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4/5/2011 1 Chapter 40: From Realism to Symbolism The Fin de Siècle The Paris Exposition The Paris Exposition of 1889 celebrated the future in its exhibits of new inventions. The most obvious exhibit was Gustav Eiffel’s Tower, the structure at the entrance to the fair. Fairgoers marveled at its height and use of electricity to illuminate the city and permit ascent Many Parisians detested it, particularly the artistic community, who submitted a Protestation des artistes against it. They found it ugly and overpowering.

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Chapter 40: From Realism to Symbolism

The Fin de Siècle

The Paris Exposition

• The Paris Exposition of 1889 celebrated the future in its exhibits of new inventions.

• The most obvious exhibit was Gustav Eiffel’s Tower, the structure at the entrance to the fair.

• Fairgoers marveled at its height and use of electricity to illuminate the city and permit ascent

• Many Parisians detested it, particularly the artistic community, who submitted a Protestation des artistes against it. They found it ugly and overpowering.

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Victor Horta, Tassel House, Brussels, 1892-1893

• Art Nouveau represented a transitional style in a wide range of media. It was an ornamental style composed of curvilinear, organic forms. It was a European-wide response against industrialization.

• Decorative effects resembling the tendrils and shoots of plants characterize the style.

Henrik Ibsen • Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) evokes the fin de siècle spirit in his plays.

• Ibsen’s plays examine hidden realities of life in European society.

• A Doll’s House depicts the oppression of women in traditional Victorian marriage.

• Ghosts deals with venereal disease, illegitimacy, and incest.

• Hedda Gabler explores neurosis and insanity

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Auguste Rodin

• Sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) made use of the artistic modes of realism and impressionism, insisting on direct observation of his subjects and the play of light on the surface of his work.

• His preparation for sculpting involved multiple sketches of models in motion, but also research about his subjects.

Auguste Rodin The Kiss, 1886-1898 marble, 54 ½” by 43 ½” by 46 ½”

• This sculpture was considered too scandalous for public display at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

• It portrays not merely two people embracing, but the ecstatic sensations of the moment as well

• That the woman was an active participant, willingly expressing her own sexuality, was scandalous.

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Rodin, The Thinker, 1902

Bronze (some versions are marble)

Rodin, The Gates of Hell

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Post-Impressionism • Post-Impressionist painters include:

• Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

• Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

• Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

• Georges Seurat (1859-1891)

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

• The name “Post-Impressionism” is a chronological term. It does not based on stylistic continuity

• Two major types of Post-Impressionist Painting:

• Painters who focused on form include Seurat and Cezanne

• Painters who focused on personal expression include van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin.

• The two types are not mutually exclusive, however.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, Oil

on canvas, 5’ 11 ¾” by 10’ 1 ¼”

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Pointillism – your book misspells it as Pointellism

• Pointillism is also known as Divisionism because it “divides” or “separates” the colors into tiny dots.

• Seurat’s made use of tiny dots of color (pointilles) in a carefully controlled, scientific application

• Seurat tried to systematically incorporate new optical theories, and new scientific analyses of color and light.

• Pointillism is based these optical color theories: • Color is not native to the object, but is a perception of the eye

• No one color is pure, all colors contain many colors.

• Placing two different colors side by side visually intensifies their hues and causes a vibration in the eye.

• Pointillism also assumes that the eye causes contiguous dots to merge. For example, a blue dot placed next to a yellow dot will be perceived by the human eye as green. This means that, from a distance, the eye optically mixes the colors rather than the artist mixing the paint.

Georges Seurat

• Seurat thought that what Impressionism captured was too fleeting. He wanted to give the subjects of his paintings more permanence.

• Seurat’s work is also called “Neo-Impressionism” because he added science and control to Impressionistic style.

• In his painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, the scientific, controlled placement of the dots is only one of the “controlled” features of the composition. Everything is carefully placed. Curves and verticals are echoed and repeated to compliment one another. Seurat was very concerned with compositional structure.

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Paul Cézanne • Cézanne also explored color, but his interest was in how color

could structure space.

• Cezanne was interested in the compositional structure of his works. He did not find the Impressionistic style stable, permanent or durable enough.

• He used color to create form, not just surface or light effects, as the Impressionists had.

• He was obsessed with depicting 3-D objects on a 2-D surface.

• He believed that one should use geometric forms as a base. He looked for geometric forms in nature.

• The tension between spatial perspective and surface flatness would become a focus of 20th-century modern painting. Cézanne influenced many 20th century artists because of his radical experimentation.

• Like the Impressionists, Cezanne painted out-of-doors, and like Monet, he painted the same subject repeatedly, particularly Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence

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Paul Cézanne cont.

• He willingly comprised – and experimented with – proportions for compositional purposes.

• In his portraits, he was not interested in the psychology of a person, but in the structure and the plains of color.

• For Cézanne, there was no such thing as one perspective. Sometimes, he painted from many perspectives instead of one, frozen perspective. There is a push/pull quality to his works that enlivens them.

Paul Cézanne, Self Portrait, 1875

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Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904 Oil on canvas, 27 ½” by 35 ¼”

Cézanne’s Mont Sainte - Victoire

Mont Sainte-Victoire dominated the landscape of Cézanne’s home region. He painted several paintings of it.

Like the Impressionists, he pained Plein Air. Unlike the Impressionists, he used color to structure the forms, not to study the effects of light.

He also experimented with “atmospheric perspective.” Not all areas in the distance are blurred and not all colors in the distance are muted. This brings the mountain to the viewer rather than leaving it in the background. This creates the “push/pull” effect common in his works.

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Cézanne, Still life with Apples, 1875-1877, oil on canvas

Paul Cézanne. Still Life with

Plaster Cast, 1894, oil on canvas 26 1/2" 32 1/2"

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

• He was greatly influenced by Degas • Like Degas, he was also influenced by Japanese prints.

He used strong silhouettes, which offset the textured areas of his works.

• Toulouse-Lautrec also produced many lithographs for the dance halls, night clubs and night cafes he frequented.

• He favored partially oblique, cropped views, which suggests the influence of photography.

• His loose sketchy brushstrokes, which are confined within clearly defined color areas, help to give his works a sense of dynamic motion.

• As a child he broke both of his legs, and the breaks did not heal properly. Modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, which resembles osteoporosis. His legs ceased to grow, so he developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs. He stood 4’ 6” tall.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin

Rouge, 1892–1895,

4’ 3/8" 4’ 7 1/4"

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, pastel

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Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 29” x 36 1/4”

Vincent van Gogh • Van Gogh used impasto, heavy, large, thick strokes of

color in most of his works, a technique that was not admired in his lifetime.

• When he lived in Holland, he painted many paintings like Millet’s, of working class and poor.

• When he moved to Paris, he was influenced by Neo-Impressionism, but he did not use color theory scientifically. He used it to express.

• Color in van Gogh’s work is symbolic and full of feeling. Color is used as an emotional expression, and to invoke emotion in the viewer.

• Like Degas and other Impressionist painters, van Gogh was heavily influenced by Japanese art. • “Bird’s eye perspective,” not the traditional linear view of Wester

art.

• Less atmospheric perspective

• Lots of flat, broad spaces of color.

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van Gogh, cont. • van Gogh did not start painting until he was 27 years old.

He was first a missionary to the poor.

• he produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, between age 27 and when he died at age 37.

• van Gogh had fits of madness in which he lost consciousness

• His older brother died before he was born, and his mother never recovered from her grief. When her second son was born, she named him after the first who had died, Vincent. The first son was buried near their home, and Vincent grew up in his dead brother’s shadow.

• He was very close to his younger brother, Theo, who remained an emotional and sometimes financial support to Vincent throughout his life.

Vincent van Gogh, Night Café, 1888 Oil on canvas, 28 ½” by 36 ¼”

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Night Café by Vincent van Gogh

• Van Gogh wrote that he wanted to paint this café as a place where one could ruin themselves or go mad.

• Van Gogh distorted the perspective for expressive purposes

• He used sickly colors and placed them next to each other – the sickly green and the bright red are complimentary colors, and when placed next to one another, it visually enhances their effectiveness.

• He also painted the painting as if seeing the room through drunk or drug-affected eyes.

• Sense of alienation, as the figures do not interact. Some slump over the tables, asleep or passed out. The destitute and homeless often slept at tables in these all-night cafes.

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Vincent van Gogh, Portrait

of Patience Escalier,

August 1889

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, 1887, oil on

canvas

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• Gauguin as initially a stockbroker, but he quit that job to paint.

• He worked in an artist colony in Brittany, a non-industrialized area of France.

• The desire for solitude that permitted introspection took Paul Gauguin first to Brittany, then to the island of Tahiti.

• He believed that a primitive lifestyle would permit entry into the primal powers of the mind.

• He was a friend of van Gogh, though the friendship was tumultuous.

• Like van Gogh, he wanted to express emotions in his painting, but he was also interested in symbolism, psychology and imagination.

Paul Gauguin

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Paul Gauguin,The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob

Wrestling with the Angel), 1888, oil on canvas

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Paul Gauguin, Mahana no atua (Day of the God), 1894

Oil on canvas, 26 5/8” by 35 5/8”

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Friedrich Nietzsche

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of empowering the individual.

• He inspired Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt, among others, with a call for a return in the arts of Dionysian ideals, which would excite the senses.

Edvard Munch,

The Scream, 1893, oil,

pastel and castein on

cardboard, 2’ 9 3/4” x 2’ 5”

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Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, oil, pastel and castein on cardboard

• His paintings conform to the Symbolist theory, in that they depict states of mind, emotions or ideas rather than observable physical reality.

• His work is sometimes labeled Symbolism and sometimes it is used to mark the beginning of Expressionism.

• Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, with their sense of isolation felt by genius in bourgeois culture.

• The anxiety of modern life is reflected inThe Scream, as is the scream of the natural landscape that dwindles as industry spreads.

• Of this painting he said: “I felt as though a scream went through nature. I thought I heard a scream. I painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.”

Gustav Klimt

• Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), one of the founders of the Viennese Secession, sought to liberate art from conventional confines.

• His paintings, such as Judith, explore a frank investigation of human sexuality, pushing the bounds of taste and tradition.

• Judith is the embodiment of a Femme Fatale, not the chaste, moral heroine of the Old Testament or of previous centuries.

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