4: Caillebotte and Constant Change
[Doesn't go larger.]
Gustave Caillebotte
On the Pont de l'Europe, 1876-1877Oil on canvas, w130.8 cm x h105.7 cm (51.5" x 41.625")
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX USA
It's been noted before that for most of recorded human history, not much changed. If a person was a farmer in 300 BCE, and then time traveled to 200 AD, or 800 AD, or even 1600 AD, the future they saw would probably be recognizable to them in broad strokes, farmers still farming away.
And then the machine age — BAM, industrialization, expansion, old industries torn up, new ones born, a flight to the cities, the world really did look different, operate differently, with the rules of society becoming different to accommodate. Things were being destroyed and created and connected and changing at a pace our poor BCE farmer would have had difficulty accepting.
For that matter, those who lived it had difficulty. Enter genre art.
There was a great uptick in work that looked around at the 'normal' world in the lead-up to the twentieth century, and while there are a lot of potential factors in that that I'll leave alone for now1, one of the reasons might have been that the world was simply stranger, and more explicitly invited exploration. After all, there's no reason to do straightforward documentation of your surroundings in laborious paint if that's how the world had always looked, more or less. But there is reason to dwell on it if your city's skyline has changed significantly just within the past 5 years. If there are new modes of travel for the first time in centuries, if new people are flooding in, if new habits are being created, if industrial production is changing the streets, the water, and the very air.
And so a mass grappling with modernization, the above being one example by the French artist Caillebotte (associated, like Cassatt, with that newfangled Impressionist movement). A little analysis of this work by the museum that currently houses it here, but for now I would just suggest that genre art often seems to show up as a natural reaction to confusion, whether on a personal scale or societal. Getting down on canvas the world you actually live in may not make you feel less lost, but it can help you narrow in on the more interesting bits of being disoriented.
NOTES:
1. As some examples just to give you an idea: 1) new pigment tubes and other practical innovation made it physically easier to paint en plein air, out and about in the world, rather than in a studio, 2) successful artists could make a living selling directly to dealers and patrons, without relying on dictated commissions from e.g. churches or nobility, 3) the introduction of the camera spurred the need for artistic response in a number of ways, one of which was to explore the difference between a camera's reproduction of a recognized scene from reality vs a human artist's.
And then the machine age — BAM, industrialization, expansion, old industries torn up, new ones born, a flight to the cities, the world really did look different, operate differently, with the rules of society becoming different to accommodate. Things were being destroyed and created and connected and changing at a pace our poor BCE farmer would have had difficulty accepting.
For that matter, those who lived it had difficulty. Enter genre art.
There was a great uptick in work that looked around at the 'normal' world in the lead-up to the twentieth century, and while there are a lot of potential factors in that that I'll leave alone for now1, one of the reasons might have been that the world was simply stranger, and more explicitly invited exploration. After all, there's no reason to do straightforward documentation of your surroundings in laborious paint if that's how the world had always looked, more or less. But there is reason to dwell on it if your city's skyline has changed significantly just within the past 5 years. If there are new modes of travel for the first time in centuries, if new people are flooding in, if new habits are being created, if industrial production is changing the streets, the water, and the very air.
And so a mass grappling with modernization, the above being one example by the French artist Caillebotte (associated, like Cassatt, with that newfangled Impressionist movement). A little analysis of this work by the museum that currently houses it here, but for now I would just suggest that genre art often seems to show up as a natural reaction to confusion, whether on a personal scale or societal. Getting down on canvas the world you actually live in may not make you feel less lost, but it can help you narrow in on the more interesting bits of being disoriented.
NOTES:
1. As some examples just to give you an idea: 1) new pigment tubes and other practical innovation made it physically easier to paint en plein air, out and about in the world, rather than in a studio, 2) successful artists could make a living selling directly to dealers and patrons, without relying on dictated commissions from e.g. churches or nobility, 3) the introduction of the camera spurred the need for artistic response in a number of ways, one of which was to explore the difference between a camera's reproduction of a recognized scene from reality vs a human artist's.