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.