All right, eventually neoclassicism is going to be supplanted by romanticism and it's primarily, again, as a direct reaction against that cold rationalism of the movement that came before. so with the early 19th century into the mid-19th century romanticist artists would want to turn away from that cold rationalism that was also a product of the age of enlightenment and really importantly by this time the dehumanization of of the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, most Western European countries were in the throes of industrialization, which meant that increasingly people were being forced into cities to look for work in factories and manufacturing.
And so they were working in factories at a time when there were no regulation, living in squalor, in slums, making very little money, working very long hours. And there was a growing feeling by this time that mankind, that people were just like cogs. in the machinery of a kind of a mechanistic world. And that was dehumanizing, that their purpose was to run machinery and to do it for 12 hours a day, six days a week for very little money in unsafe conditions while living in unsanitary conditions. And so this artwork is a reaction against that.
It's an expression of human spirit in the face of that, or it would also be like a direct representation of that kind of dehumanization as well. Now, part of the reaction... against it is this stress on imagination and emotion as opposed to cold rationalism.
And they found nature as a important backdrop for the expression of that imagination and emotion, particularly feelings of the sublime. Again, we've talked about this earlier in the semester, the feeling of the grandeur, the power, the danger inherent in nature and the smallness of man in the face of those things. And then finally, most importantly, what you need to remember are two things. that stress on imagination and emotion is going to lead to an increased expressiveness in how artists are handling their materials. They're going to get more and more abstract like we have here with the English artist J.M.W. Turner's The Slave Ship.
You know when you first look at this if you're just glancing at it you may not recognize actual subject matter you might just see it as just color and light. It's only when we start to look a little bit closer that we see this is a ship got masts here and then we start to see in the foreground something very macabre coming. comes into focus. So initially, it's that expressive handling of the materials that we notice. The other main characteristic is that the subject matter is going to increasingly reflect the lives of the working in the lower classes.
When artists begin to work for themselves, they're going to reflect their own interests or the interests of the people that they most closely identify with, and that is going to be the working in the lower classes. So a major change in art, right? Again, it's not reflecting just the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, but But now you've got art that serves a kind of social function, that is social criticism. This is where we get for the first time artists holding up a mirror to society and showing us what we look like and asking us whether we're okay with that or whether or not we should change. Now keep these two things in mind because they're also the main characteristics of modernism in general.
And modernism with a capital M within the art world should be considered like an umbrella term that's going to cover all of the movements from romanticism to the modern world. romanticism up through basically pop art in the 1960s. So artists through modernism are going to want to make artwork that reflects their own specific time and place, like their experience. They want it to reflect who they are and what they see in the world.
And often, as I said before, this is going to then lead to them choosing subject matter that reflects the lives of working in lower classes. In this case, Turner's The Slave Ship, it's a story of a slaver who was transporting slaves. when, well, there was a sickness that broke out on board and there were many who were sick, the slaves, and a few who were dying as well.
And then there's also an approaching storm that we see on the horizon in the left center of the composition. So the ship's captain, knowing that he needed to lighten his load with the approaching storm, and then also knowing that he would receive half pay for any slaves that were lost overboard in transit, but he wouldn't receive any money for slaves who died. of disease or whatever else on board in transit, he began throwing slaves overboard.
And so what we're seeing in the foreground then are the outstretched hands and the legs with the shackles and chains, and then this feeding frenzy of sharks. So in this case, we can see Turner using art as social commentary as a way to draw attention to this terrible event to try to bring about social change through his artwork. The main thing that you need to remember about realism, which is really an outgrowth of romanticism, is that the term itself as an artistic movement in the mid to late 19th century in Europe, mainly that's going to refer to the subject matter and not the form of the paintings or how the artist... are painting.
Now this is fairly realistic, right? But realism doesn't refer to that. It refers to the subject matter, not how the artists are painting. It's realistic because they're showing all aspects of life.
One of the most important of realist, Gustave Courbet, said very famously, famously to illustrate this point, show me an angel and I'll paint you one. In other words, they were going to paint realistically what they saw in front of them. And that included, well, all matters of the everyday, even the really difficult. So in the case of Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners here, what he's showing are these three poverty stricken women who are allowed after a harvest to glean, to gather what remains of the grains to feed their families, their poor families.
And we can see these mounds. gathered in the background being loaded onto wagons to be shipped into cities. We can see a magistrate that's overseeing this whole process because there were riots during this time because of this. And what Millet is pointing out is the problems inherent in capitalism from its earliest development and that is that you have an extreme split between the haves and the have-nots.
So in this case again the realism is to show things as they really are even the dark underbelly or the worst aspects of contemporary life. So still very much within that modernist tradition in that way. We also see increasingly artists are going to develop their own styles.
And as we talked about with romanticism as well, they're increasingly expressive. The most notable probably of the realist artist is going to be Edward Manet. And it's with him that we can really see the importance of that distinction where realism is referring to what's being depicted and not how it's being depicted because Manet is taking artistic license.
and moving towards abstraction in a way that no artist had prior to him. J.M.W. Turner, to some extent, but even more so with Manet, he's allowing for these broad areas of his canvases to remain underpainted. It would have been like an underpainting for prior generations who would have then continued to work over areas like this to develop detail. And so he is being more expressive in how he's handling his paint.
And then again, the subject matter is one that is challenging. In this case, it would be challenging to the status quo in the depiction of a nude woman sitting in conversation with these two fully clothed men having a picnic. It's luncheon on the grass and we can see her clothes gathered in the foreground as well. And so, you know, what we're seeing here is not, let's say, like a mythological nude figure like we had from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, but rather a naked woman. And the fact that she's looking directly out at us from the canvas is a kind of.
of challenge as well to the art-consuming public at that time. And Manet was highly controversial because of both his subject matter and the way he painted. That's why so many people call him the father of modernism, right? Those twin tenets that I've already talked about are at play here in Manet. Now, one thing we need to understand, though, is that these kind of innovations didn't happen in a vacuum, but they were heavily influenced by, first, the availability of Yukio-e prints, which we've talked about earlier.
earlier in the semester, that increasingly through the 19th century are going to be available to Western artists, and they are extremely influential for Western artists like Abané. And it's the flatness that we see from these woodblock prints, the lack of value or subtle gradations of value across forms instead of these flat colors, and then the odd compositions are going to be really influential. And obviously you can see it in a figure like this with the nude female figure.
We do have some development of value, but for the most part, For the most part, it's going to be very flat. And of course, as we've talked about before, photography and its invention created a crisis, especially for painters, that became a liberation and allowed them to begin experimenting with paint. Because now photography could do what painting had done prior to this moment, at least since the Renaissance.
All right, at the same time all of that innovation was happening in Europe and especially in Paris, those innovations had not yet made it to the United States, hadn't crossed the Atlantic yet. Within Western culture, the United States is going to be seen as lacking, or at least lagged. behind their European counterparts. And it's why so many American artists, if they were serious artists, they would have to go study in Europe, Paris or London or Germany. Some would return to the United States, but others would just stay in Europe and make their careers there.
It was more difficult to do in the U.S. And particularly through the 19th century, artists who were engaged with the movement across the continent. continent to the American West wouldn't have been beholden to the kind of innovations that we saw in Europe. Think about it this way, it just made no sense for an artist who is painting things that had never been seen before to be experimenting with the materials. It was more important for artists like George Catlin and later Thomas Moran to paint as closely as they could what they were seeing because it was to be a record of what they were seeing that they could then show to people who had never seen these vast landscapes of Yellowstone, for example, or traditions of Mandan tribes.
And so you could really see it more as reportage. or a documentary style or recording what they're seeing, especially with the Catlin, who was not a good painter, but was a very important painter because of what he did paint. He was seen as much as like an ethnographer, courting these ways of life that even in the 1830s, people recognized were quickly passing.
And there was a growing conceit, especially within the intellectual community, that there was something very noble that was being lost with westward expansion of Euro-Americans at the expense of Native Americans. So there was either that kind of reportage or there was a realism that's mixed with romanticism, especially in landscape painting of the American West. So Thomas Moran was pretty true to what he saw, but so many other Western painters, like Albert Bierstadt, would exaggerate certain elements for pictorial effect, for drama, which is important to romanticism.
Nonetheless, even with those kinds of experimentations, I guess, they're not going as far as they're used to. European counterparts are at that time. Back across the Atlantic again, at the same time that Moran was painting Yellowstone, Monet was beginning his innovations with Impressionism.
The main thing that you need to keep in mind here is that Impressionism utilized small brush strokes, and then they used complementary colors to create this vibrating quality of light. It became known at this time through color theory that complementary colors placed next to one another made each appear more vibrant. So you can see these kinds of ruddy oranges against these washed out blues. which made them appear even more saturated, even though they are tinted and shaded.
All of this was towards making works in which we see a kind of dissolution of form, and the subject matter becomes not so much about the Rouen Cathedral, but rather the play of light across the Rouen Cathedral. What Monet is interested in here is the complicated facade of the Rouen Cathedral, which he could watch these changing qualities of light and record them quickly. Part of what we see with Impressionism is that there are representations of a world in constant flux.
What they were wanting to depict was the rapidity and the mobility of life at that time. Keep in mind, this is after the rail had been invented, and so now people could, in half an hour, be outside of the city, as opposed to an all-day excursion by wagon. Importantly for us as well is that artists begin to work differently at this time, and so they reject the salon. which was the normal way of viewing and exhibiting artwork at that time.
And they began to use galleries and artist-run spaces to promote their own work. So they weren't relying upon the academies, which had been so powerful prior to this, where you had to jump through all the... the hoops and kiss all the butt in order to be allowed to be an artist. Now artists were becoming more and more independent.
All right, that leads us finally to the last major movement of the 19th century, and that's post-impressionism. Unfortunately named, but it does speak. to a couple of important things that as soon as I get rid of this little red dot, I'll get to. Okay, so the first thing that we see with post-impressionism is that they're going to build off of the innovations of the impressionist.
With post-impressionists, though, what they'll do is, well, as Cezanne said, they wanted to make something solid out of impressionism again, like the art that you would see in a museum, you know, the famous art of the Baroque or the Renaissance. Probably most important to post-past, impressionism is that artists are going to, by this time, and it'll be something that carries through all art, all time periods after this, more or less, in the West. And that is that they're going to develop personal styles that helps to communicate unique experience of reality.
Again, this is one of the major characteristics of modernism, right? Artists wanting to do something that reflects their unique experiences of reality, but now it's really turned up to 11 here. And it's all towards searching for a connection. kind of authentic experience that's uniquely one's own.
So a good example of this comes from Van Gogh and Gauguin, who were ostensibly friends, but they painted for a time at the behest of Van Gogh's brother, Theo. When Vincent was going through a particularly rough patch, he asked Gauguin to hang out with Van Gogh, who was living in Arles at the time, outside of... of Paris.
And he thought it would be good for Vincent to have Gauguin with him. They ended up painting side by side in several different scenarios. And so we have these paintings of theirs that are of the exact same subject matter painted with these personal styles that communicate their unique experiences of reality that are authentically their own. Their night cafes are the exact same scene, but depicted in just completely different ways that tells you a lot about the character of the men.
For Van Gogh... his psychological troubles are well chronicled and we've talked about the night cafe before in other words like if you imagine yourself walking into this scene from our vantage point which was the artist right it kind of seems like we'd have to walk up into it and so there's a sense of alienation that van gogh is painting this scene but he's not a part of it right the only thing in the foreground are these two chairs that are kind of askew. There's no people in the foreground and there's a lot of space between Van Gogh and everybody else. The bartender looks back at him but seems disinterested. All of the patrons at the bar are kind of huddled.
until they're drunk and they're alienated from one another even though they're sitting at the same table they're not engaged in conversation this isn't a good time even the young couple in the back it looks like she's staring into her drink she's got her hand up close to her mouth or resting her chin and he seems to be turned to her and like like mansplaining something right but yeah it doesn't look like a happy exchange she's not looking at him the whole theme is one of alienation of a kind of psychological distress now look across it goes Gauguin. He's not standing apart from the scene. He's sitting in the scene.
He's at a table that's shared by the owner of the bar, the Madame Janou. And look at her expression. She's at ease and she's comfortable. She likes the company of Gauguin. Look at her eyes.
They're at ease, kind of looking off something else to the side. She's got this sly grin on her face. She's amused.
And then we see the pool table in the middle ground with a cat underneath. one of the legs. Nice little touch, right? And then even the figures in the background, while they're loaded too, if you look particularly at this group, they're engaged in conversation.
It's not as dismal as we have it with Van Gogh. Even though they look like space aliens, they're all engaged in conversation and it's a communal moment, right? And so we have in these two scenes of the exact same moment, two completely different approaches.
I mean, we can see it in style instead of that. impasto or really heavy textural application of paint like we have from Van Gogh that we love so much. Gauguin uses what we call washes, you know, where he's kind of staining the canvas more than building paint up on it. But even more so in the attitude, the, again, the communication of that unique, authentic experience to reality of Gauguin is completely different than Van Gogh.
It's one thing to keep in mind that all of the art that we're going to see from this time forward, where it really amps up with lots of isms, the age of isms is coming. It's really brought about through post-impressionism and this search for really personal styles that communicate again that unique experience all right we'll pick it up with the 20th century in the next lecture then