The Objectivity of Realism: Art and Architecture

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The Objectivity of Realism: Art and Architecture

Public Display. Art in Europe between 1750 and 1914 existed more and more in an urban, industrial, capitalistic market society whose population (especially in cities) was increasing and whose artistic tastes were changing. Art was no longer a luxury item for the elite and became a widely consumed commodity. An expanding public comprising new classes had the means and desire to have access to images and artistic representations, both intheir original form and, after the mid nineteenth century, as reproductions.The market was a product of these conditions, and later in the century, so were the exhibition and the public art museum. The art market, the exhibition (which was a form of advertising as well as a source of goods), and the art museum were all forms of public display and remain a fixture of the art world to this day. The initial purpose of public art museums, which were sponsored by governments, was to display the glories of a nation&s history to its citizenry. Indeed, museums were organized in such a way that artifacts, the historical products of nations, were displayed to the mobile viewer chronologically, giving a sense of the flow of time from the distant past to the present. These repositories of artifacts culled from a nation’s past were, like much of the art itself, products of the rise of nationalism. The Louvre in Paris—which opened in 1793 in the midst of the French Revolution and warfare between the revolutionaries and other states in Europe—was explicitly created to proclaim national greatness and national power. As European nations expanded around the globe over the course of the nineteenth century, both through commerce and imperial conquest and domination, the arti-facts of the host nation’s past were joined by those gathered from other civilizations.

Realist and Naturalist Painting. Romantic painters often selected landscapes as their subject matter or attempted to portray individuals in such a way as to give the viewer access to the subject’s inner self. Realist and Naturalist painters were as committed to these subjects as Romantics, but their style of depiction was decidedly different. Realist painters chose ordinary subjects and depicted them in ways that the viewer could readily imagine seeing in everyday life, while Naturalists were more concerned with an exact depiction of minute details in a given scene. The French Romantic Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863) wrote that painting should be a “feast for the eyes” served up in brilliant colors, and German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) averred that painting was a leap of the imagination into the world of feeling beyond rationality and the concrete. The Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), however, countered the Romantic unreality with its opposite. As he wrote in 1861 in a newspaper called the Courier du dimanche,” The art of painting consists only in the representation of objects which the artist can see and touch.... I ... maintain that painting is essentially a concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. . . . An abstract object, being invisible and non-existent, does not form part of the domain of painting. His attack on Romanticism included its embodiment of nationalism evoked by reference to the past. Courbet believed that “no period should be reproduced except by its own artists. I mean by artists who have lived in it.” The German Naturalist Adolf von Menzel (1815–1905), like all painters of this style, rejected Romanticism, employing a style that reveled in detail and exactitude in its rendering of physical reality.

Political and Social Criticism in the Visual Arts. Courbet’s realism was driven by a political and social commitment to fundamental change in society. He believed that a romantic retreat to the unreal was escapism and an abdication from the true purpose of art, which was to inform the viewing public of the real nature of the world and so prepare

people to change it. Courbet was a socialist, and like many other European artists living in the mid nineteenth century, he championed the ultimately unsuccessful Revolutions of 1848. Political and social criticism were expressed by other Realists as well. The French painter and illustrator Honore Daumier (1808–1879) used biting satire to expose the foibles and corruption of contemporary bourgeois man, or he employed his demonic side to call attention to the deep flaws of politics and society. In The Dream of the Inventor of the Needle Gun (1866) he ridicules technological invention and indirectly challenges the connection between industrialism and the idea of progress. Perhaps, instead, it leads to death and destruction. Ever the Realist, Daumier created illustrations that are often set in the everyday world—the teeming, busy, noisy city street—and often depict everyday people, such as The Blacksmith (1855–1860).

Photography and Lithography. Photography, invented in 1839 simultaneously in England and France, and lithography represent the industrialization and mass production of the visual media. Photography froze concrete images of reality. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) perfected what he called calotypes, produced by exposing waxed-paper negatives and sensitized coated paper positives to sunlight. In France, Louis Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1789–1851) perfected a technique through which images were projected onto a sensitized silvered metal plate. The shiny daguerreotypes captured such an extraordinary amount of precise detail that they were called “the mirror of nature.” The technique of lithography was developed around the turn of the nineteenth century. An image is drawn with an oil-based crayon or a grease-based solution on a smoothly sanded piece of limestone. The resulting image absorbs ink while the stone does not,

and the inked image may be reproduced by pressing a sheet of paper to the stone. This process can be repeated thousands of times, exactly reproducing the original each time. After the invention of photography and lithography, mass-produced representations proliferated among the growing art-consuming public. The impact on the visual art world was enormous. The distribution, and even the idea, of art was transformed. Photography first conquered the market for portrait images created in professional photographers’ studios. It then became a medium for amateurs as well, after the portable handheld camera, called a Kodak after the company that made it, became widespread in the 1890s. As photography came to dominate the notion of realistic representation, painters began to abandon Realism, and the new styles of Impressionism and Modernism emerged. Lithographic reproductions of original works aided in the dissemination of affordable art to thousands of people and publicized the works of thousands of artists.

Industrialism in Architecture. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe was deeply industrialized, and its market economy was increasingly integrated internally as well as with that the rest of the world. In architecture these developments are vividly represented by the Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) and erected in London in 1851. This mammoth building stretched 1,848 feet long and 408 wide, enclosed 19 acres, and, in keeping with the industrial age in which it was built, it was made of more than 6,000 cast-iron columns and 1,245 wrought-iron girders. Within the iron frame thousands of panes of glass were installed, giving the structure its name. Regardless of its aesthetic qualities, which were hotly debated at the time, the place of the Crystal Palace in history is assured because it was the first great building not constructed with masonry, wood, or stone. Erected in only nine months, the Crystal Palace was built to house an exhibition of more than 100,000 objects from Great Britain and the rest of world, showcasing British preeminence

in Industry and world trade as well as the geographic sweep of the British Empire. After the exhibition, the building was disassembled, moved to Sydenham, and reconstructed there as the focal point of a landscaped park. Inside was a public, architectural museum with huge replicas of different styles of historical architecture. As a land-mark representing industrialism and the ever-expanding market economy, the Crystal Palace drew tens of thousands of visitors before it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Reaction. The Crystal Palace had its critics as well as its champions. John Ruskin (1819–1900), perhaps the greatest art critic of the second half of the nineteenth century, appreciated the Crystal Palace as a feat of engineering but not as art: “There is assuredly as much ingenuity required to build a screw frigate, or a tubular bridge as a hall of glass. . . . all, in their several ways, deserve our highest admiration; but not admiration of the kind that is rendered to poetry or art.” Ruskin, like William Blake (1757–1827) before him, was sounding a common criticism, one condemning industrial capitalism as a system that deprived individuals of their dignity and their freedom. William Morris (1834–1896), a disciple of Ruskin, carried this critique to his Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris sought to renew architecture and society by returning to handicraft production that somehow would stand outside the market economy, thereby defying commercialism and repudiating the profit motive. With Philip Webb he designed and built the Red House, which stands as a monument to the Arts and Crafts Movement. The decorative arts for interior design were coordinated with the architecture of the building, all modeled on the styles of the pre-capitalist and pre-industrial Middle Ages.

Commercial Architecture. The Crystal Palace pioneered the use of iron and glass in construction, and purveyors of the mass-produced consumer items that increasingly came to dominate the market economies of European cities during the last third of the nineteenth century saw a profitable application of this new technology. The use of iron for structural support released more space for glass windows in which merchandise could be displayed. The product of the alliance of architecture and commerce was the department store. The first one, Au Bon Marche, rose on the Left Bank in Paris in the 1850s and underwent major expansion and renovation in 1872. Its architect, Alexandre La Planche, covered load-bearing iron frames with stone facades that were punctuated with large display windows. The outside of the department store thus became a venue for advertising, giving passersby a glimpse of what goods could be purchased within. Once lured inside, shoppers (most of whom were women) were treated to abundant displays of goods amid fantastically ornate interiors, prompting the novelist Emile Zola (1840–1902) to christen the department store “the cathedral of commerce.” Stores such as Au Bon Marché or Printemps, which opened in Paris in 1874, were also semi-public spaces for strolling or lingering at refreshment centers. Department stores became a fixture of the urban landscape, and as sites where products were offered at set prices with no obligation to buy, changed shopping from a provisioning task to a leisure activity. The increased pur-chasing power of the middle classes (with the expansion in the ranks of “white-collar” workers) and the working classes (with emergence of “pink-collar” workers—secretaries and retail workers—and the rise of real wages among factory workers), expanded the ranks of buyers dramatically. Advertising and consumption also affected the places where products were made. More and more factories were designed to advertise what was made inside. Templeton’s Carpet Factory (1889–1892) in Glasgow, Scotland, for example, incorporated Assyrian, Persian, and Byzantine architectural motifs in its exterior design as a way of showing the prospective buyer that luxurious, exotic, “oriental” rugs were being made inside.

Domestic Architecture. As the public world for Europeans grew more densely populated, urban, and noisy, the private, domestic world of the family became more secluded and tranquil. In fact, current psychological theory taught that states of mind were directly related to formal surroundings, so architects of domestic buildings and interior designers adopted the canons of privacy and tranquility. The home was to be a soothing and peaceful haven from the bustling and stressful outside world. No longer did domestic interiors announce familial status and history as Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill had in the late eighteenth century. Gone were the days when a public figure’s dwelling was a semipublic museum as much as a private home. A distinguished essayist and a son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole (1676–1745), Horace Walpole (1717–1797) stocked his home with medieval artifacts and opened its doors to a select group of tourists. Privacy and intimacy had become the prevailing values by the late nineteenth century.