by Jeanne Willette | Sep 17, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
ÉDOUARD MANET AND “THE (FEMALE) NUDE” Unlike his predecessor, Gustave Courbet who carefully directed the critical discourse around his art, Édouard Manet was far more taciturn. When he spoke, it was in fragments, causal remarks, rarely buttressed by explanations...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 14, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
ÉDOUARD MANET AND THE SALON Part One Like the career of Gustave Courbet, the career of Édouard Manet breaks into two segments. As with all aspiring artists, Manet had to make his mark, and he chose to call attention to himself through a series of paintings that...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 10, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
Art-for-Art’s-Sake in Context In the Salon of 1846, the poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire argued that average people (in modern clothes) were as heroic as any Roman heroes of ancient times. In the waning days of the July Monarchy, the Greco-Roman legends...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 3, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE RISE AND FALL OF GUSTAVE COURBET Part Two The early career of Gustave Courbet is discussed within the historical context of class struggles during the middle of the nineteenth century. The Realism in Courbet’s paintings of the 1850s manifested itself not...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 3, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
AVANT-GARDE REALISM IN FRANCE: GUSTAVE COURBET In 1845, The art critic, Théophile Thoré (who “discovered” the Dutch artist, Jan Vermeer) complained that French art was “…without system, without direction, and abandoned to individual fantasy.”...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 27, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE Like many writers before and after him, Baudelaire wrote without specific commission, on “spec” as it were. This essay on Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, was actually written in 1860 and would not be...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 27, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE RURAL REALISM OF GUSTAVE COURBET Part One As a self-proclaimed “Realist” in a highly charged political atmosphere, Gustave Courbet challenged the conventions of the French Salon system. For ten years, Courbet had waited his chance to break through in...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 20, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
BAUDELAIRE AND MODERNITY Every age needs its observer and every era requires an interpreter. To elevate the culture above mere description, that individual has to be an odd cross between a poet and a reporter. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a renegade poet, a...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 13, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
BAUDELAIRE AS ART CRITIC “We are going to be impartial. We have no friends—that is a great thing—and no enemies.” Thus Charles Baudelaire began his career as an art critic with the Salon of 1845. With a tone we suspect to be sardonic, the young writer...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 13, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
SINCERITY AND ARTIFICE IN REALISM England and France By the middle of the nineteenth century, Realism was an international movement. In England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were the rebellious Realists, challenging the classicism of the Academy. The English artists...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 6, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES AND REALISM Art history has exorcised Pre-Raphaelites from the canon of “correct” Modern art, but the PRB was the first group to self-consciously declare themselves avant-garde artists. The small group set themselves apart from the major art...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 30, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
Avant-Garde Realism in England: Coping with Contemporary Life The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853) Debuting in the revolutionary year of 1848 under the mysterious acronym “PRB,” the paintings showed a virtuoso demonstration of technical prowess in painting and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 30, 2010 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
REALISM IN EUROPE Part Two Because art history tends to focus towards all things French, French “Realism” is often considered the exemplar of European Realism. Given that the British did not experience a violent Revolution in 1848, it is certainly correct...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 23, 2010 | Modern, Modern Art
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723-1792) Royal Academy in England: Classicism and Conservatism Although the Royal Academy in England was established one hundred years later than the Royal Academy in France, England’s academic system was part on an ongoing rivalry for dominance...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 16, 2010 | Modern, Modern Art
THE AVANT-GARDE IN FRANCE The Generation of Realism 1850s In 1845, The art critic, Théophile Thoré (who “discovered” Vermeer) complained that French art was “..without system, without direction, and abandoned to individual fantasy.” According...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 16, 2010 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
EUROPEAN REALISM Part One In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Revolution of 1848 broke out like a series of brushfires across the continent of Europe. Although the uprising of the lower classes and the peasants was the last significant attempt to achieve...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 9, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
REALISM IN THE SALONS IN THE 1850s Realism had many faces. As an international impulse seen in European and American art, Realism was not so much a style or a look as a new approach to art, overtaking the old ideas of exhausted Romanticism. By the 1840s, due to the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 2, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
THE REALIST ARTIST IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD The history of nineteenth century art is the story of a struggle against schemata in the arts. The only remedy for the artist who wanted to avoid formal formulas, the rules of how to paint and sculpt, was a careful study...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 25, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL AND THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING American Romanticism was always based upon the concept of the search for the Garden of Eden. The “frontier” of America, the edges of this God-given Garden, was the Appalachian...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 25, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
REALISM IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND The main goal of a Realist artist in France was to create an objective and detached description of banal reality, as it existed, in all its ordinariness. Realism, tended to adhere to a particular social point of view that of championing...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 18, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
Realism in England, France, and America At the end of the Napoléonic wars, the French were able to take a good hard look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution, going full speed ahead in Britain. Appalled at the misery of the lower classes, the industrial smog of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 11, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH AND GERMAN IDENTITY Caspar David Friedrich personified German Romanticism, producing paintings that became icons of the movement. Working in a nation under alien occupation, Friedrich found the intersection between pantheism and the alienation...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 11, 2010 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
THE PROBLEM OF ART Marxism as Methodology In his anthology, Marxism and Art, Maynard Solomon recounted that although both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were interested in the literary arts early in their respective careers, they both were distracted by philosophy....
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 4, 2010 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
THE PROBLEM OF CAPITALISM The Birth of Consumption As philosophers who inherited the goals of the Enlightenment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the main theme was freedom, freedom to become a full human being, creating oneself through free choices. They...
by Jeanne Willette | May 28, 2010 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
THE PROBLEM OF PROPERTY Engels and Ownership For centuries, philosophers had been trying to determine the origin of property. Almost without exception, from Rousseau to Hobbs, property was the equivalent to the apple in the Garden of Eden. Property was the cause of...
