CHAPTER 18:
THE TRIUMPH OF THE BOURGEOISIE
NOTE: As we approach modern times, artistic movements often will come and go quickly. It is important to your understanding of these different movements to remember that while in the Renaissance, various movements grew out of each other, more modern movements are created to oppose the previous movement.
Rococo was anti-baroque, light and decorative, not heavy and dramatic; aristocratic, not middle class.
Neoclassicism was anti-rococo, suggesting a serious, balanced, educated, stable society.
Romanticism was anti-neoclassical, humanistic, free from rules and convention, passionate, mysterious, and above all, idealistic.
Our next movement will obviously be anti-romantic, seeing the world as it is, not as it could be. This is, naturally, Realism.
But before getting to the Realistic Movement, we need to examine some very important historical events . . .
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787 –1851) in vented the Daguerreotype process of photography in 1839 in which images were recorded on glass.
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)
In 1839, Talbot come up with another kind of camera that produced a negative and allowed pictures to be printed on paper. (Calotype)
Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857) invented the Wet Collodion Process, introduced in 1851, which was basically the first widely accepted camera.
Two very important artists were the first to use photography in two very important ways . . .
Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1823 –1896) was most famous for making 10,000 prints during The American Civil War (1861–1865)
After seeing pictures such as these, who could ever again envision war as a glorious adventure with heroes waving sabers and getting shoulder wounds?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (as
photographed in 1865 by Julia Margaret Cameron) (1809-1883) was poet laureate
of
When he read about “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in the Crimean war, October 25, 1854, he immediately wrote a poem about it. This is the romantic view of war, in one of the most popular poems ever written.
You can imagine the shock it had on people when they learned what war really was . . .
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) used her camera not to record events, but to create works of art.
Beatrice Cenci (1870)
Portrait of J. F. W. Herschel, 1867
Friar Laurence and Juliet, 1864
The first born, 1865
I wait, 1872
Light and love, 1865
What can an artist do when exact images of
people can now be captured in a fraction of the time a painter would take to
create the same image?
Before we answer that question, let’s consider one more important historical event . . .
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859.
This was followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man.
Needless to say,
And, as if all that weren’t enough, Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883) published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
All these things led to the REALISTISM Movement in Art, as humankind began to investigate the scientific reality of the world. Of course, this change did not happen overnight. Many pieces of Art were transitional, containing elements of both Realism and Romanticism.
The work of Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) is a good example of transitional Art. His work looks Romantic, yet its theme is Realistic.
“L’Angulus” 1858
The Man with the Hoe, 1862
Edwin Markham (1852-1940) wrote “The Man With the Hoe,” based on this painting in 1899. Surely, he saw the threat of Marxism.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with cries against the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packed with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (1832 –1923 is famous for designing the Eiffel Towerfor the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and the armature for the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor
The beauty of the
By way of comparison, The Washington Monument, designed in 1848 by Robert Mills, was a product of the Romantic age, which liked the sight of a majestic structure and did not care how it was constructed.
Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) had similar scientific
notions when he designed The Crystal Palace in
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819 –1877) really led the way for Realism in painting.
"Lovers in the Country" 1844
"The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, Ornans" 1850-1855
"The Sleeping Spinner" 1853
"The Painter's Studio; A Real Allegory" 1855
"The Meeting, or "Bonjour Monsieur Courbet"" 1854
These two works
show just how far Courbet went in realism, to the
point where it does not differ very much from pornography.
The Sleepers (1866)
The Origin of the World, ca. 1867
Honoré Daumier (1808 - 1879) may have had more of a social conscience as the painted the burdened poor of the city.
"The Burden (The Laundress)" 1850-1853
"The Laundress" 1863 - 1864
"The Third-Class Carriage" 1863-1865
“Three Lawyers Conversing,” a caricature
As Daumier pointed out the struggle of the poor in the cities,
so did many novelists and playwrights who developed the Realistic Era in
Literature. Among them were Victor Hugo,
Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, and Emile Zola in
Basically, the difference between a Romantic love story and a Realistic one is this: In a romantic novel, the lovers are usually separated but will love each other forever.
In Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott (1819), Ivanhoe marries the Christian girl, Rowena,
even though he loves the Jewess, Rebecca, who returns to
In Idylls of the King (1856 - 1885) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lancelot and Guinevere love each other forever, even though she chooses to become a nun and never see him again, rather than betray her husband, King Arthur.
In
Emily Brontë's
Now, let’s look at some realistic novels . . .
In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), bored, wealthy housewife seeks the romantic love she reads about, and ends up, poor, alone, and a suicide.
Bored with her husband, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873 to 1877) wants a divorce to marry Count Vronsky, but their relationship is more physical than emotional, so they argue and she throws herself in front of a train.
Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is from an impoverished family in a big city, with brutal parents and selfish brothers. Poverty forces her to become a prostitute and she soon dies of syphilis. She never really loves anyone.
Cyrano de Bergerac looked like a Romantic play: It was set in 1640, like The Three Musketeers; it had fops and precious damsels and fencing; its hero was a famous poet, who spoke poetry all the time; it had the standard five act format of the Neoclassical period.
But,
listen to the words of the story, and you will hear what is actually a very realistic play, and never out of
date. (It has been estimated that Cyrano
de Bergerac is playing somewhere in the
A few years ago, the play was rewritten for a film by Steve Martin.
But let’s get back to the original.
Benoît-Constant Coquelin as the original Cyrano in 1897. (He also played Tartuffe in 1884.)
Cyrano Hercule Savinien de Bergerac (1619 –1655) was a real person, and, in truth, the first writer of science fiction. He wrote History of the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657, and History of the States and Empires of the Sun) (1662).
Cyrano antagonizes aristocratic fops at a play by saying one of them is too stupid to even make a clever insult.
Unlike the other members of his society, Cyrano refuses to wear fancy clothes or follow the rules they consider good manners.
Challenged, Cyrano arrogantly decides to “improvise a ballade” while he fights the duel.
In a society where everything is judged by appearance, where beauty is all that counts, Cyrano is naturally in love with one of those “Precious Damsels” of whom Moliere poked so much fun.
Roxanne, Cyrano’s childhood friend, to whom he has never expressed his love has asked to meet him alone.
Angered by the way artists are forced to have a “patron” limit his creativity to that which is accepted by society (just like Mozart and many of the other humanists we discussed), Cyrano rages.
Cyrano
and his cadets are from Gascogne, and they dislike
recruits from other provinces, especially men from
Christian knows he has to make a bold move if he is to be accepted by the other cadets. Cyrano, meanwhile battled “a hundred” attackers the night before, sent to punish him by the aristocrats after the duel, and his men want to hear the story.
Knowing the only way to woo Roxanne is to act within the rules of fashion, Cyrano makes a strange deal with Christian.
After several weeks of Cyrano’s poetry working wonders on the dim-witted Roxanne, Christian decides to take matters in his own hands. As he says, “I know how to take a woman in my arms!”
Cyrano
helps the broken-hearted Christian by feeding him lines under Roxanne’s balcony
in a scene that certainly is meant to pay homage to Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet. But this scene is crucial:
pay careful attention to the words Cyrano uses.
They sound Romantic, but they are not.
When Roxanne asks about poetry, Cyrano replies with realism:
“Love hates that game of words!
It is a crime to fence with life—I tell you,
There comes one moment, once and God help those
Who pass that moment by—when Beauty stands
Looking into the soul with grave, sweet eyes
That sicken at pretty words!”
Before Christian can consummate their marriage, the soldiers are called to war, where they find themselves surrounded and facing certain death. The Spanish, however, gallantly allow a woman to pass throw their ranks.
This is a very important moment in the play. Roxanne has matured. He is no longer impressed by appearances. She has learned that true love is something other than “that game of words.” Christian, at heart a good man, wants real love, not feelings based on superficialities.
Christian takes his place in the field, while Cyrano goes to finally tell Roxanne the truth.
Fourteen years have passed. Cyrano has never changed. He still stands above patronage, still alienates the powerful aristocrats.
Roxanne lives a cloistered life with the Holy Sisters of the Church. Her only contact with the outside world is Cyrano, who has, for 14 years been her “gazette” (newspaper), entertaining her with the news and gossip at court. Despite his wounds, he is determined not to miss his visit.
As you know, in the rococo and neoclassical periods, all plays had to conform to the format of the “French Well Made Play,” which consisted of five acts. The scène à faire (the scene that has to be) is always required. This is that scene.
Let’s answer the question we posed at the start of this discussion: How does an artist compete with a camera in an age of Realism?
The answer is really obvious—he goes deeper-he looks for the reality behind reality. And that’s what we’ll examine in Chapter 19. (Picture of Sigmund Freud)