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Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819.  16’ 1” x 23’ 6”, Oil Paint on Canvas

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1800 - 1830: Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa

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1800 - 1830: Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa

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Keywords: Death, Romanticist, Gericault, Medusa, History, Betrayal, Loss, Pain, Settlers, Classism, Soldiers, Stranded

What is the subject matter and iconography?

This painting showcases the tragic event that took place on a ship known as “The Medusa” a few years previous. According to Khan Academy, This ship was a part of a fleet that sought to reclaim Senegal from the British as a French colony, however it ended up being ran aground. There was an estimated 400 people on the ship, many of them being settlers and soldiers. The upper class were given lifeboats to save them, however many lower class people (settlers and soldiers) had to fend for themselves on this raft. It was a gruesome and horrific event that resulted in numerous deaths and even cannibalism. In this painting we see people toppling each other and trying to survive, acting like animals. There are corpses piled onto each other and the color of their bodies shows us that their flesh is rotting. We can see the harsh waves and how the raft is hardly holding itself together with how many people are squished onto it. This painting gives us that stomach churning feeling of disaster after it has already struck.

What is the style?

The Raft of Medusa is a romanticist painting as it goes against what neoclassical paintings would usually do, the figures are not heroic or idealized in the slightest and it does not tell us a victorious story. The figures in this painting have faces filled with horror, grief, and hunger rather than triumph and joy. Everyone is clawing away at each other, as if to say “it’s every man for himself.” As Dr. Gand states in the “Romanticist Visons: Gros & Gericault” module page, “It speaks the hard truth that history means defeat, not just triumph; betrayal, not just heroism; and loss, not just gain.” This shows us how times are beginning to change and how artists are not idealizing certain events anymore.

Who was the original, historical audience for this artwork? How did the subject and style satisfy their desires? How did it fit their historical values and way of life?

The audience of this painting was the upper class and the academy. In many ways, this painting meets the requirements for the academy because of the way the figures are positioned. They are set in such a way that forms something almost like a “crescendo of this pyramid of figures,” (Khan Academy “Gericault, Raft of the Medusa” 2:42), looking orderly and disorderly at the same time. Some bodies are even posed based on Greek and Roman sculptures. This painting was antimonarchic because it shows the failure of the captain of the ship, who was appointed by the King. It tells the audience that the monarch can be careless and fail to protect people, and it was a way for Gericault to express this opinion to higher society.

Sources:

“Romanticist Visons: Gros & Gericault” module page written by Dr. Gand

“Gericault, Raft of the Medusa” video from Khan Academy

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Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849, Oil on canvas, 5′3′′ × 8′6′′ (1.6 × 2.59 m). Formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden; destroyed in World War II

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Hammering Conventions of Academic Art: The Stone Breakers 

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Hammering Conventions of Academic Art: The Stone Breakers 

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Keywords: Realism, Overlooked, Commitment to truth, Avant-garde, Laborers, Post-industrial revolution, Suffering, Inhumanity

What is the subject matter and iconography?

Source: Stokstad and Cothren, Art History, Ch 31, Mid- to Late Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe and the United States, “Realism and the Avant-Garde”

The subject matter of this painting includes two faceless laborers breaking stones. An older man and young boy, assumed to be his son, are hammering stones to form gravel used for roadbeds. Dressed in tattered clothing, the impoverished workers do back-breaking work.

Close to the ground, adjacent to the dirt and weeds, the figures are symbolized to be at the bottom of the world. They are set at the very bottom of the hill and shown a peak of the blue sky in the far right corner of the canvas. This is meant to represent the isolation of the lower class. Beneath the ruling class and stripped of human expression, the laborers are dehumanized.

According to Stokstad and Cothren, the laborers “...represent the disenfranchised peasants on whose backs modern life was being built.” We can’t see the men’s faces, the deliberate choice is used to comment on society’s treatment of lower classes—stripping them of their humanity and only seen for their bodies that provide labor.

This painting is commenting on how the socially dispossessed are treated. Society uses their bodies for brutal work and treats them as if they’re nothing.

What is the style?

Source: Stokstad and Cothren, Art History, Ch 31, Mid- to Late Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe and the United States, “Realism and the Avant-Garde”

Avant-garde is tied to the idea of progress, as it was a result of discontentment with

academic art and the failures to achieve equality after both the French and American Revolutions. Surrounded by violence, poverty, and unrest, a new movement emerged called Realism.

Courbet was a pioneering artist, being one of the first to consider himself a Realist. Realism was a representation of the truth, exhibiting the harsh realities of life for everyone—especially those previously underrepresented. It was unembellished, noncomforming, and provocative. Steering away from the idealization of classical traditions, Courbet used his art as a vehicle for sociopolitical criticism.

Who was the original, historical audience for this artwork? How did the subject and style satisfy their desires? How did it fit their historical values and way of life?

Source: Dr. Elizabeth Gand, Diablo Valley College course, Baroque to 20th Century Art History (197 SP24), course module page, “The Avant-Garde: ‘To the Barricades!’”

Academic art was authoritative and conservative. It was associated with classical and neoclassical artistic values. It established standards and essentially controlled what people value in art. Avant-garde artists like Courbet rejected what the academy established and was dedicated to portraying the hard truths of life.

The original audience for this artwork was a mix of aristocrats and intellectuals. The typical art patron in France during the mid-19th century subscribed to the Academy’s artistic philosophies. Courbet intended to provoke this audience when he introduced a 5′3′′ × 8′6′′ painting with the subject matter being laborers instead of a typically classical hero, rejecting the classical hero archetype. This grand scale was generally reserved for history paintings–breaking taboos of lower classes being represented with veneration. Critics were appalled by the elevation of peasant labor, not liking how Courbet served the wake-up call. He challenged prevailing notions of nobility in art, making a statement that all classes are worthy and deserving of representation.

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Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886, Oil on canvas,  6′ 10″ by 10′ 1″

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Dissecting a Newly Modernized World, Dot By Dot: Pointillism and Post-impressionism

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Dissecting a Newly Modernized World, Dot By Dot: Pointillism and Post-impressionism

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Keywords: Post-Impressionist, Modernization, Post-Haussmannization Paris, Pointillism, Divisionism, Color Science, Anti-Consumerist, Revolutionary, Stiffness, Color

What is the subject matter and iconography?

Source: Dr. Elizabeth Gand, Diablo Valley College course, Baroque to 20th Century Art History (197 SP24), course module page, "Georges Seurat's Pointillism"

As Dr. Gand explains in her video "Seurat Lecture", the subject of this painting "gives us a sense of History painting in an avant-garde context". Seurat achieves this through his use of scale and the depiction of real people in a real setting. It feels reminiscent of the way Gustave Courbet challenges conventions of History paintings through how he is depicting his subject matter.

Dr. Gand explains how there is a sense of frozen time as the people in the painting are suspended from motion in a strange aura of calmness. Although there is a sense of calmness, the people are stiff and faced away from the viewer. It's hard to feel comfortable with the upper-class stillness, as the subjects stiffly relax across from a working-class industrial neighborhood. In their stiffness there is no sense of openness, warmness, or play despite the warm park setting. To them, "even recreation is a pose", as one art critic is quoted in Dr. Gand's lecture.

Through these details, Seurat is making a commentary on the evolving Parisian lifestyle and how their culture of beauty and high class makes them alienated, stiff, and depressing. What at first may seem like a lively park setting, his way of freezing the upper-class Parisians in a sense of distant apathy, reveals a deeper critique of the city's evolving modernized lifestyle. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. But even the rich are caught in a cold, disconnected, and unfulfilling life, even when relaxing at a park. This separation from one another is emphasized by Seurat's pointillism, each person being made up of thousands of separate dots of color.

What is the style?

Source: Dr. Elizabeth Gand, Diablo Valley College course, Baroque to 20th Century Art History (197 SP24), course module page, "Georges Seurat's Pointillism"

In her video, "Seurat Lecture" Dr. Gand gives language to what makes Seurat's style so radical and fascinating, explaining, "Georges Seurat exhibited A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1886 with the last Impressionist group exhibition. It announced the style he had created-- referred to as divisionism, sometimes as chromoluminarism, also known as pointillism. What all three names refer to is the way he used color and brushwork." No one had seen such a technique being used before. Seurat is breaking boundaries beyond Impressionism, making his piece stand out among the other Impressionists' at the group exhibition. It pushes an already avant-garde movement even further, making him a forerunner of the Post-Impressionist movement.

Standing from a distance to this grand painting, you might just see a beautiful, colorful, soft scene of an afternoon at a park. As you get closer to Seurat's painting you would notice that each tiny detail is made up of hundreds of dots of paint. It's mesmerizing and mind-blowing. His achievement is a perfect demonstration of how he fits into the list of artists continuing to challenge the status-quo.

The green grass is filled with dots of many contrasting hues, intensities, and values, and would not just look green if you were right up against the painting. When perceived from a distance the colors would appear more luminous and intense than the same colors seen separately. On close inspection the strokes and colors would remain distinct and separate. The colors are striking in multiple different ways at multiple different viewpoints. This is the technique Dr. Gand refers to as pointillism and it was invented by Seurat in this painting.

(https://padlet.com/annabeerrss/art-as-an-integrative-experience-of-rejection-and-a-rapidly--wwlobm98ayh30931/wish/2990140401)

The evidence of the artist's hand has never been so clear in the history of painting. The word "divisionism" reflects perfectly how Seurat breaks down each color into a thousand tiny dots of different colors, while also adding another aspect of distance and separation to this painting. I believe his style of using fragmented dots can also symbolize the disconnected nature of Parisian's which Seurat is depicting as his subject matter.

Who was the original, historical audience for this artwork? How did the subject and style satisfy their desires? How did it fit their historical values and way of life?

Source: Dr. Elizabeth Gand, Diablo Valley College course, Baroque to 20th Century Art History (197 SP24), course module page, "Georges Seurat's Pointillism"

Despite his clear artistic devotion and revolutionary style invention, people at the time were not so eager to accept Seurat as an artist. Dr. Gand elaborates stating, "Critics and the public reacted to the painting with disbelief and suspicion". It really made Parisians touchy as the painting depicted their leisurely disconnected lifestyle of carelessly relaxing across from a lower class industrial neighborhood. The very Parisians depicted were most likely the same ones critiquing his painting, since they felt as though Seurat was calling out their absurd and apathetic lifestyle. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, was looked down on and scrutinized in the same way many of these avant-garde paintings were at the time.

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Georges Braque, Violin and Palette, 1909, Oil on canvas. (91.7 x 42.8 cm)

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A Complete Deconstruction of Life As We Know It

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A Complete Deconstruction of Life As We Know It

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Keywords: Cubism, modernism, abstraction, expressionism, primitivism, essence, feeling, Post-impressionism

What is the subject matter and iconography?

Braque's painting displays a violin, sheet music, and a palette (that hangs from a nail) in a vertical arrangement.

Everything is highly abstracted as you travel from the top to the bottom, in this descent of lines and shade. The nail on which the palette hans is depicted  in a much more realistic manner as compared to the rest of the piece's style. This choice not only highlights the contrast between this modern influx of abstraction and past of realism, but also illustrates a bringing together of the two into one cohesive piece.

What is the style?

The lack of concrete details points to its abstraction, and the added geometric style to its cubism.

Who was the original, historical audience for this artwork? How did the subject and style satisfy their desires? How did it fit their historical values and way of life?

As prior and around this time there has been a sudden uproar in technological advancements, people felt they were losing the nature of life and spiritual connection to their world. People were starting to focus inwards and on subjects relating to their mental states. There was [more] desire to learn and understand the workings of the mind and attempt to decipher their biological blueprints. The motivations, the emotions, the innate desires that humans have. A step into the world of visually describing the essence of humans, and what is was like to be one. A unique experience that only they could describe. Art was another medium in which to convey and satisfy the desire they had to understand their desires.