Early Modernism:

Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau

Unit 4: Later Europe and America

Historical Background

1848: Revolutions in Sicily, Venice, Germany, Austria, and Lombardy that challenged old order and sought to replace aristocracies with democracies.
1870: Napoleon III replaced the self-styled "citizen-king" (Louis-Phillipe) of France in 1830, which led to a tumultuous time that inspired the Franco-Prussian War.
August Comte (1798-1857) influenced the concept of Positivism. This theory allowed that all knowledge must come from proven ideas based on science or scientific theory. This then inspired other 19th century thinkers like Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Karl Marx (1818-1883).
New inventions: telephones, motion pictures, bicycles, and automobiles.
Avant-garde: 18th century academies were abandoned in the late 19th century. Artists used the past for inspiration, but rejected traditional subject matter. Religious subjects, aristocratic portraits, history paintings, and mythological scenes were gone.
Modernism: artists chose to represent peasant scenes, landscapes, and still-lives.

DATES / HISTORY / KEY PERIODS

1760-1840: Industrial Revolution

1798-1857: August Comte - Positivism = "all knowledge must come from proven ideas based on science/scientific theory"

1803: Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny (United States) (Colonialism)

1804: First steam locomotive begins operation

1812-1815: War of 1812; US and Britain end in draw but Native Americans lose power

1833: The Slavery Abolition Act banned slavery throughout British Empire

1835-1836: Texas Revolution (independence from Mexico)

1844: First publicly funded telegraph line in the world; Baltimore and Washington

1846-1848: Mexican-American War; leads to Mexico's cession of much of the southwestern United States

1848: The Communist Manifesto published

1848: Seneca Falls Convention; leads to battle for women's suffrage

1848: Berlin Revolution/Venice Revolution/Sicilian Revolution/Austrian Revolution

1859: Charles Darwin publishes "On the Origin of Species"

1851: The Great Exhibition in London

1861-1865: American Civil War

1862: France gains foothold in Southeast Asia; annexes Cambodia in 1863 (Colonialism)

1867: USA purchases Alaska from Russia (Colonialism)

1869: Mendeleev creates the Periodic Table

1875/1880: Introduction of large scale electric power utilities (London and New York)

1876-1914: The Gilded Age; massive expansion in population, territory, industry, and wealth in the United States

KEY ART MOVEMENTS

1848-1860s: Realism (height 1850)

- The first "modern" movement in art. Inspired by "positivism."
- Reject traditional forms of art/literature/and social organization.
- Led by Enlightenment and Industrial revolution.
- Replaced idealistic images with real-life events, often images of lower-class depicted with reverence, honesty, and sincerity.
- Early manifestation of avant-garde desire to merge art and life.
- Anti-institution and non-conformist.
- Dark, earthy palettes leading to "ugly" and unpleasant parts of real-life.

1872-1880s: Impressionism (height 1874)

- Emphasis on color and realistic scenes of ordinary subjects.
- Many works completed outdoors "en plein air."
- Thin, small brushtrokes with softer edges.
- Concerned with spontaneous and naturalistic rendering of light and color.
- Contemporary landscapes and scenes from modern life.
- Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) was shown in Paris and inspired the name of the entire movement due to a hazy painting style and possibly to quell accusations of it being unfinished.

1880s-1890s: Post-Impressionism (height 1886)

- Favored emphasis on symbolic content with formal order and structure.
- Stressed artificiality of the picture.
- More inclined to emphasize geometric forms, unnatural colors, and distortion.

1890s: Symbolism

- Seeks to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphors.
- Reaction against Realism.
- Favors spirituality, imagination, and dreams.
- Painters often used mythology but symbols are generally not familiar emblems of mainstream iconography. Intensely personal, private, ambiguous, and obscure.

1890s-1914: Art Nouveau (height 1900)

- Developed in a few artistic centers in Europe: Brussels, Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna.
- Reaction against academic art, eclecticism, and historicism of art/architecture.
- Inspired by nature, asymmetry, and use of modern materials like iron, glass, concrete, etc.
- Relies on vegetal and floral patterns, complexity of design, and undulating surfaces. Straight lines are avoided.
- Designers particularly enjoy using elaborately conceived wrought ironwork for balconies, fences, railings, and structural elements.

Late 19th c. Architecture

Architects and engineers worked in the direction of a curtain wall - a building that is held up by an interior framework, called a skeleton. The exterior wall being a mere curtain made of glass or steel that keeps out the weather.
Emphasis on the vertical. As land values soar in modern cities, architects respond by building up.
Buildings use tall pilasters and setting back windows behind them.
Architects believed their buildings were "works of art" and covered them with decorative adornments like terra cotta or ironwork.
Great architectural advances made by the Chicago School (formed after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871). This inspired the mainstay of 19th century architecture towards materials that survived fire: steel or iron wrapped in terra cotta casings.
Windows were wide and open to let in light and air as well as passerby's being able to see large window displays of products or advertisements.
Chicago Window = central immobile windowpane flanked by two smaller double-hung windows that open for ventilation.

Patronage and Artistic Life

Even though most artists wanted to exhibit at the Salon of Paris, many found the conservative nature of the jury to be stifling, and began to look elsewhere for recognition. Artists whose works were rejected by the Salon set up oppositional showcases, achieving fame by being antiestablishment. Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s were examples of this as well.

One of the greatest changes in the marketing of art came with the emergence of the art gallery. It was a more comfortable setting than the Salon: no great crowds, no idly curious - just the art lover with a dealer in tastefully appointed surroundings.

The persona of the struggling and misunderstood artist grew. These artists fought the conventional aspirations of their family, escaped to more bohemian lifestyles, and worked for years without much success or recognition. Ex: Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.

European artists were greatly influenced by an influx of Japanese art, particularly their highly sophisticated prints of genre scenes or landscapes. These broke European conventional methods of representation, but were still sophisticated and elegant. Japanese art relies on a different sense of depth, enhancing a flatness that dominates the background. Subjects appear at odd angles or on a tilt. This interest in all things Japanese was called Japonisme.

Painters felt that the artificial atmosphere of the studio inhibited artistic expression. In a movement that characterizes Impressionism (en plein-air), artists moved their studio outdoors seeking to captures the effects of atmosphere and light on a given subject.

With the invention of lithography in 1798, great Romantic artists such as Delacroix and Goya saw the medium's potential and made effective prints. By the late 19th century, those politically inclined, used the lithography to critique society's ills. Others, like Toulouse-Lautrec, used the medium to mass-produce posters of the latest Parisian shows.

Unit Vocabulary

AQUATINT = Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone.

AVANT-GARDE = In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.

CARICATURE = A caricature is a rendered image showing the features of its subject in a simplified or exaggerated way through sketching, pencil strokes, or other artistic drawings.

DRYPOINT = An intaglio printmaking technique that creates sharp lines with fuzzy, velvety edges. A diamond-pointed needle is used to incise lines directly into a bare metal printing plate, displacing ridges of metal that adhere to the edges of the incised lines.

JAPONISME = Japonisme is a French term that refers to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design among a number of Western European artists in the nineteenth century following the forced reopening of foreign trade with Japan in 1858.

LITHOGRAPHY = Lithography is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps.

MODERNISM = Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth-century precedents, artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of modern societies.

PLEIN-AIR = En plein air, or plein-air painting, is the act of painting outdoors. This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look.

POSITIVISM = Positivism is a philosophical movement that originated in the 19th century that focuses on empirical observation, data, and experience as the roots to knowledge and truth. This movement takes a scientific approach to knowledge, elevating that which can be experienced and logically rationalized.