satyric pendant:

Reference to a famous saying by Voltaire: “La satire ment sur les gens de lettres pendant leur vie, et l'éloge ment après leur mort.” [Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.] from his Letters January 1769

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Leonardo to Rembrandt (great age of oil-painting):

Leonardo (1452-1519) was active from 1469 to his death; Rembrandt (1606-69) was active 1624 to 1669.  Between these men we have a span of 200 years which Spengler regards as the high water mark for Faustian oil painting.

 

Paris (of Baudelaire):

The Paris Baudelaire knew was the city described in the novels of Balzac & Victor Hugo.  The Industrial Revolution with its new factories & workshops swelled the city.  Its population increased from 785,000 to over 1 million.  The city expanded north & west; the poorest neighbourhoods in the centre became more crowded.  As the population grew, so too did discontent amongst the poor & workers.  Riots were common in the 1830s.  Unrest came to a head in 1848 when large demos were broken up by the army. Barricades went up.  When the army looked un-trustworthy, Louis-Philippe abdicated.  The centre of the city was Île de la Cité, a maze of narrow, winding streets & crumbling old buildings, picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy & dangerous (in 1832 cholera killed 20,000 people).  The first railway stations were built. Paris was also the birthplace of a new social type: le bohème- students or artists, joyous, lazy, boisterous & scornful of middle-class standards, living an artistic & unconventional life.  Baudelaire fits this well.  They attracted attention from writers & Puccini wrote an opera to celebrate them!  Prostitution was common (a vice Baudelaire knew well); between 1816-42 their numbers doubled (to 43,000), young women from the French provinces unsuccessfully seeking work in the city.  During the Second Empire (1852-70) Paris again doubled geographically & demographically (to 2 million).  It was not a beautiful city.  Her central civic structures (the Hôtel de Ville & Notre Dame) were surrounded by slums. Napoleon III gave engineers the task of bringing more water, air & light into the city centre & widening the streets.  It became the most beautiful city in Europe.  Thanks to the growing number of wealthy Parisians and tourists in Paris & the new network of railroads & stations delivering fresh seafood, meat, & vegetables, it became famous for its restaurants.  The Paris Salon became the most important event of the year for painters, engravers & sculptors.  The dominant artists were Ingres, Delacroix (an associate if distant, of Baudelaire) & Corot; Manet (a friend of Baudelaire) & Courbet (a radical leftist & friend of Baudelaire) also emerged.

 

Corot (silver landscapes):

in contrast to the Realists (i.e. Courbet, Manet) Spengler sees Corot as looking backward to the work of the great age, painting as a vision, not as a reproduction of facts.

see Chapter VII page 246 and above pages 271 and 287

 

Courbet (factual space):  * see EndNote<A>

A consistent theme in Courbet is the association of the artist’s work with sincerity & authenticity. Courbet himself wrote frequently in his letters and in prefaces to his exhibitions about "truth" as his essential artistic aim.  He intended both his subject matter and his technique to be free of what he characterized as the idealizing falsifications and pretensions of mainstream Salon painting.  His artistic frankness was celebrated and emulated in the literary world by writers such as Emile Zola (French, 1840-1902), who labelled the avant-garde movement Realism.  Such Realism was an antidote to urban fatigue and dissolution.  Against the rhetorical, stylized tradition of painting that continued to dominate the Salon, critics posited the freshness, authenticity, and freedom of Realism.  Realism fit Courbet’s leftist political inclination as well.  The association between Academic art and the old authority of the aristocracy and the Roman Catholic church on the one hand, and between the anti-institutional school of landscape painting and liberal democracy on the other, was fairly overt in the highly politicized field of mid-century art criticism.

 

Manet (factual space): * see EndNote<B>

The first 19th-century artist to paint modern life, pivotal in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.  Manet became a student in the studio of Thomas Couture from 1850 but grew to dislike his master's Salon style and thereafter set up his own studio in 1856. Manet rejected the academic salon approach & few of his earliest work survives (it may have been destroyed by Manet himself).   He rarely painted religious, mythological, or historical subjects but rather contemporary subjects such as beggars, singers, Gypsies, people in cafés, and bullfights.

 

Corot (not Parisian):

Corot approached landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed & his palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks (the "forbidden colours" among the Impressionists), along with dark and silvery green.  Though his strokes appear at times to be rapid and spontaneous, usually they were controlled and careful.  His compositions were thought out, rendered simply and concisely, heightening the poetic effect.  Although a proponent of plein-air studies, he was essentially a studio painter and few of his finished landscapes were completed before the motif.  He would spend his summers travelling and collecting studies and sketches & use winter in the studio finishing & polising the work to make it  market-ready works. His emphasis on drawing images from the imagination & memory (rather than direct observation) was in line with the tastes of the Salon jurors, of which he was a member.

 

Courbet (Arles): * see EndNote<C>

Spengler tells us: “Courbet…portray[s] over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly…that remarkable valley near Arles.” However research failed to locate any Courbet landscapes which might fit this description.  Most of his landscapes were based in north east France, the French Comte or the Swiss/French border, Ornans.  However, in 1854 Courbet did visit Montpellier, which is 37 miles west of Arles.  This was during his first stay with his rich patron, the collector Alfred Bruyas.  The most famous memento of this visit is his Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854).  He produced a number of seascapes at this local. 

 

Cezanne (Forest of Fontainebleau): * see EndNote<D>

1839-1906, French artist & Post-Impressionist painter who laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new & radically different world of art in the 20th century.  He employed repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes, planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields.  The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".

 

Manet (the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil): * see EndNote<E>

Argenteuil is a commune in the NW suburbs of Paris. Manet spent summer 1874 in Argenteuil & visited his friend Monet, who had lived there since 1873.  The surrounding villages beside the Seine were then full of Impressionist painters, as well as Manet and Monet, Renoir and Gustave Caillebotte.  Manet produced a series of paintings there:- Argenteuil (1874 oil on canvas) & is considered one of his first works to qualify fully as an Impressionist work.  Similar was Claude Monet Painting in his Studio, The Monet Family in their Garden and Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil, all painted 1874.

 

Manet (the railway station): * see EndNote<F>

The Railway (aka The Gare Saint-Lazare) 1873, oil; the setting is the urban landscape of late 19th century Paris.  Using his favourite model in his last painting of her (fellow painter, Victorine Meurent, also the model for Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass), sits before an iron fence holding a sleeping puppy and an open book in her lap.  Next to her is a little girl with her back to the painter, watching a train pass beneath them.

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Impressionist sources (Spain & Holland, Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals):

Manet in particular seems to have been eclectic.  His Music in the Tulleries reflects a style inspired by Frans Hals & Velázquez.  His Luncheon on the Grass reflects his study of the old masters; the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) which is in turn based on a drawing by Raphael.  Two other cited as precedents for this work are: Pastoral Concert (c. 1510) and The Tempest, both attributed to Italian Renaissance masters Giorgione or Titian.  In Pastoral Concert, 2 clothed men & a nude woman are seated on the grass, engaged in music making, while a second nude woman stands beside them.  The Tempest is an enigmatic painting featuring a fully dressed man & a nude woman in a rural setting.  The man is standing to the left and gazing to the side, apparently at the woman, who is seated & breastfeeding a baby; the relationship between the 2 is unclear.  One of his most famous works, Olympia, uses a pose based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) & echoes Goya's The Nude Maja (1800).

 

Courbet too learned from past masters.  While still learning his trade, before 1848, young Courbet gained technical proficiency by copying the pictures of Diego Velázquez, José de Ribera, and other 17th-century Spanish painters.

 

Impressionists (and English landscapists): * see EndNote<G>

JMW Turner (1775-1851), the leading light of English Landscape Painting, produced a large volume of watercolours, prints and oil paintings.  His unique combination of Romanticism and down to earth realism had a significant influence on his contemporaries, including the French Barbizon School, and laid the foundation for the revolutionary landscape painting introduced by French Impressionism.  As his work matured, it became almost impressionistic in style, as he focused less on the details and more on the overall atmospheric effect. He became a master at rendering pure light by the use of shimmering colour

 

Impressionism (Japanese art):

The Japanese or “pictures of the floating world” (Ukiyo-e) inspired many Impressionists.  In 1874 the term Japonism was coined, to describe woodblock prints’ prominent role in Impressionism.  Though such prints had only recently made their way into Western consciousness a few decades earlier, they were already extraordinarily popular & the Impressionists studied them intently.  Manet was influenced by Japanese prints.  His Olympia nude is very flat, a feature inspired by Japanese wood block.  The conciseness of his Boating also reflects lesson he took from Japanese wood prints.  Monet amassed an large collection of woodblocks.  The distinctive subject matter Impressionist artists selected, including everyday iconography like scenes of nature & candid portraits, has roots in Japanese prints.  Monet’s iconic collection of Japanese Bridge depictions clearly references Ukiyo-e scenes of everyday life.  Degas’ signature series of women at la toilette is inspired by the voyeuristic depictions of bathing women often found in Japanese prints.  Both Impressionist paintings & Japanese woodblock prints share a unique approach to perspective.  Often, the viewer’s vantage point is from above and positioned at a slight angle, allowing us to see scenes in their entirety, as if they are set on a theatrical stage & we are the audience.  Woodblock print compositions are flat, with solid planes of colour & bold lines taking precedence over realism. Some Impressionists followed suit here as well. 

 

Rottmann: * see EndNote<H>

1797-1850; German landscape painter; he belonged to the circle of artists around the Ludwig I of Bavaria, who commissioned large landscape paintings exclusively from him. He is best known for mythical and heroic landscapes. The King in 1826 sponsored his travels in Italy in order to widen his repertoire, which up to that point consisted solely of domestic, German, landscapes.  Here he made sketches for the 28 Italian landscapes in fresco which he was commissioned to paint in the arcades of the Hofgarten at Munich. The cycle, completed in 1833, gave visual expression to Ludwig’s alliance with Italy, and raised the genre of landscape painting to the height of history painting.

 

Wasmann:

1805-86, German-born painter in the Biedermeier style- an artistic style in central Europe, 1815-48, fuelled by middle class sensibility & political stability, artists concentrated on non-political, the domestic.  He spent most of his life in a part of the Tyrol that is now in Italy.  From 1832 to 1835 he lived in Rome, & came under the influence of the Nazarene movement.  The Nazarenes were a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty & spirituality in Christian art.  They often affected a biblical manner of clothing and hair style.  He eventually converted to Catholicism.  As well as portraits, he produced landscapes & religiously-themed works in Nazarene style

 

K. D. Friedrich: see EndNote<I>

1774- 1840; German Romantic landscape painter, most important German artist of his generation, best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature; his often symbolic & anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.  His paintings characteristically set human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that directs the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension.

 

Runge: * see EndNote<J>

1777-1810; German painter and draughtsman considered among the best German Romantic painters despite a relatively short career; a mystical, deeply Christian turn of mind, and in his art expresses notions of the harmony of the universe through symbolism of colour, form, and numbers. He considered blue, yellow, and red to be symbolic of the Christian trinity and equated blue with God and the night, red with morning, evening, and Jesus, and yellow with the Holy Spirit. He also wrote poetry and to this end he planned a series of four paintings called The Times of the Day, designed to be seen in a special building and viewed to the accompaniment of music and poetry.  This was a common concept to romantic artists, who tried to achieve a "total art", a fusion between all forms of art.  In 1803 he had large-format engravings made of the drawings of the Times of the Day series that became commercially successful and a set of which he presented to Goethe.

 

Marees

see Chapter VII pages 244 252

 

Leibl:

see Chapter VII pages 244 252

 

Chardin:

1699-1779, 18th-century French painter; master of still life, noted for his genre paintings depicting kitchen maids, children & domestic activities.  Carefully balanced composition, soft diffusion of light, and granular impasto characterize his work; self-taught, he was greatly influenced by the realism & subject matter of the 17th-century Low Country masters.  He worked very slowly and painted only around 200 pictures.  His paintings have little in common with 18th century French Rococo.  His subjects were viewed as minor categories (of far less majesty then history painting).  He favoured simple yet beautifully textured still lifes & sensitively handled domestic interiors and genre paintings. His influence on modern art was wide-ranging; Manet's half-length Boy Blowing Bubbles and the still life’s of Cézanne are indebted to him; Matisse's admired his work & as an art student made copies of several Chardin paintings in the Louvre.

 

Claude Lorrain & Corot (connection):

Between 1821 and 1822, Corot studied with Achille Etna Michallon, a landscape painter.  Michallon had a great influence on Corot's career.  He exposed him to the principles of the French Neoclassic tradition, as exemplified in the works of French Neoclassicists Claude Lorrain & Nicolas Poussin, whose major aim was the representation of ideal Beauty in nature, linked with events in ancient times.  As landscape was his major interest, Corot used figures in his work in an incidental manner, much as they were by Claude Lorrain.

 

Rubens and Delacroix:

Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement.  This was in stark contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres (whose emphasis was on clarity of outline and carefully modelled form).  Between 1857-61 he worked on frescoes for the Chapelle des Anges at the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris.  They included "The Battle of Jacob with the Angel", "Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon", and "The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple".  Such large commissions gave him the opportunity to compose on a large architectural setting, much as had those masters he admired, Rubens, Veronese & Tintoretto.

 

Eichendorff:

1788- 1857; Prussian poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator & anthologist, a major writer of Romanticism.  The titles of his poems reflect his main motifs of wandering, but also the passing of time (transience) and nostalgia.  Time, for his, is not just a natural phenomenon but each day & night has a metaphysical dimension.  The morning, evokes the impression that all nature had been created just in this very moment; the evening acts as a mystery death, pondering on transience and death.  His other main motif, nostalgia, is described by some critic as a phenomenon of infinity. He is the most popular German poet set into music, with approximately 5000 musical settings (by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Richard Strauss among others).

 

Morike:

1804-75 German Lutheran pastor,Romantic poet & writer of novellas and novels. His poems (Gedichte, 1838), are mostly lyrical, yet often humorous and written in simple and seemingly everyday German. Wittgenstein praised his work & recommended him to Bertrand Russell.  Many of his poems were set to music and became established folk songs, while others were used by composers (Hugo Wolf and Ignaz Lachner) in their symphonic works.

 

Thoma: * see EndNote<K>

1839-1924; German painter; he has little in common with modern art his style was formed partly by his early impressions of the simple idyllic life of his native district, partly by his sympathy with the early German masters, particularly with Albrecht Altdorfer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. In his love of the details of nature, in his precise (though by no means faultless) drawing of outline, and in his predilection for local colouring, he has distinct affinities with the Pre-Raphaelites.

 

Bocklin: 

1827-1901, Swiss symbolist painter; influenced by Romanticism, his symbolist use of imagery derived from mythology & legend often overlapped with the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites.  Many of his paintings are of mythological subjects in settings involving classical architecture, allegorically exploring death & mortality in the context of a strange, fantasy world.  He is best known for his 5 versions (painted 1880-86) of the Isle of the Dead, which partly evokes the English Cemetery, Florence, which was close to his studio and where his baby daughter Maria had been buried.