Art is Reacting to Industrial Revolution

The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium (MSK Gent) —Romantic and Realist Art of the 1800s at

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—French Realist Art of the 1800s at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm

Responses to Slavery

Haven’s article on Goodman’s scholarship on art protesting slavery before the Civil War at http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/february18/artists-slavery-protests-021809.html

Art and Slavery article at http://www.realhistories.org.uk/articles/archive/the-art-of-slavery.html

I chose the Realist painting named “Retreat from the Storm” by Jean-François Millet 1846.

“The impending storm poses a real threat to this woman and her child, whose subsistence depends on the stray sticks of firewood they have gathered. Throughout the 1840s, the number of homeless peasants increased dramatically in France, reaching a crisis in the recession of 1847 and contributing to the fall of King Louis-Philippe in the 1848 revolution. Millet’s singular image, rivalling Delacroix in its depth of emotion and Daumier in its graphic economy, probably represents Millet’s first treatment of this theme. He reworked the composition in a painting now in the Denver Art Museum.” (www.metmuseum.org)

Looking at this painting, I can see the anguish in this mother’s eyes. She is fearful of the storm because her child is with her, but also determined to get the sticks to burn for warmth and cooking. If the wind gets, the sticks wet she will not be able to light them right away and will have to lay them out to dry. Laying them out to dry could result in them being stolen by another desperate poor person. The storm could also rip them from her arms and blow them away or scatter them again. She would be faced with having to pick them all up again, along with keeping her child safe. Nothing short of a hard life indeed. But I do know a mothers’ heart and mind are instilled with a determination to do what is right and best for her children. She will go to the ends of the Earth to provide for them, no matter what pleasures or food she has to do without.

The Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. Realism emerged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and developed during the period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. As French society fought for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn from the everyday lives of the working class. Rejecting the idealized classicism of academic art and the exotic themes of Romanticism, Realism was based on direct observation of the modern world. (www.metmuseum.org)

Protesting against slavery came quickly to most African American writers who took up pens before 1865. One of the primary objectives of black paper during slavery was to bring about the end of slavery. Since slavery existed foremost in the South, writers often directed appeals for freedom to northern whites, whom they hoped would influence their slaveholding counterparts in the South. “Northern sympathizers” as an audience became a kind of catch phrase for much of the black writing from this period. That audience was especially important given the fact that the majority of African Americans not only did not have the power to change their condition, but they were mostly illiterate. It would be well into the twentieth century before a substantially measurable black audience emerged to respond to the commentary of black writers. (nationalhumanitiescenter.org)

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.613

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/aaprotestpoetry.htm