Berthe Morisot

A few years ago, when the women's rights movement was at its most militant, art historians, especially the female variety, dug deep into the past and came up with a wealth of feminist activities in the arts. And, although the male of the species had always dominated nearly every aspect of the arts up until then, today I wonder if there has not been a sort of abandonment of the arts by men as they've turned to seeking more profitable venues for their efforts. I rather doubt if polling figures exist regarding the male/female ratios in any of the arts, but I have kind of an intuitive feeling that the numbers are at least equal and very possibly men may be a minority in some areas. (The logic being that a society can support only a certain number of artists, thus, with the rapid increase in female artists in the past hundred years, a similar percentage decrease must have occurred in male artists.) This has long been the case in the field of dance and I think this may be the case now in interior design (where men have fled to architecture), and painting (where men have gravitated toward photography, the cinema, and various electronic media).   
   
Two French sisters stand out as interesting examples of the relationship of women painters to the male-dominated art community of their time. Edma and Berthe Morisot (pronounced MOR-is-so) both were talented amateurs who admired the Barbizon painters of the mid-1800s and who later studied for a number of years under Jean-Batiste-Camille Corot (pronounced cor-ROW) during the 1860s. The sisters exhibited legitimate talent, showing in five Salon shows during the latter half of the decade. In 1869 Edma got married and followed traditional custom. She gave up her art for her family. About the same time, Berthe met Eduoard Manet (pronounched  ma-NAY) and fell under his influence. She also met his brother, Eugene, and fell under his influence as well. She married him.  
    

Summer Day, 1879,
Berthe Morisot


Unlike her sister however, Berthe refused to abandon painting in favor of domestic chores. Her family could well afford to pay someone to fulfill that obligation.  Instead, to her brother-in-law's dismay, she allied herself with the impressionists and showed regularly in their scandalous little exhibits. As an impressionist, her work became more painterly, her style looser, yet her technique remained delicate. Like her friend and the other token female impressionist, Mary Cassatt, she painted from a female point of view, her subject matter tending toward women in domestic scenes, her palette much lighter and more pastel than those of her male counterparts.  Nearly a hundred years ahead of her time, her thinking was quite that of the modern-day feminist.  She is quoted by Higonnet: "I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they."   
   

Painting History

In a time when we can push a button on a remote control and see the sparkling color images of history being made 24/7 on cable network news, it is difficult for us to realize what it must have been like when the only visual chronicler of history was the highly skilled history painter with his contrived, painted strokes of pigment and binder on a massive framed canvas displayed at an annual salon. Not exactly Brian Williams with the Nightly News.
  
When one reads about the strong governmental domination of the art academies in France, England, and many other European countries, we may ask ourselves, in light of our twentieth-century art scene, why would the government care much what artists painted? The answer of course is that history painting was deemed the highest realm to which an artist could aspire, and what these painters put on canvas, to a great extent, determined how people viewed history.  In other words, history painters were something on the order of today's "spin doctors". Governments have always had a stake in how history is recorded, thus, you better believe, they cared very much what these artists painted.  
   
One such history painter was the American-born, Benjamin West. West lived from 1738-1820, and though he began his art education in Philadelphia, he studied mostly abroad, in Italy and England where he lived most of his life.  West didn't forget his American roots however. Though a founder of the Royal Academy, his studio in London was a haven for Colonial artists studying there. His friendship and encouragement benefited American artists such as Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, among others, who studied at what was in effect, an "American Academy"  
    

Death of General Wolfe,
1770, Benjamin West


West's most famous history painting was the Death of General Wolfe, painted in 1770. By history painting standards, the work is not all that large, measuring some 5 by 7 feet. It depicts a scene from the French an Indian War and is formal, yet stark, noble, and human. Even while the painting was still a "work in progress", King George III let it be known he would not purchase a painting wherein British heroes were depicted in modern dress. No less than the godlike Sir Joshua Reynolds, then president of the Royal Academy, tried to prevail upon West not to continue such an "aberration of taste". Undaunted, West continued work on it. When it was displayed at the 1770 Salon, it was met with great critical acclaim. Reynolds apologized for his "error of judgment" and in effect, so did the king.  He ordered a copy for the royal collection, inasmuch as the original had quickly sold. In fact, West actually painted  four replicas of the original. Added to that, he collected royalties form hundreds of engravings based upon the painting. It wasn't the "evening news" perhaps, but the pay was good.

Social Realism

It is doubtful very many painters harbor hopes their work will have much impact on old and new social problems because if that were really their aim, they wouldn't be using brushes but television or movie cameras instead. However, during the first half of the twentieth century, there was a belief (perhaps naive) that art and artists could change the world by changing the way people looked at and thought about various social problems and injustices.
Many of these artist were painters, men like Robert Gwathmey, Philip Evergood, Jack Levine, and, perhaps most closely tied to what we've come to call Social Realism, Ben Shahn.



Sacco & Vanzetti Mural, Syracuese Univ.

Shahn was born in 1898 in Lithuania.  He came to the U.S. with his immigrant parents when he was eight.  He grew up seeing firsthand the suffering and injustice wrought by American society of his day upon those whose only crime was being poor or of some ethnic minority.  He studied art at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, and while in his early twenties, gained some notoriety through his paintings of the trial and execution of Nicole Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, who were tried for murder, but convicted largely because of their radical political beliefs. In conjunction with Upton Sinclair's novel, Boston, based upon the same trial, Shahn's stark, visual images, showing the two men in their coffins, focused adverse national attention upon the skewed legal system and social/political biases in the case.




Father Coughlin,
1938, Ben Shahn

 During the 1930s and 40s, Shahn continued to espouse and paint in connection with a number or left-wing socialist causes advocating changes that today, most of us take for granted.  In 1947, his paintings of a Centralia, Illinois, coal mine disaster which killed 111 men, centered not so much on the victims but on the wives and loved-ones they left behind. His Miners' Wives, painted in 1948, and Death of a Miner (1949) were instrumental in awakening the rest of the world to the negligence in coal mine management, the crass disregard for human life, the working conditions, and the lax safety standards which had led to the disaster.  As a result, one has to wonder how many present-day miners' lives have been saved through this artist's work.

Asher B. Durand



The Signing of the Declaration of Independence,
Painting by John Turnbull,
Engraving by Asher B. Durand, 1823

 It's not unusual for an artist to begin in one medium and find a great deal of success, only to feel unfulfilled and wish for something more challenging and enjoyable. That would pretty much be the case for a young engraver named Asher B. Durand. Born in 1796, by the 1830s, Durand was considered the best engraver in the United States. He became wealthy doing plates for bank notes, stocks, bonds, and all manner of commercial documents. In addition, he was also quite successful in creating etchings of others artists' famous paintings such as John Vanderlyn's Ariadne, and in particular, John Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence.   

Durand got his chance to try his hand at painting when, in 1834, he was commissioned by Luman Reed to do a series of oil portraits of the first seven presidents of the United States. Reed himself is notable in American art history as being the first collector of work by exclusively American artists, having sold off earlier purchases of European masters in favor of work by Durand, Thomas Cole, and William Sidney Mount. It was Reed, in fact, who had indulged Thomas Cole in painting his Course of Empire for the private art gallery in the new home he was building. At any rate, following the successful completion of the presidential series, Durand was emboldened to try landscapes. His naturalistic style and engraver's eye for detail caused him to quickly become this country's predominant landscape painter in this country as well. 



Kindred Spirits, 1848,
Asher B. Durand

  In 1848, upon the death of Durand's friend, Thomas Cole, Jonathan Sturges, a business partner of Luman Reed's (who had also died), commissioned Durand to do a commemorative painting. The result was perhaps the foremost painting of the Hudson River School, Kindred Spirits.  The painting is not a large one, barely more than three feet square. It depicts a rocky stream flowing down through the Catskills, primeval forest vegetation, and an outcropping of rock upon which stand Thomas Cole and his poet friend, William Cullen Bryant, also an ardent nature lover.  This single painting sums up much of what Americans felt for their country, its landscape, and it's art during the nineteenth century. It hangs today, not in an art museum, but in the New York Public Library.

The Ashcan School

America has always been in love with the landscape. Here I'm talking about the real thing as well as the poor imitations we try to render to canvas.  Surveys repeatedly show it to be the favorite type of art, not only in the U.S., but abroad as well. What started out with the primeval paintings of the Hudson River School 200 years ago gradually became more and more subdued as tastes changed to favor domestic farm scenes, then small, rural villages and their quaint genre activities, followed eventually by what has come to be called the urban landscape, with the emphasis on urban. As these misnamed "landscapes" became more and more citified the activities depicted became less and less quaint.  They became quite harsh, in fact. This transition began around 1900 and has since come to be called the Ashcan School.



Cross Streets of New York,
1899, Everett Shinn

 The Ashcan School was, of course, no more a school than the Hudson River School.  But like the Hudson River School, it was a group of artists with a single focus--in this case, the city. Usually it was New York, but Boston and Philadelphia each had "branches." And in most cases, the emphasis was on the harsh realities of the city. The pictures were not pretty. Often, they were often downright grim. The "school" grew up around the leadership of Robert Henri, who guided and nurtured this type of painting and the artists who painted it for some 50 years, until his death in 1951. Although the style of painting was often quite painterly, and (for lack of a better term) impressionistic, sometimes even expressionistic, it is often referred to as Social Realism (realism here having more to do with the content than the style of painting).


Italo-American Celebration,
Washington Square
1912, William Glackens


Though most of the artists tended to paint the middle or lower classes, some, like William Glackens and Maurice Prendergast chose to depict the life and times of the city's more well-to-do. Many of the Ashcan artists had more in mind than simply painting pictures. With their Socialist, even Marxist leanings, they intended their work to make a difference, to be a catalyst for change in the often harsh, miserable conditions they saw and painted. Artists such as John Sloan, Everett Shinn, George Luks, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Reginald Marsh all worked to "shake up" not only the staid art world of the National Academy, but the political powers-that-be as well. The term, Ashcan School, is not elegant. Even given the fact that it was coined some thirty years after Henri and Sloan began. It was intended largely as a term of derision for a movement with enough impact to worry art critics and politicos alike.

Oppression

When we think of oppression, we usually think of religious oppression, or political oppression, but seldom do we consider artistic oppression except perhaps in the context that our work, already priced ridiculously low, still won't sell. In Germany however, in the 1930s, artistic oppression, an outgrowth of political oppression, of course, was a very real threat to the livelihoods, indeed, even the lives of certain avant-garde artists who found themselves targets of the conservative political ideology sweeping the country at the time. This reactionary conservatism culminated in 1933 with the election of Adolph Hitler as chancellor. The lightning rod for this oppression was the Bauhaus.     

Modern architecture as seen here,
had its start with Germany's Bauhaus.


Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by Walter Gropius, an architect, and Paul Klee, a painter, they were joined by Vasily Kandinsky, Joseph Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and other art luminaries in the creation of a school merging industrial arts, architecture, and art into a unified curriculum as revolutionary as their liberal political philosophy. Twice the school was moved to avoid being closed down, first to Dessau, and later to Berlin. German authorities considered it not only educationally unsound, but politically subversive as well. Once Hitler came to power, the Nazis launched an aggressive campaign against Modernist art. The school was finally forced to close. Most of the faculty emigrated to the US where a semblance of the school ended up in Chicago.
 

The Junkerboden Under Snow,
1936–1938, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner


But the artistic oppression didn't stop there. The Nazis especially objected to German Expressionism, calling it "degenerate art". Paintings were burned and confiscated. Going beyond that, they organized a derisive exhibition of such works, seeking to stamp out Modernism for all time. Derogatory signs and slogans were posted on the gallery walls next to the art work. Over six-hundred paintings, sculpture, prints, and books taken from German public museums were view by 2 million people in the four months the exhibit was on display in Munich. Painter, Ludwig Kirchner, was driven to suicide while other artists merely left the country. And in the end, needing hard currency, the Nazi government shipped the works off to Switzerland where they were sold at auction. Because of this, ironically, many of these "degenerate" works survive today to bear witness to the "art oppression" that was a harbinger of even worse forms oppression yet to come.   

Growing Old

Old age is never a comforting thought. For an artist especially, it can be a real horror. It rings up images of arthritis in which merely holding a brush can bring anguished pain. It threatens the artist's lifeline to the outside world, his or her vision.  It often entails frailty and fatigue where once there was strength and vigor. There can be sadness and despair in outliving old friends, one's spouse, even ones' children. Yet the creative urge never dies. Sometimes it is the one spark that keeps an artist alive and aware. It can be a harsh taskmaster, driving the aging artist, now with excruciating pain, and an uncertain, but nonetheless final, deadline to do that which, in youth, would have been quite easy. Where others might simply give up, the true artist adjusts. Claude Monet painted massive garden scenes seen through double cataracts with a brush bound to fingers which could no long grip it.

Henri Matisse, in the last decade of his life, following repeated, debilitating surgeries, his eyesight also failing, and so weak he could no longer get out of bed, adjusted to his condition by moving to huge sheets of paper he could still see and large blocks of painted paper meticulously arrange by assistants according to the master's directions. The work was necessarily abstract. No more could he create the intricate, flat, interior designs or two-dimensional painted figures that had long been the hallmark of his flamboyant style. His gouache on paper work entitled The Snail, created in 1953, just a year before he died, is an excellent example of the adjustments an old man made in continuing to do as best he could what best he loved.



The Snail, 1953,
Henri Matisse

 The "painting" is, in reality, a collage, (some nine and a half feet square) framed in large sheets of orange-painted paper cut by Matisse after having been painted by an assistants to his precise color demands. Color was always Matisse's forte. Even in his glory days, he was first and foremost a colorist.  In his later years, he was able to take advantage of twentieth century scientific developments which gave him a whole rainbow of bright, new, pure pigments only dreamed about in his youth.  Inside the orange frame is a white field in which only the most vivid imagination can discern the image of a snail. Arrange in a spiral from a central block of green are rectilinear shapes in magenta, lavender, flaming yellow, orange, bright red, royal blue, and grass green. A single sheet of black keeps the competing color fields under control against the pure whiteness of his background. The work is a testament to a man's sheer stubbornness to persist in the face of 85 years of daunting debilitation, giving new meaning to the phrase, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."