Manet’s Civil Wars, part III: The Birth of Impressionism

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A silence of death reigned over these ruins…No clatter of vehicles, no shouts of the children, not even the song of a bird…An incredible sadness invaded our souls.

— Théophile Gautier

Manet looks at Civil War

In 1872, rubble and debris could be seen all over Paris. Only a year after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war and subsequent civil war, the economy was a wreck. The city would remain a vast construction site for the rest of the decade.

Ruins of the Tuileries Palace, 1871

Because the recent events were so emotionally devastating, most French artists avoided those awful days as subject matter.  But not Édouard Manet.

Manet, Civil War (Scene from the Commune of Paris) , 1871.

Inspired by Goya’s suite of etchings, The Disasters of War (from the early 1800s), Manet documented the suffering of the Parisians during their Terrible Year. His lithograph, Civil War (Scene from the Commune of Paris) was based on sketches he made in the grim aftermath of a battle against federal forces in late May 1871. We can see at the center a dead, heroic Communard behind a stone barricade. In the lower right corner are the legs of a civilian victim.

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Manet’s Civil Wars, part II: The Siege of Paris

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“…every war is worse than expected.” – Paul Fussell

During the Franco-Prussian war everyone in Paris, whether painter, poet, or plumber, was swept up by history. Even after the abdication of Napoleon III and the birth of the new Republic that Édouard Manet and his fellow Impressionists had long dreamt of, the armies of the “Government of Defense” continued to suffer defeat after humiliating defeat across French territory. By the autumn of 1870, there seemed little hope of stopping Prussian forces in their relentless drive towards Paris.

The Siege

As bad news continued to flood in, many Parisians – if they had the means – fled from the city. Monet, who had a military exemption purchased by his father, headed north — crossing the Channel to London. There he was joined by Camille and their son where a small artists community of exiles was forming. Pissarro (who was technically a Danish citizen) came with his family, then Sisley, Daubigny, and their art dealer Durand-Ruel. Cezanne headed in the opposite direction — home to the south of France — to avoid being drafted.

1870 Paris: Manet (left) in Bazille’s studio/Bazille in uniform

Manet and Degas, however, stayed to defend their city. Partisans of the new French Republic like so many of their friends, they enlisted in the National Guard. Renoir joined the cavalry. Rodin was drafted but later dismissed because he was too nearsighted. Gauguin served in the French navy in a group that captured four German ships. Frédéric Bazille, a close friend of Monet and Renoir, was killed leading an assault on the Prussians 65 miles south of Paris. Corot, in his 70s, refused to leave his studio and donated huge sums to the poor of Paris. Courbet, Gustave Moreau, Fantin-Latour, and Daumier also remained. Berthe Morisot, who could have spent the war far from the fighting with her sister in Normandy, insisted on staying with her parents in the city’s affluent neighborhood of Passy.

As the Prussians drew closer, the battered, retreating French armies, along with farmers from the countryside, poured into Paris. The population of the capital grew rapidly – just as the new Republican government was struggling to figure out how to feed a city about to be cut off from the outside world.

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Manet’s Civil Wars

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In June 1864, the painter Édouard Manet was trying to recover from the brutality of the critics’ response to his Salon entries that January. This had followed on the heels of being treated as a laughingstock the year before when he exhibited a painting that became infamous in Paris, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), at the Salon des Refusés (the Salon of the Refused). Despite his desire to be accepted by the academic community, Manet found himself described as a radical artist, ignorant of the basic tenets of art. Somewhat bewildered, he was searching for a subject that could revive his reputation and ensure his admission into the next Salon.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe, 1863

What was the Salon?

In today’s art scene with its myriad pathways for exhibiting, the importance and power of the Salon is hard to comprehend. Begun in the early 1800s to show off the work of academic prize winners in the Louvre’s Salon de Carré (hence its name), by the 1860s it had become essentially the only exhibition in Paris that mattered. If you were a young artist, you had to be accepted to the annual Salon to receive any kind of notice. An academic jury consisting of members of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and prizewinning artists from previous Salons served as either your gateway to a future in art or your roadblock. The judges expected paintings with historical, uplifting subject matter or scenes from mythology. All submissions were expected to be “skilled,” in other words, have a polished, finished appearance.

Édouard Dantan, A Corner of the Salon

Unfortunately, acceptance to an annual Salon was only the first step. Where and how your work was hung in its many rooms also mattered.  In the 19th century, artworks were displayed in rows stacked up along the walls. A small painting hung high near a doorway would never attract notice, while a work placed at eye level in a grand room could mean a great deal to an artist’s reputation.

The Battle

While preparing for the annual family vacation along the Normandy coast of France, Manet read in the Paris newspapers about an exciting naval battle of American ships that had just taken place off the harbor of Cherbourg. In one of the most important sea battles of the American Civil War, the Union’s USS Kearsage, which had crossed the Atlantic on a mission to sink one ship — the Confederate navy’s CSS Alabama — finally caught it.

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When Clement Greenberg met Norman Rockwell

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After World War II, the center of the art universe shifted and New York City replaced Paris as the home of the avant-garde. In Manhattan’s downtown bars and studios, passions ran high. Arguments about art and ideas often turned into celebrated drunken brawls. Amidst the turbulent turf wars, one art critic reigned supreme – Clement Greenberg. His discovery of Jackson Pollock led to the rise of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant art form in the post-war art world. His opinions were followed intensely, even feared, by artists, dealers, and collectors.

Mercedes Matter, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Frank O’Hara, and Elaine de Kooning at Cedar Tavern, NYC, 1960. [Photo: Arthur Swoger]

Yet, despite the New York School’s position as the foremost movement in Modern Art, if you asked most Americans in the 1950s to name their favorite artist, they would probably have said Norman Rockwell, the beloved illustrator of covers for the Saturday Evening Post. For decades, the Post had been the most popular magazine of its time. Self-proclaimed as “America’s Magazine,” its covers depicted an ideal small-town America, not unlike the New England towns where Rockwell spent most of his adult life. In fact, his models were often his neighbors. His covers were regularly turned into posters and found their way onto the walls of homes across the country.

Norman Rockwell, “The Discovery,” Saturday Evening Post, December 29, 1956

This frustrated Clement Greenberg, who was justifiably proud of the emergence of New York as the global center of art. In his best-known essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he struggled to understand how such a strange state of affairs was possible and why the citizens of his country were not embracing their great cultural victory. At the end of its very first sentence, he almost calls out Rockwell by name:

“One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover.”

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Kokoschka’s Alma Mahler doll

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A strange, life-size doll is at the center of one of the Modern era’s most bizarre episodes. Its inspiration was the sudden end of an intense love affair between the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka and the fascinating Alma Mahler.

Born in 1879, Alma Maria Schindler grew up surrounded by the best of Viennese society. Her father was a noted painter; Crown Prince Rudolf was one of his patrons. While she would become a composer and a writer, it is her love affairs with some of the most important artists, architects, and composers of the 20th century that have kept her celebrity alive since her death in 1964. Continue reading →

Father Ivan and his Children

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Ivan Sutherland and his robot crawler, 1983

In 1982, Ivan Sutherland got on a six-legged walking robot he had built and took his first ride. His students at Carnegie Mellon Institute called the eight foot long machine “The Trojan Cockroach.” To Sutherland it was as an “electric animal,” which he made because he thought it would be fun. Fun has always been Sutherland’s inspiration.

When denied my minimum daily adult dose of technology, I get grouchy. I believe that technology is fun, especially when computers are involved, a sort of grand game or puzzle with ever so neat parts to fit together. I have turned down several lucrative administrative jobs because they would deny me that fun. If the technology you do isn’t fun for you, you may wish to seek other employment. Without the fun, none of us would go on.”

The Trojan Cockroach was the first computer controlled robot that could carry a human being. But it is merely a footnote in the life of the man known as “Father Ivan,” since he is the person who gave birth to computer graphics and who, along with his many students, helped usher in the Computer Age.

Sketchpad

Sketchpad demonstrated in 1963.

Computer graphics was born in 1962. Its twenty-four year old father, Ivan Sutherland, was then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his child, who he named Sketchpad, was his doctoral thesis. Sutherland’s program for MIT’s TX2 computer enabled him to draw directly on its nine-inch cathode ray tube with a light pen. For the first time in history, digital images were created by hand and appeared as the artist was working on them (rather than in a printout hours later). Continue reading →

Loïe Fuller: Artist and Inspiration

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While at the Cleveland Art Museum earlier this month, my attention was caught by an impressive plaster head by Rodin. It was immediately familiar as a large scale version of one of the heads from his famous The Burghers of Calais, but I thought it even more moving in its own right. The marks of Rodin’s fingers as he created such a sorrowful expression were amplified by pencil marks and the traces of colored washes — I never knew Rodin did such things. But I was surprised a second time when I read the label and it said “Gift of Loïe Fuller.”

I was already aware that Loïe Fuller was an extraordinary woman. Could she be even more extraordinary than I knew?

Marie Louise Fuller was born in 1862 on a farm outside of Chicago. As a young girl, she was inspired to be an actress by Sarah Bernhardt. She found her truer calling while acting in a play, when she twirled her long white skirt in a way that suggested a rising butterfly. The audience loved it and soon she was performing across the country as a dancer in vaudeville, burlesque, and even Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.  Known best for her free-spirited Serpentine dance, today she is considered one of the founders of Modern Dance despite never having taken any lessons. But it wasn’t until she was 30 and crossed the Atlantic that she became one of the most famous dancers in the world.

As Loïe Fuller, she became the toast of Paris when she opened her show at the Folies-Bergère in 1892. At the center of an empty dark stage, Fuller entered in a white silk costume of her own design and then flung the material out in ever-changing huge abstract forms. Unbeknownst to the audience, inside hundreds of yards of fabric, she had sewn in bamboo sticks to push out the shapes. Colored lights, manipulated with mirrors from the sides of the stage, illuminated the billowing forms. Audiences were mesmerized by the magical metamorphosis taking place before their eyes.

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Bernini’s Passionate Affair

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Regular visitors to Florence’s Bargello, home to its great sculpture collection, know well the frustration of finding rooms, sometimes the whole second floor, closed. Imagine my shock in June to discover that not only was the second floor open but galleries I had never seen before. In one, amidst display cases with coins, was a treasure I didn’t know existed, but learned later was quite famous and considered perhaps Gianlorenzo Bernini’s finest portrait sculpture – his bust of Costanza Bonarelli. According to the label,

This celebrated bust is the most famous of Bernini’s portraits. It is a very ‘private’ image that he perhaps made for himself and kept in his home for a long time…

Gianlorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Costanza Bonarelli, marble, 1637-1638. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

Costanza was the wife of one of Bernini’s assistants, when the artist was in his late thirties and working in Rome. He fell passionately in love with her and carried on an illicit affair.

Sensuality is a hallmark of Bernini’s work. The passion in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is well-known to every art history student. Gazing at his much more direct portrait of Costanza, it is not hard to share the feelings of the sculptor for this young woman. She seems to be portrayed just after a liaison. Her hair is disheveled, her dressing gown is wrinkled, unbuttoned, and hangs loosely across her breasts. One can easily imagine that her make-up is long gone. Costanza looks out with parted, sensual lips and seems a bit dazed.

Bonarelli was no servant girl, but a member of the noble Piccolomini family of Siena, whose members included two popes, the dukes of Amalfi, and the patron of Galileo. However, by the 1600s the fortunes of her family line had tumbled and, before she married, the young Costanza had received money from two religious fraternities to keep her from a life on the streets. Her husband, Matteo, began working for Bernini about two years before this sculpture was made in 1637 or 1638. At the time, Costanza was about 24 years old and had been married for five years.

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The Journey of Mario’s Legendary Father

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Ancient burial caves of the Zuiganji Temple in Matsushima, JapanAround 1960, a small boy who liked to explore nature without a map was wandering in the forest near his village. He was frightened when he accidentally discovered the entrance to a cave in the woods. Later, he got up the courage to return alone from his house with a lantern. His decision to explore the cave’s passageways would take on greater meaning in the years to come.

The boy was Shigeru Miyamoto and he grew up to be one of the founding fathers of electronic game design. As a young man, he wanted to be a manga artist and went to college for art and design. After graduation, his father got him an interview at an old Japanese company that specialized in playing cards, but had begun to expand its offerings into electronic toys – Nintendo. Miyamoto brought children’s clothes hangers in the shape of animals that he had designed and convinced the company to hire its first artist.

A couple of years later, motivated by the huge success of video arcades, Nintendo built their own version of Space Invaders that failed dismally. Stuck with two thousand unsold arcade units, they turned to their artist and asked if he could come up with a better game. At this time, video arcades games, while popular, were little more than shapes shooting and attacking other shapes. But in 1982 that all changed when Nintendo released Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was the first arcade game with a story and characters – a gorilla, the girl he kidnapped but loved, and a hero – a carpenter known in this game as “Mr. Video,” later “Jumpman,” and finally, “Mario” (named for the landlord of Nintendo’s warehouse in Seattle, Washington). Continue reading →

Diary of an Affair: Picasso and Marie-Thérèse

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As the sun set in Paris, on January 8, 1927, Pablo Picasso was walking past a fashionable department store when his eyes fell upon a young shopper. Immediately infatuated, the artist (then unhappily married and in his mid-forties) took Marie-Thérèse Walter by the arm and said, “I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together!” She was confused by the man and unaware of who he might be. Picasso introduced himself by dragging her into a bookshop and showing her a book filled with reproductions of his paintings. Thus began a passionate affair and an enormously productive period for Picasso. Continue reading →