[<<] 1860s [>>]
Related: 1800s - Édouard Manet - modern art - Salon des Refusés
Literature: Artifical Paradises (1860) - The Painter of Modern Life (1863) - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Art: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) - Olympia (1865)
Births: Georges Méliès (1861 - 1938) - Arthur Schnitzler (1862 - 1931) - Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) - Rupert Carabin (1862 - 1952) - Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918) - Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944) - Luigi Pirandello (1867 - 1936) - Gaston Leroux (1868 - 1927) - Paul Chabas (1869 - 1937)
Le déjeuner sur l'herbe/"The Lunch on the Grass" (1863) - Edouard Manet
Events
Modern Art [...]
Paris [...]
Paris was a remarkable crucible of creativity in the 1860s. The aesthetic debates of that decade were central not only to the formal direction modern painting, literature, and music would take; the manner in which art and culture either influenced or mirrored national identity became a near obsession. The world from which Impressionism came also gave birth to a modern politics marked by sharp nationalist pride, conflict, and hatred. Sewn into the fabric of French controversies surrounding Wagner and the direction of modern art from the 1860s and 1870s were strands of chauvinism, racialist thinking, and anti-Semitism. The Jewish librettist of La Vie Parisienne and many other Offenbach works, Ludovic Halévy, was for years among the closest of Edgar Degas's friends. That friendship would end in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair: Degas was a staunch believer in Dreyfus's guilt. --Leon Botstein, http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogues_extensions/94_95season/1st_concert/leon.cfm [Aug 2004]
"The Parisian," noted a perceptive American visitor to Paris in the late 1860s, "cares but little for his home ... As much time as he can spare from his business he spends on the streets, at the café, or at some place of amusement." And why not? For most Parisians, "home" was a constricted apartment with few amenities, while just beyond the doorstep lay the most stylish and sophisticated urban environment of the age. Parisians could stroll in the attractive parks or along the broad boulevards of the new Paris, drink and socialize in one of the city's thousands of cafes, visit a dance hall, or take one of more than 50,000 seats (one for about every thirty-six residents) in the city's theaters, circuses, and café_concerts. --http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogues_extensions/94_95season/1st_concert/truesdell.cfm [Jul 2004]
La Vie Parisienne
Rich foreigners, like those parodied by Offenbach in La Vie Parisienne, flocked to the "modern Babylon" for the latest in everything fashionable. Not-so-rich foreigners also came to the city, and sometimes, like Offenbach, a native of Cologne, stayed. These visitors and immigrants came for Paris' sophisticated, urban culture, and in coming, further enriched that culture in myriad ways. Paris, like New York in the twentieth century, had the ineffable charisma of the symbolic center of the world, of the place to be. It was, as social critic Walter Benjamin aptly put it, "the capital of the nineteenth century." --http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogues_extensions/94_95season/1st_concert/truesdell.cfm [Aug 2004]Richard Wagner [...]
Understanding art and culture as functions of seemingly unique, easily described national character traits has become a convenient and deceptive habit. There is irony, consequently, in the realization that the most significant event in the modern history of French music was the Paris premiere of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser (in a revised version) on March 13, 1861. The work caused a near riot, prompting Wagner to withdraw it after the third performance. From the publication that spring of Charles Baudelaire's two-part essay "Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris" to the death of Claude Debussy in 1918, the debate over whether one ought to succumb to or resist Wagner's ideas defined the character of French music and aesthetics.
--Leon Botstein, http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogues_extensions/94_95season/1st_concert/leon.cfm [Aug 2004]Movies
- The Story of Adele H (1975) - François Truffaut [Amazon.com]
François Truffaut's dramatization of the true story of Adele Hugo, the daughter of French author-in-exile Victor Hugo, and her romantic obsession with a young French officer is a cinematically beautiful and emotionally wrenching portrait of a headstrong but unstable young woman. Adele (Isabelle Adjani, whose pale face gives her the quality of a cameo portrait) travels under a false name and spins a half-dozen false stories about herself and her relationship to Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), the Hussar she follows to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pinson no longer loves her, but she refuses to accept his rejection. Sinking farther and farther into her own internal world, she passes herself off as his wife and pours out her stormy emotions into a personal journal filled with delusional descriptions of her fantasy life. Beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros in vivid color, Truffaut's re-creation of the 1860s is accomplished not merely in impressive sets and locations but in the very style of the film: narration and voiceovers, written journal entries and letters, journeys and locations established with map reproductions, and a judicious use of stills mix old-fashioned cinematic technique with poetic flourishes. The result is one of Truffaut's most haunting portraits, all the more powerful because it's true. --Sean Axmaker for Amazon.com
A Biased Timeline of the Counter-Culture [...]
1860 -- the generation coming of age with the revolt of 1848 is in its 20s: Dore & Manet 28, Burne-Jones 27, Morris 26, Degas & Whistler 26, Cezanne 21, Monet & Renoir & Rodin 20, + Lewis Carroll 28, Twain 25, Ramakrishna 24-- 1860s Can-can becomes the rage in Paris 1861 Confederate states ?cesede; U.S. Civil War starts U.S. introduces passport system Pasteur's germ theory of fermentation First horse-drawn trams in London and first daily weather broadcasts in Britain U.K.: William Morris (27) starts design firm leading to the birth of the Arts and Crafts movement Paul Cezanne (22) arrives in Paris 1862 U.S.: Homestead Act opens free land for pioneers Victor Hugo: Les Miserables Founding of Red Cross proposed by Swiss humanist Dunant 1863? U.S.: first Federal conscription (for the Civil War) (including 300 dollar buy-out) 1863 July five days: NYC Draft Riots, 105 killed, many Negro 1863 The "Salon de Refuses" in Paris: ?Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass exhibited? and many others London begins constructing Underground railroad U.S. Congress establishes free city mail delivery 1863-4 8000 Navajos captured by Kit Carson and interned for four years in New Mexico, then sent to a reservation 1864 Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground Mark Twain 29, arriving in San Francisco, finds a vigorous literary movement called The Bohemians Massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians at Sand Creek, Colo. First International Workingmen's Association founded by Karl Marx, London and New York Tolstoi: War and Peace Octavia Hill begins London tenement-dwelling reforms 1865 U.S. Civil War ends Thirteenth amendment to US Constitution abolishes slavery Many freed blacks turn to farming, xxx, & music (minstrel shows, etc.) Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Atlantic cable completed First oil pipeline (in Pennsylvania) Ku Klux Klan founded, Pulaski, Tenn. First railroad sleeping cars (designed by Pullman), U.S. First train holdup (North Bend, Ohio) 1700 die in explosion of "Sultana", Mississippi River First carpet sweeper Commons Preservation Society founded, U.K. 1866 London's first department store 1866 (-67) Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment "Black Friday" on London Stock Exchange 1867 First socialist member of N. Ger. Reichstag elected Marx: Das Kapital vol. 1 Paris Universal Exposition introduces Japanese art to the west and much more Straus: "Blue Danube" waltz first bicycles manufactured (France?) reinforced concrete patented gold discovered in Wyoming Mark Twain: The Jumping Frog . . . Baudelaire dies, the last of the old crowd? 1868 Painters begin to paint in Impressionist style: Claude Monet (28): The River (impressionist) Bakunin founds Alliance internationale de la democratie sociale plastic celluloid invented Nobel ?invents? dynamite End of Shogunate civil wars in Japan, establishment of young Meiji emperor, Japan starts to modernize 1869 U.S. National Prohibition Party formed in Chicago Red River Rebellion in Canada John Stuart Mill: On The Subjection of Women Bret Harte: The Outcasts of Poker Flat British debtors' prisons abolished First postcards, Austria
Manet's Modernism - Michael Fried
Manet's Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s - Michael Fried [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Our current understanding of the paintings of Manet is so heavily filtered through the lens of Impressionism that in many ways, his contributions to art history have been obscured. Called the "first modernist," his paintings marked a break with the past and paved the way for what we've come to accept as modern art in the treatment of the canvas as a flat surface. But during his time, Manet's modernist innovations were the object of ridicule. "It's flat, it isn't modeled," said Courbet of the nude in the painting Olympia. "It's like the Queen of Hearts after a bath." In Manet's Modernism, Michael Fried has set out to see Manet as his contemporaries would have seen him and to gain a more accurate reading of Manet's place in history. --Amazon.com
Manet's Modernism is the culminating work in a trilogy of books by Michael Fried exploring the roots and genesis of pictorial modernism. Fried provides an entirely new understanding not only of the art of Manet and his generation but also of the way in which the Impressionist simplification of Manet's achievement had determined subsequent accounts of pictorial modernism down to the present. Like Fried's previous books, Manet's Modernism is a milestone in the historiography of modern art. --Product Description:
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