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Chapter Twenty One

Toward the Modern Era: 1870-1914

The Growing Unrest

• Belle époque: beautiful age• But also a growing frustration,

restlessness– Economic disparity, resentment– Population growth, urban alienation– Capitalism vs. Socialism– Suffrage Movement– Loss of religious security

Ludwig Meidner

“Ich und die Stadt”(1913)

(I and the city)

What emotion is being expressed here? How do you know?

Kathy Kollwitz’s realist etching, “March of the Weavers” (1897).What is being represented here?

Kathy Kollwitz’s realist etching, “Riot” (1897).What is being represented here?

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Kathy Kollwitz’s lithograph, “Conspiracy” (1897).This is the third plate in her “Weaver’s Revolt Cycle”

New Subjects for LiteraturePsychological Insights in the Novel

• Marcel Proust (1871-1922)– Remembrance of Things Past

– Evocation of memory

– Stream of consciousness style

New Subjects for LiteraturePsychological Insights in the Novel

• Nature of individual existences– The subconscious and human behavior

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)– Concern for psychological truth

– Human suffering, salvation

– Crime and Punishment

New Subjects for LiteratureRegionalism and Realism in the Novel

• Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)– The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

– One of the United States’ most popular storytellers

– Uses dialects and regional details from his childhood and work experiences

From Twain’s Roughing It, “The story of Grandfather’s Old Ram” (page 768)

Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram–but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time–just comfortably and sociably drunk…

His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart miner of the period. On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed “the boys” sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes, powder-kegs, etc. They said:

“Sh–! Don’t speak–he’s going to commence.”I found a seat at once, and Blaine said:I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram

than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois–got him of a man by the name of Yates–Bill Yates–maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon–Baptist–and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west. Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson–Sarah Wilkerson–good cretur, she was–one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar’l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don’t mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn’t trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was–no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all–it was a galoot by the name of Filkins–I disremember his first name; but he was a stump–come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary…

New Subjects for LiteratureRegionalism and Realism in the Novel

• Émile Zola (1840 - 1902)– The Ladies’ Delight

– Analyzes with scientific precision how modern advertising and marketing work

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From Zola’s The Ladies’ Delight (page 770)

Here…emerged the exploitation of women. Everything led to this point: the capital which was constantly being renewed, the system of concentrating the merchandise, the low prices to attract customers, the fixed prices to reassure them. Woman was what the shops were fighting over when they competed, it was woman whom they ensnared with the constant trap of their bargains, after stunning her with their displays. They had aroused new desires in her flesh, they were a huge temptation to which she must fatally succumb, first of all giving in to the purchases of a good housewife, then seduced by vanity and finally consumed. By increasing their sales tenfold and democratizing luxury they became a dreadful agent of expense, causing ravages in households and operating through the madness of fashion, which was constantly more expensive. And if in store woman was queen, adulated in herself, humored in her weaknesses, surround by every little attention, she reigned as a queen in love, whose subjects were swindling her so that she paid for each of her whims with a drop of her own blood.

Responses to A Changing Society:The Role of Women

• Family life, society at large– Right to vote, marriage ties

• Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879)– Criticism of anti-feminist social conventions

• Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899)– Sexuality as liberation from oppression

– “The Story of An Hour” (1894)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Philosophy

• -Nihilism• -“God is dead”• -Critic of judeo-Christian

culture, nationalism, and all other “surrogate gods”

• -Asserts Will to Power• -Poses concept of the

Übermensch (Superman—a Caesar with Christ’s soul)

New Movements in the Visual Arts

The new realism of impressionismand the turn toward abstraction

• Édouard Manet (1832-1883)– Break from classical tradition

– Assumes view of the artist; shows us how he sees his subjects

Look at the representation of depth here. Do you notice anything interesting or odd?

–Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (1863)

Compare and contrast the figure and bottles in the foreground with the reflection in the mirror. How are they different? A Bar at the Folies-Bergére(1882)

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New Movements in the Visual Arts

Impressionism• Realism of light, color

– Fidelity to visual perception, “innocent eye”

– Devotion to naturalism; how things ‘really’ look in nature

– Realism of light and color

– Records all colors without trying to blend them together

• Claude Monet (1840-1926): created the style of impression with the following revolutionary, controversial painting….

Impression: Sunrise (1872)

–Red Boats at Argenteuil (1875)

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New Movements in the Visual Arts

Impressionism

• Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)– Beauty of the world, happy activity– Women as symbols of life– Le Moulin de la Galette (1876)

• Edgar Degas (1834-1917)– Intimate moments as universal experience– Psychological penetration– “Keyhole visions”

How does Renoir’s painting combine realism and impressionism? Le Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Degas’s “The Rehearsal” (1874). How does this differ from classical and romantic art? What does it make ballet look like?

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How do Degas’s

nudes differ from the classical

nudes of the Renaissance?

Degas looked to represent the ordinary in his nudes.

The artist assumes odd

angles to give the sense of his subjects

being spied-on

New Movements in the Visual Arts

Post-Impressionism

• Rejection of Impressionism• Personal artistic styles that break with

both tradition of classical idealism and with impressionism; every artist is working in his own unique style with his own unique techniques– Georges Pierre Seurat (1859-1891)– Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

Seurat’s pointillist technique

Seurat’s pointillism up close

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-1886); Seurat’s unique, mathematical pointillist technique produces a rather unique looking image.

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Gauguin’s new study’s of everyday life And his interest in the exotic

New Movements in the Visual Arts

Post-Impressionism• Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

– Impose order on nature; does not represent things either as they really look or as they ideally should be

– Priority of abstract considerations; nature as fundamentally geometrical

– Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-1906)

• van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889)– Autobiographical, pessimistic art– Social, spiritual alienation A Cezanne still life; geometry and perspective are subtly

modified to suit artist’s personal sense of order.

One of Cezanne’s many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. What is the influence of impressionism here?

What kinds of shapes does Cezanne use here to impose order on nature?

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Van Gogh’s self portrait.

What is the first thing you notice?What is its effect?

What do you think the artist is trying to communicate about himself? (we’ve come a long way from Albrecht Dürer!)

Starry Night. What is Van Gogh communicating about the stars and the night?

Starry Night. What is Van Gogh communicating about the stars and the night?

The Night Café. A place “full of the terrible passions of humanity—a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime”

New Movements in the Visual Arts

Fauvism

• “Les Fauves”: the wild beasts of France

• Loss of traditional values of color, form

• Distortion of natural relationships

• Henri Matisse, The Red Studio (1911)

Matisse’s Red Studio Matisse’s “The Joy of Life” (1906). What makes things look so joyful here? How is this different from classical realism and impressionsim?

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New Movements in the Visual Arts

Expressionism

• Alarm and hysteria

• Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)– Autobiographical, social, psychological

• Die Brücke (The Bridge), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)– Emotional impact, alienation and loneliness

– Heckel (1883-1970), Nolde (1867-1956)

What is being expressed here in Edvard Munch’sThe Scream (1893)?

An Erich Heckel expressionist woodcut

What emotion is being produced here?

Emil Nolde’s “Die Sünderin (Christus und die Sünderin)” (1926)

Nolde’s “Pentecost.” How is this different from the many images of the pentecost found on medieval churches?

Cubism• Objects viewed as problems to be

solved according to the artist’s vision and through his analysis

• Solution to problem of how to represent three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional paintings

• Break object into different planes and present as if viewed from all sides at once—hence the reference to the three-dimensions of the cube

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Cezanne’s geometric paintings of landscapes is one of the inspirations for a new style of modern painting called cubism.

Picasso’s “Reservoir”(1907)

Note the similarity to Cezanne’s geometric technique, especially in the planar composition of the buildings.

Picasso’s “The Guitar Player”

Cubist artists were affected by the new technologies of film and the concept of a moving image constructed out of frames.

Cubist painters, led by Picasso and Braque, fragmented their images into two-dimensional, intersecting geometrical forms. They presented a vision of the subject that showed multiple aspects at the same time. The movement was highly revolutionary and influential.

Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907)

The evolution of Western human figuration is represnted in this painting, from koure (left), to classical (center) to geometrical (right).

Picasso,

“Three Musicians” (1921)

How has Picasso’s cubism changed over time?

Futurism

Art of speed, technology, and modernity

Art of speed, technology, and modernity

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Balla’s “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash” (1912)Umberto Boccioni’s “Unique Forms in the Continuity of Space” (1913)

In 1912, Boccioni had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece." Yet Unique Forms of Continuity in Space bears an underlying resemblance to a classical work over 2,000 years old, the Nike of Samothrace (see inset). There, however, speed is encoded in the flowing stone draperies that wash around, and in the wake of, the figure. Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man.

Severini’s “Armored Train in Action” (1915)

Painted during World War I