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Tag Archives: the industrial revolution

The Art of Aleksey Savrasov

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by michelinewalker in Russian Art, Russian Music

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Aleksei Savrasov, Romanticism, the Imperial Academy of Arts, the industrial revolution, the Lyrical Landscape, the MSPSA, the Peredvizhniki, the Transitional & Eternal

Early Spring Thaw by Aleksey Savrasov, 1785 (Wikiart.org.)

Early Days and Education

  • a Romantic

I have mentioned Savrasov (1830 – 1897) in two earlier posts. In one of these posts, I combined a short discussion of the artist and a list of newspapers. I also wrote that Aleksey Savrasov was Isaac Levitan’s teacher and had been a member of the Peredvizhniki group. The Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers) group protested academic restrictions. I will add that, at the beginning of his career, Savrasov’s paintings were considered Romantic. The romantics expressed sentiment and individualism as their country entered its Industrial Age, William Blake‘s “dark, satanic mills.”

Savrasov was born in Moscow and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (MSPSA) under professor Karl Rabus (1800-1857). In 1852, Sarasov traveled to the Ukraine. Then, in 1854, the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, commissioned several works from him. Savrasov therefore moved to Oranienbaum, near Saint Petersburg.

Oranienbaum

“View in the Neighbourhood of Oranienbaum,” 1754, earned Savrasov his membership in the Russian Academy of Arts.

view-in-the-neighbourhood-of-oranienbaum-1854.jpg!Large (1)

View in the Neighourhood of Oranienbaum, Aleksey Savrasov, 1854 (Wikiart.org.)

In 1854, Savrasov’s View in the Neighbourhood of Oranienbaum (1854), earned him membership in the Imperial Academy of Arts. By the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighbourhood of St. Petersburg.

winter-1873.jpg!Large

Winter by Aleksei Savrasov, 1873 (Wikiart.org.)

Winter by Aleksei Savrasov, 1870 (Wikiart.org.)

The Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (MSPSA)

  • a teacher
  • a friendship with Vasily Perov
  • a rich social life

In 1857, the year Savrasov married Sophia Karlevna Hertz, the sister of art historian Karl Hertz (1820-1883), he became a teacher at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (MSPSA). His best students were Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin, who had fond memories of him.

In Moscow, he and his wife entertained art lovers and art collectors, including Pavel Tretyakov, who gave his art gallery to Russia in 1892. At this time in his life, Savrasov had a fine and productive relationship with artist Vasily Perov. Savrasov helped Perov paint his Bird catcher and Hunters on Bivouac and Perov helped Savrasov paint the boat trackers in his Volga.

The International Exhibition in England

  • England
  • Switzerland

In 1662, Savrasov travelled to Europe to see England’s International Exhibition and also went to visit Switzerland. The lesson he drew from visiting the International Exhibition in England was that no academies could so promote an artist as an international exhibition. (See Aleksey Savrasov, Wiki2.org.)

Alcoholism and Death

In the late 1870s, after the death of this daughter, Savrasov became an alcoholic. No one could help. In 1882, he was dismissed from the MSPSA. The following line is very moving: “Only the doorkeeper of the MSPSA and Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery, were present at his funeral in 1897.” (See Aleksey Savrasov, Wiki2.org.)

The Rooks have returned by Aleksey Savrasov, 1871  (Wikiart.org.)

A Spring Day by Aleksei Savrasov, 1873 (Wikiart.org)

Comments

  • masterpieces
  • the transitional & the eternal
  • the lyrical landscape

Savrasov’s “The Rooks have returned” (1871) is considered one of his finest, if not his finest, painting. But so many of Savrasov’s paintings are masterpieces that saying one is the best is a genuine challenge.

For instance, “A Spring Day” (1873) is perfection and it touches us because it depicts the beginning of a season. Human beings have painted the seasons for a very long time and they have kept Books of Hours. Jean de France, duc de Berry‘s Très Riches Heures depicts each month of the year and its labour. Savrasov’ paintings often portray transitions and, therefore, renewal They show the end or beginning of a season, the end of winter, in particular. Seasons follow seasons eternally. Life rises again, irrepressibly.

Note that smoke comes out of the chimney of the first little brown homes. Until now, the Industrial Revolution, humans have protected themselves. We have dealt with the elements, found a refuge and built roads and fences. The pale green of trees in the background allows us to get a clear view of the disheveled trees burgeoning.

From the point of view of composition, “A Spring Day” has several golden sections. A golden section/ratio resembles an off-center crucifix. One of two lines, an horizontal and a vertical line, is longer than the other line. “A Spring Day” shows a long horizontal line that crosses a vertical line. The meeting point is a group trees. Perspective is achieved by the change in colouring from dark to pale. Moreover, there is a road, or vanishing point (le point de fuite). There is no flaw in the composition of “A Spring Day.”

The sky sits above a long arched line supported by small trees on the right and the bulkier houses on the left.

“A Spring Thaw,” the painting placed at the beginning of this post, combines diagonal and other lines. They are hints of Japonisme. Moreover, the colouring is very smooth.

Savrasov’s softens his landscapes as though each were a praise of nature and a prayer.

RELATED ARTICLE 

  • The Art of Isaac Levitan (8 December 2018)

Sources and Resources

  • Kazakhstan’s Dark Satanic Mills NYT
  • The Encyclopedia Britannica

 

Love to everyone 💕

On the music of Sergei Prokofieff

Basso profondo as accompaniment

The Rooks have arrived by Aleksey Savrasov, 1880 (Wikiart.org)

© Micheline Walker
27 December 2018
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Edgar Degas’ Apparent Serenity

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Alan Gowans, Degas' female nudes, Edgar Degas, genre painting, Impressionism, the Bellilli family, the industrial revolution, Tony Emery

584px-Edgar_Germain_Hilaire_Degas_032
The Tub (Le Bain), by Edgar Degas, 1886 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)

Edgar Degas (b. Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas [19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917])

We associate the art of Edgar Degas with portraits, the depiction of ballet dancers, horses, horse racing, and people engaged in everyday activity (genre  painting).  We also know that he taught Mary Cassatt to make etchings.  It proved extremely useful as Cassatt would later make prints using drypoint.  In 1890, Cassatt visited the Paris Japanese Arts Exhibition of 1890 (wood-block ukiyo-e prints), held at the École des Beaux-Arts.  That exhibition had such an impact on artist Mary Cassatt that she decided to devote the following year to making prints.  In short, Cassatt and Degas were very good friends.

Degas’ Apparent Serenity

When I started studying the fine arts, our teacher, Tony Emery, told the class that Degas’ lovely depictions of ballerinas expressed not serenity, but a rather dark view of the world.  Another teacher, Professor Alan Gowans[i] made similar statements.  The ballet dancer is “the perfect symbol of a rigidly organized society.”  Degas was “commenting of the human condition.”[ii]  The industrial revolution had transformed humans into robot-like workers who  performed the same motion in a repetitive manner, as did ballet dancers.

Remember William Blake‘s (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) “dark Satanic Mills.”  The “dark Satanic Mills” may have been Blake’s response to “orthodox churches of the establishment,” (see The Gardian) but it was also a response to the industrial revolution.  Humans working in factories were like the machines they used to produce “goods.”  In this regard, Professor Gowans points to three paintings: “The Bellilli Family,”  “The Cotton Merchants” (1863), and “The Milliners’ Shop.”  In “The Bellilli family,” we sense rigidity.  In “The Cotton Merchants,” human beings stand behind the cotton.  In “The Milliners’ Shop,” the milliner sits behind the “hats and hat racks.”  They completely “dominate the milliner herself.”[iii]

(Please click on the smaller images to enlarge them.)

750px-Edgar_Degas_-_La_famille_Bellellicotton-merchants-in-new-orleans-1873.jpg!HalfHD
Edgar_Germain_Hilaire_Degas_011 
The Bellilli Family, by Edgar Degas, 1867 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
The Cotton Merchants, by Edgar Degas, 1873 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
The Milliners’ Shop, by Edgar Degas 1884 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
 

Professor Gowans also refers to Degas’ “handling of the nude.”  Degas’ bathers are depicted “climbing awkwardly and unobtrusively in and out of bathtubs, having their hair dried, and so on…” (See Woman Leaving Her Bath.)[iv]  For my part, however, I rather like the painting featured at the top of this post, but other portraits of nudes are less flattering.  Degas tended to paint anonymous human beings.  We see the back of their head or body. However, his paintings are consistent with genre painting.  He captures his subjects in medias res, in the midst of things (Horace).

woman-in-a-bath-sponging-her-leg
the-tub-1886.jpg!HD 
Woman in a Bath Sponging her Leg, by Edgar Degas, 1884 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
The Tub (Le Bain), by Edgar Degas, 1886 (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
 
 

Biographical Notes

Degas was born, in Paris, to a wealthy family.  His mother was a Creole and he had family, a brother, an uncle and other relatives, in Louisiana.  Degas visited with them after the Franco-Prussian War.  He was in New Orleans in 1872-73, living at his uncle’s home.  After his father’s death, he learned that his brother René had incurred an enormous debt.  Degas therefore sold the family home in Paris as well as the artwork he had inherited.  He would, however, become an avid collector when he started selling his own artwork. 

In 1853, Degas enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris, where he was not an enthusiastic student.  He did however have a studio in the family’s home.  To begin with, he was therefore mostly self-trained and did not enter the École des Beaux-Arts until he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) who encouraged him to pursue a career in the fine arts.  So, two years after enrolling in the Faculty of Law, he entered l’École des Beaux-Arts where he was a student of Louis Lamothe.  Later, in 1861, he visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon, in Normandy, where he made studies of horses.  Horse racing would become the subject matter of many of his paintings.

Schools

Degas disliked being called an Impressionist.  In fact, other artists, such as Mary Cassatt and Édouard Manet, were artists whose artwork had been rejected by the Salon, the official exhibition of Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts.  They were the refusés.  There was only one Salon des refusés, in 1763.  Consequently, it may be useful to revisit Impressionism.  It was not a genuine “school,” except for a common wish to suggest or evoke, a wish stemming, to a large extent, from the invention of photography as well as Japonisme.  The ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) prints artists and art lovers collected were mass-produced prints.

racehorses-before-the-stands-1872_jpg!HD 
Racehorses before the Stands, by Edgar Degas, 1872
Chevaux de courses devant les tribunes
(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
 

However, Degas would make fun of artists who worked en plein air.  Moreover Degas preferred to be described as a realist.  He may in fact have known “naturalist,” writers, the most prominent being French author Émile Zola, its founder.  We have reached a point in the history of art where there occurred a blending of the visual arts, literature and music.  During Degas’ lifetime, Émile Zola was a key figure among French writers and intellectuals.  But unlike Zola, who wrote the famous J’Accuse during the Dreyfus affair, blatant anti-Semitism on the part of the French military and the French clergy — the latter  apologized, Degas had no sympathy for Jews nor, for that matter, anyone else.

Progressive Blindness

At the age of 35, Degas started losing his eyesight and died a nearly blind man.  As he aged, he grew into an embittered individual which may have been caused by the progressive loss of his most precious sense: sight, not to mention skepticism as to his condition,   the skepticism the deaf face: “he or she hears when he or she wants to.”  One thinks of Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) whose hearing was impaired beginning with the “Eroica,” Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (Op. 55), first performed on 7 April 1805, when he was 35.

So, according to two of my teachers, Degas was one of the first artists to depict the profound sense of alienation that characterizes modern “man,” i.e. men and women.  In such cases, magical realism, the ability to fantasize, falls short of a human being’s needs.

I will conclude by pointing out that reception is a factor in the description and classification of works of art.  For many of us, Degas’ dancers are graceful and carefree young women who have the innocence of his fourteen-year-old little dancer, featured below.

fourteen-year-old-little-dancer.jpg!HalfHD
Fourteen-year Old Little Dancer, 1881
(Photo Credit: Wikipaintings)
 
_____________________________
[i] Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painters and Painting  1760 – 1960 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 209.
[ii] Gowans, loc. cit.
[iii] Gowans, loc. cit.
[iv] Gowans, loc. cit.
 
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893)
“Swan Lake” Op. 20, (composed in 1875–1876)
Armonie Symphony Orchestra
 
the-star-dancer-on-stage_jpg!HD
The Star Dancer on Stage,
L’Étoile
pastel, 1878
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
  
  
© Micheline Walker
10 August 2013
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