This might be a good time to take a look at the idea of "Art
for Art's Sake" I mentioned in connection with the development of
Impressionism. It did not originate with the Impressionists; its origins
can be traced back to 1790 in the writing's of Immanuel Kant who broke
with traditional aesthetics in his The Critique of Judgment . Basically,
he argued that the appreciation of beauty is subjective and disinterested
-- unaffected by the object's purpose/function, a concept not lost on
contemporary designers of automobiles or their advertising departments,
for example -- what do you really need in a car? Three or four wheels,
good gas mileage, dependable engine, comfortable seats and a rust-proof
body. Oh, and I almost forgot, a good sound system. And we want that Viper
or Corvette because... ??
In 1835, the French poet Theophile Gautier published what amounted
to the manifesto of "art for art's sake." In it he challenged the idea/belief
that the value of works of art depends on their utility/function. "What
is the good of music? What is the good of painting?... There is nothing
truly beautiful that can be used for anything; everything that is useful
is ugly, for it is the expression of some need... The most useful room
in a house is the latrine." Of course, he was writing in 1835 and I am
pretty sure the latrines/bathrooms he was exposed to were rather basic,
to say the least. I imagine he would be incredulous if he were to attend
a contemporary Home Show and see what a modern "latrine" has turned into.
Which, more or less, brings us to the next point: that "art for art's
sake" could be used simply as a justification for hedonistic (a belief
that the pursuit of pleasure is the chief good/aim in life) aestheticism.
Which is exactly my point. This period is often considered the beginning
of the "Modern World" and from one point that beginning means the Political
and Industrial Revolutions (a rather materialistic or objective kind of
interpretation of history) that we have talked about.
But, it is also the beginning of the "Modern World" in much a deeper psychological
sense, and that beginning, like the Political and Industrial Revolutions,
is still going on in the Arts (all the arts, not just our little corner
of the visual arts) as well as in our lives. For the Arts, if they are
nothing else, are a reflection of our lives/beliefs and those of the society
we live in; we are, in a sense, the culmination of all those who came
before us. So this whole concept of "art for art's sake" takes on a much
broader aspect than just an argument between artists. It challenges our/society's
concept of art and the artist's function in the society. Is art just about
"beauty?" Does "Good Art" mean beautiful art, "Bad Art"' mean ugly art,
or is there more to it? Is the artist's function then to just create beautiful
designs/objects? Does art and the artist even have a "function" in our
modern society? Are we just a hedonistic/materialistic society or is there
more to us? Will this class give you the "right" answers to any of these
questions? To answer that I would like to quote, with additions, the French
poet Charles Baudelaire (b.1821 - d.1867):
"What is the good of criticism (teaching)? What is the good? -- A vast and terrible question mark which seizes the critic (teacher) by the throat from the very first step in the first chapter (class) he sets down to write (teach). ...I sincerely believe that the best criticism (teaching) is that which is both amusing and poetic: not a cold, mathematical criticism which, on the pretext of explaining everything, has neither love nor hate, and voluntarily strips itself of every shred of temperament... To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism (teaching) should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say , written (taught) from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons."
(J.Mayne, The Mirror of Art, London 1955. Extracted from the Salon of 1846, first published as a booklet, Paris 1846)
Will this class
give you the answers to any of these questions? No. And, anyway, that
would just take the fun out of the journey/process... another quote! This
time from my Harley-Davidson Zippo lighter: "It's not the Destination,
it's the journey." Think about it... which is the point, of course. And
speaking of journeys, let's get back to ours.
What about that function of art? Art for Art's Sake or what? Another
Frenchman (seems like we're dealing with a lot of Frenchmen doesn't it?
But remember that at this time Paris was, pretty much, the intellectual
and artist center of Europe), Edmond
Goncourt (b.1822 - d.1896) remarked that "Art sets out from
the useless: it aims towards that which is agreeable for the few. It is
the egotistic adornment of aristocracies."
Which was immediately jumped on by the proponents of Realism in
the arts: "... it is not true that the only aim of art is pleasure, for
pleasure is not an end; it is not true that it has no other aim but itself...
Art has the objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves (we're
back to Aristotle's view of the contemplation of art as a path to higher
knowledge)... it was not given to us to feed ourselves with myths, to
intoxicate ourselves with illusions... but rather to deliver ourselves
from these harmful illusions by denouncing them," wrote a French socialist
Piere-Joseph Proudhon. Which might well be the rallying point for the
Post-Impressionists (Paul
Gauguin and Vincent
van Gogh), as well as all the "Expressionistic/Abstract" artists
and not a few of the "Cubistic/Geometric Abstractionists" who will follow
them, who felt that Impressionism's attempt to record their immediate
impressions (objective reality) of the natural world and everyday life
fell short of the "objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves...
but rather to deliver ourselves from these harmful illusions by denouncing
them." But before we go there, we'll take a look at the other half of
Post-Impressionism represented by Paul
Cezanne and Georges
Seurat.
Paul Cezanne
|
Paul
Cezanne
 Self-Portrait |
Many of the Post-Impressionists
started as Impressionists; their work can be seen either as a reaction
against the seemingly empty pursuit of reflected light (i.e. objective
reality) and the validation of the new middle-class society (i.e. the
vulgar materialism), or the acceptance of "objective reality," a kind
of visual Empiricism .
The First of our Post-Impressionists, Paul Cezanne is about the
process of seeing. He turned the statement: "This is what I see" into
the question: "Is this what I see?"
Okay, so what does that mean? What was the "process of seeing"
and why did Cezanne have such a powerful impact on the development of
western art?
We have already talked about Monet: he was the first artist to challenge
the traditional conventions of painting based on linear perspective rather
than on actual observation. But for all his radical notions he still adhered
to the idea that one's view of nature was static within the illusionistic
space inside a painting. Things closer to you are in sharper focus than
those in the background, colors stronger and detail more distinct. But
is it? And is such a view really representative of how the artist/you
actually sees the world in front of him? Which brings us back to Paul
Cezanne and his breakthrough into the world of unfixed perception.
Cezanne once said that he was never able to see the same scene twice; every time be blinked, shifted, reorganized his focus, or even scanned a view, his image would alter.
 Fruit Dish, Glass and Apples c.1879-82 |
His paintings quickly became experiments in documenting the process of perception, complete with all its inconsistencies. He shares his doubt with the viewer, the "vulnerability of perception" that he saw as tantamount to objective truth in painting (don't slide over that "objective truth" which is a long way from Plato's or Aristotle's "truth").
So, lets take
a closer look at two of Cezanne's early still-lifes. Even in this
early work we can see a persistent questioning of space.
The tables appear to be tilted up in relation to the object on
them, especially in one on the left, putting the vase and the fruit in
danger of sliding off. In effect we are seeing the vase from one perspective
(say, while sitting on a chair, our eye level being slightly above the
top of the vase) and the table from another perspective (say, sitting
on a high stool or the difference from sitting up straight in the chair
as opposed to slouching down).
 Cezanne: Vase of Tulips c.1890-2 |
So what do we have here? Certainly not a "photographic" representation but rather a more subtle, and perhaps, more "representational" of the artist's, and consequently the viewer's, act of looking at the items in the still-life.
He shares his
doubt with the viewer, the "vulnerability of perception" that he saw
as tantamount to objective truth in painting. In this sense, his painting
of a Vase of Tulips and Fruit Dish, Glass and Apples are
more "real" than a photographic representation which gives us all the
detail, but none of the doubt. So perhaps he's not that far from Plato
or Aristotle -- the difference, of course, is that Cezanne was looking
for an "objective truth" in the world he saw in front of him, his doubt
was his inability to see it, while Plato and Aristotle believed that the
"truth" was never out there to be found.
Georges Seurat
 Bathers at Asnieres c.1883-84 |
Seurat's attempt to formalized Monet's ephemeral vision of the world
was based on two relatively new scientific theories on color. The first
was that placing two colors side by side would intensify both and secondly,
that the eye would "optically" mix colors placed adjacent to each other
-- blue dots next to yellow dots would merge and be perceived as green
when viewed from a distance.
Seurat wanted to paint the "moderns" as they went about their daily
lives. This was a new time and a new world, at least in Paris, and
it deserved to be captured for all time and that's what he did.
 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 1884-6 |
Seurat's masterpiece,
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is the subject
matter of Impressionism, the middle-class at their leisure, but his aims
are anything but the transitory or "conditional" moments of Impressionism.
The painting proclaims, before anything else, that it is not a
single moment of vision: that it was not built in a day -- La Grand
Jatte is huge, ten feet by nearly seven feet, far larger than any
Impressionist painting.
Seurat wanted to paint the processional aspect of modern life.
"Processional aspect" is a rather interesting phrase I picked up from
Robert Hughes (page 113 in your text) -- Processional: adj. of or for
a procession. Procession: n.. a number of people or vehicles or boats
etc. going along in an orderly fashion and La Grande Jatte is nothing
if not orderly.
That orderliness is what gives Seurat's work its' grandeur. But that "frozen
formality' also betrays another side of city life that was also new to
our "moderns" -- isolation. The people in his paintings are alone, even
in a crowd. Whether sitting by the river at Asnieres or strolling on La
Grande Jatte, they're encased in their own space, walled-off from each
other. But then that interpretation could very well be a kind of romantic
projection on a rather straight forward affirmation of the new society
emerging from the Industrialization of Europe. But no such ambiguities
accompany our next artists.
Paul Gauguin
 Portrait of the Artist with Idol. c.1893 |
The
archetypal dropout, Gauguin felt that modern society had become overly
materialistic and had lost sight of the true realities of life. First
in Brittany, and later in Tahiti, he looked to a more primitive society
in which he could recapture the elusive truth he was searching for, hoping
to rejuvenate both European art and its culture.
The popular notion that Gauguin "discovered himself as a painter"
in Tahiti makes for a nice myth, but, in fact, Gauguin had all the components
of his work -- the flat patterns of color, the wreathing outlines, the
desire to make symbolic statements about human fate and emotion, the interest
in "primitive" art, and the thought that color could function as a language
-- assembled in France before his trip to Tahiti.
 Jacob Wrestling With the Angel c.1888 |
By
1886, when he settled in Brittany, he had already formulated in letters
and no doubt also in conversation the essence of his new style, paintings
in which dream and memory predominate. "Art is an abstraction" he wrote
from Pont-Aven in 1888, "extract it from nature, dreaming before it, and
think more of the creation which will result than of nature."
Gauguin painted a mythical world that no longer existed in reality,
a simpler world that was closer to the spiritual values he was looking
for.
 The Yellow Christ c.1889 |
"In painting, one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music. . . Think of the highly important musical role that color will play henceforth in modern painting."
Gauguin never found the Tahiti he was seeking; as in Jacob Wrestling with the Angel and The Yellow Christ, the symbolic representation is an image that originated in Gauguin's mind rather than in his eye and so it would be in Tahiti.
Instead of Noble Savages, prostitutes; instead of the pure children of Nature, listless half-breeds -- a culture wrecked by missionaries, booze, exploitation and gonorrhea; its rituals dead, its memory lost, its population down from forty thousand in Captain Cook's time to six thousand in Gauguin's.
Which, in a strange way, suited the formal, classical side of his work. Although he thought of himself as a "primitive" (his grandmother was half-Peruvian) displaced among the cafes and salons of Paris, whole tracts of his imagination belonged more to the Romantic Neoclassicism and its fondness for allegory than to the Modern world.
 The Specter Watches over Her c.1892 Oil 281/4 x 361/4" Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York |
In 1897, he painted the large canvas called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. From the Tahitian Eve in the center, plucking fruit from the tropical Tree of Paradise, to the whispering figures and the old crouching woman, it is filled with symbolism: "a philosophical work," Gauguin wrote to a friend in France, "on a theme comparable to that of the Gospel."
Gauguin's Symbolist, expressive aims, were shared by Vincent van Gogh, for whom art was a means of personal and spiritual redemption. "To try to understand the real significance of what great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God," Vincent wrote in 1880.
 Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Oil on canvas 571/4" x 1471/2" Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
The concept of art as a new religion, a way of life to which the artist is called and to which he gives himself up utterly, was an article of faith for Van Gogh as much as for Gauguin.
". . . instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly. . . . I am always in hope of making a discovery there to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones, to express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against somber background" (Vincent van Gogh).
Vincent van Gogh will become the "hinge" on which 19th century Romanticism will turn into 20th century Expressionism. His paintings become his way of sharing his inner most feelings, his fears and doubts and, above all, his love of all nature. His greatness lies in the success of that sharing, his ability to transmit his feeling to others, regardless of time or place.
Vincent van Gogh
 Self-Portrait c.1889 |
No longer was color applied in flat, sweeping gestures; instead it was understood first and foremost as paint, which has its own material qualities. Van Gogh drew even further away from established conventions, heightening not the appreciation of nature in some supposedly objective form, but the intrinsic personality of the artist wrestling with his subject.
The result was an even greater shift toward the primacy of the artists' subjective experience in the vision of the painting. Such blatant subjectivity will have major implications for later artists who will explore the battle ground of the self and the pressure and anxieties of modern life.
 Auvers c.1888 |
Although Vincent had finally begun to receive critical praise, he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later. Not for his lack of acceptance, but because he was afraid that during one of his "spells" he might hurt someone else, as he had hurt himself when he cut off part of his ear during a "spell."
 The Ravine c.1889 Oil 28.5 x 35.9" |
 Olive Grove at St. Remy c.1889 Oil 28 x 36" |
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Lautrec's most characteristic work is based on Parisian society, especially the Parisian cafe scene where, as Robert Hughes points out, a "peculiarly ironic and detached view of life was emerging, based on the sense of dandyist display -- 'seeming' rather than 'being' (i.e.: image is everything) -- disposable and rapidly changing style, fleeting social encounter, impersonal transaction."
So how does he fit into our nice little Post-Impressionist categories? Not very well. Influenced by Impressionist color as well as Edgar Degas and Japanese art, he leans more toward the Symbolists, a style that paralleled Impressionism and emphasized the internal world of the imagination, rejecting both the social consciousness of Realism (Gustave Courbet) and the Impressionist interest in nature and the material world.
 At the Moulin Rouge c. 1892-5 Art Institute of Chicago |
In the middle background you can see Lautrec with his cousin as they pass through the Moulin Rouge (he's the short one).
 Lautrec in his Studio with a model. |
Although At the Moulin Rouge is considered his masterpiece, he is probably best known today for his many posters. Unlike the textural surfaces of his paintings, his lithograph posters were strongly influenced by Japanese prints and consisted of flat, unmodeled blocks of color. Ironically, they were so successful that the Moulin Rouge became so popular with the Parisian equivalent of the "yuppie" that Toulouse soon had to find a new hangout!
Lautrec poster for one of the most popular dancers at the Moulin Rouge |
 Poster for La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge c.1891 5ft.5in x 3ft.10in. |
 Poster for his friend the singer Aristide Bruant |
Edvard Munch
Precursor of Modern Expressionism
 The Scream c. 1893 Oil on Cardboard 36" x 29" Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo |
After
an early flirtation with Impressionism and while studying in Paris
in 1889, Munch abandoned for good the emotionless subjects of the Impressionists
and Post-Impressionists (the objective empirism of artists such as Cezanne
and Seurat) and set out to record the anguished psyche of modern humanity.
In The Scream he succeeded in creating a stark and terrifying image
of modern alienation and despair, he scribbled in the upper part of the
picture: "Can only have been painted by a madman."
The Scream belonged to an unfinished series of paintings Munch titled
the Frieze of Life. So fearsome were the images and so threatening the
symbolism of this series that when six of the paintings were exhibited
at a major Berlin art show in 1892, shocked authorities ordered the show
closed.
And as you might expect, Munch's relationships with women were
just as neurotic. He believed love was a losing struggle of the male against
the female preying mantis and that sex was, in all senses but that of
procreation, inherently destructive: women being either "femme fatales,"
a view sharedby many of the Symbolists, or Earth Mothers (ie: fertility
idols).
His women seem to oscillate between fantasies of rape as in Puberty
and visions of women as devourers of men's souls.
 Puberty c.1894-5 59.5" x 43.25" Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo |
To emphasize his point about the Madonna, Munch framed it with a painted border of spermatozoa (since lost).The "Femme Fatale" raised to the nth degree as Kali the destroyer and creator.
Munch wrote in a text meant to accompany the painting:
"Your
face embodies all the worlds beauty... Your lips, crimson red like the
coming fruit, glide apart as in pain. The smile of a corpse.
Now life and death join hands. The chain is joined that ties the thousands
of past generations to the thousands of generations to come."
 Madonna c.1894-5 53.5" x 42.25" Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo |
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the Berlin fiasco, Munch's influence
on German painting was immense. His works of the 1890s played a large
part in the founding of modern German Expressionism by the Munich expressionist
group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and the Dresden expressionist
group, Die Brucke (The Bridge). Munch's forceful technique and
free, intense brushstrokes have antecedents in Post-Impressionist paintings
of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, but his works reflect an intensity
and emotional depth unparalleled in modern art.
Lynn University Art Appreciation
Information provided by: http://www.machanley.com