Art History Today

Romantic Art & the Public Exhibition (9)

PARIS (1846) Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846.”

Charles Baudelaire introduced a new form of art criticism which defied imitation. His reviews or Salons were poetic, discursive, playful, occasionally scabrous, but always the product of a disciplined mind and hyperaesthetic personality. The first was due to a classical education at the College Louis-le Grand in Paris; the second the result of his father being a painter, and therefore growing up in an atmosphere of artistic appreciation. However, when his mother married again, it was to a Napoleonic martinet- General Aupick who persuaded Baudelaire’s family to restrict his finances.[1] Rebelling against this familial jurisdiction, Baudelaire tried to earn a living in the market place by producing copy for a number of newspapers and periodicals. After the political ructions of the 1830s, Baudelaire settled down to become an art critic, a function well suited to him as he was an ardent collector of paintings and prints, as well as a keen amateur draftsman. One of his early Salons of 1846 was addressed “To the Bourgeois” which was obviously meant as some kind of joke as Baudelaire was the epitome of aristocratic dandyism, a concept that he would elaborate on in 1863. Baudelaire also tried to define romanticism concluding that it did not “lie in the choice of subjects,” nor in fidelity to truth, “but in the way he[ the artist] feels.” Then after a discussion of colour, Baudelaire goes on to examine the links between Delacroix and Romanticism offering examples of his art and other painters in the exhibition he is reviewing. These range from the Delacroix and Ingres to a group of artists that he mischievously labels the “apes of sentiment” which includes “bad painters” like Ary Scheffer.

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[1] One of the best biographies of Baudelaire is by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (Galliard 1987) which is also available in a fine translation by Graham Robb, Baudelaire, (Vintage, 1989).

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LONDON (1836) Romanticism & Turner

The 1830s were an important decade for the arts in England. In 1831 the young Queen Victoria (only eighteen years of age) opened the new National Gallery, and the public flooded in eager to see the masterpieces on its walls. Was the taste of the public satisfied by romantic art? The answer is a resounding no, especially the kinds of heroic battle scenes and history paintings that we are looking at on this course. The public were enthusiastic about the romantic sublimity of John Martin’s romantic panoramas, but those were closer to history painting with their Biblical scenes rather than representations of themes connected with the modern movement. As for landscape, there wasn’t really any public demand for painting of nature; this was the preserve of private collectors and connoisseurs and certainly not the taste of a public. One of the greatest landscape artists of the time, Constable, disapproved of the National Gallery and took no interest in public events to the extent of banning all newspapers from his house. The nearest thing to a romantic sensitivity in art at this time is Turner’s art, but it would meet with great hostility. regarded as the modern art of its day, and hence provoking contentious reactions. One of these was by the Rev John Eagles who lambasted Turner’s Judith and her Nurse (“a strange jumble”) in Blackwood’s Magazine only to be rebuffed by an irate Ruskin springing to Turner’s defence, his first public declaration of support for the painter. By contrast, Turner received an enthusiastic review from one “Michael Angelo Titmarsh,” better known to the world as William Makepeace Thackeray who raised Turner’s farewell to the old fighting ship Temeraire to the status of a “national ode.”

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PARIS (1824) Stendhal: “Salon of 1824.”[1]

While the ailing king Louis XVIII was gravely ill at sixty nine years of age, the people of Paris including citizens, tourists, critics, connoisseurs, foregathered in the Place du Carousel eager for the doors of the Louvre to be thrown back so that they could rush to see the art in the Salon of 1824. Amongst these would have been Stendhal who had been sent by the Journal de Paris to report on the exhibition. This resulted in a series of articles run in the Journal over a spell of several months. One of the first things that would have met Stendhal’s eyes would have been Ingres’s large Vow of Louis XIII which faced Delacroix’s Massacre at Scios, which as David Wakefield said stood for the poles of Classical and Romantic.[2] Yet things were more complex than simply a battle of ideas fought on the walls of the Salon, and this complexity prevailed for a variety of reasons. Firstly, romanticism could never have formed itself into a school without repudiating its tenets of individual self-expression; secondly, romanticism as encountered in this exhibition was “the extension to the visual arts” of ideas and beliefs spread by the critics, some of whom would not have been fervently anti-classical.[3] Despite the battle-lines being drawn, romanticism as both a movement and a taste never really established itself in the French art world. The number of works sent to this Salon was staggering: no less than 2,180 exhibits, of which 1,761 were paintings and 164 sculptures.[4] Significantly only 25 paintings were of ancient history which would have suited Stendhal who said that he much preferred an unfinished scene from French medieval history to twenty paintings of classical subjects like Agamemnon disregarding Cassandra’s prophecies.

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[1] Holt, Triumph of Art, 261-279.

[2] David Wakefield, “The Salon of 1824 and the Critics” in The French Romantics: Literature and the Visual Arts 1800-1840 (Chaucer Press, 2007), 77.

[3] Wakefield, The French Romantics, 78.

[4] According to Wakefield (79), the genre count was 400 landscapes, 300 portraits, 100 religious works, 100 literary subjects, 50 from modern history, 50 36 from classical mythology, 25 from ancient history.

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LONDON (1809) Henry Crabb Robinson: “William Blake; Artist, Poet, & Religious Mystic.”[1]

In his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd says that Blake’s life could be considered “the parable of the artist who avoids the market place, where all others came to buy and sell.”[2] Yet despite his insularity Blake continued to believe from 1791 (a year when he lost an opportunity to gain a larger audience by publishing his topical poem on the French Revolution) that his prophetic books, pregnant with dense allegories and imbricated with complex systems gathered from the religions of the world, could reach the public. In 1809 Blake even composed something he called a “Public Address” in which he explains his ideas on character as it is presented in his engraving Chaucer’s Pilgrims.[3] There is some uncertainty about wether this was Blake’s own design that Thomas Stothard stole, but it could be the case that Blake’s version was an attempt to outstep Stothard who got the idea from another artist Cromek in 1806.[4] The exhibition that accompanied this direct address to the public was opened on May 9^th 1809 at his brother’s hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street in the West End of London. It barely attracted any interest but one of the few visitors was Henry Crabb Robinson who had studied in Germany and been placed there as a correspondent for the Times. Among the items analysed by Robinson are Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s poem The Grave, and various other works some of which are described in Blake’s “Descriptive Catalogue” on the art of fresco.[5] Robinson supplements his own observations with the DC, Blake’s description of the Chaucer engravings, and commentaries on Blake by his friend Fuseli. Robinson concludes that Blake “as an artist will never produce consummate and immortal work” or “flawless poems,” but nevertheless will be of interest to connoisseurs and art appreciators in Germany. Towards the end of Blake’s life, Crabb Robinson, a convert to German idealism, and a friend of the Romantic poets, concluded that “constant hallucinations” had “doomed” Blake to obscurity, and indeed poverty, which was moderately alleviated in his very final years by acts of kindness by wealthy artists such as Sir Thomas Lawrence who had admired Blake’s designs for Blair’s The Grave.[6] Blake (top) and Stothard’s versions above.

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[1] Holt, Triumph of Art, 138-147.

[2] Peter Ackroyd, Blake, (QPD, 1995), 162.

[3] Blake, Complete Writings ed. Geoffrey Keynes (OUP, 1966), 591.

[4] Ackroyd, Blake, 272, who says there is “no evidence that he [Blake] sketched any Chaucerian designs before 1808.”

[5] Blake, Complete Writings, 563-586.

[6] Quoted in Ackroyd, Blake, 342.

Romantic Art & the Public Exhibition (5)

BERLIN (1808-10): Various German Critics: Friedrich’s Seascape, the Critics & the Public.

No less than 422 works of art were shown at the official exhibition of the Prussian academy in Berlin. Friedrich sent two paintings: The Abbey in the Forest and the Monk by the Sea. Both of these were immersed in the mysticism and gothic dread of the middle-ages, though the Monk by the Sea seemed to be more in harmony with more recent literature, especially Young’s Night Thoughts (1742) which was tremendously influential on romanticist thought. One visitor, Heinrich von Kleist memorably described the act of looking at Friedrich’s picture as like viewing with eyelids cut away. Herr von Kleist ended by stating that he couldn’t really reach a verdict on the painting. Other critics Brentano and Von Arnim created a kind of drama of emotions involving a cast of various members of the public including couples, families, connoisseurs, ending with a “gentle tall man” who had listened with dismay and consternation to the public verdict. This shadowy character is obviously meant to stand for Friedrich himself who gives thanks that paintings cannot hear the judgement of museum-goers; if they could, they would veil themselves.

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DRESDEN (1808) Various German critics. Viewing Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains

Together with anti-classical artists like Friedrich and Runge, Dresden was home to a coterie of intellectuals and philosophers who espoused the cause of romanticism. Some of these had connections with Carstens and Fernow in Rome, and they were opposed to the classicism that Goethe had set out for the “new German school.” Many academics and scholars in Germany held the same view as the painters on the classical tradition. As explained by Holt, the Schlegels had “employed the term romantic to expand the connotation of “Nordic” to include medieval Christian elements.”[1]A good example of this was Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains commissioned (after seeing a drawing for it in an exhibition) by Countess Maria Theresa of Thun-Hohenstein. It was subsequently executed as an altarpiece in the Thun ancestral castle at Tetschen in Bohemia where it was received with a hushed reverence as if it were hanging in a church. Though opinion was generally favourable towards Friedrich’s painting, there were some dissenters to his quixotic practice of blending religious iconography and landscape together. The academic classicist von Ramdohr was particularly vocal on this supposedly violation of the principles of artistic decorum.[2] Amongst Ramdohr’s criticisms were Friedrich’s use of colour, his abandonment of aerial perspective, his mismanagement of landscape and figure painting, and most of all his use of allegory for a pious subject. It is interesting that Ramdohr sees Friedrich’s allegory intended for “a select few” rather than the public who presumably would desire a more traditional kind of religious painting. Ramdohr’s critique provoked a defence on the grounds that Friedrich was changing the language of painting and its forms, thus attracting a new kind of picture viewer.

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[1] Holt, Triumph of Art, 150.

[2] Von Ramdohr, “Remarks concerning a landscape painting by Herr Friedrich in Dresden”

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ROME (1795): Karl L. Fernow: “Concerning some new works of art of Professor Carstens.”[1]

In this review the German critic Fernow reproduces Carsten’s text which is as follows: “The following works of art are on display for public review in the house of the deceased Pompeo Batoni.” Then follows a list of works stating the subject and literary source of the painting. This is essential as Carsten’s subjects were immensely scholarly and were mainly drawn from classical culture; without this description the pictures would have been completely incomprehensible to the public. Taking one example “The Birth of Light” (above) which we learn is “sketch from Sanchoniath, an ancient Phoenician author. Ftas (the original power of things) begat with Neitha (Night) Fanes (Light). After Light was born, from Ftas’s breath went forth the cosmos in which reposed the germ of all creation. It was hatched by the warmth of Fire; Heaven and Earth arose, and all things developed. Ftas shows the course taken by the cosmos into the infinite.” As Fernow points out, Carsten’s subjects are entirely new, little used in traditional pictorial art, and suited to the personality of the artist. As we shall see, Carstens has much in common with Blake who was an equally idiosyncratic artist presenting his art for public inspection.

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[1] Holt, Triumph of Art, 57-63.

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The Rise of the Independent Exhibiting Artist.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the start of a rebellious trend on the part of artists in exhibitions. Perhaps the first historical expression of this can be found in the life of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa who may have rejected patronage in order to pursue his own course; this veered between a longing to belong to a system of conventional patronage, and a wilful rejection of that aspect of the art world.[1] In this Rosa was foreshadowing the behaviour of modern artists. Such behaviour survived into the next century with such works as Joseph Anton Koch’s The Artist as Hercules at the Crossroads (1791) (above).[2] As the title suggests, this recalls the iconographical convention of showing the strongman at a junction where he can choose the direction of either Vice or Virtue, symbolised by two different female figures, one stern in mien, and one lax in disposition. In 1791- the time this drawing was done- Koch had escaped the Court College of Art in Stuttgart, and this singular image might be connected with that flight. The statuesque figure on the left represents Art-Virtue, and bears the legend “Imitatio’ which makes her a distant cousin of Pittura. The other figure, decked out in garish clothing, could not be further removed from the family of Pittura: she is ‘Art the Whore’ who disconcertingly binds Koch with a chain around his ankle. In addition to symbolising the affected manner of the court, this figure, with its grotesquery, mocks the kind of training that the artist received there. As Bätschmann observes, though this image can be located in 18th century debates about virtue, notably Lord Shaftesbury whose political ideas were linked with the iconography of Hercules at the Crossroads, it also concerns artistic freedom. An artist is free to give up the rewards and riches at court; but the consequence of that is that he may find himself on the stony path of poverty. Many of Koch’s predecessors trod the safe road of court patronage which brought distinction and monetary success. Although it may be unsafe to generalise, Koch’s rejection of all this courtly favour reflects the fiercely independent attitude of post-renaissance painters in Germany who exchanged the high wages- and associated arrogance- for humility, artistic integrity, and inevitably, poverty. According to Bätschmann, Koch started a trend of artists moving from state service and the academy to the stand-alone studio best exemplified by Asmus Jakob Carstens who stated that he “did not belong to the Berlin Academy, but to mankind.”

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[1] See Xavier Salomon’s ‘“Ho Fatto Spiritar Roma” Salvator Rosa and Seventeenth-Century Exhibitions’ in Salvator Rosa (Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kimbell Art Museum, 2010-11), 74-98.

[2] Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World, 24-5.

Romantic Art & the Public Exhibition (1)

Art for the Public in the Age of Romanticism.

The origins of the growth of public exhibitions in the nineteenth-century are found in the seismic changes caused by the French Revolution, and more generally “the liberalization of Society” which caused profound alterations in the nature of society, politics and culture.[1] During revolutionary France, art objects previously belonging to the aristocracy were nationalised and displayed in public museums. Napoleon even created large museums in the provinces which might surprise the visitor today with their impressive holdings. Yet the art boom of the early nineteenth-century was far from provincial; it was international with opinions about artists, exhibitions, and styles bruited through newspapers like the London Monthly Review, the Parisian Mercure de France which reported on events occurring in places as far apart as St Petersburg, Rome, Paris, and Berlin. Many of these newspapers were published in these cities, so the art reporting and book reviewing of the time had a truly cosmopolitan flavour. This was also the age of the rise of the art critic whose opinions and judgements about painting and sculpture would be found in a myriad number of journals, club periodicals, and generally the world of arts and letters throughout Europe. A formidable standard had been set by the enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot, but with public interest combined with greater demand for art news, more critics appeared, some of whom like Stendhal, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Goethe and a brace of others were known not only for art reviews or connoisseurship, but other forms of art, poetry, science and politics.

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[1] Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, The Triumph of Art for the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics, (Anchor Books, 1979), 9.

Representing History: Romanticism & Society. Slides for Lecture.

1) Goya, The Family of Carlos IV, 1800, oil on canvas, 280 x 336 cm, Prado, Madrid.

2) Goya, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, 1790s, oil on canvas, 127 x 101 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

3) Goya, The Duchess of Alba, 1797, oil on canvas, 210.2 x 149.3 cm, The Hispanic Society of America, New York.

4) Goya, Portrait of Antonia Zárate, c. 1805, Oil on canvas, 103,5 x 81,9 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

5) Goya, Ferdinand Guillemardet, French Ambassador to Spain, 1798, oil on canvas, 186 x 124 cm, Museé du Louvre, Paris.

6) Girodet, Portrait of J. B. Belley, Deputy for Saint-Domingue, 1797, Oil on canvas, 159 x 113 cm, Musée National du Château, Versailles.

7) Girodet, Mademoiselle Lange as Danaë, 1799, Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm, Institute of Arts, Minneapolis.

8) Girodet, Portrait of Queen Hortense, 1808, Oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

9) Girodet, François-René de Chateaubriand, 1809, Oil on canvas, 120 x 96 cm, Musée d'Histoire et du Pays Malouin, St Malo.

10) Richard Westall, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, 1813, oil on canvas, NPG, London.

11) Theodore Gericault, Portrait of an Artist in His Studio, c. 1820, Oil on canvas, 147 x 114 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

12) Eugene Delacroix, Self-Portrait, c. 1837, Oil on canvas, 65 x 54,5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

13) Eugene Delacroix, Louis-Auguste Schwiter, 1826-27, Oil on canvas, 218 x 144 cm, National Gallery, London.

14) Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of David Lyon, c. 1825, Oil on canvas, 217 x 132 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

15) Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Portrait of Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1814, oil on canvas, 90.7 x 74.3 cm, Kunstakademiets Bibliotek, Copenhagen.

16) Bertel Thorvaldsen, Statue of Byron, 1831, Marble, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

17) Asmus Jakob Carstens, Self-Portrait, 1784, Pencil drawing, 332 x 208 mm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

18) Theodore Markus Rehbenitz, 1815, Self-Portrait, pencil drawing, Private Collection.

19) Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait, 1810, Black chalk, 228 x 182 mm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

20) Goya, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812, Oil on panel, 64 x 52 cm, National Gallery, London.

21) Louis Leopold Boilly, Meeting of Artists in Isabey's Studio, 1798, Oil on canvas, 72 x 111 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

22) Louis Leopold Boilly, At the Entrance, 1796-98, Oil on panel, 40 x 31 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

23) Honoré Daumier, “There’s no doubt about it, it certainly is my profile; but I shall always regret that the artist had the obstinacy to omit my spectacles,” 1864.

24) Ingres, Monsieur Louis François Bertin, 1832, Oil on canvas, 116 x 95 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

25) Ingres, Study for Monsieur Bertin, n.d., black chalk and graphite, 34.9 x 34.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

26) Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer, 1820, oil on canvas, 386 x 512 cm, Museé du Louvre, Paris.

27) Ingres Portrait of the Forestier Family, c. 1828, graphite and white chalk on tracing paper, 30 x 37.2 cm, Harvard Museums.

28) Ingres, Countess Haussonville, 1845, oil on canvas, 131.8 x 92. 1 cm, Frick Collection, New York.

29) Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856, oil on canvas, 120 x 92 cm, National Gallery, London.

30) Anon, Allegory of Heracles with baby Telephus suckled by the doe: fresco from Herculaneum, 1st century CE, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

31) Eugène Delacroix, Portrait of Madame François Simon, oil on canvas,61 cm x 51 cm, Kuntshalle, Karlsruhe.

32) Portrait of Clément Boulanger, née Marie- Élizabeth Blavot, later Madame Edmund Cavé, oil on canvas, location unknown.

33) Ingres, Madame Cavé, 1831-34, watercolour, 40.6 x 32,7 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

34) Ingres, Hygin-Edmond-Ludovic Cavé, watercolour, 40.6 x 32,7 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

35) Eugène Delacroix, Frédéric Chopin, 1838, Oil on canvas, 45,7 x 37,5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

36) Emile Signol, Portrait of the Young Berlioz, 1831-32, oil on canvas, Villa Medici, Rome.

37) Eugène Delacroix, Portrait of George Sand, 1838, Oil on canvas, 79 x 57 cm, Ordrupgaardsamlingen, Ordrupgaard.

38) Emile Deroy, Portrait of Baudelaire in the Hotel Pimodan, 1844, oil on canvas, Musée des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

39) Caspar David Friedrich Moonrise by the Sea, c. 1821, Oil on canvas, 135 x 170 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

40) Nadar, Photograph of Constantin Guys.

41) Constantin Guys, Napoleon and his Court, nd, w/c, study for a book illustration, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

42) Constantin Guys, Aux Champs- Elysees, nd, pen and wash, formerly in the possession of Baudelaire, now owned by the Museé de la Ville de Paris.

43) Constantin Guys, Women in a Carriage with Men on Horseback, Pen and brown ink, gray wash, and watercolour, over pencil, on paper, 203 x 343 mm, Morgan Library, New York.