modernism in art: an introduction: salon des refuses

Salon des Refusés: Breaking with the Academy

Course aims: Taking account of early avant-garde

movements, this course aims to provide a critical introduction to the radical and innovative artistic movements that characterise Modernism. Starting with the Salon de Refusés (1863) and moving through Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and Dada (amongst others) the course provides a rich account of the historical and artistic context against which key artists and designers attempted to reshape the way we look at and live in the world.

Course structure Week 1: Salon des Refusés: Breaking with the Academy JC Week 2: Flirting with controversy: Courbet and taboo in 19th Century

Europe DJ Week 3: Introducing Subjectivity: From Impressionism to Cubism DJ Week 4: Picasso’s Exorcism: fear of ‘Primitives’ and ‘Prostitutes’ JC Week 5: “Standing on the World’s Summit”: Futurism’s becoming...JC Week 6: Revolution and Rebuilding: Constructivism, De Stijl and the

Bauhaus JC Week 7: DaDA & ?@$ SuRREAl:sm DJ Week 8: Reflections of a Modern World (An Introduction to some key

thinkers)DJ/JC Week 9: Abstract Expressionism and the Rise of Formalism DJ Week 10: In Jeopardy: Idealism, Authenticity, Universality and the

Avant-Garde DJ/JC Week 11: unseen assessment & credit essay workshop.

james.clegg@ed.ac.uk

Participation

Salon des Refusés: Breaking with the Academy

Give you a general understanding of the broader factors influencing the way European artists worked before and during the 19th Century.

Give you a knowledge of what the Salon des Refusés of 1863 signified and how it represented changes in art, society and culture at that time.

Encourage you to think critically about visual representation, connecting the art of the new painters to the political agendas of the time.

Provide a clear definition of Modernism, Modern Art and Modernity.

Help you to get the most out of the course Modernism in Art: An Introduction.

This lecture should:

Leonardo da Vinci (1483) Virgin of the Rocks

Why did Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks become part of one of the earliest legal suits in art history?

Penguin Classics, George Bull’s translation of Live of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.

(Vasari 1987 [1568], p. 360)

What does this legal suit tell us about the mistranslation of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the

Artists?

What’s peculiar about the content of this image?

What key developments had a big impact upon artists working in the 18th and 19th Centuries?

The Enlightenment“A universal dictionary is an opus which proposes to fix the meaning of the terms of a language, by defining those which can be defined, through a short, meticulous, clear, and precise enumeration or the qualities of ideas attached to them. The only good definitions are those that group the essential attributes of the thing designated by the word.”

(Diderot 1755)

French Revolution

Eugiene Delacroix (1831) Liberty Leading the People

Industrial Revolution

William Simpson (1851) Souvenir of the Great Exhibition, the Foreign Department viewed from Transept

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”.

Marx, K and Engels, F (2005 [1847]) The Communist Manifesto, London, Bookmarks Publications. P.10.

Consumerism

Above, Postcard of the Paris Exposition of 1900. Right, Bon Marche department store (1897).

What key developments had a big impact upon artists working in the 18th and 19th Centuries? Individuality State (liberty, human rights) Progress Truth Rational Thinking New Technologies

Academies “During the 1700s academies became

the principal centres of art instruction, so that to entertain the notion of becoming an artist was to prepare for entry into the academy ... [From] 1738 on, academies opened in virtually every large city in France ...” (Goldstein 1996, p. 49)

Academies

Charles le Brun (1663) , study of emotions

Charles Le Brun (1679-84) The King Governs Alone

Time Discovering Truth (1769)Hercules and Antaeus (1770)Venus Entreating Vulcan to Forge the Arms of

Achilles (1771)Timolean Ordering His Brother’s Death

(1771)

Salons

Gabriel- Jaques de Saint-Aubin The Salon of 1765

Ekphrasis

Hierarchy of the Arts History Painting Portraiture Genre Painting Landscape Still Life

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology.

Copying from the Canon

Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1513 – 15.

Nicholas Poussin (1638-40) The Arcadian Shepherds

Nicholas Poussin (1628-9) The Arcadian Shepherds

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1857) The Two Ways of Life

Politics in 19th late Century France

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1852) Napolean III

Salon des Refusés

Palais de l’industrie

Salon des Refusés

Édouard Manet (1862-3) Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe

Salon des RefusésDear Sir,I am one of the 1,700 artists accepted by the 1863 Salon.As such, I have been stuck in a corner where I do not see a single visitor in

a week.That, alas, is because my painting had nothing official about it, and

depicted not a trace of a battle, not a single public employee.By contrast, during that time, the public, who showed such disdain for my

picture, which had been accepted, poured into the exhibition of those who were rejected.

Could you please tell me whom I should approach in order to obtain my transfer from the hell of those admitted to the heaven of those excluded?

You would be doing me a service for which I should be eternally grateful to you.

One of those admitted

Impressionism?

Camille Pissarro (1973) White Frost

Impressionism?

Camille Pissarro (1973) White Frost

Critical support for the Independents

Frédéric Bazille (1870) The Artist’s Studio in the Rue de la Condamine

Readings of Impressionism“For the first time in three centuries, French society is giving birth to a school of

French painting that is in its own image, and no longer in the image of peoples, now extinct; a painting, which describes its own appearance and way of life, and no longer those of civilizations long vanished; which in its very facet bears the imprint of that society’s luminous grace and clear, lucid, penetrating mind”

(Castagnary 1867, in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (1998), p. 413)

“What I ask of the artist is not that he give me sweet visions or terrible nightmares, but that he give of himself, body and soul, that he clearly express the force and singularity of his mind, the harshness and strength of his character, that he take nature firmly in his grasp and set it down firmly in front of us just as he sees it [...] The works of tomorrow cannot be the same as those today, you cannot formulate any rules or devise any formulae; you have to give in willingly to your nature and avoid self deception. Are you afraid of speaking your own language, you who spend hours transcibing dead ones?”

(Zola 1866, in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, (1998), p. 552-3)

Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Nadar (1855) Charles Baudelaire

Readings of Impressionism

“... It was through Impressionist paintings that urban life based on leisure, consumption and spectacle first acquired visible identity, one conveyed through forms that imply the free expression of the artist’s personal vision. Moreover, Impressionism also provide us with a model for how artists act – independent of convention and true to self. If it still appears natural today, it is because its ideals continue to be so dominant that most people now take them completely for granted.”

Rubin, p.4

T J Clark (1984)The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the art of Manet and his Followers

Leonardo da Vinci (1483) Virgin of the Rocks

Why did Leonardo da Vinci’s [sic] Virgin of the Rocks become part of one of the earliest legal suits in art history?

[see Shiner p.35]

Penguin Classics, George Bull’s translation of Live of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.

(Vasari 1987 [1568], p. 360)

What does this legal suit tell us about the mistranslation of Lives of the Artists?

What’s peculiar about the content of this image?

Rapael Sanzio (1512-14) The Sistine Madonna. The Old Master’s Picture Gallery, Dresden

Terms Modernity Modern Modern Art Modernism Modernist

Modern Throughout the course the term Modern

will be used to designate things which correspond to the specific changes taking place from (roughly) the 18th Century onwards. The changes include a new sense of individuality, the rise of a sense of the state, a belief in progress, a desire to attain universal truths, belief in rational thinking and new technologies.

Modernity Modernity refers to the conditions

brought about by large economic and social changes of the industrial revolution and other key modern developments and tends to evoke the accelerated pace of modern life. Baudelaire defined it as, “the ephemeral, the fugitive [and] the contingent”.

(Baudelaire 1863, in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, (1998), p. 497)

Modern Art Modern Art can be identified by it’s

stylistic difference from the traditional art of the academies and refers to a very broad set of movements and artworks reflecting a diversity of responses to the Modern world.

Paul Cézanne (1883) Bather with Outstretched Arms

Modernism and Modernist Modernism refers to more than just stylistic

or aesthetic characteristics and relates to practices that have a (political) commitment to critically respond to modernity. To say that an artist or designer is a modernist, therefore, suggests that they are actively involved in trying to challenge and reflect upon the limitations of Modern Art and society. For this reason many Modernist movements tend to revolve around manifestos.

El Lissitzky (1919) Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

Readings Self-Consciousness and Scepticism, from Harrison, C. (1997) Modernism.

Tate Gallery, London. The Essential Feminine or how essential is femininity?, from Parker, R. and

Pollock, G. (1981) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. Patheon Books, New York.

References Brettell, R. (1999) Modern Art 1851-1929. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Clark, T. J. (1984) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton

University Press, Princeton. Doyle, W. (2001) French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Frascina, F., Blake, N., Fer, B., Garb, T. and Harrison, C (1993) Modernity and Modernism: French Painting

in the Nineteenth Century. Yale University Press in association with The Open University, London. Goldstein, C. (1996) Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers. Cambridge University

Press, USA. Harrison, C., Wood, P. and Gaiger, J. (eds.) (2000) Art in Theory 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing

Ideas. Blackwell, Oxford. Harrison, C., Wood, P. and Gaiger, J. (eds.) (1998) Art in Theory 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing

Ideas. Blackwell, Oxford. Harrison, C. (1997) Modernism. Tate Gallery, London. Johnson, G. A. (2005) Renaissance Art: A Very Short Inroduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Nord, P. (2000) Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge,

New York. O’Hara, K. (2010) The Enlightenment. Oneworld Publications, England. Parker, R. and Pollock, G. (1981) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. Patheon Books, New York. Perry, G. and Cunningham, C. (1999) Academies, Museums and Canons of Art. The Open University, Italy. Rubin, J. (1999) Impressionism. Phaidon, London. Shiner, L. (2001) The Invention of Art. The University of Chicago Press, London. Thomson, B. (2000) Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception. Thames & Hudson, London. Vasari, Giorgio (2008 [1991] The Live of the Artists. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wood, P (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. Yale University Press in association with The

Open University, London.