¶ … Painter of Modern Life," Charles Baudelaire argues that the artist functions as the ideal representative of what is defined as valuable within the modern historical moment. The art that is produced in an era will show the morals and communal ideology of the majority population and will also show the dissenting viewpoints of the minority populations. Art and, by extension, the artist show the truth of society in both its pleasant and unpleasant contexts. There are specific characteristics which are required in order for an individual to transcend childhood curiosity and become an adult artist. It is curiosity and observation which are eternal and allow for an artist to portray the world with honesty and integrity. In this article, Baudelaire describes an artist who he calls Monsieur G. And reflects that this man created a painting entitled "The Man of the Crowd" wherein a singular moment is presented where a man is monitoring the world around...
Instead of taking part in the action of the scene, he is on the periphery of the image, watching others be active. By watching, he is taking note of small details and recording them for others to see. Therefore, the scene is a duality in that the audience is viewing the man who is viewing others. The painting is not only a comment on the things that the man sees, but also a comment on how people see the man and, consequently, how people view and judge others.
Picasso's Las Meninas (After Velazquez) Baudelaire, in The Painter of Modern Life, approached the modern element in modern painting by reminding us that everything old-fashioned was necessarily once in fashion: "every old master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have come down to use from former generations are clothed in the costume of their own period…If for the necessary and inevitable costume of the age
Realist Painting Style and Realism The Realist style owes its existence to the Realist concept. "Realism is democracy in art," Courbet believed. (Nochlin, xiii) Taking that as the credo upon which the works of the artists were constructed, the style itself can be nothing if not anti-academic, anti-historical, anti-conservative. Indeed, whether brushstrokes or pen markings or etching into stone or metal form the image, the underlying attitude is one of freedom,
And yet, it is also important to understand that not everyone criticized Manet, for it was also Dejeuner which set the stage for the advent of Impressionism. Indeed, Manet emerged as something of an enfant terrible in the Parisian art scene of this era. In the same year, he would also produce Olympia, another painting featuring a female nude that would become the centre of much controversy. Olympia caused a
(269) It would seem that the artists and the press of the era both recognized a hot commodity when they saw one, and in this pre-Internet/Cable/Hustler era, beautiful women portrayed in a lascivious fashion would naturally appeal to the prurient interests of the men of the day who might well have been personally fed up with the Victorian morals that controlled and dominated their lives otherwise. In this regard, Pyne
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