In the early years of the 1700s, at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, there was a shift away from the classicism and “Grand Manner” (based on the art of Nicolas Poussin) that had governed the art of the preceding 50 years in France, toward a new style that we call Rococo. The Palace of Versailles (a royal chateau that was the center of political power) was abandoned by the aristocracy, who once again took up residence in Paris. A shift away from the monarchy, toward the aristocracy characterizes the art of this period.

What kind of lifestyle did the aristocracy lead? Remember that the aristocracy had enormous political power as well as enormous wealth. Many chose leisure as a pursuit and became involved themselves in romantic intrigues. Indeed, they created a culture of luxury and excess that formed a stark contrast to the lives of most people in France. The aristocracy—only a small percentage of the population of France—owned over 90% of its wealth. A small, but growing middle class will not sit still with this for long (remember the French Revolution of 1789).

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 64.2 cm (Wallace Collection, London)

Fragonard’s The Swing

As with most Rococo paintings, the subject of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing is not very complicated. Two lovers have conspired to get an older fellow to push the young lady in the swing while her lover hides in the bushes. Their idea is that—as she goes up in the swing, she can part her legs, and her lover can get a tantalizing view up her skirt.

Sculpture on the left, female figure in the middle, and two cupid sculptures in the background (detail), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 64.2 cm (Wallace Collection, London)

The figures are surrounded by a lush, overgrown garden. A sculptured figure to the left puts his fingers to his mouth, as though saying “hush,” while another sculpture in the background shows two cupid figures cuddled together. The colors are pastel pale pinks and greens, and although we have a sense of movement and a prominent diagonal line—the painting lacks the seriousness of a Baroque painting.

If you look closely you can see the loose brushstrokes in the pink silk dress—and as she opens her legs, we get a glimpse of her stockings and garter belt. It was precisely this kind of painting that the philosophers of the Enlightenment were soon to condemn. They demanded a new style of art, one that showed an example of moral behavior, of human beings at their most noble.

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re looking at Francois Boucher’s “The Marquise de Pompadour.”

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] I have to, before we go into it, just say that I don’t like Rococo paintings, but I really like this one. There’s something really beautiful about it.

Dr. Zucker: [0:19] So what is it?

Dr. Harris: [0:19] I’m taken in by the pink ruffles, and the lace, and the cameo on her wrist, and the pouf that she’s using to powder herself, and the flowers on the bottom, and the pink of her cheeks, and the blue bow in her hair, and the little pink at the end of the brush that she’s using to put on her blush. I mean, it’s just really yummy.

[0:41] [laughs]

Dr. Zucker: [0:41] Let’s talk about those things for just a moment because they really do catch the eye. The lace and the pink ribbons have a kind of almost architectural quality to them that’s really extraordinary.

Dr. Harris: [0:52] Yeah, they have a kind of real volume to them.

Dr. Zucker: [0:54] They have volume and structure. You can feel the weight and the stiffness of the fabric. The pouf is the opposite of that. There’s tremendous focus, of course, on the cameo on her wrist, because it’s a portrait of her lover.

Dr. Harris: [1:07] King Louis XV.

Dr. Zucker: [1:08] That’s right, of France. Then contrast that with the rendering of her face, of her head, which is impossibly soft and sort of re-formed. Look at the size of the eyes in comparison to the size of the mouth. She’s become a child.

Dr. Harris: [1:25] That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that.

Dr. Zucker: [1:26] It’s almost as if we’re looking at Japanese cartoons. What are those called?

Dr. Harris: [1:30] Anime. I mean, it’s certainly not about her personality, who she was, and her humanity in any real way.

Dr. Zucker: [1:37] No, it’s her persona, right?

Dr. Harris: [1:38] Yes, it’s her persona. To me, that’s what the whole painting is about. It’s just about artifice. It’s like the artifice of the French court in the 18th century in the Rococo period. It’s about the artifice of the clothing, of the makeup. It’s just about surface.

Dr. Zucker: [1:52] It’s true. But this is a very intimate kind of surface, isn’t it?

Dr. Harris: [1:56] Well, that it’s the king’s lover, in that way?

Dr. Zucker: [1:58] Yeah, and also just the sense of proximity. We feel…

Dr. Harris: [2:01] That’s true. We’re very close to her.

Dr. Zucker: [2:03] Yeah, we feel as if we can reach out.

Dr. Harris: [2:04] We’re her best friend, and she’s about to share an intimate secret.

Dr. Zucker: [2:07] That’s exactly right. Then [our] eye rises up across her wrist, over the portrait of her lover, across her breast, up to her neck. Then finally we get to her face, which seems almost remote.

Dr. Harris: [2:20] The first thing that I noticed was all of those accessories of artifice. Then I looked at her face. I read the label. OK, this is the mistress to Louis XV. Then I thought, who is this woman? I looked at her face for clues. I didn’t get anything.

Dr. Zucker: [2:36] The sense of clarity with which the artifice, as you put it, is painted against the softness and the indeterminacy of her individuality is, I think, clearest in the collar. Look how incredibly crisp, almost frozen, that collar is, and then look at the softness. There is this wild sense of indeterminacy and mystery, I think.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767, oil on canvas (Wallace Collection, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Nicolas Delaunay after Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les Hazards heureux de l’Escarpolette [Happy Hazards of the Swing], 1782, etching and engraving (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

This oil painting known asThe Swingwas created by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard sometime during 1767 and 1768. A gentleman of the court reportedly requested the painter represent his mistress being pushed on a swing as he secretly admired her from below. While the figures in the work are not identifiable as portraits of specific individuals, their rich attire and leisurely activity underline their aristocratic status.

Such playful and erotic scenes were popular among the elite clientele Fragonard served. Unlike large-scale history paintings, or the widely collected genres of portraiture and landscape, these works were relatively small (81 x 64.2 cm in the case of The Swing) and intended for display in intimate rooms known as cabinets. Admiring the painting in the privacy of such a space, the patron and his inner circle would have appreciated its depiction of societal norms subverted for the pursuit of personal pleasure. The work’s strong appeal led to the production of a printed version by Nicolas Delaunay in 1782, which circulated among a broader, though still elite, audience of collectors.

Female figure (detail), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 64.2 cm (Wallace Collection, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Blind-Man’s Buff, 1750–52, oil on canvas, 46 x 36 inches (Toledo Museum of Art)

Play and pleasure

Swinging was one of several outdoor leisure activities common among elites in eighteenth-century France. Artists captured these popular games and pastimes in numerous works of art created for private patrons, such as two of Fragonard’s earlier paintings: Blind Man’s Bluff and The See-Saw. The See-Saw‘s portrayal of a young woman gleefully raising her arms and legs as she is suspended in mid-air is a clear precedent for the pose of the main figure in The Swing. Both women recline back as they lift their arms nearly above their heads and kick one leg up, revealing the area beneath their skirts. Eighteenth-century audiences would have considered this uninhibited behavior quite indecent under ordinary circumstances. However, within the context of leisure activities, the period’s established rules of social etiquette were often bent. 

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The See-Saw, 1750–52, oil on canvas, 120 x 94.5 cm (Museo Nacional Thyssean-Bornemisza, Madrid)

Intimate garden-parks like the one depicted in The Swing were common sites for aristocratic leisure. These outdoor spaces were viewed as less formal than domestic interiors. Situated on the grounds of private country estates and pleasure pavilions, garden-parks provided a retreat from the strict regulations of elite society. Here, French nobles could fashion themselves as carefree shepherds or milkmaids, a role-playing game alluded to by the swinging woman’s straw hat. In addition, the hidden alcoves and secret corners within these asymmetrical gardens enabled men and women to mingle more freely and couples to sneak away unchaperoned. By juxtaposing various natural and man-made elements, Fragonard emphasizes the freedoms and restrictions French elites simultaneously experienced when playing in these spaces. While the fountains and trelliswork on the right suggest efforts to manipulate nature, the overgrown plants and abandoned rake in the foreground underline that the will of nature—like that of love—can never be fully constrained.

Female figure (detail), Jean-Honoré

The same materialistic ideals which drive many men and women today have performed the same function throughout history. Those in positions of power often chose to commemorate their status through images. Some purchase works of art by famous artists to demonstrate their wealth, while others commission portraits of themselves as reminders of their prestige.

A young couple in the middle of the eighteenth century, Robert Andrews and Frances Andrews, opted for the second option to celebrate their marriage and subsequent combination of their families’ fortune. To depict their increased status, the Andrews’ commissioned a relatively unknown painter named Thomas Gainsborough to paint their portraits. Little could they anticipate that within a few decades it would be the artist, and not the subjects, that would make their portrait famous.

A conversation on canvas

Gainsborough’s portrait of the newly-married Robert and Frances Andrews is typical of the genre of “conversation pieces;” informal group portraits which gained popularity in the middle of the eighteenth century in England. Unlike the formal, straightforward portraits which characterized earlier periods and locations, the “conversation piece” usually presented a small group of individuals in an outdoor space, engaged in discussion and unaware of the viewer’s presence. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews diverts from that tradition, as its sitters are clearly reacting to Gainsborough’s presence, but their relaxed poses and location in the English countryside connects them to the “conversation piece” tradition.

At the time Gainsborough executed this painting, he was a 23-year-old emerging artist working in city of Ipswich in the rural English county of Suffolk. As a teenager he served an apprenticeship in London and also received instruction from Hubert-François Gravelot, a popular Rococo engraver working in England’s capital city. In 1749 Gainsborough moved with his wife to Ipswich, 70 miles from London and just 20 miles from his birthplace of Sudbury, in Suffolk County. Robert Andrews and his future wife, then known as Frances Carter, also grew up in Sudbury, in much wealthier families. In his portrait of the pair, Gainsborough captures the barely-veiled disdain in Frances Andrews’ eyes and her wry smile. She and her husband are well aware that the portraitist, whom they would have known since childhood, is well below them on the social ladder.

Fete galante

Poussinistes vs. Rubenistes

The Grand Tour

Moral Narratives

2 types of revolutions:

Industrial Revolution (began in Britain c. 1760), Political revolutions (U.S. in 1776, France in 1789)

Time of transitions:

Rule by aristocracy to democracy

Agriculture to industry

Rural life to urban life

Characteristics of Romantic Art:

Fascination with…

•Power of nature, the “Sublime”

•Exoticism/Orientalism

•Supernatural elements, fantasy, dreams

•Violence/horrific themes

•Longing for the past

•Intense emotion, passion

•Nationalism expressed through a return to one’s personal past (revival of folk stories, folk music, native myths and architecture)

(Less consistent in formal qualities; can have tight or loose brushwork)

Works to Know:

Chapter 27: The Modernist Revolution

Works to Know:

Early Modern Sculpture

Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space. 1928 (unique cast)

African Art

Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Fang peoples, 18^th-19th century

Reliquary guardian figure (mbulu ngulu), Gabon, Kota (or Bakota), Gabon, c. 1920

Headdress: Male Antelope (Ci Wara), 19th–20th century Mali, Bamako region

Akua’ba, n.d., (Asante people) Ghana, wood

Ife Portrait Heads, c. 14th-15th century, brass, 35 cm high, Ife, Africa

Fauvism

Henri Matisse. Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat). 1905

Henri Matisse. The Red Studio. 1911

Cubism

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon). 1907 (Pre-Cubism)

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911 (Analytical Cubism)

Pablo Picasso. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass. 1912 (Synthetic Cubism)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street, Dresden. 1908

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913

German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter

Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912

Vasily Kandinsky. Sketch I for   “Composition VII.” 1913

Paul Klee. The Niesen. 1915

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

Italian Futurism

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912

Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Responses to Modernism

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912

Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel, 1913

Marc Chagall. I and the Village. 1911

Giorgio de Chirico. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 1914 

Russian Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 1915 (dated 1914)

Kazimir Malevich, White on White, 1918

Ideas to Know:

Breaking rules

Looking for new inspiration: African Art, Cycladic Art, Folk Art, children’s art, stained glass

Fauvism: removing the naturalistic description function from color

Analytic Cubism: deconstructing space; showing more than one viewpoint at the same time; influence of Cezanne

Synthetic Cubism: building up images; use of collage; “real” vs. illusion

German Expressionism: Die Brücke: dissatisfaction with industrial modern life; looking to German past with woodblock prints

German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter: looking for spirituality and “universal truths;”

Abstract art vs. non-objective art, non-narrative art, non-representational art

Italian Futurism: sought to reject the past and bring Italy into the future; interest in new technology, speed, and movement

Russian Suprematism: “supremacy of feeling;” pro-Russian revolution; wanted to create a new vocabulary and language of art removed from the elitist past

Dada:

Hans Arp, Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917

Raoul Hausmann. Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age). ca. 1920

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar    Republic, 1919

Käthe Kollwitz. Never Again War! 1924

Surrealism:

Joan Miró. Composition. 1933

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29

Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931

Man Ray. The Gift. 1921 (1958 replica)

Meret Oppenheim. Object (Luncheon in Fur). 1936

Organic Sculpture of the 30’s:

Alexander Calder. Lobster Trap and Fish Tail. 1939

Henry Moore. Recumbent Figure. 1938

De Stijl:

Piet Mondrian. Composition (Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow). 1930

American Art between the Wars

Georgia O’Keeffe, Yellow Calla, 1926

Georgia O’Keeffe, Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, 1936

Stuart Davis, Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style. 1940.

American Regionalism

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

Harlem Renaissance

“In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities,” from the Migration of the Negro series, 1940-41

Mexican Art between the Wars

Diego Rivera, Flower Carrier, 1935

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939

Protest Art

Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937

Social Realism

Edward Hopper, Night Hawks, 1942

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, California. 1936

Precisionism

Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927

Surrealism: 1930’s; element of chance (like Dada); randomness related to dream states; juxtaposition of unrelated objects; exploration of the subconscious mind; dream images; stream of consciousness

De Stijl (The Style): Dutch movement; sought to create utopian environment through geometric abstraction; sought universal order that would make nationalism obsolete;
also called International Style and Neo-Plasticism

Regionalism: Representational; local (Midwest) imagery

Quizzes:

Escape Room Quiz: Art Between the Wars

Kahoot! (Art in America between the wars)

Chapter 29: Postwar to Postmodernism

Works to Know:

Abstract Expressionism: Action Painting

Jackson Pollock Autumn Rhythm: Number 30. 1950

Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Painting

Mark Rothko No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953

Post-Painterly Abstraction

Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea. 1952

Postwar Sculpture

Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral—Moon Garden Plus One. 1957–60

Post Abstraction

Robert Rauschenberg. Odalisk. 1955–58

Jasper Johns. Three Flags. 1958

Installation Art

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961 

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrors, 2017

Performance Art

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, Nov. 26, 1965

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein. Drowning Girl. 1963

Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1961–64

Minimalism

Ellsworth Kelly. Red Blue Green. 1963

Frank Stella. Empress of India. 1965

Donald Judd, Untitled. 1969

Earthworks

Robert Smithson. Spiral  Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. 1970

Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  Running Fence Sonoma and Marin counties, California. 1972–76

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

Feminist Art

Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party. 1979

Video Art

Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. 1995

Installation Art

Yayoi Kusama, A Dream I Dreamed, 2014

Ideas to Know:

Breaking Rules!

Abstract Expressionism (two branches—Action Painting and Color Field Painting):

         Influenced by Surrealism

Art about emotion, myth, universal forces

         Brought attention to the paint on the canvas (rather than hiding)

Brought NYC to the center of the art world

Post-Painterly Abstraction

         “Stain painting”

Post Abstraction

         “Combines”

Installation Art

         Art as experience

         Not collectable

Performance Art

         Art as life

         Improvisation; unpredictable

Pop Art:

Reaction to elitism of Abstract Expressionism; unemotional
Similar to Dada in love of ready-made, common objects

Sought a mass-produced look—accessible

Interested in mass media and pop culture

Minimalism:

         Unemotional

         Reduced to most basic parts

         “What you see is what you see”—denial of meaning

         The earth is the canvas

         Interactive

         Out of the gallery—less elitist

         Not collectable

Activist Art:

        Art as political statement