CLAUDE MONET – “Poplars au bord de l'Epte, view from the marshes” - 1891 – oil on canvas, 88- 93 cm. - USA, private collection

One of my favorite Impressionist pieces. His greatest lyrical achievement is reached in this strangely irresistible picture. The composition so beautifully resembles the beauty of a Japanese haiku, asymmetric and touching, while the poplars' leaves sing in red, purple, and finally in a blue that would make Yves Klein green with envy. It's Monet in his full bloom, the artist who once told his family that he wanted “to paint as the bird sings”.

CLAUDE MONET – “Meules (Haystacks, white frost)”- 1891 - oil on canvas - Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington

Between 1890 and 1891, Monet created a series of 15 canvases representing a group of haystacks in the outskirts of Giverny. Wassily Kandinsky had the opportunity of seeing one of these haystacks in an exhibition in Moscow in 1895, and he was impressed to the point of suggesting it as the first abstract painting in the history of Art: "And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. It was a haystack [or rather, a grain stack], the catalogue informed me, but I could not recognize it (.) I realized that there the object of the picture was missed (.) What I had perfectly present was the unsuspected -and until then hidden- power of the palette".

Gotta get a kick out of this. While the expression doesnt reflect the original, the hand certainly does, and, I think, in this more modern context, it makes a fairly strong statement.

The tan lines also exaggerate the 80's Olympia's nakedness, as was Manet's Olympia's nakedness seemingly exaggerated.

I also notice that in this piece the maid is not only notably attractive but also regarding the viewer.

The Pearl and the Wave. (1873). Paul Baudry

Academic paintings and traditional representations of the nude in 19th century France put woman on display for the pleasure of a spectator presumed to be male. The European artistic tradition was subject to conventions calculated to flatter the male viewer and to stimulate his fantasy of sexual domination. Nudes were depicted in allegorical form as mythological figures who flaunted an unnatural lack of pubic hair or any element that identified them as individual women and erased any potentially threatening signs of woman's desiring subjectivity.

T.J Clark’s analysis of acadmeic paintings of the nude by painters such as Alexandre Cabanel, William bouguereau, Felix-Henry Giacomotti, and Paul Baudry shows that the genre, as it is defined in the above terms, was in disarray. Although presented in allegorical form and lacking those elements which define them as sexual beings, the women in these paintings seem to collaboarte a little too eagerly with the male gaze, as if “they were actively soliciting it and desireing its sexual consequence.” (Bernhemimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 104) The critic J.A Castagnary wondered saracastically about the woman lolling on some rocks in Baudry’s The Pearl and the Wave (1863) if she might not be “a Parisian modiste.. lying in wait for a millionaire gone atray in this wild spot.” (Clark, PML, 295)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: "Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the boating party)", 1880-81 - oil on canvas, 129.5 × 172.7 cm - Washington, Phillips Collection

The light is the main protagonist of this famous painting, in wich Renoir has depicted a group of his friends relaxing on a balcony along the Seine river (among them, another famous Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte, who can be seen in the lower right of the canvas).

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: "Moulin de la Galette", 1876 - oil on canvas, 131-175 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

This masterwork has been described as “the most beautiful painting of the 19th century”. The painting depicts one of the numerous dances that took place in the Moulin de la Galette, one of the most frequented clubs in 19th century Montmartre, a paradise for bohemians and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh or Renoir himself. One of the supreme masterworks from early Impressionism.

I'm at last in the city of Dijon and my life is in complete upheaval to say the least. I'm jobless, freindless, and homeless- I need to walk to the local Subway to get internet connection or phone reception. It's very cold and very dark.

My current project is writing a brief catalogue entry for Manet's Olympia that shall be assimilated into my final paper.

CLAUDE MONET – “Le gare Saint Lazare (Saint Lazare Station)”, 1877 – oil on canvas, 75-100 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

"It's a pictorical symphony", observed the magazineL'homme libre when this painting was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, one of the few positive critics to a painting in that show. "Monet likes this station, and he has already depicted it with less success. This time it is really wonderful. He has painted not only the movement, the colour and the activity, but also the noise. It's unforgettable".

CLAUDE MONET – "Impression, sunrise" (1873) - Paris, Musée Marmottan

“Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape", said of this canvas Louis Leroy, an Art critic, when the painted was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1877. And this is just an example of how most of the critics of the time reacted to this painting, and, by extension, to the whole Impressionist movement (a movement that in fact owes its name to this painting) It is not surprising, then, that nobody offered 1,000 francs, the asking price for this painting.

EDGAR DEGAS: “L'absinthe (absinthe drinkers)", 1876 - oil on canvas, 92-68 cm. - Musée d’Orsay, Paris

"What a slut!", George Moore commented about the woman in this painting, adding that "the tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson", and also that "no one has said so much in so little space, and no one has expressed in such a simple way (...) thanks to the science of the drawing, invisible but omnipresent, almost impersonal". The sad and melancholic "Absinthe drinkers" appears to have influenced works of later artists, such as Picasso's interiors from the Blue Period, or Edward Hopper's urban scenes.

PAUL CÉZANNE: “The Card Players”, 1893-96 - oil on canvas, 47- 56 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

This is the smallest of the three versions of this subject painted by Paul Cézanne, but it is quite probable that it was also the last of them, and the most elaborated. While the composition is really simple (two players facing each other, with a black bottle silently dividing the composition in two parts) the fabulous psychological intensity in the faces of the players make this painting a masterpiece of post-impressionist art.

GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: "Paris Street, rainy day"1877 - oil on canvas, 212.2 - 276.2 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

This is Caillebotte's most famous and ambitious painting, exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition at the Rue Le Peletier, where it was not well accepted by the critic. L'Évenement wrote about this painting: "the drawing is of good quality, but Caillebotte has forgotten to include the rain". Regardless, this is considered one of the best representations of 19th century Paris ever painted.

GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: "Les raboteurs (The floor scrapers)", 1876 - oil on canvas, 102 - 146.5 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

The vertiginous perspective and the almost photographic focus are characteristic of Caillebotte's first works. This work exemplifies as no other the stupor that Caillebotte could cause between the assistants to the first impressionist exhibitions. Zola, who really appreciated Caillebotte, described it like "an antiartistic, clean painting, frost and bourgeois, by force of exactitude."

Edouard Manet. The Absinthe Drinker. 1858-1859. Oil on canvas.

I'm currently working on a biography essay for Manet that will eventually be assimilated into my final paper.

More Sources:

Mathews, Patricia Townley. 1999. Passionate discontent: creativity, gender, and French symbolist art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Allard, Sébastien, Henri Loyrette, Laurence Des Cars, and David Radzinowicz. 2007. Nineteenth century French art: from Romanticism to Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Paris: Flammarion.

Garb, Tamar. 2008. The body in time: figures of femininity in late nineteenth-century France. The University of Kansas Franklin D. Murphy lecture series. Lawrence, Kan: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle

Mathews, Patricia Townley. 1999. Passionate discontent: creativity, gender, and French symbolist art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe ("The Luncheon on the Grass") — originally titled Le Bain (The Bath) — is a large oil on canvas painting. Created in 1862 and 1863, its juxtaposition of a female nude with fully dressed men sparked controversy when the work was first exhibited at the Salon de Refuse. The piece is now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The shock value of a woman, naked as can be, casually lunching with two fully dressed men, which was an affront to the propriety of the time, was accentuated by the familiarity of the figures.One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution that occurred in the Boise de Boulgogne, a large park at the western outskirts of Paris, at the time. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting. Indeed, the Bois de Boulogne is to this day known as a pick-up place for prostitutes and illicit sexual activity after dark, just as it had been in the 19th century.

Peter J. Gartner, Art and Architecture: Musee D'Orsay, 2001, p.180

Nana, 1877, is an example of one of Manet's later works which follows Olympia and Le Dejuner sur l'herb. This painting is somewhat less shocking then its predecessors because the courtisan is clothed. Still she remains similar to the other two paintings in her defiant stare and prominence in the painting. The fact that her male caller is such an unimportant part of the composition did cause a stir. For a man to play such a minor role to woman, a courtesan no less, in the same painting was not usually done.

The painting was probably named after Emile Zola's fictional heroine of L'Assommir and Nana.

Olympia was the most scandelous representation of a prostitue in 19th century painting. Or so was called out by the critics of the salon. For example, Victor de Jankovitz wrote that "the expression of [Olympia's] face is that of being prematuraly aged and vicious; the body's putrefying color recalls the horror of the morgue." The critic Geronte called Olympia "that Hottentot Venus, with a black cat, exposed completely naked on her bed, like a corpse on the counters of the morgue, this Olympia is dead of yellow fever and all ready arrived at an advanced state of decomposition."
- Berheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, p 102

Such drama! Why was the paiting so threatening? While the cricts of the period were often drowned in erotic nudes, shamefully created to flatter the male viewer; depicted frontally and sans pubic hair, when the saw Olympia they cried scandal and saw death. Why? One can hardly look at Olympia's face today and recall the "horrors of the morgue" or the "yellow fever." Olympia's scandal, I would posit, is due to its simultaneous activation and exposure of the dynamics of the production of woman as fetish in patriarchal consumer society.

Basic outline, 1st draft:

Introduction:

-prostitution and prostitution in the arts an immense presence.
-statements about female sexuality and misogyny at this time
-appropriate art vs. in appropriate art
-Manet’s Dejuner sur l’herbe, Nana, et Olympia. Why the problems?
His early masterworks, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Nana, and Olympia, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

Prostitution in 19th century parisian life:

-Origins, numbers, practice.
-examples in artwork

Acceptable art work:

-“Scholarly pieces”: Titian’s Venus, etc.

Dejuner’ sur l’herbe, 1863:

-description
-controversy
-analysis

Olympia, 1865:

-description
-controversy
-analysis

Nana, 1877:

-description
-controversy
-analysis

On Manet:

Conclusion:

What I'm beinging to find interesting is that Manet's Olympia was deemed "vulgar" and "immoral" by the majority of critics seemingly because Olympia gaurded her sexuality; placed her hand firmly over her gentiles as if to suggest that it were in fact, her property; not the viewer's or her patron's. Titian's Venus met no simlar outcry with her pubic-hair-less privates, only delicately and suggestively covered by her hand, seducing the onlookers with a sincere look of "come hither." Thank heaven she was called "Venus" and her little dog was near by to remind us of her fidelity.



"..and elsewhere he notes that diverse critics, in 1865 and since, have found Olympia somehow masculinized, or androgynous. As far as he is concerned this response is a "wrongheaded" reaction to the figure's nonconformity to the traditonal notions of Woman. "Surely Olympia's sexual identity is not in doubt," Clark remarks, "it is how it belongs to her that is the problem.""
-Figures of Ill Repute

More likely research question as the last is putting me up a creek:

Why is the prostitue ubiquitous in the art of 19th century French Impressionism?
-Not only because of her pressence as a socai phenomenon but, more importantly, because of her function in stimulating artistic strategies to controll and dispel her fantasmic threat to male mastery.

"There is, in this idea of prostitution, a point of intersection so complex- lust, bitterness, the void of human relations, the frenzy of muscles and the sound of gold - that looking into it makes you dizzy; and you learn so many things! And you dream so well of love!" -Flaubert

Research Question: (Possibly)

How does prostitution of the French Impressionist era affect the image of women in the West and in the modern period?

I am currently gathering information and resources while narrowing my thesis statement. My topic of study involves prostitution in French impressionism.

I have gathered the following sources:
*Clayson hollis: Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era
*Charles Berhiemer: Figures of Il Repute: Representing Prostitution in Ninteenth-Century France
*Katie Hickman: Courtasans: Money Sex and Fame in the 19th Century
*Robert L. Herbert : Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

I also bought my plane ticket- I'll be in France on the 4th of Febuary, which will either greatly enhance my research or just make it a lot more difficult. We shall see!

In addition to submitting finished assigments via email, I will use this blog to update my work, research, and progress throughout the term.