Let's do number 108 through 117, and this is going to take us with romanticism, realism, and photography. All right, last we went to neoclassical. Now we're going to go to romanticism with liberty leading the people. All right, romanticism is going to be a big shift. It's going to look different, and this is liberty leading the people.
But let's do a little bit of background here of just some big context. This is early 1800s Europe. Okay, French Revolution is over.
And French Revolution was supposed to be about reason, but heads were getting cut off and the reason, they were starting to question the value of pure reason. So the Romantics will go to the imagination. And we have novels like Notre Dame, there's spiritual religious revivals, both Christian like Great Awakening, but transcendental spirituality like Thoreau and transcendentalism. And some social issues emerge like the abolition movement.
the desire to get rid of slavery. So now we'll go to our work here, which is Liberty Leading the People. Okay, this is a romantic work because of the style, but let's just take a look at the work itself.
Liberty Leading the People is about revolution in France. Okay, the barricades was you'd make a barricade, and then the cops would be over here, and you could ride over here, and that's what they would do during the Revolution of 1830. There was conflict between the monarchy and the king and the people. So this is liberty leading the people.
And now it's not a topless woman. She's kind of like a Greek idea or a Greek statue. She symbolizes freedom.
And this is the idea that all people want freedom of a democracy. There's all kinds of people. Rich bourgeois guy, black guy, kid, rich, poor, average. All the people want...
liberty. That's the big idea here. There is real, real suffering here because romantic art has a lot of emotion.
We have dead bodies and real suffering, and we have real emotion here of the revolution. Now, stylistically, this is also a romantic painting. And now we go back to, remember, diagonal line, dynamic, things are happening, dramatic, we feel it.
And we have all three of these here. We have diagonal. we have drama because we can feel it and we have a lot going on we have a revolution going on of liberty leading the people by de la crowe all right just remember this is baroque this is romanticism they're very similar and you can see the contrast here neo-classical is going to be very different more vertical more intellectual less dynamic this is going to be diagonal dynamic and dramatic another thing just to think about as we go forward Emphasis on color, emphasis on line.
Romantics are going to emphasize color, less line. Sometimes they call it expressive color. And again, if we go back, classical, Hellenistic.
Renaissance, Baroque. And then we'll go to neoclassical, to Romanticism. A second theme is nature. The Romantics love nature.
And then we have the Oxbow of 109. All right, this is an American painting. But the thing of nature is this is also the romantic time, the time of the Industrial Revolution. The world is dramatically changing.
So part of the romantic impulse is to go back to the beauty of nature and away from this modern kind of stuff. And another term is sublime. That's just nature can be just so beautiful. It's terrifying.
And so the romantics want to experience nature, whereas the Enlightenment is more trying to understand it. All right, so back to Oxbow here. This is the idea, what should America do?
Should we leave awesome, sublime nature, or should we develop it and create a new country? So it's got a political subtext of the Oxbow. All right, and then, you know, just to think about it, here's the nature of the Oxbow, here's the nature of France. All right, then Turner is kind of in his own league. He did Slave Ship, so he's, I'm never going to say he's romantic.
We'll just call him Turner. and there's Slaveship. I'm sure you remember it, the horrors of slavery.
When you first look at it, it looks like a pretty painting, but it's that awful story of slavery. So the subtext of Turner is political. It's the abolition movement, you know, how awful slavery is. But Turner, as an artist, is an interesting guy.
He had a thing, paint truth, paint light. So talk about color versus line, he is a color guy, as you can see. In fact, Very little line there. In fact, he almost goes total abstraction and just expresses color. So as an artist, he's definitely a color guy, very innovative.
He also has a theme of the modern world or the nature versus machine. You know, even here, the ship is overwhelmed by nature. And this one was a tugboat pushing the sailboat away.
So he's a very important artist, Turner. Political subtext, but also stylistically the way he paints. Then Palace of Westminster is a House of Parliament, and this looks Gothic.
And what happens here is in the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution, people want to go back to the good old days before all the dirt and the industry. And so Gothic was like considered... the good old days. So this looks gothic.
It's tall, the spires, it's very vertical, and they embrace a gothic style for their government building in England. Now technically it's symmetrical, which would be classical, but the verticality means gothic. All right, then realism comes up later on, and basically this is the Stonebreakers by Corbet, and this realism because it looks very, very real. Corbet had a great quote, show me an angel and I'll paint one. He's a secular artist, very, very different from the medieval artists.
And part of him is workers' rights. Karl Marx is popping up at this time. There are revolutions and whatnot going on and there's an emphasis on workers' rights and this work really elevates a worker into art. These are two workers breaking rocks, the stone breakers by Corbet realism. Finally, photography is going to come up in the 1800s.
Lots of changes, and we have a new thing called a camera. We have three works here in the curriculum. So the big idea in photography is this.
It's a machine that can do this. This is really going to change art. So this is an old photograph, and one theme is the photos look like art.
It looks like a still life. It's got sculpture and painting. And then what's going to happen is...
The camera is going to ask a lot of questions and there's a famous photographer named Nadar. Here he is here. So this one is making fun of Nadar and it says photography is high art.
It's mocking photography in the 1860s because some artists embrace photography and some hate it. They say it's a machine, it's not art. And this is going to really change art as we shall see. Horse in Motion is a series of photographs but it's a work of art that shows movement. So it's actually very significant.
You can see the movement of the horse. All right, the other thing, the early photos look like portraits. They look like paintings.
And so we're going to see photography is really going to change things because artists might start to say, well, wait a minute. Should I paint realistically or should I get weird and be modern? And that's going to be modern on the next one.
Okay.