Monet's Painting example essay topic

Painting in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century During the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-determination fostered by the French Revolution and spread by Napoleon helped spawn a revolutionary spirit across Europe. This spirit of rebellion also infected artists of the period. Painters began to challenge the philosophy and the aesthetic principles of the academies, looking outside these conservative institutions for their training, subject matter, style, and purpose. While many artists and critics promoted the status quo, others sought change, seeing validity in new themes and new approaches. To many artists, the histories and mythologies still promoted by the academies offered no inspiration, and so they turned elsewhere for their subject matter. Some looked to nature, others to daily life, and still others to themes of the worker, the poor, and the oppressed.

As they sought alternatives, many artists gathered in groups based on common interests. Outside the established mainstream of their own time, the Realists, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists broadened the horizons of Western art. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), a self declared Realist, rejected the inherent sentimentality of work by the Romantics. Courbet's interest in portraying things as they really appear, together with his nonacademic orientation, placed him in the front rank ofthe quest for realism, the premise for much of the artistic activity of the period. Michael Wood quotes Courbet as saying: It was not my intention of attaining the trivial goal of art for art's sake.

My aim is to translate the customs, the ideas, and the appearance of mown epoch as I see them. According to Janson The storm broke in 1849, when heexhibited The Stone breakers, the first canvas fully embodying his programmatic Realism (dc). Courbet was inspired by the complete expression of human misery he saw in an encounter with an ol road worker in tattered clothes and his young assistant. The painting was completely ridiculed by critics and public alike; it was considered unsuitable for artistic representation, and linked to the newly defined working class, which was finding outspoken champions in men like Marx and Engels (Gardner dc clix). Courbet was praised by some social reformers; however, and they saw the painting a universal condemnation of capitalism and its potential greed.

In 1859, a young Parisian painter named Edouard Manet (1832-1883) submitted his first picture to the Salon, but his Absinthe Drinker, portraying a drunken bum, was rejected for its unseemly subject and uncompromising realism. In 1863 Manet participated in the famous Salon des Refuses, an exhibition consisting of works rejected by the official Salon, and he came to be viewed as the hero of the nonconformists. Though Manet regarded himself as working in the tradition of the great masters, his approach was to rethink established themes in modern terms. Manet succeeded at shocking his audience many times, but no work created more turmoil than his Olympia (1863), exhibited in the Salon of 1865.

The response to the painting was outrage against an image which was sexually explicit, socially provocative, and stylistically inconsistent with accepted standards of modeling and composition (Moffett xcv). Manet's picture, which is a reinterpretation of Titian's Venus of Urbino, substitutes a known Parisian prostitute for a goddess. Completely at ease with her naked body, Olympia calmly gazes over the viewer exuding a frank sensuality. As with Courbet's The Stone breakers, Manet's Olympia was harshly criticized, even by Courbet, but Manet was championed by others. The famed writer Emile Zola praised Manet's truthfulness, and noted that Manet had introduced the Parisians to a woman of their own times. In the 1870's, while Manet was painting cafe society and other scenes of Parisian life, his friend Claude Monet (1840-1926) had settled in Argenteuil so he could paint along the banks of the Seine River.

Four years later, Monet banded together with a small group of artists, and they gave a show of their works in the studio of the photographerNadar. The exhibition was quite a radical idea at the time; never before had a group of artists united together for a showing of their work without sanction from the government or judgment from a jury. Monet exhibited Impression: Sunrise (1872), a view of a sunrise seen through a window at Le Havre. This painting shows Monet's method of work. With the most sparing palette and brushwork, he fixed the movement of light and water between the morning sun dulled by fog, and the small dark boat in the foreground.

Monet only set down the essentials, ye this skill in translating vision into paint registered a complex reality. Distance, atmosphere, light, time of day, and place are all convincingly portrayed (Gardner dc cvi). The exhibition lasted only one month, and, contrary to popular belief, the majority of press coverage was positive. However, it was the critic Louis Leroy, in a satirical dialogue renouncing Monet's painting, who gave the group its name: theImpressionists. Ironically though, according to Hamilton, Although Monet has long been considered the archetypal Impressionist, he was possibly the first to express publicly his dissatisfaction with the cult.

As early as 1880 he confessed... that it had become a banal school with its doors open to the first hack who comes along ( iv). The term Post- Impressionism, which arose from a famous exhibition held in London, is like many isms in art, a nebulous one. In its broadest sense it can be used to describe the work of a number of individual painters who evolved a style in reaction against the Impressionists. Although several of these artists began their careers with theImpressionists, they soon developed a style of painting more concerned with evocative color, structure, and form. Less concerned with the transitory effects of light and motion, the Post-Impressionists often turned to different subjects, and painted with a greater emphasis on formal discipline. The most important of the Post-Impressionists is Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).

Early in his career Cezanne came under the influence of the Impressionists, and heexhibited with them in their first show. Nevertheless, as Cezanne matured as an artist, he moved off in another direction. His desire was, as Michael wood quotes, to make of Impressionism something solid and durable. In Woman With Coffee Pot (1890), the central female figure is presented with the same dispassionate, meticulous, exploring eye as the coffee pot. Cezanne discerned and described the basic shape of all forms on the canvas, and then he revealed their interrelationships. The woman achieves monumentality through the abstraction and reduction of the various parts of her body; Her arms are cylinders, and the lower part other dress is a triangle.

As a result, the human form is at one with the shape of the coffeepot, the cup, the tablecloth, and the rectangles of the door panels. Cezanne's analysis of structure is especially evident in his still lifes, which at the time were revolutionary in there departure from previous examples in the genre. In these paintings there is little attempt at verisimilitude in the usual sense. Instead, Cezanne relentlessly examined the structure, texture, and colors of bottles, fruit, and tablecloths. Traditional conventions of spatial representation, perspective, and color have been abandoned, and the still life has become a visual analysis translated into paint. To Cezanne it really did not matter whether he was painting an apple or a man; the search for the underlying structure of form was the same.

Without a doubt the most famous of the Post-Impressionists today is Vincent van Gogh. His tragic and tempestuous life, and lack of recognition in his own lifetime, has made him the stuff of legend. In many ways van Gogh is seen as the prototype of the modern artist. He served no apprenticeship, essentially sold no paintings, labored in total isolation, poverty, and obscurity, and saw art as a calling, not a profession. The greatest period of van Gogh's short but highly productive career came at the end of his life, where, between bouts of mental illness, he produced a series of impassioned paintings. His Night Cafe (1888) was intended, as van Gogh stated in a letter to his brother Theo, to express the most terrible passion of humanity by means of red and green [and] a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime (Chipp vi).

The abrupt tipped-up view of the room with its dazzling lights and hot colors is both strange and menacing. The harsh expressiveness of the Night Cafe is a clue to Vincent's inner turmoil at the time. Here Van Gogh has used much of what he learned about form and color from the Impressionists, but in a much more ardent and personal way. The Realists, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists, even with all their radical departures from the artistic styles of the past, did not completely break away from the major traditions of Western art. However, in 1886 a new generation of artists was emerging: The young Pablo Picasso was growing up in Barcelona, Henri Matisse wasa student in Paris, and Georges Braque had celebrated his fourth birthday in Le Havre.

They were among the artists destined to make Western art completely diverge from the past during the first part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, we must not discount the achievements of the masters from the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was these artists who built the bridge whereby the next generation could continue on and develop Modern art as we know it today: Courbet and Manet forever changed our perceptions of what is considered proper subject matter on the canvas, Monet and van Gogh's use of color laid the foundations for Expressionism and Fauvism, and Cezanne's use of shape and form led to the most radical break with tradition in the history of Western art, Cubism. Wood, Michael A Fresh View: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Art of the Western World. WNET.

1989. Chip, Herschel. Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Moffett, Charles.

The New Painting. San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of SanFrancisco, 1986. Hamilton, George. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940. Eng. : Penguin, 1978.

Janson, H.W. History of Art. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1977. Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages II. New York: Harcourt Brace.