufficiently explained your personal view of the work and made a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. Does not meet the required number of references; all references poor quality choices. Partially explained your personal view of the work and made a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. Does not meet the required number of references; some references poor quality choices. Satisfactorily explained your personal view of the work and made a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. Meets number of required references; all references high quality choices. Thoroughly explained your personal view of the work and made a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. Exceeds number of required references; all references high quality choices. More than 8 errors present 7-8 errors present 5-6 errors present 3-4 errors present 0-2 errors present Weight: 30% 2. Classify the work of art, highlighting the style, movement, and any innovation the artist displayed. Weight: 20% 3. Analyze the relationship between the work of art and the influences on the artist that shape the interpretation of the art. Weight: 20% 4. Explain your personal view of the work and make a recommendation for or against the public viewing the work. Weight: 15% 6. Include 3 references to support your claims. (The text may be used as one reference.) Weight: 5% 7. Clarity, writing mechanics, and formatting requirements Weight: 10% Fair Proficient Exemplary Chapter 2 Seurat, Cezanne, and the Language of Structure Introduction • In his text Wilenski describes the reaction against Impressionism in French painting during the 1880s as a general classical revival. • According to this recipe, Renoir, Seurat, and Cezanne expressed their dissatisfaction with naturalistic accuracy, which was basic to the Impressionists program, by reverting to classical French tradition and stressing the more enduring architectonic elements of pictorial structure. • For some of the Post-Impressionists styles also represented and effort to preserve Naturalism while re-establishing the fundamentals of traditional pictorial design and structure. • Renoir did so by monumentalizing his figures and enlarging his manner; Seurat would pay homage to the spirit of Naturalism under the aegis of “science”; Cezanne would build his most arbitrary formal inventions around the prismatic colors of Impressionism and invest them with the vivacity of his own fresh, sensory perceptions of nature. Introduction • Although these artists rejected the spontaneity and “formlessness” of the conventional Impressionists painting, they nonetheless absorbed and extended the movement’s basic values and especially its pragmatic, scientific spirit. • The artist’s sensations before observed nature were considered indispensable. • They made themselves felt within a more carefully articulated pictorial structure. • Within this structure they focused on conceptual program and analytical thought. • The vital, new traditions of observation and direct painting methods were respected, but more universal application of the old principles was sought. • We even see Monet stretching his art to the every edge of abstraction. Introduction • • Opposed to the magnificent later work of the reconstituted Impressionists, who had admittedly altered and enhanced their styles but retained elements of their earlier attachment to Naturalism, was a profoundly anti-naturalistic reaction. The common denominator among French painters in the PostImpressionists period was the search for new types of subjects and new forms of representation. • There was an evident effort to deepen the meaning of art by a conceptual, rather than perceptual approach. • The final 15 years of the 19 th century became fertile ground for active generation of revolutionary and creative individuals. • They surged up in every field of human concern; and many gave an expressive voice to the peculiar schizoid nature of modern life, polarized by its attraction to the extremes of the romantic and the real. Introduction • Henri Bergson characterized the world as dualistic: the life fore and the resistance of the material world to that force.  On the one hand, humans know and measure matter through their intellect, which they use to formulate the doctrines of science and to apprehend things as entities set out as separate units within a stream of becoming.  On the other, humans are endowed with intuition, which gives them an intimation of the life force that pervades all becoming. • While all great Post-Impressionists would bring new tension and excitement to art by acknowledging and counterbalancing the dualities of mind and spirit, the commensurate and the incommensurate, the real and the romantic, Seurat and Cezanne found their resolution mainly through intellect. Georges Seurat Georges Seurat • Both Seurat and Cezanne transcended their “sensations” of nature by creating more abstract and impersonal styles in a radical new structural language of color form. • In their paintings they treated the sensuous, palpable things of nature but reorganized them according to the dictates of a lofty intellectual ideal. • Seurat’s resolute “scientific” objectivity and Cezanne’s structuralism were opposed. • It is a measure of the universality of the search for new expressive content that even so circumspect a formalists as Seurat, for all his devotion to science, tried to imbue his painting with a new emotional resonance. Georges Seurat • Whether drawn to scientific explanations of artistic methods, like Seurat was, or to symbols of human suffering and spirituality, the Post-Impressionists shared a common impulse in establishing an art that went beyond realism. • Bathers was Seurats first public • His dislodging his forms from their surrounding atmosphere, established them in space, and created a tension between them and the space they inhabited. evidence of defection from Impressionism. Georges Seurat • Unlike Impressionists, whose preference ran to scenes of preindustrial freshness and innocence, Seurat, a passionate Socialists, tended to take his subjects from the urban and suburban world of working-class Paris. • In the Bathers, he dignified each figure with a sculptural roundness, while softening contours so that they merge hazily with a living, sundrenched atmosphere. • We see a carefully thought-out architectural organization, and also a sense of virtually inexhaustible variety within the otherwise strictly planned formal scheme. Georges Seurat • Seurat carefully controlled the space and volume of his paintings and he has also calculated the character of the scene it depicts. • Each figure is sharply typed as a personality by some expressive detail of dress or gesture. • Seurat’s remarkable powers of generalization extended the Impressionists' swift glimpse of a “moment in time” and made an episode stand for something customary and permanent in human activity. • He also found a form that could withstand patient and studied contemplation. • As a method of working, Impressionists attempted to seize the immediate fragment of vision before nature and set it down with a minimum of ratiocination. Georges Seurat • Impressionists wished precisely to give the impression of something entirely nature and unarranged. • Seurat composed with unashamed deliberation and scrupulous care for characteristic details, working up the picture from countless drawings, etc. • • His forms take their place in a preordained, conceptual scheme of things that obeys certain immutable pictorial conventions. His methods initiated a new expression of artistic will. • While rebelling against his academic training, he still adhered to the masterful drawings. • Note pages 25-26 provides Seurat’s academic history as well as his traveling artistic history and the development of his technique. • His subjects were commonly of peasants or laboring-class origin. • His subjects are of rare character in the 19th century. Georges Seurat • Through the Independents Salon of 1884 where he met Paul Signac they developed Neo-Impressionism (which began to emerge with Bathers): which seeming to imply that this fresh approach had eclipsed the old Impressionist manner. • Seurat and his friends rationalized discoveries that the Impressionists already know intuitively and applied to their painting without conscious research or pedagogy. • Seurat’s intense devotion to color theory may be understood as part of the scientific awareness of his historical period, which was sustained by the belief that everything could be formulated and explained in terms of natural law. • In the mid-1880s Seurat became convinced that the elementary rules of harmony could be established in painting. Georges Seurat • Seurat also claimed that the manifold elements of painting could be simplified and codified, in “tone, tint, and line.” • 1184: Seurat began the methodical application of his theories in a painting project. • Review discussion of Figure 25 and 26 on page 27-28. Paul Cezanne Paul Cezanne • The new interest in the solid presence of objects and a deeper concern with the more permanent and formal aspects of nature are even more dramatically illustrated by the revolutionary and profoundly influential paintings of Cezanne. • Because of the impact of his experiments on the 20 th century, Cezanne has been called “the father of modern art.” • In the course of his life he succeeded in producing art of clarity and calm by bringing into equilibrium a whole array of warring objectives: the orderliness of classical form and accidentality of nature, the synthetic on the one hand and the imitative on the other, the immutable and the momentary. Paul Cezanne • • While observing an actual bit of nature, he sought within his “sensations” of the motif the alterations that would enable him to “realize” a reconstruction of this subject, a reconstruction offering both the timeless, “unnatural” perfection of a Poussin and the naturalness and instantaneity so esteemed by the Impressionists. • He was able to find a solution to the age-old problem of resolving the conflict between the threedimensional space of external reality and the two-dimensional limits of the painting surface. • This solution brought with it a new synthesis of line and color, elements long viewed as rivals. While deriving order out of nature and his sensations of it, he also hoped to preserve in his art something of nature’s organic quality. • Page 29 starts Cezanne’s educational history. Chapter One Modernism and Its Origins in the 19th Century Modernism and Its Origins in the 19th Century  One of the defining characteristics of modern art is the amount of vigorous debate every aspect of it has forever stirred, not least the issue of when such art began (or when it ended).  Some argue that the origins of 20th century art go back as far as 1750s, when the 18th Century Enlightenment sparked an aesthetic rehabilitation.  Some focus on the year 1839 with the invention of photography.  More frequently 1855 is cited as the beginning of modern which was the year of the Paris Exposition, where Gustave Courbet laid a solid foundation for the new patronage by building his own pavilion and there displaying such grandly iconoclastic works as The Painter's Studio (Fg. 12).  1863 is often cited when Emperor Napoleon III allowed a Salon des Refuses to take place. Modernism and Its Origins in the 19th Century  In 1874 the modernists movement made its next decisive inroad into Western conscious when the conflict between the values of French art establishment and those of younger artists ignited a rebellion.  Progressive painters of Paris pooled their resources and mounted their own exhibition, where many of the earmarks of modernism would become increasingly familiar.  For the purposes of the course and the text, we are starting the conversation in 1886, after the last of eight Impressionist exhibitions in Paris and with the birth of the Independents Salon.  The term most often used is "PostImpressionism."  It should be noted that from the 15th century Renaissance onward, Westerners have consistently thought of themselves as modern. Modernism and Its Origins in the 19th Century  The Industrial Revolution and advances in science and technology drove this identification with the "modern" label.  Artists found innovation itself to be highly emblematic.  The old pyramidal hierarchies collapsed.  If the world since the mid-19th century has succeeded in co-opting the term "modern" for its very own period designation, it was, in substantial part, because those who seemed most tellingly to represent the age in cultural forms discovered a model, in the evermore insistent, urbanized present, especially as experienced in the city of Paris and its environs.  The creators of modern art were themselves the products of history. The Renaissance and Its Heirs The Renaissance and Its Heirs  While modernism might seem a venerable tradition, having endured well over a century, Monet and the Impressionists, in order to come into their their own as "painters of modern life," had to prevail against a Renaissance aesthetic still dominate in European art after more than 400 years.  We see the perfection of Renaissance art in Raphael's School of Athens (Fig. 2) The Renaissance and Its Heirs  In contrast to Italian painters’ linear perspective, Flemish painters had achieved a comparable illusion by a system known as aerial perspective.  From time to time over the years, Renaissance mastery degenerated into mannerism, only to inspire new talents capable of reforming an reviving it.  For early 16th century, this was thrillingly modern art, an art, moreover, whose seamless union of the real and the ideal proved so ripe with potential, for variations in both form and meaning, that it became the lingua fanca of European civilization for many generations thereafter.  Note that the same system devised for representing the world in a rational, objective manner could also be made to project quite the opposite, that is irrational flights of fantasy, heavenly apotheosis, or even willful perversity. The Renaissance and Its Heirs  David’s Oath of the Horatii exemplify the aspect (note the detailed explanation and exploration on page 11).  David commenced the modernist process of abandoning the representational “tricks” invented by the Renaissance, which absolutists rulers had transformed into an instrument of authoritarian power, and of acknowledging the three-dimensional world in some manner that would not also evade the reality of the painting surface. The Renaissance and Its Heirs  If David’s painting and technique shattered the grand unity so brilliantly articulated by Raphael, it nonetheless offered the merit of reflecting the ever-greater contradiction and instability of modern life.  Ingres injected Romantic erotica into his works; indulging his gift for color and line.  Ingres’s approach helped to serve to sanction modernism’s search for inspiration outside the classical world of high Western art.  Eventually, modernists would draw sustenance not only from Asia but also from African and Oceania, as well as from such readily available “low” or “marginal” sources as folk and popular art, children’s art, graffiti, and other aspects of art brut, including the work of the insane. The Renaissance and Its Heirs  More important for Manet and the Impressionists was the enrichment that the painters had long been finding in the so-called minor categories of artistic production-landscape, still life, and genre.  Nicolas Poussin is credited with making landscape a proper subject for artists.  His paintings were the first to be called “heroic.” The Renaissance and Its Heirs  Insofar as modern art originated in an urgent desire to escape academic formula, its ultimate roots may be uncovered deep in the 18th century, after nascent industrialization struck many, especially Rousseau, as the lethal foe of “natural man,” the creative person whose essential instinct or vital fore could scarcely be expected to flourish in a world dominated by standardized products and routinized labor.  The factory system is seen as repressive; within the academy a hierarchy developed (pg. 13) of devices.  Liberation from the academic system was sought after by many modern artists.  The route to modernism, therefore, lay not through history painting, but instead, through landscape rendered with scintillating color and chiaroscuro and began with Lorraine. Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period  In the 19th century, modernism all but arrived once a trio of nonFrench Northerners conflated Poussin's heroic simplicity, Claude's luminism, and Dutch realism to revisualize the natural realm as a place of sublime revelation.  Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea renders the Baltic shore to three basic elements-land, sea, and sky. Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period  Rosenblum wrote “Monk by the Sea seems to pinpoint for the first time not only the modern experience of what Soren Kierkegaard would soon identify as alienation and what would later be called by 20th-century Existentialists the gulf between “Being and Nothingness,” but also the daring pursuits of many modern artists, from Turner to Rothko, who, escaping from the material world, tried to distill the mysteries of nature and spirit in veils of atmospheric color.” (pg. 13).  Turner examined nature as closely as a scientists might.  As in late Baroque exploitations of one-point perspective, an artists pushed concrete, measurable experiences until it dissolved into the strange and the incommensurate. (These breakthroughs would happen time and time again in modern art). Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period  John Constable painted careful, loving records of the countryside which appeared to be naturalism itself.  If Turner and Constable proved decisive in preparing the way for the modernism unleashed by Manet and the Impressionists, it was, in large part, owing to the impact the English painters had on Delacroix, who declared himself a “pure classicist.”  Delacroix found his fabled process not only in a broadened, whiplash version of Venetian or Rubensian painterliness but, more important, in a precocious insight about optical science. Realism/Naturalism Realism/Naturalism  More and more the most independent French artists forfeited the security of academic training, as well as the official patronage this promised, for a cherished doctrine of freedom-freedom to cultivate self-expression, to spurn the claims of social utility, and to prosper without resorting to the money-grubbing activities of the shop- and factory-owning class.  The affluent bourgeoisie felt the same pressures from the urban industrial environment as did the landscapists, they became avid buyers of “Barbizon art,” its freely brushed views of unspoiled nature, country villages and simple peasants appearing to offer a reassuringly updated synthesis of landscape tradition.  A culminating moment came when Courbet set up his pavilion outside of Paris’s 1855 Universal Exhibition, as the same time that he also exhibited a large group of paintings at the concurrent Salon. Realism/Naturalism  Note the description of Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio on page 14.  This painting broke free of whatever came before it in the 19th century painting and set a standard of ambition for much that would follow.  Although more overt in his social engagement than would be typical of mainstream modernists, Courbet confirmed his modernity not only in the flattening materialism of his painted surfaces; he also asserted it in the democracy of his generally monochromatic palette. Realism/Naturalism  During this era we see the rise of Balzac’s Human Comedy and Marx’s Communists Manifesto (to name a few texts).  Daumier in his works mercilessly caricatured exploiters of the poor at the same time that he consistently dignified the victims.  With is fluent, summarizing touch and his eye steadily focused upon the follies and foibles of contemporary French society he made himself a true artist of modern life.  Along with other artists, Courbet and Daumier would become a cherished ancestor to a long line of politically active, socially conscious artists whose work has provided rich accompaniment to the more purely formal interests of 29th century modernism. Edouard Manet Edouard Manet  Manet emerged as the first true painter of modern life through a process of mastering Renaissance conventions until he could work the irony of translating their literalized fiction.  The paintings of Bouguereau gratified the conservative Salon public for the very good reason that, by making a scene of pseudo-innocent, Arcadian frolic look as real as a tinted photography, they afforded the male members of a repressed, hypocritical society the occasion to savior ripe feminine flesh under the pretext of appreciating the pure, uplifting world of Classical antiquity.  Carried out by the Emperor’s Perfect, Baron Haussmann, these would gradually transform medieval Paris onto a Neoclassical façade or spectacle so dazzling that an illegitimate, autocratic regime might hope to gain prestige and conceal or contain whatever social unrest continued to fester in postRevolutionary France. Edouard Manet  Such were the distractions of this unprecedentedly glamorous world of pleasure and entertainment that it brought into being a whole new subset of class bourgeois society.  Manet found himself at home in Haussmann’s modern, brilliantly planned, man-man world.  For Manet’s famous painting we see he mocks the academy and the grand bourgeois. Edouard Manet  Manet’s painting became one of the greatest scandals of art history (discussed on pg. 16).  In 1864 Manet’s work was rejected by those who defended the tradition he was working against.  Manet chose to develop a technique for manifesting originality of a totally different order, an order more sensitive than ever to such Romantic, or indeed, Realists/Naturalists, qualities as “sincerity,” “truth,” and “selfexpression.”  These are profoundly human values, remote from the cool inhumanity often ascribed to modernist abstractions, the genesis of whose development art history tends to locate in Manet’s startling departures from academic practices. Edouard Manet  Modernism unfounded in an ever, more addictive thirst for originality, creativity, or “authenticity,” if not in regard to self and nature, then increasingly to self and medium, forever eliminating old or even current possibilities while searching for new ones until, in the years after WWII, options would narrow virtually to zero.  Modernists believed that if they purified their language, or form, of their work, the better the art might serve society by providing a utopian paradigm for dealing with its ever-greater complexity.  For modernists, art must be understood as a representation of the paired models, or originals, a translation of nature into culture whose success depended upon the artist’s ability to discover a technique or formal language capable of communicating to the world at a large meaning recognizably unlike anything ever seen before. Impressionism Impressionism  Manet played mentor to the Impressionists but never participated in their shows or adopted their for more maverick approach to the challenge of becoming painters of modern life.  In April 1874: Impressionists artists exhibited at the studio of Felix Nadar; and it is often thoughts to have evolved a group style (and to a degree this is true).  The technique could be learned or “made,” it is important to note that style emerged from the unique, unavoidable singular way each of the artists inflected what was essentially a painterly means of conveying the effect of direct, personal response to a slice of vital, present life seized, upon the moment and unaware, as if by a candid camera.  Style together with themes became the “found” element of Impressionists. Impressionism  It is important to read through each artist’s style and note their works (be sure to view the images in the text with the descriptions).  Monet and the Impressionists created an image of the world that remains virtually without parallel in the history of art.  The impression of spontaneity was key to these artists.  The connection to photography is strong for these artists; involving viewers in a greater human relationship with the painting. The Crisis of Impressionism The Crisis of Impressionism  By the early 1880s, Impressionism as an aesthetic of instantaneity had begun to seem to ephemeral and formless, a “crisis” acknowledged first by the Impressionists themselves.  Thereafter, during the fin-de-siècle years, detachment and directness towards the contemporary world virtually disappeared from advanced painting, as one ingenious artist after another elaborated or simplified Impressionism’s so-called “group” style into a variety of new “corrective” possibilities.  Here we enter the “Post-Impressionist” phase.  Post-Impressionists launched the characteristic modernist process of continuous self-regeneration through practical or analytical self-criticism. 
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