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| Salon of 1890 |
Paris
of the Belle Époque was imbued with an ethereal quality and gave rise to revolutionary
forms of art, music, and literature. The years between 1879 and 1914 bore elements of beauty,
innovation, and highly multidisciplinary art forms, a legacy embedded in the ambiance of present-day Paris. The first metro line opened in 1900, daring
women exchanged confining skirts for trousers, and artists, writers, and
musical composers gathered in cafés and music halls.
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| The Gare St-Lazare, Claude Monet (1877) |
It was the era of invention—not only of the motion picture and telephone, but also of self-fashioning women who entered the public sphere as writers, actresses, and scientists. Yet if Belle Époque Paris was the center of progress and pleasure, it was also a time of decadence. In contextualizing both the hope and melancholy of the times, we look to Impressionist art for a sense of modern subjectivity as it grapples with changing conceptions of time and beauty. The Impressionists’ audacity to situate the mundane in the visual arts was deeply unpopular in the Belle Époque—a controversy that speaks to the angst underlying modernity as it continually brings about new forms of society and, with it, ways of feeling and seeing.
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| Gustave Courbet’s La Rencontre (1875) |
Scandalous
paintings such as Courbet’s La Rencontre
(1875) allow us to understand emerging notions of the artiste libre who makes a forceful break with long practiced arts
patronage to make his own artistic choices. Here we see the haughtiness of the artist who looks upon his mécène, Alfred Bruyas, accompanied by his valet and dog. This painting caused a scandal at the universal exposition, where it was described as une manifestation d'un monstrueux orgueil.
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| Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854) |
In contextualizing Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854), we can imagine the shock it gave jurors who criticized its “vulgar subject matter” of half-clad, working-class men.
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| Argenteuil, Édouard Manet (1874) |
And when Manet submitted Argenteuil (1874) to the
Salon, critics ridiculed it for the vivid blue of the water, calling it “too
intense” as they preferred the traditional, somber colors of academic painting.
In its defense, writer Emile Zola offered this perspective: “Imagine that on
the ruins of classical rules and romantic humbug, in the waste of dullness and
the impenetrable fog of banality and mediocrity, a tiny flower has sprung up, a
green shoot on the old, exhausted stump [….] That is why I feel cheerful when I
look at Manet’s works amid those others, reminiscent of decay, that are hung
alongside.”
Like Monet
and Renoir who worked with tubes of paint and canvas in the open air, Degas,
Manet, Pissarro, Morisot, and Gauguin decided artwork would be their own way of
seeing the modern world, foregoing mythological, biblical, and aristocratic
subjects of the past. This meant a more democratic type of painting, one that
arguably mirrors France’s shift from monarchy to republic. What they were
painting, how they were painting, and where they were painting were radical. Light
changed the appearance of what one saw hour to hour and became an object of
study itself as Monet painted haystacks or train stations at various times of
the day. Impressionists realized something that John Berger said in the 1970s:
“In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged
minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the
role of the ruling classes, and [seeking] such a justification.” Impressionists
invented ways of seeing the present, inviting spectators to engage with change
itself, with the modern world, and with reforms in society. In this way, painting
became a privileged mode for accessing and witnessing the world.
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| Un Atelier aux Batignolles, Henri Fantin-Latour (1870) Manet painting, with Astuc seated nearby. Standing, from Left to Right: Scholderer, Renoir, Zola, Maître, Bazille, and Monet |
To appreciate Impressionism, we turn to literature, musical
composition, and poetry of the Belle Époque as these art forms looked to painting for interplay and innovation in the struggle to represent
their experience. Literary movements such as Naturalism, which was also inspired
by scientific methods of observation, became
interchangeable with Impressionist painting: Zola was an Impressionist with a pen.
As Kahnweiler, a well-known art dealer of
Cubists Picasso and Braques, said: “Painting is in fact a form of writing.” The
French musical composer, Erik
Satie, contemporary of the Impressionists, would agree as he said he learned
more from painters than he ever did from musicians. Like composers Ravel and
Debussy, Satie was seeking new paths in musical expression, a quest predicated
by “the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian
adventure.” In his view, it did not matter whether music made use of methods
discovered by Symbolism or Impressionism, so long as one went one’s own way.
Indeed, the painting in series that Monet invented suggests that our observations of the world are incomplete and that modern life needs constant revision. The Belle Époque marks the awareness of change, and the back-and-forth of the various arts therein allows us to delve deeper into the limitless debate between Classical traditions and modernity.
Indeed, the painting in series that Monet invented suggests that our observations of the world are incomplete and that modern life needs constant revision. The Belle Époque marks the awareness of change, and the back-and-forth of the various arts therein allows us to delve deeper into the limitless debate between Classical traditions and modernity.
Monet's study of the portal of the Rouen Cathedral
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| Bazille's Studio; 9 Rue de la Condamine, Frédéric Bazille (1870) Left to Right: Renoir (sitting), Zola (on stairs), Manet & Monet next to Bazille |
Poetry, musical composition, and paintings of the Belle Époque occasionally hearkened back
to the Classical period, a period that--not without coincidence--witnessed the
birth of La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In peering from our own viewpoint to the Belle Époque, we exercise
historical perspective once again as we look from the Belle Époque back to the early
modern period, a time when Louis XIV’s renown was derived by the way he framed his
own portraiture with attributes of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. If seventeenth-century Paris is regarded
as a time of high art and renown, it was in part due to its artistic emulation of the high
beauty of Classical Greece. In observing how society grafts itself onto
previous ones for stability, we see how art embodies the struggle to release the restraints
of a heavily coded past and create newer
expressions of experience. As Apollinaire wrote in “La jolie rousse” (1919), Pitié pour nous qui combattons toujours aux frontiers de l'illimité et de l’avenir.
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| Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Édouard Manet (1863) The woman looks directly at the viewer, interrogating his or her way of seeing. |
A guiding symbol for a discussion of modernity and the shifts it produced is the Eiffel Tower. This iron tower emblematizes the dramatic shift from classical to modern aesthetics, the effects of which toy with notions of time, timelessness, and beauty--as can be sensed in the protests that arose with its construction (1887-89): “We come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the beauty, until now intact, of Paris, to protest with all our force, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."
Technology
and progress inspire disenchantment and nostalgia for former ways of living, sparking
questions surrounding identity, culture, and history that merit ongoing
discussion. The visual arts serve as an ideal point de départ for comprehending the crossroads of tradition
and modernity. In truth, painting maintained a remarkable role
in buffering, interrogating, and ultimately forming our modes of seeing. When we look deeper into Impressionist painting and its context, we understand the sacrifice and remarkable passion that these artists demonstrated as seers of the world: They took a decidedly active role in questioning the boundaries set forth by the values of their culture and their time. Still today, their perspectives intimate alternate ways of coping with reality as modernity marches on.
