on 28-Nov-2018 (Wed)

large- scale exhibitions were being mounted throughout Western Europe, following the French model of public exhibitions sponsored by the monarchy. In France, these exhibitions were known as Salons

The Paris Salon took place regularly, usually every two years, and would feature hundreds of artworks

In the early years of the Salon, the unprecedented access to artworks brought viewers face to face with an often con- fusing variety of subjects, styles, and media. To help guide visitors through the exhibitions, self-appointed arbiters of aesthetic quality began to write reviews

There were five main genres: history (depicting biblical, mytho- logical, or historical subjects), landscape, portrait, still life, and (slightly confusingly) “genre painting” (scenes of everyday life)

The French Royal Academy, at the time of its foundation in 1648, held that history painting was the greatest achievement for a painter because historical sub- jects demanded erudition as well as the highest degree of technical skill

most history paintings were expected to present one or more heroic figures, often depicted nude, so anatomy and life drawing were an essen- tial part of a history painter’s education. Finally, history paintings are often set in real or imagined towns, on battle- fields, or in other landscapes, and thus required the ability to execute works in that genre as well.

many of the earliest public exhibitions of artwork were organized by dealers and auctioneers

bourgeoisie, a class of citizens with newly acquired economic strength and a taste for the fashions and habits of the nobility

Collectors from the middle as well as upper registers of soci- ety now sought to fill their homes with beautiful things. Thus, during the eigh- teenth century, a market force was introduced into the art world, leading to a proliferation in the nineteenth century of smaller works with themes suited to a bourgeois domestic interior.

one of modernism’s central tenets: that art is first and foremost the manifestation of an individual’s emotional and intellectual will

modernity: cities grew as dwindling agricultural jobs prompted workers to seek employment in manufacturing.

One of the signal markers of the rise of modernism in the West was the advent of the de- partment store and the idea of shopping as a leisure activity

Modern art, like all forms of modernism, is a response to the diverse po- litical, economic, and cultural pressures of modernity

Young artists would learn to create by first copying works acknowledged as superior examples of their genre, style, or medium. Only after a student fully understood the work of earlier artists and was able to reproduce such examples faithfully could he or she go on to create new forms.

The Oath of the Horatii (fig. 1.2). The subject is taken from classical sources and had been treated earlier by other painters. For his version, David (1748–1825) emulates the crisp linearity, rich colors, and sculptural treatment of figures by earlier painters such as Nicolas Poussin, relying on him for the clear, geometrical arrangement: the bold pentagon holding old Horatio and his sons, the oval grouping of despondent women on the right. David has radically compressed the clear, stage-like architectural setting in emulation of ancient relief sculpture.

To express genius, then, the Romantic artist had to resist academic emulation and instead turn inward, toward making pure imagination visible.

the two dominant art styles of the late eighteenth century: Neoclassicism and Romanticism

in Neoclassical art a fundamental Renaissance visual tradition was seriously opposed for the first time—the use of perspective to govern the organization of pictorial space

Linear perspective suggests the recession of space through the use of real or implied lines, called “orthogonals,” which seem to converge at a point in the distance.

Atmospheric perspective imitates the tendency of distant objects to appear less distinct to give the illusion of depth

[David & Neoclassicists] arranged their figures as a frieze across the pic- ture plane and accentuated that plane by closing off picto- rial depth through the use of such devices as a solid wall, a back area of neutral color, or an impenetrable shadow. The result, as seen in The Oath of the Horatii, is an effect of fig- ures composed along a narrow stage behind a proscenium, figures that exist in space more by the illusion of sculptural modeling than by their location within a pictorial space that has been constructed according to principles of perspective.

The Neoclassicists continued the Renaissance tradition of glaze painting to attain a uni- form surface unmarred by the evidence of active brushwork, whereas the Romantics were more experimental, sometimes reviving the richly impastoed surfaces of Baroque and Rococo paintings.

Romantic artists sought techniques that would endow prints with the spontaneity of drawings (see Printmaking Techniques, below). Blake created experimental relief etch- ings to pursue this interest. Romantic artists also quickly embraced the new process of lithography in order to achieve their goals.

David and his followers tended toward history painting, especially moralistic subject matter related to the philo- sophic ideals of the French Revolution and based on the presumed stoic and republican virtues of early Rome

Neoclassical painters were hampered in their pursuit of a truly classical art by the lack of adequate prototypes in ancient painting. There was, however, a profusion of ancient sculpture. Thus, it is not surprising that Neoclassical paintings such as The Oath of the Horatii (see fig. 1.2) should emulate sculptured figures in high relief within a restricted stage

Ingres’s preoccupation with tonal relationships and formal counterpoints led him to push his idealization of the female body to the limits of naturalism, offering abstractions of the models from which he worked

Goya carried his art through many stages, from pen- etrating portraits of the Spanish royal family to a particular concern in his middle and late periods with the human pro- pensity for barbarity

During his lifetime Goya was not very well known outside Spain, despite his final years in vol- untary exile in the French city of Bordeaux. Once his work had been rediscovered by Édouard Manet in the mid-nine- teenth century it made a strong impact on the mainstream of modern painting

[Delacroix's] greatest originality, however, may lie less in the freedom and breadth of his touch than in the way he juxta- posed colors in blocks of mutually intensifying complemen- taries, such as vermilion and blue-green or violet and gold, arranged in large sonorous chords or, sometimes, in small, independent, “divided” strokes. These techniques and their effects had a profound influence on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists

For some painters, the landscape offered a mani- festation of the sublime, the rational workings of a deity; for others, a symbol of humanity’s helplessness in the face of an irrational fate.

The principal French Romantic landscape movement was the Barbizon School, a loose group named for a village in the heart of the forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris.

Works by Bonington and Constable rather than Turner, however, had the greatest influence on the Barbizon painters. Thus, the emphasis continued to be on unified, tonal painting rather than on free and direct color.

Jean-François Millet (1814–75) peopled his landscapes with laborers, often treat- ing them with a grandeur customarily reserved for biblical or classical heroes

modernism might be best understood as a struggle between the forces of objective rationality and subjective expression