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Essay Name       : 1075.txt
Uploader         : dave day
Email Address    :
Language         : english
Subject          : Art
Title            : painting in the second half of the 19th century
Grade            : a
School System    : cochise college
Country          : us
Author Comments  : na
Teacher Comments : na
Date             : 11-96
Site found at    : through net search(yahoo)
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Painting in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
    During the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-determination
fostered by the French Revolution and spread by Napoleon helped spawn a revolutionary
spirit across Europe. This spirit of rebellion also infected artists of the period. Painters
began to challenge the philosophy and the aesthetic principles of the academies, looking
outside these conservative institutions for their training, subject matter, style, and
purpose. While many artists and critics promoted the status quo, others sought change,
seeing validity in new themes and new approaches. To many artists, the histories and
mythologies still promoted by the academies offered no inspiration, and so they turned
elsewhere for their subject matter. Some looked to nature, others to daily life, and still
others to themes of the worker, the poor, and the oppressed. As they sought alternatives,
many artists gathered in groups based on common interests. Outside the established
mainstream of their own time, the Realists, the Impressionists, and the Post-
Impressionists broadened the horizons of Western art.
    Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), a self declared Realist, rejected the inherent
sentimentality of work by the Romantics. CourbetÆs interest in portraying things as they
really appear, together with his nonacademic orientation, placed him in the front rank of
the quest for realism, the premise for much of the artistic activity of the period. Michael
Wood quotes Courbet as saying: ôIt was not my intention of attaining the trivial goal of
art for artÆs sake. My aim is to translate the customs, the ideas, and the appearance of my
own epoch as I see them.ö According to Janson ôThe storm broke in 1849, when he
exhibited The Stone breakers, the first canvas fully embodying his programmatic
Realismö (dcv). Courbet was inspired by the complete expression of human misery he
saw in an encounter with an old road worker in tattered clothes and his young assistant.
The painting was completely ridiculed by critics and public alike; it was considered
unsuitable for artistic representation, and ôlinked to the newly defined working class,
which was finding outspoken champions in men like Marx and Engelsö (Gardner dcclix).
Courbet was praised by some social reformers; however, and they saw the painting a
universal condemnation of capitalism and its potential greed.
    In 1859, a young Parisian painter named Edouard Manet (1832-1883) submitted
his first picture to the Salon, but his Absinthe Drinker, portraying a drunken bum, was
rejected for its unseemly subject and uncompromising realism. In 1863 Manet
participated in the famous Salon des Refuses, an exhibition consisting of works rejected
by the official Salon, and he came to be viewed as the hero of the nonconformists.
Though Manet regarded himself as working in the tradition of the great masters, his
approach was to rethink established themes in modern terms.
    Manet succeeded at shocking his audience many times, but no work created more
turmoil than his Olympia (1863), exhibited in the Salon of 1865. The response to the
painting was outrage against an image which was ôsexually explicit, socially provocative,
and stylistically inconsistent with accepted standards of modeling and compositionö
(Moffett xcv). ManetÆs picture, which is a reinterpretation of TitianÆs Venus of Urbino,
substitutes a known Parisian prostitute for a goddess. Completely at ease with her naked
body, Olympia calmly gazes over the viewer exuding a frank sensuality. As with
CourbetÆs The Stone breakers, ManetÆs Olympia was harshly criticized, even by Courbet,
but Manet was championed by others. The famed writer Emile Zola praised ManetÆs
truthfulness, and noted that Manet had introduced the Parisians to a woman of their own
times.
    In the 1870s, while Manet was painting cafe society and other scenes of Parisian
life, his friend Claude Monet (1840-1926) had settled in Argenteuil so he could paint
along the banks of the Seine River. Four years later, Monet banded together with a small
group of artists, and they gave a show of their works in the studio of the photographer
Nadar. The exhibition was quite a radical idea at the time; never before had a group of
artists united together for a showing of their work without sanction from the government
or judgment from a jury. Monet exhibited Impression: Sunrise (1872), a view of a sunrise
seen through a window at Le Havre.
     This painting shows MonetÆs method of work. With the most sparing palette and
brushwork, he fixed the movement of light and water between the morning sun dulled by
fog, and the small dark boat in the foreground. ôMonet only set down the essentials, yet
his skill in translating vision into paint registered a complex reality. Distance,
atmosphere, light, time of day, and place are all convincingly portrayedö (Gardner dccvi).
    The exhibition lasted only one month, and, contrary to popular belief, the
majority of press coverage was positive. However, it was the critic Louis Leroy, in a
satirical dialogue renouncing MonetÆs painting, who gave the group its name: the
Impressionists. Ironically though, according to Hamilton, ôAlthough Monet has long been
considered the archetypal Impressionist, he was possibly the first to express publicly his
dissatisfaction with the æcultÆ. As early as 1880 he confessed ...that it had become a banal
school with its doors open to the first hack who comes alongö (xxxiv).
    The term ôPost- Impressionism,ö which arose from a famous exhibition held in
London, is like many ôismsö in art, a nebulous one. In its broadest sense it can be used to
describe the work of a number of individual painters who evolved a style in reaction
against the Impressionists. Although several of these artists began their careers with the
Impressionists, they soon developed a style of painting more concerned with evocative
color, structure, and form. Less concerned with the transitory effects of light and motion,
the Post-Impressionists often turned to different subjects, and painted with a greater
emphasis on formal discipline.
    The most important of the Post-Impressionists is Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).
Early in his career Cezanne came under the influence of the Impressionists, and he
exhibited with them in their first show. Nevertheless, as Cezanne matured as an artist, he
moved off in another direction. His desire was, as Michael wood quotes, ôto make of
Impressionism something solid and durable.ö
     In Woman With Coffee Pot (1890), the central female figure is presented with the
same dispassionate, meticulous, exploring eye as the coffee pot. Cezanne discerned and
described the basic shape of all forms on the canvas, and then he revealed their
interrelationships. The woman achieves monumentality through the abstraction and
reduction of the various parts of her body; Her arms are cylinders, and the lower part of
her dress is a triangle. As a result, the human form is at one with the shape of the coffee
pot, the cup, the tablecloth, and the rectangles of the door panels.
     CezanneÆs analysis of structure is especially evident in his still lifes, which at the
time were revolutionary in there departure from previous examples in the genre. In these
paintings there is little attempt at verisimilitude in the usual sense. Instead, Cezanne
relentlessly examined the structure, texture, and colors of bottles, fruit, and tablecloths.
Traditional conventions of spatial representation, perspective, and color have been
abandoned, and the still life has become a visual analysis translated into paint. To
Cezanne it really did not matter whether he was painting an apple or a man; the search
for the underlying structure of form was the same.
    Without a doubt the most famous of the Post-Impressionists today is Vincent van
Gogh. His tragic and tempestuous life, and lack of recognition in his own lifetime, has
made him the stuff of legend. In many ways van Gogh is seen as the prototype of the
modern artist. He served no apprenticeship, essentially sold no paintings, labored in total
isolation, poverty, and obscurity, and saw art as a calling, not a profession.
    The greatest period of van GoghÆs short but highly productive career came at the
end of his life, where, between bouts of mental illness, he produced a series of
impassioned paintings. His Night Cafe (1888) was intended, as van Gogh stated in a letter
to his brother Theo, ôto express the most terrible passion of humanity by means of red
and green [and] a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crimeö (Chipp
xxxvi). The abrupt tipped-up view of the room with its dazzling lights and hot colors is
both strange and menacing. The harsh expressiveness of the Night Cafe is a clue to
VincentÆs inner turmoil at the time. Here Van Gogh has used much of what he learned
about form and color from the Impressionists, but in a much more ardent and personal
way.
    The Realists, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists, even with all their
radical departures from the artistic styles of the past, did not completely break away
from the major traditions of Western art. However, in 1886 a new generation of artists
was emerging: The young Pablo Picasso was growing up in Barcelona, Henri Matisse was
a student in Paris, and Georges Braque had celebrated his fourth birthday in Le Havre.
They were among the artists destined to make Western art completely diverge from the
past during the first part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, we must not discount the
achievements of the masters from the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was these
artists who built the bridge whereby the next generation could continue on and develop
Modern art as we know it today: Courbet and Manet forever changed our perceptions of
what is considered  proper subject matter on the canvas, Monet and van GoghÆs use of
color laid the foundations for Expressionism and Fauvism, and CezanneÆs use of shape
and form led to the most radical break with tradition in the history of Western art,
Cubism.

Works Cited
Wood, Michael  ôA Fresh View: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.ö
    Art of the Western World.  WNET.  1989.
Chipp, Herschel.  Theories of Modern Art.   Berkeley: University of California Press,
    1968.
Moffett, Charles.  The New Painting.   San Francisco:  The Fine Arts Museums of San
    Francisco,  1986.
Hamilton, George.  Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940.   Eng.:  Penguin,  1978.
Janson, H.W.  History of Art.  New York: H.N. Abrams,  1977.
Gardner, Helen.  Art Through the Ages II.   New York: Harcourt Brace
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