50 EUROPE
In this chapter
- Geography and History
- Religion and Philosophy
- Literature
- Romanticism
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Mary Shelley
- Realism
- Charles Baudelaire
- Gustave Flaubert
- Christina Rosetti
- Leo Tolstoy
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Henrik Ibsen
- H.G. Wells
- W.B. Yeats
- Modernism
- Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce
- Franz Kafka
- T.S. Eliot
- Wilfred Owen
- Seamus Heaney
- Romanticism
- Architecture
- Performing Arts
- Music
- Romantic Era
- Art Song
- Piano Music
- Program Music
- Nationalism
- Romantic Opera
- Twentieth Century
- Impressionism
- Expressionism and Serialism
- Primitivism
- Electronic Music/Music Concrete
- Romantic Era
- Music
- Visual Arts
- Romanticism
- Introduction to Romanticism
- Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne
- Painting colonial culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque
- Theodore Gericault, Raft of the Medusa
- Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808
- Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons
- John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
- J.M.W. Turner, Slave Ship
- Early Photography: Niepce, Talbot, and Muybridge
- Pre-Raphaelites
- Introducing the Pre-Raphaelits
- Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine
- Realism
- A Beginner’s Guide to Realism
- Gustave Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet
- Edouard Manet, Olympia
- Edouard Manet, Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)
- Impressionism
- Impressionism, an Introduction
- Edgar Degas, The Dance Class
- Berthe Morisot, The Cradle
- August Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- August Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
- Claude Monet, Les Nympheas (The Water Lilies)
- Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte- 1884
- Vincent Van Gosh, The Starry Night
- Paul Cezanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)
- August Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Art Nouveau
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Edvard Munch, The Scream
- Fauvism
- Introduction to Fauvism
- Henri Matisse, Dance I
- Expressionism
- Expressionism, an introduction
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Egon Schiele, Portrait of Wally
- Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version)
- Cubism
- Inventing Cubism
- Pablo Picasso, Guernica
- Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Two Cubist Musicians
- Dada
- Introduction to Dada
- Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain
- Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Wieman Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
- Surrealism
- Surrealism: An Introduction
- Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)
- Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
- What Is Degenerate Art?
- Kathe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
- Postwar Art
- Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II
- Henry Moore, Reclining Figure
- Joseph Beuys, Celtic+~~~~ and Conceptual Performance
- Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present
- Romanticism
GEOGRAPHY and HISTORY
RELIGION and PHILOSOPHY
Marxism
Unlike Enlightenment social theory, Marxist theories did not try to solve specific social problems that arose from industrialization and urbanization. Rather, they advocated removing the economic system that they felt caused these problems—capitalism. When German philosophers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, they made a prediction: the workers would overthrow capitalism in the most advanced industrial nation, England. The natural forces of history, they argued, made this revolution inevitable. They derived their views of these historical forces from the work of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) on the dialectic method.
Hegel argued that history itself was the movement created by the interaction between a thesis (an original state) and a force countering that original state (antithesis), resulting in a new and higher state (synthesis). This dialectic can be likened to a grade report: based on the original grades (the thesis), a student will ideally reflect on their performance and address areas of weakness (antithesis) to ultimately arrive at a higher understanding of the topics under study (synthesis).
Hegel argued that in various eras of history, Absolute Spirit—which might be understood in many ways, including God or the collective human consciousness—confronts its own essence and transitions to a higher state. Hegel saw this most clearly in the life of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. Hegel presents Jesus as a rational philosopher who reflects on and confronts Judaism—antithesis challenging thesis. The resurrection of Jesus following his crucifixion symbolizes an awakened consciousness both in the individual of Jesus and in humanity. Within this framework, the birth of Christianity following Jesus’s resurrection is viewed as the synthesis, the higher state (Dale 2006).
In contrast to Hegel’s idealistic dialectic, Karl Marx (1818–1883) proposed a view of the dialectic called dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism identities the contradictions within material, real-world phenomena as the driving force of change. Most important to Marx were the economic conflicts between social classes. The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) states, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels [1969] 2000, ch. 1). Marx and Engels note that in every epoch of history (as understood at the time) society has been divided into social orders and that tensions between these social orders determine the direction of history, rather than the realization of any abstract ideals. Specifically, they identified the colonization of the Americas and the rise of trade with India and China as the revolutionary forces that created and enriched the bourgeois class, ultimately resulting in the death of feudalism. Similarly, Marx regarded the clash of economic interests between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (workers) as the contradiction that would bring down capitalism and give rise to a classless society (Marx and Engels [1969] 2000).
Marx laid out a detailed plan for how the proletariat revolution would occur. Marx proposed the concept of surplus value as a contradictory force within capitalism. Surplus value was the profit the capitalists made above and beyond the wages of the workers. This profit strengthens the capitalists’ monetarily and so gives them more power over the workers and a greater ability to exploit them. Marx viewed this surplus value as a key part of the “economic law of motion of modern society” that would inevitably lead to revolution (Marx [1954] 1999).
Despite there being competition among workers for jobs, Marx believed that conflict with their employers would bind them. As capitalism advanced, the workers would form into a class of proletariats, which would then form trade unions and political parties to represent its interests. As the revolution advanced, the most resolute members of the working-class political parties, those with the clearest understanding of the movement, would establish the communist party. The proletariat, led by the communists, would then “wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State” (Marx and Engels [1969] 2000, ch. 2). The communist party would need to rule society as “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and enact reforms that would lead to a classless society.
These developments did, in fact, materialize—but in Russia, not in England, as Marx had predicted. Marx had expected the revolution to begin in England, since it was the most industrial society, and to spread to other nations as their capitalist economies advanced to the same degree. The unfolding of actual events in a way contrary to Marx’s predictions led Marxists and others to doubt the reliability of Marx’s system of dialectical materialism. This doubt was compounded by the realizations that the Russian communist party was responsible for killing millions of farmers and dissidents and that some working-class parties and unions were turning to fascism as an alternative to communism. By the early to mid-20th century, opponents of the capitalist system were questioning orthodox Marxism as a method of realizing the ideal of a government by the working class.
Copyright: Smith, Nathan. (2022). The Marxist Solution. In Introduction to Philosophy. OpenStax.
Existentialism
Video URL: https://youtu.be/YaDvRdLMkHs?si=LBhU5DjDOmvpECd6
Post-modernism
Many modern scholars embraced the idea that the world operates according to a set of overarching universal structures. This view proposes that as we continue to progress in terms of technological, scientific, intellectual, and social advancements, we come closer to discovering universal truths about these structures. This view of progression toward truth gave rise to a school of thought known as structuralism, which is pervasive in many academic fields of study, as discussed below. Postmodernism departs from this way of thinking in rejecting these ideas and contending that there exists no one reality that we can be certain of and no absolute truth.
The philosophical battle over whether there is one nonnegotiable reality took shape in conversations around structuralism and post-structuralism. Structuralists historically looked to verbal language and mathematics to show that symbols cannot refer to just anything we want them to refer to. For example, most people would say it is ridiculous to use the word car to refer to a dog. Rather, language and mathematics are universal systems of communication emerging from a universal structure of things. This claim sounds similar to Platonic idealism, in which the structures that ground our world are understood as intangible “forms.”
Freud’s Structuralism in Psychology
The theory of psychoanalysis is based on the idea that all humans have suppressed elements of their unconscious minds and that these elements will liberate them if they are confronted. This idea was proposed and developed by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). For Freud, psychoanalysis was not only a theory but also a method, which he used to free his patients from challenges such as depression and anxiety. In Freud’s early thinking, the “unconscious” was defined as the realm in which feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that exist outside of consciousness reside. These elements of the unconscious were understood to set the stage for conscious experience and influence the human automatically (Westen 1999). Freud later abandoned the use of the word unconscious (Carlson et al. 2010, 453), shifting instead to three separate terms: id, referring to human instincts; superego, indicating the enforcer of societal conventions such as cultural norms and ethics (Schacter, Gilbert, and Wegner 2011, 481); and ego, describing the conscious part of human thought. With these three terms, Freud proposed a universal structure of the mind.
Post-structuralists point out that Freud’s ideas about psychoanalysis and universal structures of the mind cannot be proven. The subconscious foundations on which psychoanalysis is grounded simply cannot be observed. Some have argued that there is no substantive difference between the claims of psychoanalysts and those of shamans or other practitioners of methods of healing not grounded in empirical methods (Torrey 1986). French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (1930–1992) took an even harsher approach, presenting psychoanalysis as a means of reinforcing oppressive state control.
Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) and others have criticized Freud’s ideas from a feminist perspective, accusing psychoanalysts of excluding women from their theories. In this view, psychoanalysis is based on a patriarchal understanding. Those taking this view point out that Freud made a number of patriarchal claims, including that sexuality and subjectivity are inseparably connected, and that he viewed women as problematic throughout his life (Zakin 2011). Yet many psychoanalytic feminists express a critical appreciation for Freud, utilizing what they find valuable in his theories and ignoring other aspects.
Deconstruction
Closely related to post-structuralism is deconstruction. Accredited to Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), deconstruction aims to analyze a text to discover that which made it what it was. Derrida rejected the structuralist approach to textual analysis. In the structuralist framework, there was a focus on how a text fits into a larger framework of linguistic meaning and signifying (Barry 2002, 40). Derrida, among others, held that these structures were as arbitrary as other facets of language, such as the arbitrary decision to use “tree” to refer to a large plant with a bark, trunk, and leaves when we could have called it a “cell phone” and have procured the same symbolic use (Thiselton 2009). Derrida asserted that texts do not have a definitive meaning but rather that there are several possible and plausible interpretations. His argument was based on the assertion that interpretation could not occur in isolation. While Derrida did not assert that all meanings were acceptable, he did question why certain interpretations were held as more correct than others (Thiselton 2009).
When German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) famously declared that “God is dead,” he rejected God as a basis for morality and asserted that there is no longer (and never was) any ground for morality other than the human. The removal of the notion of sure foundations for ethical behavior and human meaning can stir a sense of anxiety, a fear of living without a place of certainty (Warnock 1978). This fear and anxiety inform the existential notion of the “absurd,” which is simply another way of stating that the only meaning the world has is the meaning that we give it (Crowell 2003). In this motion away from objective assertions of truth, one comes to what Nietzsche calls “the abyss,” or the world without the absolute logical structures and norms that provide meaning. The abyss is the world where nothing has universal meaning; instead, everything that was once previously determined and agreed upon is subject to individual human interpretation. Without the structures of fixed ethical mandates, the world can seem a perpetual abyss of meaninglessness.
Ethics in Post-structuralism
Although Nietzsche lived prior to Derrida, he engaged in a type of deconstruction that he referred to as genealogy. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche traces the meaning of present morals to their historical origins. For example, Nietzsche argued that the concepts we refer to as “good” and “evil” were formed in history through the linguistic transformation of the terms “nobility” and “underclass” (Nietzsche 2007, 147–148). Nietzsche held that the upper classes at one time were thought to be “noble,” having characteristics that the lower classes were envious or and would want to emulate. Therefore, “noble” was considered not an ethical “good” but a practical “good.” A person simply had a better life if they were part of the ruling class. Over time, the concept of “noble” took on a more ideal meaning, and the practical characteristics (e.g., reputation, access to resources, influence, etc.) became abstract virtues. Because the lower classes were envious of the upper classes, they found a theoretical framework to subvert the power of the nobility: Judeo-Christian philosophy. In Judeo-Christian philosophy, the “good” is no longer just a synonym for the nobility but a spiritual virtue and is represented by powerlessness. “Evil” is represented by strength and is a spiritual vice. Nietzsche views this reversal as one of the most tragic and dangerous tricks to happen to the human species. In his view, this system of created morality allows the weak to stifle the power of the strong and slow the progress of humanity.
Foucault on Power and Knowledge
For French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), “power” at the base level is the impetus that urges one to commit any action (Lynch 2011, 19). Foucault claimed that power has been misunderstood; it has traditionally been understood as residing in a person or group, but it really is a network that exists everywhere. Because power is inescapable, everyone participates in it, with some winning and others losing.
Foucault contended that power affects the production of knowledge. He argued that Nietzsche’s process of genealogy exposed the shameful origins of practices and ideas that some societies have come to hold as “natural” and “metaphysically structural,” such as the inferiority of woman or the justification of slavery. For Foucault, these and other systems aren’t just the way things are but are the way things have been developed to be by the powerful, for their own benefit. The disruptions promoted by critical theory are viewed as insurrections against accepted histories—disruptions that largely deal with a reimagining of how we know what we know—and understood as a weapon against oppression.
Critical Race Theory
One of the most controversial applications of critical theory concerns its study of race. Critical race theory approaches the concept of race as a social construct and examines how race has been defined by the power structure. Within this understanding, “Whiteness” is viewed as an invented concept that institutionalizes racism and needs to be dismantled. Critical race theorists trace the idea of “Whiteness” to the late 15th century, when it began to be used to justify the dehumanization and restructuring of civilizations in the Americas by Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Belgium. As these colonizing nations established new societies on these continents, racism was built into their institutions. Thus, for example, critical race theorists argue that racism not as an anomaly but a characteristic of the American legal system. Ian Haney López’s White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race argued that racial norms in the United States are background assumptions that are legally supported and that impact the success of those socially defined by them. Critical race theory views the institutions of our society as replicating racial inequality.
The idea of institutionalized racism is not unique to critical race theory. Empirical studies, such as those carried out by W. E. B. Du Bois, have outlined the structure of institutionalized racism within communities. Critical race theories are unique in that they do not see policies that arise from these empirical studies as a solution because these policies, they argue, arise within a power structure that determines what we accept as knowledge. Instead, critical race theorists, like other branches of critical theory, turn to the philosopher, the teacher, or the student to relinquish their role as neutral observers and challenge the power structure and social institutions through dialog. Critics of this approach—and other critical theory approaches to education—worry that these programs seek to indoctrinate students in a manner that bears too close a resemblance to Maoist “self-criticism” campaigns.
Radical Democracy
“Radical democracy” can be defined as a mode of thought that allows for political difference to remain in tension and challenges both liberal and conservative ideas about government and society. According to radical democracy, the expectation of uniform belief among a society or portion of a society is opposed to the expressed and implied tenets of democracy (Kahn and Kellner 2007). If one wants freedom and equality, then disparate opinions must be allowed in the marketplace of ideas.
One strand of radical democracy is associated with Habermas’s notion of deliberation as found in communicative action. Habermas argued for deliberation, not the normalizing of ideas through peer pressure and governmental influence, as a way in which ideological conflicts can be solved. Though Habermas admitted that different contexts will quite naturally disagree over important matters, the process of deliberation was viewed as making fruitful dialogue between those with opposing viewpoints possible (Olson [2011] 2014). Another type of radical democracy drew heavily on Marxist thought, asserting that radical democracy should not be based on the rational conclusions of individuals but grounded in the needs of the community.
Copyright: Smith, Nathan. (2022). Postmodernism. In Introduction to Philosophy. OpenStax.
Feminism
Third wave feminism is, in many ways, a hybrid creature. It is influenced by second wave feminism, Black feminisms, transnational feminisms, Global South feminisms, and queer feminism. This hybridity of third wave activism comes directly out of the experiences of feminists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries who have grown up in a world that supposedly does not need social movements because “equal rights” for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women have been guaranteed by law in most countries. The gap between law and reality—between the abstract proclamations of states and concrete lived experience—however, reveals the necessity of both old and new forms of activism. In a country where white women are paid only 75.3% of what white men are paid for the same labor (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2016), where police violence in black communities occurs at much higher rates than in other communities, where 58% of transgender people surveyed experienced mistreatment from police officers in the past year (James et. al 2016), where 40% of homeless youth organizations’ clientele are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (Durso and Gates 2012), where people of color—on average—make less income and have considerably lower amounts of wealth than white people, and where the military is the most funded institution by the government, feminists have increasingly realized that a coalitional politics that organizes with other groups based on their shared (but differing) experiences of oppression, rather than their specific identity, is absolutely necessary. Thus, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (1997) argue that a crucial goal for the third wave is “the development of modes of thinking that can come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity, and the creation of a coalitional politics based on these understandings” (Heywood and Drake 1997: 3).
In the 1980s and 1990s, third wave feminists took up activism in a number of forms. Beginning in the mid 1980s, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) began organizing to press an unwilling US government and medical establishment to develop affordable drugs for people with HIV/AIDS. In the latter part of the 1980s, a more radical subset of individuals began to articulate a queer politics, explicitly reclaiming a derogatory term often used against gay men and lesbians, and distancing themselves from the gay and lesbian rights movement, which they felt mainly reflected the interests of white, middle-class gay men and lesbians. As discussed at the beginning of this text, queer also described anti-categorical sexualities. The queer turn sought to develop more radical political perspectives and more inclusive sexual cultures and communities, which aimed to welcome and support transgender and gender non-conforming people and people of color. This was motivated by an intersectional critique of the existing hierarchies within sexual liberation movements, which marginalized individuals within already sexually marginalized groups. In this vein, Lisa Duggan (2002) coined the term homonormativity, which describes the normalization and depoliticization of gay men and lesbians through their assimilation into capitalist economic systems and domesticity—individuals who were previously constructed as “other.” These individuals thus gained entrance into social life at the expense and continued marginalization of queers who were non-white, disabled, trans, single or non-monogamous, middle-class, or non-western. Critiques of homonormativity were also critiques of gay identity politics, which left out concerns of many gay individuals who were marginalized within gay groups. Akin to homonormativity, Jasbir Puar coined the term homonationalism, which describes the white nationalism taken up by queers, which sustains racist and xenophobic discourses by constructing immigrants, especially Muslims, as homophobic (Puar 2007). Identity politics refers to organizing politically around the experiences and needs of people who share a particular identity. The move from political association with others who share a particular identity to political association with those who have differing identities, but share similar, but differing experiences of oppression (coalitional politics), can be said to be a defining characteristic of the third wave.
Around the same time as ACT UP was beginning to organize in the mid-1980s, sex-positive feminism came into currency among feminist activists and theorists. Amidst what is known now as the “Feminist Sex Wars” of the 1980s, sex-positive feminists argued that sexual liberation, within a sex-positive culture that values consent between partners, would liberate not only women, but also men. Drawing from a social constructionist perspective, sex-positive feminists such as cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1984) argued that no sexual act has an inherent meaning, and that not all sex, or all representations of sex, were inherently degrading to women. In fact, they argued, sexual politics and sexual liberation are key sites of struggle for white women, women of color, gay men, lesbians, queers, and transgender people—groups of people who have historically been stigmatized for their sexual identities or sexual practices. Therefore, a key aspect of queer and feminist subcultures is to create sex-positive spaces and communities that not only valorize sexualities that are often stigmatized in the broader culture, but also place sexual consent at the center of sex-positive spaces and communities. Part of this project of creating sex-positive, feminist and queer spaces is creating media messaging that attempts to both consolidate feminist communities and create knowledge from and for oppressed groups.
In a media-savvy generation, it is not surprising that cultural production is a main avenue of activism taken by contemporary activists. Although some commentators have deemed the third wave to be “post-feminist” or “not feminist” because it often does not utilize the activist forms (e.g., marches, vigils, and policy change) of the second wave movement (Sommers, 1994), the creation of alternative forms of culture in the face of a massive corporate media industry can be understood as quite political. For example, the Riot Grrrl movement, based in the Pacific Northwest of the US in the early 1990s, consisted of do-it-yourself bands predominantly composed of women, the creation of independent record labels, feminist ‘zines, and art. Their lyrics often addressed gendered sexual violence, sexual liberationism, heteronormativity, gender normativity, police brutality, and war. Feminist news websites and magazines have also become important sources of feminist analysis on current events and issues. Magazines such as Bitch and Ms., as well as online blog collectives such as Feministing and the Feminist Wire function as alternative sources of feminist knowledge production. If we consider the creation of lives on our own terms and the struggle for autonomy as fundamental feminist acts of resistance, then creating alternative culture on our own terms should be considered a feminist act of resistance as well.
As we have mentioned earlier, feminist activism and theorizing by people outside the US context has broadened the feminist frameworks for analysis and action. In a world characterized by global capitalism, transnational immigration, and a history of colonialism that has still has effects today, transnational feminism is a body of theory and activism that highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism. In “Under Western Eyes,” an article by transnational feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991), Mohanty critiques the way in which much feminist activism and theory has been created from a white, North American standpoint that has often exoticized “3rd world” women or ignored the needs and political situations of women in the Global South. Transnational feminists argue that Western feminist projects to “save” women in another region do not actually liberate these women, since this approach constructs the women as passive victims devoid of agency to save themselves. These “saving” projects are especially problematic when they are accompanied by Western military intervention. For instance, in the war on Afghanistan, begun shortly after 9/11 in 2001, U.S. military leaders and George Bush often claimed to be waging the war to “save” Afghani women from their patriarchal and domineering men. This crucially ignores the role of the West—and the US in particular—in supporting Islamic fundamentalist regimes in the 1980s. Furthermore, it positions women in Afghanistan as passive victims in need of Western intervention—in a way strikingly similar to the victimizing rhetoric often used to talk about “victims” of gendered violence (discussed in an earlier section). Therefore, transnational feminists challenge the notion—held by many feminists in the West—that any area of the world is inherently more patriarchal or sexist than the West because of its culture or religion through arguing that we need to understand how Western imperialism, global capitalism, militarism, sexism, and racism have created conditions of inequality for women around the world.
In conclusion, third wave feminism is a vibrant mix of differing activist and theoretical traditions. Third wave feminism’s insistence on grappling with multiple points-of-view, as well as its persistent refusal to be pinned down as representing just one group of people or one perspective, may be its greatest strong point. Similar to how queer activists and theorists have insisted that “queer” is and should be open-ended and never set to mean one thing, third wave feminism’s complexity, nuance, and adaptability become assets in a world marked by rapidly shifting political situations. The third wave’s insistence on coalitional politics as an alternative to identity-based politics is a crucial project in a world that is marked by fluid, multiple, overlapping inequalities.
Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies by Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, Sonny Nordmarken is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
LITERATURE
Romanticism
Although the publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is often heralded as the formal start of Romanticism, the roots of the movement began earlier. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, had embraced the power of rational thought and the scientific method to advance society in an orderly fashion. Romanticism, however, heralded a more individual approach, often guided by strong emotions and some type of spiritual insight. According to Romantics, deeper understanding of the world was achieved through intuition and emotional connections, rather than reason. In literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the early proponents of the Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang ) period, which rejected the Enlightenment’s focus on reason in favor of strong emotions and the value of the individual. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is a classic Storm and Stress novel, with a protagonist driven by his extreme emotions. If nature could be a source for inspired reflection in Wordsworth, it could also be dangerous. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which touches on the Romantic idea of poet as genius at the end, notes the thin line between genius and madness. Exceptional individuals as protagonists are the norm in Romanticism, in part from the (early) admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte.
The admiration for Bonaparte, however, began to fade among many Romantic poets as he became a part of the monarchy and a more traditional figure of authority. One type of exceptional individual, the Romantic hero, has either rejected society or been rejected, and therefore is no longer constrained by society’s rules (with the reminder that a Romantic hero is not necessarily romantic, but rather a product of Romanticism). Romantic heroes tend to be self-centered and arrogant, but are capable of compassion and even self-sacrifice, in some cases. A Byronic hero is a subset of Romantic hero, named for the poet Byron, who was described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The distinction between the two types can get murky, since the Byronic hero is in some ways simply a bit more dangerous and alienated than the Romantic hero (in fact, characters such as Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Faust in Goethe’s Faust have been called both by various literary scholars). Byronic heroes are more likely to have some guilty secret in the past, or some unnamed crime that is never revealed, which drives the characters’ actions, and they are more likely to end tragically.
There were critiques of Romanticism even during the movement. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she questions both Enlightenment views of science and Romanticism’s view of the hero. The first narrator, Robert Walton, fails miserably to advance scientific exploration in the Arctic, while risking the lives of others. Similarly, Victor Frankenstein’s self-absorbed behavior slowly destroys everyone around him. Victor’s passivity and silence become more and more criminal as the novel progresses. Mary Shelley began the novel while she and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were spending time with Byron, which makes her critical analysis even more intriguing.
Literary movements are, of course, fluid and overlapping. Some scholars date the end of Romanticism to the early 1830s, while others extend Romanticism to as late as 1870. In British literature, Victorianism (1837-1901), which coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria, covers the transition from Romanticism to Realism; while poets such as Tennyson and Robert Browning are clearly descendants of Romanticism, their work contains realistic elements that do not technically fit into Romanticism.
William Wordsworth
As a young man, Wordsworth memorized passages from Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. His lyrical poetry, therefore, bears the imprint of the musical quality of the early modern poets who lived before him. From Milton’s concept of the sublime, he created work that celebrates the sublimity of the natural world. Wordsworth, who is now considered the premier poet of the Romantic movement, enjoyed most of his acclaim long after his death. During his lifetime, his work was overshadowed by the more immediate popularity of Lords Tennyson and Byron. When the Romantic Movement spread to other parts of Europe and America, however, Wordsworth’s connection of nature and the human imagination sparked an immense following.
Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, Wordsworth’s literary circle became known as the “Lake Poets,” named after the Lake District in England. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, which was popular and brought them some financial success. The book contained one of Wordsworth’s best-known poems, “Tintern Abbey,” the study of a natural location with thematic undertones of loss and consolation. The book also contains one of Coleridge’s famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, the innovation of Lyrical Ballads influenced a rising, younger group of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.
In the Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth proposes a theory that connects poetry and the workings of the human mind. His intended audience is not the high-brow literary elite, but the common men and women. For example, he addresses those who were caught in the industrial confines of cities due to the loss of common land in the country in his poignant poem “Michael.” In the “Preface,” Wordsworth writes, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” an example of which he demonstrates in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Perhaps his most powerful and influential poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” captures the human mind and its connection to the natural world.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
License: Public Domain
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge is the first critic of the Romantic literary movement in England. His father was a school-master and a vicar, and Coleridge grew up in a household full of books, which he read voraciously. His father’s fascination with astronomy created in the young man a vision of the vastness of the world, a vision that would later inform his own work. His character and literary style were formed when he was an adolescent student at Christ’s Hospital school in London; there, he immersed himself in the classics and English poets such as Shakespeare and Milton. From the English poets, he drew the significance of sound and imagery. Coleridge saw poetry as a means of enjoyment and science as a means to scientific truth; according to Coleridge, however, the best poetry uses metaphor and imagery to express truth. He is responsible for bringing the ideas of Immanuel Kant and human understanding to the literary circles of England. He also introduces an innovative supernatural context in much of his poetry, which requires that his audience release their grip on reason. He collaborated with William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, a foundational book of verse for the Romantic period. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge introduces the concept of a “willing suspension of disbelief”: In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
The suspension of disbelief or poetic faith is necessary for the enjoyment of two of Coleridge’s famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Kubla Khan” (1817). Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” appeared in his imagination in the waking moments of an opium-induced sleep; the poem represents the poet’s fascination with the human imagination and the vastness of nature, the unconscious and fantasy. This poem, though not Coleridge’s most prized work, has stimulated scholarly conversation for its potent and vivid imagery and language, and foreshadows the work of poets like William Blake and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe.
Kubla Khan
License: Public Domain
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
From an early age, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a controversial figure. He was the first-born male of his family, and therefore he had expectations of a substantial family inheritance. He was expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism (1811), copies of which he sent to every conservative professor at the college. Shelley and his father parted company upon his refusal to accept Christianity as a means of reinstatement to the college, forcing Shelley to wait for two years to receive his inheritance. Shelley would continue to defy religious hypocrisy and espouse politically radical ideas for the rest of his short life. Shelley’s defiance of social traditions extended to his personal life. His first wife, Harriett Westbook, committed suicide when Shelley began an affair with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The group of radical intellectuals with which Shelley associated touted free love and lived on the fringe of respectable society. Shelley legally married Mary, but continued to have affairs with many women as the couple made their way across Europe. Mary Shelley would later write the Romantic masterpiece Frankenstein. Shelley’s death by drowning in 1822 established him as a tragic figure in the Romantic era. In spite of the few years in which he lived and composed, Shelley leaves behind some of the period’s most elegant poetry. He is buried beside John Keats in Italy. Shelley’s poetry practically trips from the lips in tremendous similes, alliterations, and phrases. In “Ozymandias,” he explains the vanity of greatness in the fall of Ramesses II of Egypt.
Ozymandias
License: Public Domain
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831). As the daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the expectations for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were high. Her mother died shortly after her birth, and her father gave her an unconventional education. Mary grew up listening to her father’s guests, who ranged from scientists and philosophers to literary figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mary was sixteen when she fell in love with one of her father’s admirers, the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who was estranged from his wife), and ran away with him. The two of them married, several years later, after the death of Shelley’s first wife. In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy became the neighbors of Lord Byron, with whom they developed a close friendship while vacationing on the shores of Lake Geneva. During a stretch of bad weather, Byron suggested that each of them should write a ghost story. Mary’s initial idea, which resulted from a nightmare she had, quickly evolved into Frankenstein.
The story of Victor Frankenstein is a cautionary tale of what happens when Romantic ambition and Enlightenment ideals of science and progress are taken too far. This theme also appears in the story of the narrator, the unlucky explorer Robert Walton, who encounters Victor and hears his story. Victor’s most important failure is his abandonment of his Creature, who never receives a name. Victor leaves his initially innocent “child” to survive on his own simply because of his appearance. Although Victor questions whether he himself is to blame for everything that follows, he continues to be repulsed by the Creature’s looks. The impassioned speeches that Mary Shelley writes for the Creature implicitly criticize society for rejecting someone for the wrong reasons. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether Victor, the Creature, and/or society in general is the most monstrous.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Read an excerpt of Frankenstein here
World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Realism
The dates for Realism as a movement vary, from as early as 1820 to as late as 1920. Although Realism is, in many ways, a rejection of Romanticism, it does address some of the same concerns about the industrial revolution that Wordsworth had expressed earlier. The passage of years increased the number of authors who noted the failures of industrialization, especially where pollution and quality of life were concerned. The British period of Victorianism (1837-1901) saw a gradual shifting from Romanticism to Realism. Poets such as Tennyson and Robert Browning are more properly transitional poets: products of Romanticism, but who express themselves in more realistic terms. It is important to remember not only that literary movements are not set in stone, but also that they are not always identified the same way by their own time period. When Charles Baudelaire wrote his seminal work, The Flowers of Evil (1857), he was praised as a poet of Romanticism by Gustave Flaubert, even though most modern scholars locate Baudelaire in Realism, and later poets of Modernism cite him as an early example of their own movement.
Romanticism was slowly but surely replaced with an attempt to see the world as it is. As later generations would note, it is difficult to represent reality in its entirety in one poem, play, short story, or novel. Early Realists tended to include more portrayals of middle class and/or lower class characters, who previously were not the main subjects of literature. In Europe, writers such as Ibsen wrote about the middle class specifically, using ordinary occurrences (at least, ordinary for the middle class experience) as the stuff of drama. Authors such as Henry James occasionally were criticized for novels in which very little seems to happen, since ordinary events are rarely as dramatic as the situations regularly found in Romanticism. In some cases, the attempt to be more realistic led to many works that focused on the negative aspects of humans, leaving out the positive aspects to avoid Romantic overtones.
As a general guideline, Realism tended to point out society’s problems (and the problems with the Romantic view), but offered observations, rather than suggested changes. Naturalism, a subset of Realism often treated as a separate movement, was regularly motivated by a desire to improve the world. Naturalism concerned itself with the poorest members of society in particular, and social change was the goal. Naturalism was criticized for being even more focused on the negative aspects of life than regular Realism. Emile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885) is perhaps the most famous example of Naturalism. In it, Zola depicts the lead-up to and aftermath of a coal miners’ strike with a stark realism that shocked readers. His unsentimental portrayal (in almost journalistic fashion) of events angered both conservatives (reluctant to admit the brutal working and living conditions of the poor) and socialists (unhappy that the workers were not Romantic heroes). Eventually, Modernism began in literature as Realism and Naturalism were ending, overlapping for a brief period of time. Perhaps not surprisingly, Modernism would claim to be more real than Realism—or, as the artist Georgia O’Keeffe said, “Nothing is less real than realism” (Haber), preferring abstract art as a way to arrive at a more complete image of (one type of) truth.
Baudelaire
Like the work of so many transitional authors, Charles Baudelaire’s poetry cannot be classified easily. In 1861, Gustave Flaubert wrote a letter to Baudelaire complimenting him on his poetic style: “You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else” (Flaubert). Baudelaire is believed to have coined the term “modernity” (modernité), which does not necessarily carry the same connotations as being a modern poet or a product of Modernism, focusing as it does on the urban experience. Nonetheless, Baudelaire was an early inspiration for later Modernist (and Symbolist) poets, even though his poetry is now most often classified as Realism. Baudelaire saw himself as a poet of the urban life in Paris, claiming that beauty can be found in the ugliest images and most depraved situations. His most famous book of poetry, provocatively titled The Flowers of Evil, was published in 1857. Audiences were shocked by Baudelaire’s directness in his poems about sex, death, and depression, to name a few of the topics. Baudelaire, his publisher, and his printer were charged with and found guilty of public indecency, and six of the poems were banned from subsequent editions (the ban on the six poems, which discuss lesbians and vampires, was not lifted in France until 1949). Baudelaire’s life was provocative as well; he cultivated the image of a “cursed poet” (poéte maudit) with a life of drugs, prostitutes, mistresses, and wasteful spending. He squandered roughly half of his inheritance in the first two years, so his family convinced a judge to remove control of his finances and give him an allowance. Despite the many setbacks in his life, Baudelaire’s literary fame grew as time passed. He continued to innovate in his writing, experimenting with prose poetry in his later years. Those poems were published posthumously in Paris Spleen (1869), adding to Baudelaire’s influence on Modernist writers.
Correspondences
License: Public Domain
In Nature’s temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood.
And man must wander through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the sense’s and the soul’s delight.
The Corpse
License: Public Domain
Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met
By the roadside on that sweet summer day;
There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,
A loathsome body lay.
The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,
Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,
In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare
The swollen side and flank.
On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven
As though with chemic heat to broil and burn,
And unto Nature all that she had given
A hundredfold return.
The sky smiled down upon the horror there
As on a flower that opens to the day;
So awful an infection smote the air,
Almost you swooned away.
The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,
Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,
That ran along these tatters of life’s pride
With a liquescent gleam.
And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,
The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:
It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell
And multiply with life
The hideous corpse. From all this living world
A music as of wind and water ran,
Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled
By the swift winnower’s fan.
And then the vague forms like a dream died out,
Or like some distant scene that slowly falls
Upon the artist’s canvas, that with doubt
He only half recalls.
A homeless dog behind the boulders lay
And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,
Waiting a chance to come and take away
The morsel she had torn.
And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,
A vile infection man may not endure;
Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!
O passionate and pure!
Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!
When the last sacramental words are said;
And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face
Moulders among the dead.
Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm
That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,
That I still guard in memory the dear form
Of love that comes to this!
Spleen
License: Public Domain
The rainy moon of all the world is weary,
And from its urn a gloomy cold pours down,
Upon the pallid inmates of the mortuary,
And on the neighbouring outskirts of the town.
My wasted cat, in searching for a litter,
Bestirs its mangy paws from post to post;
(A poet’s soul that wanders in the gutter,
With the jaded voice of a shiv’ring ghost).
The smoking pine-log, while the drone laments,
Accompanies the wheezy pendulum,
The while amidst a haze of dirty scents,
—Those fatal remnants of a sick man’s room—
The gallant knave of hearts and queen of spades
Relate their ancient amorous escapades.
Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was born on Dec. 12, 1821 in Rouen, France. He grew up in an affluent middle class family; his father was a respected surgeon. As a young man, Flaubert became friends in college with other students who despised the bourgeoisie, and began writing short stories and, eventually, novels that were critical of middle class values. Flaubert’s health problems (he suffered from epilepsy) forced him to give up plans to study the law, so he devoted his energies to writing literature. After his father died, he retired to a country house near Rouen, where he would spend the rest of his life. His masterpiece, Madame Bovary, is a psychological study of a woman desperate to escape a banal middle-class life. Flaubert is considered to be one of the greatest practitioners of literary realism in France. “A Simple Soul” is the study of the life of Felicite, a servant of Madame Aubain. Over the course of 50 years, she loses many people for whom she cares, and she ends her life caring for a rather difficult parrot named Loulou.
Consider while reading:
- What characteristics of realism do you see in this story?
- Analyze the character of Felicite. What kind of suffering and loss does she undergo in her life?
- What do you think Flaubert is saying about life through this character. How do you respond to her?
- What is the significance of the title of the short story?
Read an excerpt of “A Simple Soul” here: A Simple Soul – Gustave Flaubert – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was born the youngest child in a famous and accomplished family of artists, poets and scholars. Educated at home, she was by nature reserved and pious, like her mother. A devout evangelical Christian, she rejected suitors she considered not sufficiently serious in their faith. She suffered from neuralgia and angina for much of her life and lived very quietly, working for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and writing mostly devotional poetry. The long poem “Goblin Market” (1862) is Rossetti’s best known work and is markedly different in style and content from any of her other poems. Published in 1862 and illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the well-known Pre-Raphael poet, the poem was controversial from the first. While she informed her publisher that the poem was not intended for children, Rossetti often insisted in public that it was intended for children. The plot of the long narrative poem is very similar to a fairy tale: the brave and steadfast sister, Lizzie, saves her impulsive sister Laura from a deadly enchantment that has resulted from Laura succumbing to the temptation of eating goblin fruit. The poem’s dark undertones of sexuality, commodification, and religious ritual have fascinated readers since its publication.
After Death
License: Public Domain
The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.
Up-Hill
License: Public Domain
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Leo Tolstoy
This Russian writer was born in a privileged class and chose to abandon his privilege for a simple life. Beloved for the radical transformation in his work and in his life, he has become one of the most famous writers in literature. His writing reflects his life, in fact, in its simplicity and realism. As a young man in school, Tolstoy excelled in linguistics, and he master several languages. When he traveled through Europe, therefore, he was able to absorb the political and social climate through conversations with the common people he met. At home in Russia, Tolstoy sympathized with the serfs, who bore the brunt of fierce poverty brought about by war and famine. His experience in the Crimean War led to his great novel War and Peace (1869), a realistic and gruesome account of battle. Another of his great novels, Anna Karenina (1873-77), introduces the audience to the reality of relationship among corrupt human beings. Tolstoy continually treats realism as a means of admonishing others to moral righteousness.
In his mid-50’s, Tolstoy experienced a religious conversion that led to his abandoning the Russian Orthodox Church in favor of the simple faith and a purer form of Christianity. Instead of living in his estate house, he lived and worked alongside the peasants, worshipping with them instead of observing religious ritual. Of course, he was consequently excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. His change of lifestyle, however, endeared him to a wide audience in both Russia and Europe. He professed a religious system in which human beings are born pure, but are eventually and inevitably corrupted by society. His characters search for happiness in social success, but they only find peace in an objective and realistic acceptance of life. Tolstoy also became interested in educational theory; subsequently, he opened a school in his family manor house for the children of the country peasants who worked the land. He taught a method of inspiration that influenced educators in Europe and America, who modeled Tolstoy’s approach to learning in the early stages of public educational.
Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) demonstrates the self-centeredness and shallowness of people in high society. Ilyich makes all the right moves to gain wealth and social acceptance: he marries a well-connected woman he does not really love; he neglects his wife and children in favor of his career; and, as a judge, he treats the prisoners in his court with disdain and indifference. When Ilyich must come to terms with the reality of death, he learns that the only comfort he receives is from a servant who represents the naturalness of the common people.
Consider while reading:
- Describe Ivan Ilyich’s wife’s reaction to his illness and death.
- Describe his associates’ reactions to his death.
- What is the significance of the black bag?
- How does Ilyich finally let go of life and embrace death?
Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich here: The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life was every bit as eventful as the stories that he wrote. As a young man, he was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad for being part of a group that was considered subversive. He received a last-minute reprieve from the tsar, and Dostoyevsky instead spent four years doing hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. Those experiences informed his works; in addition to characters who face imminent death or time in Siberia, there are characters with epilepsy, gambling problems, bad luck in love, and ongoing poverty—all conditions that he faced. His fame began with his first novella, Poor Folk (1845), but he never made enough money from his writings to support his family in comfort. Despite all of these hardships, Dostoyevsky managed to become one of Russia’s greatest writers. Leo Tolstoy praised Dostoyevsky as the better writer, and his works influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Faulkner, among many others (including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud). Dostoyevsky is considered the first existentialist novelist; for him, the psychology of the characters is the basis for realism (their experience of the world is the world). In novels such as Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), characters range from murderers to devout followers of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dostoyevsky’s own religious preference), all portrayed with psychological clarity. In Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky satirizes (among other things) the idea that scientific progress will create a utopian society. In Part One, the unnamed narrator, or Underground Man, may seem crazy at first, with what appear to be random and contradictory thoughts. In fact, the argument is constructed very carefully to demonstrate that human beings demand free will—and that they will give up everything to get it. In Part Two, which is an extended flashback, the Underground Man offers a practical demonstration of his theories in his own past. Of particular interest is his love-hate relationship with Romanticism; the narrator ultimately argues that all of us prefer Romanticism to real life (or Realism), simply because real life is not as satisfying as escapism.
Read “Notes From Underground” here: Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen is called both “the father of Realism” and “the father of modern theater” in Europe, which is to say that he was the first playwright to use Realism on stage. Ibsen’s impact on theater makes him the most influential European playwright since Shakespeare. For Ibsen, art should be both challenging and a force for social change; his plays often expose what he saw as the moral hypocrisy of society. In particular, Ibsen’s plays peel back the veneer of respectability of the Norwegian middle class, revealing what happens when people only pretend to be moral. No group or ideology was safe from his criticism, and often there are no characters in a play who are completely without blame. For example, in An Enemy of the People (1882), the outright villains may be the businessmen who are poisoning the local water source, but the locals are equally at fault for refusing to believe the truth for selfish reasons, and the supposed hero of the story makes matters worse with his stubborn temper. In Ghosts (1881), Ibsen broke several taboos in his depiction of how a husband’s repeated infidelities lead to passing on syphilis to his unborn son. As guilty as the husband was, everyone from the pastor to the wife bear some responsibility for looking the other way, even after the husband’s death. Ibsen’s goals for A Doll’s House (1879) are every bit as broad as his other works. Nora and Torvald try to live up to their society’s ideals for how men and women should behave, but both of them become victims to society’s unrealistic expectations. The truth in this case is a lit match that leads to a metaphorical explosion. The fact that Nora and Torvald do not agree on the definition of what is right appears to be a product of which gender holds the power in society, rather than an actual gender issue. A Doll’s House does not offer a conventional happy ending, which so shocked audiences that some theaters actually rewrote the ending when staging it. The ending is also complicated by the fact that Nora’s rebellion against expectations has no guarantee of success in a society where women could not even borrow money without a man’s signature. A common theme in Ibsen’s plays, therefore, is that truth does not always set you free; in fact, sometimes the very best intentions are doomed to failure if society refuses to listen or change. It is a problem that Ibsen faced himself, since his efforts to influence change were invariably seen as shocking and controversial. It is a testament to his persistence and talent that audiences now expect the theater to address social issues.
Read A Doll’s House here: #10 – A doll’s house : Ghosts / With an introd. by William Archer – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library
H.G. Wells
Herbert George Wells, generally referred to as H.G. Wells, was a prolific 19th-century British writer best known for his science fiction novels. He is often referred to, in fact, as the father of science fiction. Born into a lower middle class family, after his father’s shop failed and the family went bankrupt, Wells held a variety of jobs as an adolescent, including working as a teaching assistant, apprentice draper, and pharmacy clerk. He would later use these experiences in his novels as the basis for social satire. After eventually winning a scholarship to Imperial College, Wells trained as a scientist; he was particularly interested in Darwinian theory. Wells was also an avid Socialist and an active member of the Fabian Society, an organization that advocated a long-term approach to the eventual Socialist revolution. Throughout his life, Wells suffered from various physical ailments, including diabetes, and his life was further complicated by a series of romantic affairs and two failed marriages. Wells, who published 51 novels as well as dozens of stories, story collections, works of non-fiction, and essays, is also best known for his novels The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and When the Sleeper Awakes. An early science fiction novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) dramatizes the practice of vivisection, the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of scientific research. Vivisection was a controversial topic in fin de siècle England, with a number of organizations formed to fight the practice as cruel and unethical. As the novel examines the ethics of vivisection, it also illustrates the possibility that civilization was spiraling downward into an increasingly degenerate state. Although Wells was an educated man and a scientist, he appears to be warning of the dangers that unregulated science can pose to the larger community.
Read The Island of Dr. Moreau here: The Island of Doctor Moreau – H.G. Wells – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
W.B. Yeats
The poetry of William Butler Yeats does not fit easily into any literary movement. He admired the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, who embraced a combination of realistic techniques and symbolic meanings. Yeats’ poetry is full of myths and symbols, and his belief in a type of mysticism or spiritualism underlies much of his work (for Yeats, mysticism and the occult were real, not metaphorical). His earlier poems, such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), could be straight out of Victorianism, but over time, Yeats began to incorporate more realistic elements into his poetry. In “Easter, 1916″—written right after the failed Easter Uprising for Irish independence—Yeats offers a critical (and mostly unflattering) view of the individuals who were executed, but recognizes how their deaths for the cause have transformed them into something greater than themselves (a new mythology). Despite that transformation, the narrator worries about whether it was a worthwhile sacrifice (in fact, by 1922, Yeats would be elected a senator in the new Republic of Ireland). Even though his poetry in later years would contain elements of Modernism, such as in the poem “The Second Coming” (1921), Yeats never abandoned the mystical and symbolic in his poetry, becoming a modern poet who disliked Modernism and refused to give up traditional elements (Albrecht; Longley). In his life, Yeats had the same tendency to be caught between (or among) movements. Although he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant born in Dublin, who was expected to support the English presence in Ireland, Yeats became an Irish Nationalist: partly out of patriotism, and partly because he fell in love with the actress Maud Gonne, a beautiful Nationalist. Yeats proposed to Gonne at least four times, and his (bitter) reaction to her rejection of him can be found in many poems, including some of those written after he married Georgiana Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children. The poem “When You Are Old” (1895) is an early example of his obsession with Gonne. Besides writing poetry, Yeats was one of the founders of the Irish (now Abbey) Theater, for which he wrote many plays. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, it was mostly for his plays, which the Nobel organization noted in 1969 is doubly ironic: not only are his poems more famous now, but also “Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize” (Frenz).
Easter 1916
License: Public Domain
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashed within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
When You Are Old
License: Public Domain
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty will love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
License: Public Domain
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Modernism
The philosophical movement in art and literature that we call “Modernism” was characterized by the artist’s response to two powerful forces: the effects of industrialization and the aftermath of wars, particularly the Russian Revolution and World War I. Modernist writers and artists rejected the certainties of Victorian culture, particularly conventional religious faith and respect for authority. Perhaps the most fundamental underlying tenet of Modernism is that traditional ways of thinking about art, music, literature, government, religion, sex, civil rights, architecture, fashion, and other aspects of daily life should be questioned and re-invented. We can trace the roots of Modernism to writers, artists, poets and philosophers of the late 19th century. For example, Sigmund Freud’s theories on the importance of the unconscious, published between 1899 and 1930, certainly influenced writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot to explore the interior lives of their protagonists. Thus, the use of internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness techniques became an important characteristic of Modernist poetry and fiction. Frederic Nietzsche’s theory of “the will to power,” his argument that the primary driving force in humans is toward achievement and success, also influenced novelists and short story writers like Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield. Critics generally point to such writers and playwrights as August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, W.B. Yeats, Henry James, and Charles Baudelaire as exhibiting experimental techniques and themes that would come to be associated with Modernism. The Impressionist, Expressionist and Cubist movements in visual arts, encompassing artists like Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso also typify the spirit of resistance and a desire to create art that spoke to the contemporary condition of men and women in a rapidly changing world.
Modernist writers and poets responded to war, financial collapse, and social change by experimenting with traditional forms and conventions. Given the dramatic events they witnessed, these writers challenged the traditional Enlightenment view of human beings as primarily rational in texts that explored the chaotic workings of the human unconscious. Poets and writers alike made use of images, symbols, and allusions to mythology and Jungian archetypes. In the theatre as well, playwrights like Luigi Pirandello challenged the comfortable assumptions of audiences by breaking down the “fourth wall” of the play and encouraging members of the audience to think more critically about the action onstage. Reflecting a tumultuous time, the texts that you will read in this unit will challenge you to read deeply and carefully, but their innovations and the ideas they present are exciting and complex.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born into the affluent and intellectual family of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen. She was one of eight children; both of her parents had been widowed. Julia Stephen brought three children to her second marriage, Sir Leslie brought one, and they had four children together. Sir Leslie Stephen was a writer, critic, philosopher, and scholar. Virginia and her siblings grew up in an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, with access to their father’s extensive library and frequent visits by many of the most important thinkers and writers of the late Victorian period. Woolf suffered a number of traumas as a child: her mother died when she was thirteen; one of her half-brothers sexually abused her; her half-sister died when she was fifteen. When Woolf was in her twenties, she lost both her father and a brother to illness. Woolf herself began in adolescence to suffer severe bouts of depression; in adulthood, these tended to regularly occur after she had completed a book. She attempted suicide more than once while depressed; sadly, she did finally kill herself in 1941, when she weighted her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river near her home.
Woolf, her siblings, and her husband were extremely influential in the Modernist movement. Together with her sister, Vanessa, and her brother Adrian, Woolf began holding intellectual salons in their home after the death of her father. Their gatherings of writers, intellectuals, and avant garde artists became known as “The Bloomsbury Group.” The group included such notable figures as Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), a lengthy essay generally now published alone, is actually a compilation of two lectures on “Women and Fiction” that Woolf delivered to women undergraduates at Cambridge. In the essay, Woolf comments on the need for women who aspire to write to have an independent income and a private space in which to be alone. Additionally, Woolf includes a speculative section on “Shakespeare’s Sister” as she laments the absence of a canon of women writers. Woolf emphasizes the need for a truly androgynous voice as the way forward for twentieth century literature.
Read A Room of One’s Own here: A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929) (wordpress.com)
James Joyce
James Joyce, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born in Dublin into an affluent Irish family. Over the course of his childhood, however, his father’s drinking and a series of job losses caused his family to lose both income and social status. The eldest of ten children, Joyce was singled out for his academic potential and attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, both Jesuit schools. He later graduated from University College, Dublin, where he had already begun publishing essays. For most of his adult life, James lived as an expatriate, travelling in Europe but living mostly in Trieste, Zurich and Paris in the company of Nora Barnacle, a young woman with whom he eloped in 1904 and eventually married. Initially, he supported Nora and himself teaching English. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. Lucia spent most of her adult life institutionalized for schizophrenia and estranged from her mother. Joyce, who struggled with health problems related to his drinking and to eye problems, died in 1941 of complications from surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was 59.
Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is written as a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey and tells the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, making his way around Dublin. His other prominent works include the experimental and obscure Finnegans Wake (1939), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and the short story collection Dubliners (1914). Like T.S. Eliot, Joyce is known for his highly allusive style in Ulysses; the book requires a separate handbook to explain its complex structure, the texts it parallels, and its many, many literary references. As a modernist and avant garde writer, Joyce is credited, along with Virginia Woolf, with pioneering the use of stream of consciousness as a literary technique.
Like the rest of the short stories collected in Dubliners, “The Dead” was written when Joyce was in his twenties, but it was not published until later because of a long feud between Joyce and his publisher over concerns about libel. The collection presents a view of ordinary people in Dublin during a period characterized by intense nationalistic struggles and a renaissance of Irish culture. The thematic structure of the collection depicts an individual’s movement from childhood to maturity. “The Dead” is the longest story in the collection and is sometimes published separately as a novella. It is generally considered to be the most complex and haunting story in the collection. Thematically, the story addresses contemporary concerns about Irish national and cultural identity, memory, and loss. The story is set during a Christmas party at the home of Kate and Julia Morkin, the aunts of the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. As the narrative unfolds, Gabriel gives a dinnertime speech, confronts an Irish nationalist schoolteacher, and has a final emotional scene with his wife Gretta, who has been sentimentally reminded of the tragic death of her first love.
Read “The Dead” here: The Dead – James Joyce – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic. He was from a German-speaking Jewish family; he could speak Czech, but he wrote his literary works in German. After earning a law degree, Kafka worked in insurance, which paid the bills while he tried to find the time to write. Only a fraction of what Kafka wrote has survived, since he burned most of his works during his lifetime. Although he did publish a few stories, Kafka left instructions to burn the remaining works after his death. His executor, Max Brod, published the manuscripts instead, and Kafka became famous posthumously. Many readers have noticed similarities between the author and some of his characters—specifically, the ones who have tedious jobs, a profound distrust of bureaucracy, a fear of authority, a feeling of powerlessness, and an entire set of Freudian complexes, especially where fathers are concerned. The stories can be viewed through the lenses of Existentialism, Surrealism, religious parables, psychoanalysis, and social criticism, to name a few. The terrifying power of bureaucracy is perhaps the most famous theme in Kafka’s works, leading to the term “Kafkaesque” to describe being trapped in nightmarish and surreal situations (most famously in his work The Trial, in which the protagonist is never told what his crime was). While Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) shares that feeling of helplessness, it is also full of his unique brand of tragi-comic humor. As much pity as one might feel for Gregor, the novel’s protagonist, there is something inherently ridiculous about his calm acceptance of his transformation into a giant cockroach-like bug. The fact that Gregor’s biggest concern at that moment is being late to his job is both sad and funny: an indictment not only of bureaucracy’s dehumanizing effects, but also of the human tendency to rationalize the absurdities of life.
Read Metamorphosis here: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
T.S. Eliot
Academy in St. Louis, and went on to study at Harvard. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he began his graduate studies. During this time, he focused on Symbolist poetry. He tried to study abroad in Germany in 1914, but left the country early due to the threat of war. Instead, he went to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who would have a profound influence on Eliot’s work. While Eliot did occasionally return to the United States, he settled in England and eventually became a citizen of the country. It was Pound who helped Eliot publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) in Poetry. The poem established Eliot’s reputation as an experimental, intellectual writer. Eliot possessed an amazing versatility. By the time he was 40, he had published over 20 books, which included volumes of poetry, criticism, and plays. His most notable work is The Waste Land (1922), which explores the disenfranchisement and ennui felt by the post-World War I, Lost Generation. The work is experimental in its fracture perspectives, play with tone and language, and disrupted narrative. His criticism, most specifically works from The Sacred Wood, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), constructs a comprehensive literary theory, where the poet is not merely repeating popular ideas, but is interacting with an entire body of literary history, starting with Homer. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1948, he was considered one of the most influential writers in the English language.
Read The Waste Land here: The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen is one of the most respected poets of World War I, which is an impressive feat for someone who wrote almost all of his poems between August 1917 and September 1918. Many previous British poets had focused on the glory of war. Owen’s experiences in the trenches, however, shaped his much grimmer view of war. Along with his friend and fellow British poet Siegfried Sassoon, Owen wrote about the realities of war in a way that was unfamiliar to audiences of the time. The title of his poem “Dulce et Decorum est” is a reference to a quotation by the Latin writer Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (roughly translated, “It is sweet and proper to die for your country”). In the poem, Owen challenges that view with a description of a poisonous gas attack on soldiers in the trenches. In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Owen replaces heroic songs and music with the terrifying sounds of battle, and he explores the dread of waiting for something to happen in the poem “Exposure.” In “A Parable of the Old Men and the Young,” Owen rewrites the ending of the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, implicitly questioning the motives of the older men who send young men to their deaths. Owen’s poetry is remarkable not only for its content, but also for its use of half rhyme and assonance instead of full rhyme: a style that he is credited with popularizing. His rejection of traditional poetic form and reaction to the horrors of World War I are textbook examples of Modernism in poetry. Despite both his feelings about the war and being wounded badly enough that he was sent home for recovery, Owen insisted that it was his duty to return to the fighting, in part to continue to record the experiences of the common soldier. One week before the signing of the Armistice that ended the war, Owen was killed on the battlefield.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
License: Public Domain
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Dulce et Decorum est
License: Public Domain
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/qB4cdRgIcB8?si=TDcXQtiM5FQXxSyJ
Seamus Heaney
Born in 1939, Heaney grew up in a large Roman Catholic family on a farm in County Derry, near Belfast, in Northern Ireland. His rural upbringing provided him with an appreciation for the small details of rural life and for the land; these qualities would come to mark his poetry vividly. While he lived in a largely Protestant area that experienced the violent “troubles” between Catholic and Protestant militants, Heaney never advocated strongly for the Catholic cause in his poetry, an omission for which he was sometimes criticized. Heaney began publishing poetry as a student at Queen’s University in Belfast, but his career as a poet really began with the 1966 publication of his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist. Over the course of Heaney’s career, he taught English at a number of Irish colleges, was Poet in Residence at Harvard University, and was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. After moving to Dublin, in The Republic of Ireland, in 1972, Heaney wrote his two arguably most political volumes of poetry, North (1975) and Field Work (1979). One of his best known and loved volumes, The Haw Lantern, was published after his mother’s death in 1987. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, cited by the committee for his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” In 1999, he published a critically lauded translation of Beowulf. In 2006, he suffered a minor stroke; he documented this experience in his 2010 collection of poems Human Chain.
The Haw Lantern
Copyright Seamus Heaney
The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.
But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.
The Tollman Man
Copyright Seamus Heaney
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
ARCHITECTURE
Gothic Revival
The Gothic Revival was primarily an architectural movement that began in 1740s England. Also termed Victorian Gothic and Neo-Gothic, the style sought to revive medieval forms, much like the Neoclassical style sought to revive works from classical antiquity. During the 18th century, the ruins of medieval Gothic architecture began to receive newfound appreciation after having been relatively dismissed in the overall history of architecture. Some critics believe there was a kind of nostalgia for an enchanted, less rational world that was linked to the perceived superstitions of medieval Catholicism.
In England, the center of the Gothic revival, the movement was intertwined with philosophical trends associated with a reawakening of Christian traditions in response to the growth of religious nonconformism. Ultimately, the Gothic style became widespread in the third quarter of the 19th century. While the Neoclassical style of the 18th century was associated with “radical” and liberal perspectives, the Gothic Revival was associated with “traditional” sensibilities, such as conservatism and the monarchy. As industrialization progressed, there was an increasing reaction against the use of machinery and factory production. Supporters of medievalism criticized industrial society, believing the pre-industrial model to be a golden age.
Paralleling the ascendancy of Neo-Gothic styles in 19th century England, interest spread rapidly to Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the Americas. Indeed, the number of Gothic Revival and Carpenter Gothic structures built in the 19th and 20th centuries may exceed the number of authentic Gothic structures that had been built in Gothic’s original era. The Gothic Revival style is characterized by its stone and brick structures, many of which are religious in nature, as well as heavy decoration. The most fundamental element of the Gothic style of architecture is the pointed arch. Columns that support arches are smaller in Gothic buildings, and continue all the way to the roof, where they become part of the vault. In the vault, the pointed arch can be seen in three dimensions where the ribbed vaulting meets in the center of the ceiling of each bay. This ribbed vaulting is another distinguishing feature of Gothic architecture. The slender columns and lighter systems of thrust allowed for larger windows and more light in Gothic structures. The windows, tracery, carvings, and ribs make up a bewildering display of decoration where almost every surface is decorated with a profusion of shapes and patterns. Gothic revival cottages and smaller buildings also became popular and are referred to as “Carpenter Gothic.” These structures are defined by their use of Gothic elements such as pointed arches and steep gables.
A. W. N. Pugin was a prominent architect, designer, artist, and critic who was deeply involved in the Gothic Revival. The height of his work is seen in the interior design of the Palace of Westminster. Pugin designed many churches in England during his career and published a series of volumes of architectural drawings entitled Examples of Gothic Architecture and Specimens of Gothic Architecture that remained in print and were the standards for the Gothic Revival for the next century.
Exterior of the Palace of Westminster. Palace of Westminster Westminster Hall south. Provided by: Wikipedia. Located at: en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_Westminster_Hall_south.jpg. License: Public Domain: No Known Copyright
Video URL: https://youtu.be/7oBUIo5R5qg?si=OQdAkIa4bbReHnF6
Beaux-Artes
Beaux-Arts architecture expresses the academic neoclassical architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. “Beaux Arts” describes the architectural style of over two centuries of instruction under academic authority: first, of the Académie royale d’architecture (1671–1793), then, following the French Revolution, the Architecture section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The style of instruction that produced Beaux-Arts architecture continued without major interruption until 1968. The Beaux-Arts style had widespread influence outside of France, including on the architecture of the United States in the period from 1880–1920.
Beaux-Arts academic training emphasized the mainstream examples of Imperial Roman architecture, Italian Renaissance, and French and Italian Baroque models. Beaux-Arts training made great use of agrafes (clasps that link one architectural detail to another), interpenetration of forms, and “speaking architecture” (architecture parlante) in which supposed appropriateness of symbolism could be taken to literal-minded extremes. Beaux-Arts training also emphasized the production of quick conceptual sketches, highly-finished perspective presentation drawings, close attention to the program, and knowledgeable detailing. Site considerations tended toward social and urbane contexts. All architects-in-training passed through the obligatory stages—studying antique models, constructing analos, analyses reproducing Greek or Roman models, “pocket” studies and other conventional steps—in the long competition for the few desirable places at the Académie de France à Rome.
Beaux-Arts architecture depended on sculptural decoration along conservative modern lines, employing French and Italian Baroque and Rococo formulas, combined with an impressionistic finish and realism. Slightly overscaled details, bold sculptural supporting consoles, rich deep cornices, swags, and lavish sculptural enrichments, all flourished in the Beaux-Arts style, as demonstrated in the Opera Garnier in Paris.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/EtTGyLsR7lk?si=Q2qvxFGPhV3xUXHA
Haussmann the Demolisher and the creation of modern Paris
During each of the previous political revolts (1789, 1830, 1848, and again in 1871), sections of Paris had succumbed to the revolutionaries. These successes were due in part to the political sympathies of the citizens of Paris, but the crooked narrow lanes of the medieval city also played a role. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that was the streets of Paris. Such barricades (makeshift barriers erected across streets to prevent the movement of opposing forces) proved very effective and made Paris all but uncontrollable at times. Think back to Eugène Delacroix’s painting of the revolution of 1830, Liberty Leading the People—Marianne (Liberty) is shown rising over a barricade of just this sort.
During the period known as the Second Empire (1852-70), Napoleon III, the great-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor of France in the early nineteenth century), ruled France. He asked an administrator, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, to modernize Paris—to bring clean water and modern sewers to the fast growing city, to light the streets with gas lanterns, to construct a central market (Les Halles), and to build parks, schools, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and administrative buildings. But the most ambitious aspect of Haussmann’s plan was to literally reshape the city.
For his role in changing the Paris cityscape, Haussmann would acquire the nickname “the demolisher.” He plowed over the ancient, winding streets of the city (the same narrow streets that had proved so useful to revolutionaries). In their place, he created broad straight boulevards that were impervious to the barricade—and, equally important, they could better accommodate the free movement of troops.
The avenues also allowed for the easy flow of commerce and so were a boon for business. Napoleon III had dreamed of a new imperial city whose very streets spoke of the glory of the French empire. Haussmann delivered. As with nearly every urban renovation, a percentage of the population was displaced. Haussmann forced citizens from their homes as these buildings were torn down to make way for the clean lines of the new city. The wealthy were quickly accommodated. The new boulevards were lined with fashionable apartment houses. It was, as usual, the poor that really suffered.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Haussmann the Demolisher and the creation of modern Paris,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris/.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international style of art and architecture that was most popular from 1890–1910 AD. The name Art Nouveau is French for “new art.” A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants, but also in curved lines. It is also considered a philosophy of furniture design. Art Nouveau furniture is structured according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life. Art Nouveau was most popular in Europe, but its influence was global. It is a very varied style with frequent localized tendencies.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/sazsDYOXVis?si=zbDErfF0OlKt78tT
Before the term Art Nouveau became common in France, le style moderne (“the modern style”) was the more frequent designation. Maison de l’Art Nouveau was the name of the gallery initiated during 1895 by the German art dealer Samuel Bing in Paris that featured exclusively modern art. The fame of his gallery was increased at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, where he presented coordinated installations of modern furniture, tapestries and objets d’art. These decorative displays became so strongly associated with the style, that the name of his gallery subsequently provided a commonly used term for the entire style. Likewise, Jugend (Youth) was the illustrated weekly magazine of art and lifestyle of Munich, founded in 1896 by Georg Hirth. Jugend was instrumental in promoting the Art Nouveau style in Germany. As a result, Jungenstil, or Youth Style, became the German word for the style.
Art Nouveau is now considered a “total style,” meaning that it can be seen in architecture, interior design, decorative arts (including jewelry furniture, textiles, household silver, and other utensils and lighting), and the visual arts. According to the philosophy of the style, art should strive to be a way of life, and thereby encompass all parts. For many Europeans, it was possible to live in an Art Nouveau-inspired house with Art Nouveau furniture, silverware, crockery, jewelry, cigarette cases, etc. Artists thus desired to combine the fine arts and applied arts, even for utilitarian objects.
Art Nouveau in architecture and interior design eschewed the eclectic revival styles of the 19th century. Art Nouveau designers selected and “modernized” some of the more abstract elements of Rococo style, such as flame and shell textures. They also advocated the use of very stylized organic forms as a source of inspiration, expanding their natural repertoire to use seaweed, grasses, and insects.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/SMqERP-J2tQ?si=JlQXXqcvsz2zF6xE
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus was a school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the functional design approach it taught and publicized. Despite its name meaning “house of construction” in German and the founder, Walter Gropius, being an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during its first years. Nonetheless, the school was founded on the idea of “total” creativity, or gesamtkunstwerk, in which all arts would be brought together. Many well-known artists attended the Bauhaus, including Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Max Bill, and Herbert Bayer. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design, having a profound influence on subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.
The most important influence on Bauhaus was Modernism, a cultural movement with origins as far back as the 1880s that had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—radically simplified forms, rationality, functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
Germany’s defeat in World War I, the fall of the German monarchy, and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge in artistic experimentation. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural radicalization that followed the Russian Revolution. Yet the political influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not have radical views and said Bauhaus was entirely apolitical. Another significant influence was the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function. Thus the Bauhaus style was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between function and overall design.
The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having being painted as a centre of communist intellectualism. Although the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.
The influence of the Bauhaus on design education was significant. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology, and this approach was incorporated into the curriculum of the Bauhaus. The structure of the Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary course) reflected a pragmatic approach to integrating theory and application. In their first year, students learned the basic elements and principles of design and color theory, and experimented with a range of materials and processes. This approach to design education became a common feature of architectural and design school in many countries.
The Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany: Bauhaus means “house of construction.”
Expressionism
Expressionist architecture was individualistic and in many ways eschewed aesthetic dogma. While the movement was very broad, some points can be found as recurring in works of Expressionist architecture, and are evident in some degree in each of its works.
- A distortion of form for an emotional effect.
- The subordination of realism to symbolic or stylistic expression of inner experience.
- An underlying effort at achieving the new, original, and visionary.
- A profusion of works on paper, and models, with discovery and representations of concepts being more important than pragmatic finished products.
- Often hybrid solutions, irreducible to a single concept.
- Themes of natural romantic phenomena, such as caves, mountains, lightning, crystal and rock formations.
- Utilizes the creative potential of artisan craftsmanship.
- A tendency towards the gothic than the classical.
- Draws as much from Moorish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Indian art and architecture as from Roman or Greek.
- Conceives architecture as a work of art.
Form also played a defining role in setting apart expressionist architecture from its immediate predecessor, art nouveau, or Jugendstil. While art nouveau had an organic freedom with ornament, expressionist architecture strove to free the form of the whole building instead of just its parts.
An example of a built expressionist project that is formally inventive is Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower. This sculpted building shows a relativistic and shifting view of geometry: devoid of applied ornament, form and space are shaped in fluid concrete to express concepts of the architect and the building’s namesake.
Functionalism
Wagner’s approach to design was closely tied to that of the Secession—a progressive group of Austrian artists, architects and designers who pursued artistic rejuvenation in combining quality building processes with new materials and technologies, and expressive modernist forms. Secessionist architects, including Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, were drawn to the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk—or the “total work of art”—in which all aesthetic elements are subordinated to the whole effect. In practice, this concept promoted artistic craftsmanship across a wide spectrum of disciplines and favored collaborative models of creation over individual authorship. In 1903, the craftsmen cooperative called the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) was developed by a group of Secessionists to facilitate this end. Bringing together designers of fashion, furniture and books, with architects, sculptors, painters, ceramists, and jewelers, the Werkstätte elevated the status of the craftsman while at the same time facilitating the unification of artistic endeavors in single fully-designed products.
Materials were selected due to their durability, economy and functionality. For the flooring, glass-block, porcelain tile and linoleum was laid over asphalt to create insulated, easily cleaned and long lasting surfaces. In high traffic areas, marble wall paneling thwarts wear and prevents the need for repainting, and aluminum hot-air blowers are not only sleek and sanitary, but occupy minimal floor space.
The bank’s furniture and detailing were also under Wagner’s purview and he developed an entire catalogue of standard-design furnishings that allowed for maximum economic and functional flexibility, depending on the respective location and use of each piece. With the exception of the chief executive’s office—where brass, velour and mahogany was used in the furniture—light fixtures were made of aluminum, porcelain and nickel, and the wood used in desks, cabinets, counters and chairs was artfully-treated beech.
Thus, from its light fixtures to its systematic building plan, The Postal Savings Bank is both a manifestation of Otto Wagner’s ideal of modern “functionalist” architecture and an exemplary work of Secessionist design. In its austere lines, simple construction, and minimal use of materials, exemplifies Wagner’s belief that “The architect always has to develop the art-form out of construction.”
Copyright: Dr. Elizabeth M. Merrill, “Otto Wagner, Postal Savings Bank,” in Smarthistory, November 28, 2015, accessed June 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/otto-wagner-postal-savings-bank/.
The Villa Savoye at Poissy, designed by Le Corbusier in 1929, represents the culmination of a decade during which the architect worked to articulate what he considered the essence of modern architecture. Throughout the 1920s, via his writings and designs, Le Corbusier (formerly Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) considered the nature of modern life and architecture’s role in the new machine age. His famous dictum, that “The house is a machine for living in,” is perfectly realized within the forms, layout, materials, and siting of the Villa Savoye. [1]
Located just outside Paris, the Villa Savoye offered an escape from the crowded city for its wealthy patrons. Its location on a large unrestricted site allowed Le Corbusier total creative freedom. The delicate floating box that he designed is both functional house and modernist sculpture, elegantly melding form and function.
Le Corbusier had been developing his theories on modern architecture throughout the previous decade. In 1920, he founded the journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), and many of the essays he published there would eventually be incorporated into his landmark collection of essays, Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) in 1923. This book celebrated science, technology, and reason, arguing that modern machines could create highly precise objects not unlike the ideal platonic forms valued by the ancient Greeks. Le Corbusier lavished praise on the icons of modernity—race cars, airplanes, and factories—marveling at the beauty of their efficiency. However, he also argued that beauty lay not only in the newest technology but in ancient works such as the Parthenon, whose refined forms represented, in his view, the perfection of earlier Archaic systems. Le Corbusier sought to isolate what he called “type forms,” which he referred to as universal elements of design that can work together in a system. He found these across time and across the globe, in the fields of architecture and engineering. The many images embedded throughout the text drew striking visual parallels and eloquently expressed his search for modern perfection through universal forms.
During the 1920s, Le Corbusier designed a series of houses which allowed him to develop his ideas further. By 1926, he had devised his Five Points of Architecture, which he viewed as a universal system that could be applied to any architectural site. The system demanded pilotis to raise the building off the ground and allow air to circulate beneath; roof terraces, to bring nature into an urban setting; a free plan that allowed interior space to be distributed at will; a free façade whose smooth plane could be used for formal experimentation; and ribbon windows, which let in light but also reinforced the planarity of the wall.
The Villa Savoye incorporated these principles, and also realized many of the concepts expressed in Vers une Architecture. Made of reinforced concrete, the ground floor walls are recessed and painted green so that the house looks like a box floating on delicate pilotis. Visitors arrive by car, in true machine-age fashion. The stark white exterior wall, with its strips of ribbon windows, has a remarkably smooth, planar quality. This stands in contrast to the fluidity of the interior, which is organized by a multistory ramp that leads the viewer on a gently curving path through a building that is nearly square. The contrast between the sharp angles of the plan and the dynamism of the spaces inside charge the house with a subtle energy.
The ramp winds from the entrance up to the salon, a formal interior space that flows seamlessly into the roof terrace outside. Corbu, as he is also known, treated the terrace as a room without walls, reflecting his desire to fully integrate landscape and architecture. The ramp finally culminates in the curved solarium crowning the house, whose rounded enclosure appears to be an abstract sculpture when viewed from below. Seen from the roof terrace, the ramp and cylinder of the solarium echo the forms of the ocean liners lauded in Vers une Architecture. Le Corbusier and Madame Savoye believed in the health benefits of fresh air and sunshine, and considered leisure time spent outdoors one mark of a modern lifestyle. The Villa Savoye’s integration of indoor and outdoor spaces allowed the family to spend time outdoors in the most efficient way possible—the house was, in a sense, a machine designed to maximize leisure in the machine age.
The Villa Savoye can be understood as Le Corbusier’s refinement of his architectural system, his own personal Parthenon. Its essential geometric volumes embody his concept of the type form, and its careful consideration of procession and proportion connect the building to Classical ideals. At the same time, its clean simplicity and its use of concrete evoke the precisely-calibrated works of engineering so admired by the architect. The Villa Savoye represents Le Corbusier’s re-conception of the very nature of architecture, his attempt to express a timeless classicism through the language of architectural modernism.
Copyright: Dr. Malka Simon, “Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/le-corbusier-villa-savoye/.
PERFORMING ARTS
Music
Romantic Music
Romantic music is a term denoting an era of Western classical music that began in the late 18th or early 19th century. It was related to Romanticism, the European artistic and literary movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century, and Romantic music in particular dominated the Romantic movement in Germany.
Characteristics often attributed to Romanticism, including musical Romanticism, are:
- a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature
- a fascination with the past, particularly the Middle Ages and legends of medieval chivalry
- a turn towards the mystic and supernatural, both religious and merely spooky
- a longing for the infinite
- mysterious connotations of remoteness, the unusual and fabulous, the strange and surprising
- a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly, the frightful, and terrifying
- fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences
- a new attention given to national identity
- emphasis on extreme subjectivism
- interest in the autobiographical
- discontent with musical formulas and conventions
Harmonies in nineteenth-century music are more dissonant than ever. More chords add a fourth note to the triad, making them more dissonant and chromatic. These dissonances may be sustained for some time before resolving to a chord that is consonant. One composition may modulate between several keys, and these keys often have very different pitch contents. Such modulations tend to disorient the listening and add to the chaos of the musical selection. Composers were in effect “pushing the harmonic envelope.”
The lengths of nineteenth-century musical compositions ran from the min- ute to the monumental. Songs and short piano pieces might be only a couple of minutes long, although they were sometimes grouped together in cycles or collections. On the other hand, symphonies and operas grow in size. By the end of the century, a typical symphony might be an hour long, with the operas of Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini clocking in at several hours each. Performing forces reflected similar extremes. There is much nineteenth-century music for solo piano or solo voice with piano accompaniment. The piano achieved a modern form, with the full eighty-eight-note keyboard that is still used today and an iron frame that allowed for greater string tension and a wider range of dynamics. Crescendos and decrescendos became more common, alongside more tempo fluctuations, even within compositions.
Orchestras also increased in size and became more diverse in makeup, thereby allowing composers to exploit even more divergent dynamics and timbres. With or- chestral compositions requiring over fifty (and sometimes over 100) musicians, a conductor was important, and the first famous conductors date from this period. In fact, generally-speaking, the nineteenth-century orchestra looked not unlike what you might see today at most concerts by most professional orchestras (see Figure 6.9). Nineteenth-century composers knew well the forms and genres used by their predecessors, most prominently the music of Beethoven, but also the music of com- posers such as Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Bach. They continued to compose in these forms and genres, while sometimes transforming them into something quite different, especially among those composers who identified themselves as progressives, as opposed to conservatives. The wider nineteenth-century interest in emotion and in exploring connections between all of the arts led to musical scores with more poetic or prose instructions from the composer. It also led to more program music, which as you will recall, is instrumental music that represents something “extra musical,” that is, something outside of music itself, such as nature, a literary text, or a painting. Nineteenth-century critics and philosophers sustained expansive debates about ways in which listeners might hear music as related to the extra musical. Extra musical influences, from the characteristic title to a narrative attached to a musical score, guided composers and listeners as they composed and heard musical forms.
Art Song
An art song is a vocal music composition, usually written for one voice with piano accompaniment, and usually in the classical tradition. By extension, the term “art song” is used to refer to the genre of such songs. An art song is most often a musical setting of an independent poem or text, “intended for the concert repertory” “as part of a recital or other relatively formal social occasion.” While many pieces of vocal music are easily recognized as art songs, others are more difficult to categorize. For example, a wordless vocalise written by a classical composer is sometimes considered an art song and sometimes not.
Other factors help define art songs:
- Songs that are part of a staged work (such as an opera or a musical) are not usually considered art songs. However, some Baroque arias that “appear with great frequency in recital performance” are now included in the art song repertoire.
- Songs with instruments besides piano and/or other singers are referred to as “vocal chamber music”, and are usually not considered art songs.
- Songs originally written for voice and orchestra are called “orchestral songs” and are not usually considered art songs, unless their original version was for solo voice and piano.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) lived a short but prolific musical life. Like Joseph Haydn, he performed as a choirboy until his voice broke. He also received music lessons in violin, piano, organ, voice and musical harmony: many of his teachers remarked on the young boy’s genius. Schubert followed in his father’s footsteps for several years, teaching school through his late teens, until he shifted his attention to music composition fulltime in 1818. By that time he had already composed masterpieces for which he is still known, including the German Lied, Der Erlkönig (in English, The Erlking), which we will discuss.Schubert spent his entire life in Vienna in the shadow of the two most famous composers of his day: Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music we have already discussed, and Gioachino Rossini, whose Italian operas were particularly popular in Vienna in the first decade.
Schubert also wrote operas and church music. His greatest legacy, however, lies in his more than 600 Lieder, or art songs. His songs are notable for their beautiful melodies and clever use of piano accompaniment and bring together poetry and music in an exemplary fashion. Most are short, stand alone pieces of one and a half to five minutes in length, but he also wrote a couple of song cycles. These songs were published and performed in many private homes and, along with all of his compositions, provided so much entertainment in the private musical gatherings in Vienna that these events were renamed as Schubertiades (see the famous depiction of one Schubertiade by the composer’s close friend Moritz Schwind (painted years after the fact from memory in 1868). Many of Schubert’s songs are about romantic love, a perennial song top- ic. Others, such as The Erlking, put to music romantic responses to nature and to the supernatural. The Erlking is strikingly dramatic, a particular reminder that music and drama interacted in several nineteenth-century genres, even if their connections can be most fully developed in a lengthy composition, such as an opera.
Schubert set the words of several poets of his day, and The Erlking (1815) is drawn from the poetry of the most famous: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Erlking tells the story of a father who is rushing on horseback with his ailing son to the doctor. Delirious from fever, the son hears the voice of the Erlking, a grim reap- er sort of king of the fairies, who appears to young children when they are about to die, luring them into the world beyond. The father tries to reassure his son that his fear is imagined, but when the father and son reach the courtyard of the doctor’s house, the child is found to be dead.
As you listen to the song, follow along with its words. You may have to listen several times in order to hear the multiple connections between the music and the text. Are the ways in which you hear the music and text interacting beyond those pointed out in the listening guide?
Video URL: https://youtu.be/5XP5RP6OEJI?si=aCSJRVl72NmNwe0F
Composter; Franz Schubert
Composition: The Erlkonig (The Erlking)
Date: 1815
Genre: art song
Form: through-composted
Nature of Text: English translation
Who rides there so late through the night and wind?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holds the boy tightly clasped in his arm,
He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.
“My son, why do you anxiously hide your face?”
“Look, father, is it not the Erlking!
The Erlking with crown and with train?”
“My son, it is the mist over the clouds.”
“Oh, come, dear child! oh, come with me!
So many games I will play there with thee;
On my shoreline, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother has many a gold garment.”
“My father, my father, and do you not hear
The words that the Erlking softly promises me?”
“Be calm, stay calm, my child,
The wind sighs through the dry leaves.”
“Will you come with me, my child?
My daughters shall wait on you;
My daughters dance each night,
And will cradle you and dance and sing to you.”
“My father, my father, and do you not see,
The Erl-King’s daughters in this dreary place?”
“My son, my son, I see it aright,
The old fields appear so gray.”
“I love you, I’m charmed by your lovely form!
And if you’re unwilling, then force I’ll employ.”
“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”
The father, horrified, rides quickly,
He holds in his arms the groaning child:
He reaches his courtyard with toil and trouble,
— In his arms, the child was dead.
Performing Forces: solo voice and piano
What we want you to remember about this composition:
- It is an art song that sets a poem for solo voice and piano
- The poem tells the story of three characters, who are depicted in the music through changes in melody, harmony, and range.
- The piano sets general mood and supports the singer by depicting images from the text.
- Piano accompaniment at the beginning that outlines a minor scale (perhaps the wind)
- Repeated fast triplet pattern in the piano, suggesting urgency and the running horse
- Shifts of the melody line from high to low range, depending on the character “speaking”
- Change of key from minor to major when the Erlking sings
- The slowing note values at the end of the song and the very dissonant chords
The Piano
The piano was founded on earlier technological innovations that date back to the Middle Ages. By the early Baroque there were two primary stringed keyboard instruments: the clavichord and the harpsichord. The invention of the piano is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731) of Padua, Italy, who was an expert harpsichord maker, and was well acquainted with the body of knowledge on stringed keyboard instruments. The instruments of Cristofori’s day possessed individual strengths and weaknesses. The clavichord allowed expressive control of the sound volume and sustain but was too quiet for large performances. The harpsichord produced a sufficiently loud sound, but had little expressive control over each note. These tonal differences were due to the mechanisms of the two instruments. In a clavichord the strings are struck by tangents, while in a harpsichord they are plucked by quills. The piano was probably formed as an attempt to combine loudness with control, avoiding the trade-offs of available instruments. Technical innovations continued to be added to the piano as various instrument makers experimented with ways to improve the instrument’s mechanical function and tonal expression. By the late 19th century the piano had evolved into the powerful 88-key instrument we recognize today. It is important to remember that much of the music of the Classical era was composed for a type of instrument (the fortepiano) that is rather different from the instrument on which it is now played. Even the music of the Romantic period, including that of Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, was written for pianos substantially different from modern pianos.
Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) grew up in and around Warsaw, Poland, son of a French father and Polish mother. His family was a member of the educated middle class; consequently, Chopin had contact with academics and wealthier members of the gentry and middle class. He learned as much as he could from the composition instructors in Warsaw—including the keyboard music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven—before deciding to head off on a European tour in 1830. The first leg of the tour was Vienna, where Chopin expected to give concerts and then head further west. About a week after his arrival, however, Poland saw political turmoil in the Warsaw uprising, which eventually led to Russian occupation of his home country. After great efforts, Chopin secured a passport and, in the summer of 1831, traveled to Paris, which would become his adopted home. Paris was full of Polish émigrés, who were well received within musical circles. After giving a few public concerts, Chopin was able to focus his attention on the salons, salons being smaller, semi-private events, similar to soirées, generally hosted by aristocratic women for artistic edification. There and as a teacher, he was in great demand and could charge heavy fees.
The composition on which we will focus is the Mazurka in F minor, Op. 7, no. 1, which was published in Leipzig in 1832 and then in Paris and London in 1833. The mazurka is a Polish dance, and mazurkas were rather popular in Western Europe as exotic stylized dances. Mazurkas are marked by their triple meter in which beat two rather than beat one gets the stress. They are typically composed in strains and are homophonic in texture. Chopin sometimes incorporated folk-like sounds in his mazurkas, sounds such as drones and augmented seconds. A drone is a sustained pitch or pitches. The augmented second is an interval that was commonly used in Eastern European folk music but very rarely in the tonal music of Western European composers.
All of these characteristics can be heard in the Mazurka in F minor, Op. 7, No. 1, together with the employment of rubato. Chopin was the first composer to widely request that pianists use rubato when playing his music.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/H1_2K8K2W3U?si=sQ5w2k3KTBma2IS-
Composer: Fryderyk Chopin
Composition: Mazurka in F minor, Op. 7, no. 1
Date 1836
Genre: piano character piece
Form: aaba’ba’ca’ca’
Nature of Text: the title indicates a stylized dance based on teh Polish mazurka
Performing Forces: solo piano
What we want you to remember about this composition:
- This mazurka is in triple time with emphasis on beat two
- The texture is homophonic
- Chopin asks the performer to use rubato
- Its “c” strain uses a drone and augmented seconds
Program Music
Program music or programme music (British English) is music that attempts to depict in music an extra-musical scene or narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience in the form of program notes inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which relates a drug-induced series of morbid fantasies concerning the unrequited love of a sensitive poet involving murder, execution, and the torments of Hell. The genre culminates in the symphonic works of Richard Strauss that include narrations of the adventures of Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, the composer’s domestic life, and an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman. Following Strauss, the genre declined and new works with explicitly narrative content are rare. Nevertheless the genre continues to exert an influence on film music, especially where this draws upon the techniques of late romantic music.
The term is almost exclusively applied to works in the European classical music tradition, particularly those from the Romantic music period of the 19th century, during which the concept was popular, but programmatic pieces have long been a part of music. The term is usually reserved for purely instrumental works (pieces without singers and lyrics), and not used, for example for Opera or Lieder. Single movement orchestral pieces of program music are often called symphonic poems. Absolute music, in contrast, is to be appreciated without any particular reference to anything outside the music itself.
Hector Berlioz (b. 1803-1869) was born in France in La Côte-Saint-André, Isère near Grenoble. His father was a wealthy doctor and planned on Hector’s pur- suing the profession of a physician. At the age of eighteen, Hector was sent to study medicine in Paris. Music at the Conservatory and at the Opera, however, became the focus of his attention. A year later, his family grew alarmed when they realized that the young student had decided to study music instead of medicine. In 1830, Berlioz earned his first recognition for his musical gift when he won the much sought-after Prix de Rome. This highly-esteemed award provided him a stipend and the opportunity to work and live in Paris, thus providing Berlioz with the chance to complete his most famous work, the Symphonie Fastastique, that year.
Upon his return to Rome, he began his intense courtship of Harriet Smithson. Both her family and his vehemently opposed their relationship. Several violent and arduous situations occurred, one of which involved Berlioz’s unsuccessfully attempting suicide. After recovering from this attempt, Hector married Harriet. Once the previously unattainable matrimonial goal had been attained, Berlioz’s passion somewhat cooled, and he discovered that it was Harriet’s Shakespearean roles that she performed, rather than Harriet herself, that really intrigued him. The first year of their marriage was the most fruitful for him musically. By the time he was forty, he had composed most of his famous works. Bitter from giving up her acting career for marriage, Harriet became an alcoholic. The two separated in 1841 Berlioz then married his long time mistress Marie Recio, an attractive but average singer who demanded to perform in his concerts.
Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is important for several reasons: it is a program symphony, it incorporates an idée fixe (a recurring theme representing an ideology or person that provides continuity through a musical work), and it contains five movements rather than the four of most symphonies.
Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d’un artiste . . . en cinq parties (Fantastical Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts) Op. 14 is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is an important piece of the early Romantic period, and is popular with concert audiences worldwide. The first performance was at the Paris Conservatoire in December 1830. The work was repeatedly revived after 1831 and subsequently became a favourite in Paris.
The symphony is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless love. Berlioz provided his own program notes for each movement of the work (see below). He prefaces his notes with the following instructions:
The composer’s intention has been to develop various episodes in the life of an artist, in so far as they lend themselves to musical treatment. As the work cannot rely on the assistance of speech, the plan of the instrumental drama needs to be set out in advance. The following programme must therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera, which serves to introduce musical movements and to motivate their character and expression.
There are five movements, instead of the four movements that were conventional for symphonies at the time:
Rêveries—Passions (Reveries—Passions)
Un bal (A Ball)
Scène aux champs (Scene in the Fields)
Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of the Night of the Sabbath)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/598i8b3HGrw?si=z035LzR_52hdbfaq
Composter: Hector Berlioz
Compostiion: Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 15: 4th Movement- March au supplice
Date: 1830
Genre: Symphony, Fourth movement
Form: Sonata form
Performaning Forces: Large Romantic symphony orchestra.
From Berlioz’s program notes for March au supplice:
Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. As he cries for forgiveness the effects of the narcotic set in. He wants to hide but he cannot so he watches as an onlooker as he dies. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow when his head bounced down the steps.
Berlioz claimed to have written the fourth movement in a single night, reconstructing music from an unfinished project—the opera Les francs-juges. The movement begins with timpani sextuplets in thirds, for which he directs: “The first quaver of each half-bar is to be played with two drumsticks, and the other five with the right hand drumsticks.” The movement proceeds as a march filled with blaring horns and rushing passages, and scurrying figures that later show up in the last movement. Before the musical depiction of his execution, there is a brief, nostalgic recollection of the idée fixe in a solo clarinet, as though representing the last conscious thought of the soon-to-be-executed man. Immediately following this is a single, short fortissimo G minor chord—the fatal blow of the guillotine blade, followed by a series of pizzicato notes representing the rolling of the severed head into the basket. After his death, the final nine bars of the movement contain a victorious series of G major brass chords, along with rolls of the snare drums within the entire orchestra, seemingly intended to convey the cheering of the onlooking throng.
Nationalism
During the Romantic period, music often took on a much more nationalistic purpose. For example, Jean Sibelius’ Finlandia has been interpreted to represent the rising nation of Finland, which would someday gain independence from Russian control. Frédéric Chopin was one of the first composers to incorporate nationalistic elements into his compositions. Joseph Machlis states, “Poland’s struggle for freedom from tsarist rule aroused the national poet in Poland. . . . Examples of musical nationalism abound in the output of the romantic era. The folk idiom is prominent in the Mazurkas of Chopin.” His mazurkas and polonaises are particularly notable for their use of nationalistic rhythms. Moreover, “During World War II the Nazis forbade the playing of . . . Chopin’s Polonaises in Warsaw because of the powerful symbolism residing in these works.” Other composers, such as Bedřich Smetana, wrote pieces which musically described their homelands; in particular, Smetana’s Vltava is a symphonic poem about the Moldau River in the modern-day Czech Republic and the second in a cycle of six nationalistic symphonic poems collectively titled Má vlast (My Homeland). Smetana also composed eight nationalist operas, all of which remain in the repertory. They established him as the first Czech nationalist composer as well as the most important Czech opera composer of the generation who came to prominence in the 1860s.
Composers looked to their native as well as exotic (from other countries) mu- sic to add to their pallet of ideas. Nationalism was expressed in several ways:
- songs and dances of native people
- mythology: dramatic works based on folklore of peasant life (Tchaikovsky’s Russian fairy-tale operas and ballets)
- celebration of a national hero, historic event, or scenic beauty of country
Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was born in Votinsk, a small mining town in Russia. He was a son of a government official, and started taking piano at the age of five, though his family intended him to have a career as a government official. His mother died of cholera when he was fourteen, a tragedy that had a profound and lasting effect on him. He attended the aristocratic school in St. Petersburg called the School of Jurisprudence and, upon completion, obtained a minor government post in the Ministry of Justice. Nevertheless, Pyotr always had a strong interest in music and yearned to study it.
At the age of twenty-three, he resigned his government post and entered the newly created Conservatory of St. Petersburg to study music. From the age of twenty-three to twenty-six, he studied intently and completed his study in three years. His primary teachers at the conservatory were Anton Rubinstein and Konstantin Zarembe, but he himself taught lessons while he studied. Upon completion, Tchaikovsky was recommended by Rubinstein, director of the school as well as teacher, to a teaching post at the new conservatory of Moscow. The young professor of harmony had full teaching responsibilities with long hours and a large class. Despite his heavy workload, his twelve years at the conservatory saw the composing of some of his most famous works, including his first symphony. At the age of twenty-nine, he completed his first opera Voyevoda and composed the Romeo and Juliet overture. At the age of thirty-three, he started supplementing his income by writing as a mu- sic critic, and also composed his second symphony, first piano concerto, and his first ballet, Swan Lake.
The reception of his music sometimes included criticism, and Tchaikovsky took criticism very personally, being prone as he was to (attacks of) depression. These bouts with depression were exacerbated by an impaired personal social life. In an effort to calm and smooth that personal life, Tchaikovsky entered into a relationship and marriage with a conservatory student named Antonina Ivanovna Miliukova in 1877. She was star struck and had fallen immediately and rather despairingly in love with him. His pity for her soon turned into unmanageable dislike to the point that he avoided her at all cost. Once in a fit of depression and aversion, he even strolled into the icy waters of the Moscow River to avoid her. Many contemporaries believe the effort was a suicide attempt. A few days later, nearly approaching a complete mental breakdown, he sought refuge and solace fleeing to his brothers in St. Petersburg. The marriage lasted less than a month.
At this darkest hour for Tchaikovssky, a kind, wealthy benefactress who admired his music became his sponsor. Her financial support helped restore Tchaikovsky to health, freed him from his burdensome teaching responsibilities, and permitted him to focus on his compositions. His benefactor was a widowed industrialist, Nadezhda von Meck, who was dominating and emotional and who loved his music. From her secluded estate, she raised her eleven children and managed her estate and railroads. Due to the social norms of the era, she had to be very careful to make sure that her intentions in supporting the composer went towards his music and not towards the composer as a man; consequently, they never met one another other than possibly through the undirected mutual glances at a crowded concert hall or theater. They communicated through a series of letters to one another, and this distance letter-friendship soon became one of fervent attachment.
In his letters to Meck, Tchaikovsky would explain how he envisioned and wrote his music, describing it as a holistic compositional process, with his envisioning the thematic development to the instrumentation being all one thought. The secured environment she afforded Tchaikovsky enabled him to compose unrestrainedly and very creatively. In appreciation and respect for his patron, Tchaikovsky dedicated his fourth symphony to Meck.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/-BbT0E990IQ?si=IJnSFd_n2o84D0jb
Composter: Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Composition: 1812 Overture
Date: 1882
Genre: Symphonic Orchestra
Form: Two part overture- choral and finale
Performaning Forces: Large Romantic symphony orchestra, including a percussion section with large bells adn a battery of cannons
What we want you to remember about this composition:
- The piece depicts preparation for war, the actual conflict, and victory after the war is ended. It is quite descriptive in nature.
- Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is one of the most famous and forceful pieces of classical music. The 1812 Overture is particularly famous for its epic finale.
- It was made famous and mainstream to the public in the United States through public concerts on July 4th by city orchestras such as the Boston Pops.
- Though the piece was written to celebrate the anniversary of Russia’s victory over France in 1812, the piece’s finale is very often used for the 4th of July during fireworks displays.
- At 4:45-6:39, you can hear the brief motives of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem. This is heard again in the horns in 11:31-12:05
- The Russian hymn is heard at 0:00-2:14, and then again in victory in 12:56-13:59, including church bells commemorating victory throughout Russia.
- At 14:11-15:09, the Russian anthem with cannons/percussion overpowers the French theme, the church bells join in again symbolic of the Russian victory.
Romantic Opera
Opera continued to be popular in the nineteenth century and was dominated by Italian styles and form, much like it had been since the seventeenth century. Ital- ian opera composer Giacomo Rossini even rivaled Beethoven in popularity. By the 1820s, however, other national schools were becoming more influential. Carl Maria von Weber’s German operas enhanced the role of the orchestra, whereas French grand opera by Meyerbeer and others was marked by the use of large choruses and elaborate sets. Later in the century, composers such as Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner would synthesize and transform opera into an even more dramatic genre.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) succeeded Giacomo Rossini as the most important Italian opera composer of his day. Living during a time of national revolution, Verdi’s music and name become associated with those fighting for an Italy that would be united under King Emmanuel. A chorus from one of his early operas about the ancient enslaved Hebrews would become a political song for Italian independent fighters. His last name, V.E.R.D.I. would become an acronym for a political call to rally around King Emmanuel. Although Verdi shied away from the political limelight, he was persuaded to accept a post in the Italian parliament in 1861.
As was the case with many sons of nineteenth-century middle-class families, Verdi was given many and early opportunities to further his education. He began music instruction with local priests before his fourth birth- day. Before he turned ten, he had become organist of the local church, and he continued music lessons alongside lessons in languages and the humanities through his adolescence. He assumed posts as music director and then in 1839 composed his first opera. Like his predecessor, Rossini, Verdi would prove to be a prolific com- poser, writing 26 operas in addition to other large-scale choral works. Like Rossini’s music, Verdi’s music used recitatives and arias, now arranged in the elaborate scena ad aria format, with an aria that contained both slower cantabile and faster cabaletta. Verdi, however, was more flexible in his use of recitatives and arias and employed a much larger orchestras than previous Italian opera composers, resulting in operas that were as dramatic as they were musical. His operas span a variety of subjects, from always popular mythology and ancient history to works set in his present that participated in a wider artistic movement called verismo, or realism.
A good example of his operatic realism can be found in La Traviata, or The Fall- en Woman (1853). This opera was based on a play by Alexandre Dumas. Verdi want- ed it to be set in the present, but the censors at La Fenice, the opera house in Venice that would premiere the opera, insisted on setting it in the 1700s instead. Of issue was the heroine, Violetta—a companion-prostitute for the elite aristocrats of Parisian society—with whom Alfredo, a young noble, falls in love. After wavering over giving up her independence, Violetta commits herself to Alfredo, and they live a blissful few months together before Alfredo’s father arrives and convinces Violetta that she is destroying their family and the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s younger sister. In response, Violetta leaves Alfredo without telling him why and goes back to her old life. Alfredo is angry and hurt and the two live unhappily apart. A consumptive, that is, one suffering from tuberculosis, Violetta declines and her health disintegrates. Alfredo’s father has a crisis of conscience and confesses to his son what he has done. Alfredo rushes to Paris to reunite with Violetta. The two sing a love duet, but it is soon clear that Violetta is very ill, and in fact, she dies in Alfredo’s arms, before they can go to the church to be married. In ending tragically, this opera ends like many other nineteenth-century tales.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/RKRvMmEen5k?si=RslfrT0ycWuoAijk
Composer: Guiseppi Verdi
Composition: “Follie” and “Sempre libera” from La Traviata
Date: 1853
Genre: recitatives adn aria from an opera
Form: alternatures between singing styles of accompanied recitative, with some petetition of sections
Performing Forces: soprano (Violette), tenor (Alfredo), and orchestra.
- The virtuoso nature of Violetta’s singing
- The subtle shifts between recitative and aria, now less pronounced than in earlier opera
- A large orchestra that stays in the background
Twentieth Century Music
At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France. The term was actually loathed by Debussy: “I am trying to do ‘something different—in a way realities—what the imbeciles call ‘impressionism’ is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics”—and Maurice Ravel’s music, also often labelled with this term, explores music in many styles not always related to it. It’s no surprise that music of this period mirrored the urgency and turmoil in the world at large. For many composers, the raw emotion and sentimentality reflected in the music of the nineteenth century had grown tiresome, and so they began an attempt to push the musical language into new areas. Sometimes, this meant bending long-established musical rules to their very limits, and, in some cases, breaking them altogether. One of the by-products of this urgency was fragmentation. As composers rushed to find new ways of expressing themselves, different musical camps emerged, each with their own unique musical philosophies. We now categorize these musical approaches with fancy terms ending in “-ism,” such as “primitivism,” “minimalism,” “impressionism,” etc. We will discuss many of these individual movements and techniques as well as address what makes them unique, but before we do this, let’s first talk about those things that most (but not all) music of the twentieth century has in common.
One of the ways in which composers deviated from the music of the nineteenth century was the way in which they constructed melodies. Gone were the singable, sweeping tunes of the Romantic era. In their place rose melodies with angular shapes, wide leaps, and unusual phrase structures. In some cases, melody lost its status as the most prominent feature of music altogether, with pieces that featured texture or rhythm above all else.
The most obvious difference between twentieth-century music and what preceded it is the level of harmonic dissonance. This is not a new phenomenon. The entire history of Western music can be viewed in terms of a slowly increasing acceptance of dissonance, from the hollow intervals of the Middle Ages all the way to the lush chords of the nineteenth century. However, in the twentieth century the use of dissonance took off like a rocket ship. Some composers continued to push the tolerance level for dissonance in the context of standard tonal harmony. One example is through the use of polytonality, a technique in which two tonal centers are played at the same time. Some composers sought to wash their hands of the rules of the past and invented new systems of musical organization. Often, this resulted in music that lacked a tonal center, music that we now refer to as atonal. Some com- posers such as Igor Stravinsky even tried their hand at more than one style.
In preceding centuries, music was typically relegated to logical, symmetrical phrases that fell squarely into strict meters. That all changed at the dawn of the twentieth century. Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring famously undermined the audience’s expectation of the role of rhythm by abandoning strict meter for rapidly changing time signatures. Instead of the steady familiar time signatures containing three or four beats, Stravinsky peppered in measures containing an odd number of beats such as five or seven. This created a sense of unease in the audience by removing something from the music that they had previously taken for granted: a steady and unwavering sense of meter.
Near the beginning of the twentieth century, numerous composers began to rebel against the excessive emotionalism of the later Romantic composers. Two different styles emerged: the Impressionist style led by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and the atonal Expressionist style led by Arnold Schoenburg. Both styles attempted to move away from the tonal harmonies, scales, and melodies of the previous period. The impressionists chose to use new chords, scales, and colors while the expressionists developed a math-based twelve-tone system that attempted to completely destroy tonality.
Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in quite different directions. The single most important moment in defining the course of music throughout the century was the widespread break with traditional tonality, effected in diverse ways by different composers in the first decade of the century. From this sprang an unprecedented “linguistic plurality” of styles, techniques, and expression. In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg developed atonality, out of the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed the twelve-tone technique which was developed further by his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern; later composers (including Pierre Boulez) developed it further still. Stravinsky (in his last works) explored twelve-tone technique, too, as did many other composers; indeed, even Scott Bradley used the technique in his scores for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.
In the 1940s and 50s composers, notably Pierre Schaeffer, started to explore the application of technology to music in musique concrète. The term electroacoustic music was later coined to include all forms of music involving magnetic tape, computers, synthesizers, multimedia, and other electronic devices and techniques. Live electronic music uses live electronic sounds within a performance (as opposed to preprocessed sounds that are overdubbed during a performance), Cage’s Cartridge Music being an early example. Spectral music (Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail) is a further development of electroacoustic music that uses analyses of sound spectra to create music. Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono and Edgard Varèse all wrote electroacoustic music.
Impressionism
The two major composers associated with the Impressionist movement are Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Both French-born composers were searching for ways to break free from the rules of tonality that had evolved over the previous centuries. Impressionism in music, as in art, focused on the creator’s impression of an object, concept, or event.
Claude-Achille Debussy (22 August 1862–25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures associated withImpressionist music, though he himself disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was madeChevalier of the Legion of Honour in his native France in 1903. Debussy was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced many composers who followed.
Debussy’s music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of atonality. The prominent French literary style of his period was known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/y1hWp4pQpAs?si=kvfq4egpj7JXoKXz
Composter: Claude Debussy
Composition: La Mer
Date: 1903-1905
Genre: Orchestral suite
Form: through-composted
Performing Forces: symphony Orchestra
What you should listen for:
- Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
- Frequent use of parallel chords which are “in essence not harmonies at all, but rather ‘chordal melodies’, enriched unisons,” described by some writers as non-functional harmonies;
- Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
- Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale;
- Unprepared modulations, “without any harmonic bridge.”
Expressionism and Serialism
Schoenberg famously developed a system whereby the twelve notes of the chromatic scale were randomly organized into scale units that he called the twelve-tone row. These rows could then be further “serialized” (organized in random fashion) by a number of different techniques. This idea of assigning values to musical information is called serialism. In 1921 Schoenberg composed his Piano Suite opus 25, the first composition written using the 12-tone method. Each 12-tone composition is built from a series of 12 different pitches that may be arranged in a number of different ways. The original row may be played forward, backwards (retrograde), upside down (inverted), and backwards and inverted (retrograde inversion). All of the melodies and harmonies in a 12-tone piece must be derived in some way from the original row or from fragments of the original row.
After immigrating to the United States, Schoenberg reconnected with the Jewish faith he had abandoned as a young man. The sadness he felt because of the personal accounts of the horrible treatment experienced by so many Jews during World War II led to his composition of A Survivor from Warsaw, which was composed for orchestra, male chorus, and narrator. The piece was completed in September 1947 and the entire piece is built on a twelve-tone row. This important work is Schoenberg’s dramatization of a tragic story he heard from surviving Polish Jews who were victims of Nazi atrocities during World War II. Schoenberg created a story about a number of Jews who survived the war by living in the sewers of Warsaw. Interestingly, among Schoenberg’s many and very specific performance instructions is the request that the narrator not attempt to sing his part throughout the performance.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/Nwis6WIP2CU?si=TBeIJpIpAvH_H2yR
The story of the opera centers on the title character Wozzeck. Like the main character in many romantic operas, he is a tragic figure. However, whereas the operas of the nineteenth century often depicted gods and mythical figures, the story of Wozzeck is couched in a sense of realism and addresses the type of societal problems that Berg may himself have encountered during World War I, problems such as apathy and human cruelty. The character of Wozzeck is that of a pitiful and unremarkable soldier who is tormented by his captain and used for and subjected to medical experiments by a sadistic doctor. Wozzeck, who is often given to hallucinations, eventually goes mad and kills his love interest, Marie, who has been unfaithful. The opera ends after Wozzeck drowns trying to clean the murder weapon in a pond and wading out too far.
Primitivism
The brilliant Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was truly a cosmopolitan figure, having lived and composed in Russia, France, Switzerland, and the United States. His music influenced numerous composers, including the famed French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Stravinsky caused quite a stir when the ballet entitled The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913. He composed the music for a ballet that was choreographed by Sergei Diaghilev, and it was so new and different that it nearly caused a riot in the audience. The orchestral version (without the dancing) has become one of the most admired compositions of the twentieth century.
Stravinsky’s use of “primitive” sounding rhythms to depict several pagan ritual scenes makes the term “primitivism” seem appropriate. Use the listening guide below to follow Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The subject of this ballet is an imagined pagan, sacrificial rite in ancient Russia. It features jarring, repetitive rhythms and extensive use of percussion to evoke an older, less civilized time. So even though the vast majority of Stravinsky’s output does not fall into the category of primitivism, the importance of Rite of Spring is such that the movement bears some examination. To be clear, in the visual arts primitivism had many important adherents who produced a large number of major works.
Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was a new structure, which had opened on 2 April 1913 with a programme celebrating the works of many of the leading composers of the day. The theatre’s manager, Gabriel Astruc, was determined to house the 1913 Ballets Russes season, and paid Diaghilev the large sum of 25,000 francs per performance, double what he had paid the previous year. Ticket sales for the evening, ticket prices being doubled for a premiere, amounted to 35,000 francs. The programme for 29 May 1913 also included Les Sylphides, Weber’s Le Spectre de la Rose and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances.
At the time, a Parisian ballet audience typically consisted of two diverse groups: the wealthy and fashionable set, who would be expecting to see a traditional performance with beautiful music, and a “Bohemian” group who, the poet-philosopher Jean Cocteau asserted, would “acclaim, right or wrong, anything that is new because of their hatred of the boxes.” Final rehearsals were held on the day before the premiere, in the presence of members of the press and assorted invited guests. According to Stravinsky all went peacefully. However, the critic of L’Écho de Paris, Adolphe Boschot, foresaw possible trouble; he wondered how the public would receive the work, and suggested that they might react badly if they thought they were being mocked.
On the evening of the 29 May the theatre was packed: Gustav Linor reported, “Never . . . has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear.” The evening began with Les Sylphides, in which Nijinsky and Karsavina danced the main roles. The Rite followed. Some eyewitnesses and commentators said that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew into a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in “Augurs of Spring.” But music historian Richard Taruskin asserts, “it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky.” Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into “a terrific uproar” which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers. The journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten recorded that the person behind him got carried away with excitement, and “began to beat rhythmically on top of my head,” though Van Vechten failed to notice this at first, his own emotion being so great.
Monteux believed that the trouble began when the two factions in the audience began attacking each other, but their mutual anger was soon diverted towards the orchestra: “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on”. Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected—possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. Things grew noticeably quieter during Part II, and by some accounts Maria Piltz’s rendering of the final “Sacrificial Dance” was watched in reasonable silence. At the end there were several curtain calls for the dancers, for Monteux and the orchestra, and for Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the evening’s programme continued.
Among the more hostile press reviews was that of Le Figaro ’s critic, Henri Quittard, who called the work “a laborious and puerile barbarity” and added “We are sorry to see an artist such as M. Stravinsky involve himself in this disconcerting adventure.” On the other hand Gustav Linor, writing in the leading theatrical magazine Comoedia, thought the performance was superb, especially that of Maria Piltz; the disturbances, while deplorable, were merely “a rowdy debate” between two ill-mannered factions. Emile Raudin, of Les Marges, who had barely heard the music, wrote: “Couldn’t we ask M. Astruc . . . to set aside one performance for well-intentioned spectators? . . . We could at least propose to evict the female element.” The composer Alfredo Casella thought that the demonstrations were aimed at Nijinsky’s choreography rather than at the music, a view shared by the critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, who wrote: “The idea was excellent, but was not successfully carried out.” Calvocoressi failed to observe any direct hostility to the composer—unlike, he said, the premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. Of later reports that the veteran composer Camille Saint-Saëns had stormed out of the premiere, Stravinsky observed that this was impossible; Saint-Saëns did not attend. Stravinsky also rejected Cocteau’s story that, after the performance, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Diaghilev and Cocteau himself took a cab to the Bois de Boulogne where a tearful Diaghilev recited poems by Pushkin. Stravinsky merely recalled a celebratory dinner with Diaghilev and Nijinsky, at which the impresario expressed his entire satisfaction with the outcome. To Maximilien Steinberg, a former fellow-pupil under Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky wrote that Nijinsky’s choreography had been “incomparable: with the exception of a few places, everything was as I wanted it.”
Video URL: https://youtu.be/d6d8wacBjPQ?si=THctrkj_AHLaW3wD
The following version includes a larger group of dancers and may be more disturbing than the scene above.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/s7pV2cX0qxs?si=Iu55zkypOKzciqvp
Composter: Igor Stravinsky
Composition: Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance
Date: 1913
Genre: Ballet music
Form: Specific passages accompany changes in choreography
Performing Forces: Full Orchestra
Electronic Music/Music Concrete
It wasn’t long before composers in Paris also began using the tape recorder to develop a new technique for composition called musique concrète. This technique involved editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. The first pieces of musique concrète in Paris were assembled by Pierre Schaeffer, who went on to collaborate with Pierre Henry.
In 1950, Schaeffer gave the first public (non-broadcast) concert of musique concrète at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. “Schaeffer used a PA system, several turntables, and mixers. The performance did not go well, as creating live montages with turntables had never been done before.” Later that same year, Pierre Henry collaborated with Schaeffer onSymphonie pour un homme seul (1950) the first major work of musique concrete. In Paris in 1951, in what was to become an important worldwide trend, RTF established the first studio for the production of electronic music. Also in 1951, Schaeffer and Henry produced an opera, Orpheus, for concrete sounds and voices.
Romanticism
In the decades following the French Revolution and Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo (1815) a new movement called Romanticism began to flourish in France. If you read about Romanticism in general, you will find that it was a pan-European movement that had its roots in England in the mid-eighteenth century. Initially associated with literature and music, it was in part a response to the rationality of the Enlightenment and the transformation of everyday life brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Like most forms of Romantic art, nineteenth-century French Romanticism defies easy definitions. Artists explored diverse subjects and worked in varied styles so there is no single form of French Romanticism.
Even when Charles Baudelaire wrote about French Romanticism in the middle of the nineteenth century, he found it difficult to concretely define. Writing in his Salon of 1846, he affirmed that “romanticism lies neither in the subjects that an artist chooses nor in his exact copying of truth, but in the way he feels…. Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing, in other words: intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means the arts possess.”
The first marker of a French Romantic painting may be the facture, meaning the way the paint is handled or laid on to the canvas. Viewed as a means of making the presence of the artist’s thoughts and emotions apparent, French Romantic paintings are often characterized by loose, flowing brushstrokes and brilliant colors in a manner that was often equated with the painterly style of the Baroque artist Rubens. In sculpture artists often used exaggerated, almost operatic, poses and groupings that implied great emotion. This approach to art, interpreted as a direct expression of the artist’s persona—or “genius”—reflected the French Romantic emphasis on unregulated passions. The artists employed a widely varied group of subjects including the natural world, the irrational realm of instinct and emotion, the exotic world of the “Orient” and contemporary politics.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, 1806, oil on canvas, 260 x 163 cm (Musée de l’Armée, Paris; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Few world leaders have had a better understanding of the ways in which visual art can do political work on their behalf than did Napoleon Bonaparte. From the time he ascended to power during the French Revolution until his ultimate removal from office in 1815, Napoleon utilized art (and artists) to speak to his political (and sometimes his military) might. One of the best-known images that serves this exact end is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1806 painting Napoleon on His Imperial Throne. In this painting, Ingres shows Napoleon not only as an emperor of the France, but almost as if he were a divine ruler.
Shortly after the turn of the 19th century, Ingres was one of the rising stars and fresh voices of the French Neoclassical movement, an artistic style that was in part founded by Ingres’s prestigious teacher, Jacques-Louis David. By 1806, David had painted Napoleon many times. Two of the most famous of these works are Napoleon Crossing the Alps and The Coronation of Napoleon, the latter, a painting that is contemporary with Ingres’s portrait. In both of these images, David went out of his way to glorify his patron. This, too, was one of Ingres’s primary goals, and the portraitist utilized furniture, attire, and setting to transform Napoleon from a mere mortal to a powerful god.
Napoleon sits on an imposing, round-backed, and gilded throne, one that is similar to those that God sits upon in Jan van Eyck’s Flemish masterwork, the Ghent Altarpiece. It’s worth noting that, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, the central panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, which include the image of God upon a throne, were in the Musée Napoléon (now the Louvre) when Ingres painted this portrait. The armrests in Ingres’s portrait are made from pilasters that are topped with carved imperial eagles and highly polished ivory spheres. A similarly spread-winged imperial eagle appears on the rug in the foreground. Two cartouches can be seen on the left-hand side of the rug. The uppermost is the scales of justice (some have interpreted this as a symbol for the zodiac sign for Libra), and the second is a representation of Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola, an artist and painting Ingres particularly admired. One final ancillary element should be mentioned. On the back wall over Napoleon’s left shoulder is a partially visible heraldic shield. The iconography for this crest, however, is not that of France, but is instead Italy and the Papal States. This visually ties the Emperor of the French to his position—since 1805—as the King of Italy. It is not only the throne that speaks to rulership. He unblinkingly faces the viewer. In addition, Napoleon is bedazzled in attire and accouterments of his authority. He wears a gilded laurel wreath on his head, a sign of rule (and more broadly, victory) since classical times.
Left: God the Father (detail), Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (open), completed 1432, oil on wood (Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent); right: Napoleon (detail), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, 1806, oil on canvas, 260 x 163 cm (Musée de l’Armée, Paris; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In his left hand, Napoleon supports a rod topped with the hand of justice, while with his right hand he grasps the scepter of Charlemagne. Indeed, Charlemagne was one of the rulers Napoleon most sought to emulate (one may recall that Charlemagne’s name was incised on a rock in David’s earlier Napoleon Crossing the Alps). An extravagant medal from the Légion d’honneur hangs from the Emperor’s shoulders by an intricate gold and jewel-encrusted chain. Although not immediately visible, a jewel-encrusted coronation sword hangs from his left hip. The reason why the sword—one of the most recognizable symbols of rulership—can hardly be seen is because of the extravagant nature of Napoleon’s coronation robes. An immense ermine collar is under Napoleon’s Légion d’honneur medal. Ermine—a kind of short-tailed weasel—have been used for ceremonial attire for centuries and are notable for their white winter coats that are accented with a black tip on their tail. Thus, each black tip on Napoleon’s garments represents a separate animal. Clearly, then, Napoleon’s ermine collar—and the ermine lining under his gold-embroidered purple velvet robes—has been made with dozens of pelts, a certain sign of opulence. The purple color of the garment was a deliberate choice, and has a long tradition as a hue restricted for imperial use. Indeed, Roman emperors had the exclusive right to wear purple, and it was through this tradition that Jesus also came to wear violet robes. All these elements—throne, scepters, sword, wreath, ermine, purple, and velvet—speak to Napoleon’s position as Emperor.
Left: Napoleon (detail), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, 1806, oil on canvas, 260 x 163 cm (Musée de l’Armée, Paris; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Necklace of the Grand Master of the Order of the Legion of Honor, owned by Napoleon I (Musée de l’Armée, Paris)
But it is not only what Napoleon wears. It is also how the emperor sits. In painting this portrait, Ingres borrowed from other well-known images of powerful male figures. Perhaps the most notable was a long-since-destroyed but still well-known image of Zeus (the ancient Greek God, king of the gods of Mount Olympus) that Phidias, one of the most famous Greek sculptors, made around 435 B.C.E. This “type” showed Zeus seated, frontal, and with one arm raised while the other was more at rest. Indeed, this is the posture Jupiter takes in a slightly later Ingres painting, Jupiter and Thetis. Thus, Ingres is working in yet another rich visual tradition and, in doing so, seems to remove Napoleon Bonaparte from the ranks of the mortals of the earth and transforms him into a Greek or Roman god of Mount Olympus. Never once accused of modesty, there is no doubt that Napoleon approved of such a comparison.
Copyright: Dr. Bryan Zygmont, “Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne,” in Smarthistory, November 29, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/ingres-napoleon-on-his-imperial-throne/.
Painting colonial culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque
Video URL: https://youtu.be/PPwz3iaT71M?si=x4r2P7wQkHTA-Uag
In his painting La Grande Odalisque (below), Ingres transports the viewer to the Orient, a far-away land for a Parisian audience in the second decade of the nineteenth century (in this context, “Orient” means Near East more so than the Far East). The woman—who wears nothing other than jewelry and a turban—lies on a divan, her back to the viewer. She seemingly peeks over her shoulder, as if to look at someone who has just entered her room, a space that is luxuriously appointed with fine damask and satin fabrics. She wears what appears to be a ruby and pearl encrusted broach in her hair and a gold bracelet on her right wrist. In her right hand she holds a peacock fan, another symbol of affluence, and another piece of metalwork—a facedown bejeweled mirror, perhaps?—can be seen along the lower left edge of the painting. Along the right side of the composition we see a hookah, a kind of pipe that was used for smoking tobacco, hashish and opium. All of these Oriental elements—fabric, turban, fan, hookah—did the same thing for Ingres’s odalisque as Titian’s Venetian courtesan being labeled “Venus”—that is, it provided a distance that allowed the (male) viewer to safely gaze at the female nude who primarily existed for his enjoyment.
And what a nude it is. When glancing at the painting, one can immediately see the linearity that was so important to David in particular, and the French neoclassical style more broadly. But when looking at the odalisque’s body, the same viewer can also immediately notice how far Ingres has strayed from David’s particular style of rendering the human form—look for instance at her elongated back and right arm. David was largely interest in idealizing the human body, rendering it not as it existed, but as he wished it did, in an anatomically perfect state. David’s commitment to the idealizing the human form can clearly be seen in his preparatory drawings for his never completed Oath of the Tennis Court(left). There can be no doubt that this is how David taught Ingres to render the body.
Students often stray from their teacher’s instruction, however. In La Grande Odalisque, Ingres rendered the female body in an exaggerated, almost unbelievable way. Much like the Mannerists centuries earlier—Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck (c. 1535) immediately comes to mind—Ingres distorted the female form in order to make her body more sinuous and elegant. Her back seems to have two or three more vertebrae than are necessary, and it is anatomically unlikely that her lower left leg could meet with the knee in the middle of the painting, or that her left thigh attached to this knee could reach her hip. Clearly, this is not the female body as it really exists. It is the female body, perhaps, as Ingres wished it to be, at least for the composition of this painting. And in this regard, David and his student Ingres have attempted to achieve the same end—idealization of the human form—though each strove to do so in markedly different ways.
Copyright: Dr. Bryan Zygmont, “Painting colonial culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/painting-colonial-culture-ingress-la-grande-odalisque/.
Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
VIdeo URL: https://youtu.be/jlVBaqyGKMs?si=Yxt9o0rb7hHlXWPU
When this work was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819, the public would have recognized the subject. It had been in the news just a few years before and quickly grew into a political scandal. In July 1816, a French naval ship, Medusa, was its way to Senegal carrying the new governor of the colony, his family, and some other government officials and others. The government officials came to secure French possession of the colony and to assure the continuation of the covert slave trade, even though France had officially abolished the practice. Another group aboard the Medusa was composed of reformers and abolitionists who hoped to eliminate the practice of slavery in Senegal by engaging the local Senegalese and the French colonists in the development of an agricultural cooperative that would make the colony self-sustaining.
The captain of the Medusa, who had received command of the ship through royal patronage, accidentally ran the ship aground on a sandbar off the coast of West Africa. The ship’s carpenter could not repair the Medusa and the decision was made to put the governor, his family and other high-ranking passengers into the six lifeboats. The remaining 150 passengers found themselves packed onto a raft made by the carpenter from the masts of the Medusa.
The group on the raft included lower-ranking military men, colonists, and sailors of European and African descent. The overcrowded makeshift raft, just 65 x 23 feet, was lashed to the lifeboats, but it impeded their progress so the more elite passengers in the boats took axes and cut the lines to the raft, casting it adrift. Of the 150 people aboard the raft, 15 were rescued by the Argus—the ship that we can barely see at the back of the canvas—and only 10 ultimately survived to tell the tale of cannibalism, murder, and other horrors aboard the raft.
There had never been a painting like Raft of the Medusa. It was on the grand scale of French history painting (think, for example, of Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii) but instead of ideal forms and a moralizing story from history, Géricault offered the Salon audience a thoroughly modern, Romantic depiction of death and suffering based on a contemporary event that was in the news. To create his painting, Géricault investigated everything about the story of the raft and talked with many of the survivors. He then brought all of the research together to create a radical painting that responded to the conservative tradition of history paintings.
Gericault first learned about the disaster in the Paris newspapers. Then two of the survivors, the ship’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, and the engineer, Alexandre Corréard, published accounts of their experiences on the raft. Géricault interviewed them both and worked with other survivors as well. The painter went to the French coast to study the movement of ships on the water. He examined images of the raft’s design and the Medusa’s carpenter, who had built the raft, gave Géricault a miniature copy of it. Géricault began drawing the bodies of the living and the dead, then working out the scene in watercolor and oil sketches trying to figure out what the show the viewers and just how to do it. The process required over 100 studies that moved through each episode of the story.
No one who wrote about the painting in 1819 was unmoved. Conservative critics and writers were appalled and accused Géricault of creating a disgusting, repulsive mistake. More progressive writers who supported the modern, Romantic approach marveled at the artist’s shocking painting that caused them to tremble and admire the scene of the horrific events on the raft. When he ran through Paris after seeing Raft of the Medusa, completed in Géricault’s studio, young Delacroix experienced that same shock. He had seen something completely new that challenged every expectation for history painting and experienced an entirely kind of painting on a grand scale.
Copyright: Dr. Claire Black McCoy, “Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa,” in Smarthistory, May 27, 2021, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/theodore-gericault-raft-of-the-medusa/.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
Video URL: https://youtu.be/6skizQlC-uU?si=ce7mtwxEZP4beh_P
Clearly, this figure is not meant to be a portrait of a specific individual, and Delacroix did not mean to suggest that there was a half-naked woman running around carrying a loaded firearm and a flag during the Trois Glorieuses—the Three Glorious Days as it came to be known—of the July Revolution. Instead, she serves as an allegory—in this instance, a pictorial device intended to reveal a moral or political idea—of Liberty. In this, she is similar to an example familiar to those in the United States, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty (1886). Clearly, this monumental statue is not a portrait of a woman named Liberty who wears a Roman toga, carries a torch, and an inscribed tablet. Instead, she represents an idea. The same is true of Delacroix’s painted Liberty.
This factory worker provides a counterpoint to the younger man beside him who is clearly of a different economic status. He wears a black top hat, an open-collared white shirt and cravat, and an elegantly tailored black coat. Rather than hold a military weapon like his older brother-in-arms, he instead grasps a hunting shotgun. These two figures make clear that this revolution is not just for the economically downtrodden, but for those of affluence, too.
Copyright: Dr. Bryan Zygmont, “Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People,” in Smarthistory, November 22, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/delacroix-liberty-leading-the-people/.
Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808
Video URL: https://youtu.be/_QM-DfhrNv8?si=bozDTlo5gVy8yLe6
We see row of French soldiers aiming their guns at a Spanish man, who stretches out his arms in submission both to the men and to his fate. A country hill behind him takes the place of an executioner’s wall. A pile of dead bodies lies at his feet, streaming blood. To his other side, a line of Spanish rebels stretches endlessly into the landscape. They cover their eyes to avoid watching the death that they know awaits them. The city and civilization are far behind them. Even a monk, bowed in prayer, will soon be among the dead.
Goya’s painting has been lauded for its brilliant transformation of Christian iconography and its poignant portrayal of man’s inhumanity to man. The central figure of the painting, who is clearly a poor laborer, takes the place of the crucified Christ; he is sacrificing himself for the good of his nation. The lantern that sits between him and the firing squad is the only source of light in the painting and dazzlingly illuminates his body, bathing him in what can be perceived as spiritual light. His expressive face, which shows an emotion of anguish that is more sad than terrified, echoes Christ’s prayer on the cross: Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:24)
Close inspection of the victim’s right hand also shows stigmata, referencing the marks made on Christ’s body during the Crucifixion.
The man’s pose not only equates him with Christ, but also acts as an assertion of his humanity. The French soldiers, by contrast, become mechanical or insect-like. They merge into one faceless, many-legged creature incapable of feeling human emotion. Nothing is going to stop them from murdering this man. The deep recession into space seems to imply that this type of brutality will never end.
This depiction of warfare was a drastic departure from convention. In 18th century art, battle and death were represented as bloodless affairs with little emotional impact. Even the great French Romanticists were more concerned with producing a beautiful canvas in the tradition of history paintings, showing the hero in the heroic act, than with creating emotional impact. Goya’s painting, by contrast, presents us with an anti-hero, imbued with true pathos that had not been seen since, perhaps, the ancient Roman sculpture of The Dying Gaul. Goya’s central figure is not perishing heroically in battle, but rather being killed on the side of the road like an animal. Both the landscape and the dress of the men are nondescript, making the painting timeless. This is certainly why the work remains emotionally charged today.
Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
For Constable “Truth (in all things)” was what mattered. Not for him Turner’s clash of elemental forces – land, sea, sun and sky – creating those highly dramatic, almost abstract fields of color. Constable, an English painter, instead pursued an art that was, in his own words, “legitimate, scientific, mechanical.”
That the same artist could declare, without fear of contradiction, that “painting is but another word for feeling” should not surprise us. For what we might see as a conflict between the scientific and the emotional was for the Romantics nothing of the kind. For them reason and emotion informed and enhanced each other, so that truth gained through the filter of personal experience was considered of a higher order than that got by slavish reference to universal laws.
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden, 1826, oil on canvas, 88.9 x 112.4 cm (Frick Collection, New York)
“I should paint my own places best,” Constable once said, referring to the Suffolk landscape he grew up in and which he painted with an almost religious devotion. Yet in the course of his life, Salisbury too became one his “own places”.
He first visited this small city in the west of England in 1811 on the invitation of the Bishop, one of his first and most important patrons, for whom he painted Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Gardens, a version of which can be found in New York’s Frick Collection. Over the years he made many more trips producing over 300 paintings and watercolors of the area.
It was in Salisbury, too, that the painter formed his closest friendship with the Bishop’s nephew John Fisher: “we loved each other,” Constable wrote towards the end of his life, “and confided in each other entirely.”
The scene depicts Salisbury Cathedral across the River Avon. The vantage point was well-considered. For many months Constable produced pencil and oil sketches from different viewpoints in preparation for the final design. In the end, we are presented with a sort of a composite construction based on these, with topographical features artfully maneuvered into position, such as Leadenhall where the rainbow ends and the church of St Thomas to the left, neither of which are visible from this viewpoint.
Yet for all its contrivances, the painting still retains an extraordinary sense of vitality, more so than the Frick painting, for example, with its meticulously observed topography and those picturesque recessional markers such as the framing foliage or the three neatly placed cows. In Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadow the viewer is instead guided sinuously backwards and forwards in the picture space through a stimulating interplay of line and curve.
Up close Constable’s painterly method is even more impressive. Using palette knife and brush, the effects are truly breathtaking. Indeed, few artists have shown such an extraordinary facility for capturing the textures of the natural world.
It is the rainbow though that captivates, the first in any of Constable’s paintings. It came as an afterthought, as x-rays of the painting show. But what an afterthought! In one masterstroke Constable negotiates a multitude of difficulties. Compositionally it unites the various elements of the painting, softening the horizon and creating rich echoes with the curve of the river and the undulating line of the large tree to the right that is carried through the cart and horses.
But that is not all. In 1834 he gave a series of lectures on the history of landscape painting. Alluding to rainbows painted by the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, he stated: “I mean more than the rainbow itself, I mean dewy light and freshness, the departing shower, with the exhilaration of the returning sun.” The rainbow then generates feelings of “freshness” and “exhilaration”, as well as capturing that ceaseless mutability of the forces of nature, that like the tide, depart and return.
That the base of the rainbow is situated at Leadenhall where John Fisher lived and Constable had stayed, reveals also something of its personal significance, made all the more poignant in that a year after the painting was exhibited Fisher died at the age of forty-four.
Lastly, one senses that with the rainbow bounding the cathedral as boldly as it does, Constable invites us to consider traditional Christian iconography. The storm has passed and whatever it may stand for: the Papist (Catholic) threat to the Church of England, the artist’s own religious uncertainty or, as many have argued, his deep sense of desolation at the loss of his wife, the rainbow that marks its passing carries with it more benign associations: God’s pardon and reconciliation with man (as in after the Flood) or the promise of peace after the storm of life (as in the Resurrection).
Copyright: Ben Pollitt, “John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/constable-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows/.
J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship
Video URL: https://youtu.be/NoCW80MEGXY?si=I_Oh4FEu9FAixoDe
Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
By modern standards, nineteenth-century photography can appear rather primitive. While the stark black and white landscapes and unsmiling people have their own austere beauty, these images also challenge our notions of what defines a work of art.
Photography is a controversial fine art medium, simply because it is difficult to classify—is it an art or a science? Nineteenth century photographers struggled with this distinction, trying to reconcile aesthetics with improvements in technology.
Although the principle of the camera was known in antiquity, the actual chemistry needed to register an image was not available until the nineteenth century.
Artists from the Renaissance onwards used a camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber), or a small hole in the wall of a darkened box that would pass light through the hole and project an upside down image of whatever was outside the box. However, it was not until the invention of a light sensitive surface by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce that the basic principle of photography was born.
From this point the development of photography largely related to technological improvements in three areas, speed, resolution and permanence. The first photographs, such as Niépce’s famous View from the Window at Gras (1826) required a very slow speed (a long exposure period), in this case about 8 hours, obviously making many subjects difficult, if not impossible, to photograph. Taken using a camera obscura to expose a copper plate coated in silver and pewter, Niépce’s image looks out of an upstairs window, and part of the blurry quality is due to changing conditions during the long exposure time, causing the resolution, or clarity of the image, to be grainy and hard to read. An additional challenge was the issue of permanence, or how to successfully stop any further reaction of the light sensitive surface once the desired exposure had been achieved. Many of Niépce’s early images simply turned black over time due to continued exposure to light. This problem was largely solved in 1839 by the invention of hypo, a chemical that reversed the light sensitivity of paper.
Copyright: Dr. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby, “Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/early-photography-niepce-talbot-and-muybridge/.
Pre-Raphaelites
During a visit to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1848, the young artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was drawn to a painting entitled The Eve of Saint Agnes by William Holman Hunt. As a subject taken from the poetry of John Keats was a rarity at the time, Rossetti sought out Hunt, and the two quickly became friends. Hunt then introduced Rossetti to his friend John Everett Millais, and the rest, as they say, is history. The trio went on to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group determined to reform the artistic establishment of Victorian England (1837–1901).
The name “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (PRB) hints at the vaguely medieval subject matter for which the group is known. The young artists appreciated the simplicity of line and large flat areas of brilliant color found in the early Italian painters before Raphael, as well as in 15th century Flemish art. These were not qualities favored by the more academic approach taught at the Royal Academy during the mid-19th century, which stressed the strong light and dark shading of the Old Masters. Another source of inspiration for the young artists was the writing of art critic John Ruskin, particularly the famous passage from Modern Painters telling artists “to go to nature in al singleness of heart… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”
This combination of influences contributed to the group’s extreme attention to detail, and the development of the wet white ground technique that produced the brilliant color for which they are known. The artists even became some of the first to complete sections of their canvases outdoors in an effort to capture the minute detail of every leaf and blade of grass.
It was decided that seven was the appropriate number for a rebellious group and four others were added to form the initial Brotherhood. The selection of additional members has long mystified art historians. James Collinson, a painter, seems to have been added due to his short-lived engagement to Rossetti’s sister Christina rather than his sympathy with the cause. Another member, Thomas Woolner, was a sculptor rather than a painter. The final two members, William Michael Rossetti and Frederic George Stephens, both of whom went on to become art critics, were not practicing artists. However, other young artists such as Walter Howell Deverell and Charles Collins embraced the ideals of the PRB even though they were never formally elected as members.
The Pre-Raphaelites decided to make their debut by sending a group of paintings, all bearing the initials “PRB”, to the Royal Academy in 1849. However, Rossetti, who was nervous about the reception of his painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, changed his mind and instead sent his painting to the earlier Free Exhibition (meaning there was no jury as there was at the Royal Academy). At the Royal Academy, Hunt exhibited Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, a scene from a historical novel of the same name by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Millais exhibited Isabella, another subject from Keats, created with such attention to detail that one can actually see the beheading scene on the plate nearest the edge of the table, which echoes the ultimate fate of the young lover Lorenzo in the story. In both paintings, the accurately designed medieval costumes, bright colors and attention to detail produced criticism that the paintings mimicked a “mediaeval illumination of the chronicle or the romance.” [2] Interestingly, no mention was made of the mysterious “PRB” inscription.
In 1850, however, the reaction to the PRB was very different. By this time, many people knew about the existence of the supposedly secret society, in part because the group had published many of their ideas in a short-lived literary magazine entitled The Germ. Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini appeared at the Free Exhibition along with a painting by his friend Deverell entitled Twelfth Night. At the Royal Academy, Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids and Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents, famously abused by Charles Dickens, received the brunt of the criticism. [3] In the aftermath of the humiliating reception of their work, Collinson resigned from the group and Rossetti decided never again to exhibit publicly.
Undeterred, Millais and Hunt again continued to exhibit paintings demonstrating the beautiful colors and detail orientation of the mature style of the PRB. The Royal Academy of 1851 included Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia, and three pictures by Millais, Mariana, The Woodman’s Daughter, and The Return of the Dove to the Ark as well as Convent Thoughts by Millais’s friend Charles Collins. Although many were still dubious about the new style, the critic John Ruskin came to the rescue of the group, publishing two letters in The Times newspaper in which he praised the relationship of the PRB to early Italian art. Although Ruskin was suspicious of what he termed the group’s “Catholic tendencies,” he liked the attention to detail and the color of the PRB paintings. Ruskin’s praise helped catapult the young artists to a new level.
The Brotherhood, however, was slowly dissolving. Woolner emigrated to Australia in 1852. Hunt decided in January 1854 to visit the Holy Land in order to better paint religious pictures. And, in an event Rossetti described as the formal end of the PRB, Millais was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1853, joining the art establishment he had fought hard to change.
Despite the fact that the Brotherhood lasted only a few short years, its impact was immense. Millais and Hunt both went on to establish important places for themselves in the Victorian art world. Millais was to go on to become an extremely popular artist, selling his artworks for vast sums of money, and ultimately being elected as the President of the Royal Academy. Hunt, who perhaps stayed most true to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, became a well-known artist and wrote many articles and books on the formation of the Brotherhood.
Rossetti became a mentor to a group of younger artists including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Rossetti’s paintings of beautiful women also helped inaugurate the new Aesthetic Movement, or the taste for Art for Art’s Sake, in the later Victorian era. To a contemporary audience, the Pre-Raphaelites may appear less than modern. However, in their own time the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood accomplished something revolutionary. They were one of the first groups to value painting out-of-doors for its “truth to nature,” and their concept of banding together to take on the art establishment helped to pave the way for later groups. The distinctive elements of their paintings, such as the extreme attention to detail, the brilliant colors and the beautiful rendition of literary subjects set them apart from other Victorian painters.
Copyright: Dr. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby, “A beginner’s guide to the Pre-Raphaelites,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/a-beginners-guide-to-the-pre-raphaelites/.
Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents
Video URL: https://youtu.be/nRPLiTZAry4?si=TtzmfYkJUC7_QeHw
The picture centers on the young Christ whose hand has been injured, being cared for by the Virgin, his mother. Christ’s wound, a perforation in his palm, foreshadows his ultimate end on the cross. A young St. John the Baptist carefully brings a bowl of water to clean the wound, symbolic of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. Joseph, St Anne (the Virgin’s mother) and a carpenter’s assistant also react to Christ’s accident. At a time when most religious paintings of the Holy Family were calm and tranquil groupings, this active event in the young life of the Savior must have seemed extremely radical.
The same can be said for Millais’ handling of the figures and the setting in the painting. Mary’s wrinkled brow and the less than clean feet of some of the figures are certainly not idealized. According to the principles of the P.R.B., the attention to detail is incredible. Each individual wood shaving on the floor is exquisitely painted, and the rough-hewn table is more functional than beautiful. The tools of the carpenters trade are evident hanging on the wall behind, while stacks of wood line the walls. The setting is a place of work, not a sacred spot.
William Michael Rossetti recorded in The P.R.B. Journal that Millais started to work on the subject in November 1849 and began the actual painting at the end of December. We know from Rossetti and the reminiscences of fellow Brotherhood member William Holman Hunt that Millais worked on location in a carpenter’s shop on Oxford Street, catching cold while working there in January. Millais’ son tells us that his father purchased sheep heads from a butcher to use as models for the sheep in the upper left of the canvas. He did not show the finished canvas to his friends until April of 1850.
Although Millais’ exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1849, Isabella, had been well received, the critics blasted Christ in the House of his Parents. The most infamous review, however, was the one by Charles Dickens that appeared in his magazine Household Words in June 1850. In it he described Christ as: a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France or in the lowest gin-shop in England.”
The attacks on Millais’ painting were undoubtedly unsettling for the young artist. Millais had been born in 1829 on the island of Jersey, but his parents eventually moved to London to benefit their son’s artistic education. When Millais began at the Royal Academy school in 1840 he had the distinction of being the youngest person ever to have been admitted.
At the Royal Academy, Millais became friendly with the young William Holman Hunt, who in turn introduced Millais to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the idea for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was born. The young artists exhibited their first set of paintings in 1849, all of which were well received, but the paintings shown in 1850 were universally criticized, although none with as much fervor as Christ in the House of his Parents.
Millais’ Christ in the House of his Parents is a remarkable religious painting for its time. It presents the Holy Family in a realistic manner, emphasizing the small details that bring the tableau to life. It is a scene we can easily imagine happening, but it is still laced with the symbolism expected of a Christian subject. It is Millais’ marriage of these two ideas that makes Christ in the House of his Parents such a compelling image, and at the same time, made it so reprehensible to Millais’ contemporaries.
Copyright: : Dr. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby, “Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/millais-christ-in-the-house-of-his-parents/.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1874, oil on canvas, 125.1 x 61 cm (Tate Britain, London)
The English painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced at least eight paintings of Proserpine trapped in her subterranean world, the fatal pomegranate in her hand. He also wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, which is inscribed in Italian on the painting itself and in English on the frame, cited below. This is the seventh version of the painting. It was produced for the wealthy ship-owner and art collector Frederick Leyland from Liverpool and is now in the Tate collection, London. The original idea was to paint Eve holding the forbidden apple, a scene from Genesis; and in fact the two stories are almost directly comparable. Eve and Proserpine both represent females banished for their sin of tasting a forbidden fruit. Their yielding to temptation has often been seen as a sign of feminine weakness or lack of restraint. Just one bite. Surely that can’t hurt. Or can it? It took less than one bite to destroy the mythological goddess Proserpine’s life. This tragic maiden was gathering flowers when she was abducted by Pluto, carried off to his underground palace in Hades – the land of the dead, and forced to marry him. Distraught, her mother Ceres pleaded for her return. The god Jupiter agreed, on condition that Proserpine had not tasted any of the fruits of Hades. But she had—a single pomegranate seed—and as punishment she was destined to remain captive for six months of each year for the rest of her life in her bleak underground prison.
At first glance the painting appears still, subdued—muted like the colour scheme. Proserpine is motionless, absorbed in thought, and the only sign of movement is the wisp of smoke furling from the incense burner, the attribute of the goddess. But look closely, and the painting appears to bristle with a tortuous, pent-up energy. It is full of peculiar twists and turns. Take Proserpine’s neck: it bulges unnaturally at the back, and looks as though it is slowly being screwed or twisted like rubber. Her hands too are set in an awkward grip. Try mimicking this yourself—it is difficult to hold this pose for long. This is a painting of almost tortured stillness: a body under strain.
This underlying unease is also apparent in the lines and creases of Proserpine’s dress. Notice how it does not form natural-looking folds. Instead it looks like the fabric is covered in clinging, creeping ridges that seem to slowly wind their way around the goddess, ensnaring and rooting her to the spot. These ridges could be compared to the tendril of ivy in the background, which appears to sprout directly from her head. Ivy is a plant with dark connotations—an invasive vine, it has a tendency to grip, cover and choke other plant-life. It is often associated with death, and is a common feature in graveyards. Rossetti wrote that the ivy in this painting symbolises ‘clinging memory.’ But what are these memories that cling so tightly?
In this painting, a clear correspondence is set up between Proserpine’s improbably large lips and the pomegranate in her hand. While the rest of the painting has been completed in cool, sometimes murky colors—Rossetti called it a “study of greys” —the lips and pomegranate are vivid and intense, painted in warm orange and red tones. It is significant that these features—the mouth and the fruit—have strong associations with the pleasures of taste. It is as though Rossetti is presenting both as objects ripe for consumption, tempting the viewer to take a taste. This is not as improbable as it first sounds: one of Rossetti’s earlier paintings, Bocca Baciata (left), which also shows a single female figure with a fruit (an apple in this case) was considered capable of stirring an erotic, physical response in viewers. The artist Arthur Hughes, a contemporary of Rossetti’s, said that the owner of this painting would probably try to ‘kiss the dear thing’s lips away.’ In fact, the title of the painting itself translates as “the mouth that has been kissed.”
This sensual, carnal side of Rossetti’s work caused controversy during his lifetime—for a Victorian artist, he was venturing into dangerous territory. Even today some find his sexualized vision of feminine beauty difficult to stomach. Rossetti argued however that work was not just a study of the sensual in life. He insisted that his art was an attempt to synthesize the sensual and the spiritual. His fried Theodore Watts-Dunton defended this in an article “The Truth about Rossetti.” To Rossetti he wrote, “the human body, like everything in nature, was rich in symbol… To him the mouth really represented the sensuous part of the face no less certainly than the eyes represented the spiritualized part.” adding that if the lips of Rossetti’s women appear overly full and sensual, this is always counter-balanced by the spiritual depth invested in their eyes. It is true that in this painting there does appear to be a haunting melancholy in Proserpine’s eyes, but whether Rossetti fully achieves this synthesis of the sensual with the spiritual is still up for debate.
Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, – one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door.
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar, how far away,
The nights that shall be from the days that were.
Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
(Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring,) –
“Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!”—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Proserpina (For a Picture)”(1880)
Copyright: Stephanie Roberts, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/rossetti-proserpine/.
Realism
The Modern Era begins with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Clothing, food, heat, light and sanitation are a few of the basic areas that “modernized” the nineteenth century. Transportation was faster, getting things done got easier, shopping in the new department stores became an adventure, and people developed a sense of “leisure time”—thus the entertainment businesses grew.
In Paris, the city was transformed from a medieval warren of streets to a grand urban center with wide boulevards, parks, shopping districts and multi-class dwellings (so that the division of class might be from floor to floor—the rich on the lower floors and the poor on the upper floors in one building—instead by neighborhood).
Therefore, modern life was about social mixing, social mobility, frequent journeys from the city to the country and back, and a generally faster pace which has accelerated ever since.
Gustave Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet
Arguably the most influential artist of nineteenth century French Realism, Gustave Courbet (goos-tav core-bay), is the first major figure that we can identify as avant-garde (ahh-vahhnt guard). This was originally a French military term subsequently adopted for certain radical artists and thinkers. “Avant” means advance or forward, and “garde” is similar to the English guard or soldier, so the original phrase referred to the vanguard or the troops that pushed ahead of the main battalions at great personal risk. In the art world, avant-garde refers to those artists willing to risk their reputations in search of new methods of visual expression that break down old, ineffective approaches to art-making. The avant-garde is always ahead of the pack, but their new ideas, if ultimately successful, are often adopted by the masses.
In his canvas The Meeting or, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, of 1854, Courbet has painted himself on the right side. This self-portrait offers a number of significant clues as to how the artist thought of himself or perhaps how he wished to be seen. Rather like dressing in the morning or applying makeup (if you do), a self-portrait allows for a degree of control over the way that others perceive you.
Courbet, then, is announcing who he is. Our job is to read the clues that this image offers. Looking closely at the painting, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, what visual cues help identify each person? Before you say to yourself, “I don’t know how to do this,” remember that you are in fact an expert in reading the clues given by the people around you. Everyday you respond to body language, types and styles of clothing, facial expression, hand gesture, and environmental context. Those judgments are based upon your quick, and quite sophisticated assessment of these sorts of clues. So look at these figures as actors on a stage or, as Courbet has suggested, people that you’ve run across as you stroll a country road. What do the costumes, the props, and the interactions express?
The man in the green jacket beside the dog is very well dressed indeed. But is the man in brown next to him? He wears a suit, but it is worn and ill-fitting. His name is Calas and he serves the man beside him. The rich man in the center is flanked by both his servent Calas and his dog. Is Courbet trying to draw a connection between this man and the dog as well as a distinction between himself and the group of three? Do you see this as a chance meeting? And what of the angle of the heads?
Look closely at the angle of Courbet’s head in relation to the angle of the servant. The fellow in green is the son of a banker, an industrialist named Alfred Bruyas who is one of Courbet’s patrons and had himself been a painter. Bruyas has also removed his right glove, presumably to shake Courbet’s hand, Courbet has not returned the gesture. The patron and artist, though, are unfairly matched, since Bruyas is on Courbet’s turf.
We know that Courbet came from Ornans in eastern France, quite outside of the orbit of Paris where he had moved. But here, Courbet is self-sufficient, and carries on his back a folding easel that contains everything he needs (paint, canvas, palette, oil, turpentine, and rags) to paint directly from nature. Bruyas, on the other hand, must be trailed by a servant and carries only a small cane. One can imagine that Bruyas and his servant had been transported by the carriage in the background, ill-prepared as they are for the countryside, while Courbet had evidently been making his way on foot.
The meeting between the two men represents the vitality of the countryside in contrast to the mannered style of the city. Even the different treatment of Bruyas and Courbet’s beards, though related to each man’s true likeness, further underscores the contrast of the stuffy aesthete to the “worker-artist.” The issue we’ve discussed before–the exaltation of the countryside as the Industrial Revolution progressed–sees its full expression in this work. This, then, really is Courbet’s manifesto. Here is the artist, a man of the country who goes his own way.
Unlike the other great painters of rural life and labor, such as the French Realist Jean-François Millet, the artist Gustave Courbet was very politically active. In 1848, he witnessed and read about a series of unsuccessful uprisings in France, England, and Germany. These revolts had been inspired by earlier enlightenment thinking. Unlike the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, however, these more modern actions were fueled by the depravations and mass dislocations caused by the industrialization of Western Europe. Laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century built both massive fortunes and the slums of the wretchedly poor. And life was indeed wretched for most.
When we think of the economic system currently employed in the United States, we think of modern capitalism. After all, the planned socialist economies of the “Iron Curtain” (the Soviet Union and its allies), have been discredited. However, before we come to feel too smug, we should remember that our system is actually is a highly socialized capitalism, which is a very good thing. As stated earlier, pure capitalism is brutal. This period saw young children chiseling coal from tunnels too narrow for adults and the common use of poisonous substances without even rudimentary safeguards required for workers. There was no safety net beyond one’s family and church. Many died of neglect, starvation, and disease.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Gustave Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/courbet-bonjour-monsieur-courbet/.
Édouard Manet, Olympia
Video URL: https://youtu.be/nFhgy9mkNRo?si=icu5yNI8u_R_OEeg
Olympia features a nude woman reclining upon a chaise lounge, with a small black cat at her feet (image above), and a Black female servant behind her brandishing a bouquet of flowers (image below). It struck viewers—who flocked to see the painting—as a great insult to the academic tradition. And of course it was. One could say that the artist had thrown down a gauntlet. The subject was modern—maybe too modern, since it failed to properly elevate the woman’s nakedness to the lofty ideals of nudity found in art of antiquity —she was no goddess or mythological figure. As the art historian Eunice Lipton described it, Manet had “robbed,” the art historical genre of nudes of “their mythic scaffolding…”[1] Nineteenth-century French salon painting (sometimes also called academic painting—the art advocated by the Royal Academy) was supposed to perpetually return to the classical past to retrieve and reinvent its forms and ideals, making them relevant for the present moment. In using a contemporary subject (and not Venus), Manet mocked that tradition and, moreover, dared to suggest that the classical past held no relevance for the modern industrial present.
As if to underscore his rejection of the past, Manet used as his source a well-known painting in the collection of the Louvre—Venus of Urbino, a 1538 painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Titian (image above)—and he then stripped it of meaning. To an eye trained in the classical style, Olympia was clearly no respectful homage to Titian’s masterpiece; the artist offered instead an impoverished copy. In place of the seamlessly contoured voluptuous figure of Venus, set within a richly atmospheric and imaginary world, Olympia was flatly painted, poorly contoured, lacked depth, and seemed to inhabit the seamy, contemporary world of Parisian prostitution.
Why, critics asked, was the figure so flat and washed out, the background so dark? Why had the artist abandoned the centuries-old practice of leading the eye towards an imagined vanishing point that would establish the fiction of a believable space for the figures to inhabit? For Manet’s artistic contemporaries, however, the loose, fluid brushwork and the seeming rapidity of execution were much more than a hoax. In one stroke, the artist had dissolved classical illusionism and re-invented painting as something that spoke to its own condition of being a painted representation.
Left: Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas, 119.20 x 165.50 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Manet had created an artistic revolution: a contemporary subject depicted in a modern manner. It is hard from a present-day perspective to see what all the fuss was about. Nevertheless, the painting elicited much unease and it is important to remember—in the absence of the profusion of media imagery that exists today—that painting and sculpture in nineteenth-century France served to consolidate identity on both a national and individual level. And here is where the Olympia’s subversive role resides. Manet chose not to mollify anxiety about this new modern world of which Paris had become a symbol. For those anxious about class status (many had recently moved to Paris from the countryside), the naked woman in Olympia coldly stared back at the new urban bourgeoisie looking to art to solidify their own sense of identity. Aside from the reference to prostitution—itself a dangerous sign of the emerging margins in the modern city—the painting’s inclusion of a Black woman tapped into the French colonialist mindset while providing a stark contrast for the whiteness of Olympia. The Black woman also served as a powerful emblem of “primitive” sexuality, one of many fictions that aimed to justify colonial views of non-Western societies.
If Manet rejected an established approach to painting that valued the timeless and eternal, Olympia served to further embody, for his scandalized viewers, a sense of the modern world as one brimming with uncertainty and newness. Olympia occupies a pivotal moment in art history. Situated on the threshold of the shift from the classical tradition to an industrialized modernity, it is a perfect metaphor of an irretrievably disappearing past and an as yet unknowable future.
Copyright: Dr. Thomas Folland, “Édouard Manet, Olympia,” in Smarthistory, December 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/edouard-manet-olympia/.
Édouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/3xBGF8H3bQ4?si=_JlHpDzLn5oJ93jX
Impressionism
The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition—called the Salon—and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reputation and make a living as an artist). The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury—which could often be quite arbitrary. The artists we know today as Impressionists—Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley (and several others)—could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions was too long. They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it.
The artists pooled their money, rented a studio that belonged to the photographer Nadar, and set a date for their first collective exhibition. They called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and their first show opened at about the same time as the annual Salon in May 1874. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 through 1886.
The impressionists regarded Manet as their inspiration and leader in their spirit of revolution, but Manet had no desire to join their cooperative venture into independent exhibitions. Manet had set up his own pavilion during the 1867 World’s Fair, but he was not interested in giving up on the Salon jury. He wanted Paris to come to him and accept him—even if he had to endure their ridicule in the process.
Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Sisley had met through classes. Berthe Morisot was a friend of both Degas and Manet (she would marry Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène by the end of 1874). She had been accepted to the Salon, but her work had become more experimental since then. Degas invited Morisot to join their risky effort. The first exhibition did not repay the artists monetarily but it did draw the critics, some of whom decided their art was abominable. What they saw wasn’t finished in their eyes; these were mere “impressions.” This was not a compliment. The paintings of Neoclassical and Romantic artists had a finished appearance. The Impressionists’ completed works looked like sketches, fast and preliminary “impressions” that artists would dash off to preserve an idea of what to paint more carefully at a later date. Normally, an artist’s “impressions” were not meant to be sold, but were meant to be aids for the memory—to take these ideas back to the studio for the masterpiece on canvas. The critics thought it was absurd to sell paintings that looked like slap-dash impressions and to present these paintings as finished works.
Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists also challenged the Academy’s category codes. The Academy deemed that only “history painting” was great painting. These young Realists and Impressionists questioned the long established hierarchy of subject matter. They believed that landscapes and genres scenes (scenes of contemporary life) were worthy and important. In their landscapes and genre scenes, the Impressionist tried to arrest a particular moment in time by pinpointing specific atmospheric conditions—light flickering on water, moving clouds, a burst of rain. Their technique tried to capture what they saw. They painted small commas of pure color one next to another. When viewer stood at a reasonable distance their eyes would see a mix of individual marks; colors that had blended optically. This method created more vibrant colors than colors mixed as physical paint on a palette. An important aspect of the Impressionist painting was the appearance of quickly shifting light on the surface of forms and the representation changing atmospheric conditions. The Impressionists wanted to create an art that was modern by capturing the rapid pace of contemporary life and the fleeting conditions of light. They painted outdoors (en plein air) to capture the appearance of the light as it flickered and faded while they worked.
By the 1880s, the Impressionists accepted the name the critics gave them, though their reception in France did not improve quickly. Other artists, such as Mary Cassatt, recognized the value of the Impressionist movement and were invited to join. American and other non-French collectors purchased numerous works by the Impressionists. Today, a large share of Impressionist work remains outside French collections.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic, “Impressionism, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/a-beginners-guide-to-impressionism/.
Edgar Degas, The Dance Class
Video URL: https://youtu.be/NigP3DjV3NY?si=bWcQlK6-ORu2gptO
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle
Video URL: https://youtu.be/na05-xCZR8s?si=2ECJ5HrwzjidOGI9
Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
Video URL: https://youtu.be/o6amlRsb1n4?si=gSqeskO2EJRnfzba
Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
Video URL: https://youtu.be/feCG2zfzflo?si=OgD5-Rh9Qo8RKUuE
Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
Video URL: https://youtu.be/DWHJx0kFQCo?si=fvLxjgxsfhCtKuPD
Claude Monet, Les Nymphéas (The Water Lilies)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/6fHorNn2zqQ?si=LiIPsOKNiadyzVWF
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884
Video URL: https://youtu.be/wNB9Vm6MoDQ?si=37NIPMR6-Ca5Rz9W
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
Video URL: https://youtu.be/ndwOgL3ZgCQ?si=kxJcTsNv8aSqMWLe
Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/iQY3SdZeZ6g?si=jI2XeMsdA5pxCaRh
Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
In 1885, Rodin was commissioned by the French city of Calais to create a sculpture that commemorated the heroism of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, a prominent citizen of Calais, during the dreadful Hundred Years’ War between England and France (begun in 1337).
We see six men covered only in simple layers of tattered sackcloth; their bodies appearing thin and malnourished with bones and joints clearly visible. Each man is a burgher, or city councilmen, of Calais, and each has their own stance and identifiable features. However, while they may stand together with a sense of familiarity, none of them are making eye contact with the men beside them. Some figures have their heads bowed or their faces obscured by raised hands, while others try to stand tall with their eyes gazing into the distance. They are drawn together not through physical or verbal contact, but by their slumped shoulders, bare feet, and an expression of utter anguish.
Rodin followed the recounting of Jean Froissart, a fourteenth-century French chronicler, who wrote of the war. According to Froissart, King Edward III made a deal with the citizens of Calais: if they wished to save their lives and their beloved city, then not only must they surrender the keys to the city, but six prominent members of the city council must volunteer to give up their lives. The leader of the group was Eustache de Saint-Pierre, who Rodin depicted with a bowed head and bearded face towards the middle of the gathering. To Saint-Pierre’s left, with his mouth closed in a tight line and carrying a giant set of keys, is Jean d’Aire. The remaining men are identified as Andrieu d’Andres, Jean de Fiennes, and Pierre and Jacques de Wissant.
Unbeknownst to the six burghers, at the time of their departure, their lives would eventually be spared. However, here Rodin made the decision to capture these men not when they were finally released, but in the moment that they gathered to leave the city to go to their deaths. Instead of depicting the elation of victory, the threat of death is very real. Furthermore, Rodin stretched his composition into a circle causing no one man to be the focal point which allows the sculpture to be viewed in-the-round from multiple perspectives with no clear leader.
While these six men, at first glance, may look fragile, the heavy, rhythmic drapery that hangs from their shoulders falls to the ground like lead weights, anchoring them and creating a mass of strong, unyielding bodies.
In fact, the fabric appears to almost fused to the ground—conveying the conflict between the men’s desire to live and the need to save their city. Rodin included raised portions of the floor under the men’s feet which would have, ultimately, made some of the men appear higher than others, yet they are all sculpted to be around the same height, that of an adult male. The burghers were not meant to be viewed in the form of a hierarchal pyramid with Eustache de Saint-Pierre at the top, which would have been typical in a multi-figure statue, but as a group equal in status. By bringing these men down to ‘street level,’ Rodin allowed the viewer to easily look up into the men’s faces mere inches from his/her own; enhancing the personal connection between the viewer and the six men.
Because the patrons wanted a heroic quality, with a raised pedestal that would place the figures in a God-like status high above the viewers, Rodin presented the city of Calais with The Burghers of Calais complete with a pedestal. However, the raised pedestal did not allow an audience to view the work of art as Rodin had intended. Therefore, he created a second version, one lacking a pedestal, to be placed at the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron in Paris. Rodin’s goal was to bring the audience into his sculpture of The Burghers of Calais, and he accomplished this by not only positioning each figure in a different stance with the men’s heads facing separate directions, but he lowered them down to street level so a viewer could easily walk around the sculpture and see each man and each facial expression and feel as if they were a part of the group, personally experiencing the tragic event.
Throughout his career, Rodin took risks and created his works of art in his own, albeit unconventional, way. As a result, Rodin set a standard for artists who came after him and his Burghers of Calais became one of his most well-known and studied works.
Copyright: Elisabeth Rowney, “Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/rodin-the-burghers-of-calais/.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau artists and designers created a completely new style of decoration, rejecting the widespread nineteenth-century practice of copying historical, and especially Classical and Medieval, forms. While each designer invented their own decorative motifs, organic, often plant-based, forms and the whiplash line became hallmarks of Art Nouveau design, appearing in multiple media and contexts. Victor Horta’s Tassel House in Brussels is one of the earliest examples of the Art Nouveau style. Horta designed the building’s architecture and every detail of the interior decoration and furnishings, making the house into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total art work in multiple media. The repeated use of organically curved, undulating lines — often called whiplash lines — unifies the design, repeating in the floor tiles, wall painting, ironwork, and even in the structure of the spiraling staircase and surging entryways.
French Art Nouveau was linked to government-supported efforts to expand the decorative arts and associated craft industries. Private residences and luxury objects were the focus for many Art Nouveau designers, including Emile Gallé, who made both decorative glass and furniture. Despite the close association of Art Nouveau with luxury items, the style is also apparent in urban design, public buildings, and art for the masses. Horta’s Maison du Peuple was the center for the socialist Belgian Workers’ Party, and among the most famous examples of Art Nouveau style are Hector Guimard’s entrances to the Paris Metro, the city’s new public transportation system.
Art Nouveau designs were also widely visible in the advertising posters that decorated Paris. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Jules Chéret depicted famous fin-de-siècle performers such as Jane Avril, Sarah Bernhardt, and Loïe Fuller. Their posters stylized the female body and used sinuous whiplash lines, decorative plant forms, and flattened abstract shapes to create vivid decorative images.
Art Nouveau was fashionable for only a brief period around the year 1900, but the movement was part of a long-term modern trend that rejected historicism and Academicism and embraced new materials and original forms. In the modern period artists and designers increasingly recognized that the health and well-being of society and all its members were supported and enhanced by well-designed objects, buildings, and spaces. The unified designs of Art Nouveau presaged the innovations of the Bauhaus as well as architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
Video URL: https://youtu.be/BRUOACBkFRg?si=stDOymUGO3KX9VFd
Edvard Munch, The Scream
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1910, tempera on board, 66 x 83 cm (The Munch Museum, Oslo)
Second only to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream may be the most iconic human figure in the history of Western art. Its androgynous, skull-shaped head, elongated hands, wide eyes, flaring nostrils and ovoid mouth have been engrained in our collective cultural consciousness; the swirling blue landscape and especially the fiery orange and yellow sky have engendered numerous theories regarding the scene that is depicted. Like the Mona Lisa, The Scream has been the target of dramatic thefts and recoveries, and in 2012 a version created with pastel on cardboard sold to a private collector for nearly $120,000,000 making it the second highest price achieved at that time by a painting at auction.
Conceived as part of Munch’s semi-autobiographical cycle “The Frieze of Life,” The Scream’s composition exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (1893, National Gallery of Art, Oslo), two pastel examples (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo and 1895, private collection), and a final tempera painting (1910, National Gallery of Art, Oslo). Munch also created a lithographic version in 1895. The various renditions show the artist’s creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work’s subject matter fits with Munch’s interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread.
For all its notoriety, The Scream is in fact a surprisingly simple work, in which the artist utilized a minimum of forms to achieve maximum expressiveness. It consists of three main areas: the bridge, which extends at a steep angle from the middle distance at the left to fill the foreground; a landscape of shoreline, lake or fjord, and hills; and the sky, which is activated with curving lines in tones of orange, yellow, red, and blue-green. Foreground and background blend into one another, and the lyrical lines of the hills ripple through the sky as well. The human figures are starkly separated from this landscape by the bridge. Its strict linearity provides a contrast with the shapes of the landscape and the sky. The two faceless upright figures in the background belong to the geometric precision of the bridge, while the lines of the foreground figure’s body, hands, and head take up the same curving shapes that dominate the background landscape.
Fauvism
Fauvism developed in France to become one of the first new artistic styles of the 20th century. In contrast to the dark, vaguely disturbing nature of much fin-de-siècle, or turn-of-the-century, Symbolist art, the Fauves produced bright cheery landscapes and figure paintings, characterized by pure vivid color and bold distinctive brushwork. The best known Fauve artists include Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck who pioneered its distinctive style. Their early works reveal the influence of Post-Impressionist artists, especially Neo-Impressionists like Paul Signac, whose interest in color’s optical effects had led to a divisionist method of juxtaposing pure hues on canvas. The Fauves, however, lacked such scientific intent. They emphasized the expressive potential of color, employing it arbitrarily, not based on an object’s natural appearance.
Like many modern artists, the Fauves also found inspiration in objects from Africa and other non-western cultures. Seen through a colonialist lens, the formal distinctions of African art reflected current notions of Primitivism—the belief that, lacking the corrupting influence of European civilization, non-western peoples were more in tune with the primal elements of nature. The Fauves’ interest in Primitivism reinforced their reputation as “wild beasts” who sought new possibilities for art through their exploration of direct expression, impactful visual forms and instinctual appeal.
Copyright: : Dr. Virginia B. Spivey, “Fauvism, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/a-beginners-guide-to-fauvism/.
Henri Matisse, Dance I
In 1909 Henri Matisse received an important commission. An extremely wealthy Russian industrialist named Sergei Shchukin asked Matisse for three large scale canvases to decorate the spiral staircase of his mansion, the Trubetskoy Palace, in Moscow. The large and well loved painting, Dance I at MoMA, is somewhat disingenuously titled. Although it is full scale and in oil, Matisse did not consider it more than a preparatory sketch. Yet a comparison between the initial and final versions is instructive. Matisse borrowed the motif from the back of the 1905–06 painting Bonheur de Vivre, although he has removed one dancer.
Henri Matisse, Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life), 1905–06, oil on canvas, 176.5 x 240.7 cm (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia)
In Dance I, the figures express the light pleasure and joy that was so much a part of the earlier Fauve painting. The figures are drawn loosely, with almost no interior definition. They have been likened to bean bag dolls because of their formless and unrestricted movements. The bodies certainly don’t seem to be restrained by way. But don’t let this childlike spontaneity fool you. Matisse works very hard to make his paintings seem effortless. Imagine for a moment, that instead of this childlike style, Matisse had decided to render this figures with the frozen density of Jacques Louis David. Would the sense of pure joy, the sense of play have been as well expressed? Matisse has done something that is actually very difficult. He has unlearned the lessons of representation so that he can create an image where form matches content.
The dancers inhabit a brilliant blue and green field. But what exactly does the green represent? Many people would quickly reply, “a grassy hilltop.” Okay, but what then is the blue intended to represent? If I were lecturing at MoMA, as I often do, many listeners would offer that “the blue is the sky that rises above the hill.” But others in my group might begin to look frustrated. One might then say, “that’s not what I see, the blue is really water moving back into the distance.”
What Matisse has done here, even in seemingly simple rendering, is use spatial ambiguity to explore one of the key issues in modern painting, the conflict between the illusion of depth and an acknowledgment of the flatness of the canvas. One final point here, did you notice the break in the circle? The hands of the two front dancers are parted. Matisse has been careful to allow this break only where it overlaps the knee so as not to interrupt the continuity of the color. Why do this? The part is often interpreted in two ways, as a source of tension that requires resolution or, as an invitation to us the viewer to join in, after all, the break is at the point closest to our position.
The final version of Dance has a very different emotional character. It has been described as forbidding, menacing, ritualistic, even demonic. Drum beats almost seem to be heard as the simple pleasure of the original is overwhelmed. What causes these dramatic changes in mood? Beyond the color shift, which is pretty obvious, the figures of the 1910 canvas are drawn with more interior line, line which often suggests tension and physical power. See for instance, the back left figure. Another more subtle change occurs where the two back figures touch the ground. In the 1909 canvas, the green reaches up to the feet of the two back most dancers, in the 1910 canvas, something else happens, the green seems to compress under the dancer’s weight. This subtle change creates either a sense of lightness or a sense of weight and contributes to the way we perceive each painting. While Matisse’s artistic style may exhibit a child-like quality, he was fully aware of his deliberate choices and intentions.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Henri Matisse, Dance I,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/matisse-dance-i/.
Expressionism
Though many artists of the early twentieth century can accurately be called Expressionists, two groups that developed in Germany, Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), are among the best known and help to define the style. Influenced in part by the spiritual interests of Romanticism and Symbolism, these artists moved further from the idealized figures and smooth surface of 19th century academic painting that can be seen in paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, for example. Instead of depicting the visible exterior of their subjects, they sought to express profound emotional experience through their art. German Expressionists, like other European artists of the time, found inspiration in so-called “primitive” sources that included African art, as well as European medieval and folk art and others untrained in Western artistic traditions. For the Expressionists, these sources offered alternatives to established conventions of European art and suggested a more authentic creative impulse.
In 1905, four young artists working in Dresden and Berlin, joined together, calling themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge). Led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the group wanted to create a radical art that could speak to modern audiences, which they characterized as young, vital, and urban. Drawn from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, the name “Die Brücke” describes their desire to serve as a bridge from the present to the future. While each artist had his own personal style, Die Brücke art is characterized by bright, often arbitrary colors and a “primitive” aesthetic, inspired by both African and European medieval art. Their work often addressed modern urban themes of alienation and anxiety, and sexually charged themes in their depictions of the female nude.
Based in the German city of Munich, the group known as Der Blaue Reiter lasted only from their first exhibition at the Galerie Thannhausen in 1911 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Created as an alternative to Kandinsky’s previous group, the more conservative Neuen Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists Association of Munich or NKVM), Die Blaue Reiter took its name from the motif of a horse and rider, often used by founding member Vasily Kandinsky.
This motif appeared on the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac (left), published in May 1912, and reflects Kandinsky’s interest in medieval traditions and the folk art of his Russian homeland. In contrast to Die Brücke, whose subjects were physical and direct, Kandinsky and other Die Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual in their art, which often included symbolism and allusions to ethereal concerns. They thought these ideas could be communicated directly through formal elements of color and line, that, like music, could evoke an emotional response in the viewer. Conceived by Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the almanac included essays by themselves and other German and Russian artists, musical compositions by Expressionist composers, such as Arnold Schönberg, and Kandinsky’s experimental theater piece, “Der gelbe Klang” (The Yellow Sound). This range of content shows Der Blaue Reiter’s efforts to provide a philosophical approach not just for the visual arts, but for culture more broadly. These ideas would become more fully developed at the Bauhaus where Kandinsky taught after the war (Marc died during the Battle of Verdun in 1916).
While the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups had relatively defined memberships, Expressionist artists also worked independently. In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele stand out for paintings that show intense, often violent feeling and for their efforts to represent deeper psychological meaning.
In the aftermath of the First World War, many artists in Germany felt that the forceful emotional style of Expressionism that had been so progressive before the war but had become less appropriate. Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) arose as a direct response to pre-war stylistic excess.
Copyright: Shawn Roggenkamp, “Expressionism, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, October 2, 2016, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/expressionism-intro/.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier is a masterpiece of psychological drama. The painting shows Kirchner dressed in a uniform, but instead of standing on a battlefield (or another military context), he is standing in his studio with an amputated, bloody arm and a nude model behind him. It is in this contrast between the artist’s clothing and studio space that we can read a complicated coming of age for an idealistic young artist.
Kirchner volunteered to serve as a driver in the military in order to avoid being drafted into a more dangerous role. However, he was soon declared unfit for service due to issues with his general health, and was sent away to recover. Self-Portrait as a Soldier was painted during that recovery. These circumstances distinguish the 1915 canvas from other avant-garde projects of the period such as Otto Dix’s 1924 print series The War, in which the artist depicted the horrors he had witnessed first hand. Kirchner never fought, and this painting is instead an exploration of the artist’s personal fears.
The severed hand in Self-Portrait as a Soldier is not a literal injury, but a metaphor. This differentiates it in important ways from other depictions of wartime amputees, such as Dix’s many representations of wounded veterans designed to shame politicians with a grotesque view of the soldiers who were abandoned when they were no longer considered “useful” to the nation. Kirchner’s is a metaphoric, self-amputation—a potential injury, not to the body—but to his identity as an artist.
Self-Portrait as a Soldier can perhaps be best understood by comparing it with an earlier painting by the artist with similar subject-matter, his Self-Portrait with Model (1907/26). Here, a rounder, healthier-looking Kirchner stands confidently in his studio in a jaunty striped robe. He holds a brush and palette and seems to be wearing less clothing than the model seated behind him, clearly suggesting a sexual relationship. Even the warm colors give the work a sensuous atmosphere. This is the artist at the height of youthful confidence. Compare that with the sallow, angular artist we see in the Self-Portrait as a Soldier. The later painting features darker, colder colors, and the glassy-eyed model looks more like a carved statue than an actual person. Even the skinny, limp cigarette seems to stand in opposition to the robust pipe that the artist smokes in the earlier portrait. Kirchner the soldier stands impotently in his studio, surrounded with everything he would need to make art, were he able to do so.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait with Model, 1907/26, oil on canvas, 150.5 x 100 cm (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg)
During the war, Kirchner suffered from alcoholism and drug abuse and for a time his hands and feet were partially paralyzed. In a sense his fears about the war were self-fulfilling. Kirchner recovered and his work was exhibited internationally to much acclaim during the interwar period.
Adolf Hitler persecuted artists who painted in a style that he considered outside of the Aryan ideal soon after he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition of 1937 was a grand spectacle that the Nazis organized to mock the modernist art they hated. This was a humiliating time for Kirchner. At least thirty-two of his works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art exhibition. In addition, more than 600 of his works were removed from public collections. He committed suicide in 1938.
Copyright: Shawn Roggenkamp, “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/kirchner-self-portrait-as-a-soldier/.
Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally
Video URL: https://youtu.be/KI24PVRdSRY?si=aXDCJ4_YNrN3SzRC
Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/Sa3FyvaKYVw?si=AnFLcC2w_bDeisRd
Cubism
Cubism is a terrible name. Except for a very brief moment, the style has nothing to do with cubes. Instead, it is an extension of the formal ideas developed by Cézanne and broader perceptual ideas that became increasingly important in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were the ideas that inspired Matisse as early as 1904 and Picasso perhaps a year or two later. We certainly saw such issues asserted in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But Picasso’s great 1907 canvas is not yet Cubism. It is more accurate to say that it is the foundation upon which Cubism is constructed. If we want to really see the origin of the style, we need to look beyond Picasso to his new friend Georges Braque.
The young French Fauvist, Georges Braque that had been struck by both the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 and his first sight of Picasso’s radical new canvas, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Like so many people that saw it, Braque is reported to have hated it—Matisse, for example, predicted that Picasso would be found hanged behind the work, so great was his mistake. Nevertheless, Braque stated that it haunted him through the winter of 1908. Like every good Parisian, Braque fled Paris in the summer and decided to return to the part of Provence in which Cézanne had lived and worked. Braque spent the summer of 1908 shedding the colors of Fauvism and exploring the structural issues that had consummed Cézanne and now Picasso. Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine the illusion of depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a vertical curtain that hangs before us. In canvases such as Houses at L’Estaque (1908), Braque simplifies the form of the houses (here are the so called cubes), but he nullifies the obvious recessionary overlapping with the trees that force forward even the most distant building.
When Braque returned to Paris in late August, he found Picasso an eager audience. Almost immediately, Picasso began to exploit Braque’s investigations. But far from being the end of their working relationship, this exchange becomes the first in a series of collaborations that lasts six years and creates an intimate creative bound between these two artists that is unique in the history of art.
Between the years 1908 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Braque and Picasso work together so closely that even experts can have difficulty telling the work of one artist from the other. For months on end they would visit each others studio on an almost daily basis sharing ideas and challenging each other as they went. Still, a pattern did emerge and it tended to be to Picasso’s benefit. When a radical new idea was introduced, more than likely, it was Braque that recognized its value. But it was inevitably Picasso who realized its potential and was able to fully exploit it.
By 1910, Cubism had matured into a complex system that is seemingly so esoteric that it appears to have rejected all esthetic concerns. The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks somewhat put upon even while they may acknowledge the importance of such work. I suspect that the difficulty, is, well…, the difficulty of the work. Cubism is an analysis of vision and of its representation and it is challenging. As a society we seem to believe that all art ought to be easily understandable or at least beautiful.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Inventing Cubism,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/inventing-cubism/.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it?
In 1936, Picasso (who was Spanish) was asked by the newly elected Spanish Republican government to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The official theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Yet Picasso painted an overtly political painting, a subject in which he had shown little interest up to that time. What had happened to inspire it?
In 1936, a civil war began in Spain between the democratic Republican government and fascist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, attempting to overthrow them. Picasso’s painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance. For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed.
On May 1, 1937, news of the atrocity reached Paris. Eyewitness reports filled the front pages of local and international newspapers. Picasso, sympathetic to the Republican government of his homeland, was horrified by the reports of devastation and death. Guernica is his visual response, his memorial to the brutal massacre. After hundreds of sketches, the painting was done in less than a month and then delivered to the Fair’s Spanish Pavilion, where it became the central attraction. Accompanying it were documentary films, newsreels and graphic photographs of fascist brutalities in the civil war. Rather than the typical celebration of technology people expected to see at a world’s fair, the entire Spanish Pavilion shocked the world into confronting the suffering of the Spanish people.
Later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso’s studio. “Did you do that?” he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”
This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.
Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. A documentary quality is further emphasized by the textured pattern in the center of the painting that creates the illusion of newsprint. The sharp alternation of black and white contrasts across the painting surface also creates dramatic intensity, a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement.
Pablo Picasso, (detail) Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía)
On first glance, Guernica’s composition appears confusing and chaotic; the viewer is thrown into the midst of intensely violent action. Everything seems to be in flux. The space is compressed and ambiguous with the shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints characteristic of Picasso’s earlier Cubist style. Images overlap and intersect, obscuring forms and making it hard to distinguish their boundaries. Bodies are distorted and semi-abstracted, the forms discontinuous and fragmentary. Everything seems jumbled together, while sharp angular lines seem to pierce and splinter the dismembered bodies. However, there is in fact an overriding visual order. Picasso balances the composition by organizing the figures into three vertical groupings moving left to right, while the center figures are stabilized within a large triangle of light.
The horse and bull are images Picasso used his entire career, part of the life and death ritual of the Spanish bullfights he first saw as a child. Some scholars interpret the horse and bull as representing the deadly battle between the Republican fighters (horse) and Franco’s fascist army (bull). Picasso said only that the bull represented brutality and darkness, adding “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words. The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”
In the end, the painting does not appear to have one exclusive meaning. Perhaps it is that very ambiguity, the lack of historical specificity, or the fact that brutal wars continue to be fought, that keeps Guernica as timeless and universally relatable today as it was in 1937.
Copyright: Lynn Robinson, “Pablo Picasso, Guernica,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/picasso-guernica/.
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso: Two Cubist Musicians
The Portuguese and Ma Jolie are well-known examples of late Analytic Cubism , sometimes called High Analytic Cubism or Hermetic Cubism. The latter name refers directly to the mysterious and difficult qualities of these paintings’ abstraction. The two paintings are very similar in overall appearance. At the time, Braque and Picasso were using the same pictorial language and had stopped signing the front of their paintings, sometimes making it difficult to distinguish authorship of individual works.
Cubist portraits and figure paintings typically follow the traditional format of placing the figure in the center of the canvas. In The Portuguese , darker shadowed planes suggest the upper body in the center. There are also suggestions of cylindrical forms representing the upper arms on the sides of this area, and half circles above them indicate shoulders. On top of the dark torso area rises a long lighter triangle outlining a collection of smaller forms surrounding another dark cylinder. This is the area of the man’s neck and head.
Left: Georges Braque, The Portuguese , 1911–12, oil on canvas, 46 x 32 inches (Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland) Right: Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler , 1910, oil on canvas, 39 9/16 x 26 9 / 16 inches (Art Institute of Chicago)
Picasso’s Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler uses a similar yet more legible strategy of contrasting light and dark areas to suggest the head above the body. The face of Braque’s guitar player is more abstracted than Kahnweiler’s face, in which we can find the eyes, nose, and mouth / mustache fairly easily.
In Braque’s painting, curved lines may represent closed eyelids, the bottom of the nose, a mustache, or a chin, but no clear relationships between these marks and those next to them solidly anchor our translation of the schematic lines and angles into a legible face . We cannot identify even the basic features – eyes, nose and mouth – with certainty.
While the guitarist’s face and head in Braque’s painting are a welter of black lines and shifting light and shadowed planes, there are some legible signs within the painting. The one that is most helpful in terms of orienting the viewer is the black outline of the guitar’s sound hole crossed by black horizontal lines indicating the instrument’s strings in the center of the lower portion of the painting. A bright rectangle projects diagonally to the right from the sound hole to indicate the guitar’s fret board.
Once we recognize the location of the guitar we can begin to look for the signs of the figure holding it. This approach to reading Cubist works by looking for identifiable signs and establishing others based on their relationship to them is key to understanding Cubist paintings, particularly the later ones.
They are structured like a language in which basic units (comparable to words) are placed in relation to each other (as words are in a sentence), making it possible to represent and communicate an infinite number of ideas. You could also think of Cubism as an attempt to create a new alphabet or sign language for representation.
One of the most striking aspects of The Portuguese is the inclusion of letters, numbers, and an ampersand in the painting’s shadowy, abstract planes. They are in standardized stencil format and suggest partially visible posters or painted signs, perhaps on the walls or windows of an interior space. They are also flat forms floating in ambiguous relation to the complex spatial planes depicted in the painting; neither clearly foreground nor background, they remind the viewer that the painting is literally a flat surface and even its confusing shallow planar space is an illusion.
The letters, numbers, and ampersand also repeat our experience of trying to understand the painting by the limited number of identifiable visual signs. We recognize them as individual signifying units, but they don’t make up complete words; the information they provide is only partial, and we have to fill in the blanks.
The Portuguese offers an array of clues in the form of letters, symbols, abbreviated representations, suggestive forms, and signs. It is a mystery with many possible readings and no single correct solution. By the time The Portuguese was painted neither Braque nor Picasso worked directly from life. Despite Braque’s letter informing Kahnweiler that the painting’s subject was a Portuguese guitar player he saw on board a ship in Marseilles, it is unlikely that a specific real world scene is the basis for every detail in the painting.
Picasso’s Ma Jolie is even more abstract than Braque’s The Portuguese . Other than a greater concentration of shaded planes in the center of the painting there is little suggestion of a distinction between figure and background, or head and body. Picasso does provide a few visual hints of the subject, signs that he used, often more legibly, in contemporary works.
Curved black lines in the lower corners are often interpreted as indicating the arms of a chair, and the group of short parallel lines ending in circles on the lower right may be tassels or fringe on the chair. Six vertical lines in the center of the painting suggest the strings of a guitar or zither. The words “Ma Jolie” (“my pretty one” in French) accompanied by a musical staff and treble clef painted at the bottom of the canvas refer to a popular song of the day, as well as to Picasso’s nickname for his current girlfriend.
The reference to a popular song adds to the multiple ways music is the subject of Analytic Cubist paintings. In part, musical references are practical; musical instruments are more complex and interesting forms than the glassware and bottles that were also common Cubist subjects. Musical instruments are easy to identify by parts and lend themselves to the formal transformations foundational to Cubist innovations. Braque was an amateur musician, and both artists had various instruments in their studios. Music was also an important touchstone for Cubism more generally. As a non-representational art form with its own internal structures and systems of tones and rhythm, music is an abstract language that is suggestive rather than concretely referential. The paintings of late Analytic Cubism with their mysterious objects and figures in indeterminate space are like music; they are visual orchestrations of painted forms in which shifting patterns suggest far more than they clearly depict. For both Picasso and Braque these paintings were as close as they were willing to approach complete abstraction.
Copyright: Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, “Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso: Two Cubist Musicians,” in Smarthistory, March 23, 2020, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/georges-braque-pablo-picasso-two-cubist-musicians/.
Dada
When you look at Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a factory-produced urinal he submitted as a sculpture to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, you might wonder just why this work of art has such a prominent place in art history books.
You would not be alone in asking this question. In fact, from the moment Duchamp purchased the urinal, flipped it on its side, signed it with a pseudonym (the false name of R. Mutt), and attempted to display it as art, the piece has generated controversy. This was the artist’s intention all along—to puzzle, amuse, and provoke his viewers.
Fountain was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, one of the first venues for experimental art in the United States. It is a new form of art Duchamp called the “readymade”— a mass-produced or found object that the artist transformed into art by the operation of selection and naming. The readymades challenged the very idea of artistic production, and what constitutes art in a gallery or museum. Duchamp provoked his viewers—testing the the exhibition organizers’ liberal claim to accept all works with “no judge, no prize” without the conservative bias that made it difficult to exhibit modern art in most museums and galleries. Duchamp’s Fountain did more than test the validity of this claim: it prompted questions about what we mean by art altogether—and who gets to decide what art is.
Duchamp’s provocation characterized not only his art, but also the short-lived, enigmatic, and incredibly diverse transnational group of artists who constituted a movement known as Dada. These artists were so diverse that they could hardly be called a coherent group, and they themselves rejected the whole idea of an art movement. Instead, they proclaimed themselves an anti-movement in various journals, manifestos, poems, performances, and what would come to be known as artistic “gestures” such as Duchamp’s submission of Fountain.
Dada artists worked in a wide range of media, frequently using irreverent humor and wordplay to examine relationships between art and language and voice opposition to outdated and destructive social customs. Although it was a fleeting phenomenon, lasting only from about 1914-1918 (and coinciding with WWI), Dada succeeded in irrevocably changing the way we view art, opening it up to a variety of experimental media, themes, and practices that still inform art today. Duchamp’s idea of the readymade has been one of the most important legacies of Dada.
In a 1936 essay titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German philosopher and cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, proclaimed that the industrial age had changed everything about the way we view art. He believed that new technologies for mass production and media (such as photography) would invalidate the remnants of classical artistic traditions that were still being promoted by institutions such as art academies and museums. Although Duchamp coined the term “readymade” and was the first to show mass produced objects as art, he drew inspiration from Braque, Picasso, and the other Cubists then working in Paris, who had already begun incorporating everyday items from mass culture (such as newspaper and wallpaper) into their abstracted collages.
Berlin Dadaists embraced the tension and images of violence that characterized Germany during and after the war, using absurdity to draw attention to the physical, psychological, and social trauma it produced. Employing strategies ranging from a Cubo-Futurist rendering of form to mixed-media assemblage, they satirized the immorality and corruption of the social elite, including cultural institutions such as museums. Many of these works were featured alongside manifestoes and other textual works in Dada journals.
During the Weimar Republic, artists such as Hannah Höch produced collages using imagery from magazines and other mass media to provoke the viewer to critically evaluate and challenge cultural norms.
One of the most transformative Berlin Dada practices—one that continues to inform contemporary art today—was the invention of mixed media installations. This began in earnest with the First International Dada Fair in 1920, which featured an assortment of paintings, posters, photographs, readymades, and two- and three-dimensional mixed media art.
Many of the artists who identified with Dada went on to become Surrealists. Because of this, and the relatively brief duration of the Dada phenomenon, it took some time for subsequent artists and historians to appreciate its value. In retrospect, however, we can see the reverberations of Dada throughout the twentieth century, and it has been one of the main contributors to contemporary art practices since its revival as Neo-Dada in the 1960s.
Copyright: Dr. Stephanie Chadwick, “Introduction to Dada,” in Smarthistory, September 4, 2017, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/introduction-to-dada/.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
Video URL: https://youtu.be/f7gdqwtA3jM?si=cLZzVU7HLcpJ6IiJ
Surrealism
Historians typically introduce Surrealism as an offshoot of Dada. In the early 1920s, writers such as André Breton and Louis Aragon became involved with Parisian Dada. Although they shared the group’s interest in anarchy and revolution, they felt Dada lacked clear direction for political action. So in late 1922, this growing group of radicals left Dada, and began looking to the mind as a source of social liberation. Influenced by French psychology and the work of Sigmund Freud, they experimented with practices that allowed them to explore subconscious thought and identity and bypass restrictions placed on people by social convention. For example, societal norms mandate that suddenly screaming expletives at a group of strangers—unprovoked, is completely unacceptable.
Surrealist practices included “waking dream” seances and automatism. During waking dream seances, group members placed themselves into a trance state and recited visions and poetic passages with an immediacy that denied any fakery. (The Surrealists insisted theirs was a scientific pursuit, and not like similar techniques used by Spiritualists claiming to communicate with the dead.) The waking dream sessions allowed members to say and do things unburdened by societal expectations; however, this practice ended abruptly when one of the “dreamers” attempted to stab another group member with a kitchen knife. Automatic writing allowed highly trained poets to circumvent their own training, and create raw, fresh poetry. They used this technique to compose poems without forethought, and it resulted in beautiful and startling passages the writers would not have consciously conceived.
In the autumn of 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” the founding of a journal (La Révolution surréaliste), and the formation of a Bureau of Surrealist Research. The literary focus of the movement soon expanded when Max Ernst and other visual artists joined and began applying Surrealist ideas to their work. These artists drew on many stylistic sources including scientific journals, found objects, mass media, and non-western visual traditions. (Early Surrealist exhibitions tended to pair an artist’s work with non-Western art objects). They also found inspiration in automatism and other activities designed to circumvent conscious intention.
Another technique, the exquisite corpse, developed from a writing game the Surrealists created. First, a piece of paper is folded as many times as there are players. Each player takes one side of the folded sheet and, starting from the top, draws the head of a body, continuing the lines at the bottom of their fold to the other side of the fold, then handing that blank folded side to the next person to continue drawing the figure. Once everyone has drawn her or his “part” of the body, the last person unfolds the sheet to reveal a strange composite creature, made of unrelated forms that are now merged. A Surrealist Frankenstein’s monster, of sorts.
Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray, Untitled (Exquisite Corpse), 1926-27, colored pencil, pencil, and ink on paper, 35.9 x 22.9 cm (MoMA)
Today, we tend to think of Surrealism primarily as a visual arts movement, but the group’s activity stemmed from much larger aspirations. By teaching how to circumvent restrictions that society imposed, the Surrealists saw themselves as agents of social change. The desire for revolution was such a central tenet that through much of the late 1920s, the Surrealists attempted to ally their cause with the French Communist party, seeking to be the artistic and cultural arm. Unsurprisingly, the incompatibility of the two groups prevented any alliance, but the Surrealists’ effort speaks to their political goals.
In its purest form, Surrealism was a way of life. Members advocated becoming flâneurs–urban explorers who traversed cities without plan or intent, and they sought moments of objective chance—seemingly random encounters actually fraught with import and meaning. They disrupted cultural norms with shocking actions, such as verbally assaulting priests in the street. They sought in their lives what Breton dubbed surreality, where one’s internal reality merged with the external reality we all share. Such experiences, which could be represented by a painting, photograph, or sculpture, are the true core of Surrealism.
Copyright: Josh R. Rose, “Surrealism, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, September 8, 2016, accessed June 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/surrealism-intro/.
René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)
Video URL: https://youtu.be/w702yvnip_w?si=IisgNuBHoIzsQ9IT
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory
Video URL: https://youtu.be/6mp-fBJNQmU?si=oPD84fBN0rJByr2G
What is: Degenerate Art?
Video URL: https://youtu.be/-3DjtCQ_26s?si=jDQImywO_epuce7P
Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
Käthe Kollwitz, Memorial Sheet of Karl Liebknecht (Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht), 1919–20, woodcut heightened with white and black ink, 37.1x 51.9 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)
In the political turmoil after the First World War, many artists turned to making prints instead of paintings. The ability to produce multiple copies of the same image made printmaking an ideal medium for spreading political statements. German artist Käthe Kollwitz worked almost exclusively in this medium and became known for her prints that celebrated the plight of the working-class.
The artist rarely depicted real people, though she frequently used her talents in support of causes she believed in. This work, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht was created in 1920 in response to the assassination of Communist leader Karl Liebknecht during an uprising of 1919. This work is unique among her prints, and though it memorializes the man, it does so without advocating for his ideology.
From the end of the First World War in late 1918 to the founding of the Weimar Republic (the representative democracy that was the German government between the two World Wars) in August 1919, Germany went through a period of social and political upheaval. During this time, Germany was led by a coalition of left-wing forces with Marxist sympathies, the largest of which was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Other, more radical groups were grappling for control of Germany at the same time, including the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD).
The Socialists and Communists both wanted to eliminate Capitalism and establish communal control over the means of production, but while the Socialists believed that the best way to achieve that goal was to work step by step from within the Capitalist structure, the Communists called for an immediate and total social revolution that would put governmental power in the hands of the workers. In this spirit, the KPD staged an uprising in Berlin in January 1919. Military units called in by the SPD suppressed the uprising and captured two of the leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered while in custody on January 15, 1919. Their deaths struck a chord across the left-wing landscape and they were widely celebrated as martyrs to the Communist cause.
Kollwitz was not a Communist, and even acknowledged that the SPD (generally more cautious and pacifist than the KPD), would have been better leaders. But she had heard Liebknecht speak and admired his charisma, so when the family asked her to create a work to memorialize him she agreed.
The composition divides the sheet into three horizontal sections. The top section is densely packed with figures. Their faces are well modeled and have interesting depth in themselves, but the sense of space is very compressed – the heads push to the foreground and are packed into every available corner of space. It gives the impression of multitudes coming to pay their respects, without compromising the individuality of the subjects.
The middle strata contains comparatively fewer details, further emphasizing the crowding at the top of the printing plate. This section draws attention to the specific action of the bending mourner. His hand on Liebknecht’s chest connects this section to the the bottommost level of the composition, the body of the martyred revolutionary.
Woodblock printing is a technique in which a design is carved into a slab of wood which is then covered with ink and printed onto paper. Ink coats the original surface of the wood block, which prints as black, while the cut away areas stay the color of the paper. This is different from printmaking methods such as engraving in which the ink is caught in the recesses carved into the metal plate by the stylus and therefore the lines print black and the untouched areas of the plate come out white in the print.
The German Expressionist artists, in particular Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Brücke group, used woodcuts as early as 1904 to capture the rough, vital energy that they perceived in the work of so-called “primitive” societies without a fine art tradition.
Kollwitz’s career overlapped with the German Expressionists but she was not an Expressionist herself and was about a generation older than most of them. Her use of such a trendy technique was uncharacteristic, and in fact, she only worked in woodblocks for a few years after the First World War. Kollwitz created some of her most powerful and affecting work in this style, including the War print cycle of 1924. She embraced the raw effect of woodblock printing to create pieces works that have cast off the subtlety and finesse of her earlier work in etching and lithography. Kollwitz’ felt that her protest against the horrors of war was best communicated in the rough edges and stark black and white that woodblock prints afforded.
Copyright: Shawn Roggenkamp, “Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/kathe-kollwitz-in-memoriam-karl-liebknecht/.
Postwar Art
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II
Video URL: https://youtu.be/ps4wuBpAUCQ?si=FioEBV_aaS3V0o1_
Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure
Video URL: https://youtu.be/Mbvaz0EPK_g?si=NbDMtf2Mkk_fbuRv
Joseph Beuys, Celtic +∿∿∿∿ and Conceptual Performance
For Joseph Beuys, there should be no clear demarcation between art and life. Human life means life in a community, with other people. Therefore, artistic activities (should) have a direct social impact. Beuys does not have in mind any kind of “applied arts” in service of a society, nor does he speak simply of “making society better.” He sees rather a metaphysical significance of human creative capacities and, consequently, art. Each human being has a creative potential in Beuys’ eyes. This potential is to be realized in communion with others. So the particular activities of individuals do matter but gain full meaning only if they lead to building a new society based on solidarity, creativity and freedom. In such a communion, man can reach his/her real identity, not only as a social atom, but as a person. This is the reason that Beuys perceives society as the greatest work of art, a “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk).
This is what Beuys called the “social sculpture” (Soziale Plastik). This concept should not be understood in terms of aesthetics. “Social sculpture” does not mean that a society should adopt the aesthetic properties of, let’s say, sculpture, in order to become a total work of art. On the contrary, it is insistence on the very human capacity of freedom and creativity that should form the new society. In such a society, human beings will not just live “better” but will come to a broader exercising of their own humanity. In this sense, they will not only live a better life; they will also be able to be in a more fundamental sense. Here we see what the phrase “every man is an artist” (jeder Mensch ist ein Kuenstler) really means.
Beuys did not think that each human being should paint or produce particular things we call “art.” He rather sees creativity as a universal human capacity which enables man to be what he/she really is. Thus one’s existence becomes the same as artistic creation. The form of this creation is not of particular importance. This is the reason why Beuys can teach, give public lectures, or engage in political action and consider these activities “art.”
Another aspect of the idea of the “social sculpture” consists in Beuys’ critique of the modern society not only as an extremely rationalized but also as a highly individualized one. His understanding of the society as a “sculpture” is based on the concept of community in which people are tied by personal relations not by laws or any force.
In his work Celtic +∿∿∿∿ (1971), Beuys is performing an action which reminds us of a famous story from the Gospel. It is the story when Christ washed the feet of his disciples showing his humility and demonstrating the principle “let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.”
In this action, Beuys represents Christ himself, giving a lecture on modesty and service instead of dominance. The action also shows one of the principal Christian virtues—rejection of individuality and selfishness in order to make room for God in human souls. In this example, we can see the impact of Christianity on the formation of Beuys’ artistic concepts, not only as a symbol or illustration of Biblical stories but to which connect the artist’s work with his understanding of the Christian tradition. These relations touch on some of Beuys’s basic ideas on the world and art.
Beuys speaks of “the essence of Christ” (das Wesen des Christus) suggesting that every human being must be, potentially at least, “a kind of Christ.” Stressing creativity and freedom as fundamental values, Beuys sought a means to build a new society in which “every man is an artist.”
Copyright: Dr. Davor Džalto, “Joseph Beuys, Celtic +∿∿∿∿ and Conceptual Performance,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/joseph-beuys-feet-washing-and-conceptual-performance/.
Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present
“Sit silently with the artist for a duration of your choosing”—so the instructions read on a small plaque in the second-floor atrium at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Behind the plaque, a queue of visitors forms, eager to enter a large square space—demarcated only by tape on the floor—to sit down at a wooden table across from a dark-haired woman in a navy-blue dress that conceals every part of her body save her face and her hands.
The woman is the pioneering artist Marina Abramović, but its likely that few of the people in line have any sense of this woman’s indelible impact on contemporary art. As I wait, an anthology of her performances scrolling through my head. Watching her from afar, I look to see the courage and fearlessness in a woman capable of incising a five-pointed star on her own stomach, screaming until she loses consciousness, and living in a gallery for 12 days without food. Strangely, she doesn’t seem reckless at all, but peaceful and wise. I then remember she trained with Tibetan Buddhists and has said she’s able to transcend the limits of her own body and mind through meditation. She’ll need these skills now more than ever as she attempts her longest performance-to-date, sitting at this table for every hour of every day that her retrospective is open at MoMA. No food. No water. No breaks.
So, I wait for my moment with the artist, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A young girl is sitting across from Marina and the two seem engaged in a staring contest, though from that distance it’s impossible to tell if they’re actually making eye contact or simply staring ahead in a daze. Seventy-five minutes later she finally stands up and exits the square, declaring she lost all sense of time and thought it had only been a few minutes. Marina leans forward and closes her eyes, while the next sojourner steps forward and takes the empty seat. Marina sits up and another staring contest commences—this one lasting sixty-seven minutes. This process repeats—ten minutes, fifty-five minutes, twenty minutes, forty-five minutes, etc. Finally, the man in front of me takes the seat and I’m next. More than three hours from when I entered the succession I’ve seen only six people participate in the performance and more than thirty leave the line in frustration. The nameless, faceless strangers I queued with hours ago are now friends—an artist from Poughkeepsie, an art history undergrad from Chicago, a nurse from outside Philly—and we share our excitement as our turn approaches. Finally, after nearly four hours, my time has come.
I enter the square and approach the table, immediately noting the heat of the lights and the watchful eyes of the crowds gathered to gawk at the spectacle. I put my purse on the floor and take a seat. While Marina leans forward, I settle into the chair and imagine I’ll last about ten minutes before I become either bored or totally uncomfortable. She begins to sit up and I try to prepare myself for the moment she opens her eyes. I have many skills, but sitting still and being silent are not traits I’m known for, so I was afraid: afraid of the judgment implicit in staring, afraid of the silence, afraid I wouldn’t have the transformative experience that had captivated those before me, afraid, afraid, afraid. Her lids opened and our eyes locked, not in a stare but in a friendly gaze. For the first few minutes, I thought only about who this woman was—a renegade, a feminist, an inspiration—but quickly realized that those things were more about her persona than the person. I discarded my preconceived notions and expectations and, as soon as I stopped thinking of her as an artist-celebrity, saw the woman behind the legend. We sat absolutely still in deafening silence, exchanging energy, and just being with each other. I’ve heard it said that couples married for decades can sit in silence and understand one another perfectly, but I’d never imagine that sort of intimacy could be possible between two total strangers. It is.
I could have stayed in that moment for hours but thought of my fellow line-mates, now friends, and decided it would be selfish to bask in this experience any longer. But, could I leave? It felt as rude as leaving a lecture in the middle. How would I leave? Abruptly just wouldn’t do, so I said good-bye and thanked her. More than thirty minutes had passed, thirty minutes of epic silence I’ll never forget.
Copyright: Rebecca Taylor, “Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed June 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present/.