Realism

1850-1880
Accurate and objective description of the ordinary, observable world
Positivism
Truthful depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer
Portrays the lives, appearances, problems, etc of the middle and lower
classes.
Appeared after the 1848 Rev. in France, reaction against Victorian
materialism

List of Works:
1. Daumier, Rue Transnonain, 1834
a. Lithographic print of the atrocities by the government.
b. Moment shown is the bloody aftermath of the event.
c. Biting caricature and social commentary in print form.
d. Image can travel to a large audience.
e. Caused censorship laws 1835.
f. World is hungry for mass-produced images.
2. Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
a. One of the first artists to call himself "avant-garde" or "Realist."
b. Stonebreakers represent the disenfranchised peasants on whose
backs modern life was being built.
c. The boy represents a grim future, while the man signifies an
increasingly obsolete rural past.
i. Both are faceless laborers.
d. Intended to make a political statement.
i. By rendering labor on the scale of a history painting, he
intended to provoke.
ii. He suggests that even the lowest in society could be
venerated as heroes.
e. Instead of the usual highly finished academic style and inspiring
message, his canvas reveals the brutality of modern life, his rough
use of paint, dull, dark colors, awkward poses, and stilted
composition making the scene feel realistic, gloomy, and degrading.
f. First socialist picture ever.
3. Millet, The Gleaners, 1857

a.
b.
c.
d.

Despite its warm colors, the scene is one of extreme poverty.

Described as "Realist" Implied social criticism.
Modern industrial life of peasants farming.
Painter that paints for unknown audience.

Modernism

1850Heavily influenced by Impressionism

Importance of the machine as a part of beauty
Importance of subjective experience
The necessity for system to replace the concept of objective reality

List of Works:
1. Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863
a. Most scandalous aspect of the painting was the immorality of his
theme: a suburban picnic featuring two fully dressed bourgeois
gentlemen, a naked woman to the front left, and another scantily
dressed woman in the background.
b. Equally shocking were its references to important works of art of
the past combined with its crude, unvarnished modernity.
c. His modern interpretation of the classical scene combined with his
modern style was intentionally provocative.
d. All its elements suggest the seamier side of city life.
e. Presenting it under a flimsy guise of academic art underlined
Manet's subversiveness.
2. Manet, Olympia, 1863
a. Appears to pay homage to Titian's Venus of Urbino in its subject
matter and composition.
b. Made the modern counterpart the very antithesis of Titian's.
i. Cold harsh, angled face.
ii. Indicates that she is in a position of power and that we are
subordinate, akin to the black servant at the food of the bed.
c. In reversing the Titian, Manet overturns the entire tradition of the
accommodating female nude.
d. Scandalous because viewer couldn't read her particular place in
society.
i. Level of sexual commerce is confusing.
ii. Lower class is written into her body.
3. Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

a. Fascinated by the streets of Paris, especially Haussmann's modern

street plan, and his subjects and compositions characteristically
represent modern life.
b. Unconventional, almost telescopic composition that tilts the
perspective.
c. Street itself seems to be the subject of the painting.
d. Modern subject.
4. Manet, A Bar at the Folies- Bergre, 1881-82
a. Complex theme of gender and class relations in modern urban life.
b. The barmaid is at once detached from the scene and part of it, one
of many items on display for purchase.
c. The image is about sexualized looking and the barmaid's uneasy
reflection in the mirror, which seems to acknowledge that both her
class and gender expose her to visual and even sexual
consumption.
d. Complicated mirroring.
e. Refusal to go to landscape.
f. Contemporary, everyday scene.
g. Familiar but not exact or specific, no narrative.
h. Painter as flaneur, position, space, observer.

Impressionism

Late 1869s late 1890s

Self-reflexive
o Open brushwork, visible means, highly self-conscious and
composed
Thinks very hard
o Choosing which images
Out to capture sensation/impression
o Fascination with light
Invested in experience and moment
Visual = primary sense
Modernist in implication between content and form
o Landscape marked by bourgeois and leisure
o Quickness of culture
Optical realism
Untainted by intellectual preconceptions
Monet
o Plain-air landscape painting

List of Works:
1. Monet, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868
a. Celebrates the semi-rural pleasures of outings to the suburbs.
b. Includes shimmering expanse of water. Intense brightness of colors
makes the first impression one of pure sunlight.
c. Could paint anywhere.
d. Sought to capture the play of light quickly, before it changed.
e. Loosest paint application, sketchiness, very quick, elevating prior
stage.
f. Experiencing it in the moment.
g. Sight-specific painter.
h. Information presses against surface.
2. Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1873
a. Rendered almost entirely as color alone.
b. Forms and atmosphere are shimmering shapes in color.
c. Registers the intensity and shifting forms of a first sketch and
renders it as the final work of art.

d. Gives name to a moment.

e. Split from official language of art.
f. Not a Romantic scene--modern, industrial.
g. Reflections--brushstrokes undefined.
3. Degas, The Rehearsal on Stage, c. 1874
a. Contains acerbic social commentary.
b. Poses show how the life of a dancer is tiresome, involving tedious
hours of work.
c. Captures the soul of modern life.
4. Renoir, Moulin de la Galette, 1876
a. Combined spontaneous handling of natural light with animated
figural compositions.
b. Glamorized the working-class clientele of the dance hall by placing
his artist friends and their models in their midst.
c. He underscores the innocence of their flirtations by including
children in the painting in the lower left, while emphasizing the ease
of their relations through the relaxed informality of the scene.
d. Idyllic image of a carefree time and place encapsulates Renoir's
idea of the essence of art.
e. Quickness and spontaneity.
5. Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grade Jatte, 1884-86
a. Pointillism (more meticulous), Neo-Impressionism.
i. Color theory.
ii. Contains 11 pure colors.
b. Figures represent a range of lower-middle-class types recognizable
to the 19th c. viewer.
c. Gives structure and repetition to Impressionism.
d. Gives culture back its formality.

Post-Impressionism

Modes of interpretation
o Formal/materialist
o Experimental/phenomenological
o Content
Language of its own
Growing dissatisfaction with Impressionism
o Too focused on surfaces
Primitivism and folklore notes with elements of mysticism
Synthetism
Czanne
o Bridge between late 19th century and early 20th century
o Complexity of human visual perception
Gauguin
o Symbolism

List of Works:
1. Czanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire with Pine, c. 1885-87
a. Aimed to make Impressionism more solid and durable.
b. Evergreen frames the scene to the left and echoes the contours of
the mountains, creating visual harmony between the two principal
elements of the composition.
c. The even light, still atmosphere, and absence of human activity
create the sensation of hermetic stillness.
d. Handling of paint is very deliberate and controlled.
e. Created a composition in accordance with a harmony that he felt
the scene demanded, rather than from the details of the scene
itself.
f. Realization that painting is a material object, line and color on a
canvas.
g. Careful implication of looking and understanding.
2. Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
a. Painting from careful observation and the artist's imagination.
b. The idea of death is rendered visible in the painting by the cypress
tree, a traditional symbol of both death and eternal life, which rises
dramatically to link the terrestrial and celestial realms.

c. The brightest star in the sky is actually a planet, Venus, which is

associated with love.
d. Possibly expresses Van Gogh's euphoric hope of gaining in death
the love that had eluded him in life.
e. Brushwork is immediate, expressive, and intense.
f. Resistance of the real.
3. Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892
a. Called his style "synthetism," because he believed it synthesized
observation and the artist's feelings about a subject in an
abstracted application of line and color.
b. Implicitly suggests that the painting represents a scene from
Tahitian religion, but there is no evidence.
c. Shows the late-19th c. desire to get away from the oppressive life of
the city, and to get back to so-called primitive versions of culture.
d. Equates tropical with the sensual.
e. Power relations present.
i. Sexual freedom.
f. Ornament acknowledges flatness.
g. Imagining, dreaming.

Expressionism

Late 19th- Early 20th century

Emphasized artists subjective emotion
Frequently distorted or altered
Violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional
expression.
Fauvism
o From 1905
o Revolutionized concept of color
o Full of violent color and bold distortions

List of Works:
1. Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
a. Painting from careful observation and the artist's imagination.
b. The idea of death is rendered visible in the painting by the cypress
tree, a traditional symbol of both death and eternal life, which rises
dramatically to link the terrestrial and celestial realms.
c. The brightest star in the sky is actually a planet, Venus, which is
associated with love.
d. Possibly expresses Van Gogh's euphoric hope of gaining in death
the love that had eluded him in life.
e. Brushwork is immediate, expressive, and intense.
f. Resistance of the real.
2. Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892
a. Called his style "synthetism," because he believed it synthesized
observation and the artist's feelings about a subject in an
abstracted application of line and color.
b. Implicitly suggests that the painting represents a scene from
Tahitian religion, but there is no evidence.
c. Shows the late-19th c. desire to get away from the oppressive life of
the city, and to get back to so-called primitive versions of culture.
d. Equates tropical with the sensual.
e. Power relations present.
i. Sexual freedom.
f. Ornament acknowledges flatness.
g. Imagining, dreaming.

3. Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06

a. Large pastoral landscape depicting a golden age.
b. Academic in scale and theme, but avant-garde in other respects--in
the way the figures appear flattened and in the distortion of the
spatial relations between them.
c. Emphasizes expressive color and draws on the tradition of folk art
in his use of unmodeled forms and strong outlines.
4. Matisse, The Woman With the Hat, 1905
a. Interested in deliberate disharmonies.
b. Controversial because of its thick swatches of crude, arbitrary, nonnaturalistic color and its broad and blunt brushwork.
c. Not authorized by the subject.
d. Color relations trump subject's wishes.
5. Nolde, Masks, 1911
a. Refers to both the masks he studied in Paris, and to those familiar
to him from European carnivals.
b. By collapsing these traditions together, he transforms sources
drawn from art beyond the Western tradition into a European
nightmare full of horror and implicit violence.
c. Primitivism. Expressionism.
d. Heightened emotional life of painting.
e. Return to Gauguin.
6. Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913
a. Women and men appear as artificial and dehumanized figures, with
masklike faces and stiff gestures.
i. Their bodies crowd together, but they are psychologically
distant from one another.
b. The harsh biting colors, tilted perspective, and piercing sharp
brushstrokes make this a disturbing Expressionistic image of urban
degeneracy and alienation.