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.
Infantry in Arms, 1887
William Henry Lippincott
Upperclass household. Servant and mistress of the house.
A Spring Morning in the Park, 1892
Alice Barber Stephens
Nursemaid’s change look of parks. Many nursemaids seen in this public park. Rittenhouse square. Upperclass leisure but also portraying work.
Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl, 1862
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Avant-Garde artists, shown at Les refuses.
Various whites color pallets emphasized abstract forms, influenced by Japanese prints, not concerned with realism. Art for art’s sake, rally cry of modernism. Art should stand on its own - shape and color and form - without moral or narrative requirements.
She is the name of the robed goddess of freedom. Her tablet means law + has date of Declaration. Broken chain, icon of freedom and USA, a welcome immigrants
Liberty / Statue of Liberty.
He made the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.
Richard Morris Hunt.
She wrote the Sonet, New Colossus. What was it?
Emma Lazarus.
Written for the Statue of Liberty pedestal fundraising efforts later engraved on it. Expressed impact on immigrants. Emotional. Give me your tired your poor, your, etc.
What image does the US government use to sell Liberty Bonds?
Statue of Liberty
“Remember your first thrill…”
He paints a picture depicting the unveiling of the completed Statue of Liberty.
Edward Moran
He authored Animal Locomotion
Eadweard Muybridge
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, 1871-72
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
This is one of the most famous paintings by an American outside American. Bought by french state.
He, American, spent time in London.
Paired down composition.
Chromatic, neutral tones, experimentation, view of the river Thames hung in the back. Flattented forms.
gave music subtitles to his paintings, interested in the musical harmony of paintings, not meaning.
Eclogue, 1890
Kenyon Cox
Shift in emphasis. No longer heroic, masculine males, to feminine beauty through female nudes. Trained in Pairs. Aesthetic ideals over modern life. Allegorical. Pastoral poem. Classical prototype. Italian renaissance inspired.
In the Studio, 1880
William Merritt Chase
NY personality, opulent studio space. Pictured here.
Opened to the public. On trend: interiors and decorated surfaces. She is another richly textured object. Japanese objects, popular japonesma.
Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler, 1883
William Merritt Chase
Images of the particular, portraiture.
Wheeler, is his student.
You can see this tapestry in “in the Studio”
Studies in the Julian / Paris. Internationalism in the American art world.
Self-Portrait, 1885
Ellen Day Hale
Self-confident gaze
Among those who flourished after the Civil War. Family ties: Unitarian minister father - the Hale’s of Boston, Nathan Hale, Beecher Stowe the author, accomplished women. Boston to Paris. Julien. Manet - she liked. Straightforward, bold.
Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911
John Singer Sargent
Florence, to American parents. Paris and London.
Rendering the appearance of things was honorable, refined, and intensified for the viewer
Painted in Switzerland. Character study. His niece.
Unified color scheme. Languid, anonymous, poetic. Luxurious. Non-chalenace.
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
John Singer Sargent
Transcended portraiture, public and private.
Painted in Paris.
Members of the American Expatriate community.
Family, Boston-trained lawyer, and rich wife.
Half portrait, half interior.
The lack of connection between the girls, was unusual. format unusual. Traditional and modern. Diego Velasquez inspired. Degas inspired. Asymmetrical empty center. Modern life interrupted. Japanese vases are prized. Younger engages, older become indistinct.
The Wyndham Sisters (Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant), 1899
John Singer Sargent
Three daughters of a wealthy Pearcy Wyndham - Londoner.
From left: Adeane, Tennant, Elcho
establishes genealogy, mother in past, and Sargent’s connection to artists of the past.
The three graces.
Sita and Sarita, 1893-94
Cecilia Beaux
Woman with the black cat, cat looks directly, she does not. Manet inspired / comparison. Compared to Olympia.
Henry Sturgis Drinker (Man with Cat), 1898
Cecilia Beaux Artist and sitter, her brother-in-law. East coast society. The portrayal of self assurance He is in white, when men are usually wearing black, but here this means he is comfortable. He holds a cat. Signifies his admiration and affection for the painter.
M. Adelaide Nutting, 1906
Cecilia Beaux
Unlike the man in white, this woman in black with a nondescript background - another uncommon way to show gender, this represents a woman in a man’s world.
Nutting is a superintendent of nursing at John Hopkins.
Commissioned by her students upon retirement.
assurance, reflection on the future of women in the field.
She was an author, founder of leadership roles, established a library, army nurse core member. She is bomb. Professor at Colombia Teachers College, the first woman to hold a professor role at Colombia.
After the Meeting, 1914
Cecilia Beaux
Pictured here: Dorthia Gilder. Century Magazine father. Painter mother. Beaux was friends with the family.
She is Beaux’s best friend and lover.
Painting is an unusual, animated figure, restless woman advocate of the feminist cause. Simple contrast, flat. She is a spirited and active suffragette.
Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888
John Singer Sargent
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1902
Richard Morris Hunt
Hunt is the architect and founding museum trustee. Modeled after the facade and great hall of Ecole des Beaux-arts. Neoclassical.
Established to rival Louvre and prove Western pride and prestige, the US is cultured. Promote public good.
Central Park, NY, begun 1857
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux
The battle over public space.
First major landscape public space in urban America.
These men won the park’s design competition
Improved public health, and promote civil society.
Fostered the great park movement.
“Democratic development” a place for everyone believed Olmsted.
343 acres.
View of Central Park (toward Mall) from Water Terrace, c. 1875.
John Bachmann
Ordered
Sport, amusement, eduction
Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865
Albert Bierstadt
Paintings like this one from Bierstadt gave Americans an impression of what the park looked like. Olmstead created paths inspired by the sublime.
1890 became a park.
Best General View, Mariposa Trail, 1863
Carleton E. Watkins
This - of Yosemite he took while working for the California geological survey.
Photographers also provided an impression of what to expect of the western parks.
Artistic conventions are used like painters.
Watkins was from San Francisco. Helped create Yosemite’s reputation for the pristine and stunning wilderness. The best features of the valley are shown here. Falls at the visual center. Added clouds from second negative.
Kitty Tach and a friend a Yosemite National Park, c. 1895
George Fiske
Leaving the trail, and their propriety. Famous photograph.
Glacier Point, the valley below.
Five Cents a Spot, 1889
Jacob Riis Urban poverty. New York immigration. Riis is a social reformer. Activist. Police reporter. Assigned to Mulberry Bend where there were slums. Documenting poor living conditions. These people went to central park on their days off. Magnesium flash, technology. Magic Lanterns slide lectures.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, Court of Honor, Daniel Chester French’s Republic seen from back, in distance is Frederick William MacMonnies, The Triumph of Columbia
The court of honor is the primary architectural statement. Neoclassical facades, the white city, unity, large, festive.
Inside the lagoon in the court of honor were these two allegorical sculptures: Republic seen from the back, and The Triumph of Columbia.
Women were symbols of continents and concepts and men symbolized actors in the field of history.
French: 65’ H, 35’ base, electric lights glowed.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
The Triumph of Columbia
Frederick William MacMonnies
Barge, movement, and drama, 28 figures occupy in total, Colombia on top, 8 women representing arts, sciences, industry work ores. Victory wreath at sturn. A man manages the rudder, he steers the boat.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Women’s Building
Sophia Hayden
The Board of lady manager’s goal with this was to represent the concerns of all women. 150 white middle and upper-class ladies on this board. This was to be a meeting area for women. Unprecedented to show off the accomplishments of women. Hayden was the first woman architect to graduate from MIT. She won the competition for this building.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Hall of Honor, Women’s Building
Sophia Hayden
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Primitive Woman
Mary Fairchild MacMonnnies
South End. One of two murals at the end of the Women’s Building. Married to the sculptor who did The Triumph of Columbia.
Women doing “women things” subtle roles of domesticity, and idealized style.
People of course liked this one more cause women be being women and it was more classical and less modern.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Modern Woman
Mary Cassatt
One of two murals at the end of the Women’s Building.
Adopted bright colors and middle-class dress
Pursuing fame, changes by geese
Plucking fruits of knowledge
Engaged in art, music, and dance
Men are not present, they are not portrayed as caretakers of children and men.
The Boating Party, 1893-94
Mary Cassatt
Xpatriat in France
Degas’s friend
Loose brushwork, showing women in domestic environments, not sentimental, monumental works showing women performing their given tasks of caretaking.
In South of France. Manet’s subject of boating.
High horizon, surface pattern, all were influenced by Japanese prints. The Color scene, post-impressionist flat brush strokes. Composition unconventional. Her boldest work.
Alexander Cassatt and His Son Robert, 1884
Mary Cassatt
Her brother and nephew - Philly businessman
Strong bond, likeness
Rare and effecting example of a paternal subject in her work.
They do not gaze at each other, these two are connected intellectually, not emotionally.
The Banjo Lesson, 1893
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Race and Religion.
AA as subject matter. Passing on of cultural knowledge, hope within this passing. Banjo is a generational conduit. Rembrandt is a model for composition.
Daniel in the Lions’ Den, 1907-18
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Religious painting.
Somber. This, strong contrast between light and dark.
Biblical, human touch.
This Paris educational institution was popular among Americans, especially women.
Julien.
Not until 1897 could they study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Known for their depictions of upper-class women
Sargent & Beaux
Saught after portraitist. But he started to hate it so became a muralist, watercolorist.
Sargent
Rival to Sargent
Cecilia Beaux
Strong personality. One of several patrons who formed collections that became museums. Her collection of old masters is held in her Venetian Boston villa - Fenway Court.
Isabella Stewart Gardner
He was a designer of Central Park, designed the grounds for the World’s Colombian Exposition, and also designed the layout of roads and paths of Yosemite National park. He was president of the service that surveyed and mapped Yosemite and outlined maintenance and preservation of the park. Inspired by his vision of the sublime.
Olmstead
Biggest cultural and economic event of the 19c. 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage - meant to say “hey, look what we’ve done”. Architectural unity.
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Who painted the two murals in the Women’s Building at the at World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
Mary Fairchild MacMonnnies
Mary Cassatt
He is a pioneer AA artist, student of Thomas Akins.
American expatriate artist. Leader of an artist colony.
Red cross WWI. Modernist painter of religious, holy land, genres, landscapes, animals, and religious subjects.
He moves full-time to Paris.
Inspired future AA artists.
Henry Ossawa Tanner
He wrote How the Other Half Lives, 1890
Jacob Riis
Book, how the other half lives, studies among the tenement slums in NYC. These photos helped bring attention to the living conditions. NY poverty, clearing of slums for sanitary conditions.
This is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Impressionism
