Dictionary of Art and Artists













Paintings


that Changed the World



(by Klaus Reichold & Bernhard Graf)



From Lascaux to Warhol






Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.

William Butler Yeats


 

The Old World Towed by the New
 

The beginnings of the modern age

 

The devilish little steamship puffed out an odious and ghost-like stream of smoke, glowing red and ominous, while behind it the brave old ship followed at a slow pace, sad and majestic, marked by the sign of Death.

Adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray, after 1839

 

A forerunner to the inventions of James Watt
 

She had served her country well and now her

day was past, and England mourned. The fighting "Temeraire", as John Ruskin and other Englishman had called her, was the symbol of heroism at sea. When the British and French fleets clashed at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, the Temeraire was the second ship of the English line. Although Admiral Nelson, the commander of the British fleet, died of a gunshot wound on the deck of her sister ship, the "Victory", he had carried the day. Outnumbered by six ships, his fleet of twenty-seven had trounced the French. The Temeraire played an important part in the victory at Trafalgar, which was to assure British supremacy at sea for another century. She had decoyed French fire, which was aimed at Nelson and the flagship, away from the Victory and had captured a prize. At the end of the battle, as a contemporary records, she was almost hidden between two French ships secured to her mainmast and her anchor.

Some thirty years later, Joseph Mallord William Turner  was deeply moved watching the gallant old ship being towed from Sheerness to the breakers yard at Deptford. However, the brilliant painter of atmospheric effects and moods was not just thinking of farewells. He was also looking forward to new beginnings. In 1765, ten years before Turner was born, James Watt had triggered the Industrial Revolution in England by inventing the steam engine. Turner was fascinated by the marvels of technology that were emerging all around him. He was among the first to paint pictures, dramatically experimental ones, of modern means of transportation, such as trains and steamships. Both the magnificence and the threatening aspect of such inventions are revealed in his paintings of them. An observer might find symbolism in the Temeraire's last voyage: the tugboat towing her under steam representing the New Order and all its ambivalence, the sailing vessel the Old — already transfigured in memory.

 

Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775—1851)
The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up
1858
The National Gallery, London
 

Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775—1851)
Rain, Steam and Speed The Great Western Railway





 

Stark Naked
 

The women's baths

 

I believe, in the whole, there were two hundred women.... The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second, their slaves behind them,.... all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked.... There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of... Titian,.. I was charmed by their civility and beauty... Tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letter to Elizabeth Rich on her experiences in the women's baths at Sophia, dated 1 April 1717

 

Jean-Leon Gerome
Turkish Bath

Jean-Leon Gerome
Turkish Bath

Jean-Leon Gerome
Turkish Bath

Jean-Leon Gerome
The Teaser of the Narghile

Jean-Leon Gerome
Turkish Bath

Jean-Leon Gerome
Nude Woman

Jean-Leon Gerome
A Bath, Woman Bathing Her Feet

Jean-Leon Gerome
A Bath, Woman Bathing Her Feet
 

Although the Minoans and later the ancient Greeks had bathtubs, it was the Romans who made bathing popular. The epitome of Roman civilisation, Roman therme, or baths, were luxurious and spacious. Pools, walls and even floors were heated. Splendid examples of urban architecture, therme were places where men bathed, had manicures and pedicures, took steam baths and did gymnastic exercises. They were a focal point of social and political activity. Romans are known to have made momentous decisions whilst steaming in the baths or strolling about in sandals and towels. With the fall of the Roman empire, this glorious bath culture disappeared from the European scene. What later replaced it was certainly on a much more modest scale. Medieval Nuremberg, for instance, boasted a total of thirteen public "bathing rooms" in which huge wooden tubs were filled with hot water. There were also sometimes steam baths and resting rooms heated by tiled stoves. Such baths were not just venues for promoting body culture; they were also used as surgeries: teeth were pulled, blood was let, cupping-glasses were applied to the backs and chests of those with colds and minor operations were performed. Bathing rooms were frowned on by the Church owing to the voluptuous pleasures enjoyed in them. "Bath attendants" were licentious women who are said to have been the reason why King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia visited the bathing establishments of Prague, his capital, more frequently than was good for his sensitive skin. In the Near East, on the other hand, the ancient bath culture survived because going to a hammam (bath) is prescribed by Islam. Inspired by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's account of her travels in the region, the French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres painted the women's section of a Turkish bathhouse. The celebrated master was eighty-three years old when he added the crowning touch to his oeuvre by depicting a Turkish bath scene. Ingres made hundreds of preliminary sketches for the painting before presenting it to Prince Charles-Louis-Napoleon in December 1859. Only a few weeks later, however, the painting was returned to Ingres, allegedly because the prince's wife, Eugenie de Montijo, was scandalised by the naked ladies depicted so sensuously in this remarkable work. When Turkish Bath was exhibited in a second, essentially unchanged version, the nudes were what brought the painting widespread public acclaim. Critics praised it as a "tryst with Oriental coquetry" or, rather crudely, as a "feast of carnal delights" and a "still life of sensual pleasures". It certainly had an impact on Picasso and other artists, who admired it both for its composition and formal idiom. After this masterpiece, Ingres was no longer thought of as a "bloodless exponent of Neoclassicism". From now on he was a groundbreaking "revolutionary".

 

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
(1780—1867)
Turkish Bath
1863





 

Eros Awakes to a Storm of Indignation
 

Paris and the "Salon des Refuses"

 

When one considers the shameless indecency with which he foists his Dejeuner sur I'herbe on respectable visitors, all that is left to say is: as a painter, Edouard Manet possesses all the qualities necessary to be rejected unanimously by all the juries on earth.

Anonymous letter to the Gazette de France, 1863
 

Emperor Napoleon III derived pleasure in being benevolent. Under his patronage, the "Salon des Refuses" was held in 1863, an exhibition of paintings that had not been considered good enough for the official Paris Salon. Nevertheless, when the Emperor entered the room, he went into a rage. Who could have painted such a monstrous thing?

When he found out that the painter of the work thus stigmatised was Edouard Manet, he was not only furious, but appalled. The thirty-two-year-old painter Manet came from a hitherto respectable bourgeois family: His father was a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Justice and his mother came from a long line of diplomats. Edouard was the Prodigal Son. Although his family wanted him to study law, he failed the entrance examination. He was then sent to sea as a cadet on the "Havre et Guadeloupe" line. Life at sea did not agree with him and he was incapable of tying nautical knots. Yet he did learn some things that might prove useful to him as a painter, which was what he now intended to become. Despite his father's opposition to his plans, the family finally acquiesced.

The cause of the scandal was that the naked figure at her ease enjoying breakfast outdoors was the naturalistic figure of what could be a real woman, not an allegorical personification of "Sin" or "Lust" and certainly not recognisably mythological. The woman represented was obviously modern. She was in the company of men who were dressed in the fashion of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In fact, this was a group portrait of identifiable public figures.

Criticism of the picture was devastating. Public condemnation ranged from biting irony to malicious chuckles at the artist's expense. Only the writer Emile Zola and several other open-minded friends of the arts stood up for Manet, even daring to call him "one of the leading personalities of the age" and a "courageous man" who had lent the exhibition "brilliance, intellectual elan, wit and the appeal of the unexpectedly novel". Today one might be inclined to think that the vehement reaction to the painting stemmed from the public's annoyance at having been caught out in collective forbidden fantasies by a sharp-witted voyeur.

 

Edouard Manet
(1832—1883)
Le Dejeuner sur I'herbe
1863
Musee d'Orsay, Paris





 

A Look that Kills
 

Antiquity and the Industrial Age

 

But Perseus, with the snake-haired monster's head. That famous spoil, in triumph made his way On rustling pinions through the balmy air And, as he hovered over Libya's sands, The blood-drops from the Gorgon's head dripped down. The spattered desert gave them life as snakes. Smooth snakes of many kinds, and so that land Still swarms with deadly serpents to this day.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, (IV. 617-24), AD 1-8

 

Even Odysseus was afraid of Medusa. This crafty Greek hero broke off his stay in the Underworld because he was afraid of being confronted by the decapitated head of the monster, whose glance turned anyone who saw her into stone. According to the Greek poet Hesiod (c. 800 ВС), who undertook to organise the myths of the ancient Greek gods in Theogony, Medusa was one of the three Gorgon sisters who dwelled beyond the Mediterranean in the far West, which is where mythology located the powers of evil to be. Due to their odious appearance and the fatal effect which they had on all who saw them, the Gorgons, like the goddesses of revenge, were the horror figures of antiquity. They contemptuously mocked everyone by sticking out their tongues and were hideous to behold: round faces with baleful eyes and hair and belts made of hissing snakes. The ancients thought these sisters were immortal, except for Medusa.

Therefore, Perseus, one of Zeus's numerous offspring, was charged with killing her. He cunningly reached the home of the Gorgons and, along the way, assembled the necessary tools: a helmet that made him invisible, winged shoes that let him glide above the ground and a curved sword with which he eventually decapitated the sleeping Medusa. After he succeeded in killing her, Perseus put the ghastly head into a bag as a trophy for safe keeping, where, however, it did not remain for long. On his way home from the Gorgons, he fell in love with the beautiful Andromeda in Ethiopia and defeated a sea monster in order to save her. It was then that he felt he simply had to show his beloved the head of Medusa — though only the reflection of it in water — to prove his heroism and divine descent, which obliged him to battle evil.

Intrigued by this ancient myth in the late nineteenth century, the English painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones executed a Perseus cycle which concluded with a work entitled The Baleful Head. Originally intended for a church, the painter may have viewed Perseus as a forerunner to the Christian dragon-slayer St George, and the idyllic and tranquil garden scene as a symbol of the desire for a perfect world, free of evil and the taint of industrialism, which was rapidly growing in the nineteenth century. Burne-Jones grew up in the industrial city of Birmingham at a time when the slums were increasing. His contemporary, William Morris, a writer and critic, stated in a 1891 lecture that artists in industrial society had to "look back" for inspiration: "When an artist has really a very keen sense of beauty, I venture to think that he can not literally represent an event that takes place in modern life. He must add something or other to qualify or soften the ugliness and sordidness of the surroundings of life in our generation." Against a background of retrogressive aestheticism, Burne-Jones formulated the following creed: "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream, of something that never was, never will be — in a light better than any that ever shone — in a land no one can define or remember, only desire and the forms divinely beautiful." Perhaps The Baleful Head represents a visionary prescription for dealing with a world out of control.

 

Edward Coley Burne-Jones
(1833-1898)
The Baleful Head
1887





 

The Heat of a Summer's Day
 

Anyone for a swim?

 

The summer spreads far and wide, despotic, colourless, heavy - as if a king with nothing better to do had inflicted the pains of death - in the white-hot glare of heaven which tightly ensnares you, and yawns. Liberated, Man left his work and rested.

Paul Verlaine, Allegoria, 1884

 

In Bathers at Asnieres not a cloud disturbs the relentless blue sky. The air and water shimmer in the oppressive heat, and motionless stillness smoulders. Only the boy in the water seems to be making a sound. Is he imitating the boat siren, as has been suggested by some art historians? Or is he shouting to a friend further out in the river?

Seurat was always a painter of summertime and summer light. He often travelled to the countryside to sketch men and women harvesting gram, peasants mowing fields with scythes, and labourers paving roads. Born in Paris in 1859, Seurat was one of the greatest painters of Post-Impressionism: his work shows the mark of the Impressionists' fascination with light but he took their ideas in a new direction. He developed a painting technique called Pointillism which relied on the optical mixing of colours. When a work was seen from a distance, the small dots of colour which made up the painting, blended together to create a lively, painterly surface.

It was summer when the poet Gustave Kahn visited the artist in his cramped studio in Boulevard de Clichy. Seurat was in the process of completing a painting, and Kahn observed that he "worked so energetically, despite the oppressive heat and humidity, that by the end of the day the artist was thinner than when he began". Seurat was a loner, an extremely serious and taciturn person. The artist Edgar Degas used to call him "the solicitor" because he was always formally dressed and wore a top hat. At the same time every evening "the solicitor" could be seen leaving his flat, striding purposefully towards the Boulevard Magenta to die with his parents.

Seurat enjoyed spending time at the waterfront and was a frequent visitor to the wooded island of La Grande Jatte on the Seine, a popular outing destination for the Paris bourgeoisie. His excursions took him as far as Asnieres-sur-Seine, located about five kilometres north-west of Paris. During Seurat's lifetime, factory smokestacks already marked the Asnieres skyline, as can be seen in Bathers at Asnieres, and it was far from an ideal place to bathe. As long ago as 14 February 1790, when the royal medical Counsellor Boncerf tested the water he was overcome by a "biting, pungent alkaline stench that impaired his respiratory system to such an extent that his throat and tongue swelled mightily". Until recently the Parisians' "favourite wench" was so polluted with sulphur and other toxic waste that, at a depth of one metre, divers were unable to see their hands when held directly in front of their eyes. For several years now the waste from the vast city is treated in modern sewage plants and there are hopes that Parisians might one day be able to bathe again in the Seine — enjoying it more than they did when Seurat was alive.

 

Georges Seurat
(1859—1891)
Bathers at Asnieres
1883





 

"I Think Gauguin Is Sick of Me"
 

How Vincent van Gogh lost part of his ear

 

There is a lot of strife to strive against There is a lot of suffering to suffer And many prayers to pray -But at the end of it all is peace.

Vincent van Gogh, from a sermon in Isleworth, October 1878

 

Paul Gauguin, Les Miserables, 1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam
 

Van Gogh left school without finishing, quit an apprenticeship and was a disaster as an itinerant preacher. He then became a painter and — as it seemed to most of those who knew him — was as unsuccessful at this as he had been at everything else, depending on his brother Theo who was an art dealer for money and becoming an out-of-control alcoholic, who spent his evenings in whorehouses. One episode of apparent madness led to his commitment. When he was discharged he shot himself: he died at the age of thirty-seven, a passionate and dreamy man.

Other painters admired him. Claude Monet thought Van Gogh's pictures were the best at the March 1890 "Salon des Independants", and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec challenged an acquaintance to a duel for mocking Van Gogh's work. Yet Van Gogh was never able to make a living as a painter. The only picture he is known to have sold during his lifetime was Red Vineyard at Aries.

One episode has come to symbolise Van Gogh's life lived between hallucination and creative frenzy. In 1888 he moved from Paris to Aries in Provence, attracted by the southern light and the intense colours. There he shared a little yellow house with Paul Gauguin, who was already a successful painter. But Gauguin soon found that he liked neither Aries nor Van Gogh. On December 23 they quarrelled worse than ever: Gauguin felt threatened and left to spend the night at an inn. When he returned the following morning, there was a throng of spectators in front of the house, which was spattered with blood. Gauguin was arrested. It turned out that Van Gogh had returned at night alone and had cut off his own ear lobe with a razor. Then he had gone to a brothel, where he had presented the ear lobe, wrapped in newspaper, to a prostitute named Rachel: "Truly I say unto you, you will think of me." Emile Bernard, a staunch supporter of Van Gogh, admitted publicly that his friend was mad.

Van Gogh was sent to an asylum, where he painted Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear which reveals the state he was in. He, who had always said he wanted to bring the sun to suffering people by painting in brilliant colours, appears as a shadow of what he had once been. When Van Gogh was young, Camille Pissarro had said: "This man will either go mad or he'll leave all the rest of us far behind." Rather than "either-or", he should have said "bothand".

 

Vincent Van Gogh
(1853—1890)
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
1889





 

Paris: A City of Extremes
 

Chansons and cabaret

 

One finds great luxury here and, at the same time, the greatest filth, noise, shouting, fighting and dirt -more than one can imagine. One vanishes from sight in Paris - and that is convenient because no one is interested in the life one is leading.

Frederic Chopin, с 1831

 

At the heart of Montmartre: The Moulin Rouge
 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Outrageous and lascivious: Chilperic (Mlle Marcelle Lender Dansant le Pas du Bolero), 1896
 

Paris, a happy-go-lucky place. The pianist and composer Frederic Chopin came to this conclusion in 1831, shortly after arriving m the Seine metropole as a Polish emigre. "You can amuse yourself here, you can laugh — you can delight in all things. And no one gives you dirty looks, for here everyone does what they please." Half a century later, Montmartre was looked on as the centre of dissolute life in Paris. A quartier on the urban fringes, Montmartre had only recently become part of the city. Where pious nuns had once prayed and decent wine-growers earned an honest, hardworking wage, beggars, prostitutes and drug dealers were now in abundance. They were followed by singers, writers and penniless painters, all of them unknown. This dubious artists' colony was to turn Montmartre into a household name, even though its fame was of a decidedly dubious nature. Most of the money earned there fell into the pockets of pimps, pickpockets and streetwalkers. Montmartre was shunned by the bourgeoisie and by most successful artists.

The poet Aristide Bruant was one artist who managed to make a living there. Born in 1851, he left the local lycee at the age of seventeen because his family faced financial ruin. Working as a goldsmith and on the railway, he became intimately acquainted with destitution and the underworld. His experience provided the material for the many chansons he wrote and sang, making him one of the first French chansonniers as we know them today. After founding his own cabaret in Montmartre, where his mocking of the public was met with outrage, he made the acquaintance of a young painter in 1886. A scion of the aristocracy, the twenty-two-year-old Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was fascinated by Montmartre. As Bruant's friend, he became the leading chronicler of Pans nightlife. Painting in bars and brothels, dance-halls and cabarets, he also found time to draw for a gazette Bruant had launched and illustrated the poet's chansons when they were published. The public got to know Toulouse-Lautrec through his posters. He sold his first one to the Moulin Rouge music-hall. Well-founded criticism was offset by a strong resistance to Toulouse-Lautrec's style of poster. When Bruant was planning to appear at Les Ambassadeurs, a cafe with concerts in the centre of the city, the stage manager was appalled by the poster designed for the occasion. He considered it a cheap advertisement and a "nasty smear" on his establishment. Bruant however, already a celebrated eccentric, simply refused to appear in the cafe if the poster was not displayed — a poster that is now one of the most famous in the world.

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(1864—1901)
Les Ambassadeurs, Aristide Bruant
1892
Coloured lithograph, posrer





 

"I Painted the Clouds like Real Blood"
 

The shadows of a bleak childhood

 

One evening I was walking along a street, tired and ill, with two friends: the city and the fjord lay below us. The sun was setting and the clouds turned blood red. Then I heard the colours of nature scream -and that shrill cry echoed over the fjord.

Edvard Munch, From My Diary, 1929

 

Edvard Munch, Death in the Sick-Room, 1893
 

Edvard Munch had a hard life. A doctor's son, he had a bleak childhood in Oslo. "My home was the home of illness, agony and death", he was to write in his memoirs. His mother died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty, leaving behind four children. Edvard was only six at the time. In her letter of farewell she wrote: "And now, my dear children, my sweet little ones, I say farewell to you. Your father will be able to tell you about how to get to Heaven better than I can. I'll be there waiting for you all." A pious woman who accepted her fate, all she could do was to hope for joy in the world to come — certainly not a legacy likely to inspire happiness and a zest for living in her children. Until he was thirteen, every time Edvard had a fever he was convinced that he was going to die. Influenced by his mother's negative way of viewing things, he vowed never to look forward to anything again. His father, at heart a good man, was distressing to his children. A sister of Munch's had already died of tuberculosis and, after the death of his beloved wife, Munch's father took refuge in fanatical pietism, forcing a strict regimen of prayer on his children.

When he was older, Edvard argued incessantly with his father, while a second sister became a religious fanatic who was eventually declared insane.

From around 1889 onwards, Edvard became increasingly depressive, suffering from occasional fits of terror. Yet, by the age of seventeen, he had discovered another language with which to express his feelings of desperation: painting. It promised relief, consolation and hope. In a state of feverish excitement, he concluded that "the curse on mankind has become the undertone of my art — and my paintings pages in my diary". His visits to Paris and Berlin proved to be a great inspiration and, at the age of twenty-eight, he painted The Scream — an archetype of human experience on canvas. All the terrors of human existence seem to concentrate in the face, twisted with fear. Like so many other paintings of his, The Scream is, as Edvard Munch said himself, "a bitterly earnest scene — and a child of sleepless nights, which have taken their toll in blood and nerves".

 

Edvard Munch
(1863—1944)
The Scream
1895