But here we are in 2012, and Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth has decided that the issue has not been appropriately concluded, and wants to suggest that there is life in the womb upon conception, and wants an independent review on the section of the Criminal Code that states that a fetus is human once it is fully emerged from the birth canal. There are countless controversies surrounding the the exact definition of life in the womb, but the issue in Canada has been a quiet one for years, and re-opening this debate, even when our Conservative Prime Minister is stating that he won’t touch it with a ten foot pole, surely can’t be doing any favours for the Conservative party.

But let’s get down to brass tacks here. I always find it both fascinating and appalling that  it is most often a man who feels the need to start making decisions of the female womb. The last time I checked, men were incapable of bearing children, so what is it exactly, that gives them the right to dream up laws and regulations that would strip a woman of a basic human right; To bring life into the world, or not to. When a man is racked with worrying about the risks of carrying a baby, the possibility of not having the right resources for yourself and your baby, and then of course all of the economic ramifications that come afterward, then perhaps they can step forward and give their two cents. But as far as dictating to a woman how the conversation should go with her doctor when she’s making decisions about her own reproductive system, it’s an abomination.

I can’t imagine that Canada would ever send women’s rights reeling back thirty some odd years, but it’s still unnerving to know that there are still individuals in this country, people in positions of power, that believe they have the right to make decisions on such a personal issue. I think back to a close friend of mine in high school who had an abortion in the eleventh grade because she had made a mistake. If she had the baby, she would have had to sacrifice a full scholarship to the top University in the country, and she probably wouldn’t be the successful lawyer that she is today. Why should those who are carrying the baby make the decisions about their own body? Perhaps I’m making the issue a little too black and white, but as an atheist, strong, free Canadian woman, there is no debate.

The movement, like most new art trends, was greeted by the art world with revulsion, hence the negative comment by the art critic. It did not take long however for wealthy art collectors like Gertrude Stein to recognize the genius of the new style and prices began to raise. The movement was able to stage several exhibitions between 1901 and 1906, although the first real full exhibition was not recognized until their appearance at the Salon d´Automne in 1905. The great van Gogh, unappreciated during his life, summed it up best when he said, “Instead of trying to render what I see before me, I use color in a completely arbitrary way to express myself powerfully”. These artists used vivid colors to shock their viewers out of their complacency and bringing art down to Earth with their rough, clumsy style.

Fauvism was not extremely long lived and by 1908 most of the artists had moved on to cubism, which we will address next week. When the originator of the style, Matisse, died (1869-1954), Fauvism soon followed. When the movement moved away from Fauvism and into Cubism they moved from using color to using shape to convey emotions and ideas. But while it existed this style gave us some of the world´s most extraordinary art. When Vlaminck gave us The River we were treated to an ostensibly peaceful scene but his free use of colors gives us the sense of an impending storm on the horizon.

During the last few decades of the 19^th Century and first decade the world had changed more than it had during the previous 100 years or more. The rapid industrialization of the Western world had changed nearly every aspect of most peoples lives. The camera, less than 50 years old, had already begun to develop and the movie camera would not be far behind. Telephone and telegraph lines were beginning to dominate the landscape and with the invention of the electric motor, diesel engine and automobile had begun to shrink the world and these changes had to change the art world as well. The engineers, from civil to construction to eventually software engineers, were changing the way we viewed the world and even the way we viewed reality. Until this period the world had never really gotten over the Greeks obsession with depicting real life images, viewing the real world. While they might have blurred images or painted them slightly out of proportion, we always saw life.

The rapid mechanism of the world led to an artistic fascination with shapes developed into the Modernist period. Modernism is actually a group of related but visually different styles, such as Fauvism, German Expressionism, Constructivism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. The first Modernist was the French master, Edouard Manet, and the first American Modernist was Theodore Robinson. This period was one of the longest in recent art history, lasting in all more than a century. The style had actually begun to develop, although slowly in the mid 1860′s, or the beginning of the Industrial Age, and did not finally expire until the 1970´s. As new inventions abounded and science delved deeper and deeper into the very nature of reality, the art world developed new experimental forms and media to express some of these new ideas and to suggest even more possibilities. They used the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Watson and Crick, quantum physics, chemistry, all are explored by modernist art. Modernists felt that depicting what you saw was easy. Mere mimicry. But to use intuition instead of intellect when you were trying to understand reality was a different proposition.

The multiplicity of “isms” such as Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Fauvism and all the rest was mostly an American phenomenon. Artists from Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) to Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965), used the porous boundaries between the styles and developed a new era of experimentation. Basically these artists blended philosophy with modern art in an effort to literally get them to explain each other. One American, Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) was responsible for introducing the modernist ideas of Matisse and Picasso to American painters and sculptors. Maurer´s father was an artist as well, a Currier & Ives illustrator, and Maurer committed suicide after his death, guilt wracked over his fathers hatred of the the art that he loved so much.

The first Post-Impressionistic are turned up in France in 1886 but had moved to Britain within a few years. The term was actually given to this group of artists by British are critic Roger Fry. Many art historians argue about whether post-Impressionism strengthened or weakened impressionism but the fact is that art styles change and grow. Post-Impressionism opened a doorway to the styles we now enjoy and without its move to more abstract visions , using unnatural colors and distorted images, the art world would be in a far different place today. When Fray named the movement he made his reasons very clear and had no intention of saying the Impressionism was being replaced. He rendered the name as a means of identifying a part of the Impressionist movement, a time marker if you will. Some art historians actually maintain that post-Impressionism is actually part of the Modernist style and others refer to the movement as Symbolism. Symbolism really applied to the French version and came into wide spread use in the literature of the period long before the art world grasped the concept.

One of the interesting historical notes about post-Impressionism s that it officially starts just after the death of Manet, which was shortly after the very beginning of Impressionism. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that post-Impressionism really was only the growth of Impressionism. Artists like Vincent Van Gogh merely changed some essential lines and used different colors to bring out a different side to an image, blending Expression and Impressionism to create the grand child of both.

]]> http://courtauldassociation.org/the-pendulum-swings/feed/ 0 http://courtauldassociation.org/impressionism-makes-an-impression/ http://courtauldassociation.org/impressionism-makes-an-impression/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:35:16 +0000 ctuck http://courtauldassociation.org/?p=140 The invention of the photograph during the last half of the 19^th Century put painters in a challenging position, essentially destroyed the Realism movement in the art world simply because in a realistic sense a painter could not compete with a camera. But at the same time, and because of early photography´s inability to add color and deal with lighting issues, a new paradigm in the art world began to grow: Impressionism. The impressionist appellation actually came from a derogatory nickname given to the movement by a Conservative art critic after Claude Monet produced his classic, “Impression: Sunrise” and, much to the critics chagrin the movement embraced the name and developed the motto that the human eye, working with the human spirit, could render a much more accurate picture. Impressionists recognized that while improved cameras would be able to capture much more physical detail, no matter how advanced the technology became it could not match the human eye in capturing the spirit of the moment. The blending of light, movement and feeling were at the core of Impressionistic art and artists attempted to capture their personal visual sensations of an object, while sometimes ignoring the actual image of the object in front of them.

Impressionists artists believe that details would be best rendered by doing a very fast oil painting and that this style would best remove any intellectual preconceptions that the artist had, giving the art a nearly childlike innocence and naivete that was absent in all other styles, but especially in the naturalistic and realistic styles of painting. Some of the most well-known artists in history came from this period. In France Eduard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, led the movement and in the United States it was John Singer Sargent, Francis Coates Jones, and Mary Cassatt. The style became so popular that even now, nearly a century and a half after its conception, organizations are offering scholarships, such as the CGC Scholarships offered by the New York Botanical Gardens and which is based on the work of Monet.

The original Impressionist movement had only just begun however when Georges-Pierre Seurat and Henry Edmund Cross began to reconsider some of its fundamentals. Their objections were mostly based on the lack of permanence in their art. But while this led to what became known as Neo-Impressionism and made a fundamental shift in the direction of the art, it only differed in two basic aspects. Figures in these paintings were much better defined the the entire composition was much more conservative. Rapid rejection and reform, became known as pointillism or confetti-ism and was founded on the idea that touches of color side by side was the best way to present an image. The artists understood, well before the twin aspects of our brain were understood by science, that the human brain would automatically blend the colors in order to make sense of the image. Other artists, such as Paul Signac, Theodoor van Rysselberghe, Georges-Pierre Seurat and Henry Edmond Cross quickly joined the new movement.

Like most periods of art, the Romantic period ended with a whimper rather than a bang. By the beginning of the 20^th century however, the Age of Realism in art had begun in earnest and Romanticism had been soundly rejected for this new and exciting style. While the Greeks had dabbled with realism nearly three-thousand years before, they had worked exclusively with perfecting the human form. Modern Realism on the other hand seeks to bring the observable world into clear and uncluttered focus. The world was in the beginnings of one of the largest and fastest development periods in human history and art became sweep up into the scientific wave as had much of the rest of the Western world.

Realism never tried to idealize. Instead of copying past methods it sought to simply capture the image, render a completely accurate picture of the models, whether human or still. The hard of a Realist thought that both Classicism and Romanticism were far too artificial, too staged to appeal to the essential human spirit and that Baroque and Neoclassicism were obscene.

Realism in art can almost exclusively seen in paintings. Very little sculpting and no architecture came from the period, all the work then being done in older styles of art. The form started just after the French Revolution in mid century but grew in both France and England with equal fervor. The French were experiencing their first years of Democracy and the English had had enough of Victorian Imperialism. In France Realism was led by artists such as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins and Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. This group was highly focused on the different aspects of life and regularly threw centuries old rules of artistic design out the window in the search for realistic portrayals of real life. The Barbizon School, which taught French landscape painters from 1840-1850 was based on the art of these masters and was attended by such art luminaries as Jean-Francois Millet and Camille Corot. The School was actually a retreat used by French artists and because of the natural surroundings, quickly became sought after by Realists.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, opened in 1848 and not ended until the 1890´s was the first real “avant-garde” movement in art history. This group wanted to move back in time, instead of forward, and apply modern principles when depicting the natural world. They wanted pureness in representation and contested that post Raphael art allowed to much of the artists own ideals of what the image looked like instead of its reality. The group had two interesting traits. The first is that they required intense accuracy in their art. They used real, instead of remembered or imagined, landscapes for models and concentrated in being very precise in attention to color and every minute detail. At the same time the English movement adhered faithfully to a tradition established by Hogarth years before of taking a high moral approach to their work.

The first American school of landscape painting was the Hudson River School and although the school was only active for 35 years, (1835-1870), it was attended by some of the most prominent artists of the period, like George Innes, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Moran and Martin Johnson Heade. But besides being the Alma Mater of such luminaries, the Hudson River School also acted as one of the focal points of a new period in Art: The Romantic period. Romanticism was the perfect choice for an age in which new freedoms were just being discovered. Not only freedoms in politics but also freedom to make many more personal decisions. There are many in the United States that claim that the country is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, by Christian leaders. But the fact is that those leaders were almost exclusively secularists who had no problem with religion but distrusted the Church and who made their feelings clear in all of their writings. America was not the first nation to experiment with democracy, the Greeks had practiced it more than 3,000 years ago. They were the first nation in nearly 1,500 years to begin to separate government and religion.

Romanticism gave artists the freedom to speak of matters of the heart in their paintings and sculptures. The art for promoted such unusual ideas as individualism, irrationalism, subjectivism, raw emotion and vivid imagination, emotions that take control and sweet the artist away. The style refused definition for a long time because it favored the blending of many different styles in order to create a completely new style. In much the same way that Renaissance artists were fascinated by nature but in a much more revolutionary. Much like the social movement toward individual freedom, Romanticism was immediately against the established order, both social and religious. Much more interested in human nature than human form, Romantic artists presented images depicting ethnic cultures, remote and mysterious places, even occult subjects were for the first time appearing in Western Art. The life styles of artists changed somewhat however. Previously being a good artist was on of the best jobs to have. But the new age, disappearance of “nobility” and lessening influence of the Church, the first “starving artists” were born. But now, in some of the finer shops, tattoo artists are using styles from both the Romantic and Gothic periods to create some truly beautiful artwork.

The term “Romanticism” was first coined by the poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, from Germany, They originally used the term to describe the entire social movement sweeping the Western world but it soon became applied exclusively to the new style of art. These two mistakenly believed that his movement was essentially a Christian one, despite its clearly secular nature and the fact that the Church fought each of these social changes. They might have been correct however if they thought that the movement was inspired, not because of a return to Christian principles, but from a flight away from Christian intolerance.

Last week we talked about the beginnings of the movement away from the showiness of the ostentatious Baroque and decorative Rococo periods and the move away from exclusively religious art that began in the Lowlands of Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. This trend began to spread across Europe and into the Americas from the mid-eighteenth and lasted until the early nineteenth centuries and is known as the Neoclassical period. One of the main reasons was the general public´s reaction to the opulence championed by Royalty on the Continent during the mass movements toward democratic societies. Another reason was the rediscovery of ruins at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the mid 1700´s and the publication of Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art by art historian Johann Winckelmann. These factors led to a powerful revival of Classical Antiquity that lasted nearly two centuries.

The earlier, but previously unrecognized art of such men as Nicolas Poussin, who specialized in classical history paintings and Claude Lorrain´s famous landscapes, became the inspiration for a new wave in realism for artists long after these artists deaths. The movement actually began as an architectural movement because of the plethora of Classical Roman buildings in Rome. This fact placed the real beginnings of the movement back into the heart of Italy, the home of the original Renaissance. There is really no particular year or event that can be clearly seen as the defining beginning of the Romantic and Neoclassical periods.

The movement developed a much more serious and unemotional flavor than had ever been seen in the art world. Reflecting the heroic styles from the Greeks and Republican Romans, using plain and somber colors instead of bright pastel colors, with only a few highlights was the general theme of this artistic style. The art tried to promote the ethical “superiority” of antique art, which celebrated moral narratives like self-sacrifice and self-denial. Both sculpture and paintings dropped the theatrical and whimsical earlier styles and was a great deal more organized, emphasizing theme and linear design rather than the effects of light, which by this time were much better understood, color and atmosphere. Simply comparing the art of Masters like sculptor John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli and William Blake with the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Dante Alighieri and others will demonstrate the huge influence artists from the Classical Period had on this period.

The 16^th Century saw the opening of one of the longest continuous wars in human history, the Dutch 80 Year War, which was a revolt against Spanish Control over the Low Countries. It was toward the end of this interminable war that the Dutch Golden Age of Painting began and because of the influence of Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer the art world began its next important period. The Dutch Golden Age began during the Middle of the Baroque period. The reasons for the Dutch dominance in art during this period are many. The break with the traditional conservative and very Catholic Spanish control, especially since the Spanish Inquisition was still going on in some locations, led to a complete restructuring of Dutch society and Dutch art was one of the first areas to feel the changes. There are a number of easy scholarships that allow students to study the period in depth.

Dutch art of the period is considered Baroque but in reality many of the aspects of the Baroque style, such as the love of splendor and idealization, are missing, making this style part of the Baroque period but separate from it, being fascinated more with realism that with pomp and grandeur. This mini-period lasted from about 1628 until the French invaded the Low Lands in 1672 and it was during this period that the concept of “genres”.

The Calvinists took over the religious aspects of Dutch life during this period and, unlike the Vatican, banned religious painting inside the Churches. While religious paintings were permitted in homes the fact was the most people could not afford them and very few religious paintings were produced during this period, the artists preferring to concentrate on scenes from real life, landscapes, peasant life, animals, flowers, and maritime paintings. This was also the period when the “Hierarchy of Genres”, which held that some styles were better than others and this drove painters to want to produce work that would last through the ages. Keep in mind that the greats like Da Vinci, who only painted for money to finance is inventions, and Michelangelo, who painted out of piety, were not concerned as much about money and fame in art as they were about mechanics and religion.

With one notable exception, The Young Bull (Paulus Potter 1647), which was huge ( Nearly 10 foot wide) most paintings of the period were relatively small, and the only really large paintings were usually family group portraits. Wall painting had been common for literally thousands, of not tens of thousands of years, but during this period the practice essentially ended in Europe. Walls were decorated with hanging paintings, which were painted on either canvas or wooden panels and some artists even painted over many surviving Golden Age paintings with new subjects, a practice which began because new frames and canvases were expensive. There was also very little sculpture done during this period and was usually only commissioned for tomb monuments or for decoration of public buildings or areas.

The battle began when the Catholic Church announced a “counter” Reformation in the late 1550´s and began to use art to influence people´s opinion of the Church. The commissioned many pieces that were biblically correct and visually stunning, reaching people on a nearly visceral level. The Church used Masters like Bernini and Rubens to create dramatic paintings using revolutionary techniques like casting certain figures, who are standing in deep shadow, in bright but soft illumination. While Renaissance art was highly stylized, Baroque was much earthier and realistic. For the first time artists painted about live on the streets instead of in the palaces and the masses flocked to this art. Artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer ruled the art world in northeastern Europe and Caravaggio ruled the south. New scientific discoveries, brought on by the Renaissance and the work of men like Da Vinci and Galileo were rapidly changing the way people looked at the world. Dozens of new trade routes, with both Asia and the newly discovered Americas, with thriving colonies, had produced an entirely new form of art.

Art was only purchased by the privileged monied classes for most of history. But now that the economy had begun to create a thriving middle class, more careers in education, eventually leading up to medical advances until we now have jobs like astronauts and careers in software engineering opened up as more people could pay for school and educational levels increased, artists began to produce on a much faster scale and Baroque went through many changes through the years.

The Baroque Style, which we will study for the next several articles, is an “absolutist” style. Baroque is all about exaggeration, colossal sculptures, movement and a great deal of emotion. Like the misshapen pearl it is both more and less than it should be. We can see the influence of this period in other periods, like Gothic, surrealism, Art Deco, and many others. But the period was torn by war and religious conflict, each event which had its own influence on the period and we will explore each of these events and discuss how they changed what might have been.