Mary Leriche
Development of Modern Art: Post
2
An analysis of the tension, opposition and technical
developments during the 19th century will be made through the works
of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins. I will also examine some other artists and
their work during this time to give a broader understanding of this time
period.
During this time photography was becoming a big thing, and
so Impressionism developed as a direct response to photography and as a
rejection of all previous art movements. Impressionists were concentrating on a
fleeting moment, capturing how they
saw movement. They wanted to create a visual representation of what they
experienced. They concentrated on the effect of light on what they painted;
they also emphasized brushstrokes, the form, shape, and color of objects. This
resulted in a blurriness to their paintings a lot. The concept behind what they
were trying to do was quickly paint oil sketches accurately recording
landscape. They wanted to show how objects appeared in light.
Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins were both Impressionist
painters, though their work style varied in how it was created, they both
strove for the same ideals of the Impressionist movement in how art was created.
They had a similar background, both came from Pennsylvania in America, both
ended up in Paris around the same time and became a part of the Impressionist
movement there.
The first work that will be looked at is Five O’Clock Tea, which is oil on canvas
painting that was created by Mary Cassatt in the year 1880. In this painting
the viewer sees two ladies of the upper class having tea in a primly decorated
parlor. Since Cassatt rejected the timelessness of the nude, or more
accurately, deprived of access to the representation of unclothed bodies, she
uses fashion to define a specific historical moment, a concrete social milieu
within the supposed a-historicity of the female domestic realm. One of the
ladies in the painting is Cassatt’s sister, Lydia, and the other woman is a
visitor.
Nudes in paintings were objects for men to look at, there
was an objectification of women in art. The audience who saw these paintings was
by default considered to be male. In Five
O’Clock Tea the women are not looking at the viewer (a male), they are not
beckoning the male gaze- they are not on display for the male viewer. This
scene is a reality of women’s lives, which would be overlooked by men, but as a
woman Mary Cassatt was able to understand this moment in a way a male could
not, therefore giving the painting an essence of understanding. She is trying
to show women and women, as they naturally are, not something to be owned or
used by men. Here we see how gender and gender roles plays a part in the art
during this time.
The next artwork that I will compare is Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole, which is also an oil
on canvas painting created from 1883-5. There are young men and boys swimming
naked outside. This painting projects a heady sense of escape from social
constraint through sheer bodily freedom. The youthful male nudes, including
Eakins himself in the foreground, are represented modestly, form the back or
with strategically bent leg, and evoke moral qualities of honesty and purity in
the out-of-doors context. Democratic freedom is signified by the youthful male
American body in the American landscape: to be American is at once to be
natural and to have a privileged relation to Nature.
In this painting the viewer is able to see how Eakins is
more traditional compared to Cassatt, who’s paintings are a lot like Manet’s
work. In this painting the men are located more in the foreground, with Eakins’
depicted as the fore most figure in the lower right corner of the painting.
Even though the brushstrokes are seen, the entire painting blends more then
Cassatt’s paintings. There is some depth of field, though it is slightly off.
There is a slight blurriness and a softness to the forms in some areas. The
males are the focus in this painting, with one of the males standing on a large
rock in the center of the composition.
Woman in Black at the
Opera is another oil on canvas painting created by Mary Cassatt in 1880.
The woman in the painting looks active, at a time when women were rarely
understood to possess what is called “the power of the gaze,” Cassatt has given
it forcefully and completely to her opera-goer. She holds the opera-glasses,
that prototypical instrument of male specular power, firmly to her eyes; even
her fan is somewhat raised in the tense excitement of her active looking.
Energy, control, the vividness of active looking, even the suggestion of veins
standing out beneath the glove on the wrist of the hand which grasps the
opera-glasses; all this and the forcefulness of the dark silhouette against the
light of the house behind: one can see this portrait in some way functioning as
a self-image of the modern woman artist herself.
The man in the background is a little important in the
painting because he’s centrally located, and the lines and directions in the
painting lead to him. He mimics the woman in black in the way he gazes at her.
The woman is in black because she is alone, which was not supposed to happen
when she was in public. With her wearing black it helps her blend into the
background. Cassatt understands the male gaze within the world of art, but in
this painting she is saying the woman’s gaze is more important, and the male
gaze is not important at all.
The Concert Singer
(Weda Cook) is an oil on canvas painting done by Thomas Eakins in 1892.
This is one of the portrait’s of a woman that Eakins made, even though Cook is
shown actively performing, on the stage, she is in some sense figured as less
active. The pose of the singer is
relatively pliant, wavering rather than a posture of easy command. She seems to
have surrendered her separateness to the spell of what she is doing. To put it
another way, Eakins interprets the female singer as the instrument of the music
that flows forth from her rather than as a creator in her own right. Indeed,
this notion of instrumentality is carried further by the presence of the male
hand to the lower left, meant as a synecdochal reference to the otherwise
invisible orchestra leader. Yet the hand can also be read as a sign of
masculine control and dominance; it is, in fact, the hand of Weda Cook’s
teacher, Dr. Schmitz: his almost unseen masculine presence figures as the
active, generating force of the artistic creativity bodied forth in the
painting.
This painting show’s even though Eakins is painting women,
he still represents them as objects that are controlled by men, frail in
themselves, needing the strength and leadership of men to succeed. Cook seems
to almost fade into the background vs. the presence of the hand holding a
baton. There is a little depth of field in this painting, but there does not
seem to be a real wall behind Cook as she is on stage. The brushstrokes are
visible in the painting, and there is a softness and fuzziness that is a part
of impressionist art.
There is an opposition in how men paint and depict what
happens in different scenes, and how they depict the role of women, compared to
how women artists during this time depicted the same type of scene. One of the
things influencing how women depicted scenes that had female’s in them is that
they had a deeper understanding of what was going on in the instances that were
painted. They understood these scenes emotionally, mentally, and physically,
compared to men who painted their idea of what was happening. There is also a
dichotomy of men’s ideas of women, believing they own or are better than women,
and how they objectify women stripping them of their humanity in their own
existence. Women understand that they do not need men and depend on them as
much as males believe, women can show what goes on in a scene in a deeper more
meaningful way, and they also show that women are in a sense better than men
for they do not treat and think of men the way men treat and think of women.
Two other impressionist artists who understand this higher
more complex quality of women are Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet. In Berthe Morisot’s painting The Psyche, she depicts a young woman
who is starting to become sexually aware of herself. In the painting Morisot
uses a mirror to show light, she hints at some depth but it is not as dark as
it is in reality. Morisot is sympathizing with the character in the painting.
Psyche is from Greek and Roman mythology who represents sexuality and love,
essentially cupid. Morisot as a woman understands what this character is going
through on a deeper level, in a way a man never could. In Edouard Manet’s
painting Olympia, which is oil on
canvas made in the year 1863, he paints the nude female in a way that is not
traditional. His style of painting is impressionist in that he flattens the
painting and has extreme white vs. darker colors but not completely black. Previously
throughout history nude females were depicted as Venus, their gaze longing and
beckoning the male viewer. In Olympia,
she is not Venus, but a prostitute who is depicted as having extreme sexuality,
but she is in control of it. She waits for a client, but she will be in
control, not the male that will come. Her hand is not placed softly covering
herself, she holds herself deliberately, and there is a harshness of the scene
that emphasizes her control. She does not depend on a man, she depends on
herself, and by keeping control she stops the objectification that is usually
applied to women.
Sources that were used are:
Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History by Stephen
Eisenman
Images were obtained from Google images
No comments:
Post a Comment