Part I

The Eiffel Tower. Symbol of an Age of Realism. Symbol of an Age of Technology. Symbol of the late 19th century.

Even more than in the “enlightened” 18th century, men were now trying to control the world around them. And now, they had the advanced tools of science and technology with which to work. Note the cast iron gears of the enormous crane used in the construction of the Eiffel Tower, seen here.

By the end of the 19th century it was industry which produced much of what is now considered art. Mass-produced lithographs of engineering feats, such as the locomotive, are now collector’s items.

One of the grand ideals of the Enlightenment – and of the Romantic period early in the 19th century – had been the belief in progress. Progress is symbolized here by an old-fashioned man o’war being towed to the destruction by a product of the modern age, a small black tugboat belching smoke. By the late 19th century, advances in engineering and technology were making material progress a reality.

The engineer Eiffel constructed his famous tower to commemorate the great Paris Exposition of 1889, but he had earlier made his reputation as a builder of bridges. Eiffel's dramatic railroad trestle is only one of a series of iron bridges which had begun to leap across rivers and chasms during the latter part of the 18th century. And as time and technology advanced, these spans became longer and more daring. Decoration and ornament were neglected as the functionalism of the engineer began to replace the historical styles copied by the architect.

Brighton Pavilion was built during the 1820s in the exotic and Oriental style favoured by the Romantics. But the fairyland exterior concealed a functional inner structure supported by cast iron columns.

The Frenchman Labrouste designed the library of St. Genevieve in Paris in the 1840s. Again, the outside is in the Romantic tradition of imitating an historical style. In this case, a 15th-century Renaissance palace, seen here. But inside the library the reading room has a vaulted ceiling supported by slender iron columns and iron ceiling ribs cast into intricate designs. For another library about ten years later, Labrouste designed a traditional neoclassic exterior.

But inside, Romantic Byzantine domes were made of sheet metal, a product of the new industrial age. And concealed behind a partition is the storage area for the books. This private area of the building was far from the public eye, so Labrouste was free to experiment with new forms. He could make the stacks a structural framework, as bare and honest as one of Eiffel’s railroad bridges.

The Crystal Palace was erected outside of London in 1851. Its builder, Joseph Paxton, had made his reputation designing green-houses. The Crystal Palace, a vast iron and glass structure, was designed to house the first World’s Fair, known as the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”. In it were displayed the products of the Industrial Revolution. But the building itself was the best expression of the new technology. The many thousand cast iron and glass parts were manufactured in factories all over England. Thus prefabricated with interchangeable parts, the whole Exhibition Hall was put together in only a few weeks’ time.

The potentials of engineering captured the imagination of Western man in the late 19th century. The tremendous strength of iron girders made dreams of vast spaces an engineering fact. In Chicago in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a new way of building developed. It was based on the mass production of steel, a recently perfected alloy of iron. Here, it is used in the ceiling girders. Steel-framed skyscrapers multiplied with industrial efficiency. As man increasingly concerned himself with the technical world, the subject matter of painting moved away from these emotion-filled Romantic scenes, which had predominated in the first half of the century. Many artists turned their backs on subjective fantasies, such as this and painted life as they actually observed it.

These artists, led by Gustave Courbet, called themselves Realists. Courbet and some of his contemporaries selected scenes of ordinary life, favoring the poor and downtrodden classes, men and women struggling with the practicalities of everyday life in order to survive. A political radical, Courbet felt that the smug middle class should stand with deference before the artist (in this case himself) who glorified the proletariat. A clash of artistic values soon developed: the past against the present, or the Academics (who preferred to emulate the past) against the politically active Realists. A contemporary satirized this by showing Neoclassicism in mortal combat with Realism.

The Realists rejected the romanticized past, seen here, as irrelevant. Many late 19th-century artists felt that if the present were an ugly age and mankind suffered great hardships, it was the duty of art to reveal the brutal truth. It is no coincidence that this was the century of Darwin, whose law described a ruthless survival of the fittest, and of Marx, who saw life as a desperate struggle for survival. As if to give visual expression to man’s struggle, back-breaking work became a predominant subject of literature and art during the 19th century.

Part II

In the 1860s, Edouard Manet shocked the Parisian art world by exhibiting this painting. The official academy of art had refused it. So Manet and some of his fellow artists formed their own exhibition and called it the Salon des Refuses – the Exhibit of the Rejected. Victorian sensibilities were disturbed by the fact that the nude lady was sitting at a picnic with clothed men. Further, these men were dressed in contemporary Parisian clothing. This made the painting appear entirely too real! The public was scandalized!

Actually, the art world was even more upset by Manet’s technique. He painted simply, in flat, bold colors. Official academic art preferred slick, detailed, subtly colored work, such as this painting, the Apotheosis of Napoleon. Manet's scenes were not carefully arranged studio poses. Instead, they were realistic and candid views of real people. Moreover, the paint on the canvas was itself becoming as important as the subject. Colors were used to flatten forms into two dimensions. Brush strokes were bold and hasty. Backgrounds became sketches, seemingly incomplete. The eye of the spectator was obliged to fill in what was missing.

Artists were fighting to free themselves from the artificial conventions and rules of academic art, such as the exact duplication on canvas of every detail in the scene they were painting. Also, the pursuit of literally capturing the external and objective world had inspired scientific and technological minds like Daguerre’s to the invention of the photographic process. Here are two more early photographs. The development of the camera encouraged many artists to give up mere technical reproduction of their subject matter for now the mechanics of photography could preserve external reality more accurately than the painter could ever hope to do. Thus, the artist was freed to approach reality from his own, individual point of view. Some tried to record their impression of a subject as rapidly as possible. As a blink of the camera’s eye could duplicate objective reality, so the painter’s personal technique also became intentionally hasty. Painters left their studios and painted out-of-doors, right on the scene.

This practice was satirized in Daumier’s cartoon Landscape Painters at Work. The artist set his easel anywhere, before the subject he wished to capture, as if he were the camera. Several painters even had boats rigged out as floating studios. At an exhibition in 1874, Claude Monet, not to be confused with Edouard Manet, showed a painting which he called “Sunrise – Impression”. Monet was not so much interested in the details of his subject matter as in the play of light in the early morning atmosphere. The label Impressionist was given to Monet and his associates, who painted in a similar way. Impressionism was really a series of techniques.

The Impressionist artist set for himself the goal of recording the effect of light upon objects and upon the atmosphere. Thus, whatever scene he selected to record, his real subject was light and air. He used brilliant colors, even in the shadows because, he reasoned, shadows are actually not gray or black, but merely the darker hues, like blue, violet, or green. Instead of mixing their colors on the palette, according to tradition, the Impressionists set down individual flecks of pure color next to each other on the canvas.

These separate flecks of color were blended by the optical process in the viewer’s eye. Let your eyes go out of focus for a moment, and notice the vibrancy and shimmer, approximating the visual experience of sunlight, created by this further optical blending.

In this optical approach to reality, the subject itself became unimportant. It could, for example, be haystacks painted at different times of the day or season. The important thing was that at each time the light and atmosphere would be different. So Monet worked rapidly to catch the one moment before the light changed. Here, he studied the facade of a cathedral, seen in differing light and varying weather. In a rapidly changing world, the artist’s real subject was change itself, not haystacks or cathedral facades.

As if they were high speed recording machines, the Impressionists set their easels out-of-doors to catch a quick impression of the effects of sunlight. They chose landscapes in which they could set blues against greens or reds against greens. These contrasting colors caused a vibrating sensation to the eye. A close look at the surface of this canvas shows how the eye and mind of the spectator actually bring the individual flecks of color together to form the complete picture.

Impressionism may only have been a passing phase, but the discoveries made at the time of the Impressionists about the composition of light and the visual process had a profound effect on all artists of this and later generations.

The artistic phase which followed Impressionism, known as Post-Impressionism, included four individual giants of art: Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. Seurat and Cezanne were like atomic scientists – they envisaged their paintings as miniature models of the world. Because of their concern with structure, they are considered Formalists, in comparison to Van Gogh and Gauguin, who turned their creative eye inward. Often referred to as Expressionists, they sought to capture the personal and subjective reality of their feelings and emotions.

Despite their different, individual approaches to reality, all four painters agreed that literal external reality was a subject for the camera and not for the paint brush. The artist’s job was to search for intangible realities – be it the abstract reality of forms and forces, sought by the Formalists, Seurat and Cezanne, or the subjective reality of man and his vision of his world, pursued by the Expressionists, Van Gogh and Gauguin.

Seurat concentrated on assembling and arranging forms in space. He eliminated irrelevant detail. This left him free to reconstruct his subject in space, out of countless tiny parts. Each part, or, in this case each dot or point of color is made to fit precisely with its neighbors. This technique is called Pointillism.

In this preliminary study of Sunday Afternoon on an Island Park, the artist had sorted his various forms into mere arrangements of dark and light colors. The subject is barely identifiable. In the final version, a machinelike, impersonal precision results. The Sunday promenade of the middle classes is translated into an assemblage of manikins, mechanical dolls set in their proper place in relation to the other objects in the scene. In this cafe scene, we can see the importance of the paint itself. The dots of color have become more significant than the subject, which is trivial.

Both Seurat’s scientific method of painting and his concern with solid form make him a uniquely individual innovator.

Part III

The Formalist, Paul Cezanne, seen in this self-portrait, shared Seurat’s concern for structure and technique. Though first exhibiting with the Impressionists, such as with this early work, Cezanne soon looked beyond sunlight and the ever changing appearance of things, as you can see in this later work.

He said in a letter: “It was a necessary step. I wanted to make of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the art of the old masters.” He particularly admired the careful organization of the 17th-century master, Poussin.

Like Seurat, Cezanne also reduced nature to a series of simple geometric shapes, to give solidity to his subject matter. Instead of using Seurat’s dots, however, Cezanne assembled his subjects out of square color planes carefully laid one next to the other. He wrote: “Let me remind you of what I have been saying: Nature should be reduced to cylinders, spheres, and cones. The whole work should be in perspective. I am trying to show perspective with color alone. Man’s view of nature is more in depth than on the surface.”

Cezanne lived on the verge of a new age, an age when old, traditional values were being rapidly rejected. For instance, this traditional still life, seen from a single perspective, has a feeling of permanence. In Cezanne’s rapidly changing world, however, these timeless qualities had lost much of their meaning. Instead, Cezanne implied motion and the passage of time by giving each object – the table, the pitcher, the fruit – its own perspective. Follow the edges of the table top. The lines are broken. They do not meet on either side of the tablecloth. Each part of the picture is seen from a different point of view. The basket of fruit is seen from eye level, the pot is seen from above, the covered bowl is seen from the side, and the pitcher from the right. This use of different perspectives within the same work helps to translate abstract ideas of motion and the passage of time into concrete visual images. Less than two years after Cezanne’s death in 1906, Picasso and Braque were to develop Cubism, in which the individual object itself is fragmented into a multiplicity of perspectives.

In contrast to the Formalists were the Expressionists, Van Gogh and Gauguin. They sought not the reality of forms and forces, but the inner reality of the self. Both avoided industrialized society in their paintings and in their lives. Van Gogh escaped by committing suicide. And Gauguin escaped to the tropical and exotic world of the South Seas. In a world rapidly becoming over civilized and over mechanized, these two artists turned inward to express primitive, childlike emotions. In rejecting the Impressionist’s objectivity, Gauguin said: “The Impressionists look for what is near the eye and not at the mysterious centers of thought.”

Paul Gauguin tried to express the mysterious, vital forces that animate the universe, such as the miracle of childbirth, venerated in the Nativity. He first escaped from civilization to the primitive farm regions of Brittany, in northern France. But Brittany was still too close to the superficial middle-class civilization which oppressed him. Abandoning his family and his bourgeois life completely, Gauguin fled to Tahiti. There among the innocent natives he could, as he put it, “paint like a child and be in harmony with the mysterious Being of the Universe”. Now he repeats the Nativity theme in a Tahitian setting. Like the bright, flat patterns of the native costumes, Gauguin’s canvases more and more denied the illusion of deep space, and themselves became flat, brilliant statements of color and sensuous line.

For his part, Vincent Van Gogh said: “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly.” Van Gogh distorted and exaggerated his simplified forms. His self-portraits are alive with writhing and twisting lines. So are his emotion-laden landscapes. The canvas is filled with agitated struggling forms. The colors are intense – brilliant! The sky is dreamlike and explosive. A hysterical and tension-ridden vision! Van Gogh’s reality was a foreshadowing of Freud’s. He painted suppressed and seething unconscious forces overlaid by a thin veneer of civilization. His prison courtyard symbolizes the oppression of the mind more than of the body.

In contrast to the serious visions of the Post-Impressionists, the fashionable art of the day was restless and self-conscious. Artists pretentiously called it Art Nouveau, or the “new art”. In fact, it was really not much more than an escape into eye-pleasing decoration. Its lines twist through mass-produced poster designs, architecture, advertisements, park benches, and even street lights. The curvilinear forms of Art Nouveau suggest the last, forlorn twisting of an individualism that would find little place in the regimented, mass societies of the 20th century.

As we have seen, the second half of the 19th century was a tangled web of conflicting views of reality. There was the reality of ugly truths; the reality of light and air, captured in a quick impression; the reality of forms and forces; the reality of the innerself; and the denial of reality in the fanciful decoration of Art Nouveau. Gone was the Renaissance vision of life Man was no longer the center of things. He no longer controlled his destiny. Gone was the 18th-century Enlightenment ideal of the best of all possible worlds and the perfectibility of man. Gone was the early 19th-century Romantic opportunity to escape into the distant past. By the end of the century, industry, engineering, and technology had changed the life of Western man. Romantic values had been rejected in favor of a material and practical world.

Many turn-of-the-century artists rejected this materialistic, industrial world, as had Gauguin and Van Gogh. They revolted against science and mechanization. “Fin de siecle” means “end of an age”. For most men it had been an age of hope and faith in the miracles of industry. For the sensitive, far-seeing visionary, however, it had become an age of world-sickness and anxiety. In 1893, the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch, captured the essence of an oppressive environment filled with fear and terror. It had become a threatening and incomprehensible world. By the turn of the century, the artist was striving to express his deep-seated fear of the present and the future. It was too late to turn back from the technology he had worshipped. There was no escape!