Influences on the 20th century

Enlightenment ideals• Reason (human autonomy: Humans seek

knowledge and use own reason rather than being told what to think by the church)

• Enlightenment is universal (humans are equal by nature, differences less important than inherent sameness)

• Progress (away from superstition and

‘immaturity’)

• Secularism (the separation of church and

states)

• Idea of popular government (not just aristocrats should

rule but also the Bourgeois- middle class)

Rembrandt, ,The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632

“Invention of Time”

In November 1840, the Great Western Railway ordered that London time should be used in all its timetables, and at all its stations.

It was not until the 1880s that time was standardised in England. Aside from train timetables towns around the country set their watches to a time they themselves agreed upon.

1884 the Greenwich Meridian was adopted internationally as the prime meridian (except by France)

Empire and Education

The Great Exhibition (World Fair) 1851

The Crystal PalaceMay-October 1851, Hyde Park, London

All the progress on show in expos was seen as belonging to all i.e. the people felt a sense of attachment; with power and progress as a national achievement.

The design of the exhibition hall rendered the crowd not just visible but the crowd itself ‘the ultimate spectacle’

Victoria and Albert Museum

V+A (at current site since 1857)

• Originally the South Kensington Museum

• Opened 1852, funded by The Great Exhibition

• 1858 extended opening with the introduction of gas lighting

“The anxious wife will no longer have to visit the different taprooms to drag her poor besotted husband home. She will seek for him at the nearest museum, where she will have to exercise all the persuasion of her affection to tear him away from the rapt contemplation of a Raphael”

Lloyd (1858) in Bennett (1995) The Birth of the Museum, p 32

Le Bon Marché• The birth of department stores offered a behavioural role model for

women (at that time shopping being seen as being for women)

• They could aspire to this Bourgeois lifestyle

• The working class women employed in these stores could be moulded and become a model of the transformative power of these institutions.

The City

“To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”

Berman, M. (1982), All That Is Solid Melts Into Air” , London: Verso p.15

The Haussmanisation of Paris 1852-1870 (Continued after Haussmann to c.1882)

• ‘Creative destruction’• Slum clearance and the opening up of the city• Expand local business to help project costs• Commercial streets, zoning for cafés, • Macadam streets, faster traffic• Parks, public squares, uniform buildings• Ease of movement for military

Baron Haussmann

Paris 1771 Paris Post-Haussmann

Charles Marville, Rue Soufflot, The Pantheon, 1858-78

Rue Soufflot, The Pantheon, February 2008

The 19th Century poet, writer and critic Charles Baudelaire had his essay The Painter of Modern Life published in 1863, in the midst of these huge social changes.

Etienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire, 1861-62

Baudelaire’s modernité

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

The Painter of Modern Life (1863)

Shift to what became known as Modernism

• The huge changes in society through the19th century began to influence the workbeing made by those in the arts.

• The late 19C saw the emergence of adistinct movement which was influencedby these change.

Why the Modernism movement?

– There is a direct reaction to the Romantic ideas that did not always portray truth.

– Individuals began to revolt against anything coming from the Romantic Era.

• In fact, the concept of avant-garde implies a very militant stand against Romanticism.

• Most Modernists wanted to go as far as destroying everything that came as a result of Romanticism and have it replaced with Modernist methods and ideas.

• Modernism is the reaction of artists and writers to the new society formed because of industrialization.

No doubt it is an excellent discipline to study the old masters, in order tolearn how to paint, but it can be no more than a superfluous exercise ifyour aim is to understand the beauty of the present day. The draperies ofRubens or Veronese will not teach you how to paint watered silkd'antique, or satin à la reine, or any other fabric produced by our mills,supported by a swaying crinoline, or petticoats of starched muslin.What would you say, for example, of a marine painter (...) who,having to represent the sober and elegant beauty of a modern vessel,were to tire out his eyes in the study of the overloaded, twisted shapes,the monumental stern, of ships of bygone ages, and the complex sailsand rigging of the sixteenth century?[The painter of modern life], guided by nature, tyrannized over bycircumstance, has followed a quite different path. He began by lookingat life, and only later did he contrive to learn how to express life.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

The Academic Styles:Neoclassicism and Romanticism

William-Adolphe Bouguereau“The Bathers” (1884)

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, 1856

Camille Pisarro, Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897

In search of Modernity

Claude Monet, Train in the Snow, 1875

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Bathers, 1884 Paul Cezanne, The Three Bathers, 1879-82

Paul Delaroche

“From today painting is dead” 1839 (Attributed)

"The painter will discover in this process an easy means of collecting studies which he could otherwise only have obtained over a long period of time, laboriously and in a much less perfect way, no matter how talented he might be."

Hippolyte Bayard, Self-Portrait in the Studio, post 1850

It is instructive to consider some of the other significant ideas emerging in the 19th-20thC. which influenced thinking significantly.

• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species, 1872

• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900

• 1880: Edison invents the electric light• 1895: France's Lumière brothers build a

portable movie camera, Paris audience sees movies projected