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Tag Archives: Claude Monet

Katsushika Hokusai: Beauty

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Japonisme

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Claude Monet, Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Japonism, Mount Fuji, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Utamaro

 
Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai, 1832 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Related Post: Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme
 
  • Kitagawa Utamaro  (c. 1753 – 31 October 1806),
  • Katsushika Hokusai (c. 31 October 1760 – 10 May 1849) and
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858).

Beginning in the 1850s, the influence of Japonism on European art in general and French art in particular was pervasive. In my last post, I named three artists: Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. All three were ukiyo-e painters of the Edo period. But there were other ukiyo-e painters and it is still possible to purchase Japanese estampes. Prints belonging to original series executed by our three artists and other masters are very expensive. However, affordable prints are available. Moreover one need not be ashamed of hanging a reproduction on a wall in one’s home.

Katsushika Hokusai

In this post, I will simply discuss beauty: its relativity and mankind’s ability to see beauty in the unfamiliar. However, I will not do so in any depth.

At the top of our post, is a very famous print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It is the first in a series of thirty-six prints constituting Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1823-1829). One may see all thirty-six views by clicking on the title of the series: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Umegawa in Sagami Province,
The Kazusa Province sea route
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
 
Umegawa_in_Sagami_province
 
 800px-The_Kazusa_sea_route

Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji

Not only did Hokusai make a series of thirty-six prints depicting various views of Mount Fuji, but he went on to make a hundred: One-hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834). Hokusai demonstrated that depending on the direction from which Mount Fuji was drawn, not to mention the weather and the season, depictions of its reality varied. To the Impressionists, this was grist to the mill as they were fascinated by the manner in which light kept reshaping reality.

The more important factor, however, was the popularity of an art that differed from Western art. As soon as they reached Europe, the Japanese prints were considered beautiful by artists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and, later, Vincent van Gogh. Claude Monet purchased as many prints as he could. This degree of enthusiasm attested to the fact that, even otherwise expressed, “reality” could be beautiful and that it could be beautiful to several individuals.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Given the popularity of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one could presume that beauty is an absolute. This cannot be the case, at least not altogether. What Europeans saw as beautiful was not the beauty their academicists rewarded, but an exotic form of beauty and, in the case of Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the beauty of one print in particular: The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

The popularity of The Great Wave showed not only that many individuals could agree on what was and was not beautiful, but that many individuals could also agree that art rooted in an oriental form of aesthetics was beautiful. However, despite a consensus regarding the beauty of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, I doubt very much that its popularity suggested that beauty was an absolute.   

Quotations

Allow me to quote one of my former professors who writes that, in 1874, a group of painters working in Paris formed a “loose association” and put on an exhibition under the title of “The Anonymous Society of Painters and Sculptors.” Critics were in attendance:

“To describe what they saw there, critics coined a new word—Impressionism. It was no compliment, however. As one of them put it: We have seen an exhibition by the Impressionalists . . . M. Manet is among those who maintain that in painting one can and ought to be satisfied with the impression.  . . .[They] appear to have declared war on beauty.”[i]

Émile Zola spoke for the Impressionists when he declared flatly that,

“. . . Beauty is no longer an absolute, a preposterous universal standard. Beauty is identical with itself. . . . Beauty lives within us, not outside us. What do I care for philosophical abstraction, for an ideal perfection conjured up by a small group of men! What interests me as a man is mankind, the source of my life.”[ii]

Woman looking in Mirror (Artinthepicture.com)
Woman (hellaheaven-ana.blogsp)
Woman profile (Wikipaintings)

mirrorHokusai1

woman-profile

Conclusion

One particularly “avid” collector of Japanese prints was Frank Lloyd Wright.  In fact, Wright also sold ukiyo-e woodblock prints. (See Frank Lloyd Wright, Wikipedia.)

However, I will close this post by quoting Van Gogh. (See Japonaiserie [Van Gogh], Wikipedia.)

“In a letter to Theo dated about 5 June 1888 Vincent remarks

About staying in the south, even if it’s more expensive — Look, we love Japanese painting, we’ve experienced its influence — all the Impressionists have that in common — [so why not go to Japan], in other words, to what is the equivalent of Japan, the south? So I believe that the future of the new art still lies in the south after all.” 
_________________________
[i] G. H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), p. 92. Quoted in Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painters and Painting, 1760-1960 (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 181.
[ii] Alan Gowans, loc. cit.
 

800px-Hokusai_1760-1849_Ocean_waves

Ocean Waves 
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
© Micheline Walker
30 June 2013 
WordPress
 
  
“Lullaby From Itsuki Village” (Itsuki no Komoriuta)
Toshiko Yonekawa 

Related articles

  • Great Waves: Inspired by Hokusai (June 2013) (hannahsartclub.wordpress.com)
  • Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme (michelinewalker.com)

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Édouard Manet: Enigmas

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Édouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Courbet, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salon

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, by Édouard Manet, 1863

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, by Édouard Manet (1862-1863)

Although future critics may think differently, Édouard Manet‘s (23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Luncheon on the Grass, (c. 1863) may well have changed the course of the history of European art, mainly French.  It is a representational, à la Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877), rather than an abstract painting.  However, it ushered in a revolution.

Le Salon & Le Salon des Refusés   

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe could not be shown at the Salon  (founded in 1725), the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.  It was rejected by Academicians Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) and Adolphe-William Bougereau (30 November 1825 – 19 August 1905).  Manet therefore showed it at the Salon des refusés.  Ironically, history was very kind to rejected artists, les refusés. 

Avant-garde artists had to settle for the Salons des refusés, which was somewhat of a blessing.  Persons who own works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Claude Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin etc. were shrewd investors.  Americans loved the Impressionists, and other Modernistes.  The shrewder investors bought a Vincent van Gogh or a Pablo Picasso.

You may remember that Gertrude Stein and her brother Leon Stein bought Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, showed at the 1905 Salon d’automne, a new Salon, established in 1903.  Matisse was described as a Fauviste, a wild beast, but he didn’t coin the term.  This was “du nouveau,”  (something new), to quote French poet Charles Baudelaire.  Matisse used unusually bold colours.  The Cone sisters were also in Paris at the time.  These wealthy American socialites could afford artworks.

SalonAutomneManet_1866_The-Fifer_GGW-468

The Fifer, by Manet, 1866

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: an element of Magical Realism

Novelty made Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe a painting Academicists would reject.  It featured a nude woman sitting with two fully dressed men and sharing a luncheon.  Nudes had long entered the Fine Arts, but not in such a manner.  The nude figure does not seem to fit the painting.  But it could fit the imagination of the gentlemen sitting next to her as well as Manet’s imagination.  It could also be a reference or a reminiscence: art within art.  There is in Manet an element of magical realism, a characteristic of Latin American literature.  According to Professor Matthew Strecher, magical realism is “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”[i]

Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère is also enigmatic.  Just where is the man?  Furthermore, I wonder whether or not the mirror reflects the woman.  Manet was accused of not knowing perspective, which does not make much sense.  (See A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, Wikipedia.)  But the newness of the painting may be the depiction of the young woman who seems a foreigner.  Her eyes display a kind of bewilderment.  The painting could be a depiction of Marxist alienation.  The painting was shown at the Paris Salon, in 1882, at a later date than Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863).

Edouard_Manet_004

Un Bar aux Folies Bergère, by Édouard Manet, 1882 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my former teachers writes that “[i]n each case Manet takes a ‘standard’ Reality, not only as to content, but also as to form.”[ii]  Professor Gowans also states that Manet was teaching other painters and that his work is therefore “didactic.”  As for the public, they were not a factor.

Also enigmatic is Manet’s Olympia, shown at the 1865 Paris Salon.  But it will not be discussed today.

______________________________

[i] Matthew C. Strecher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 25, Number 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 263-298, at 267.

[ii] Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painter and Painting 1760-1960 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 190.

Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_Project_3© Micheline Walker
17 June 2013
WordPress
 
Olympia, 1863
Photo credit: Wikipedia
(Please click on the picture to enlarge it.)

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