Art 108 Study Questions - California State University ...



“The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde”

Stephen Eisenman

Rhetorics of Realist Art & Politics

1. How does Eisenman define the Realists – who, what, when, where, why?

2. What did the work of Realist writers and artists share with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848?

3. What was the subject of Realist writers and artists and how was it different from Classicism?

4. What tradition did Baudelaire say was lost? What tradition did he say was coming into being? What did modern dress have to do with it?

5. How did Daumier and Grandville satirize the “real conditions” of their “suffering age”?

6. What did Marx think of using the past to inspire the working class Revolution of 1848?

7. What did post-Classical art and literature in England emphasize?

8. What was the social and political context for the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? What was “Chartism”?

9. What happened at the Chartist demonstrations of 1848 and how did they coincide with the 1848 Revolutions in Europe? Did Chartism succeed? Why?

10. Why did Marx (in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) think that Classical antiquity could no longer be used to cover up the truth about the men and women of 1851?

11. Which English artists got together in February 1848 to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)? What were the topics of their first meetings and works of art?

12. To what art and political movement did the PRB turn for inspiration?

13. How does Eisenman describe William Holman Hunt’s Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice…”? What does the painting depict? What was the work’s literary source? How does it recall the art of J.L.David before and during the French Revolution? What does Eisenman mean by the painting’s “vivid naturalism”? Why is it different from Academic idealism?

14. What rules of painting does John Everett Milais dispense with in Christ in the House of His Parents (1850)?

15. What was Charles Dicken’s response to Millais’s painting? Why?

16. Describe the response of English criticism in 1850-1? How did the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ work change?

17. What class is represented in Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853)? What are the narrative and the moral lesson? How is it like Couture’s Romans of the Decadence?

18. What is the narrative and moral lesson of Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852-65)?

19. Why were Millais, Hunt, Rossetti and Brown’s pictures disdained by critics at first? How was Work received in 1865? Why?

20. What led to the outbreak of revolution in France in February, 1848? Where did it spread?

21. What happened in France in June, 1848? What did Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx write about it?

22. What was the purpose of the rhetoric of Realism shared by Daumier and Jean-Francois Millet? How was their work different from conservative official realism under Louis Napoleon?

23. What was Daumier’s credo that all realists more or less shared?

24. What was so radical about Courbet’s technique? What does Eisenman claim it did?

25. What kind of art did Courbet reject, and what kind did he embrace?

26. What position does Eisenman take regarding the avant-garde and Courbet?

Courbet’s Trilogy of 1849-50

27. What was Courbet’s background? When did he come to Paris and where did he study art?

28. How were Courbet’s early self portraits (Man With Leather Belt and The Wounded Man) different from the juste milieu?

29. Who did Courbet meet at the bohemian Brasserie (restaurant bar) Andler? What is Bohemianism?

30. Did Courbet participate in the street fighting in 1848? Why?

31. How many paintings did Courbet show in the Salon of 1848? What was the response of the Salon critics to After Dinner at Ornans? Why is the painting historically significant?

32. What three paintings of 1849-50 “changed the history of art”? Say why for each painting.

33. What formal and narrative elements of The Burial at Ornans and Peasants of Flagy distinguish them from Isidore Pils’ more conventional painting, The Death of a Sister of Charity, 1850, and Rosa Bonheur’s Plowing in the Nivernais (1849)?

34. What is “the new and provocative coherence” in Courbet’s three paintings (his trilogy)? What were his sources? What formal elements did he borrow from those sources? What is “popular culture”?

35. What was the attitude of the regime of Louis Napoleon towards rural popular culture – entertainers, pamphleteers, and the prints that inspired Courbet?

36. What did conservative critics mean when they condemned the “deliberate ugliness” of Courbet’s art?

37. Did Courbet’s artistic activism survive after the trilogy created in 1849-50?

38. Why does Eisenman assert that Courbet’s trilogy can be seen as the origin of avant-gardism?

39. Explain Eisenman’s argument about the relationship between the “avant-garde” and what he calls “modernism.”

Courbet’s The Studio of the Painter

40. What was the Universal Exposition of 1855? What did Napoleon III propose to Courbet and what was the artist’s response?

41. Why is The Studio of the Painter called Courbet’s “manifesto in paint”? How long did it take to complete. Was it accepted by the Exposition jury?

42. Who are the various people in The Studio?

43. Why, where, and when did Courbet build the “Pavillion of Realism”? What was Delacroix’s opinion of The Studio?

44. What does Eisenman claim about Courbet’s paintings of women, The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, and The Sleepers?

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