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Art Criticism and Social Protest in the Nineteenth Century

In some ways the 19th century had its own language, as terms and events which would
have been common knowledge 150 years ago have faded into history.
Warfare, often on a colossal scale, marked the 1800s. The Napoleonic Wars roiled
Europe, and the American Civil War threatened to permanently tear apart the young nation.
Other conflicts included revolutions throughout Latin America, the Crimean War, wars in the
western Pacific, and the Spanish-American War. The Monroe Doctrine and The Great Game
were turning points in international affairs.
The great powers of Europe clashed during the Napoleonic Wars, and decades later
they battled in the Crimea. In the later years of the 19th Century the Franco-Prussian War
rewrote the map of Europe. The 1800s will always bring to mind Trafalgar, Waterloo, and the
Charge of the Light Brigade.
Modern industry emerged in the 19th century thanks to such innovations as steam
power, steel production, textile mills, and mass production based on the principles of inventor
Eli Whitney. The whaling industry boomed for a time, and pumping oil from the ground
became a colossal new business. People rushed to mine gold and copper, and banking
powerhouses rose to prominence.
Despite the great advances of the 19th century, the period will also be known for
slavery. The slave trade was eventually eliminated, and in the United States the abolition
movement became a great moral force. The conflict centred around slavery eventually led the
United States into a tragic war between the states. On the other side of the world, in Russia,
the serfs were liberated.
Populations were on the move, therefore the population of the New World increased
dramatically as millions of immigrants arrived. Starting with the Irish during the Famine,
successive waves of immigrants arrived in the United States, and American cities swelled
with their numbers. Immigration also populated Australia, which had been a distant penal
colony.
Mark Twain coined the term "The Gilded Age" to describe conditions in the late
1800s, when a new class of very rich people reveled in ostentatious displays of wealth while
downtrodden workers organised for fair wages and safe factory conditions. The American


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south languished in the racist Jim Crow period, and the urban poor were chronicled by writers
such as journalist Jacob Riis.

The 19th century can be remembered for some notorious murders, including the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the double murder which may have been committed by
Lizzie Borden, and a murder of a New York City prostitute which essentially created the
template for tabloid newspaper coverage.
Great minds transformed the world throughout the 1800s. Washington Irving, Charles
Dickens, and Walt Whitman made their mark in literature, while Charles Darwin, Karl Marx,
and Louis Pasteur shook up other disciplines. Impressionism startled the art world. Great
museums and libraries flourished, books were made widely available, and literacy became
widespread.
Here are some random literary and artistic movements of the 19
th
century which
dominated the period.

Romanticism
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary,
and intellectual motion that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in
most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to
the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt on the aristocratic social and political norms of
the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalisation of nature. It was
embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a good impact on
historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and
complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and
radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more


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eloquent.The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic origin of aesthetic
experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and
aweespecially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and
its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and aged custom to
something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic, and argued for a "natural"
epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and
customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to
elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically
medieval in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and
industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes
more true than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to
escape.

Defining Romanticism
Defining the nature of Romanticism may be approached from the starting juncture of
the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The magnitude the
Romantics placed on untrammelled feeling is summed up in the remark of the German painter
Caspar David Friedrich that "the artist's feeling is his law". To William Wordsworth poetry
should be "the spontaneous cataclysm of powerful feelings". In order to truly express these
feelings, the content of the art must come from the imagination of the artist, with as little
holdback as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of. Coleridge
was not alone in believing that there were natural laws governing these matters which the
imagination, at least of a good creative artist, would willingly and unconsciously follow
through artistic inspiration if left alone to do so.










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As well as rules, the influence of models from other works would impede the creator's
own imagination, so originality was absolutely essential. The concept of the intellect, or artist
who was able to produce his own original work through this process of "creation from
nothingness", is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This idea is often
called "romantic originality."

Eugne Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827






Not essential to Romanticism, but so deep as to be normative, was a strong belief and
interest in the importance of nature. Even so this is particularly in the effect of nature upon the
artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the usually very social art of
the Enlightenment, Romantics were disbelieving of the human world, and tended to believe
that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed
its audiences directly and personally with what was intended to be felt as the personal say of
the artist. So, in literature, "much of romantic poesy invited the reader to identify the
protagonists with the poets themselves".
According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and uneasy spirit, seeking
violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually
changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for
perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a
passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of
expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals."
Unsurprisingly, given its rejection on principle of rules, Romanticism is not easily
defined, and the period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries
and different artistic media or areas of account. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as
taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be
found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very


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average view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. In other fields and
other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical
Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic
power as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are
described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 194648. However in most
fields the Romantic Period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.
The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution
(17891799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the
political and social unrest that went along with them, served as the background for
Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics had, in the words of one of their
number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between fights, attended school to the rolling of
drums".
In ideology and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as
disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the very idea of
moral absolutes and agreed values, leading to something like the melting away of the very
notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and
totalitarianism, with a gradual recapture coming only after the catharsis of World War II. For
the Romantics, Berlin says, in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity
and sincerity of the chase of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and
groups states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism,
where the notion of ageless models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to
convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in
spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a
mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but
create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals define the self-
expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the
demands of some "external" voice church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of
taste is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense
imaginative.
The end of The Romantic era is marked in some zones by a new style of Realism,
which affected literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through
Verismo opera. This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and


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Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya were important angels of Realism in their respective
media. However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style
against which Realists rebelled, continued to prosper in many fields for the rest of the century
and beyond. In music such works from after about 1850 are referred to by some authors as
"Late Romantic" and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not
usually use these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian"
avoids having to characterise the period further.
In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary sanguinity and belief that the world
was in the process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art
became more conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with
the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia,
feelings that great change was underway or just about to come were still feasible. Displays of
intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did the exotic and historical settings pioneered
by the Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often
replaced with careful technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist,
late 19th-century art was often extremely detailed, and ego was taken in adding authentic
details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about the
nature and purpose of art, above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, continued to be
important for later generations, and often underlie modern views, despite of opposition from
theorists.

Realism
Realism in the arts may be generally defined as the attempt to represent subject matter
truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and
supernatural elements. The term originated in the 19th century, and was used to describe the
work of Gustave Courbet and a group of painters who rejected idealisation, focusing instead
on common life.
In its most specific feel, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the
1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated
French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against the exotic
subject content and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. First, it
sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy,


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without avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. Realist works depicted people of all
classes in situations that appear in average life, and often reflected the changes produced by
the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with
the introduction of photography a new visual origin that created a desire for people to
produce representations which look objectively real.
Broadly speaking, realist works of art are those that, in revealing a truth, may
emphasise the ugly or bedraggled, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or Kitchen
sink realism. The motion even managed to impact on opera, where it is called Verismo, with
contemporary working-class heroines such as Carmen, who works in a cigarette factory, and
Mimi in La bohme.
Realism as a style or movement needs to be distinguished from "realism" as a term to
describe the very accurate detailed and accurate representation in art of the visual appearance
of scenes and objects. Realism in this latter sense is also called naturalism, mimesis or
illusionism. It is found at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training,
and the escape of stylisation. It becomes especially marked in European painting in the Early
Netherlandish painting of Jan van Eyck and other artists in the 15th century. Even so such
"realism" is often used to depict, for example, angels with wings, which were not things the
artists had ever seen in real life. Equally, 19th century Realist painters such as Courbet are by
no means especially noted for precise and careful depiction of visual appearances; in
Courbet's time that was more often a character of Academic painting, which very often
depicted with great skill and care scenes that were contrived and artificial, or imagined
historical scenes. It is the choice and treatment of subject matter that defines Realism as a
movement in painting, rather than the careful concentration to visual appearances. Other
terms such as naturalism, naturalistic and veristic do not escape the same obscurity, though
the distinction between "realistic" and "realist" is often useful, as is the term "illusionistic"
for the accurate rendering of visual appearances.


douard Manet, Breakfast in the Studio
(the Black Jacket), New Pinakothek, Munich, Germany,
1868



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In general, Realists depicted everyday subjects and situations in coeval settings, and
attempted to depict individuals of all social classes in a similar manner. Classical idealism and
Romantic emotionalism and drama were avoided equally, and often sordid or chaotic
elements of subjects were not smoothed over or omitted. Social realism emphasises the
depiction of the working class, and treating them with the same seriousness as other classes in
art, but realism, as the avoidance of artificiality, in the treatment of human relations and
feelings was also an aim of Realism. Treatments of contents in a heroic or sentimental manner
were equally rejected.
As an art movement Realism was a reaction in the mid 19th century against what was
seen as the artificiality of Romanticism, led by Courbet in France. It propagate across Europe
and was influential for the rest of the century and farther, but as it became adopted into the
mainstream of painting it becomes less common and useful as a term to define artistic style.
It has been used for a number of later movements and currents in art, some involving
careful illusionistic representation, such as Photorealism, and others the depiction of "realist"
subject matter in a social sense, or attempts at both.

The Realist Movement
The Realist movement began in the mid-19th century as a response to Romanticism
and History painting. In favour of depictions of 'real' life, the Realist painters used common
drones, and ordinary people in ordinary surroundings engaged in real activities as subjects for
their works. Its chief exponents were Gustave Courbet, Jean-Franois Millet, Honor
Daumier, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. According to Ross Finocchio, of the Department
of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Realists used unprettified item
depicting the existence of ordinary contemporary life, coinciding in the contemporaneous
naturalist literature of mile Zola,Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.

Illusionistic realism



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Lord Leighton's Cimabue's Madonna Carried in Procession of 1853-55 is at the end of
a long tradition of illusionism in painting, but is not Realist in the sense of Courbet's work of
the same monthlies.
The evolution of increasingly accurate representation of the visual appearances of
things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the accurate depiction of the assay
of humans and animals, of perspective and effects of distance, and of detailed effects of light
and colour. The Art of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe achieved remarkably lifelike
depictions of animals, and Ancient Egyptian art developed assemblys involving both
stylisation and idealisation that nevertheless allowed very effective depictions to be produced
very widely and consistently. Ancient Greek art is commonly recognised as having made
great progress in the representation of anatomy, and has remained an influential miniature
ever since. No original works on panels or walls by the great Greek painters survive, but from
literary accounts, and the surviving oeuvre of derivative works (mostly Graeco-Roman works
in mosaic) it is clear that illusionism was highly valued in painting. Pliny the Elder's famous
story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC may well be a
legend, but indicates the aspiration of Greek painting. As well as accuracy in shape, light and
colour, Roman paintings show an unscientific but effective lore of representing distant objects
smaller than closer ones, and representing regular geometric forms such as the roof and walls
of a room with perspective. This progress in illusionistic effects in no way meant a rejection
of idealism; statues of Greek gods and heroes attempt to define with accuracy idealised and
beautiful forms, though other works, such as heads of the famously ugly Socrates, were
allowed to fall below these ideal standards of beauty. Roman portraiture, when not under too
much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its motives.

Bas-de-page of the Baptism of Christ,
"Hand G" (Jan van Eyck), Turin-Milan
Hours. An advanced illusionistic work,
with the dove of the Holy Ghost in the
sky.


The art of Late Antiquity famously rejected illusionism for expressive power, a change
already well underway by the time Christianity began to affect the art of the elite. In the West
classical standards of illusionism did not begin to be reached again until the Late medieval or


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Early Renaissance period, and were helped by the development of new techniques of oil
painting which allowed very cagey and precise effects of light to be painted using very small
brushes and several layers of paint and glaze. Scientific methods of representing perspective
were developed in Italy and gradually spread across Europe, and accuracy in anatomy
rediscovered under the influence of classical art. As in classical times, idealism remained the
norm.
The accurate depiction of geography in painting had also been developing in Early
Netherlandish and Renaissance painting, and was then brought to a very high level in 17th
century Dutch Golden Age painting, with very subtle techniques for depicting a range of
weather conditions and degrees of natural light. After being another development of Early
Netherlandish painting, by 1600 European portraiture could give a very good image in both
painting and sculpture, though the subjects were often idealised by smoothing features or
giving them an artificial pose. Still life paintings, and still life elements in other works, played
a considerable role in developing illusionistic painting, though in the Netherlandish tradition
of flower painting they long lacked "realism", in that flowers from all seasons were typically
used, again from the habit of assembling compositions from individual drawings, or as a
deliberate convention; the large displays of bouquets in vases, though close to modern
displays of cut flowers that they have influenced, were entirely atypical of 17th century
habits, where flowers were displayed one at a time. Intriguingly, having led the development
of illusionic painting, still life was to be equally significant in its abandonment in Cubism.


Woodcutting,
miniature from a set of Labours of the Months by
Simon Bening, 1550


The depiction of ordinary subjects in art also has a long history, though it was
constantly squeezed into the edges of compositions, or shown at a smaller scale. This was
partly because art was expensive, and usually commissioned for specific religious, political or
personal reasons, that allowed only a relatively small measure of space or effort to be devoted
to such scenes. Drolleries in the margins of archaic illuminated manuscripts sometimes


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contain small scenes of everyday life, and the development of perspective created large
background areas in many scenes set outdoors that could be made more interesting by
including small figures going about their everyday lives. Medieval and Early Renaissance art
by convention usually showed non-sacred figures in contemporary dress, so no adjustment
was needed for this even in religious or historical scenes set in aged times.
Early Netherlandish painting brought the painting of portraits as low down the social
scale as the booming merchants of Flanders, and in some of these, notably the Arnolfini
Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1434), and more often in religious scenes such as the Merode
Altarpiece include very detailed depictions of middle-class interiors full of lovingly depicted
objects. Even so these objects are at least largely there because they carry layers of complex
significance and symbolism that undercut any commitment to realism for its own sake. Cycles
of the Labours of the Months in late medieval art, of which many examples ride from books
of hours, concentrate on peasants labouring on different tasks through the seasons, often in a
rich landscape background, and were significant both in developing landscape art and the
depiction of everyday working-class people.
In the 16th century there was a enthusiasm for the depiction in large paintings of
scenes of people working, especially in food markets and kitchens: in many the food is given
as much prominence as the workers. Artists included Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim
Beuckelaer in the Netherlands, working in an essentially Mannerist style, and in Italy the
young Annibale Carracci in the 1580s, using a very down to world unpolished style, with
Bartolomeo Passerotti somewhere between the two. Pieter Bruegel the Elder pioneered large
panoramic scenes of peasant life. The Le Nain brothers in France and many Flemish artists
including Adriaen Brouwer and David Teniers the Elder and Younger painted peasants, but
little townsfolk. In the 18th century small paintings of working people working remained
favourite, mostly drawing on the Dutch tradition, and especially featuring Realism or
naturalism as the depiction of ordinary, everyday subjects.
Much art depicting ordinary people, especially in the form of prints, was comic and
sententious, but the mere poverty of the subjects seems relatively rarely have been part of the
moral message. From the mid-19th century onwards this changed, and the difficulties of life
for the broke were emphasized. Despite of this trend coinciding with large-scale migration
from the countryside to cities in most of Europe, painters still tended to paint poor rural
people, largely leaving illustrators such as Gustave Dor to show the horrors of city slums.


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Crowded city street scenes were favourite of Impressionists and related painters, especially
ones showing Paris.
Realism had a major impact on epic writings, especially on novels and drama. One of
the main features of this is the interest given by writers on the ratios between the human and
the environment, between individuals and society. The essential instrument of the author's art
is the close observation of reality and its objective reflection on creation.The elements of a
realist style can be identified in different cultures and historical ages.
In the second part of the 19th century, in Europe, Realism gained status of a current, of
an aesthetic orientation, theorised by artists and critics and illustrated through numerous
creations. Very well known authors of realist novels are considered to be Honor de Balzac,
Stenhdal and Gustave Flaubert in France, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace
Thackeray in England, Lev Nikolaevici Tolstoi, Feodor Mihailovici Dostoievski and Ivan
Sergheevici Turgheniev in Russia.
Realist novels have the following characteristics:
Themes: upstarting, avarice, immorality, etc.
Motifs: the upstart, the miser
Composition: objective, omniscient and omnipresent narrator
Subjects: inspired from reality
Action: multi-leveled.
Conflicts: social, psychological, political, etc.
Characters: fully developed
Closed structure.
Use the technique of detail.
Underline the relation between the environment and the character.
Romanian representatives of realism:
Costache Negruzzi
Nicolae Filimon
Ion Luca Caragiale
Liviu Rebreanu
Realism contains a wide variety of theories about international relations. All these
diverse theories start from the statement that the countries are motivated by power/security
and less by ideals.


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Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-
based artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and
1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France.
Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush
strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities
(often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of
movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual
angles.

Beginnings
The name of the artistic current shares its name with Claude Monde, Impression Sunrise.
For the first time in history the painters begin to create art outside of their workshops.
The impressionist artists study the way light modifies the way we perceive the surrounding
objects.

Impression Sunrise-1872
Claude Monet


In the middle of the 19th century a time
of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt
Paris and waged war the Acadmie des
Beaux Arts dominated French art. The Acadmie was the preserver of traditional French
painting standards of content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits
were valued (landscape and still life were not), and the Acadmie preferred carefully finished
images that looked realistic when examined closely. Colour was somber and conservative,
and traces of brush strokes were suppressed, concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and
working techniques.
Monet, Sisley, Morisot and Pissarro may be considered the purest Impressionists, in
their consistent pursuit of an art of spontaneity, sunlight and colour. Degas rejected much of


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this, as he believed in the primacy of drawing over colour and belittled the practice of painting
outdoors.

Painting Out of Doors

The Impressionists loved painting out of doors. The ever face of nature lent itself
perfectly to their interests in capturing fleeting moments of light and color. They used broken
brush work and prismatic to convey nature's mutability. Radicals in their time they
constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and
contours, following the example of painters such as Eugne Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner.
They also painted realistic scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors.

View of the Saint-Martin Canal
Paris, 1870
Alfred Sisley






Reading- 1873
Berthe Morisot

Among the artists of the core group (minus Bazille, who had died in the Franco-Prussian
War in 1870), defections occurred as Czanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley, and Monet,
abstained from the group exhibitions so they could submit their works to the Salon.
Disagreements arose from issues such as Guillaumin's membership in the group, championed
by Pissarro and Czanne against opposition from Monet and Degas, who thought him
unworthy. Degas invited Mary Cassatt to display her work in the 1879 exhibition, but he also


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caused dissension by insisting on the inclusion of Jean-Franois Raffalli, Ludovic Lepic, and
other realists who did not represent Impressionist practices, causing Monet in 1880 to accuse
the Impressionists of "opening doors to first-come daubers". The group divided over
invitations to Paul Signac and Georges Seurat to exhibit with them in 1886. Pissarro was the
only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions.
The individual artists achieved few financial rewards from the Impressionist
exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance and support. Their
dealer, Durand-Ruel, played a major role in this as he kept their work before the public and
arranged shows for them in London and New York. Although Sisley died in poverty in 1899,
Renoir had a great Salon success in 1879. Monet became secure financially during the early
1880s and so did Pissarro by the early 1890s. By this time the methods of Impressionist
painting, in a diluted form, had become common place in Salon art.

Content and composition

Prior to the Impressionists, other painters, notably such 17th-century Dutch painters as
Jan Steen, had emphasized common subjects, but their methods of composition were
traditional. They arranged their compositions so that the main subject commanded the
viewer's attention. The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background
so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger
reality captured as if by chance. Photography was gaining popularity, and as cameras became
more portable, photographs became more candid. Photography inspired Impressionists to
represent momentary action, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-
day lives of people.
The development of Impressionism can be considered partly as a reaction by artists to
the challenge presented by photography, which seemed to devalue the artist's skill in
reproducing reality. Both portrait and landscape paintings were deemed somewhat deficient
and lacking in truth as photography "produced lifelike images much more efficiently and
reliably".


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Jardin Sainte-Adresse, 1867,
Claude Monet


Another major influence was Japanese art prints (Japonism), which originally came
into France as wrapping paper on imported goods. The art of these prints contributed
significantly to the "snapshot" angles and unconventional compositions that became
characteristic of Impressionism. An example is Monet's Jardin Sainte-Adresse, 1867, with
its bold blocks of color and composition on a strong diagonal slant showing the influence of
Japanese prints.


A Bar at the Folies-Bergre, douard
Manet





On the Terrace, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1881




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Post-Impressionism

In 1910, the British artist and art critic Roger Fry used the term Post-Impressionism,
often spelled Postimpressionism, to refer to the development of French art since Manet. Fry
employed the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition, entitled Manet and the Post-
Impressionists. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism as a form of rejecting its
limitations: they continued using vivid colours, often dense applications of paint, and real-life
subject matter, but they showed more inclination towards emphasizing geometric forms,
distorting form for expressive effect, and using peculiar or random colour.
The Post-Impressionists were unhappy with the lack of importance of subject matter
and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not entirely agree during
the process. Georges Seurat and his followers were intensely concerned with Pointillism, the
systematic use of little dots of colour. Paul Czanne attempted to restore a sense of order and
structure to painting, so as to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the
art of the museums" (Huyghe, Rene: Impressionism). He achieved this by reducing objects to
their elementary shapes while retaining the saturated colours of Impressionism. The
Impressionist Camille Pissarro tried out Neo-Impressionist ideas between the mid-1880s and
the early 1890s. Not being contented with what he referred to as romantic Impressionism, he
investigated Pointillism which he named scientific Impressionism before turning back to a
purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life.

Vincent van Gogh used colour and rousing
swirling brush strokes to express his feelings and state of mind. In spite of the fact that they
often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists did not always agree on a cohesive
movement. Younger painters during the late 19
th
century and early 20
th
century worked in
geographically disparate regions and in different stylistic categories, such
as Fauvism and Cubism.
Defining Post-Impressionism

Poster of the 1889 Exhibition of Paintings by
the Impressionist and Synthetist Group, at Caf des Arts,
known as the The Volpini Exhibition, 1889.




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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
Portrait ofmile Bernard, 1886,
Tate Gallery London






When the term was coined by Roger Fry in the title of the exhibition of modern French
painters: Manet and the Post-Impressionists, most of the artists in the exhibition were younger
than the Impressionists. Fry later explained that these artists needed to be named for purposes
of convenience, thus stating their position in time comparatively to the Impressionist
movement. John Rewald, an American scholar of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, is
the author of one of the standard works on the movement, entitled Post-Impressionism: From
Van Gogh to Gauguin (1956). He considered it to continue his History of
Impressionism (1946), and signalled that a "subsequent volume dedicated to the second half
of the post-impressionist period", Post-Impressionism: From Gauguin to Matisse, was to
follow. Extending the period covered to other artistic movements derived from
Impressionism and confined to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rewald concentrated on
notable early Post-Impressionist artists, active in France: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Redon,
and their relations, including the artistic circles they frequented (or they were in opposition
to): Neo-Impressionism, Cloisonnism, Synthetism, Pont-Aven School, Symbolism.
In addition, in his foreword to Post-Impressionism, Rewald opted for a second volume
featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau "le Douanier", Les Nabis and Czanne, as well
as the Fauves, the young Picasso and Gauguin's last trip to the South-Sea; this was meant to
expand the period covered at least into the first decade of the 20th centuryyet this second
volume remained unfinished.


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Camille Pissarro, Haying at Eragny,
1889, Private Collection A Century of
Turmoil


Shortly after the New Year in 1848, Europe exploded into revolution. From Paris to
Frankfurt to Budapest to Naples, liberal protesters rose up against the conservative
establishment. To those living through the cataclysmic year, it seemed rather sudden;
however, hindsight offers valuable warning signs.
The year 1846 witnessed a severe famine - Europe's last serious food crisis. Lack of
grain drove up food and other prices while wages remained stagnant, thus reducing consumer
demand. With consumers buying less and less, profits plummeted, forcing thousands of
industrial workers out of their jobs. High unemployment combined with high prices sparked
the liberal revolt. The subsequent events in February 1848 in France made Austria's Prince
Clemens von Metternich's saying seem true: "When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold."
Moderate liberals--lawyers, doctors, merchants, bourgeoisie--began pushing actively
for extension of suffrage through their "banquet campaign," named thus because its leaders
attempted to raise money by giving rousing speeches at subscribed dinners in France's major
urban areas. When on February 22, 1848, Paris officials canceled the scheduled banquet,
fearing organized protest by the middle and working classes, Parisian citizens demonstrated
against the repression. Skilled workers, factory laborers, and middle class liberals poured into
the streets. The National Guard, a citizen militia of bourgeois Parisians, defected from King
Louis-Philippe, and the army garrison stationed in Paris joined the revolutionary protesters as
well. Louis-Philippe attempted reform, but the workers rejected the halfhearted changes. The
king fled and the demonstrators proclaimed the Second Republic on February 24th.
The overthrow of the monarchy set off a wave of protest throughout east and central
Europe, led by radical liberals and workers who demanded constitutional reform or complete
government change. In March, protests in the German provinces brought swift reform from


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local princes while Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia yielded to revolts in Berlin by
promising to create a Prussian assembly. The collapse of autocracy in Prussia encouraged
liberals in the divided Germany provinces to join together at the Frankfurt Assembly to frame
a constitution and unite the German nation. Meeting in May 1848, the convention was
populated by middle class civil servants, lawyers, and intellectuals dedicated to liberal reform.
However, after drawing the boundaries for a German state and offering the crown to Friedrich
Wilhelm, the Kaiser refused in March 1849, dooming hopes for a united, liberal Germany.
In Austria, students, workers, and middle class liberals revolted in Vienna, setting up a
constituent assembly. In Budapest, the Magyars led a movement of national autonomy, led by
patriot Lajos Kossuth. Similarly, in Prague, the Czechs revolted in the name of self-
government. In Italy, new constitutions were declared in Tuscany and Piedmont, with the goal
of overthrowing their Austrian masters. Here, middle class liberals pushed the concept of
Italian unification alongside the defeat of the Austrians with the help of the Young Italy
movement, founded in 1831 by nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian patriot who favored a
democratic revolution to unify the country. In February 1849, Mazzini led a democratic revolt
against the Pope in Rome, becoming head of the Republic of Rome later that month. By
attacking the Pope, the democrats went too far. The self-proclaimed protectors of the Pope,
the French, moved in and defeated Mazzini's Roman legion. The Pope was restored and a
democratic Italy collapsed, for now.
Meanwhile, from August 1848, the Austrian army soundly defeated every revolt in its
empire. In Vienna, in Budapest, in Prague, the Austrians legions crushed the liberal and
democratic movements, returning the empire to the conservative establishment that ruled at
the beginning of 1848. Nothing had come of the revolutions of 1848.

Map of Europe, showing the major events of 1848 and 1849


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There were multiple memories of the Revolutions. Democrats looked to 1848 as a
democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity. Marxists
denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the
legitimate demands of the proletariat. For nationalists, 1848 was the springtime of hope, when
newly emerging nationalities rejected the old multinational empires. They were all bitterly
disappointed in the short run. The year 1848, at best, was a glimmer of future hope, and at
worst, it was a deadweight that strengthened the reactionaries and delayed further progress.
In the post-revolutionary decade after 1848, little had visibly changed, and most
historians considered the revolutions a failure, given the seeming lack of permanent structural
changes.

The crises of the 19th century
European Nihilism in the 19th century was no other than the explicit cry for the
despair in the futility of Western Reason. In the 19th century in Europe, the basis on which
Western history had developed for thousand of years, i.e., the foundation of culture, religion,
philosophy and arts, was collapsing. The ground on which the human existence depended was
totally shaken and the being of our own existence became hopelessly questionable. The Crisis
was indeed about Western Reason.
The new era of Europe arrived precisely at the "spiritual situation" where neither ideal
of culture, purpose, unity, nor meaning in life could be found any longer. It was European
Nihilism which Nietzsche named the Logic of Decay and Disruption.
Bruno Bauer indicated in his "Die Russen und das Germanische Volk"(1853) that the
demise of philosophy, the meaninglessness of the academic life, the destruction of theology
were everywhere, and anything which could claim a place in world history had its place taken
by sciences and technologies, technical trade school, political and economic enslavement,
hopelessness for the future vision, and the absence of morality.
Proudhon predicted the proletarian hegemony in Qu'est-ce-que la Proprit? (1840).
Marx parted himself from Hegel's speculative thinking by the name of Social Praxis, as did
Kierkegaard by the name of Ethical Action. It was Marx who pointed out that the bourgeois
truth lacks passionate commitment. In the face of the rule and exploitation of the world by
means of the progress of technologies and inventions, Marx saw as necessary consequences of
the control of Western Reason the self alienation of human from oneself in the mass


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industrialization. By shifting the eschatological completion of Western history to tomorrow's
communistic society, however, Marx attempted to give hope and vision for the exploited
proletariat and, by giving the metaphysical, politico-economic theorization for the proletarian
revolution, he attempted to show the possibility towards communism as being necessary and
inevitable. We had to wait, however, more than one and a half centuries to see what a grand
illusion Marx' vision for the Proletarian Revolution was as the sole means of liberation of
human self-alienation and exploitation of humanity.
European Nihilism began to be "fashionable" in the middle of the 19th century in
France by Flaubert (e.g. the planned novel Bourvard et Pecuchet) and Baudelaire (the planned
poems titled Le Fin du Monde).
The world would come to an end, so describes Baudelaire; we are going to be
destroyed by the Progress of Modern Civilisation that we believed that we had lived for. We
are discovering only a great illusion and annui in the past and finding no hope for the future.
We can create an artificial heaven in order to thoroughly enjoy decadent pleasures.
For many people the nineteenth century was a time of profound and accelerated
change, one in which, as the poet and writer Thomas Arnold remarked, it seemed possible to
live the life of three hundred years in thirty.


A Gateway to the 19th Century: The William Steinway Diary, 18611896






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References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century
2. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5670
3. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts)
5. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism/
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
7. http://arthistory.about.com/od/modernarthistory/a/Post-Impressionism-Art-History-
101-Basics.htm
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Impressionism