Realism and the Origin of the Avant-Garde in Paris

Gustave Courbet and

Edouard Manet

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) Self-Portrait, c. 1845

Gustave Courbet, The Cellist, Self-Portrait, 1847, Oil on canvas 46 1/8 x 35 1/2 in (117 x 90 cm) Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Courbet, Portrait of the Artist (Wounded Man) 1844-54 Oil on canvas 31 7/8 x 38 1/4 in (81 x 7 cm) Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Courbet, Man With a Pipe, 1946

Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with Dog, 1842

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849 (destroyed in WW II)

Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Proudhon, 1853

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans 1849-1850, oil on canvas, 10' 3’ x 21' 9" Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849 compare with Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Grace at Table, 1740 (19"/15") Louvre, Paris

Genre painting like this was a traditional genre in European academies of art, which enforced a strict hierarchy of genres that determined a painting’s value: first history, then portrait, genre, landscape, and still life.

William Bouguereau, (left) Mother and Children, The Rest, 1879 (right) Home From the Harvest, 1878, Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville, Florida

William Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher, 1891, the De Young MA, San Francisco

Honoré Daumier, Third Class Carriage, o/c, 1862, c. 25“ x 35"

Honoré Daumier (French) Rue Transnonain April 15, 1834, 1834, lithograph, 290 x 445 mm, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Honoré Daumier, The Uprising, 1849, oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet, The Studio: An Allegory of Seven Years of the Artist's Life, 1855, oil on canvas, over 20 feet wide, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

“I have studied, outside of any system and without prejudice, the art of the ancients and of the Moderns. I no more wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intuition to attain the trivial goal of art for art's sake. No! I simply wanted to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality"

"To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation: to be not only a painter, but a man as well: in short, to create living art - this is my goal.“

Gustave Courbet, statement for his Pavilion of Realism, build next to the Paris International Exhibition of 1855

(left) Destruction of Paris following the Franco-Prussian war, siege of Paris, and (right) the Commune 1871, Communards shot by firing

squad of French soldiers in the streets of Paris

Courbet, the Communard, and the destruction of the Vendome column, symbol of Napoleonic (French) imperialism

"Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise him to disassemble this column.“ – Courbet

Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pelagie, 1872 Last self-portrait as prisoner for Communard activities

Henri Fantin-Latour. Portrait of Edouard Manet. 1867, oil on canvasArt Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Parisian dandy, flaneur, and “Painter of Modern Life”

Edouard Manet, At the Café, lithograph, 1869

Edouard Manet, Concert at the Tuileries, 1862 o/c, c. 46 x 30,” National Gallery, London. Two portraits of Charles Baudelaire by Manet on left, 1865

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

- Charles Baudelaire

Edouard Manet, Dejeuner Sur L’Herb (Luncheon on the Grass), 1862

Titian, Concert Champêtre (Italian Renaissance) 1510 compare with Edouard Manet (French Realism), Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862

Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgment of Paris, (engraving after Raphael), 1520 compare with Edouard Manet, Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51 x 74¾ inMusée d'Orsay, Paris

Titian or Giorgione, Venus of Urbino, 1510 (Louvre) compared to Olympia 1863

Alexandre Cabanel (French Academic Painter, 1823-1889) The Birth of Venus, 51 x 88 inches, 1863

Jean Leon Gerome (Academic classicism), Phrynee Before the Judges, 1861Daumier cartoon: “Venuses Again, Always Venuses”

William Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1879 and Paul Baudry, Venus and Cupid, c. 1857

Edouard Manet, Universal Exposition of 1867, 1867, o/cPainter of Modern Life

Emperor Napoleon III by Hipolyte Flandrin (Salon of 1863) with Plan of Paris – radical urban renewal designed by Baron Haussmann, 1853-1869

1867 Paris International Exhibition

Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann urban renewal, Paris:1853-1869

Blvd. Haussman with Galeries Lafayette, one of the first department stores:commodity culture

Edouard Manet, Civil War in Paris (the Commune) 1871, lithograph

Edouard Manet, The Bar at the Folies Bergere, 38 x 51 in, 1881, Courtauld, London

(left) Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl, c. 1865, oil on canvas, 21 x 26 in. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Realism(right) James McNeil Whistler (US), Symphony in White, 1864, Japonisme, aestheticism. Same model, Jo Hiffernan

James McNeill Whistler (United States expatriate) Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1875, oil on panel, 23 x 18 in, Detroit Institute of Arts

“Oh, I knock one off in a couple of days.” (Whistler)

Why is a painting made so quickly so highly valued?

What are the issues around “art for art’s sake” raised by the Whistler vs. John Ruskin trial? How are they “modern”?

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. . . .

Charles Baudelaire

Architecture as Emblem of Modernity

Top: Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1851Below right: Charles Barry (1795–1860) A. W. N Pugin (1812–52), Houses of Parliament, London, Gothic Revivalism, largely completed by 1858

Contemporaneous English buildings: one emblematic of the future, one emblematic of the past.

The House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament), London, designed by A.W.N. Pugin. Neo-Gothic interior design

Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869) The Queen and the Prince, wet plate

1854

Britain’s Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901Her name and values identify the Victorian era in Europe

Edwin Landseer (British), Windsor Castle in Modern Times, 1841-5, oil on canvas44 x 56” Victoria and Albert “at home”

The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton architect, Hyde Park, London, England 1851, moved to Sydenham in 1852, burned down in 1936

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London in 1851

Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, 1851, detail of exterior structure

Building the Crystal Palace with prefabricated truss

Building The Crystal Palace from prefabricated iron parts

“Waiting for the Queen,” Orientalist décor of Crystal Palace, Illustration by Joseph Nash for Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of

the Great Exhibition of 1851

Ornamental cover for joints of girders

(disguising modernity)

Cartoon from Punch, British satirical magazine

Crystal Palace Science Exhibit:- Envelope Machine

Compare bed and new railroad cars exhibited at Great Exhibition of 1851 (Crystal Palace)

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4 o/c, arched top, 30/22” Tate Britain, Pre-Raphaelite

William Morris, La Belle Iseult, 1858, Jane Burden (future Jane Morris) in medieval dress, Pre-Raphaelite. Morris’s only surviving oil painting, Tate, London

Red House designed by Philip Webb for William and Jane Morris. Designed 1859; completed 1860. Bexley heath (near London). neo-Gothic eclecticism, meant to be a “palace of art” for artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Inspiration for the Arts & Crafts movement and the assertion of an“authentically” English tradition

http://www.morrissociety.org/redhouse.htm See the two excellent short videos produced by the National Trust of England.

William Morris, “Pimpernel” wallpaper, 1876. The interiors of the Red House were covered with pattern, floor, walls, ceiling.

William Morris, designer, pages from The Kelmscott Chaucer (14th century texts), finished in 1896, figures by Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones

Announcing the invention of photography (the daguerreotype) at The Joint Meeting of the Academies of Science and Fine Arts in the Institute of France, Paris, August 19, 1839, unsigned engraving