Symphony in White, No. 2/ J.A McNeill Whistler

Symphony in White, No. 2, also known as The Little White Girl is a painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The work shows a woman in three-quarter figure standing by a fireplace with a mirror over it. She is holding a fan in her hand, and wearing a white dress. The model is Joanna Heffernan, the artist's mistress. Though the painting was originally called The Little White Girl, Whistler later started calling it Symphony in White, No. 2. By referring to his work in such abstract terms, he intended to emphasise his "art for art's sake" philosophy. In this painting, Heffernan wears a ring on her ring finger, even though the two were not married. By this religious imagery, Whistler emphasises the aesthetic philosophy behind his work.


Whistler created the painting in the winter of 1864, and it was displayed at the Royal Academy the next year. The original frame carried a poem written by Whistler's friend Algernon Charles Swinburne – titled Before the Mirror – written on sheets of golden paper. The poem was inspired by the painting, and to Whistler this demonstrated that the visual arts need not be subservient to literature. Though there are few clues to the meaning and symbolism of the painting, critics have found allusions to the work of Ingres, as well as oriental elements typical of the popular Japonisme.

Before the painting went on exhibition at the Royal Academy, Whistler pasted the poem written on gold leafs onto the frame. The idea of decorating a painting's frame with a poem was one Whistler had gotten from Rossetti, who had similarly pasted a golden paper with one of his poems on the frame of his 1849 painting The Girlhood of Mary. To Whistler, this poem underlined his idea of the autonomous nature of the painted medium. It showed that painters were more than mere illustrators, and that visual art could be an inspiration for poetry, not just the other way around.

White Rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.
The writing of the poem was a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter – a noble recognition of work by the production of a nobler one." Swinburne repaid the compliment: "...whatever merit my song may have, it is not so complete in beauty, in tenderness and significance, in exquisite execution and delicate strength, as Whistler's picture..."

The Third of May 1808/ Francisco Goya.

Artist	Francisco Goya
Year	1814

Francisco Goya, like William Blake, preserved a sense of humanity that could survive disillusion. With their prophetic and ironic insight, they were the first to face a world of passion and absurdity before which conventional heroic art was powerless.
In the work 'The Third of May 1808', Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808. Along with its companion piece of the same size, The Second of May 1808 (or The Charge of the Mamelukes), it was commissioned by the provisional government of Spain at Goya's suggestion.


'The Third of May 1808' can be said to be the first great picture in every sense of the word - in style, in subject and in intention; and it should be a model for the socialist and revolutionary painting of the present day! In the face of Murat's firing squad, the victims cover their eyes, or clasp their hands in prayer. And in the middle a man with a dark face throws up his arms, so that his death is a sort of crucifixion. His white shirt, laid open to the rifles, is the flash of inspiration which has ignited the whole design.


The painting's content, presentation, and emotional force secure its status as a groundbreaking, archetypal image of the horrors of war. Although it draws on many sources from both high and popular art, The Third of May 1808 marks a clear break from convention. Diverging from the traditions of Christian art and traditional depictions of war, it has no distinct precedent, and is acknowledged as one of the first paintings of the modern era. According to the art historian Kenneth Clark, The Third of May 1808 is "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention".
The Third of May 1808 has inspired a number of other major paintings, including a series by Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso's Massacre in Korea as well as his masterpiece Guernica.

The Swing/ Jean-Honoré Fragonard

 

 

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (5 April 1732– 22 August 1806) -a French painter with remarkable felicity, exuberance and hedonism....his most important works being genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and velied eroticism. The influence of Fragonard's handling of local colour and expressive, confident brushstroke on the Impressionists (particularly his grand niece, Berthe Morisot, and Renoir) cannot be overestimated.

 'The Swing' is one of his most popular works. In this painting, the woman is actively enjoying herself, but she is the man's "object" from four different viewpoints- the painter, Fragonard, the patron, Baron de Saint-Julien, the old cleric pushing the swing and ofcourse the suitor, who is looking up her dress!

Her power, on the other hand, resides in her seductiveness, which is displaced onto her shoe and thus is not as permanent as the man's power. For having been kicked into the air, the shoe must fall. And in doing so, the shoe itself becomes a metaphor for the proverbial 'fallen woman'!

Two Haystacks/ Claude Monet

The haystacks were neutral receptacles for light. But that was their point, for Monet wanted to show fifteen of the infinite varieties of light effect that could be drawn from a motif at different times of day, in different weathers. Each haystack was meant to be seen as a sample of something both commonplace and endless, that could blot up all the inspection and discrimaination a human eye can bring. "Eternity in a grain of sand/ and Heaven in a flower."

La Grande Jatte/ Georges Seurat.

 

 

'La Grande Jatte' by Georges Seurat is an example of the popular theme of leisure and pleasure dominant in the art of the 1870s. According to T.J Clarke, "within this context of the seemingly repectable place, women have been and will be corrupted by men, and innocence will be kept ot lost."
Seurat's strict geometric treatment of form has reduced them to mannequins, denying them character or individuality. The bourgeoisie are as trapped as their rigid social conventions as the workers are oppressed by the solid band of industrial buildings.

The very science of his colors, the precision of his outlines, the fixity of each figure within its own boundaries and hence social space, provided a pictorial language which viewers recognized. It articulated the modernness of the scene in a way that was not anecdotal nor humorously ironic, but insistently formal - like the modern life itself was turning out to be!

Camille in a Green Dress/ Claude Monet.

Camille or The Woman in a Green Dress(1866)

This was one of the paintings by Monet that brought him to fame. The choice of a rear viewpoint, a standard device of the small scale colored fashion print flouted portrait conventions. This, together with Monet's handling, with its abrupt transitions from dark to light and the most schematic treatment of the face, made nonsense of any traditional understanding of portraiture.

Orchestra of the Paris Opera/ Edgar Degas

Paris in the early part of 1868 was depicted with increasing activity and originality by artists. Edgar Degas, the most consistent of the "slice of life" painters, spent all of his time in the streets, cafes, theatres and concert halls of the city; noting, sketching and observing with a sharp eye the effervescent activites around him.

The painting 'Orchestra of the Paris Opera' (1868-69) is a fine example of the new theory of composition that the Impressionists were beginning to shape. The figures are caught as though in a photograph, cut off at seemingly random points and standing at odd angles to the artist-a certain influence of the Japanese prints popular at that time. This is a radical departure from the highly stylized, carefully posed and fully framed tableaux of the classical schools.

With great subtlety, Degas has obscured what is usually shown in a theatre and focused on the area reserved for the audience, particularly the orchestra pit. The space is divided into three zones. At the bottom is the public part of the theatre, the area allocated to the audience of the painting as well as the performance. In the centre is the pit where the musicians sit. At the top is the stage, edged by the footlights and filled with headless ballerinas.
An X-ray shows that Degas deliberately cut the canvas at the sides and top. The framing is therefore more radical than he originally intended. The harp, the box and the double bass were added later, linking the pit graphically to the stage. The contrast between the pit and the stage is reinforced by the difference in the treatment of the three zones: studied, precise and detailed, the central area of the pit is a veritable group portrait and accurately depicts the musicians and their instruments. The dancers on the other hand are scarcely sketched in. And yet the orchestra series painted between 1869 and 1876 illustrates the theme of the dance, which was so important in Degas's oeuvre. The subject gradually invaded his work.

Water Lilies/ Claude Monet

'Waterlilies' is the most popular series of Monet's paintings. Here the artist is not only using brush strokes in an Impressionist techniques; he also makes it rich in contemplative mood. The paintings can hence be said to be a long introspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water lilies fill the whole frame.

Monet's 'Water Lilies' are close to the ideas of his contemporary, the poet Stephane Mallarme, on poetry. In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. Mallarme conceived of poetry as being structure of words 'and' absences:

"The intellectual armature of the poem conceals itself, is present - and acts - in the blank space which separates the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a pregnant silence, no less wonderful to compose than the verse itself." Mallarme further continues-

"To conjure up the negated object, with the help of alllusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence, involves an understanding which comes close to the act of creation."

Mallarme's "negated object", the symbolist sense of reality lurking behind its semantic veils is also the world as glimpsed in Monet's lily pond.

Vision after the Sermon/ Paul Gauguin.

Artist	Paul Gauguin
Year	1888
Type	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	72.2 cm × 91 cm (28.4 in × 35.8 in)

'Vision after the Sermon' is almost a traditional narrative. An attempt to use religious themes to break with the realist programme of Impressionism.Feneon's phrase for Gauguin's work was 'distanced creations', and this stresses both the imaginative invention of the subject and the distance put between the spectator and the peasant women. Gauguin relies on the steretype of the gullible and priest-ridden religiosity of women and the Parisian's view of the peasantry as simple and superstitious. The painting's narrative clearly indicates the distance of the metropolitan tourist from the people amongst whom he painted.

To achieve an aesthetic synthesis between artist and subject, the Synthetist artist must dominate rather than be submissive to nature. This work's equal engagement with 'vision' and the 'visionary' separate it from the Impressionist or Realist painting and its reliance on fields of vibrant color bounded by artificially exaggerated contours startled young artists.

Crows in the Wheatfield/ Van Gogh

Van Gogh and Edvard Munch were two central sources for the expressionist movement which is most clearly reflected in their obsessive feelings and personal attitudes, generally executed with the same vibrant palette, using open, gestural brushmarks which were characteristic of the individual hand.

'Crows in the Wheatfield' shows the darkened sky and the black crows which have been regarded as symbolic of spiritual treatment, and the absence of human figure as indicative of his crushing loneliness.

Van Gogh had begun in order to communicate, to bring joy and solace to a troubled humanity; yet he felt his titanic efforts had been rejected  and he killed himself with a pistol shot. These qualities make him a heroic figure with whom audiences in the 20th century can so readily identify.

Sunflowers/Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh developed a method of using color that was expressive and symbolic. He said-

"Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use my color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly."

This approach towards art marks the tendency of modern expressionist movement. Van Gogh also brought into use a variation in brushmarks for expressive effect, so that the materiality of the paint surface, its variety of textures, and the general marks vitalize the flat surface with emotional energy. This can be seen clearly in his most popular paintings, 'Sunflowers'.

The Night Cafe/Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life and died, largely unknown, at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.


Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art.



 The paintings of Van Gogh have a hallucinatory quality though they represent real objects, real places and real people. In many respects, Van Gogh was a completely new type of artist. For arguably, the first time, the expression of personal temperament took precedence over conventional technical facility. While the Romantic Movement had allowed the priviledge of madness to poets, this was not usually extended to creators working in other media. Yet Van Gogh's chronic depression and his agressive and suicidal impulses came to be recognized as integral to what he painted. He emphasized the essential link between his own flawed temperament and his achievement as an artist in a long series of self-portraits.


Each of Van Gogh paintings thus became a cry of anguish as he struggled to release his violent, frustrated passions. Writhing, flame-like forms and agitated brushwork transmit with almost hallucnatory power, the convulsions of his tormented sensibility and, in such baleful works as 'The Night Cafe'. The state of almost permanent anxiety and sense of  instability which threatened to engulf the artist, can be seen reflected in his paintings too. It is painted in disharmonies of red, green and yellow -'to express the terrible passions of humanity'. Van Gogh himself says-

".....the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV greens and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh-blue greens, and all this in an atmosphere like the devil's furnace, of pale sulphur...."

Self portrait with a sunflower/Anthony Van Dyck

Anthony Van Dyck (Anthonie Van Dyck) was born on Monday, March 22, 1599 in Antwerp and he was a famous painter from Belgium.  He was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England. He is most famous for his portraits of King Charles I of England and Scotland and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. He also painted biblical and mythological subjects, displayed outstanding facility as a draftsman, and was an important innovator in watercolour and etching. Self Portrait With a Sunflower  by teh artist shows the gold collar and medal King Charles1 gave him in 1633. The sunflower may represent the king, or royal patronage.

Women in the Garden

'Women in the Garden' by Claude Monet.

The Impressionist painter, Claude Monet evolved a method of depicting form by accumulating a mass of brush-strokes which are reconstructed and completed by the spectator to produce the effect he is suggesting. This again was a vital new element in art: the realisation that the viewer has to participate, that he has to build his understanding of a painting, just as he 'reads' a landscape. This attitude was essential to the future of art. It was only because Monet destroyed the old, limited, arbitrary concept of immutable form that the painters of the 20th century were able to build new visual structures.

Music in the Tuileries Garden

Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862)


This is one of the first paintings of the Impressionist painter Edouard Manet. It proudly hangs in the National Gallery, London. It is an early example of Manet's painterly style, inspired by Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez, and it is a harbinger of his life-long interest in the subject of leisure.

While the picture was not regarded as finished by some, the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time; one may imagine the music and conversation. Here Manet has depicted his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and he has included a self-portrait among the subjects. Included in the image are Manet himself, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jacques Offenbach, and Manet's brother Eugène.

The painting is regarded as one of the first great paintings of modern urban life, and what it shows is a bustling middle-class crowd of professionals and artists at their leisure. It is also representative of a nation, transformed in part by the policies of Napoleon III into an economically competitive atate ready to enjoy its new found success and confidence.