hello I'm Dr parmy Juni from Otis College of Art and Design today we are at the fourth and last lecture about realism the first movement of Modern Art I've covered a lot of material but it's important to remember that no lecture can address every single issue it's why art historians keep researching writing and arguing you should also have a clearer idea of the criticism that these realist artists had with academic art and the changes that they proposed you probably also appreciate why that military term avantgard was coined to describe them we'll start today by looking at some of the popular visual culture about world fairs these were a very new kind of modern public spectacle that began in the mid 19th century World fairs are important to know about because they showcased so many things that people associated with being modern then we'll move on to the works of Edward Mane who shattered many of the cherished conventions of academic art with his controversial paintings if you were living in London in the year 1851 the chances were good that you went to the great exhibition of the works of Industry of all Nations that's a long title for what we would call a World's Fair this was the pet project of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria and he was a great advocate of industrialization progress and Innovation the great exhibition was intended to showcase the industrial advances of modern Nations as well as their colonial Treasures International or World fairs became popular in Europe in the 19 century because they were showcases for new technology and science countries exib Ved not only their industrial advances but their cultural Treasures people could stroll from one kind of geographical or cultural experience to another a special building called The Crystal Palace was commissioned for the exhibition and it defied what people thought proper buildings should be instead of stone it was welded metal wood and glass it Rose like a gigantic spidery Dome punctuated by thousands and thousands of sheets of glass it was temporary rather than permanent in fact after the exhibition it was dismantled moved from Hyde Park and reconstructed in a slightly different form at cenim Hill this plan of the Crystal Palace demonstrates the range of exhibitions cotton Fabrics jewelry Fine Art and musical instruments were shown along with machinery and new inventions the exhibition was a huge success a marvelous spectacle as the word is used in the modern sense people went in hordes to see it to consume to gawet new inventions and machines peruse crafts and Fine Art stare at contributions from Africa and the Middle East tickets were cheap so even Factory workers could attend one of the arguments that Scholars Advance today is that the government thought it was important for the laboring poor of London to see the tremendous industrial achievements of their country to realize how advanced they were in comparison to the Colonial World rather than complain about low wages and poor living conditions only a few non-western Nations sent Works to this first exhibition India was one and their huge stuffed elephant along with natives wearing traditional dress offered a stark contrast to Modern European Industrial Works within the Crystal Palace modernity was on display in a glass cage the great exhibition of 1851 was just the start of a series of world fairs most of them held in England France and Germany each one more elaborate and better attended in 1883 the United States hosted the world's Colombian Exposition often called the Chicago World's Fair when which lasted for 6 months and was attended by about 27 million people France hosted the 1889 Universal Exposition for which the Eiffel Tower was erected as the entrance Archway and immediately became the architectural icon of modern Paris that exhibition also boasted a massive machiner Hall where new inventions and Technology of all kind were on display like this early version of a calculator which won a gold prize these modern spectacles which ran for months and attracted millions of people reinforced Western Notions of superiority Western belief in the advantages of technology and industrialization and Western ideas about being modern academic painters like enri J and Lou barau were commissioned to make make large contemporary history paintings that commemorated French success both Works were commissioned by the government and intended to celebrate the achievements of the French Republic and its Colonial Empire that is clearly articulated in these paintings jerc paints a small native contingent literally surrounded by hordes of formerly dressed Europeans most of them men amid the modern construction of the exhibition Hall likewise buau presents the gloriously colored Central Dome area which is crowned by an Islamic arch in recognition of France's Northern African and Middle Eastern Holdings most of the figures depicted are shown in modern dress clustered in groups or moving through the hall Central and to the left he depicts a few Colonial figures including two men in bright colored garments who stand somewhat stiffly posed as though they themselves are objects of curiosity and display for a more modern public it's easy to understand the lure of new inventions and the hunger that modern people had for Innovation they wanted better appliances faster Transportation cheaper clothing Street lighting and better sanitation if you lived in a major city these changes were happening all around you you expected them you welcomed them especially if you were young because the modern world promised opportunity and it welcomed challenges so it is not surprising that many artists who considered themselves modern people were anxious to change the rules about art to resist the status quo the ultimate midcentury commentator on mod monity was Charles bodair the French poet and if he were alive today we would consider him a kind of cultural commentator in his famous essay the painter of Modern Life bodair identified the modern painter as a flano male Urban immersed in the crowd observant and detached in search of the modernity which bodair described as ephemeral the future the contingent the half of art whose other half is the Eternal and the immutable bodair was tired of academic paintings that depicted hacky literary themes paraded in historical costumes he thought they were out of step with Modern Life for bodair the hero of Modern Life was Modern Man and the subject of Modern Life was anything contemporary from city streets to brothel from Train stations to Gardens Edward Monet exemplified bod's ideal modern painter Manet was middle class Urbane sophisticated educated in art but unwilling to conform to academic standards mané consciously challenged the academy both in subject matter and technique and the public exhibition of his paintings many of them at the salons Drew widespread and controversial attention his 1863 Dean salur was an opening volley against the academy in style technique and subject he showed the painting at the salon De refus which Lou Napoleon had opened because the academy had rejected so many works that year around 4,000 of them Man's painting was definitely the hot topic of the exhibition the translates as luncheon on the grass and the artist depicted four people enjoying a picnic outside in a park-like setting the two men are fully dressed but not the women one is completely naked although her fashionable clothes including a spring Bonnet are piled up beside her the other female is wearing a Gauzy slip-like garment that is more like drapery than any 19th century dress painting fully CL men and totally naked women was not new or controversial European artists like geion and tishan had been doing this since the early 16th century in fact as the novelist Emil zah an admir of Manet pointed out there were about 50 paintings in the L which featured naked women and clothed men one of which wason's pastoral symphony so why were critics and the public so appalled at manet's painting one issue was the painting style the female nude is depicted in very bright tones and there is no attempt to modulate the background so she looks as though she is outlined and flat that challenged the convention that a good artist would create figures with believable three-dimensionality then there is the female in that background or what should be the background it's hard to tell since her lowered hand is so close to that of the reclining male what has the artist done with perspective the trees are shadowy the background patches of vegetation are blurry there is no consistent sense of a single light source all of which made a stark contrast to the more accurate representations of the fruit in the still life in the front it is as if the artist were deliberately calling attention to to different ways of painting these are not our contemporary concerns but in 1863 the art critics looking at this work and writing about it had nothing good to say except that Mane didn't know how to make a proper picture then there was the Ruckus over the nud mané used a well-known female model victorine [ __ ] and people recognized her at once an academic artist like Ang would have idealized her features and body which is what he did in this 1848 painting of Venus ad dromeda this was the expected convention then regardless of the full frontal nudity the idealization of the model demonstrated the artist's expertise and shifted the figure from a naked woman to a female nude this was critical this changed the discourse from looking add a naked woman to appreciating art remember that these were the same audiences who were concerned about the appropriateness of the female nude in photography they needed those idealizing techniques Mane did not do that he painted the model's face so that people could recognize her and her body is not perfected an academic artist would have expunged that crease of stomach flesh which is perfectly normal when sitting in that position to make matters worse or more realistic depending on which position you take she faces the audience directly gazing at them which was highly inappropriate audiences were just not used to that kind of direct gaze from a female nude what they expected was something along the lines of Alexandre cabanel's version of Venus which is an exact contemporary of man's work copal painted a very idealized nude a Venus floating on the water with winged py above her she Shields her face with one arm while allowing the viewer full access to her nude body this is the standard that Mane was up against and it had been established for centuries the direct gaze that Manet painted shattered that fragile curtain of Artis itic and aesthetic propriety to complicate matters he painted her dress and fashionable Bonnet on the grass next to her which was a fairly clear indication that he wanted you to know she had clothes modern clothes but had taken them off rather than an elegant classical pose his model sits very casually with one leg bent her exposed and naked body clearly visible to the two fully dressed men nearby to the back and center of the painting another young woman wearing a loose gown is completely bent over that kind of pose sent a very clear message to the audience that the woman was not wearing a corset so underneath that Gauzy drapery she was naked too look closely at her arms if she were to stand up without moving them she would be in the classical Venus Puda pose with one hand over her breasts and the other over her genitals with his interest in the expressive potential of paint and his fascination with modern subjects Mane critiqued ideas of representation and reality and pushed at the boundaries of acceptable subject matter the female nude seems a very calculated choice on which to make a stand while the most erotically posed female nude was completely acceptable in fine art as long as some literary or historical illusion was supplied usually a Venus Parisian audiences were appalled at the idea of looking at a naked woman it was the allegorical associations that linked female nudity with ideal qualities of virtue Purity and Beauty as long as the semblance of allegory and literary references were maintained the female body was fair game for Fine Art while Manet did not question the appropriation and display of the female body by the male artist he preferred to strip away the academic Illusions surrounding her representation the modern female nude was not a Venus or a Diana or a Sabine daughter but a model a real person and she could be a woman bathing dressing awaiting a lover even a prostitute perhaps this was his way of letting the academy know that he fully understood the rules he just didn't want to follow them they didn't make sense to him anymore not as a modern artist working in a modern world Avant guard painting techniques and using identifiable models lessen the sense of timelessness locking the figures and the scene into the contempor AR World clearly Mane had paid attention to what Corb had been preaching just two years later in the 1865 Salon mané once again shocked art audiences with Olympia now established as an icon of modernity but that year the painting caused an enormous brewhaha once again the artist played off a well-known painting tian's Venus of barbino tishan did not title the painting that when he did it that happened later Scholars today generally agree that this was a commission portrait of a cortison who had become the Mistress of a wealthy medigy Lord she is shown completely naked in a lush domestic interior holding a bouquet of flowers with a small dog curled up at her feet in the background two Maids with clothing are shown in is sharply bent and she boldly stares at the viewer lacking the expected downcast eyes demure expression koi glances or modesty that tishan took care to show what caused the critical outrage against Olympia in 1865 out of 60 critics only four had anything positive to say about the painting and they were drowned in the outcry why were those same critics so accept the paintings like the birth of Venus by kinol just two years earlier even though that work seems much more erotic and alluring with the body rendered in peachy skin tones and posed to display breasts in the pubic area one aspect of the critical disclaim was Man's painting style which it was generally agreed was bad poorly done lacking any technical ability the pose was criticized for its lack of beauty and portion one critic likened the figure to a female gorilla man's refusal to idealize the figure to round her proportions and create a silky finish to the skin tones negated any sense of female Beauty causing another critic to write that the figure's facial expression made her look like a vicious old woman and her body like a corpse yet another critic described her as prematurely aged with a the putrid body the lack of modeling the strong outlines the stark contrast between light and dark areas created an undeniable flatness to the entire painting an attention to the fact that it was a painting almost as if the artists wanted the audience to dwell on the inconsistencies there was no way to judge Olympia by academic standards without finding it wanting it looked rough unfinished and poorly executed and critics were not shy about pointing that out on style alone Manet challenged the known and accepted Aesthetics and as we talked about with Dean salur the idealizing techniques were critical to transforming a naked model in one Studio into a female nude then there was the issue of subject matter and the nude and this is another area in which Mane clearly threw down the gauntlet it's critical because it meshes the Fine Art world with 19th century popular culture the name Olympia was well known in Paris because it was a popular street name for prostitutes and that fact was not lost on the audience or the critics even the pro Manet critic Jean ranel described Olympia as a furan a working girl of the night the painting is littered with clues that allude to prostitution she reclines on plump pillows and a figured Fringe shawl wearing only jewelry fashionable mules a flower and a black ribbon audience recognize the style of shoes the bindings on the bedding the upholstery fabric it's clearly a contemporary setting with nothing to historicize it no vague landscapes oceans drapery ears py or columns it is a bedroom a scene grounded in the here and now and for audiences women who languished around naked in bedrooms with Maids coming in carrying bouquet of flowers were probably prostitutes those flowers were probably a gift from an admirer but an admirer who paid the dark skinned turban made is another reference to the Colonial Working Poor in Paris and conveyed a sense of exoticism to audiences who were already accustomed to associate the non-western female with heightened sexuality and mystery the final piece to resistance was the inclusion of a black cat who arches suggestively at the foot of the bed when tishan painted the Venus of orbino it was common to include a small dog dog in the portrait of a female the dog carried associations of sexual Fidelity Yan vanike had done the same thing nearly a century earlier in his portrait of the arnoldi and it was still a practice in the 17th century when Bron Zeno made this portrait of an unidentified woman with a puppy even in the 19th century cats were popularly associated with female sexuality and eroticism they were soft and silky and they could scratch and that may very well have been manet's reason for substituting a cat for the dog it would have made little sense to associate a prostitute with sexual exclusivity prostitution was well established in Paris London Rome and just about every major or minor city in Europe prostitutes ranged from cheap back alley Street Walkers to high-priced cortis working out of elegantly appointed brothel although morally condemned visiting a brothel or taking a mistress was an expected and quite tolerated part of life for many men especially the Bourgeois and landed classes for whom arranged marriages or marriages for social advancement were still quite common TJ Clark has written extensively about the a predominantly male audience and that was the audience that controlled art and culture a female nude stripped of her classical associations was a problem with all this concern over the female nude you might wonder what ever happened to the male nude hadn't he been a staple of Western art and culture since Antiquity not just in paintings but in sculpture much of what was always intended for public space faces aligned with Notions of strength Authority truth Valor and honor the male nude had occupied a unique position in both the Pagan and the Christian world where did the male nude fit in the modern world not surprisingly the answer is that he didn't or at least not with the same level of acceptance that surrounded the female n while the 19th Cy World eagerly embraced many modern and liberal Notions it was still very conservative in many ways as we have seen sexuality was at the top of the list at least in terms of making visible public and acceptable what occurred in private if you take a moment and consider the battles that 20th and 21st century Society have addressed in order to guarantee racial and sexual equality it is easier to understand why the new newly modern 19th century world found the issue of the male nude increasingly problematic academic artists may have continued to include the male nude in history paintings but not in works that addressed contemporary subjects like the Avant guard they too agreed with bod's description of the modern man he wore a dress coat or a frock coat and these indicated political Beauty and Universal equality along with the Avant guard they expanded on formal dress to include other fashionable variations of casual men's clothing stylistic or seasonal changes and clothing that identify differences between working and Bourgeois class men in man's 1868 painting of lunch in the studio the white pants and straw boater were fashionable items that men wore in the summer he emphasizes the the Bourgeois status of the man with little details the striped shirt which was very fashionable the tie and the glimpse of gray gloves in his pocket it's a quite different rendition than the man's clothing in boating from 1874 where the white clothing and straw hat would indicate summer fabrics and summer time but the short sleeves were a dead giveaway that this is a workingclass man as business and commerce increasingly defined a modern society as City Life and leisure activities expanded as fashion exploded into a new industry the representation of the modern man in modern Garb became the norm the activities of the Modern Man were couched in terms of economics science technology industrialization all activities that were conducted fully dressed there was increasingly little reason to use a male nude to communicate power that was accomplished through the suit which became the single defining male Garment of modernity because male fashion was never subject to stylistic extremes like female fashion a tailored dark suit accented with crisp white linen seamlessly moved into the niche once occupied by the male nude and appropriated all the associated connotations of power and strength Authority and universality male artists readily understood that since they were ego participants and active consumers because the suit offered a structured generalizing garment that essentially treated the male body as a rectilinear form to be sheathed it also conveniently masked concerns of sexual uality including homosexuality a term which first surfaced in the late 19th century more than anything the suit came to define the Modern Man and because suits were mass-produced even working men were able to own one it's interesting to consider how the suit shifted Notions of modernity by comparing two paintings that were barely 10 years apart mle and mané paint two very different representations of men as we have noted earlier mle style Incorporated more of an academic approach which tended to idealize his subjects here he depicts a peasant couple who have stopped their work midday to pray in response to the Angelus Bells there is nothing fashionable about their clothing it is done colored rather non-descript utilitarian and probably made at home it's very very lack of detail and fashion helped underscore melee's interest in communicating peasant dignity and lends a Timeless quality to the painting it is quite different however from what Manet offers in from the balcony this is fashion and modernity front and center an apartment in the newly redesigned Paris that is as elegantly decorated with ears and vases potted plants and paintings as it is with the three stylishly dressed figures who were all friends of the artist berett Moroso the impressionist painter and manet's sister-in-law sits and stares apparently quite bored Franny Claus a close friend of the artist's wife stands clasping a parasol between the two women and grounding the compositional pyramid is Antoine Gom a painter best known for his naturalistic landscapes he stands with his hands slightly spread as though to clap them together in the next moment and summon the female group to some activity despite the darkness of the background mané has clearly detailed his suit a dark jacket and a waist coat a stiff collar dress shirt and a brilliant blue tie whose colors offended the critics along with the green of the railings both of which they considered too jarring there is nothing relaxed or casual about his pose or posture he is clearly a man in charge and his suit reinforces that Authority Mane is the link between French realism and impressionism with his insistence on flatten space his critique of representation and his focus on contemporary subjects spared of the political agenda that tinged The Works of mle and Corbet the financially independent Manet was free to paint whatever he pleased his subjects ranged from elegant social peers painted on new Parisian balconies to public Dances Like Music in the tulleries or bar hostesses in bar the FES berer his Viewpoint and presentation is consistently that of the male fenor for him modernity was Urban Paris Street life and cafes private life lived in the public eye it was always modernity from a man's point of view as an artist he continually played with conventional practices and rules not for him the high academic finish his brush Strokes are strong and obvious his perspective flattened his colors often Brash rather than Blended he never wanted the audience to forget they were looking at a painting and a painting done in a new Modern Way realism wedged the opening into the guarded Fortress of academic art and Mane was one of the lead players as a vital part of the avantgard Paris art sing he became the mentor for the next generation of modern artists the Impressionists who took his ideas about painting even further in their efforts to free art from the confines of academic rules and establish a universal experience and and language for art in a modern world we'll stop here with realism Because by the early 1870s those Zant God ideas about subject and style were being pursued in somewhat different ways by other artists who eventually came to be labeled the Impressionists remember that change progress Innovation these are all defining characteristics of being modern no matter how successful a new development was or a new invention or an artistic style the modern world always expected more and avantgard artists being citizens of the modern world always responded with new ideas that they thought would be the final answer this is both the optimism and the Achilles heel of being modern next time we're going to look at the ways that the impressionist wanted to picture modernity