Advanced Guard before the Avant-Garde There is some historical disagreement over when and where the avant-garde movement in the visual arts began. But it is clear that that the notion that changes in art come from the margins not the center came into existence and...
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...
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...
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...
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...