ARTH 5 Romanticism and Realism

Today's lecture deals with Romanticism and Realism. We're covering the very end of the 1700s and heading into the early 1800s. In our next couple of lectures we're going to see the advent of photography as well as our entry into the world of modern art. Romanticism exists side by side with Neoclassicism which we covered in our last lecture. There is no linear progression during this time period per se. Romanticism deals with the exploration of emotion, expression, and of course imagination. The subject matter comes from a variety of sources such as literature and current events, even the artist's imagination. It is extremely popular in England where it really begins, but we're going to take a look mostly at what occurs in France, Spain, and we have our very first time we have art coming from America. Jacques-Louis David, we've talked about him before being the most famous Neoclassical painter. He also created paintings that would be considered Romantic. Again, he was an extremely popular painter of his day. Remember, we don't really have movie stars or people like that around this time, so artists really became these incredibly famous individuals to where they almost couldn't walk the street. He was in prison twice during the French Revolution, becomes friends with Napoleon, and becomes the court painter for him approximately 1795. He's considered by some to be the first modern artist, and of course he is thrown in jail a couple of times during the French Revolution. This is his example of a Romantic painting. You can see Napoleon on this horse as he is literally leading his troops over the Alps into Italy, and only two other people had done this before. You can see in the lower left-hand corner of this image Napoleon's name on the top of the rock there, underneath him, and then the other name translates to Charlemagne. When we look at Napoleon seated on the horse, he actually did sit for this painting for approximately two hours. That was about all the time that David had to really capture his likeness. But you can see with the horse itself rearing up on its hind legs, and this wild eye view of his face, and you have his Napoleon's textile tape around him, just kind of billowing and pointing toward conquest is what he does. This is a really incredibly large painting, about eight and a half feet tall, so you can imagine standing in front of it how impressive this would be. But really, probably the most famous of all Romantic works is The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. Géricault would have been by far an incredibly famous artist today, and he is famous already just for this painting, but incredibly more so if he had lived. He died very young at the age of 33 from a horse riding incident. He fell off of a horse. His painting, though, Raft of the Medusa, is really the seminal work of the Romantic period. The story happens on July 2nd, 1816 when a French merchant ship named Medusa is off the coast of North Africa, and it encounters a storm. The captain realizing the ship is going to sink, demands that the ship's carpenter fasten together a raft. The captain and crew took the actual lifeboats, there just weren't enough lifeboats for everyone, and the rest of the passengers, 150 of them in total, were put onto this raft, and its ropes were attached to the lifeboats. But when the captain realized the lifeboats really weren't making any headway, he demanded that the ropes be cut. On the raft there was enough food for only about one day, along with two casks of water and another two casks of wine. The ship is basically at sea for 12 days. Only 15 people survive to see land, five of those dying shortly thereafter. There were reports of madness and cannibalism on the raft. People were thrown overboard and murdered with an axe. Jericho decides to show us the moment when they spot the rescue ship on the horizon, and you can barely see this small little mast in the aft of their horizon line of the image off to the right. Jericho, though, becomes obsessed with this story, in fact, a little bit more than obsessed. He went as far as to hire the ship's carpenter to reproduce the raft in his studio. Jericho, unlike many artists, was very, very wealthy. He contacted the survivors, he went to the morgue to look at bodies of dismembered and drowned men. In fact, he borrowed them and brought them to his studio. In fact, one report of a visitor to his studio said that it looked more like a slaughterhouse than an art studio. He attended the trial of the ship's captain and completed tons of sketches of this painting before this final version was completed. The painting itself is gigantic. You know, when we look back at the Oath of the Haradai, you know, that was a painting that was like 8 feet by 12 feet. Well, this is 16 by 23. This is the size of a history painting, but it shows a current event. In fact, it's an extremely powerful event. You see that the captain was appointed by the king, and the captain did not have enough experience to really man this vessel. This painting serves as an indictment of the monarchy, showing that the French Revolution had failed, and once again, we have corruption in the monarchy. Even when the ship's captain got to land, there was not even a rescue ship sent out to find the survivors. The painting was put on display in a salon, and in fact, it's the Salon of 1819. It was surprisingly allowed into the salon, but the title of the painting was not allowed to be displayed. This was really an indictment of the monarchy. Here are a few of the other images or sketches that he was creating. These paintings do hang across from one another in the Louvre today. Our next image is going to be Liberty Leading the People. When the monarchy returns to France, it is led by Louis XVIII and Charles X. Both of these individuals made unpopular decisions in the area of censorship of the press, limiting voting rights and education. In fact, they returned education to the church. This caused large-scale uprisings in the streets of Paris, and it led to the overthrowing of the monarchy, putting King Louis-Philippe in power. Here's our painting of Liberty Leading the People, and it is by Jean Delacroix. The painting is fairly large in scale, 8 feet by 10 feet, and even though this is a revolutionary image, we don't have any soldiers that are pictured here. In fact, we have people that are commoners, students, craft workers, children, day laborers, stumbling forward through the debris, the smoke, the barricades, and the dead bodies. Their leader is this energetic, muscular, allegorical figure of liberty, with a revolutionary flag in one hand and a rifle in the other, and they're coming directly at us. It's really important to remember that this is a revolutionary painting, an incredibly beautiful painting. Prior to this, we have Women of Algiers by Delacroix. He is really taking the reins after Géricault's death in terms of producing these beautiful, colorful paintings. This one is the result of his trip from North Africa. He visited, like many other artists of this time period, French colonies set out in Algiers and Morocco and Tangiers. Delacroix states that, quote, I only began to produce something worthwhile when I had sufficiently forgotten the minor details and retained only the striking, poetic ones. The scene itself depicts a harem where three women are gathered along with their servants, and the figures are dressed in and surrounded by these beautiful, exotic textiles and colorful fabrics. When we really look at each of the surfaces of these objects and the walls and the clothing and such, everything is covered by arabesque and linear motifs. Paul Cezanne, upon seeing this painting, said, when I speak of the pleasures of color, this is what I'm talking about, and that's really what this painting does compared to many others of this time. It is very, very uncommon. Up in England, we have The Nightmare by Huxley, which Huxley is a very interesting individual. He is considered an English painter, although he spends a tremendously long time in other parts of the world. For instance, he doesn't even move to London until the age of 23. He was actually born in Switzerland, but around the age of 29, he then moves to Rome, spending eight years there before returning back to London. You would think that spending all that time in Rome, particularly, would lead him along the path of perhaps being a neoclassical painter, but that's just not the case. His works tend to seem as if they're drawn from the dark recesses of his mind. In this image, a very, very popular image, you'll see it on the cover of books and such, primarily late Romantic texts. With The Nightmare, you have this woman who looks like she's passed out on her bed. We've got an incubus laying about her waist. We have this poor skin, kind of glowing eyes peeking out from behind a curtain at the left. It's very, very creepy looking. There's actually four versions of The Nightmare that is created. This is another version here, but the same subject matter and such. When we look over to America, though, at this time, we have the very first American painter in the Romantic era, John Singleton Copley, who, again, was truly argued whether or not he's truly an American painter or not. He was born in the colonies. However, he did spend most of his life over in England. With Watson and the Shark, this is a painting that is commissioned by the man you actually see in the water that looks like his horse, Brook Watson. This is an event that happened to him 30 years earlier when he's attacked by a shark while he's swimming in Havana Harbor. He ends up losing part of his right leg before he is rescued. I was only able to find one image online of him. He did have almost like a pirate's wooden leg in the lower part below the knee. The image was so small, it's just going to be reproduced for a good image for a slideshow. This scene is somewhat unbelievable, and that's why it is registered as a Romantic painter. You've got this 14-year-old boy swimming in the water who looks already like a horse who's frozen in fright. The shark itself looks something out of the movie Jaws. It's gigantic, and you can even see its tail well beyond the lifeboat there that's in the center of the work. The boat itself has approximately seven or eight people in it, and it's really quite a unique painting. Here it is hanging up at the museum. Now earlier in the class, we talked about a couple ways of printmaking. We talked about relief printing. We talked about intaglio printing. Both of those processes were created during the Renaissance, but during this time period that we're covering now, we have the invention of lithography, which is pretty incredible. Lithography originally invented in Bavaria in 1798. However, by the early 1800s, we have artists that have learned about this process, and they kind of take it for themselves. It's a very easy way of creating prints for what I would call the everyday artists, people like you and me. We don't have to go about the idea of chipping and gouging about wood to make a woodcut or scooping out metal to make indentations in a metal plate. We're looking at freehand drawing on limestone. The limestone itself is pretty heavy. In this image, you can see it's about 4 inches thick, and it's approximately 14 inches by about 18 inches in terms of size. When we're looking at lithography, one of the coolest things is that mistakes are easily corrected. In the lower left-hand corner, you can see this bicycle rider, and if I didn't want to do a bicycle and I made a mistake and I really kind of want to change that to a skateboarder, I totally could, because again, we're just freehand drawing with basically a marker that is very similar to lipstick in terms of its waxiness, and we just wipe off the image we reapply our medium, and we are then happy with our finished image. Once we're done, we coat it with a couple of chemicals, one to fix the image onto the block, and the other is to help the ink stick to the waxiness of our drawn medium. We roll on the ink, just like we did with our earlier processes, and then this goes through a press. You'll notice also that here the printing image is black, so it's incredibly wonderful because there's no image that is going to be worn down. Here with lithography, all of a sudden we can produce thousands of prints without any issues of quality. The problem with lithography, though, is we did produce thousands of prints, and when we have thousands of something compared to tens or hundreds, we don't really have that sense of rareness of wanting to save this type of print, because they weren't so readily available. Since they didn't have any economic value, many of them were thrown away, but today it's kind of like that Catch-22 since nobody saved them back in the 1800s. Today they're very, very valuable. Once we're done printing the prints that we want, the lithographic stone can be reused. We just wash off the chemicals and clean the block. We can also wet-sand it and then reuse it. Just to review again, the five main points of lithography is that the printing surface is flat so we don't have any image that's going to be worn down. We have no special talent needed to create the image, and that works really well. We don't have to have that extra steady hand for chipping or gouging out wood or working with the metal plate. Mistakes are easily corrected. If we made a mistake with the wood block, we'd either have to work the mistake into our design or we'd have to create a new block. And then we can produce thousands of prints with lithographs. And finally, the lithographic stone can be reused. One of the most famous lithographic images in the 1800s is by Daumier. Daumier, by far, one of the most famous artists to be associated with this medium. Rue Transnonian, April 15, 1834, tells us of an event that happens on that date where a policeman is shot down and his colleagues decide to take retribution. They believe that the sniper's bullet came from 12 Rue Transnonian and they storm inside, they kill everyone and they have the wrong apartment. This is an image that's just horrific to see where this innocent father is in the center of the room crushing his child underneath him, off to the left, his wife off to the right, one of their parents. This is an image that would have been printed in newspapers. Lithography can also be printed and was printed in magazines. This caused a tremendous amount of social outrage. Besides this type of image, Daumier did not like King Louis-Philippe. He was a rather pear-shaped individual. Here, Daumier calls him Gargantua. We're off to the right as the taxpayers putting our tax money into the coffers of the government legislature. They are walking up the ramp into his mouth and the king is defecating out laws and bills. Needless to say, Louis-Philippe was not a fan of Daumier either. In fact, we have him thrown in jail a couple of times because of images such as this. Daumier also does a lot for trying to get prints into the everyday usage or idea of important or fine art. In the print lovers, the background are paintings and drawings. We have some sculpture off to the left, but they seem to be obsessed with their folder and collection of prints. This is the same as the connoisseur here who is looking inside at his art collection, again, paintings and sculptures, but right next to his chair is his folder of lithographic prints. Moving over to Spain, we have Goya, who needs no introduction. He was a port painter for Charles IV of Spain, just like Velazquez was for Philip IV. Goya himself is difficult to categorize as an artist because his style is continually changing, although he's never going to be classified as a neoclassicist painter because that's not a style that was popular in Spain. And of course we have his famous Los Caprichos, a famous series of 80 different etchings. The front piece of that is by far the most popular, it's called And the entire series really is about the follies of Spanish society. Goya's intention with this series, not unlike the Oath of the Paradise painting, was to incite action against this. When we look over to this painting of the family of Charles IV, we are reminded that this is a painting very much like Las Meninas by Velazquez. The painting is large, it's 9 feet high by 11 feet wide, and not only do we have again the family of the king, but we also have Goya positioned by a very large canvas in the back left-hand side, kind of in the shadows. The king and queen appear in the center of the portrait, and it's just a little bit different. The room itself is a lot shallower than Las Meninas, and when we look at the individuals of this family, they're not even all facing forward like Velazquez brings the family of Philip IV together. These individuals look bored and distracted. The king, in fact, looks a little fatigued. What we have here, instead of a really accurate portrait, are almost as if these are caricatures of these individuals. No one is really concerned or even interacting with anyone else in the painting. Goya kind of seems to be making fun of this family, although they do accept the painting upon its completion. Here we have a really good juxtaposition between the two images. I'd also like to show you a few of Goya's black paintings. This is a group of non-commissioned paintings produced during the later years of his life. By this time, around 1796 or so, Goya actually goes deaf when he has an illness. He did not title these paintings as art historians have named them, but they are very dark. Some of them are very gruesome, like this one with Saturn devouring his children. I'll just show you a few of the most famous ones. One last painter I want to point out is a German painter, Caspar David Friedrich, who studied at the Copenhagen Academy. He's very much considered a romantic landscape painter. He felt that God was manifest in the landscape. Many of his paintings show the two sides of human existence, both the body and the soul, as well as the earthbound and the divine. His paintings are considered, or an adjective you'd use to describe them would be sublime, something that impresses the mind with a sense of grandeur or power, something that inspires a sense of awe, religious feeling, or a sense of insight. Wonder Above the Sea of Mist is one of his most famous works, where we have this nameless, faceless individual on this rock outcropping this vast valley before him. We have a great use of atmospheric perspective, and that's caused by the extreme, and not so extreme, value contrast we see in the painting. When we see very high value contrast, we view that as being closest to us. For instance, the figure on top of the rock outcropping in the foreground, around it is very, very white types of paint. It's that dark outcropping. We view that as being close to us, whereas in the distance we have value contrast that is very, very slight. The mountains, the sky, and the clouds all have very similar values, so that views as being in the distance. And so that's how artists, that's one of the ways artists create this illusion of space. With Month by the Sea this was a painting that he completed just after his father had passed away. He had a very horrible life early on, a lot of personal tragedy. Some critics even say that this could have colored some of these works. The idea that his mother died when he was 7, and at the age of 8, one of his sisters passed away. When he was 12, Pastor David Friedrich fell through the ice. His older brother drowned, saving his life. And then at 14, another of his sisters passed away. These paintings are not very, very large paintings. With Month by the Sea also, we're looking at a very small individual looking over the Baltic Sea. And most of this painting with this low horizon line is atmosphere. It's a very atmospheric painting. And even on the land itself, there are no shrubs or plants or trees, just that one lone individual. Friedrich is a brilliant colorist, as you can see in these images. And many of them are no more than about 8 to 10 inches tall and 8 to 10 inches wide. If you get a chance to go to the Getty Museum, they have this image on their walls there. And you can literally get close enough to see the cracks in the oil painting itself. It's really quite a stunning image. I'd also like to talk about realism for just a moment, even though I will put up a video online for you to watch. Realism, as the name suggests, strives for accurate depictions of the world, both visually, socially, and emotionally. While this art was true to life, the idea that this was an imprint of the natural world, of what was happening, rather than something romantic, for instance, this wasn't really that popular for very long. It is quickly swept aside by the invention of photography. Next week we'll actually lecture on art theft, but the week after we'll deal with photography and its impact on art, which is major. It literally is the hinge that swings us to the world of modern art. Paintings like Burial at Ornans by Courbet shows a true to life painting. This is going to be a painting of the artist's own funeral. His father is the man that's standing off to the right. The artist's dog is next to him. The five weeping women in the background are his sisters. The rest of the people that you see in this painting, there's about 36 individuals, are all recognizable townspeople from the city of Ornans where Courbet lives. We also have that same type of image with the stone breakers, and again the gleaners here who are picking up the last remnants of a hay field after its harvesting. Again, all of these would be considered realism. They're not necessarily happy paintings or anything like that. They do show laborers, people who are working. And so again, in a couple of weeks we'll look at photography because photography will capture basically the same image as realism, since it is a direct imprint of nature. And with that, this is the end of this presentation and I will see you guys next week when I talk about art theft.