Module 5 Flashcards
What themes are the significant subjects for artists in America after the Civil War?
Labor and industry
The plight of capitalism, labor unrest.
Guilded Age wealth.
Portraits by what artist celebrate the new male professional?
Thomas Eakins
Captures more the working class vs. the industrial elite.
Women are portrayed like this in Aestheticism.
slaves, allegories, domestic servants, and as the feminine ideal.
What is Aestheticism?
Art should stand on its own - shape and color and form - without moral or narrative requirements. Art for arts sake. Rally cry of modernism.
Whistler is a major artist within this movement - the music guy.
This subject remains important for American artists.
Portraiture
Describes the last quarter of the 19c, named after a book by Mark Twain, the rich amass fortunes and become patrons of the arts, starting major collections and founding public art museums.
Guilded Age
These public works are established.
Public parks in cities and national parks are established
This is a huge cultural event.
World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893
What themes inform the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner
Race and religion
Cheap and popular pictures for the home. Popular company. Good marketers. Not fine art. Lithographs. The grand central depot. Colored engravings for the people.
Currier and Ives
An influential study of human motion by Eadweard Muybridge capturing mid-movement.
Animal Locomotion, 1887
Impressionism (term)
The Impressionists sought to express their perceptions of nature, rather than create exact representations.
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob Riis
1890
Pat Lyon at the Forge, 1826-27
John Neagle
THIS: Blacksmith shop. Lyon’s vocation. He is wealthy enough to commission a portrait, which usually shows men as gentlemen. But Lyon associates aristocracy with injustice. He was arrested for stealing - jail shown in the corner. Lyon is proud of working hard.
The myth of America as independent farmers and entrepreneurs is represented. Working hard for wealth is an ideal. The reality is most people work for wages
The Progress of Civilization, 1851-63, United States Capitol, Washington. D.C., Senate Pediment
Thomas Crawford
Size: 80’ L 12 h 60 f w. Designed in Rome. Carved at the capital. 1855-1859 from Massachusetts marble. Installed 1863.
Center: American, eagle and sun at back
R: Early days of American: woodsman, hunter, Indian woman and child, Indian, Indian grave.
L: Diversity of human endeavor . Soldier, merchant, youths, schoolmaster and shield, mechanic
Wheat, symbols of fertility
Anchor, symbol of hope
In contrast with where we’ve been with the grave on the opposite side. We’ve gone far.
The Gun Foundry, 1866
John Ferguson Weir
from West Point, father was artist at academy.
Set at WP Foundry in Cold Spring, NY across fm academy.
Ordinance for Civil War produced here, depticed is making of the Parrott gun. Purchased by superintendent. With Forging the Shaft, this makes up an allegory War and Piece - making swords into plow shares.
The Old Mill (The Morning Bell), 1871
Winslow Homer
Women going to factories.
Single woman, at crossroads. from the city. Symbol of agrarian past and impersonal industrial present.
Group of women, homespun, rural community in contrast.
The Morning Bell, in Harper’s Weekly,
December 13, 1873
Winslow Homer
Print of the Old Mill scene. Lone tree reminds us that there was a forest here, replaced by industrial progress. Hard work. Bell symbolizes new rhythm and location of work. Generations and gender of workers represented. Textile mill.
The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880-81
Thomas Anshutz
Born into an iron mill family in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Commentary on the changes of nature and organization of work and distribution of wealth. Labor unrest.
This, an uneasy life, the numbing effect of labor on the minds and bodies of men. Does not glorify industry. Men at lunch, bleak, indictment on industrialization. Brutal candor. Confrontational. This is a foundry near Wheeling.
The Strike, 1886
Robert Koehler Born in Germany. Working-class family, WI. Painted in Germany, exhibited in US.
First-time tensions between workers and owners are addressed - this, a confrontation between entrepreneur/working class. Corresponded a national wave of strikes for 8hr workday. Shown at an exhibition at National Academy of Design. Haymarket massacre.
Factory foreshortened. Emphasis on workers who stream out of it. Worker at bottom step - place of inferiority. Another laborer picks up a rock - tense. Employer, still, straight, will not compromise.
Women represent families that workers fight for. Dramatic moral narrative concerning failed justice.
The Police Monument, 1889, in its original location in Haymarket Square, Chicago
Johannes Gelert -
Danish sculptor, his first commission.
Location of Haymarket Massacre, confrontation between workers and police during a rally for the labor movement for 8hr workweek. 4 ‘anarchists’ were hanged. 8 sentenced, all seen as martyrs for the labor movement. A statue was erected for them.
THIS is the monument erected for the Policeman who died, one’s hand held out in an assertion of authority in the face of anarchy. Dedicated by the city, commissioned by civic officials and businessmen.
Down-to-earth representation instead of a woman representing law, this is Captain William Ward, this modeled after a traffic cop.
The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World), 1875-84, set up on pedestal by Richard Morris Hunt, 1886
Auguste Bartholdi
French sculptor. Marble. 151h. In honor of Centennial of the Declaration of Independence + alliance between France and America during the revolution. Constructed in Paris. Presented to American by the French. Copper sheets, riveted, steel iron struts.
Bartholdi identified location - bedlow’s island - rising out of the star shape fort wood. Liberty to him was beneficent + conservative views, not an anarchist/revolutionary figure.
The torch holding hand is displayed in Philadelphia and Madison Square Park in NYC to fundraise for base.
Cultural and artistic shifts
Mass distribution techniques & systems leveraged to cut costs for painting and sculpture.
Illustrations sold and used in books
Photography used by artists
Collapsable tubes for paint
Gender changed from a household economy to a market economy where products are manufactured outside the home.
Women enter the wage labor force.
He showed the change in work and labor and no one captured the drama of industrial production like this painter.
John Ferguson Weir
Female Figure Running, from Animal Locomotion
Edward Muybridge
Interested in the study of human subjects and motion photography. Photographed using an anthropometric grid.
His subjects, athletic men & sexualized women. Reinforced competitive, physically, and intellectually able. Women in maternal stances, sexualized and domestic.
Racial, bodily and social hierarchies.
Collaborated with Thoman Eakins.
Motion Study: George Reynolds, nude, pole-vaulting to left, 1885
Thomas Eakins
Inspired by Muybridge, this image was scientific capturing motion at intervals all in a single frame and single camera. zoopraxiscope. Photography informed Eakins paintings.
The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Professor Gross), 1875
Thomas Eakins
Scientific Realism. Honesty. Accurate. Used photos for this. Modern American life.
Gross, a Philadelphia surgeon. Portrays his role as intellectual and teacher. He is confident. Lecture for medical class in amphitheater. Documents medical sanitary procedures. Portrait of Gross, but a visual record of all people portrayed. Students, surgeons, and Eakin’s own likeness in the audience sketching. In Jefferson Medical College. and purchased by them. Created for Philly’s 1876 centennial exhibition. Honor scientific achievement of Philly. This was included as a medical display and not an art display. Squeamish audience.
The Agnew Clinic, 1889
Thomas Eakins
Commission. Another doctor and teacher in lecture at amphitheater. In this one, Agnew and team have clean white gowns using sterilized instruments + have help of nurse. Reflecting the new importance of hygiene, this work is made lighter. More medical assistance means new horizontal format.
U of Pennsylvania, for the portrait of Agnew who is depicted teaching. Eakins is on the right corner being
Mary V. Climber is the nurse here. She functions as a surrogate for the female viewer, a chaperone, and a buffer between Eakins, the painting, and the patient.
Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871
Thomas Eakins
Men at play.
Portray reason, order, self-discipline of Men.
Rowing popular subject, activity for the middle class. Schmitt is Eakin’s boyhood friend. Champion oarsman. Eakins is in distant boat. See from Philadelphia - Gerard Ave. and Railroad bridge. Commemorates Schmitt’s victory in event.
The Greek Slave, 1846
Hiram Powers
who says “there be a moral in every work of art” expatriate in Italy.
A symbol for abolitionists. This, the most celebrated sculpture in 19c America.
Turkish captured greek woman evoked the greek war and slavery. First nude to be accepted in America’s puritanical society. Cause, her captives took her clothes off. Spiritual purity. Replicas made by Powers.
American hypocrisy.
Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” 1868, for Currier and Ives
Frances (“Fannie”) Bond Palmer and James Merritt Ives
Fannie worked for Currier and Ives.
Fannie, Englishwoman in America. Women often hand-colored prints, men printed them. Best known work. She did many works for Currier and Ives. Here, log cabins, unsettled wilderness, renewal of a nation recovering from war, Indians are blanketed in the smoke of the steam engine, old ways making way for new.
Shake Hands? 1854
Lilly Martin Spencer
We know Spencer. Sympathetic to these women.
The portrayal of helpful women, domestic servants, many now employed, mostly immigrant, American women more likey working in factories.
