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Modernism - The Roots of Modernism

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Modernism
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Page 1: Modernism - The Roots of Modernism

Modernism

Page 2: Modernism - The Roots of Modernism

The Roots of Modernism

• Until recently, the word "modern" used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art is modern at the time it is made. In his Il Libro dell'Arte (translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook") in 1437, Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting "modern" (see BIBLIOGRAPHY). Giorgio Vasari writing in 16th-century Italy refers to the art of his own period as "modern." (see BIBLIOGRAPHY )

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Term

• As an art historical term, "modern" refers to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art.

• The term "modernism" is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, "modernism" can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art.

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Edouard Manet“Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe”1863

•Édouard Manet is often called the first modernist painter, and that modernism in art originated in the 1860s. Paintings such as his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe are seen to have ushered in the era of modernism. Why did Manet paint Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe? The standard answer is: Because he was interested in exploring new subject matter, new painterly values, and new spatial relationships

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• When Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 a lot of people were scandalized. When his painting of Olympia was exhibited the public were even more upset. Why was Manet painting pictures that he knew many people would find shocking?

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Oil on canvas (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

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The Reasons for ChangeThe roots of modernism lie much deeper in history than the middle of the 19th Century. The Renaissance period saw the first encounter with the concept of secular humanism Sir Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 was the first encounter with secular humanism, the notion of man (not God) is the measure of all things, a Worldly civic consciousness and “Utopian” visions of a more perfect society.The modernist thinking which emerged in the Renaissance began to take shape as a larger pattern of thought in the 18th century. In the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment saw the intellectual maturation of the humanist belief in reason as the supreme guiding principle in the affairs of humankind. Through reason the mind achieved enlightenment, and for the enlightened mind, freed from the restraints of superstition and ignorance, a whole new exciting world opened up.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement for which the most immediate stimulus was the so-called Scientific Revolution of the 17th and early 18th centuries when men like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, through the application of reason to the study of Nature (i.e. our world and the heavens) had made spectacular scientific discoveries in which were revealed various scientific truths.

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• In the latter half of the 18th century, the model for the ideals of the new society was the world of ancient Rome and Greece. The Athens of Pericles and Rome of the Republican period offered fine examples of emerging democratic principles in government, and of heroism and virtuous action, self-sacrifice and civic dedication in the behaviour of their citizens.

• It was believed, in fact, certainly according to the "ancients" in that quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns mentioned earlier, that the ancient world had achieved a kind of perfection, an ideal that came close to the Enlightenment understanding of truth. Johann Winckelmann was convinced that Greek art was the most perfect and directed contemporary artists to examples such as the Apollo Belvedere.

Apollo Belvedere Roman marble copy after a bronze original of c. 330 BCE (Vatican Museums, Rome)

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Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785

oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre,

Paris)

• It is under these circumstances that Jacques-Louis David came to paint the classicizing and didactic historical painting Oath of the Horatii exhibited at the Salon in 1785. This was a noble and edifying work treating a grand and moralizing subject

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• In the Salon of 1824, in which Ingres exhibited his Vow of Louis XIII, and Delacroix his Massacre of Scios, Ingres' work, painted in a style the critics called "le beau" (the beautiful), was identified with classical academic theory and the right-wing conservative forces of the ancien régime. In contrast, Delacroix, whose style was labeled "le laid" (the ugly), clearly exhibited more liberal attitudes in his choice of subject matter and was associated with anarchy, materialism, and contemporary or modern life.

Eugène Delacroix, Massacre at Chios 1824, Oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre, Paris

J-A-D Ingres, Vow of Louis XIII

1824, Oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

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• Delacroix, whose support of the revolution of 1830 is made clear in his painting Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830, for example, came to be spoken of as a colorist. The socialist statements forcefully made by Gustave Courbet in his The Stonebreakers, for example, and the sharp political commentary of Manet in his The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1868, for example, are glossed over in discussions of the formal qualities of each work; their painterly technique and the flattened treatment of pictorial space.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830 1830, Oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

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• For conservatives, Ingres represented order, traditional values, and the good old days of the ancien régime. Political progressives saw Delacroix as the representative of intellectuals, of revolution, of anarchy; his supporters said he had overthrown tyranny and established the principle of liberty in art.

• It is from Delacroix that the line of progressive modernism extends directly to Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. In the conservative view, Delacroix's Romanticism, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Naturalism were all manifestations of the cult of ugliness that opposed the Academic ideal of the beautiful. Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, were each in turn accused by conservatives of carrying on subversive work that was intended to undermine the State.

Édouard Manet The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian 1868, Oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Gustave Courbet The Stonebreakers 1849-50, Oil on canvas (destroyed)

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Gustave CourbetA Burial at Ornans

1849-50, Oil on Canvas314 x 663cm

Museed’Orsay, Paris

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Gustave Courbet1817- 1877

• “Burial at Ornans” painted in 1849 is believed to be inspired by the death of Courbet’s grandfather, the work was of momumental size and expressed the admiraiton Courbet had for his relative.

• It included 50 life size portraits of friends and members of his family.• When it was exhibited at the Salon, the critics and the public were

shocked that anyone would paint so large a picture on such a common and morbid theme.

• Works on the theme of funerals and death were usually painted in a vertical format (looking towards heaven). Courbet chose instead to use a horizontal canvas, focusing on the ground, the soil and the hole in the earth. He made no associations in his painting with heaven or with spirituality, and included no angels- a break with tradition, which created much antagonism.

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Courbet’s technique was seen as unpolished, and shocked the academics, who saw his painting as an insult to their teaching. He used a rich, low-toned palette based predominantly on black. Painted broadly, with thick applications of colour, usually spread with the palette knife.

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The Academy and the SalonThe French Academy of Painting and Sculpture wasestablished in 1648 by King Louis XVI as a way of controlling culture and glorifying his monarchy.The Academy believed that painters should abide by certain rules; • - Works should be narrative and should tell spiritually and morally uplifting

stories.• Paintings should be based on Classical mythology with an underlying moral

message.• Works should praise the government and past leaders.• Careful tonal drawing should be done, and glazes washes of oil colour built up

carefully.Work that did not fit into these categories was to be shunned. The Academy reinforcedthe belief that if an artist was not prepared to work within its guidelines, he or she

would only manage to reach a standard of mediocrity and would probably be excluded from the Salon Exhibition. The Academy was very powerful and influential.

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The Salon

• The exhibition place of the Academy was the Salon, established in 1737.

• In the 1800’s the Salon became excepetionally popular, with reports of hundreds of visitors on opening days. Often people were injured in the rush to get in the door. The walls were crowded with hundreds of works .

• The Salon created much news and was an exceptionally fashionable occasion. The winner of the Salon prize would be guaranteed great fame.

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IMPRESSIONISM

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Edouard Manet

“The Bar at The Folies-Bergere”

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The Impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or a object and the use of unmixed primary colours and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

• Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artist who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour.

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The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin and Frederic Bazille, who worked together, influenced each otherm and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870’s. The established painter Edouard Manet, whose work in the 1860’s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873 .

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Monet

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Monet “Vetheuil Waterlilies”

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Seurat

Sunday Afternoon The Island of La Grande Jatte


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