Department of History
Fieldston School .
The Birth of Modern Europe


Paris Realism: Daumier, Courbet and Manet

Realism and Modernity

Marx and Modernity
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
- Communist Manifesto, 1848
Revolutions of 1848- Liberalism
Industrial Revolution
class conflict, exploitation, alienation
technology and craft
democracy and capitalism
critique of Romanticism: academic (state run) and introverted, feeling as escape
(Courbet quote, p. 908)
radical politics- Socialism

The End of Something...
The Second Empire
1848 February Revolution
Second Republic (with Louis Napoleon as Pres.)
1851 Louis Napoleon’s coup
1852 Napoleon III (1852-70)- “Second Empire”
1870 Franco-Prussian War

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
“genre” scenes: peasants, farmers
with academic seriousness
the politics of the Salon: tastes of the bourgeoisie
Salon des Refusésˆ, 1863
Ingres (Neoclassicism) and Delacroix (Romanticism) gone
Salon system of French Academy remains reactionary
Courbet splits with Acadmey in 1861
Napoleon III orders salon for rejected pictures (4,000) beginning of the end of academic supremacy
Woman Sifting Corn, 1850s
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1560s Courbet, Woman w/ Parrot, 1866
undermining academic tradition
Funeral at Ornans, 1849-50 Detail
birthplace: rural
class
realism and the mythological
dignity of poor
removed from Salon of 1850-51
Studio of a Painter: A Real Allegory Summarizing My Seven Years of Life as an Artist,
1854-55
artist in center
public patrons
the people: Ornans
the literati (Baudelaire)
real? or symbols?
boy and woman
Courbet’s mental world...


Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Giorgione/Titian, Concert Champeter, 1510 Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,1863
content and response
“The Bath”
demonstration picture tradition
absence of allegory- direct demonstration of painting
divorce from moral pretension or concern- “immoral” or “amoral” (Victorian morality)
comp to Giorgione: idyll vs. brash picnic
boulevardiers and famous model
Modern?
technique: means over content
comp to Goya: immediacy, planar areas, elimination of transitional areas and shading
devoid of transitional tones
influence of Daguerrotypes
broad light and full, flat color
models painted in the studio/ problems with light and size
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 Olympia, 1863
Ingres, Odalisque
courtesan
detachment and “objectivity” (realism?)
realism and “naturalism”- art for art’s sake, ie., technique
subject: moment of recognition and confrontation
Fifer, 1866 Emile Zola, 1868
Zola: novels, Dreyfus case, art critic
defends the Fifer
japanes prints; defense of Olympia (in background)